So here I am. Twenty-eight years old, with thirty looming on the horizon. Drunk. Fat. Alone. Unloved. And, worst of all, a cliche, Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones put together, which was probably about how much I weighed.

I struggle with the fact that men's popular fiction is talked about differently. Books like mine don't get as many reviews and probably won't win any prizes, but they entertain the pants off of hundreds of thousands of women.

If you get the you-are-a-genius label, it can limit you. Because I'm not so scrutinized, I have more freedom. And that let's me write what I want.

My sense is that beautiful women are living in a different world than I am, and that it's a world with benefits but also drawbacks - like, you're on a ticking clock, because the day you stop being supermodel-beautiful is the day that everything the world has to offer you is no longer being offered.

I like blogs. they're good times.

Maybe love was a myth anyhow, a brew of hormones and fantasy, evolution's way of getting men and women together long enough for them to procreate,back in the day when girls got pregnant at twelve, were pregnant or nursing for the next twenty years, and were dead of the plague by forty.

Okay, I thought. Here you are. You are here. And you move forward because that's the way it works; that's the only place u can go. You keep going until it stops hurting, or until you find new things to hurt you worse, I guess. And that is the human condition, all of us lurching along in our own private miseries, because that's the way it is. Because, I guess, God didn't give us any choice. You grow up, I remembered Abigail telling me. You learn.