Not dead yet.

Dear loyal readers of Let me get this straight,

I’m sorry.

Please accept my sincerest apologies for the dearth of bloggage lately. It’s become apparent through an onslaught of inquiries, scoldings, complaints, and offers of bribery via baked goods that I am (once again) not posting enough, and have left you feeling discarded and ignored. I don’t have a particularly good excuse for my absence, except to say that I’ve been feeling awfully busy, even though I know I’m not. I could detail for you exactly what’s going on in my world, but it’s likely far less interesting than the stories you have probably already invented for yourselves to justify my scarcity, which may or may not include the following:

1. I’ve been kidnapped. Not true.



2. I am completely wrapped up with my work, which I’ve begun to take home with me, slowly allowing severe workaholism to corrupt and devour my personal life. Also not true; I cleverly have no personal life.



3. Leah finally killed me. Almost sadly not true, mostly because I’ve stopped seeing her. In fact, I’ve been extremely negligent of my workout routine, and have begun slipping back into a comfortably couch-potatoian existence. Leah doesn’t know, and if you tell her I will kill you myself. As soon as my stories are over.



4. The VenJetta finally killed me. This one is very barely not true, THANK GOD. There was a rather unsettling experience on the highway a couple of weeks ago that involved a momentary hiccup in the transmission, a sudden glaring flash of the Check Engine light, and about 60 mph of sheer dread, but it resolved itself as quickly as it appeared. I think it was mostly the VenJetta saying, “Dear Melissa: PSYCH!”



5. I’m saving all my good stories for my new book deal, which was offered to me by a Big-Name Publishing House and will almost certainly guarantee me a spot on the New York Times’ Best Sellers list, cementing my reputation as an accessible and quirky “funny girl” with impeccable punctuation and the audacity to create new words and experiment with run-on sentences. Also not true. But I’d like to send a little shout-out to any Big-Name Publishing House employees who might be reading this, who are not related to me: call me. We’ll tawk.

“So, Melissa,” you might say. “If you haven’t been sidelined by any of these things, where have you been?”

The answer is: here. I’ve been here, doing extremely mundane things in a regular pattern of unexciting schlep. I go to work everyday, try not to get fired, come home and do a lot of little nothings. I deal with things like broken laundry machines, new neighbors that look like they’re still in high school, back injuries obtained at the grocery store (because, apparently, I’m 80), scratched DVD rentals, the sadness of the end of the primetime television season, and the realization that my life has both forward momentum and an utter stillness, and I try not to think about that. I also forget that I can write about these little nothings and put them in a blog for other people to deal with for awhile.

I’m making a mental note to do that more often.