Today is Day Three of the two-week (ten-day) boot camp fitness class I’m taking at my new gym. I’ve always sort of wanted to take a boot camp class the way I’ve always sort of wanted to see if I could actually fit a regulation billiard ball into my mouth, and my excuse for not doing either was always NO NO NO I COULD DIE. However, the fact that my gym is affiliated with a hospital and is right there on the hospital campus has managed to convince me that I will not die if I do a boot camp fitness class there, and since the class is short I knew if I hated it I wouldn’t be stuck with it (which is more than you can say about the pool ball, probably).

When I first saw the class on the schedule, it said, “M-F 5:30-6:30 am” but when I registered at the front desk I was given a flyer that said it was “M, F 5:30-6:30 am.” “Are you sure?” I asked the girl at the front desk. “You mean the class meets only four times altogether?” She looked at the flyer. “That’s what it says,” she said. And even though there’s a HUGE FUCKING DIFFERENCE between a comma and a hyphen in this instance, I found I actually didn’t mind finding out on Monday morning that you bet your booty it’s five days a week all right instead of two, because if I’d known for sure I think the days leading up to this week would’ve felt a lot different, like facing a death sentence or, well, actual military deployment. Instead, I just sort of cheerfully agreed to come back the next day for more good times running around the track feeling like an alien was trying to burst out of my chest cavity. I don’t know, I was feeling spontaneous.

Yes, it’s at 5:30 in the morning. Yes, I know that’s not even in the morning but some spooky nether-hour when I’m sure garden gnomes come alive and scuttle around. I thought I would hate it but I’m finding that when the class is that early it gives me a pleasantly numb distance from the trauma for the rest of the day. Yesterday I went up and down seven flights of stairs TWICE and then we jogged a mile and then we tied bricks to our feet and did running drills. And it all just feels like a lucid dream, except for the catatonic hour or so afterwards that I spent at my desk.

And no, it’s not all that boot-campy. Nobody calling us “maggots” or making us march in formation in the rain or pointedly not asking us about our sexual orientation. Sorry.

On Friday I went to a recording studio down in Streeterville to record a short audio track from the book. I guess it’s for a promotional CD that they’ll be giving out to booksellers, so that they’ll get a chance to hear the sound of my voice. I read a five-and-a-half minute selection from the book, as well as a subliminal track where I whispered gentle suggestions to booksellers to blow their Harry Potter pre-ordering budgets* on my book instead. Or was I not supposed to mention that?

I have to admit I got way too excited when I saw who else had recorded at this place. When I went to the ladies room I wondered if Aaliyah had spent any time deep in thought in the wicker chair in the lounge area, and I got dizzy trying to use methods of probability to guess who might have used my bathroom stall before. Britney or Christina? Stall One or Stall Two? What are the odds they used the same one?

It was the first time I’d ever been professionally recorded, where I got to do several takes and go back whenever I stumbled over a word. After all this though, that chapter is now full of sentences I wish I’d never written. The phrase “when it was in all the papers” is harder to say than you think, especially when it’s in the middle of a longer sentence, and the context is such that I didn’t quite want to put the emphasis on the word all, so I’d say “when it was IN all the papers,” and wind up mumbling “when it was” and then I’d try again and completely lose my rhythm, which was very discouraging, because it meant I couldn’t even non-rap. Also the phrase “minutes extend” totally killed me. Somehow that combination of words produces so many tongue clicks I swear I could summon fruit bats. But I managed to get through the session.

*Okay, so speaking of huge book releases, apparently a couple months ago people in the book industry were getting worried that the new Harry Potter book would come out at the same time as the Da Vinci Code sequel, because supposedly there wouldn’t be enough printing capacity in North America to produce the gigantamungous first runs for both titles at once. It’s true! Or so I heard. Like, second hand. But still!

Go to Big Happy Funhouse and write a story based on this found photo. I’m one of the guest judges, so you better make it good. If you win the prize, you can drink coffee out of a cool Boy Wonder mug for four days in a row without having to do the dishes.

In other news, I was at a recording studio this morning. Luckily for everyone I wasn’t singing. More later…

An attentive reader pointed out that I totally forgot to mention The M Word in my year-end-review post, so I’m fixing that now (and here’s a Powell’s link, too).

And speaking of book links, I’m Not the New Me has its own promo site now. We’ll be adding other pages to it in the coming months, but for now I hope it’s enough to gaze into the eyes of the Girl On the Cover Who is Only Figuratively Me.

And speaking of family values (like The M Word does), I checked back at that moralvalues.com website that I’d found before and while it’s still just an empty default page, I’m alternately amused and freaked out that whoever is holding on to this domain (and no doubt hoping to sell it for big conservative Republican bucks) is thoughtful enough to put up a photo of a presumably very moral family:

(Copied here in case the site changes the picture)
I think the biracial family is a nice touch, but the best part are the expressions on the kids’ faces. Are they saying “Yuck! Homos!” perhaps? Did they just learn about secular humanism? Or maybe they think the ACLU is “poopy.” Heh-heh.

And speaking of things that are funny, another reader emailed me last night and said she’s planning on nominating The Fox News recap for a Bloggie in the “best article or essay about weblogs” category, and that made me laugh and laugh. I guess it counts as an article. Okay then…

In January I sold my book proposal, though I couldn’t announce it here until a little later. The submission process that month was kind of a wild ride, and I learned a lot about trade publishing in a very short time; the whole thing was one of the most exciting experiences you never heard about. Come to think of it, when I was writing the “year in review” entry last year I knew that the proposal would go out on submission soon, and I had to just sit on that news, and if you go back and read that entry you’ll see how I was being all hinty-hinty about things. And here you thought I was just putting up cat pictures.

In February I made some nice Single Girl Valentines and subsequently spent the rest of the year finding hotlinks to them in my referral logs. In March I turned 33 and went to New York City and managed to have lunch in the Conde Nast cafeteria without dropping my tray, which would have been eight thousand times more mortifying than dropping your tray in high school.

In April I raised a big stink (if not a slightly misinformed one) about Curves and the anti-abortion movement. In May I was interviewed by the local Fox news affiliate, and I lived to recap the experience. That same month Shylo and I broke another important story–about American Girls Gone Wild.

In June I had an arts residency at Ragdale, and while I managed to write a good chunk of my book there, I utterly failed to bring you the sounds of the prairie. In July I accidentally acquired Bootsy the fish, and I’m pleased to report that six months later he’s still alive. Also, I met Ron and, well, that’s a long story that I shouldn’t tell here, but I managed to not kill him, too.

In August I was interviewed on Zulkey.com and I finished the damn book. In September I tried Seattle Sutton and really, I have no explanation for that at all. And in October I guess I complained a lot. In November I voted, and then I reacted. In December I finally opened up comments so all you pukes could have your say, and so far you have been remarkably well-behaved.

I still can’t believe that just a year ago I didn’t have a book. That makes me dizzy. It’s very strange to look ahead to 2005, which is already plotted out and scheduled far more than any other year of my life. I suppose I could drop little hints about things I’m hoping will happen in the future but a lot of it is as foggy as it was a year ago. And that’s okay.

Here’s to the new year!