...wait until you see who wrote in the comments thread at [06.18.04 - 7:54 pm].

Today's schedule:

This.

This.

And this.

Wait. And a few of these.

And theeeeeese.

There's that certain time of the night when there's nothing left to watch on TiVo and you can't bring yourself to write another word and you're on the west coast so there's nobody you can call to waste some time with and you aren't tired enough to go to bed and you've read all of your magazines and the book you're reading is too depressing to read in your current semi-drugged condition. That is when you find yourself Googling old friends.

This isn't the time to search for exes. You don't want to find out their successes or failures. You aren't looking for that kind of gratification.

You want to know what happened to Kacie Barton, your best friend in the fourth grade who had the best giggle. Her dad was the police chief. She had a pool party. There's a picture of you there goofing around. You look so blonde and happy. Kacie had great hair -- strawberry blonde. She had bangs you envied. She sent you a letter after you moved away. It had a cassette tape of her talking to you, narrating a series of photographs she'd sent from when her family went to Hawaii. You listened to that tape over and over again from your lonely new house in Fort Worth. You missed her more than she could ever know. But her name is too common, and you have no idea if she still lives in California, and there's no way she'd even remember you after all these years...

So you're looking for Tamara Reynolds, who was your best friend in the seventh grade. She had a big family (a younger sister your sister's age), and a dog named General. You spent half of your summer at her house because her family was so nice and funny and they treated you like another daughter. Tamara's mom was the coolest mom. She was so funny, and you still remember the jokes she told you about her own large family growing up. Tamara's family was Jewish, and you went to Tamara's Bat Mitzvah, and you wished you had Hebrew class and soccer lessons like Tamara did. You wished your family had dinner together every Saturday night and goofed around in the kitchen together and always knew what was going on in each other's lives. Kids just hung out at Tamara's house because everybody was always welcome and the television was always playing MTV. We were weird kids, but our weirdness was embraced and encouraged. Tamara wrote a poem called "Oh, My God, Like, The Mall" and she got to read it at some performance we had for some reason and I had to read this stupid-ass haiku and Tamara taught me that you could write to make people laugh and they'd like it much more than some bullshit haiku you wrote about trees. You and Tamara shared a series of secret notebooks where you'd write each other letters back and forth over the day. You still have two of them. You wonder if she has two of them as well.

Tamara moved away in the seventh grade. Her family had to move to Florida. And you cried and cried and cried and you and your other friend Carrie (who lived closer to Tamara so they saw each other often and you had to ride your bike all the way over to the two of them and Carrie kissed the boy you liked so you wished it was Carrie moving away sometimes and it's weird because you're the one who's supposed to move away always always always) -- all three of you hugged in front of Tamara's empty house and promised to always be friends. You split a can of tennis balls, signing each one. Three tennis balls. Three best friends. Forever.

Tamara moved, and you sent each other letters and then her letters stopped and you heard a rumor that there was a tornado where she lived and you never heard from her again but you're too young to do anything and then you have to move and now you're Googling Tamara Reynolds in the middle of the night. You find a Tamara Reynolds and she's a famous photographer living in Nashville who does album covers and is repped on two coasts and you spend half an hour looking through her photographs, sure that this has to be your friend because she was so fantastic and smart and funny but you have no proof at all that this is her. It's a common name. The odds are this isn't your friend. You can't find an interview or a bio or a photo and you realize you've just given this famous life to a missing friend of yours because this is what you want to have happened to her. This is the life she deserved, even though you never knew her to own a camera. She was more interested in writing, soccer and boys. It gets depressing, so you move on.

Now you're looking for Kenya McNeal, your best friend in the eighth grade who wrote the funniest notes to you and had quite a bit to do with the fact that you're a writer now. She was your first real audience, someone who bugged you if you took longer than an hour to write back. You learned interesting origami with Kenya, folding her notes into tinier and tinier packages to pass her in class, in hallways, in the lunchroom. You spent hours on the phone together at night, watching Arsenio, cracking each other up. Kenya covered her mouth when she laughed, and you knew you got her good when she'd flop her head back and laugh to the ceiling. She never teased you for liking Douglas, even though she teased you for having the same fake-punk haircut together. You liked that she found a way to make you and Douglas have something in common. You knew she did that on purpose. She's so smart. Douglas thought Kenya was cooler than you were. You didn't mind that because you knew it was true. But the three of you had lunch together every day and it was your favorite time of the day. Kenya saved all of your notes in a purple binder which she gave you when you had to move away. You had all of her hilarious letters where you'd swap jokes, spread gossip, kill time and wish for fame and fortune one day. But you moved away, and even though you wrote for a little while, Kenya eventually drifted away because high school started and lives got complicated and she went to a different school and nobody heard from her in a while. You still talk with Douglas, but he doesn't know what happened to Kenya. You think of her often. You think of her every time you see Arsenio. So you Google Kenya, and her name's unique enough that you know it must be her when you find out that she went to Spellman and then on to medical school in Detroit, and according to that hyphenate in her name she's married and Kenya McNeal is now a doctor.

You are so proud of your smart, funny friend. You cheer for her and you wish there was a way to tell her that you're so happy for her, that she got out of Mississippi and now people have to call her "Doctor."

But the site you've found from her alma mater is entitled, "Alumni We Can't Locate." They're Googling her as well. Nobody knows where Dr. Kenya McNeal-Trice is.

You realize you've been doing this for an hour, pretending to catch up with old friends, creating futures and pasts for them that you didn't get to be a part of. You imagine their homes, their families, their faces now, decades older. You have to stop Googling because it's making you feel a little lonely, wishing that you didn't have to move around so much, but knowing that if you hadn't, you wouldn't have had these great people in your life for when you had them. They might never pause in the middle of the night to think about you, but you still hear the sound of their laughter in your memory. These three women left an impact on you and you hope they know that. If not, there's always the hope they'll find this one day when they ego-Google, which everyone does eventually, late at night or bored at work, when they're wondering what people think about them.

Only one journal entry and I'm already hooked. That's good writing.

...but it does help out... me.

I've been working with a few producers and one director on a pitch. We're hoping to get to adapt a non-fiction book that came out this year. We've got people interested, and the pitch is just about finished, but one of the things we're doing is putting together a visual presentation to show right before I launch into Ten Minutes of Greatness. This is something the director is putting together to show the tone of the film.

She needs a few ideas, and that's something you guys are always good with. And isn't it fun being a part of the Hollywood Machine? You're getting paid just as much as we all are for this part of the process.

Here's what Liz wrote:

Hey! How are you? Hopefully this finds you well & not totally exhausted [As you can see, Liz doesn't know about the staph -- pamie]...anyway - I was just emailing you to bug you about movie references for the "visual aid" that I am putting together for our pitch. I know you had mentioned that you might be able to post something on your website...anyway - the montage I am making is coming along well, but I am just constantly looking for more material to make it better. In particular I am looking for footage of (some of this is painfully obvious): bored looking girl, victorious girl, girl or group of friends singing along to music in car, radio station footage, people being chased (paranoid looking in rear view mirror), girl fighting with guy, helicopters descending, girl climbing building, car chase footage w/ female driver, anything w/ "on-air" sign....and anything else you think might be cool.

I know that this is a little specific - but I feel like I am good on some of the other footage that we need. Sorry to bug you - I know that you have a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of movies, though.

Talk to you soon. Thanks in advance!

Xx Liz

I sent her a bunch, but I don't want to influence your answers. I told Liz to check back here on the site so feel free to go crazy.

And an update on the Oxygen show: We put together a pilot and a sample episode, as well as some extra material. We pitched and turned it in. Now comes the waiting. Hopefully we'll know something in the next couple of weeks. Thanks to everybody for helping out when I had a question about girl behavior. We'll see what happens.

From my friend Cori:

Okay guys, this request is not for the faint of spirit. I'm looking for two people to escort two babies - both 13 months old - from either London or Kampala, Uganda to the east coast of the US, where they have been granted free surgery. One baby has cerebral palsy and the other has no head control & is asthmatic.

The babies are travelling on donated tickets, but the escorts will have to
pay their own way, roundtrip to London. I haven't checked into ticket prices yet.

Here's the deal: this will save their lives. Some of you may remember when I was looking for an escort to bring a cleft palate baby from Paris (originating in Burkina Faso) but unfortunately we didn't find anyone quickly enough and the little girl didn't make it (starvation is common in
cleft palate babies).

I want to have a happy ending here to report back on to you guys :) so please forward this email to as many people as possible.

Making this short but intense trip will change your life.

Best,

Cori

Feel free to pass this one on to someone you know who might be in a position to help.

Hi Pamie!

I hope you're feeling at least a little better - I can't begin to imagine how you must feel, but I do empathize. Go, Vicodin, go!

I do have a bit of a favor to ask of you. I've started training for the AIDS Half-Marathon in San Francisco in October, to benefit APLA. So natually I'm looking for donations. And who else could I turn to to help me broadcast my need than you?

(Though I am working other angles as well - that whole "all eggs in one basket" thing.)

Anyway, the URL for my donation page is here. Any help is extremely welcome.

Thanks yet again, Pamie, for an awesome site, for all the entertainment you
provide and, well, for just rocking so hard. You know how much I adore you and stee.

Your slavering fan,
Carol

The doctors appear to be a little scared of whatever it is I have. They upped my antibiotics to something stronger, packed my wound with medicated gauze after reducing me to tears due to their failed attempt at lancing.

Because I wanted to be able to have a coherent conversation with the doctor for my appointment I only took one of the Vicodin instead of the two prescribed for pain. Stupid me. The least painful thing of the entire hour and a half was the repeated use of needles. At one point I was in a full yoga back bend from the pain.

"Are you okay?" she kept asking me.

Tears streaming down my face, always wanting to be a nice person I was all, "Oh, yeah. Just great. Thanks. Thank you."

I tried to read the ym they gave me, but I couldn't do anything but clutch the paper-covered pillow with everything I had.

"Does it feel any better?" she asked with sympathy in her voice.

I paused for a second. "It's really hard to answer that right now," I said between sobs.

"I understand," she said, handing me a prescription for stronger drugs.

Then she said, "If this isn't better soon, you may need to see a surgeon. Come back Monday."

This all makes me very sad, you see, and is costing more and more money by the minute, so I'm upping my Karma by filling the rest of today's blog posts with good causes.

I love that I was so high in that last post that I started spelling it "staff" halfway through the post.

Doing better. Another doctor's appointment in an hour.

Also: Man, you guys have suffered through some painful moments.

Here are words you don't want to hear:

"Staph Infection."
"Nothing we can do."
"Abscess."
"Wait it out."
"Antibiotics."
"I can tell you're in a lot of pain."

At a time like this, there's only one word that sounds like angels whispering in your ear: "Vicodin."

I've never taken it before. Dude, Matthew Perry was on to something.

Vicodin turns me into Meatwad, but without the drugs I can't stop crying. I suppose at a time like this there are worse things to be than Meatwad.

If these things are as really as common as the dermatologist and the Internet want me to believe, and that everybody gets one at some point, then I don't understand why we don't have a cure. Why aren't we doing something about this? I'm in incredible pain and I'm supposed to believe everybody goes through this and just suffers through it with some antibiotics?

Screw the libraries, I'm fixin' to start the United Carbuncle Federation. This is the worst. Boils Across America, people. We have to stamp out staph.

STAMP OUT STAFF.

STAMP OUT STAFF.

Try the Vicodin; I'll be here all week.