Oy. I have a marathon meeting this morning at the business school to work through book edits with my boss. And yes, my alarm didn’t go off, I probably ate some stuff I shouldn’t have at the Superb Owl party, and the edits aren’t fully done because another work-related emergency cropped up on Friday morning (and neither my boss nor I work on Saturdays) and it’s just … oy, that’s what it is!

I’ve been noticing through internet and face-to-face relationships that the past week or two has been weird for everyone. Blogs that I read are having comment drama. (Including a bit on my own, which I am just not dealing with right now.) People are having accidents. Washington D.C. is covered in snow while here there’s not a flake on the ground. Friends are fighting and breaking up. The Smoke Monster’s rival is inhabiting a re-animated Sayid. (That’s my theory.)

Tell me it’s not just me and my network. Has this been a weird time for you as well? What, if anything, do you attribute it to? Midwinter madness?

Let’s consider this an open thread, and also a requests thread. Anything you’d like me to blog about? Or follow up on from previous discussions?

I’ve been working this week on editing the page proofs of my boss’s book for my Harvard Business School job. (Hence the lack of long, navel-gazing, rambling posts.) Whew! It’s a lot longer than my book was, I’ll tell you that. It’s a good one, though — and already up on Amazon. Check it out. Fundamentally, it is about what happens when people change jobs: Do they continue to succeed? How can you know if a job change is a good idea or not? If you are a manager, is it better to hire outside talent or invest the time and money to develop your own workers into superstars?

Sunday’s column dealt with the rude questions and comments addressed to parents of only children. I got a letter today from the mother of another only child, who suggested this answer to the “When are you having another” question: “We’re waiting to see how this one turns out first. Ask us when he’s 18.”

I suppose the ConductMom has more or less decided how I’ve turned out, and it’s not as though anyone is pushing her to give me a little brother or sister at this point, finally. But it did remind me of another thing she used to say — when I was a child, people often asked, “But aren’t you afraid she’ll be spoiled?” upon learning I had no siblings. To which my mother would reply, “We were afraid she was, but it turns out she always smells that way.”

You know I had to get it from somewhere.

They’re here! And they do actually look a bit like the ones on that “Miss Conduct” doll:

Mr. Improbable and I both like them, but Milo’s not so sure. He’s such a fashion conservative.

In case you can’t tell, the frames* are black on top and green on the bottom. I wanted to blog this whole outfit, because I like it, but we didn’t get a good full shot. Do, though, check out my cool bib necklace. I picked this up for a mere $10 at Buffalo Exchange, a new used-clothing store in Davis Square (and elsewhere — they’re a chain). It looks a lot like this one. I love wearing it with this dress, because it hits right at the neckline and therefore looks like an embellishment on the dress itself. I bet making zipper jewelry would be a fun project — you get a lot of bang for some broken zippers, a piece of felt, and a hank of ribbon.

*Yes, given that Michelle Obama is my fashion muse and inspiration (some might say obsession), I did find it ironic that the make of frames I chose is called “Sarah,” thank you very much.

Over the past month or so, I’ve gotten a little obsessed with style blogs, especially those written by academics or freelancers. You know how sometimes you get interested in something, or hungry for some particular food, and it feels like a whim — “You know, I never really knew what the Holy Roman Empire actually was, let me Wikipedia that,” or “Dang, pretzels would be good right now.” And then sometimes it feels like a need, as though your body or mind are suffering some kind of deficiency that needs to be made up.

This one felt more like a need, and I was wondering what was up with that.

To an extent, it clearly had to do with the fact that I haven’t gotten out much in December and January — in December, I had to cancel almost all my social plans due to illness, and I’m still trying to figure out how social life works when you can’t drink and more or less can’t eat, either. (Any local readers know a hip Cambridge joint that specializes in steel-cut oatmeal and herbal tea? Didn’t think so.) So a bit of it was compensatory for my lack of a social life — if I couldn’t go out, I could at least get inspiration from style blogs and put some fun outfits together for when I could.

But the fact that I was focusing so much on the writers and academics, and their work wardrobes, was my real clue to what was going on.

I think this is the resolution I make every New Year — Jewish and Gregorian and school and fiscal and anything else — concentrate. Work when I am working, play when I am playing. It’s hard, isn’t it, for those of us who work on the computer? I’m not saying I even want to work more, or harder, or whatever. Just that when I’m writing, I should write (and not shop for cardigans on eBay), and when I am done working, there should be no vague guilt or occasional checking of e-mail.

Anyway, this is why, I think, I’ve been so interested in style blogs by academics and writers and other people for whom work and life and play and duty get blurry around the edges. Because one way you can define those edges is through how you dress. And when you’re a freelancer, you need all the help you can get. (Oh, all right, I am writing this in my bathrobe, okay?)

So one of my new — not resolutions, but practices — is to get dressed and get out more in order to do my work. I live in a city rich with coffee shops and libraries, and ought to take more advantage of them. I’m suspecting this will help my productivity and my mood (writers, academics, at-home parents, and other home-employed people — you know that dazed, almost jet-lagged feeling when the sun goes down and you realize you haven’t been out of the house all day? Hate that!) as well as the local economy.

Off to choose an outfit!

… is that what we’ve decided the last decade should be called? If so, the Oughts were, for me, the Dids. During the past ten years, I

- Met and married Mr. Improbable
- Got my PhD
- Converted to Judaism
- Taught college for two years
- Started writing the Miss Conduct column, and eventually two blogs
- Wrote my first book

… along with various other life-transition experiences, like starting to travel overseas and getting a dog.

That list isn’t meant to be “ooh, haven’t I accomplished an impressive lot,” but as evidence of what a huge decade of transition the 00s were for me. According to psychologists who study adult development, we spend about half our adult life in periods of transition. Sometimes it can be hard to know when you’re in one of those phases — maybe you don’t realize you’re in transition until you’ve already made the change.

What are you doing when you’re not in transition? Building on what you’ve got. Which is how I’m feeling at the moment: all the major pieces in my life are in place. Now it’s up to me to do something with them, to start husbanding and growing my resources.

I don’t ever recall before having a calendar decade match so closely with a personal turning point (which is probably why I got such a kick out of that post by the blogger who was born in a year ending in zero) before. Have you? How were the Oughts for you?

I have a terrible sinus headache, my favorite pair of sunglasses broke, Milo behaved like a mad feral thing on his walk, and it turns out the new software on my boston.com blog doesn’t enable me to do the thing I thought it would.

It is, in short, one of those days, so I thought I would share a little faux pas story with you. As many of you know, Eddie Izzard is my favorite comedian. Our landlord and his girlfriend had extra tickets to the Izzard concert Tuesday night, and invited us to join them for that and a potluck dinner beforehand. To which I brought one of my brand-new vegetarian recipes … topped with pine nuts, to which our landlord’s girlfriend’s son has a near-fatal allergy.

Because that’s how Miss Conduct repays generosity and hospitality!

Oy.

Last week we talked about the stereotype that people with a limited diet are boring neophobes, and how wrong that view is. Unexpectedly, although my diet is now restricted, I’ve been experiencing it as a broadening of my food world, of learning new cuisines and cooking techniques. My ingredients are constrained, but not my imagination.

And you notice things. For example, I’ve started eating steel-cut oatmeal every morning. I think the John McCann oatmeal tin is a thing of beauty.

Note the “Certificate of Uniformity of Granulation” on the back, attested to by not one but three officials: men, bureaucrats yet, who literally felt their oats.

See the granules in question after the jump!

Christmas was quite delightful this year (the belatedness of the annual Mystery Milo notwithstanding). We had a good group of folks with us, and “Sherlock Holmes” certainly didn’t disappoint as far as holiday escapism, and the uncanny desirability of Robert Downey Jr., were concerned.

The only part that made me slightly unhappy was when we went to Changsho for dinner afterward. We got the big table with the lazy susan — does anything speak of joy and inclusiveness more than the big table with the lazy susan in a Chinese restaurant, I ask you — and sure enough, I was That Person who had to take her entree off the lazy susan and hoard it to herself, because I couldn’t share what anyone else had ordered.

I’m going to be That Person for a while, it seems. Essentially, there is more bad acid floating around in my gastrointestinal system than at a Grateful Dead tribute band concert, and I need to change a lot of eating habits fast. After a couple of months, when things calm down, I should be able to have the occasional quesadilla or slice of pizza.

But until then, I’m one of Those People, those people who can’t share. I can break bread with you, but that’s about it. Oh, and those fabulous Ugly Wintry Mix cocktails you all came up with? Yep. None of those, either. Which means I might now encounter Mr. or Ms. Pushytipples of my own, now that I’m not drinking much. (Or, more likely in my case, Mr. or Ms. Terribly-Concerned. I can have a drink occasionally — very occasionally — and while I appreciate being warned of things like unexpected rum in eggnog and habaneros in the queso dip, I also appreciate being treated like an adult. I am at the moment eternally grateful to one of the Fabulous Bureaucrats, whom I had dinner with two days after my diagnosis, and who unblinkingly sat through my dithering about whether or not ketchup was on my new list of forbidden foods, as well as my consumption of two glasses of white wine. The FB in question knows me well enough to know that I can’t change all my habits overnight, but change they will when I set my mind to it.)

Before all of this mishegoss went down, of course, I knew that food and identity were deeply linked, as were food and sociability: it’s pretty much what the food chapter of my book is about. But having to make a lot of changes, fast, brings certain issues into even sharper perspective.

For one thing, there was this brilliant you-know-you’re-middle-aged-when moment a few weeks ago, when I met a friend at Casablanca for a cocktail-hour business meeting. He immediately apologized and said he couldn’t eat, because he had a colonoscopy the next day; I, of course, couldn’t drink, as I have gastritis. (We ordered hot waters, he shared his broth with me, and we left a really good tip.) Not sharing food turns out to be as good a bonding experience as sharing it, though I doubt restaurateurs would agree.

It’s also been interesting to see how many of my friends with a strong ethnic identity have been quick to share recipes from their own cuisine with me. I’m not just appreciating their food; I need it. Their Greek, Bosnian, Filipino, Russian recipes will save me from my own sick body and restore me to health.

So in at least two cases, having restrictive food rules has brought me closer to people who either have similar — permanent or temporary — restrictions, or people whose ethnic identity is complemented and complimented by what I can eat. I’m sure I’ll run into others, as time goes on: people who disbelieve in my condition, or the way my doctors and I are treating it; people who will take it as a personal affront that I cannot eat or drink their particular favorite food; people who, one way or the other, make my biological condition into some kind of metaphor of rejection, perhaps rejection of something they hold dear.

Yesterday’s “Coupling” addressed that, from the perspective of a food consultant/chef who finds it impossible to form relationships with men who have food rules. She writes, “Gradually, I realized that a willingness to try new foods spoke to a person’s general openness to the world and new experiences.”

It may. Or it may speak to a person’s number of taste buds, or to their immune system or bowel functioning. Our bodily processes may be a metaphor for deeper psychological issues — or they may simply be the sometimes working, sometimes on-the-fritz results of a complicated and frankly klugey system. (No offense, but how anyone over the age of 25 can believe in Intelligent Design is beyond me. Wait ’til your knees start going and see how intelligently you think you were designed then, kid.)

The Milo arrived yesterday!

Not our dog Milo, of course; he’s been home with us all this lazy week, and enjoying very much having two relaxed and largely unproductive humans to snooze on. I mean the annual gift of Milo, the malted chocolate beverage, that someone has been leaving us every Christmas since Milo, the dog, arrived to live with us.

No Milo arrived this Christmas day, which amused me; did my newfound joy in Christmas somehow mean I had to give up the Milo of my Scroogier days? But yesterday, there it was on the porch, carefully wrapped.

We gave it to Milo to open:

But he liked the bubble wrap better: