jaysaint Getting it all down on paper…

Since I spent the entirety of my last post complaining, I won’t do the same this time. But I do have to point out that I have a nasty virus and have been laid up for three days now. Miserable.

The good news is that it struck Friday, rather than Thursday, which is the day we went to the Harry Potter sneak peek at Warner Bros. Getting into a screening is the best way to see a movie because you get the group viewing experience, but there are no teenagers invited. It’s a gang of interested, movie-fan adults. I won’t say much about the movie since I doubt folks who read this have had a chance to see it, other than to say I love Emma Thompson even when she gets only about three minutes of screen time.

Seeing the film has made me wonder if I can re-read the first six books before the seventh comes in the mail in a few weeks. It seems unlikely, but I am a super-fast reader. Right now I have that sick head thing where I don’t much enjoy reading, so maybe it will depend on how quickly I snap back.

Speaking of snapping back, I think I’ll go lie back down in an effort to speed that along.

And not in a good way. Just hot. It’s in the 90s now. And I am hot. Everyone warned me that being pregnant in the middle of a NY summer would be tough, and I blew it off every time. I’ve always preferred to be hot rather than cold. Damon’s the same way and we’ve spent many summers happily sleeping in an un-airconditioned bedroom with just a fan blowing on us. All my laughing in the face of the heat has finally come back to bite me. I staggered out into the living room around 1am last night to spend the rest of the night on the couch, directly in front of our window unit. Which, of course, doesn’t seem to be working very well. Today coming home my subway car was not air conditioned. So, to recap:

— I have invented pregnancy
— I am the first person ever to be hot
— I am actually the first person to ever be uncomfortable in any way
— I am not pleased

I can’t decide. I’ll start with the happy stuff, because it’s much harder to reverse the other way. Although in general I take my bad news first.

I got back into town from our national sales meeting last night about midnight. We spent most of the week camped out at The Four Seasons in Palm Beach. Not bad. Yesterday I was bobbing around in the ocean. It’s hard to beat that. My coworkers were fun to be with and the meetings actually felt productive.

Here’s the best part: They had a surprise activity for us, and asked us to wear white. I immediately said, “We must be playing croquet. Whites are for tennis and croquet and I seriously doubt they’re going to make us play tennis in our sandals.” The assistant in charge of all the details blanched so hard that I a) knew I was right and b) felt badly for saying it. It will surprise no one to hear that the National Croquet Club is located in Palm Beach. It was a full-on Gatsby afternoon. They’d cleared out the place for us (there were nearly 40 of us total). The national croquet champion did a demonstration for us while starchy waiters brought us lemonades and pink wine. So anyway, after our demonstration they put us in random teams of two and started a tournament. It will surprise everyone to hear that my partner and I took the whole thing! I just… still can’t believe it. And I wasn’t even the lame partner, I was scoring wickets all over the place. I even got a really fancy medal, which I wore for the rest of the day. I was ridiculously excited, as I kept insisting, “I do not win sports things!” Now I know croquet is a sport like putt putt is a sport. But I still won. I can see my medal from where I sit typing.

So now am I home, and home is where I heard the sad news. I’ll be a bit vague if I can, but it’s hard. A friend who just (like three months ago) had twins, complete with long bed rest and serious post C section complications just found out the her husband has had a 22-year-old girlfriend for the duration of her bed rest and the relationship continues. It’s horrible and ugly. My heart was racing as she told me the whole atrocious story. She seems to have little hope their marriage will recover, and her heart is clearly broken. She’s incredibly tough and I know she’s been calling down the wrath of the heavens on him, but she can’t make him a better man. For him it’s the whole can’t-grow-up impending fatherhood crisis. He told her he only cooperated with their years of grueling fertility treatments because she wanted it.

I don’t even have it in me to type more. She’s so blindsided. She says she thought they were best friends, that he would never in a million years do something like this. I remember making similar protestations of faith about my ex husband, who turned out to be a liar extraordinaire. I sat in my office this morning saying, “Damon would never. Damon would never.” And I’m right. He would never. But it’s still chilling.

So I probably should have made that two posts. But that’s my day.

I’ve got a smarty pants Friends list.

Each year at my magazine we honor a handful of activists and do-gooders. We invite them to come speak on their particular issue, throw them a nice lunch, give them an award, and put them in print and on the site.

Last year we honored people who worked on the environment, domestic violence, sexual slavery, Katrina relief and a few more. They’re always pretty widely known folks, even if not necessarily known FOR their pet cause. (We have a separate track for our grassroots heroes, who get all the same perks. We just find them a different way). For example, Harry Connick Jr. was one last year, for all the fund raising and hands-on work he’s done in Louisiana.

Anyway, if anyone has any creative ideas I’d love to hear them. We’ve got politicians covered, but are still brainstorming folks from other arenas.

Does anyone listen to Filmspotting? Such a great podcast. For those who don’t, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Each weekly show (about one hour) has a review of a new movie and then several other fun features. My favorite is their weekly Top 5 list. They pick a theme and each host (Two of them — Adam and Sam) list their top five movies in that category. Sometimes I don’t have enough encyclopedic film knowledge to play along, but I always enjoy it. Whenever they have a guest host, like they did last week, I’m reminded how truly good the two hosts are.