On Monday, I went to the gym for the first time in.....well, I don't think I'm ready to reveal that yet. It's too embarrassing. But it was in a month beginning with "A." No, not April! I'm not that lazy. Oh alright, it was August. Yes, friends, before Monday, I hadn't been to the gym---which, I should point out, is LOCATED IN THE LOBBY OF MY OFFICE BUILDING, NOT LIKE I NEVER SEE IT OR ANYTHING---since August. Though in my defence, it was the very end of August. Like, maybe a week or so before the wedding. Maybe August 28th.

I think I could live in America for the rest of my life and I would still not really understand Groundhog Day. It catches me off guard every year. I'll be making polite small talk about the weather with someone in an elevator or a shop and all of a sudden they'll smile and say jovially "well, they say we've got six more weeks of winter left, of course!"

And I'll blink and look confused and think wait, did I miss something on the Weather Channel?

I turn thirty a week from today and I am not afraid to tell you that I have been sucker-punched by that old cliche, big time. You know the cliche I'm talking about: the one where you dread turning thirty. Every prime-time sitcom in the history of the world has made rampant use of this cliche at one time or another, and apparently I have watched enough prime-time sitcoms that I've fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker. I have been dreading my thirtieth birthday since the day after my twenty-ninth. I mean, that's what you're supposed to do, right?

So there I was, with a blog post all written in my head already about my haaaaaiiiiiiiirrrrrrrr---you know, the sort of self-absorbed little nugget that some social media professor at a third-rate university would hold up as Exhibit A in a lecture entitled Why Bloggers Are Navel-Gazing Twerps Who Assume You Give A Crap About Their Bangs---when J.D. Salinger died on Thursday morning.

ONE

It is roughly 1990. We are living in Hong Kong. My mother wakes up in the middle of the night to nurse my baby brother and sister, as people with recently born infants often do. She is sitting up in bed, in the dark. She is breastfeeding Luke. She feels a weird....feeling on her left shoulder, just below her collarbone. It's like something is brushing up against her skin. Oh, she thinks, it's my necklace. Then: wait, she thinks. I'm not wearing a necklace. She puts her hand to her neck and cups it around an enormous cockroach. She screams bloody murder. She turns the light on. The cockroach is at least four inches long. My dad runs in, certain she is being decapitated or garotted or something equally as gruesome. "COCKROACH!" she shouts. "Oh, thank god," says my dad. "I thought there was something wrong with the baby."

The day was magical, no doubt in part because of all the wonderful vibes and love sent along by the Internet. This is one of the very few pictures we have so far---taken by Sean's best man, Tony, who was, as I understand it, quite a hit at the wedding---but I thought I'd post it quickly from the Melbourne Library (what, isn't the library the first place you'd go on your honeymoon?) just in case you were wondering how it all went. As you can tell, it went pretty splendidly.

The fantastic house I'm currently still house-sitting is a lot more conducive to entertaining than my own apartment is---mostly because there is a dining room! and a dishwasher! and, you know, heat!---so last night two of my friends came over in their pajamas for a ceremonial evening of Thinly-Veiled Bitching About People We Don't Like, spinach pizza, and Prosecco. Which I rather think is one of the world's most excellent combinations, don't you?

Well, mother of pearl and sweet cracker sandwich: who'd have thought that there'd be over a thousand entries for last week's Clarisonic giveaway: 1,113 to be precise, which is a number so stupendously large to me that I can hardly believe it. If only there were a way to give away 1,113 Clarisonics, you know? But I guess that would make me Oprah. 

(Look under your seats, everyone! Do it right now! Just in case!)

Some days ago I attended a party for the launch of the American version of lastminute.com, at which pink cupcakes and pink lemonade were served (if you click on that link, you'll see why.) We were told that if we ourselves wore pink to the party, we would be entered in a drawing to win a vacation, and since I don't need to hear the words "win" or "vacation" twice, and since roughly 80% of my wardrobe is pink anyway, I obliged with a Pepto-Bismol-colored skirt I bought a few years ago in Singapore, and which has served me fairly well over the years for s

So we're sitting at home on a Monday night, the promise of our pot of almost-brewed tea the most exciting thing on the horizon, when we suddenly hear all this shouting outside.