1. Julia Child, you taught me how to hard-boil eggs and make soufflés! You give me hope. When I was about eight, I used to do an imitation of you misting water into the oven for your baguettes, crying “Water! Water! Water!” On Friday I read in the newspaper that you and your husband Paul sent out Valentine’s Day cards one year with a picture of the two of you in your bathtub in Paris. That makes me so happy.

2. There is no way I could be a poet anymore, even if I wanted to regress to 17 and try it again. I am too verbose, and happily so.

3. Flirting is a skill I’m not sure I ever had.

4. I have a TV now, thanks to über-generous neighbors Paul and Jennifer. I’m afraid I’m never going to leave the house again, or at least not until the Olympics are over. I love the Olympics. The suspense, the joy, the agony, the swimmers’ Herculean bodies. But I’m also afraid that my television may make me stupid, and if I don’t have my brain, what will become of me? I’ll laze around all day in trashy tube tops, listening to Skid Row’s “Youth Gone Wild” and lying on the floor. I’ll spend all my money buying French pepper mills and Tawny Kitaen memorabilia on e-Bay and have nothing left for food. I’ll stop believing in liberal politics.

5. I’d like to make dinner for Cal from Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. What a story he tells.

6. I think we should each have a special theme song that plays whenever we enter a room, any room, anywhere. All rooms should also be equipped with fans to blow our hair back enticingly on days when we are wearing our hair down. Just imagine it. I’m not sure how the logistics of this would work, but I think about it often and contemplate which song I’d choose.

7. Oh Paris, I miss you.