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2002-01-22 | 5:13 p.m.

After dinner at Frank and Fiona's last night, we had a long (and I mean that in the fullest possible sense of the word) discussion about What the Hell Is Wrong with Me Exactly. We've had this discussion many times before, though often enough we talk about What the Hell Is Wrong with You or the ever popular What the Hell Is Wrong with Everybody Else. But this time we talked about me and my unwritten column. Frank had literally just signed and returned his latest book contract and is negotiating an advance for a new book, while Fiona, bless her heart, had recently sent her first monograph off for peer review at three distinguished academic presses. And there I sat, sniveling about how I can't force myself to write one measly 800-word column.

Pretty sad stuff really but these are old friends and they don't make a stink about it.

So today I read a profile of Susan Sontag and I thought, "I'd like my column to be somewhere between Susan Sontag and Erma Bombeck." Then certain geometric terms started to muscle in, attempting to make my idea more precise, more Sontagian (at least what I imagine Sontagianism to be, which is probably not all that close, since I haven't actually read any Sontag. This is not surprising, though, because I have the philosophical curiosity of a worker ant----which is arguably, as Frank took pains to point out last night, not a full-fledged creature in its own right but more like a partial creature, or a Borg drone. At least according to the scientists. Note that Frank himself never actually said "Borg drone" because he doesn't watch TV, making him indisputably more Sontagian than me, whatever it is.).

So, as I was saying, geometry reared its ugly, and I got to thinking, "I'd like my column to occupy a point equidistant from Susan Sontag in one direction and Erma Bombeck in the other." Which is embarrassing----it's embarrassing to think like this, in this stilted, pretentious way. And then I felt even worse because I could feel myself sort of leaning over in my imagination, psychically straining, wanting to be more like Sontag than Bombeck, because I would rather be smart than loved, and then I didn't feel right about that either. I don't want to disparage Erma Bombeck, even if it was only in my head, because she was a very funny woman, and also because she is dead and was probably a very nice person. I read some of her books when I was 10 or 11 years old and I thought they were hilarious. I'm sort of afraid to read her now because I'm afraid her stuff won't seem quite so funny anymore. (After all, during that same period I was a great fan of comic-strip paperbacks about Hi & Lois and the Wee Pals.)

Then I got to thinking that while it's true I would rather be smart than be loved, as a writer (as opposed to brain surgeon or nuclear physicist, where brains really give you an edge) I would rather be witty than nosebleed smart. So I should definitely keep Bombeck in the equation.

Then it occurred to me that when I think about this column, I don't compare my efforts (or my imagined efforts) to either Sontag or Bombeck. The person I always have in the back of my mind is Janet Konttinen. I've read Konttinen in the Chronicle a few times and almost without exception, her stuff makes me both laugh out loud and burn with jealousy. When I started thinking about Konttinen last week, I convinced myself that her domain is roughly the same as mine but that she is better at covering it than I am. We both have multiples (I have twins, she has triplets, which makes me feel----indefensibly, I admit----as if she has "won" that particular category) and we're both mothers who write from home.

What room is there for me, I wondered, in a world with Janet Konttinen in it?

So I went back and read some of her stuff today and I realized that while she is very capable, and very funny, there just may be room for me at that table.

I would revise this drivel some more but Criminy wants to get on the computer now. Until next time...

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