Amy Ephron

I admit it – I have a soft spot for hotel bars partly because the first time my present husband declared himself to me was at a hotel bar – albeit it was coming on the heels of “I think you have another girlfriend (true) and if you want to keep seeing me, you’d better tell her good-bye....” In fairness, we’d only been dating for a week and we hadn’t kissed yet. And my version of the story is way more dramatic than his. In my version, I exit the table and he runs after me and says, “Wait, wait...I think I’m falling in love with you.” In his version, the dialogue is the same, but he claims he didn’t run after me in the patio of the bar at The Peninsula in Beverly Hills and dramatically stop my exit, he simply said it at the table. (I’m right, by the way....)

Neither of us dispute the second part – that the first time we kissed was in the driveway of the Peninsula (about three minutes after the declaration) as we were both waiting for our own cars and the possibility that we might never see each other again was hanging in the air. The valets all started laughing and smiling, and in my writer’s mind, there was also applause (this is potentially debatable) but the valets were pretty sweet since basically it was sort of old people making out and could have elicited a slightly different reaction, like yucch, and if this is “too much information” for my children, I apologize about that....

Four people asked me what I wanted for my birthday last week and I gave each of them the same answer, “A new Filofax.” All four of them said the same thing. “No, you don’t. Nobody wants a Filofax any more. It’s so old-fashioned. Don’t be ridiculous. iPhone.” My daughter Maia was the harshest. She simply said, “Oh, Mom! iPhone.” It made me feel old-fashioned. It made me feel old.

For the record, I have an iPhone but despite the fact that four assistants over the last three years have religiously promised to transfer all my names and phone numbers into my computer and my iPhone, it hasn’t quite happened yet. And I never seem to have the time.

But I like my Filofax (even though it does sort of look like a truck ran over it.) It feels like a friend. I like it that it has names and addresses and phone numbers hand-printed into it. (Arguably, a few of them are dead, but I’ve learned not to notice. And I can’t quite bring myself to cross the names out. That would seem too final.) I use it in meetings to take notes. Sometimes, I’ll have a thought in the car or a random sentence for something I’m working on and I’ll pull over and jot it down into my Filofax. There are a few haikus that will probably never be printed anywhere else. I can gauge from them how sad I was on a given day. (Haikus are usually sad. The more comedic ones have found their way into my computer.)

I predict there's another shoe that's going to drop (not sure where she bought this one, but it's coming).

Everything about Sarah Palin has been stunning and spectacular since John McCain announced her as his running mate -- to the "surprise" announcement that she was resigning, followed by the spectacular announcement by her attorney Thomas Van Flein, (full-text of legal letter posted by Sarah Palin on her Twitter account), that he was planning to explore immediate legal action against bloggers, specifically Shannyn Moore, who on HuffPo wrote that "for months the rumors have been swirling about a Federal Investigation." (Hey, Van Flein, did you miss the word "rumors"?) The Governor of the Great State of Alaska gets the Second Amendment, for sure, but maybe she was between schools when they taught the "First" one.

Sarah Palin brings a lot of this on herself, though. She's secretive and she plays by her own rules. She fuels the rumors. Even when she was in public office, she didn't think that her business was our business. (I think I speak for all women in America and their gynecologists when I say that none of us were allowed to fly during our last month of pregnancy, certainly not while we were in labor!)

There is a movement to strip billions of dollars from the stimulus bill led by Ben Nelson of Omaha (whose Democratic status is debatable) and Susan Collins (Republican) of Maine. 

Included in the cuts are $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts (of course), $14 million for cyber security research by the Homeland Security Department (that makes sense?), $1 billion for the National Science Foundation (are they kidding – when we’re this close to ground-breaking stem cell research, understanding the nature of viruses, struggling to keep our oceans alive, not to mention the catastrophic potential ozone depletion – the model’s still the same even though we’ve stopped emitting...), $400 million for research and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases (hasn’t anyone thought about the amount we would be saving on health-care behind this initiative and how many jobs would be created by it?), $850 million for Amtrak (right, people should drive their own car to work and not take the train, or God forbid, carpool and coupled with the tax incentive to buy a new car, wonder who’s lobbying for this one – the only person this helps is GM and Exxon and the banking industry, God bless them), and $400 million for climate change research (oh, I forgot, we still don’t believe it exists and we haven’t signed the Kyoto Agreement...)  Really, are they kidding?!!!!