the underwear drawer

either this is a very elaborate scam or this book might actually be published after all

First (and mercifully brief self-promotional) things first: look! My book is available for pre-order on Amazon!




Please go reserve your copy, before my parents go apeshit and buy them all so as to avoid the potential embarrassment of me not selling any books at all.

Also, thanks for all the nice comments in the last entry! You're all very sweet. One of the problems with writing a book about your own experience is that everything is necessarily more personal. If I wrote a book about, say, the plight of the endangered spotted owl, I don't think I'd be quite so nervous about presenting it to the world as I do a book about the inner workings of my medical education and marriage and the birth of my kids. People can feel free to like it or dislike it, but it does take an extra layer of mental insulation against inevitable criticism when the subject matter is your own experience. That said, the readers of this blog have always been tremendously supportive and I cannot, nor will I be able to thank you enough for reminding me along the way that I could do this thing. So in case I don't thank you enough: thank you.

When it comes to book promotion, I actually have no idea how it works, so please forgive me if I don't provide more information. It's not coyness, it's ignorance. I expect there will be stuff going on in Atlanta around the time the book comes out, as well as stuff in New York, but beyond that I have absolutely no idea. I've read as much as you have about the changing face of the book industry and how in this age of new media and the...what do you call it? Internet?...that in general there are fewer book tours and in-person readings unless you happen to be David Freaking Sedaris or what have you. That said, I am open to everything and hope that I will have a chance at least somewhere along the way to meet some of you lovely people and really impress you with my poor social skills and extremely fast talking. Until then, just continue to think that I am normal. It's for the better.

Anyway, enough of that. Check out these awesome gummy candies that I found for Halloween:




Now, color me easily impressed but this is just one step shy of the gummi Venus de Milo in terms of artistry. What I wouldn't do to buy these, and then go back in time to my first year of medical school, so that I could be Queen of the Nerds. (I know, I know, you want them too. Go buy them here, 44 pieces for $6.99. You're welcome.)

This was officially going to be the first year that Halloween was not going to catch me with my pants down. Usually I kind of remember Halloween about a month and a half before, dismiss the idea of planning my kid(s)'s costumes on the excuse that it's way too early for that kind of thing, and then promptly forget about Halloween until three days before, when all that's left on the shelves are those terrible semi-porno costumes for adults who wait until the last second because they can't decide what they want to be, Slutty Nurse or Slutty She-Devil. And then I have to somehow make some last minute costume out of clothes that they already own, and although this occasionally turns out OK, I figured that a little foresight was usually better.

However, my kid is a weirdo (I'm speaking of Cal; Mack is still oblivious about Halloween and therefore essentially malleable) and he insists that he doesn't want to dress up for Halloween at all, and prefers, instead of going trick-or-treating, if we could "just stay at home that night and relax." I didn't want to push the candy issue that hard (after all, he's going to be finishing up some major dental work just two days before Halloween itself--though the dentist is very nice, I have no interest in creating as self-perpetuating revenue stream for him) I did have to ask Cal whether or not he thought it would be fun to go out with his friends and get candy, because that's what trick-or-treating is, after all, dressing up and going to get candy, not to mention more candy and did I mention CANDY? Now wouldn't that be fun?

He shrugged. "There are other fun things." Like what, canasta? Child, you are five years old. Now you will get into this Superman costume padded up with fake muscles and you will like it.

(Here's a little blast from the past, Cal circa Halloween 2007, when his costume was "Medical Resident." Gone are the days when I could dress him up for my own selfish amusement. Also gone are the days when I could use him for candy bait and then eat all his M&Ms on the pretense that they are a choking hazard.)