5. Canadian chocolate. I know that technically this falls under the header of "English chocolate" considering most of what I love is Cadbury-related, but whatever. The way I see it, it counts. Here's why I'm still obsessed with Canadian chocolate despite the US having Godiva and Choclatique and the like: because their garden-variety chocolate bars haven't got wax in them the way U.S. chocolate bars do, therefore making them creamier and yummier and all around better tasting. Which isn't to say I won't suck down a Hershey's if I'm in a pinch, but I'd much rather have a Caramilk, a Wunderbar, a Crunchie, a Mirage... mmmm. Also, Smarties kick M&M's ass all up and down the block, and anyone telling you differently is clearly selling something. Or on something.

4. The great outdoors. I spent many a family vacation either camping, staying in a cabin in the woods, or doing some natural variation thereof, and I can't help but think that it's stuck with me considering my affinity for hiking, biking and various other kinds of ings I prefer to do outdoors rather than being trapped inside at some stuffy, meat-market gym. I love the beach, I love the mountains, I can spend hours in a car en route to spending time at either or both... and though I never appreciated those trips when I was a kid, I sure as hell do now. (Hence why my 4th is being spent camping... with a bunch of actors. This oughta be good for some kind of blog fodder next week.)

3. Queen Street. I grew up in Edmonton (the mall!) and Calgary (the Stampede!), but never really felt at home in either. Nothing felt quite right until I moved to Toronto 13 years ago and lived in various spots all hovering around Queen Street. When I went back for a visit last July, sure, some things had changed... but on the whole it was exactly how I remembered it: vibrant, fun, packed with people, a real community feel - exactly the things I love about where I live now. You could walk everywhere and run into everyone, shop for anything you could possibly need from groceries to clothes, and then hit a pub or club in short order. One of the best summers of my life was the last one I spend combing Queen Street with pals before I split for San Francisco. I'm always gonna love it.

2. Certain TV shows. I'm sorry, but it needs to be said: a lot of Canadian TV was crap. But the stuff that wasn't? Gold. Say what you will about The Beachcombers, but it was the first Canadian TV drama I got hooked on as a kid, largely because there weren't many other options on the grid at the same time, and I found myself fascinated by the concept of a dramatic show about... logging. Seriously. But then I discovered Degrassi and that all fell by the wayside. Degrassi was the shit to me, because it dealt with so many things that so many people didn't want to talk about. I salute it for that, and for provoking my first incident of yelling "NO WAY!" at the TV when, during School's Out, Caitlin said the word "fucking" on national television. (I still love that the CBC didn't censor that.) Of course, I grew up on the Friendly Giant, Mr. Dressup, the Polka Dot Door, Today's Special, Jeremy the Bear... but Degrassi and The Beachcombers were the two shows that really made me pay attention to TV in a different way.

1. Shar and Renee. Two of my oldest and dearest friends, residing on either coast. They have seen me through all kinds of bullshit, been there during the best and the worst without judgment, always treated me with love and respect, visited me in my new homeland, welcomed me to stay with them when I went back to theirs... and the country is a better place with them in it.

And Alanis just came on iTunes as I finished writing this. How's that for synergy?

Happy b'day, Canuckland!

So. You may or may not have noticed I skipped updating last week. That's because this time last week, I was chin-deep in one of the most emotional scripts I've written to date. I was in the home stretch, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and though I finished it in enough time to be able to crank out some kind of blog entry, I had almost no energy left. And what little was left was used to make a celebratory sour apple martini. And then I went to bed and tried to sleep.

Note the word "tried."

I wanted to sleep in the worst way. My entire body was exhausted. I believe my brain was, too... and yet, falling asleep and staying asleep felt like an exercise in futility. No matter how much I meditated or listened to hypnotherapy CDs, I couldn't get to that blissful state that usually locked me in dreamland for a reasonably uninterrupted eight hours of zzzzz's. My brain was jumping all over the place. I was having disturbing dreams. And then, last Friday happened.

I'd made the decision after I finished this most recent script that aside from rewrites on what I've already done, I needed to take a break. I've been really proud of the work I've done - especially on these last two, in which I essentially opened many veins and really jumped into some deep emotional crap to create them (as evidenced by this last post.) At one point I'd told Sharolyn that I felt like I had tapped into this crazy energy that really connected me to the way I felt at the time something really profound was happening to me that I wound up recounting in one of the scripts... and I felt the person I was writing about, too. Almost like they were there with me. It was insanely intense and unlike anything I've ever felt before. And it wound up helping me write something that I had no idea I was capable of writing.

So following last Wednesday, I started feeling really depressed. I was drained. I went to my acupuncturist and when she nailed my energy point, I nearly leapt off the table. "I don't get it," I told her after I finished howling in pain. "I mean, I'm kind of sleeping but not really... and yet, when I hike I feel fantastic."

"Yeah, that's not real energy, though - that's just auto-pilot. It's like false energy, not root energy," she explained, and started telling me I needed to meditate before bed. I didn't have the energy to tell her it wasn't working.

By Friday I was sinking further. I really don't have anything to feel depressed about right now, yet that morning I found myself sitting at my computer answering e-mails, and I started to cry for no reason whatsoever. I thought maybe I was going through some kind of creative postpartum depression and rallied myself for a hike. Predictably, I felt great while hiking... and then when it was over, I felt drained all over again. I just wanted to go hide in a cave with my favorite comforter and pull it over my head.

On the way home - head down in "Don't bother me" body language - this guy walking past me grabbed my arm. I looked up and took my earphones out of my ear.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Why?"

He looked at me for a moment, unsure of what to say next because really, how do you respond to that? And then he pulled one of these out of his ass: "Hey, don't I know you? Yeah, you're, like, from Russia or something!"

And I said, "You don't know me." And I kept walking, sticking my earphones back in my ears.

A flash of fear washed over me. I knew he'd started following me. I'd hoped he'd get the hint and go away, but no. He followed me for two blocks until we came to a stop at a crosswalk. He walked right up next to me and started nattering again, and I took my earphones out and said, "What?"

"I'm sorry, I thought I knew you," he said. "This town can be really small sometimes. You looked familiar."

"It's okay," I said, and put my earphones back in.

But he kept nattering. And then he said something bizarre.

"You know, there was a homicide down the street," he said.

At this point I'm thinking, Really? This is your game plan? To follow me for two blocks when I've made it clear I want to be left alone, and now you're going to talk to me about murder as some kind of pick up line? Needless to say, his approach came off as more than threatening. So I turned to him and said, "Look, I'm sorry, I'm just busy."

And he went off. "Oh, I get it - it's because I'm black, isn't it? If I were blond haired and blue eyed--"

"The fact that you went there just proves that you and I have nothing to talk about," I said, cutting him off. At this point the light had turned and I crossed the street, and promptly ducked into a store and informed the woman running it that I was being followed and threatened, and that I needed to hide out for a moment to make sure I was safe. And then I sat there and shook for a bit. And then I went home.

The next day I called my energy worker and told her how I felt like I was going insane, and how I was attracting people who were fucking with me, which isn't the norm. I knew I was off kilter and not myself, and I couldn't figure out how to fix it. And she said to me, "Okay, what I'm seeing is you haven't disconnected from the energies you tapped into to write your screenplays, so all those people are swirling around you and taking over, and there's no more room for you. It's why you can't sleep, it's why you feel disjointed, and it's why you feel like you're stuck."

I knew exactly what she was talking about. The things I've been dreaming, some of the thoughts that have flitted in and out of me... they aren't mine and don't feel like me at all. And I forget when I'm in the middle of doing a creative project that there are certain things I have to do on an energetic level to take care of myself - chiefly among them, Epsom salt baths and periodically doing a scrub with lemon and sea salt. It all sounds odd, I'm sure. But for some reasons these things work for me, and when I do them on a regular basis, I run in peak condition. The problem is, when I need it most - in the middle of a creative boom - is usually when I ignore protocol. And then I wind up in trouble.

So now I'm in that mode that we've probably all found ourselves in - where you've eaten like shit for a month and suddenly your jeans don't fit, and you're going, "How the fuck did that happen?!?" Except for me, it's energetic. I did a massive cleansing in my apartment on Saturday that knocked me on my ass, and Sunday I felt more even keel, and was capable of my first decent night's sleep in about two months. Day by day I've been feeling better and more like myself, but naturally, I'm frustrated that I'm not back to 100% already now that I've figured out what the problem was. I'm recognizing that it's probably going to take a month of hard work to get me back up to par, so I've been doing my best to balance my responsibilities with taking good care of myself.

I've read a lot about this sort of thing recently - in fact, in one article Johnny Depp was talking about how after finishing a particular movie, he wound up super sick and drained from playing a character that required him to tap into some pretty dark stuff and he found it hard to shake. I get it. I get why screenwriters are paid so much, and in turn, why actors are paid so much. Getting deep into a character is intensely hard and draining work, and you can really fuck yourself up in the process if you don't take care of yourself. Actors and performers going mental, writers becoming recluses and addicts... it makes sense. I understand it. And I have such a newfound intense respect for everyone who envelops themselves in this craft. I'm watching movies and TV in a whole new way. I'm seeing my actor friends in a different light. I'm reading up on my heroes and learning from their processes differently, too.

For all the bullshit that seems to go on in Hollywood, the creative process behind it is a pretty fucking fascinating thing. Which is a good chunk of the reason why I want to be a part of it. The other reasons? That's a discussion for another time. I have a date with my bathtub, some salt, and Tori Spelling's memoirs.

I won't lie - I lost it Saturday night. I'd been working through much of the day, but there's something about writing at night that's both comfortable and gnarly for me - especially if I put on the appropriate mood music. I find writing to music just amplifies what I'm working on and motivates me to keep going. I tend to have a soundtrack for each job. So generally when I'm working on blog posts for AOL and whatnot, I listen to peppy, poppy music. Corporate stuff usually gets more of a techno thing, and when I need to mellow out and focus on interviews, I'll listen to something more ambient or kundalini. And when I write something agonizingly, gut-wrenchingly emotional where I have to rip open old wounds, out comes the playlist with 21 hours worth of slow, depressing, my-world-is-coming-to-an-end kind of music.

(As an aside, I had a moment while working on this particular script where I was thinking I should drag out the appropriate songs from my youth - the tunes I'd listen to when I'd break up with a boy or something. Y'know, stuff like "Could've Been" by Tiffany and "Foolish Beat" by Debbie Gibson, or even better, "It Must've Been Love" by Roxette. But now I hear those songs and laugh my ass off at how melodramatic I was back then. Kind of breaks the mood, you know? That said, "Somebody" by Depeche Mode will always floor me, teenage angst be damned.

Anyway. I digress.)

So there I was, in dim light with my gut-wrenching playlist writing about gut-wrenching things, thinking, "Piece of cake, I've lived through this - it'll be easy to mine for content." Famous last words. I mean yeah, it was easy to mine for content, but the difference was being able to say what I really wanted to say about it, with the character I was writing for being the age I was when I was going through it. And then all of a sudden I was back there again, really and truly. It was like I was feeling that pain for the first time.

So yeah, I lost it. Went to bed. Slept 12 hours. Got up the next afternoon and wrote some more, and managed to go to bed at a decent hour and put in my usual 8. Didn't eat much, but wrote like there was no tomorrow.

I had this moment where I wanted to run from it all and find someone to talk to about it - it took a Herculean effort to get me back to my computer on Sunday afternoon, but I didn't want to quit when it was going so well and take the chance that I wouldn't start again. But the more I thought about finding someone to talk to, the more I talked myself out of it and decided the best thing would be for me to channel it into what I was working on. So I did. And then later that evening I got an e-mail that said the following:

"You're not going to have a lot of people you can talk to about this."

So very, very true. And I'm glad I put it all in the script. But man, am I ever looking forward to getting together with friends to talk about everything but what I've been writing about. Especially because writing about writing is getting a little too meta for me. Time to go experience life for a bit.

Despite the bipolar aspect of this transition, I'm actually having a lot of fun. I've been to bat at this game more times than I can count, and when I look back on my first few scripts from when I was 19... ugh. Horrifying doesn't even cover it. And when I compare it to what I'm doing now, I'm eternally grateful that I spent the last decade plus reading and obsessing over structure and dialogue, worked with mentors who believed in me and offered invaluable advice, and put my ego aside to listen to people offering me constructive criticism.

There's no way I would've been ready for this a few years ago. And I'm not saying I'm the world's foremost authority on how to take people cutting up your work, but I think years of working with a bazillion editors has made it easier for me to understand that it's not personal. Or at least, discern between those that are personal versus those that are structural, mechanical, what have you. Either way, scriptwriting has renewed my lust for writing in a way I never thought possible. I've always been passionate about the written word, but not to the point where I've wanted to dry hump my laptop upon completing a key scene. (Okay, that might be taking it a bit far, but you get my drift.)

And the thing of it is, I have no idea where I'm going to land. I'm seriously leaping without a net. There are a number of avenues open to me right now that I'm carefully treading on, which includes the interest of producers, agents, managers and the like, and that feels nice. But I know that there's no deal until there's a deal, and that the way something appears might wind up as something completely different by the time all is said and done. So I'm staying open to what comes, the possibilities that present themselves, the opportunities that arise.

It's kind of funny because to the casual observer, it would appear that there's nothing to get giddy over... and yet, I am. I'm beside myself with glee that I've taken this step, beyond happy that there are people enjoying the work I've done, and joyous beyond compare that I'm just taking this step - this first, teeny tiny step. God knows what's gonna happen when I get to live the dream. I might explode.

I can't wait.

Within three hours of deciding I needed a break, I started getting twitchy. I had to peel myself away from my e-mail, where I'd been hitting the send/receive button almost maniacally, waiting for feedback from an editor on a pitch that I know I'm not going to get feedback on until next week anyway. I went for a hike, did my grocery shop, came home and made dinner, checked in with a couple friends, settled in on the couch to watch some Buffy... and it started happening again. The twitchiness. I started hunting scripts online so I could obsess over structure, read some of my heroes' work... I gave myself a stern talking to and insisted I disconnect from the job stuff and just, y'know, be. But it ain't going so well. It's like I'm trying to kick heroin. (Or so I'm told. Not having personally danced with Mr. Brownstone, I have to base this on numerous colorful details I've read in countless biographies on 80s hair metal bands.)

Here's the thing. If I haven't made it evident to you, allow me to be blunt: I fucking love what I do for a living. I feel like my whole life is a vacation. So if that's the case, do I really need to take a break? My body is telling me yes, but my mind is telling me no... and therein lies the issue. My fucking brain will not shut up. It's all excited about everything we've got going on, all the plans, all the ideas, and it refuses to stop chattering at me about it.

Perfect example: last week I finished working on a spec script for one of my favorite TV shows. I knew it wasn't 100%, but my goal was to give myself permission to write like crap (as I learned from reading an article by Jessica Bendinger, who wrote Bring It On) so that I could at least finish what I was working on, then go back and tweak it later. Cut to me laying in bed, wide awake, having the following mental conversation:

Brain: Hey.

Me: What.

Brain: You awake?

Me: Yes, you won't let me go to sleep.

Brain: Cool. So you know that scene where x, y and z happens? I think it'd be better if you switch it around and break it up a little.

Me: Yes, I've already thought of that, but it's time for bed, so let's talk about this tomorrow, okay?

Brain: Yeah, yeah. Right. Okay.

(About 10 minutes passes.)

Brain: Okay, you remember the part where you make the guy-

Me: Are you kidding me?

Brain: What?

Me: We gotta sleep, dude! If we don't, we'll be useless tomorrow.

Brain: Yeah, but if I don't tell you this right now, I'll forget tomorrow.

Me: No you won't. For Christ's sake, you remember every phone number we've ever had since we were six. You're not going to forget a plot point overnight.

Brain: I might. Just to spite you.

Me: Goodnight, and please, quiet down.

Brain: Humph.

(Another 10 minutes pass.)

Brain: Ooh! Ooh! You know what you can do to the part where-

Me: Look, I love you, but SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.

And so it goes. And I know full well that this is how I got sick. The crazy thing is that creatively, I'm still on fire... but I can't do this and run myself down, or I'm never going to survive. So I figure these last few days of May are my way of figuring out the balance - how to nurture rampant creativity, but rest when it's time to rest. How to write like a triathelete, but disconnect from the adrenaline rush long enough to recharge and come back at it twice as hard the next day. This is so not gonna be easy, but it's so necessary.

Here goes. Wish me luck.

To most this wouldn't seem to be anything odd, or unreasonable, or whatever. But it is to me. We split up three years ago as of next month. As of this month, it was two years ago that I told him I didn't think we could be friends, that he was the season part of that sappy "reason, season or a lifetime" e-mail that periodically makes the rounds, and that we needed to disappear from each other's lives. It took me another year after that to really and truly get over him, and it was right around this time last year that I realized I'd stopped comparing every man that I met to him. So to be dreaming about him now is really fucking irritating.

There've been a lot of them over the past few weeks, but I had a couple in the last week that were really insanely vivid and seem intent on sticking in my mind. In the first dream I was in his building's garage, and I was trying to figure out a way to get out without him seeing me. His neighbors all recognized me and were being nice, almost as if they expected me to be there. Then suddenly I saw his car pull into his parking spot, and I was trying desperately to hide... but I remember seeing all these flowers in the car. Like, tons of them, to the point where visibility was likely an impossibility. And as he got out of the car and turned around, I woke up.

In the second one, I was out somewhere... a lounge, some reading event, something social. I spotted him, he spotted me, and it was one of those things where I didn't feel like pulling a Miranda and running in the opposite direction was a reasonable reaction. So, I gingerly approached and we traded pleasantries, and then the conversation quickly grew serious. He told me that his mother had moved to his neighborhood and they had a falling out, and they weren't speaking (totally odd, as his mother is an incredible woman and highly communicative.) He was really upset about it and I was consoling him, and he kept saying, "Don't leave. Don't leave." And I woke up.

Needless to say, I was completely unsettled. I grabbed my dream dictionary and looked up the things that stuck out most to me: the flowers and the ex. The entry for "flowers" told me that they signify a new beginning and new growth, to which I was like, the hell? How can I have growth with someone I haven't had a conversation with in two years? Unless the growth is mine alone, in which case, go me. The entry for "ex" said, and I quote, "You are still searching for your ideal lover." THANKS FOR THE FUCKING NEWSFLASH, DREAM DICTIONARY.

I really don't know what else to say about this, because it's so baffling to me. There's no doubt that he was a huge part of my life, and that I loved him more than any other man I'd ever loved before. The entire time I was with him, all I could think about was how I didn't deserve him. And how someday he was going to go away. That wasn't the reason why we broke up, though. I'm not saying that our relationship wasn't fundamentally flawed from the beginning, because it was - on both our sides. But I can't talk about his side, because I don't know it - I only know mine. I'd be a liar if I claimed that it didn't make me sad to think about it. But what really makes me sad is how broken I was before it, during it and after... and how adept I was at masking it all.

I remember right after our split that I only allowed a couple people to see what a total fucking mess I was, although in retrospect, most of my actions during that time were probably pretty telling. I was drinking too much. I was blatantly hitting on - and making out with - acquaintances in hopes that it would get back to him and hurt him. I was being a party girl. I totally reverted to wounded teenager behavior and acted so embarrassingly abhorrent... ugh. It makes my skin crawl and I find myself overcome with the desire to take a Silkwood shower whenever I think about it.

But the thing of it is, if I hadn't gone through that relationship and the subsequent fall-out of it, I wouldn't be where I am now. And the other thing of it is I think that he came to me to force me through that growth. I honestly don't know that if I met him today that we'd have had any kind of relationship at all, because clearly it was who we were four or five years ago that attracted us to one another. Maybe we were supposed to be a catalyst for one another. Actually, I suspect that that's the case, as I've never sunk so low and stayed there for nearly three years, only to find a way to break free and start ascending in a way I never thought possible. I can only hope that the same has happened for him.

There are things that I might always miss: the heated discussions we'd get into on the phone about life events that he would derail by asking "what are you wearing?", our adventures all over Cali and New York (and once, the Bahamas), the way he'd challenge me (even when it pissed me off), how he'd squeeze the most ticklish part of my thigh and wouldn't stop when I squealed in protest, how he made an effort to befriend my friends, the insanity of our chemistry. I don't think I've ever experienced anything as amazing as the feel of his skin under my hands, or the physical connection we had once it was linked to the emotional. For me, it was of mythic proportion. But to an extent, it was also built on deception. I wasn't authentically me. Not like I am now.

A friend once asked me if he was the one that got away, and my answer was this: if he were the one, he wouldn't have gotten away. He was as close to a Vaughn or Angel as I've ever come... but I've gotta think that if he were my match, he'd still be here somehow. And he's not. So maybe I'm just going to miss those things until I meet the real deal. Because I finally have faith that I deserve all that, and more.

You'll recall my last girl getaway with my friend Retta, an excursion that I think my liver will never forgive me for. Despite that, we packed up our things and set out for adventure in Northern California. This time there were no bras hanging in the window, and we were smart enough to bring our own sangria mixins, lest we decide in a drunken stupor that ordering champagne from room service was once again a brilliant idea.

Our grand master plan was to drive up the coast and enjoy the ocean scenery before cutting inland. Attempting to do this without a solid map led us on a wayward jaunt through Oxnard, and what was normally a four and a half hour trip took nearly seven. Good start! But we made it there all the same, and were taken to our awesome bungalow overlooking a golf course. We immediately started cooking up plans on how to fuck with the golfers. Some of the ideas we came up with:

• Screaming "You suck!" right at tee off.
• Sounding an air horn intermittently.
• Standing on our patio pantsless with the binoculars.
• Making signs advertising a car wash, then waving them around while wearing bikinis.

We lost interest in the golfers, though, by the time we made it to dinner and discovered that our hotel encouraged the making of s'mores in their entryway fireplace for dessert. So rather than go for a chocolate molten lava pate thing to end our meal, we went old-school and fired up some balls of sugar - that I'm totally not allergic to, nosireebob - for placement on Keebler graham crackers and Hershey's squares. Had it not been for the loud talker with a proclivity for verbally abusing his girlfriend who decided to join us and use it as an opportunity to tell his lady love how everything she does is wrong, we woulda stayed there all night.

But as it was we had sangria waiting, and movies, and discussions and whatnot. And the next day I had a yen to hike the looming hillside that we were warned was "tougher than it looks and a butt burner." Sounded like my kind of hike. So the following day after a massage that left us mush mouthed, Retta and I got dressed in our hiking gear and started out. First we called the spa to let them know where we were going - the Lion's Head trail. They said, "That trail is closed because it's not clear."

Surely you see what's coming.

Yeah, so Retta and I venture out using the oddly-drawn and not totally cohesive map that we got at the spa, and went in search of the trail head. It took us 20 minutes to find it, and at one point came across turkeys on the golf course that I was tempted to race after... but then we found the starting point and we were on our way. Now, the trail we were allowed to take was open, and actually merged with the Lion's Head trail. So when we got to the merge point, it didn't seem so bad, so we made an executive decision: we were doing Lion's Head, if only because our egos - and butts - demanded it.

The trail - which was actually quite clear - took us up to nearly 1200 feet in elevation, giving us an incredible view... and the further we went, we were still able to see that the trail circled the property we were staying at. The problem was at some point it was supposed to cut downward toward the winery and lead us back to our room, but somewhere along the line we missed that turnoff point, and the trail took us down the other side of the mountain and spit us out in a farm. On said farm was a large moving truck that had the following spray painted on its back door: "MINE. So that means don't fuck with it." Duly noted.

Three hours. We had been gone three hours. It was starting to get dark, we were walking at the side of the road like a couple of hitchhikers just begging to become the plot of a horror movie, and all we could do was laugh. Eventually we called the hotel to come get us, which they did, and then we proceeded to order a ton of food from room service to make up for the caloric deficiency we were experiencing from our endless hike.

And yeah, I guess there's a lesson to be learned about listening... uhm, what was I saying? Oh yeah - I climbed the mountain. Goal attained.

It dawned on me after this conversation why freelance writers aren't usually the subject of television shows or movies. I mean, Carrie Bradshaw somehow made writing look sexy when she sat in a tank and men's underwear tapping away at her laptop, but by and large, writing doesn't look very exciting or glamorous on the outside. In fact, sometimes it's pretty gross.

Case in point: last week I went on a bender. Not a drinking bender - a writing bender. These happen to me at least once a month where I become so inspired by something I'm working on that I don't answer my phone, e-mail, pay attention to Facebook, Twitter, or even leave the house. And if I change clothes, it's a fucking miracle. I have no idea how this trend started with me, but sometimes I can get into such a creative groove that I fear doing the slightest little thing will throw me off.

So yes, for two days straight last week, my workday looked like this: eat, write for two hours, take an Alias break, write for two hours, eat and take an Alias break, write for two hours, take an Alias break, write for two hours, take an Alias break, write for two hours, eat and go to bed.

Now. You'll notice that nowhere in there did I say "get dressed," "do hair," or "shower." Believe me when I say I'm ashamed to admit this, but yes, when I get into a groove, I sometimes find I have to force myself to shower... but I will let it go for a day or three, just in case. I don't know what it is about the smell of my B.O. that signifies accomplishment - maybe because it reminds me of the first race I ran and medaled in (which, honestly, everyone medaled in - it was like the Special Olympics), maybe because it tells me I'm so freakin' busy being creative that I can't take a shower. Whatever it is, I know it's gross. But it's tradition. So the man who marries me needs to be aware that for at least two days out of every month, I will smell like rotten onion soup. (That said, for the right man I might convince myself to break protocol and shower through a streak. I dunno. We'll see.)

This isn't to say that I always write while sitting in my own filth. It really is a once-in-a-while phenomenon, though I will cop to not making much of an appearance effort unless I know I'm going into a meeting. Every once in a while, when I get bored of looking at my casual image in the mirror, I will start my day with a blow-out and closet consultation as if to convince myself that I work in an office environment that necessitates such attention. But on the whole my work wardrobe consists of yoga pants, jeans and t-shirts, wifebeaters and the like. I have been known to get up, change out of yoga pants into gym gear, go hiking, then shower and change into fresh yoga pants to sit at my desk and work. (Strangely, my UPS and Fed Ex delivery boys don't seem to mind.)

Yeah, I leave the house, and get to do neat-o things, and interview fun people, and attend fun events... but on the whole, it's just me and my computer. And yeah, the underpants/naked thing. It's been known to happen on occasion, but because I get deliveries on a semi-regular basis, it's kind of a pain to run for my robe repeatedly throughout the day when I could just be semi-decent and answer the door. That said, I have been known on occasion to strip down at my desk when I come home from a long day of running around, and it's often done while checking e-mail. And I think that's largely because there's something about my desk that signifies a comfort zone to me. (Go figure. The place where I feel most figuratively naked makes me want to periodically get literally naked.)

Aren't you glad you know what my inner sanctum is like? Should make for some interesting visuals as you read something I wrote in Business Traveler (or any of the other peeps I write for.)