I keep wanting to write the story of the dress fitting, but I’m not finding a chunk of time to do it. So like everything else pressing in my life, I’m finding that I need to do just a little at a time, and then it will all get done in the end.

In the world of the internets, we call this being iterative, or having iterative releases. Instead of slaving for protracted stretches of time on a colossal project that will be obsolete when you finally get it out the door, you do development sprints where you plan a development cycle, you push it out, and then you keep doing little chunks of improvements at a time. A project should never be done, essentially. You are always improving it.

When I left my last job, my boss signed my card, “Stay iterative and clicky!” Words to live by.

This is how I need to start approaching everything in my life, because I naturally think that everything has a big red URGENT stamp on it (in fact, I had a dream last night that involved an URGENT stamp), and while many other people around me seem to operate the same way, I’m going to have to buck the trend. In light of some, well, interesting news that hit me yesterday, I need to change my approach from URGENT to, “It will get done, and it will get done well; I’m working on it. It will happen bit-by-bit, progressively. Please keep your pants on.”

Yesterday my glorious friend Nancy, who is not only a published author, but a New York Times Best Seller, if that’s a noun that can describe a person, quit her day job so that she can focus on her second book. Her first book was obviously wildly popular, and as the old saying goes, she needs to strike while the iron is hot on book two. Her agent, who knows what’s best for her, told her that she’s spending too much time on work and not enough time on her sequel.

This decision would affect me no matter the circumstances, because she is an inspiring, far-reaching, incredible woman and someday I would like to grow up to be her. So it's an amazing and grab-me-by-the-lapels-and-shake-me move that she's making, and it makes me dream even bigger to see her run like that.

But unfortunately, her decision also concerns me and my day-to-day life directly. The job she’s leaving is as my right-hand woman. She has helped me set up a prolific operation of fabulous writers practically overnight, something I couldn’t have accomplished single-handedly without completely abandoning every other work responsibility I have. (What, you mean you want fifteen web sites launched and a huge team of writers too, and then you want a ton of well-written content to go on those web sites every day of the week?) Well, Nancy helped me accomplish this, and she did it extremely well.

Yeah, so obviously I have mixed feelings about Nancy’s decision, and I told her the first emotion I had was jealousy, because, hello! She’s living the dream, that extraordinary life that I want, and now I’m feeling even way farther away from that as a possibility as I lose an employee that had become an extension of me. When I say she was my right-hand woman, I mean she was like my right hand. And now I will make the analogy that I have to learn how to function with only my left hand, and you all know how annoying that is.

(With my apologies to lefties.)

So what this means for me in the very immediate sense, as I sit and type and sip coffee, is that I didn’t sleep at all last night. The first reason is because I am allergic to the entire universe, as Steve says, and I have decided to get allergy shots. The upshot is that for 7 days, I haven’t been allowed any anti-histamines leading up to my appointment, which is today. The drug-free week culminated in an itching, wheezing, hive-ridden scratch-fest of a night, while my head swam with work details. I even got up and made a to-do list around 1:30 a.m., thinking that would help with the brain part of the equation, but it only allowed me to focus in earnest on the itching.

Sigh.

Wish me luck today. I’m gonna need it.

Is anyone else supremely and ridiculously excited for the Sex and the City movie? (Does anyone even know if it has a title beyond that?)

I know that my girlish swooning confounds Steve, so I tried to explain SATC to him as the most delicious junk food for the brain – and the movie will be like a two-hour binge.

I just feel all sentimental and emotional even just thinking that such a vehicle exists in this world, and I cannot wait to get my eyeballs on it.

And the lead up to it. Well.

Next week I head to LA for a red carpet event. And then on the weekend, I am witness to Christy and Mark’s nuptials. And we (we, as in the girls – Joanne, Paula, Leah, and Beth in spirit) are going to see the Sex and the City movie on its premier weekend In the City. The City of New York. Where it all started. God I miss that freakin' place.

And also? I saw SJP on the Actor’s Studio tonight, and it just made the fever (and the fervor) sweatier for me. She hinted about the movie, and it scared me a little bit, because first of all, it’s how I imagine the sequel to my first novel will be -- so  that's just creepy, and secondly that scares me, because, well … will it have been done before by the time I will get to it? Or will it pave a nice path that people will (and by people I mean women don’t be silly) be hungry for?

But mostly, the whole affair is just a huge, I mean huge reminder as to why I need to finish this book of mine.

Normally I have a wild imagination and I tend to be very creative – always coming up with new ideas. This part of me is taking a nap right now while the nitty-gritties of work have taken over my life …moved in temporarily like a hard-on-his-luck relative who promises to only stay a week while he gets back on his feet, but a month later his smelly feet are still on your coffee table, and now you’re out of beer.

We were in a brainstorming meeting yesterday for a full hour, and my tinkering noggin came up with exactly zero ideas in a room full of 20 people, each with their own flashes of brilliance. And on a conference call, my boss apologized for speaking for me, but I only felt grateful that she had, as I’m not sure it occurred to me to speak.

Even my stress dreams have become boring. Where there used to be fanciful nightmares more terrifying than reality, I’m now saddled with a dull vision of a grey user interface, all buttons and frames and squares like a 1950’s version of Tetris floating behind my eyelids at night while I dream about an invisible data factory, pumping out information into the ether.

I can see the clouds breaking up in the distance. I have a great team behind me that’s rarin’ to go. Iterative releases are working their magic. Life will become mine again soon, and my brain will be freed up once more so I can see the bigger picture (or at least the medium-sized picture). Hopefully, very soon, my mind will come back down to earth.

Come back, brain, come back! 

This weekend receives mixed reviews. Friday night, Steve and I met Sita for drinks, and that gets two-thumbs up. I felt like I hadn’t been out to socialize in ages, and so it was a bit like being shot out of a cannon under the big top as the start to the weekend.

Then Saturday, Heather and I had our Day of Fun, which started with pedicures, followed by a lunch of sangria and tapas and some half-hearted shopping in Chinatown – really just ducking into stores to get out of the way of the Caps fans who were pouring out of the arena following their victory over the Flyers.

We met the boys for dinner at Gordon Biersch, and then headed to the little birthday gathering that I’d been dreading. But it turned out fine. Steve’s friend was very, very, extremely and over-the-top nice to me. We had a nice chat, a good time, and all was well.

Sunday the mood was kind of low. The rain was awful, and I just wanted to lay around the apartment all day, which is very unlike me. But I think I just needed a day of rest to allow myself to unwind and to feel like I could let it all hang out for once. I didn’t work on my book at all, and did my best to avoid feeling guilty about it.

But speaking of the book …

One thing I need to do is to clear out The Outdoor Home office so that I can actually put my desk back out there and get some work done. We have an old bed frame sitting out there that needs to go to the trash. It doesn’t come apart, so we can’t dissemble it and stick it in a closet, and the mattress it belongs to is making me lose my mind, as it’s ten-years-old and still … STILL leaning against our living room wall. Honestly. What we’re doing with this thing, I just have no idea. When we do finally get an extra bedroom or two, they’re going to be used as an office and a kid’s bedroom, not a holding cell for an old mattress. A guest bedroom is not a reasonable use of space right now.

This morning I went to the gym and enjoyed watching my old trainer torture a new victim. She’d set up these plastic circles on the floor and was forcing a chubby, breathless middle-aged woman to hot-scotch. Yes. Hop-scotch. Oh, the indignity. I felt bad for her, but I also felt really glad that wasn’t me being publicly humiliated this time.

This morning I got up at 5:30 a.m. to take a spinning class. I’m neither sane nor rational at that hour, which helped me get out of bed in the dark. It did not, however, help me to remember to shut off my alarm properly, which means that I hit snooze instead and left Steve to suffer through a full seven minutes of agony and scrunching a pillow over his head until I remembered to come make sure that I shut the thing off.

The spinning instructor was delightfully perky, and I marveled that I was in a room full of these mythical creatures called “morning people.” Spooky. Except some of them seemed pretty damn grumpy, so maybe I’m wrong about that. The class seemed kind of cliquey and the teacher introduced me as a newbie, so it seems this is a regular group. I kind of like my anonymity in the gym, so I was a little disappointed to learn it’s not a class full of transients that I would be lost amongst should I decide to continue with the morning disease.

In other news…

Yesterday I bought two audio CDs. One is the full seven hour, unabridged version of Getting Things Done, so that I can completely defy logic and half listen while I work, which is frowned upon in the world of GTD since I’m supposed to be all focused on one task at a time, and “mind like water” and all that, when I’m really approximating “mind like mud.”

The other CD is about self hypnosis, which I listen to in the car. The psychiatrist (or is he a psychologist?) on the CD explains that there’s nothing hocus-pocusy about hypnosis, and that it’s more like imaging or pretending, so what I’ll really be doing is what I like to call ‘brainstorming’ about what I want to accomplish. I think in the end, it will be helpful to unwind with a little brain imagery after a long workday so that I feel refreshed upon walking in the door. That’s the plan anyway. Let’s see if it works.

I’ll try anything, clearly.