Hello. I'm back from vacation. I'm relaxed. I'm tan. I wrote a lot. I can now say I've been tubing, by which I would mean that I've been dragged behind the back of a speedboat while clinging to a flimsy plastic innertube and screaming. It was fun, but given a choice, I will always choose the canoe. Choose the canoe! That sounds a lot like "Take the Cannoli."

(By the way, can I just mention that I can't stand my stupid gold box on Amazon? It's such a great idea, and so eye-catching, and they're totally wasting its potential -- a company that seems obsessed with researching and cataloging our tastes based on past purchases and viewing histories and favorite ice cream flavors and social security numbers and godknowswhatelse should have done a better job with this. Why are they trying to sell me a Black & Decker GH400 12" Grass Hog Automatic Feed String Trimmer/Edger with Auto Feed Spool (AFS)? What is a Grass Hog? Have I ever done anything to indicate that I would like an Auto Feed Spool? Do I even have a lawn?)

On a more serious note, I found out one of my thesis advisors died in July. She was very ill, and had been for a long time, so it's not exactly shocking news, but I'm thrown just the same. The woman was absolutely brilliant. She could speak Middle English, was an unbelievable expert on feminism and Marxism, had read everything that had ever existed, ever. And, like many extroadinarily intelligent people, she was also very difficult. There were times that I flat-out despised her. She reduced me to tears on more than one occasion, and could be hopelessly discouraging at a time when I desperately wanted people to tell me that yes, in fact, I could want to be a writer, and yes, I could really finish a book of short stories in a year, and yes, someone someday might want to read something I had written. At a time that I only wanted yesses, nothing but mushy-smushy affirmation, she gave me a lot of nos. She could be pretty merciless in her criticism, and a few times I thought she would absolutely crush me. I don't know if she knew how much she affected me. I always tried to hide it. (As did the rest of her advisees; despite all of the emotional upheaval, she was the absolute most sought-after thesis advisor and we had to fight to get her. I saw more than one of them in tears after an hour in her office, too.) But after a while, I just got angry at her, and she gave me/us something to push against, something to prove, and I wonder if that wasn't the point.

In any case, that resistance is always in the back of my mind somewhere. I have always imagined sending her a copy of my first novel, and her sending it back with chicken-scratch red all over it, saying the one thing I can still hear in her voice: "You have talent but you don't know what to do with it. Work harder. Stop writing like you're afraid." In her own weird way, she saw right through me -- the me that's terribly scared of exposing myself through writing, of taking risks and of being judged -- and I don't know if she deliberately recognized it and called me on it, or if the way she built me up and tore me down just happened to hit on it exactly.

I really, really, really wanted to show her that novel: part revenge fantasy, part thank you, part I don't know what. I thought about it all the time. This all seems very wrong, somehow.