stuff of dreams

I know two people who’ve had their second baby and didn’t let me know for months. Not that they were obligated to me. More like, you know with their first kid, they were shouting from the rooftops, on heavy, expensive paper stock.

These second kids. Oh man.

And I thought, when Stella was born, we were on top of our game. We let people know she’d arrived in a timely fashion. So, yeah. Go me. I’m always underestimating myself. Except when I’m overestimating myself, like when I thought, okay, I’ll submit my apartment for this contest and okay, I probably won’t win first place, but maybe I’ll get a $500 gift certificate. Maybe I’ll at least place. And even if I don’t, Nate Berkus will surely comment on my thread, asking, begging me if he can redo my kitchen free of charge and show it on Oprah, because wow. You have four people living in such a cute yet cozy space? You deserve a new kitchen.

I think these things and in my head they sound plausible. Sure, that could totally happen, my head says to me. Now, I don’t think I think these things linearly or willfully. The thoughts are just there, like little tufts of smoke, floating. Background conversation at the 24/7 party of voices in my head.

Thoughts like these have always been there and are how, at fifteen, I wound up shagging a pop star, a fact I am no longer proud of, so if you want to read the essay, you'll have to find the link, I'm not going to link it here, but this event has nevertheless, uh, erected a mountain in the otherwise level terrain of my history. And in a way, my lofty smoky fantasy thoughts that seem so real in my head are also how I came to write and publish a novel.

You have to dream really big to have the sort-of-big things happen, I’ve concluded. I was just on the phone the other day with the great guy who optioned my book, and as I laid there in the dark of a cold, rainy Brooklyn night, my ear attached to the phone attached to the sunny day of L.A. listening to the laundry list of bigwigs my book has been pitched to, I thought, this is the stuff of dreams. I’m sitting here bemoaning my cavelike existence as a mother of two needy tots while people in offices in Hollywood are discussing the movie version of my book.

Even if it never happens with Star Craving Mad, because people pass on these things all the time, and that’s the way it is and I’m cool with that, but even if it never happens, there were powerful people in offices in Hollywood discussing things like whether Anne Hathaway or Rachel McAdams should play the part of Maddy Braverman, who of course, is based on me. Which is a really neat thing. And makes me think, especially when I'm sitting here kids free, that anything is possible. Even a house for the four of us, so that I no longer qualify for the smallest coolest apartment contest.