“I need to mail this,” I say, handing the package to the mail guy at the post office. It’s a squarish package, roughly the size of…oh, I don’t know…A BOOK MANUSCRIPT, on its way to a publisher for consideration, please, please, accept it for publication.

“Heavy,” he says, shaking it. “What’s in it?” I’m not sure if he’s asking because he thinks it contains illegal substances or because he’s being nosy.

What’s in it?

Only my dream. The one I’ve had since fifth grade when I couldn’t wait to read my writing assignment to my classmates to make them laugh. The dream to give someone a delicious gulp of a book they read in the bathtub ‘til the water turns cold, read in bed ‘til they can’t keep their eyes open and the clock says a.m., read at the breakfast table even though they’re late for work, darn, that’s the end? When’s the sequel coming out?

What’s in it?

A year and a half of my life, travels to twelve cities, months of vomiting my story into my computer, months more molding it into “funny” and “so true,” deleting the nothing words and replacing the rest with other words more appropriate, reading it over and over until I memorized it and hated it and my eyes fell out of my head and I put them back in and read it again.

What’s in it?

Possibility. I mean, it could be the next Harry Potter, for heaven’s sake.

What’s in it?

380 pages and 110 thousand words, too many, the experts say, for an agent even to look at it, but I’ve already cut from 150 and can’t bear to turn away another word.

What’s in it?

I blink. “Um, a book,” I tell him.

“Priority mail?” he asks.

“Nope. Just regular,” I say, and go about my day.

When I was a kid my freckles were cute. Teen magazine assured my teen self of this, too, in those good-body-image articles. Now that I’m in my thirties, my freckles are suddenly not charming kisses from the sun but (insert crack of thunder here) SUN DAMAGE.

At the hair salon on Saturday, my stylist asked if I’d ever viewed my skin under an ultraviolet light to see the sun damage that had yet to reveal itself. “When I did it I was upset for three days afterward,” my stylist said. Pshaw, I thought. Such a superficial thing would never bother me. Anyway, I have a face full of adorable sun kisses, so I can’t imagine negative results.

So my stylist shined this ultraviolet light into my face, holding a mirror so I could see. AWWWWWWWK! Never mind the freaky fluorescent green of my pupils. My forehead alone was one big freckle, my cheeks the Milky Way.

“I must be pretty average, though, right, in terms of sun damage?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from wavering. “Doesn’t everyone look like this under one of these (&@#$*!!&) lights?”

“No, you’re right up there at the top,” she said.

The top? But I wasn’t even one of those sun-worshipping baby-oil-slathering silver-raft-lounging kids — I spent my summers buried indoors reading Danielle Steel novels. And, even more unfair, it turns out one of the pock-causing culprits is those birth-control pills I’ve been gulping daily since puberty. At least they’re good for something.

And that’s when I laid down one hundred sixty smackers for a new skincare line called — get this — REVERSE. Four food-color-size bottles that are supposed to last all of two months filled with magical potions concocted by mad scientists to fade my spots, even my tone (whatever that means), erase my wrinkles, and turn my giant freckle of a face into a creamy baby’s butt.

Um, just after ripping and melting and sizzling all the bad skin away. The warning labels scream something like USE ONLY A FLEA-SIZE PORTION AT FIRST, AND THEN ONLY EVERY THIRD DAY, UNTIL YOUR SKIN STARTS ENJOYING AND EVEN CRAVING THE ITCHING, PEELING, AND REDNESS AND YOU’VE SCARED OFF ALL YOUR FRIENDS AND ANY POTENTIAL DATES. ALSO, IF YOU EVEN DARE VENTURE INTO SUNLIGHT WHILE YOU’RE USING THIS STUFF, YOUR FACE WILL TURN PURPLE. BUT DON’T GIVE UP. EVERYONE MUST GO THROUGH AN UGLY DUCKLING PHASE BEFORE SHE CAN EMERGE A SWAN.

Never mind that I have the most sensitive skin this side of a Dove commercial…skin that turns my face into a ripe tomato at the first whiff of foreign matter (read: anything other than Cetaphil or Aveeno). I want to be a swan, dammit. So REVERSE it is!

And so, without further ado, Step 1 (scrub, scrub, scrub), Step 2 (tone, tone, tone), Step 3 (dab, dab, dab), Step 4 (sunscreen, sunscreen, sunscreen).

I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Barry Manilow’s Christmas album while driving to get my mail, windows rolled down, October blowing in.  (Sang along without hesitation, too, especially to that number about the man giving his sweetheart violets to wear in her fur coat.)

Summer dinner recipe:

1. Slice tomatoes.
2. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, and snipped basil.
3. Drizzle with olive oil.
4. Eat on back patio while reading good book.
5. Rip open Fudgesicle.
6. Eat in three bites standing next to fridge.

Fall dinner recipe:

1. Dice pound of potatoes and place in plastic Ziplock bag.
2. Sprinkle with ketchup, cumin, red pepper, and freshly ground sea salt (NOT that already ground iodine-infused stuff  — EVERYONE will taste the difference).
3. Ziplock the bag. Have fun shaking it for a while.
4. Pour bag’s contents into greased pan.
5. Bake at 400 degrees for half an hour or until toasty enough to eat half the contents of pan before must add to recipe.
6. Husk one pound fresh tomatillos and chop a bit.
7. Dice onion.  Cry.  Pretend it’s from the onion.
8. Boil tomatillos and onion for 10 minutes, drain, wait for mixture to cool.
9. Puree tomatillo/onion mixture while still steaming because I’m starving and can’t wait for it to cool; burn face from steam; don’t add cilantro even though recipe calls for it because cilantro makes me gag. But you might want to.
10. MEANWHILE, brown chorizo sausage. Wash hands a billion times because dealing with raw pork. Sample bit before fully cooked. Realize mistake. Panic. Wash hands again.
11. Try to find a place somewhere in crowded kitchen to set the tortillas, perhaps on this surface with the red warning light. Burn hand on hot stove surface.
12. Fry tortillas in chorizo grease, commend self for using already dirtied pan and helping environment. Every little bit helps.
13. Grease yet another baking dish.
14. Spread layer of tomatillo sauce on bottom and sides of it.
15. Dirty yet another dish with rest of tomatillo sauce.  Moisten fried tortillas in sauce.
16. Layer bottom of greased dish with moistened fried tortillas. Lick fingers. Mmmm. Commend self for being accomplished cook.
17. Layer potatoes (sample a couple to make sure they taste okay), chorizo (not a chance), cheese, sour cream (light for diet purposes), and more chef-quality tomatillo sauce, then blanket the whole thing with another layer of moistened fried tortillas. Spread with remaining award-winning tomatillo sauce, smother it all with more cheese so won’t taste anything but.
18. Place the whole shebang in the oven at 400 degrees.
19. MEANWHILE, peel and dice apples.
20. Mix apples with a little sugar, cinnamon and flour, spread mixture in yet another greased dish.
21. Mix oats, butter, white whole-wheat flour (for health purposes), cinnamon, white sugar, and brown sugar in separate bowl. Eat half of batter. Sprinkle remains over apples.
22. Dot with more butter.
23. Pull main course from oven.
24. Place apple crisp in oven.
25. Eat main course with dollop of sour cream while watching DVRed shows from last week.
26. Pause DVR.  Pull apple crisp from oven. Squirt with whipped cream (light for diet purposes).
27. Resume DVR.  Eat dessert.

The Aftermath

In the mood for some good old-fashioned radio…some new tunes.  I wonder what’s on?  Taylor Swift. Turn station. Taylor Swift. Turn station. Surprise…Taylor Swift. Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Anyway, her new song “Fifteen” is interesting. Initially it seems like a tune I might have liked when I was…oh, 15. Then she does what she’s good at, why she’s sold more albums than the Beatles this year, and really gets me with that nostalgia trick of hers…

Taking me back to when I was 15, too. I try really hard sometimes to feel 15 again. Try to remember how I felt when I was walking down the hall after the basketball game in my cheerleading uniform and my crush, the first-chair trumpet player from the pep band, walked up beside me and put his arm around me (chills, delicious chills) and we continued down the hall as one and I was grateful I was chewing my signature Big Red gum, he was so close, and I wondered what it might be like to…then I flipped away from him into the cheerleaders’ changing room to tell the other cheerleaders that He Put His Arm Around Me.

Fifteen. When the requited crush, not boring old love, was the goal. As single chicks, we’re desperately searching for love, for babies, for happily-ever-afters, for shared broccoli casseroles on Sunday evenings washed down with comfy silence. But I wouldn’t mind starting with a crush. Someone to Internet-stalk late into the night, someone to picture when I wake up at 4 a.m. and hear creepy thumps coming from the kitchen, someone to inspire me to wear a tank top instead of a T-shirt at the gym in case I run into him, someone for whom I just know this song, and this one, too, and this one (the one we’ll play at our wedding), was written.

Awk…Taylor, you got me again.  Must put down these notebooks doodles and pay my bills.

Check out my answer to this important question in my latest Her Nashville column.

Downloaded Miranda Cosgrove’s “Raining Sunshine” from “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” this morning. I figured I could stand to catch a few drops of sunshine on my tongue today in between sneezes.