I’m not going to touch that pile of your/you’re/there/their/they’re/its/it’s over in the corner. Every self-appointed Grammar Cop in the world has done that to death and all it does is make those who consistently get it wrong angry and defensive and more determined than ever to explain why they can’t grasp second-grade English.

What I want to clear out of here are the “current” phrases that are starting to smell like week-old chicken skins in the bottom of the garbage can.

1. “Wait for it.” This worked the first 12 times I heard it, but only when what I waited for was truly hilarious. But it so rarely is. “I’m going to bed… wait for it… early! LMAO.” Ha ha…ha? That brings me to…
2. “LMAO.” If you laughed it off, it’s gone. You can’t laugh it off anymore.
3. “Under the bus.” We’ve all been thrown under that proverbial bus so many times I’m thinking of having all our mail forwarded there and starting a book club.
4. “Just sayin’.” Just stop.
5. Using “friend” as a verb. I like Facebook too, but not enough to let it rewrite language. I can’t think of any other college dropouts we’d allow to do that. Parenthetically, “text” is not a verb either, nor is “Google.”
6. Asking a question and then answering it. “Am I happy my car got a flat tire on the way to Starbucks? No.” I didn’t ask you a question, so if you ask your own question and then answer it, why am I even here?
7. “Imma.” No no no no no no no no no. Kanye, go to your room.
8. “No brainer.” Indeed it is.

Feel free to add your own to this list – I know I’m missing some. I also know some people now want to pummel me with my own thesaurus. So if you need me, I’ll be … wait for it… under the bus. Just sayin’.

For me, it’s always been an epic wrestling match between who I am expected to be and who I really am, with who I want to be periodically jumping on top of the mash-up and screaming. A friend recently described me as “trying so hard to be vanilla, but the subtext is uncontrollably Thai chili and garlic sauce. With capers.”

I didn’t even know what to say to that because he is so incredibly right. I’m not vanilla, but like most adult children of alcoholics, I’m a pleaser, a soother, a peacemaker. And the more people think I’m vanilla, the calmer I can keep everyone and everything around me. But the older I get, the more sharply aware I become that by keeping everyone around me soothed and smoothed at the expense of who I really am may make the outsides calm, but inside I’m a roiling mess of resentment. And, apparently, Thai chili.

On the phone with my father last night, I listened to him talk endlessly about losing weight and dying his graying mustache brown again in a half-hearted attempt to prove to the world and mostly himself that he’s more than 64-year-old man sitting in his apartment yelling answers at the contestants on Wheel of Fortune. As he kept going, I wondered if it’s worth trying to assert my individuality, or should I just give up and admit I’m nothing more than a younger incarnation of my parents? Lately it seems like trying to show the world what an individual you are just makes you even more like everyone else. Rebelling is conforming these days, and that new tattoo on your lower back might as well have been done with a branding iron.

Am I afraid of being who I really am? Is the me I don’t let show bound to be a disappointment to those around me? Those who have handed me my scripted roles and seen me take them without question or, God forbid, protest? Daughter, sister, student, friend, wife, employee… society has certain expectations of me as a 43-year-old woman, but do they matter? And if they matter, do they matter more than the expectations I have of myself?

There’s more to me than what shows. There are aspects of me I want to let out, but like finally using my wedding china, I keep waiting for the right moment, the right situation, the perfect time and it. never. comes. The barrier is there but I can’t see it. If I can’t see it, if I can’t define it, can I tear it down? What’s holding me back from releasing me? All of me? I don’t want to be an old woman on my deathbed, weeping out my unused potential with my rattly last breaths.

A friend suggested I’m going through nothing more than a simple mid-life crisis, the kind that happens to everyone at some point, a run-of-the-mill emotional firestorm that culminates in staying up all night to drink wine and look through high school yearbooks. But I reject that explanation. I’m not having a mid-life crisis, I’m having a mid-life coming out party.

Pass the Thai chili with garlic sauce. And capers.

There is a certain amount of grace involved in handling disappointment and I exhibited exactly none of it when I was notified yesterday that my application for a fellowship to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism was turned down.

I suppose I wasn’t really all that surprised. More journalists than ever are out of work, and the New York metro area in particular is rife with them. Fully paid tuition and a healthy living stipend is a pretty sweet deal for anyone, and I knew I’d be up against all kinds of journalists who were already out of work and didn’t have to take a year off to get their master’s. Also the fellowship is specifically for business journalists, which I’m not but am interested in becoming. And of course, it had the added element of “Hey, I want to go to your Ivy League School, but instead of me paying you, I think you should pay me. How’s that grab you?” It takes a gigantic journalist ego to apply for something like that, and it’s my gigantic journalist ego that is taking a beating since finding out I didn’t get it.

This kind of disappointment feels much like grief – the mourning for something you once either had or wanted that leaves a lingering, sour pile of yuck in the pit of your stomach. I woke up this morning and lay there for a few minutes, trying to define what it was that was giving me that early-morning, post-breakup feeling and then I remembered the “We regret to inform you” email of the previous day.

As much as it sucks, I’m not sure I would trade disappointment, of any level, for all that precedes it. There are few things in life as amazing as hope and expectation, those hours or days or weeks of anticipation, of giddy excitement, of positive thinking and endless possibilities that stretch out ahead as beautiful and mystical as a street paved with chocolate.

So… now what? My street turned out to be paved with Ex-Lax. Closed door, dead end road. Yes, I’m feeling sorry for myself, but I know who I am. I know what I am. I’m a journalist. I’m a damned good journalist. And as much as it would be a relief to kick and scream and throw my notebook across the room and announce that FINE, I’m just going to go work at HOOTERS now, I know that in reality, I will lick my wounds for a couple of days, drink some wine, complain to those closest to me, and then get back to work. Because that’s what I do. I’m a journalist.

As we approached one house, I saw a sheet of paper taped to the front door. When we got closer, I could see it was a picture of a broadly smiling Mickey Mouse, with his middle finger extended. Beneath him were the words “Hey Iran!”

I knew about the hostage crisis, of course. I’d seen bits and pieces about it on the news, I’d heard my parents discussing it. But I considered it just another grown-up problem that had nothing to do with me, like inflation or weak coffee or the bathroom scale.

But this… this was different. This was a single sheet of American Attitude, and I was every inch an American. Mickey Mouse was an American icon, and he was giving Iran the finger. I may have been sheltered and 11, but even I knew what that meant. In that moment, my thoughts changed. International problems were no longer just stories on the news that didn’t affect me. They were after us. They were after me. Now I’d have to make my dad check under the bed for Iranians before I could go to sleep.

It was another year before the American hostages were released, and in that time I grew to think of Iran as not a country, with kids like me and their parents and their schools and their lives, but as a great, dark, hulking monster. It wasn’t a place, it was a Thing. A dark, scary Thing that had gotten some other Americans. I could be next.

After the hostages were released and the crisis was over, I was told to start being afraid of Soviets instead, since they were going to try and nuke me any day. I didn’t think about Iran too much anymore, but now it’s back in my face.

Only this time, it’s different.

This time, partly because I am older and wiser (mostly older), I am aware that Iran is not a big dark Thing but a place. The Internet has made the world much smaller, and in a way I’m not sure any country’s government could have predicted or particularly appreciates. Now we don’t just see the tiny glimpses of other nations that the television news shows us, we can choose to see more of the world from the relative safety of our own homes. And social networks have enabled us to connect with each other, to talk to each other, to get to know each other as people, instead of as countries or worse, as governments.

Now when I think of Iran, I don’t think of a monster coming to get me. I think of my friend Mostafa, who lives and works in Bojnord. Mostafa, who loves his family and Jethro Tull. Mostafa, who is working on his graduate degree, learning to play the electric guitar, gets hassled by his landlord and is happiest when he is spending time with his friends. Mostafa, who just wants to be able to make a living and pay his bills and live in peace.

Mostafa, who told me the idea of my country invading his fills him with fear.

We communicate only in writing, which I think amuses both of us – there’s not a language barrier so much as a Great Wall of Huh? His English is much better than my Persian, mostly because my crummy high school didn’t offer Advanced Persian, or even Intro to Squiggly Letters.

Mostafa and I often talk about the general mood of our countries, and what we’re hearing about each other. He admits that the idea of going to war with us is not one the people of Iran are behind (I know, right? Who knew.) and that he is sometimes depressed with all the talk of it, although he tries to stay upbeat. He uses the words “shiny” and “white” for positivity. “I’m a kind of shiny guy,” he told me one day. The world needs more shiny guys, I think.

“Our government relations were so good before the revolution in 1979, but now it’s absolutely broken down,” he said during one conversation shortly after the news came out that Iran was threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz. “I’m frightened of a war. Everybody’s talking about war and attacking to my country. It’s really hard to talk about the possibility of this happening. I don’t like it at all.”

He says he doesn’t even watch the news on TV anymore (sound familiar?) but has other ways of staying aware of what’s going on and “what will happen to us.”

“I don’t know what will happen in the close future for the relations of our two countries, but in my personal view I don’t want some American soldiers walking with their guns in my city streets, though I don’t like our Army or police force either,” he told me. Broken though his English is, his next words sent a chill through me. “Maybe this attack would change my situation to a better condition or the worst one. Who knows? But it will have a lots of bad happenings and consequences, and who will pay the compensation for all these disasters? Our people will. The main pressure is on my peoples’ backs. Governments always think they are only fighting other governments, but it has a bad effect on the routine lives of the ordinary people.”

He asked if I watched the Golden Globes this year, and quoted Asghar Farhadi’s speech, about the “peace loving” people of Iran who truly don’t want a war with any country.

Although he said he knows the Iranian government monitors everything they say and do (*ahem*), he openly tells me that the government is not what their people want it to be (*aHEM*).

“There’s a lot of distance between our people and our state,” he says. “I just hope someday soon things would have change for us and we’ll cross the freedom shores. You know our people don’t have any hostility with your state or your people. The politicians just don’t want to know this fact!”

He said he hopes someday his government will “be more wise” and “act like civilized human beings.” Yeah, here too, buddy.

I told him about how the very idea of “Iranians” frightened me when I was a child. This alternately amused and disturbed him.

“Our people are so warm-natured, kindly and generous, though all over the world you can find some contradictions, because nothing is definite and absolute,” he told me. “We’re just looking for free communicating with other countries and other people anywhere in the world.”

He said it’s hard for even a shiny guy to stay positive, but he tries.

“You will always find something to make you sad and down, though you feel the power inside and want to break them free,” he said. Funny how true meaning can come through even the most fractured attempts at another language.

“We still have much to be happy about, my friend,” I told him.

“You’re right, you’re so right,” he answered. “I have a fully appreciation about this friendship with you, and I’m happy about the huge circle of dear friends all over the world so I don’t feel alone.”

My conversations with Mostafa leave me alternately happy and depressed, with a big pinch of hope and sprinkled with a fair amount of panic. My country has been at war with someone for nearly all of my life. I don’t want another war. I never want war. Especially now that I know that Iran isn’t full of monsters who are coming to get me.

Put the finger back down, Mickey. You were wrong.

Darcy Deerhound Doyle, a deerhound from England, has thousands of friends on Facebook, where I met her ages ago through her mum, Bev Doyle. Bev is a friend of a friend and has become my friend in that magical way Facebook has of pushing people through portals of geographic distance until there are no time zones and we’re all just hanging out together. The internet version of Narnia.

Darcy survived osteosarcoma and used her Facebook page to spread the word about the disease, raise funds for research, and to generally talk about her life with all her brothers and sisters – dogs and cats alike. She wrote in idiosyncratic, grammatically broken baby talk, better known on the Web as lolcat. She posted pictures and regular updates, and her fan base grew exponentially. Friends from around the world found their way to Darcy, human and animal alike.

I will admit, the whole concept would have ordinarily made me roll my eyes and think, “A Facebook page for your dog? Really?” But something about Darcy made it seem normal and fine. And after awhile, I found myself looking forward to seeing what Darcy was up to. Bev not only wrote as Darcy, she became Darcy, letting us into their home on a daily basis to witness those moments that any pet owner would recognize – like Bev opening the door for Darcy to go out, only to have Darcy just stand in the doorway and survey the yard while Bev stood there freezing her ass off – but we saw it from Darcy’s perspective, which is to say it’s perfectly acceptable to simply want to see what’s going on outside, but from inside.

We sympathized when her baby brother, Wellington, would bother her. We laughed when her parents brought home a new kitten named Clover, whom Darcy called “Clober.” We celebrated when Darcy got married to Chubbyhugs Wallace, a dashing greyhound from Detroit.

There is something in us as adults that still sees the magic in anthropomorphism. It’s a bit like when you see a man dressed as Santa. It doesn’t matter how old and jaded you are, when you see that red suit and that white beard, for just the tiniest moment you still believe it’s really Santa. We know animals don’t talk our language or wear pants or drive cars… but there is still a part of us that thinks maybe they can. Maybe we want them to. Maybe by letting our imaginations make our animals more like us, we believe somehow we’ll become more like them as well, long naps and the ability to love unconditionally included.

Last Sunday, Darcy died. When her farewell message appeared, my breath caught in my throat. And as the expressions of grief and sympathy began to pour in from all corners of the earth, I sat at my computer and cried. I cried for Bev and her husband, Marc, and the pain of losing a beloved pet. I cried for sweet, brave Darcy. But most of all, I cried because we were all crying. Darcy was the thin line connecting dots all over the map to make a beautiful picture of peace and love and friendship. Any friend of Darcy’s is a friend of mine.

Fortunately, Darcy’s sister, Grace, has taken over her big sister’s “Fasebuk” posting duties. I’m sure it’s as therapeutic to Bev’s heart as it is to ours to keep that connection going. I for one would miss my daily, legalized peek into the windows of the Doyle home. So thanks, Grace, for stepping in to fill those big paw prints.

And Darcy… rest in peace.

I put the book aside and tried to think of any little things that make me happy, but my pink flannel sheets were so warm and my bed was so comfy that I fell asleep.

The next morning while I was doing that lean over and breathe deeply through your nose thing that brewing coffee requires, I was trying to think of things that make me happy and my cat came in and threw himself against my legs in his excitement to see me. So I picked him up and had a cuddle and got purred at and forgot to go back to thinking of things that make me happy.

When I sat down at the computer I was going to actually physically write down a list of things that make me happy, maybe put it up on my refrigerator or something so I can look at it when I need to. But then I had an idea for a new character in my book, so I wrote three chapters and then hugged myself and then made some hot chocolate. With whipped cream. And a little cocoa powder sprinkled on top because they do stuff like that on the Food Network and it looks cool. And I’m at least as cool as the Food Network, puh-lease. But somewhere during that little party I forgot about the list again.

And then I had an awesome salad for lunch with the best sweet peppers on it I think I’ve ever had. Sweet peppers on salad are what God eats for lunch, by the way.

Right after lunch I got a call from a girlfriend I hadn’t talked to in ages, and by the time we hung up, my sides hurt from laughing. I should have asked her to help me with my list, but I forgot.

So then evening rolled around and I was going to make that list once and for all, but I snuggled up under my big fleecy throw – man I love that thing – on the couch for some laugh-out-loud TV (my current addictions are Big Bang Theory and An Idiot Abroad), and a glass of wine. Then I started nodding off and I had to go to bed so once again… no list of happy moments.

Man, this is so hard…

She was eating a hamburger and a salad, he was eating a bowl of chili. I could not take my eyes from them. Their movements were mechanical, transferring sustenance from their plates to their bodies, but their eyes never met. Their silence was not companionable, the comfortable kind. Nor was it an awkward silence, where you try to think of something clever to say to get the conversation rolling. This was the stoic silence of endurance, of a couple who knows one another so well that they blend together and never really see each other again. They weren’t giving off feelings of anger. They hadn’t been fighting. What I was picking up were feelings of loneliness. I could sense the heavy, damp feeling of loneliness emanating from both of them, but particularly from her.  Feeling alone when you’re with someone else is so much worse than feeling alone when you’re alone.

I was mesmerized. I moved my hand slightly so that he was blocked from my view. Watching her then, she looked just as though she were alone. I shifted my hand and he was alone. I suppose it may have said something about their interpersonal skills that they also took no notice of me, the only other person in the restaurant, playing some weird game of peek-a-boo with them from across the room. How could they never even look at each other?

They finished their meal, got up and left, walking in single file, still not looking at each other.

They never once said a word.

In the same tradition that says writers never retire, they also never take a holiday from writing. At least not for very long. I just rewrote the entire beginning of my new book, The Do-Over. While I didn’t feel I could change my protagonist’s background, or any part of the basis of who she is, I did change her goals, the path of her life, and I added in a new friend who is already holding her hand, cheering her on, and kicking her butt when she needs it, like a good friend should.

Interesting. Those are also my New Year’s resolutions.

More later. Right now… coffee.

I’ve written stories for the paper, yes, but I haven’t written here in awhile. My creative writing has fallen by the wayside. I wondered why, but I have a list of excuses ready for anytime I need to pardon myself for slacking off: I’m so busy, I’m tired, there’s a new Warehouse 13 on, it’s a full moon, I have a headache, (insert relevant person’s name here) is driving me crazy, I need to do laundry, I keep thinking it’s Tuesday, I can’t find my glasses, we’re out of coffee.

Several days ago, I realized what the problem really is.

Writing used to be where I’d go to hide out for awhile. My writing was not another thing on my to-do list that needed to be dealt with and crossed off. Writing was a reward, not a chore. And somewhere along the line, the Internet burst onto the scene and one day I looked up from my writing and saw all these other writers crowded around me, each with their own blog, their own website, promoting themselves on Facebook, Mommy blogging,  travel blogging, food blogging, self publishing, plastering news of their book deal everywhere, Tweeting like the season for it is about to run out, clamoring to be heard, searching for their creative identity.

And suddenly, I was expected to jump into a box too. I was no longer a writer, one who writes for the sheer joy of the written language. I used to sit down with a notebook and a pencil and be surprised at what I ended up with. Some days it was a poem, some days a short story, other days it was the first couple of chapters of a new book, once when I was in high school it was a two-act play, a love story starring Neil Diamond and me. I’m a writer. I wrote.

But now that’s not enough. “I’m a writer,” is unfailingly met with “Oh? What do you write?” I’m expected to give a tidy answer like “fiction.” If I answer honestly that I write whatever the Muse nudges me toward, that sometimes it’s fiction and sometimes it’s non-fiction and other times it’s a screenplay and the other day it was a haiku about all the cat hair on my living room rug, they look at me with pity. Oh, isn’t that a shame. She doesn’t know what she wants to be. In order to be a writer these days, apparently I have to slap a label on my forehead while I’m working. I was so freaked out, so overwhelmed, that suddenly I couldn’t write at all. When did it become about the marketing, and not about the writing?

I was on the phone last night with Chuck Hughes, who is a chef from Montreal. He has a successful TV show on the Cooking Channel and recently participated in the Food Network’s “The Next Iron Chef.” Yet despite his success, he doesn’t wear the title of “Chef” like a diamond-studded name tag, as other TV chefs do. He calls himself a “cook.” While we were talking, I realized that for Chuck, it’s really just about the food.

“I am so tired of all these bloggers and people coming into my restaurant and taking pictures just so they can say they were at my restaurant,” he told me. “They don’t even eat my food! What the f*ck is that about?”

And just like that, the noise, the static, the competing, shouting voices of all the other writers around me fell silent as what he said, as the truth and the simplicity and the beauty of what he said, enveloped me. Despite his rising star, Chuck isn’t about the celebrity of it all. He’s still about the food. He isn’t buttonholed, he isn’t pushed into a corner, he isn’t labeled. One day he’s making sandwiches, the next he’s making kim chee, then you turn around and he’s making individual molten caramel cakes. (Note to Chuck: I need one of those. Stat.)

It’s the same with my writing. It has to be. If I try to put myself into a box, I’ll suffocate. I’m a writer. And wherever that takes me, every day, every moment, I have to follow it. Because I’m a writer. The relief I feel just typing those three words again, unencumbered by anything else, is making me laugh out loud.

I’m a writer!

Making that decision was the easy part. What’s been harder is admitting that I’ll be 45 when I graduate. I had planned to have my master’s by the time I was 25, and I was going to burst onto the journalism scene and dazzle the world faster than they could say “Who in Barbara Walter’s name is that?”

But you know how it goes. Life happened. Work, marriage, divorce, moving, I had to make the transition from cassettes to CDs, there were just a lot of demands on me. I kept thinking I’d get my master’s someday. Someday. That mythical place in the future that shows its face now and then, just long enough to tease me before it’s gone again, like Brigadoon.

But I cheated on journalism. I started a thing with public relations and it lasted for seven years. And while I don’t exactly regret it, by the time I realized it was journalism I really loved and came crawling back, journalism had changed the locks. I finally convinced it to let me back in, but there is much I don’t recognize anymore. So… back to school with me. Grad school is like marriage counseling for journalism and me. I want to find out how it has changed, and where I fit into the picture now.

So I’m back where I was in 1992, but now I’ll be 45 when I graduate. I’ll admit, that depressed me initially. I had visions of going to my first job interview after grad school and having them mistake me for Helen Thomas. I started putting pictures around of me when I was in my mid 20s, listening to the music I loved back then, trying to recapture that excited feeling of being a young journalist, full of promise and with the world spread out before me, limitless, inviting, exciting.

And then one day I realized… nothing has changed. Not really. Yes, it’s 18 years later than I thought it would be, but when I get that degree and go forward to stake out my place in my chosen field, I’ll still be full of promise, I’ll still have the world spread out before me. Everything limitless, inviting and exciting is still waiting for me. My age doesn’t matter to anyone as much as it matters to me. And at the age when most people are starting to feel burned out on their careers, I’ll just be starting to pick up speed. So while I started out thinking of my middle-agedness as a curse, I’ve come to realize it’s a blessing. I have more to offer the world than I did when I was 25. Or even 35. And my heart – my 42-year-old, world-wise, battle-scarred, stronger-than-ever heart – is happy.

Bring it on.