The greatest sex toy ever invented may be the telephone. Sometimes there's nothing more erotic than a disembodied voice, no question more tantalizing than a whispered 'What are you wearing?' Especially when you can make up the answer. On the phone your hair always looks great, your legs are always shaved, your worst pair of underwear becomes a silk negligee.

I mean, being provincial is a privilege in a way. Also people in New York think everybody interacts because they all take the subway. "Oh, I see all these different people! All these different walks of life on the subway." Well, they're not coming to your dinner party. Certainly, in small-town Nebraska, everyone indeed did mix together.

What amazes me is when I see people in their twenties who have families or live a life that seems of a much older person. But that's such a demographic, a socio-economic, cultural, class thing.

I don't keep a diary or a journal. Sometimes I'll send emails to friends and that's a way of recording what I was thinking at any given time. But I've never been a journal keeper. I feel like part of that is because I'm always on deadline. I've been a freelancer my entire career and, at any given time, I have several deadlines for all sorts of things whether it's some magazine piece or ad copywriting or anything. Obviously, people with deadlines keep journals all the time but, for me, the idea of doing more writing is never appealing. It's why I never blog.

In New York the stakes are so high. In urban centers the stakes are so high. You marry the wrong person, you go to the wrong college, you take the wrong job. Any of these things could really get you in trouble down the road. Or in your mind anyway. You're afraid to make any move, it's paralyzing.

And why the hell should you do a really hard, important job that you don't want to do? That has extremely high stakes? That just blows my mind.

As soon as I accepted that I am this kind of writer and I happen to live here, and stopped going to meetings and stopped beating myself up because I wasn't making a ton of money writing for some stupid sitcom, I felt really at home.