Do you have them yet?

...no. I have a spontaneously rebooting fileserver instead, and now I am going to have an aneurysm. So I'd better hit the vending machine for chocolate, stat.

We have much better restaurants, so decide if you want Mexican or Vietnamese or Indian or Sicilian or Japanese or South American.

Now I'm hungry for all of the above, but very thankful Dana did not take me to Buca di Beppo.

I use eggs in my Spinach Lasgana, I got the recipe from Better Homes and Garden so it's not really authentic.

Yes -- all this "oh-so-candid" confessional writing gets up my nose.

i've been stewing about this. It's what my book is, pretty much. And I'm an essayist. Okay. I'm a lousy secretary, but I want to be an essayist, like Sedaris and Vowell.

I think I have an ethical line, I ask permission before sending out a story that includes personal details of someone else.

But my work always seems to amount to naval gazing: This is what I did, what I saw, and how I feel about it. It's candid and confessional in nature.

I'm not sure that I have any sort of defense other than that I'm feeling all wounded about it, perhaps immaturely so.

I know more Italian Americans (including immigrants) than any other ethnic group, I think. I was the one of the few kids that wasn't at least half Italian.

My dad lived in Italy for a number of years and he used to threaten us with this all the time.

But my work always seems to amount to naval gazing: This is what I did, what I saw, and how I feel about it. It's candid and confessional in nature.

But you're writing about something that a lot of people don't know about. Most of the navel gazers people are complaining about are yakking on and on about the obvious.

What region, brenda, do you know?

I have a question for people with Caller ID.

When you see an unfamiliat number on ID (and no message was left) OR someone calls and immediately hangs up, what do you do?

Do you call the number back to see who called? Or ignore it? Or what?

Today and yesterday I had a couple people call and want to know who called or why the person hung up and didn't seem very pleased to be told that it was probably a wrong number (one of the lines that rings up here is a general line that almost anyone can use).

I don't understand why people call unfamiliar numbers and then get upset to find out it's a wrong number.

Naples, Cindy.

Allyson, if you believe that your writing is like Olen's or Ayelet Waldman's, there's not much I can do to comfort you. However, nothing of yours I've read is similar.

It's not like I'm bitching about everything autobiographical.