When I get the feeling a dinner party is winding down, I like to pass out a nice digestif–a white port or airplane bottles of Jägermeister. Depending on how that goes over, I might then ask if anybody wants to go to Philly, which tends to make me feel a little like a sitcom dad trying to get laid. I wonder if they, too, get their feelings hurt when they are rebuffed every day except their birthday. I always rein it in though, because appearances are so important (I didn’t say to me–that would sound shallow.) An aside: I was talking to Cookie the other day about how much I think I would enjoy being the girl Jimmy Buffett, except that–my talent for rhyme and my enthusiasm for mustaches of all thicknesses aside–I would just end up looking like some lush with a tambourine (I don’t play the guitar) because middle aged girl drunks are somewhat less accepted. I’ve been self-Pygmalioning my tipsy voice ever since I heard it on the iPhone video where Kay and I were trying to find a fox(?) on the walk home from Murph’s(?) in recognition of that particular double standard.  Darn. You know, I think the Jimmy Buffett conversation was with Jay, not Cookie. I must have been pretty high at the time. On alcohol, mother. No, wait–life.

The problem is, and I’m not blaming anyone in particular here, but when I don’t get to go to Philly, that energy has to be redirected somewhere (I took two semesters of physics for non-majors–I’m pretty sure this is called “friction”) and a lot of times I redirect the energy into getting injured. I tried to get people to go to Philly, at least in spirit, when we were in St. Lucia last week, and they totally wouldn’t, so I fell down the steps. This might mean I won’t get to run the New York Marathon on Sunday, or that my heel will start bleeding and I will have to cut out early and find a falafel cart. I bet I will also cry, tears usually reserved for certain less-pageanty passages of Beethoven, and the time I swallowed a fly while running in Brandywine Creek State Park. But that’s a good thing, because a lot of people think I don’t have feelings, which isn’t true. Also I bleed a lot.