Yes.

Frobisher! I feel like I've done my time with Cloud Atlas by reading it, though I can imagine it might be a cool movie. As a book I found it uneven (parts are great, parts are tedious), and annoyingly coy about being a fantasy/sci-fi novel (though maybe that was my problem). In general, I'm not a big fan of the recent explosion of the novels-in-stories form because, well, what's wrong with stories? No one called Winesburg, Ohio a novel because it's not; it's fantastic and intricate and interesting and you don't have to read it in order. The topic of fragmentation impresses me less ever since I realized how much easier it is to write a bunch of disparate things on a theme and make the reader tie it together in their brain than to write a unified novel. But as those kinds of books go, Cloud Atlas was better than most. You actually do have to read it in order. You should! Just skip all the parts about the 70's woman snooping around corporate headquarters.

Actually, I wrote that with age you learn what to do when someone is an asshole, which is different than how to deal with them because in my definition, an asshole is someone who can't be dealt with. I, too, used to think there was some supergreat way to dispatch difficult people but I finally realized that there's only the best way for each person, and that adding the painful cherry of right and wrong to the sundae of dealing with assholes makes it taste all the more disgusting. A turning point for me & asshole exposure was when I realized that the most unpleasant people were not the ones I should try to make like me. Now I try to get away as quickly and politely as possible, with a minimum of humiliation. This is not always realistic.

Paradoxically, the only way not to be an asshole yourself (& I'm no expert in this) is to leave the door marked "asshole" cracked. Everyone is a jerk sometimes. It may be by accident, or a misunderstanding, or justified, but does that matter when you're on the receiving end? Probably not. But leaving the asshole door cracked is surprisingly hard. A lot of people, even self-hating ones, have a gentle, downtrodden voice inside them, well-meaning and earnest, that says in a seven year-old girl tone that you cannot ever be truly destructive, or bad, or mean, because you are essentially well-meaning and good. You'll hear this voice when someone tells you you did something to hurt them, and it's very sad and victimized and compelling, but you don't want to feed this part of yourself too many cookies. Let's recall that the most vicious characters of history thought of themselves as victims--Hitler was losing the war because of the Jews, Stalin was being mocked by the peasants he starved, etc., ick. If you have a feeling of being terribly wronged, there's a good chance that someone else thinks you're being a tool. Are you? You know, from their point of view? This is when you might have to tell your victim voice to pipe down for a while and apologize--even though you feel bad too. This is hard, hard, hard. I've done it but usually I don't. It's really hard. But it's possible.

Friends. The thing with friends is that as people get older they have less time in general and want to have fun with their friends rather than long, free-form psychotherapy sessions. When you're young and have recently left home you need intense friendships to cover the loss of your family, but after a while your independence kicks in and you no longer need your friends to tell you who you are. This might not feel quite right or fair if it hasn't been this way all along, but eventually you'll want it too. Pretty much everyone gets more involved with their families and jobs as they get older (vs. their defining tribe of friends), it just happens to people at different rates.

Of course you still need companionship, and friends are still friends: you can still love them and admire them and share life events and ask them how to dress and tell them how you really feel, but as you get older you have to do it just once, not over and over, and it's better if you do it while doing something fun, like rollerskating. There's nothing wrong with feeling needy, but constantly imploring your friends for help is the emotional equivalent of asking to sleep on their couch: it's okay now and then but it might be time to get your own apartment, aka boyfriend or a life-coach or mentor or a support group. Besides, a little lightness can be good for a friendship. It cuts down on the friend-dumping.

Hotness. I am not using my hotness in any practical sense; rather, I am using it for general self-esteem, sucking all the juice I can from moments of inner dialogue such as: "I am pleased & uncomfortable to note that that semi-cute, weird biker-guy writing in his journal is looking at me like he wants to tear off my clothes and fuck me right here on the trash-strewn floor endemic to Starbucks. Why can't they sweep the floors? It's disgusting." As for too much using of the hotness, I'm not sure when that happens--maybe if you're getting paid? Then again I don't have a problem with a little willing prostitution as long as your mother doesn't find out. And why would she? Just don't get so caught up in it that you forget to tend the smart and talented part of yourself, and don't use it against other women or you'll end up using it against yourself someday (see below).

Hi Little S. B. Yes, I worry about aging. My approach is to alternate between panic and denial. I'm worried about death, I'm worried about not writing all the books I want to write or reading everything I'd like to read before I die. I'm worried I'll lose my intelligence and become someone who doesn't understand technology, and I'm worried about losing any hotness I have, because I'm still using it and I'm too insecure not to. The only people who seem to be worse off than me are every other woman I know, practically, chicks in their forties who get a glass of wine in them and are like, "Ugh, I'm such a dried-up old bag." They're usually painfully beautiful, not to mention successful, and I stare at them in shock. Every now and then I'll say, "Really? Is it really so tragic to be hot and 45? What's the problem? Did you really want to fuck everyone? You still could. Go ask that guy! Come on, don't be a pussy."

It's less of a problem if you don't believe, on some crazy-belief level, that getting older is somehow your fault. (Neither is getting fatter, by the way). My advice is to go into aging with a plan that takes into account the fact that it's completely out of your control and will not stop until you die. Once you understand this, you can decide how terrible you really think it is. Do you really want to mourn your disappearing youth, every day, at 35, 36, 37, 47, 57? Or do you want to enjoy what you have? There's an ocean of peer pressure, for lack of a better word, for women to feel bad about themselves. We are self-punishers, we are supposed to be; somewhere in our brains we believe we can have perfect lives if we look perfect, and it's hard to get an exemption from this.

But getting older has perks. You're smarter, you know what to do when people act like assholes, and you have a bed rather than a futon. It's fine and dandy. With the years you do not automatically turn into your mother or some cafeteria lady you looked at with disdain when you were seventeen. Your knees are not revolting--you just thought that once, when you were seventeen and hated your mother and that lady in the weird suit swimming laps in the pool. Back then, you didn't have anything except your youth. You were an idiot, I promise; you had no idea that hating older ladies was going tempt you into hating yourself when you became their age. You had no idea that the bad thoughts of our society had permeated you so thoroughly that you'd started directing them on to other women who would someday be represented by your knees, or that youth itself is full of a howling emptiness that is often really fucking unpleasant. I say wait to mourn losses until you have real losses. Your knees are fine. They're adorable. Someday, if they hurt, they will not be fine. Until then, they are just little and shirleyful. Go take them out to play.

Dear Somebody,

No, you're nice! Thanks so much for your complicated compliment, and also for taking the time to construct a mental world in which to put me. I have an older sister too, my only sibling, and I used to curl up outside her door and/or sleep on the foot on her bed when I had night terrors. (She feels bad about that now, but I'm just grateful someone was there at all). Actually, there's nothing I'd love more than a pesky-little-brother-friend, but in real life I'm too annoying (needy & supercilious & mean) for this to ever happen. I will stomp on your dreams, Somebody, and believe I'm doing you a favor, so watch where you put them.

The first book I can remember "reading" was Walt Disney's "Cinderella," a Golden Book, which I couldn't really read but memorized. It remains the dominant myth of my life.

I've only read The Hunger Games, but if you go to a school where you can write a book report on what I believe to be softcore porn, I say do that--and more power to you! I quite liked the first book of The Hunger Games though. It's scary and a little bit satirical. And why not try your hand at capitalization while you're at it?

Well, yes. Have you seen The Simpson's version of The Shining ? It's in one of the Halloween specials and has a great send-up of the axing of Scatman Cruthers. Don't you think it's kind of scary though, how he just walks in and gets his skull split? Where's his power of shining gone off to? Now we know just how much danger Danny is in, because if Scatman can't overcome the bad thing, how can a one little boy? Even if he is aided by another little boy who lives in his mouth.

I love Scatman Cruthers in that movies. He is fucking brilliant. "Say somebody burns some toast..."

Begin by using proper grammar and punctuation, my friend. You are not texting your bro, you're writing an actual author and asking her to help you with your homework. What should I make of: "I can find any ideas?" If you can find them, use them.

Hi T. Gassert. What a hard question! I don't know if there's something wrong with you for mourning so little because I don't know anything about real grief. I've never lost a close relative or a friend except for my grandmother who died at 103--at that point it was difficult to feel anything but lucky for having her around for so long. But fortunately, I do know something about being an asshole. What I've noticed is that when a person is having a hard time, sometimes she will express this by being insufferable. It makes no sense since niceness works better for getting sympathy, but when things are really, really bad, or endless, or hopeless--things that you'd think would make someone cry, or scream, or paint their house crimson, or jump out of an airplane, or quit their job--sometimes they make a person a total unendurable dickwad instead.

I wonder if your friend's dogmatic tirades had anything to do with being ill, and if she couldn't express it otherwise? After all, denial seems to exist in order to mediate between our forward-thinking brains and our knowledge of death. Maybe going off on "The Kenyan" made her feel closer to someone in her life who had already died. Maybe being a right wingnut made her feel closer to her dead father who she unconsciously hoped would escort her from the tunnel of light to a Rush Limbaugh afterlife. Maybe her heart and soul weren't destroyed but just terrified. Maybe she was trying to make everyone hate her so there was less to leave behind. Maybe she was trying to mitigate her own grief and terror at leaving the world by saying it sucked anyway: it's better to leave a country going down the toilet, after all, than to leave a golden age full of wonders, where everything we want to learn or see or hear is right at the tips of our fingers.

That was her outer self, I think. I'm guessing. There was another self? You can always mourn the little girl you knew. She died too. I'm sorry.