You’ll understand, then, how chagrined I was while reading an interview with poet and personal hero Stephen Dobyns, particularly this:

Is your composition space markedly different from the environment that inspires you to write poetry in the first place?

A poem, for me, can begin anyplace. It can wake me up in the middle of the night. At least a dozen have started when I was swimming laps. I fuss with one line in my head, then another and another, and then I have to write it down. I’d prefer them to show up only when I’m ready at my desk, but they are willful.

Writing poems while swimming laps! Here are some things I think about while swimming laps:

• Not swallowing water
• Okay, just not too much water
• My goggles are foggy
• Now there’s water in them
• Is my swim cap coming off
• Ugh, no, I don’t want to share my lane
• How many minutes has it been

I’d recently read somewhere that Sue Grafton would set the final book in Kinsey’s 40th year, 1990. Grafton began writing the books in the 80s and used a contemporary time period, but she chose to pace the books so that they stayed in the ’80s which, we decided, is brilliant. “A lot of it wouldn’t even work now,” my mom said. In this interview with Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas, he inadvertently explains why not:

[We] don’t want to do it the same way every time, we want to think of something new, something that’s fun to watch. “Fun to watch” is something of a watchword around here, because real private detectiving is talking on the phone and plugging away on the computer.

The closest Kinsey gets to a computer in 1987 is asking a police contact to “run someone’s name” or any number of other invasions of privacy. She types up all her files on a portable typewriter.

Recently there’s been press about the security of corporate computing, since any computer connected to the internet can theoretically be hacked. Many corporations believe they have at least one computer on premise that isn’t connected to the internet but virtually every one is, and these corporations hold unspeakably large amounts of confidential information on all of us. Who cares if my Amazon.com transaction is secure if I can’t trust the security of their data storage?

On the flipside, HIPAA is compartmentalizing and protecting health consumers’ information to the point where I fill out the same forms at every visit to every doctor, even two doctors within the same facility. This information is intensely private and very important, and I wouldn’t mind if my financial transactions became this inconvenient in the interest of confidentiality. I promise I wouldn’t mind.

Like “Harriet the Spy” author Louise Fitzhugh before her, Blume’s œuvre is filled with young female protagonists for whom boys, breasts, and sexual base-clearing are, if not irrelevant, sort of beside the point. In book after book, Blume gives us girls who have rejected the preciousness of childhood yet preserved the self-possession, ambition, and appetite for adventure that their peers and elders find in short supply.

The authoress goes on to point out that Blume’s adult women characters are shallow, shrill paranoiacs, which is a fair and sad observation — I’ll always wonder what disconnect Blume perceives between these two major eras in ladylife, and it’s hard not to be disappointed when a literary idol fails to depict adults you can relate to. (You know whose realistically flawed adult women I relate to? Anne Lamott’s.)

Full disclosure: Although Blume wrote a handful of wonderful girl characters I loved as a child, the protagonista I most loved is Harriet the Spy, wonderfully revisited in this installment of NPR’s series In Character. The runner up is Ramona Quimby, profiled in another installment.

Schalliol’s statement on the series offers insight into his interest:

As urban buildings, their form illustrates their connection with adjacent structures: vertical, boxy, an architecture confined by palpably limited parcels. When their neighboring buildings are missing, a tension emerges: the urban form clashes with the seemingly suburban, even rural setting. Thoughtfully engaging the landscape requires further investigation to resolve this tension: Why is this building isolated?

Have you seen those games where a picture is divided into tiles, and individual tiles are revealed until you can guess what the whole picture is? That’s what these buildings invoke for me — the original context is replaced and all we can do is assemble a likely narrative and then take a guess.

Isn’t it amazing that we can take down entire city blocks of buildings and leave one completely untouched? Even more amazing is when a tornado or other natural disaster does the same.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Is it acceptable for a girl to decline an invitation to a dance, only to later accept another invitation to the same dance? This is for a high school dance or prom.

GENTLE READER: If you are the parent of a young gentleman to whom this has been done, Miss Manners can confirm that the young lady is indeed rude, and that however crushed your son is, he is better off.

. . . and gets worse.

I usually love Miss Manners’ blend of etiquette and social kindness with contemporary sensibilities. In this case, what can she even be thinking? A commenter wonders if MM confused modern life with Pride & Prejudice, where Elizabeth sits out an entire ball after turning down Mr. Collins. There’s also some bitterness on display in this column. Perhaps MM is mother to a Nice Guy?

If MM’s logic held, I would have ended up betrothed to the sweet-but-not-right-for-me boy who asked me to freshman homecoming. Moreover, asking someone to prom is similar to asking her to marry you: If you aren’t pretty sure she’ll say yes, what basis do you have for asking or subsequently being “crushed”?

But I do appreciate the excuse to link to Shakesville!