Late last week, I wrote a post for BlogHer about the Piedmont Hills cheer squad. Their school district banned their cheerleading uniforms from class because they violated the dress code. I thought about it for a while and came up with this thesis:

I think it's fair to enforce a dress code policy unilaterally.

I think it's fair to make all athletes buy their uniforms or not buy their uniforms unilaterally.

I think it's fair to make all athletes wear their uniforms or not wear their uniforms on game day unilaterally.

The post was picked up by FOX NEWS on Monday. And it started attracting comments like these:

What I'm amazed about is the ignorance of many of the fairer sex about how the male brain works. Guys are visually oriented. Almost revealing will often cause more elongated sizing up by a male than totally revealing.

I was on a trip when a 28 year old lady in the group was wondering why the guys were stopping and staring at her. Well, duh! Se was wearing a pleated mini skirt walking down the street. Her excuse was that a part of the skirt was a pair of attached shorts. She said if the guys have an issue, it's their problem. I suppose she also thinks that if she were sitting on a guy's lap and rubbing his leg, it would be his problem if he became aroused.

Oh, then there was this:

What's up with that hate? The foot ball players DO wear their unpadded jeresys to school. Why you act like somehow there is this high school conspiriacy against WOMEN, and its all BOYS fault? Because you didn't mention anything about the gymnastics girls, or the dancing girls, you said nothing about the flag girls, all you said was "Cheerleaders" and then singled out the boys as being favored. Your blog sounds exactly like a high schooler. Then end it that you are all for equality. How perverse.

And this:

Because you were a cheerleader. Its not like cheerleaders are known for paying attention to what others are wearing. And who oppressed you to be a cheerleader anyway? Its not like you didn't have a choice to be something else if you hated it so much.

The conversation is veering around a lot, but the comments are really interesting, aside from the above, which, just, whatever. And it's totally solidified my belief that we need to get uniforms out of school, period. There are some uniforms that really shouldn't be worn to class (wrestling singlets, swimwear, gymnastics leotards, track shorts, cheerleading skirts), and if you can't have everyone wear their uniform, then no one should.

Would love your thoughts but closing comments because I'd like to keep them on BlogHer so everyone can see everything together. It gets confusing when they are in two places.

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In completely other news, I finally reviewed Good Enough Is the New Perfect by Becky Beaupre Gillespie and Holly Schwartz Temple over on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!

This week I corresponded with a friend of mine who is writing a memoir. She had some questions, and I had some answers she had to wrap her head around for a day or two. At one point, she wrote something akin to "I thought I was running a 5k, and I got two miles in and realized it was a 10k." I nodded sagely and spent last night working on my own novel for two more hours, two hours added to the hundreds I've spent since I started writing in 2009.

We wrote back and forth a little more, and I told her about my own struggles and time commitments. I told her how I felt when someone asked me at BlogHer '11 if I'd sold the novel I mentioned at BlogHer '10 yet and I had to say no, that I'd thought it was finished but it was so not finished last summer. Not finished at all. I've overhauled it completely since then.

Somewhere along the line, I had to face the -- is it humiliation? Maybe that's too strong a word. But it's an emotion similar to that, the sort of emotion that drops your stomach an inch when it hits you, the sort that brings a flush to your cheeks and a burn to your ears and maybe some frustrated tears to your eyes, whether you want it to or not. It's something akin to humiliation that creative people feel when they talk about their work publicly and then don't immediately succeed in the eyes of the world, in their own eyes even. It's something akin to humiliation that stops many people before they even start.

I faced it pretty hard core that day at BlogHer '11 when I realized I'd talked about this novel at my panel and then had the audacity to show up a year later with no hardcover to sell. There's a balance one must achieve between laziness or fear and hubris in order to query at all. In order to survive rejection, you have to be confident in your writing, in what you're doing. It's a mental game as much as any endurance sport, because you can't win unless you compete and finish, and just finishing alone can feel so insurmountable most days.

I write about my process here because I hear behind the scenes from so many people who think book deals drop out of the sky. Since I started working on Sleep Is for the Weak, I've managed to meet and become friendly with at least twenty published authors, and they all echo back what I emailed my friend this week: It's hard. It's painful. It's worth it. Don't give up.

I've always found the community of writers online to be so tremendously supportive of each other.

At BlogHer '11, Lisa, Elisa and Jory announced a writers conference put on by BlogHer and presented by Penguin in New York City on October 21. I'm going to go. I'm hoping to meet in person a few of those authors who were such an inspiration for me. If you find yourself in that place where you need those emails, you should go, too. But either way -- it's hard, it's painful, it's worth it, don't give up.

I won't, either. Ann Napolitano, one of our current authors, didn't -- it took her six years to write the novel I just read for BlogHer Book Club. And the writing was memorable, exciting and worth every minute, in my opinion.

Today is Beloved's birthday. And today a crew of twenty or so men showed up at our house at seven in the morning to begin replacing our roof.

The roof is wood shake, which is the worst kind of roof ever. It's expensive, it's flammable and it rots. Ours is crumbling to bits and got slammed by the hail earlier this summer to the point that we were getting water stains on the ceilings. The first insurance inspector who came said it wasn't bad enough to replace. Beloved was livid, so was the roofer, a readjustment was arranged, and lo and behold, the second adjustor agreed: New roof! Paid for by the insurance company!

I've been in a half stage of shock since Beloved told me we were getting a new roof. We've been through a lot of money and broken house issues in our ten years of home ownership, and really, I've stopped expecting insurance companies to replace anything. I'm all GET OFF MY LAWN about it in a way I never thought I'd grow -- so jaded, just like my father when he talks about parking in Omaha. I'd accepted when the sweating man huffed his way up my stairs and examined the water stains located right above my winter sweaters (is there anything so vulnerability producing as having a stranger perspiring all over your wardrobe?) that we were screwed, there would be no insurance money and we'd probably have to take out some sort of horrific loan we don't qualify for or have buckets in every bedroom to catch the water when it rained. This is my best talent: catastrophizing. I don't even stop for the mid-level crises; I go straight to the bone splitters.

The longer we've been together, the more I've ostriched about money and house-related problems. After a while, I -- feminist still -- relinqueshed the checkbook and all the balancing and math that goes with it -- to Beloved. Every time I see him sit down with a stack of bills I half-heartedly offer to help and pray he says no, which he always does, whether he wants to or not (I'll never know). When I see those numbers fluctuate, I am suddenly incapable of seeing the big picture and become positive we will be living in a van down by the river in forty days. I don't know why. I just do.

Beloved taking over the checkbook and bill balancing put a roof over my head, a layer between me and the harsh outside world. I'm fine with shouldering all things parenting, with scheduling haircuts and dentist appointments for my daughter, with knowing her shoe size at all times and exactly how many minutes it takes to pick her up from wherever, where all her friends live and with whom she's allowed to go past the end of the cul-de-sac. I can be a big girl about my career and my health and my extended family. But that one thing for which I really do need a roof is money.

I'm sitting here listening to those twenty men ripping the house apart -- literally -- and trying not to think of them punching a hole in something or falling off and landing on the cement or dying of heatstroke or smashing my tomato plants. Beloved told me to go work at Panera or the library today because it would be so loud. I'm sure he understood that I wouldn't leave because I have a sick need to think it'll all be all right as long as I'm here while it's happening. But the truth is I wouldn't know what to do if something went wrong.

There are things in life that I know how to handle and things he knows how to handle, and I hope that I am his roof sometimes. My family always told me to marry someone I secretly think is better than I am, and I did.

Happy birthday, Beloved. Thank you for being my roof.

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From my BlogHer Book Club review of The Kid: Read, then, so we will make better choices than the characters in The Kid. That we will pause and consider what a person might have been through before we judge. That we, at least, will not see the world in black and white, because it is never, ever black and white -- which is the message I took away from The Kid, a story in which the main character never really even knew his name, never knew if he was crazy or sane, never knew who his father was, never knew who was related to him, never knew anything for sure except that pancakes tasted good and dancing was a release and that he could teach himself to do the splits with practice and discipline. Read the rest.

I went to see Sapphire read from The Kid a month or so ago. I already had a copy of the book for BlogHer%20Book%20Club, but I got another one to give away on BlogHer.

Here's an excerpt from my post:

Sapphire started out as a poet, and as she read excerpts from her book, her voice changed, her meter changed, rising and lowering, now chummy, now threatening. She's a powerful performer, perhaps as powerful a performer as a writer, or maybe they are impossible to separate. She says she never cared about her poems as much as she does The Kid, though.

"It's going to take people a while to get this, but I know I have done something good, something strong," she said.

(It's a heavy, heavy dark book.)

So, if you're interested, go enter -- there are a few more days before we shut down the giveaway. I'm sorry I forgot to say anything earlier, but I was, um, on vacation. If you've read Push or The Kid, perhaps you'll join me in being somewhat amazed at the sunny nature of her autograph.

I'm home but still staggering with re-entry. Look! Shiny!

Me and my manager, Julie Ross Godar -- we are the Editors of BlogHer!

Annual Bossy pic.

It's me and Erin Kotecki Vest! She made it!

Then these guys showed up, and we left on vacation on Sunday morning, and I haven't looked at the Internet since then. I hope to catch up soon -- hope everyone had a great week.

Fascinated a little by this.

She's okay -- just a little cold.

Awesome dueling My Little Pony unicorns at Sparklecorn 2011.

It was a fun party.

This super-cool art is almost hidden on the way to a parking lot. I can't wait to show the little angel.

The Twizzler artist caught in action. There's also a statue of liberty and a space needle. I asked her how she got this job and she was all, "I have no idea."

The two tattooed men in the pool were not enthused when twenty women took over the jacuzzi area. I was trying to figure out a way to photograph them nicely when Morgan Shanahan offered to pose. Thanks, Morgan.

After a long day of networking and behind-the-scenes BlogHer duties, I wasn't sure I would make it to the People's Party. Until I heard there were puppies.

"You know," he said, "if you put up your finger, sometimes they'll land on you. That way they have a place to rest all the way out here."

We bobbed in our life jackets in the middle of the lake, the boat floating nearby. A dragonfly hovered around the little angel's head as she stared at it, fascinated, then looked to the horizon near where the baby eagles made their nest as if measuring the distance in dragonfly wingbeats. She held her finger up a little higher.

"I think I just saw lightning," his wife said. "We'd better go in."

The clouds held pink as the sun sank to the horizon. We swam toward the boat, slowly, regretfully.

As she paddled, the little angel held one pointer finger up to the sky. Just in case.

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Do you love character-driven novels? I loved the older heroine in The Beach Trees and how her story influenced the main storyline from a character development point of view. My review is up at BlogHer Book Club today.

My flight out to LaGuardia was delayed by three and a half hours on Tuesday. Two hours in the Kansas City airport, forty-five minutes on the tarmac in Kansas City, and the rest sitting on the tarmac in New York. By the time I found myself in the taxi line, it was 1:30 a.m. and the line was at least sixty people deep. The temperature congealed above ninety degrees. I watched some people ahead of me laughing to each other, and despite my intention of keeping a good attitude, I couldn't wrap my head around how anyone could laugh at that point in the trip. I stumbled into my hotel room at two bells, texted Beloved and fell into bed.

The next morning I felt much better, despite having way less than my requisite amount of sleep and a half-functioning window unit air conditioner on the 16th floor. I even figured out in my haste booking the trip last week, I'd confused Midtown East with Midtown West in my favor and instead of having a twenty-minute walk, I had a ten-minute one. Two days flew by.

My story really starts when I tried to leave on Thursday afternoon at five. I walked out into a sweltering New York afternoon. The heat index was well over a hundred, and the haze seemed to be leaking out of everyone's pores. I found myself nearly in the street trying to catch a cab at West 43rd and Fifth Avenue, along with every tourist in New York City. I expected it to take a while. I've been to New York before; I lived in Chicago for fifteen months. I forgot, though, the helplessness I would feel when I realized after fifty minutes of standing on that street with my arm in the air that I might not get a cab, that I might not make one of the last flights back to Kansas City, that all the adrenaline I'd used up powering myself from the moment I found out last week I had to take this trip until that very minute might be for nothing if I couldn't get myself home in time to get up, unpack, repack and drive to my in-laws' house in Iowa on Friday morning.

I started to sense my defenses crumbling a little. Then I felt someone staring at me and looked over my shoulder to see a small blond woman with a very large camera click-click-clicking away. I scowled at her and turned my back on her, waving my arm harder, thinking if I could just get a cab I could get away from this weirdo taking my picture. She kept circling around me to get different angles as I tried to ignore her. Finally I looked right at her as she pointed her camera at me. "You aren't putting these on istockphoto, are you?" I asked in exasperation, pissed that talking to her required me to take my attention away from the cabs that kept rushing by with other people inside them.

She smiled. Her accent was thick, European. She tried to show me the photo. "It's just so typically New York," she said, as though that meant I should be happy to be featured. "These are really very good." I saw the desperation on my face in the photo. Yes, I thought. That is typically New York for me. Every time I am here I am worried I will never escape. I want to like New York and Chicago, I really do, but I am accustomed to big sky and big horizons, and the street feels so confined to me, so crowded. Instead of seeing it as a challenge, I always end up seeing it as an ant farm.

I abandoned my spot on the street and tweeted my desperation. My friend Karen told me to find a hotel and get in their cab line. I couldn't find a hotel. I was by the library. As I tried to cross the street, a cab finally slowed, and a minute later the cab driver was berating me for my stupidity in apparently not allowing twelve hours for myself to catch a cab and get to the airport at rush hour.

"What, you thought you'd just walk onto the street and get a cab?" he said.

"No, not exactly. I admit I was surprised it took 57 minutes."

"You're going to miss your plane, you know." I'd told him my flight was at seven. It was at 7:40.

We drove in silence for a little bit.

"Okay, it's not really at seven. It's at 7:40."

He laughed. "Oh, you thought you'd make me go faster?"

"Well, you thought I was stupid, anyway."

He laughed and laughed. "I think you will make your flight."

We cleared an accident -- lightssirenscarspeoplewavingarms -- and barreled over a bridge. We arrived at the airport at 6:30. I would've made the plane probably even if it was at seven, ironically. I made it through security faster than I thought I would, all of us stinking and sweating in the cattle line. I stood behind one of those ethereally thin young women who turns to the side at the last minute and you are shocked to realize she is at least eight months pregnant and you can't tell from behind.

The flight back home left on time from LaGuardia for the first time in my fifteen-year business traveling history. When I got back to my car at 10:15, I actually had to sit in the seat and pump myself up to drive the 45 minutes home, the last leg, I told myself, you can do this. It's the last part.

When I walked in the door at 11 on Thursday night, I thought of that woman and her camera and wondered if my photo would remain in her private collection or find its way onto the Internet, forever marking me as a cog in the New York machine, a typical scene.

If that was a typical scene, it makes me sad. Because I was nervous and annoyed and very, very sad at that moment, thinking I might miss my plane despite all my planning and three days of carefully orchestrated timing, despite the extreme energy it had taken me to plan the trip at the last minute, pull myself through the meetings with good cheer and quick decisions, navigate unfamiliar subways and streets late at night, sweat with the rest of the city -- that I might be undone after all that by the lack of a taxicab ... I hope that kind of quiet desperation is not stereotypically New York.

I went out to look at my flowers and tomatoes when I got home, even though it was dark. They bloomed quietly, the only sound the cicadas and tree frogs. Despite the oppressive heat, I could see stars. No one tried to take my picture. And I went back to being my kind of anonymous. The kind in which I realize people might try to take my picture if I go to BlogHer '11 or stand on a street corner in New York, but no one will here, because I am just not that interesting, not part of the scenery, and that is absolutely fine with me.

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Ever since I started working on my YA novel (I'm still plugging, still plugging -- querying is The Suck), people have told me I should read Sarah Dessen. So I did -- see what I thought of What Happened to Goodbye at BlogHer Book Club!