Just As You (Horrifyingly) Are

Let's all hang out with Mindy Kaling and cry about stuff! That's what girl friends do when they hang out, right? I'm a little out of practice. How glad are you that Glamour.com and  Crown, the publisher and now NPR have excerpts of Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me posted? Now you can have all the fun for free that everyone else who has hard-cover-book-amounts-of-money gets to have! (Obviously you'll buy the book eventually, but you just can't right now and why do things have to cost money and not charm?)

So, in the NPR excerpt, "Non-Traumatic Things That Have Made Me Cry," Mindy confirms two things that I have always believed to be true: it is impossible not to have a huge crush on Colin Firth, and everyone gets misty at the part in Bridget Jones' Diary when Mark Darcy says, "I like you. Very much. Just as you are." But, um, the second thing maybe not for the same reason?

Day 22: What the Hurricane Taught Me

Bitch.

So....Irene.  I live in one of the floodier parts of town, and although I'm up the hill from the river a ways, I'm at the bottom of a small ridge so all the water runs down from the hill and spills into my street, and manhole geysers are a pretty regular thing here. So who could tell whether my first-floor apartment was going to food or not? It was a toss-up. But I decided to wait and see what would happen, and besides if I did flood I wanted to be there to move my Harry Potter books off the bottom shelf of my bookcase. So I hunkered down by myself in my apartment with my supplies: "non-perishable food items" in the form of wine, frozen pizza, chips and salsa, wine, the biggest jar of reduced-fat Skippy I could find, and wine; also my lantern, batteries, duct tape, and a 1000-page book with dragons in it. Oddly, the duct tape was the thing that reassured me most of all. I could duct tape the cracks in the door frame and then the water wouldn't get in? Yes, I did this, laugh at me.

You know what sucks about being all alone during a hurricane?

Ev. Er. Y. THING.