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Yesterday afternoon, I was in a severe anti-social mode. I wasn't surprised, as it typically happens for this work-at-home freelance writer after an action-packed trip away. Ever since I returned on Sunday, I've retreated further and further into my home office, not wanting to talk to anyone. The only time I did venture out into public this week, to the grocery store, I felt like throttling completely innocent strangers for doing nothing except having the nerve to be in my vicinity.

Times like these, I decided, called for renting the third season of Dexter. "I'm in the perfect Dexter mood, because I feel like throttling complete strangers!" I happily announced to the move-rental guy. We agreed that it's best to let Dexter (a serial killer) do said strangling, and were pondering whether he takes special requests via list form (I kid, I kid), when my phone blooped, telling me I had a text. I sighed, because I really didn't want to talk to anyone.

It was my buddy Josh. "Want to get a drink tonight?"

"Sure, what time?" I typed ...

The recent announcement of the word unfriend winning "word of the year" by the New Oxford American Dictionary (by the way, isn't it called de-friending?) made me think about some of the ways Facebook has changed my friendships for the better…

* I've found long-lost friends. I fully realize this is quite obvious, but stick with me. While reuniting with high school and college pals was the reason I joined the Facebook craze in the first place, what I didn't expect is for new friendships to blossom out of it. To wit: I've discovered that a couple of high-school acquaintances now live in Portland and I've met — and become buddies — with a couple of them in person, like Zach and Thane, neither of whom I knew well while growing up, and now I'm glad to have these two fascinating fellows in my life. And then there is Manny, whom I knew in college and NYC but always as more of a friend-of-a-friend. Through joking around with each other on Facebook, we've become better buddies than we ever were in person, which then translated into ...

So now I've blabbed about how the P.S. book has brought contributors and their friends together (including my own reunions). Now what do I have up my sleeve, you wonder? For my third blog post, I wanted to address a question people often ask me about the book: Why letters? Why are they unsent? Okay, that's two questions (hey, people are nosy, what can I say?).

Before I begin, might we pause for a moment of silence to commemorate the lost art of letter writing? I mean, think about it... what's the last letter you wrote? With texts and tweets and tootz (what, you don't know what a tootz is? Okay, I made that up), the craft of putting pen to paper is dying. And might I say, I'm ever-so-glad that I'm not a "digital native," because I actually remember passing notes and scribbling W/B/S (write back soon, don't you know) and cramming ten-page missives into sticker-filled envelopes. I'm also thankful that I've kept all these letters, which are currently sitting happily in a big garbage bag in my storage closet. Maybe I'll ...

When I tell people that I was in a sorority in college (which is admittedly pretty rare), they assume I'm the type of person who refers to 100 people as my "sisters."

Instead, I was the one who would fall asleep during initiation ceremonies, roll my eyes when we'd recite our little chants (or whatever you call them) at our weekly meetings, and would declare "uh, actually, I only have one sister" on a regular basis.

I proudly called myself the black sheep. "I joined a sorority so that I can talk from experience about what I hate," I'd tell others. "You know, kinda like visiting Texas."

Behind my laugh was something a little deeper, though. To explain, I have to walk you through the notoriously brutal sorority rush at Indiana University. The year was 1989. I was a small-town Ohio girl, 18 and naïve and totally in over my head. While other girls around me were preparing recommendation letters (!), buying special rush outfits that screamed "I have money" and scoring invites to sorority house lunches before rush, I figured I'd sail through unscathed. I didn't realize until ...

First things first... thank you to Powell's for letting me blab for five days about female friendships. It's an honor to be here!

The timing for my guest blog couldn't have been better, actually. You see, I just returned last night from a bookstore tour, what I like to call the West/Midwest leg, which included wonderful independent bookstores in Denver and Chicago.

Since an anthology is a group effort, and the stars are the 36 contributors, my role in these events is to act as the M.C./host/bringer-together-er for the writers. While I was excited to hang out with these seven contributors, what I didn't expect was that there was going to be a whole lot of bonding going on in the audience too. Some female-friendship highlights:

DENVER

* Jill Rothenberg, pictured below with me (Jill was my editor for my first two anthologies, Woman's Best Friend and Cat Women), wrote to her friend Melissa in the book. Her letter is about how the one ...

The Age of Cool is ending. I explain the reasons why in my new book, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool. But the implications are even more important than the causes. They are evident everywhere, and especially in the new culture of confrontation that is permeating almost every sphere of day-to-day life.

It gets ugly when a whole society loses its cool. The term "going postal" didn't exist before 1993, but now the concept of a violent anger meltdown in the workplace — or in the school, on the road, or (most recently) at the town hall meeting — is all too familiar to us. Fisticuffs and outbursts on air flights, once virtually unknown, are now increasingly common. British railway stations have recently been forced to put up signs asking passengers to refrain from assaulting the staff.

One of the fastest growing professions in America is anger management counseling. This occupation didn't exist a few years ago, but now it is a booming business. You might have seen Dr. Steven Stosny, a guru ...

In my new book, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool, I look at the strange and surprising process by which cool became uncool. Yes, you heard me correctly: it may sound like a paradox, but cool isn't hip any more.

The signs of this are everywhere, and start with the word itself. I am not sure when the deliberate misspelling of cool as "kewl" started, but a quick search for the phrase “is not kewl” on Google comes back with 50,000 hits. Oddly enough, there is even a competitor to Google, a new search engine called Cuil, which is itself a deliberate misspelling of the word.

Everywhere you look, cool is being mocked. And not just on the web. On TV, nerds are in the ascendancy, as demonstrated by shows such as Beauty and the Geek, Ugly Betty, The Big Bang Theory, and Chuck. And a whole series of books are reinforcing the point. Browse through this web site, and check out ...

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever."
—George Orwell, 1984

While fighting Nazis in the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell launched a one-man bayonet charge against a Fascist stormtrooper, bombed an enemy rifle position with a heaping dose of high-explosive grenades, survived being shot in the throat by a sniper, and recovered from the somehow-not-fatal wound just in time to escape the country before Soviet spies were able to assassinate him and leave his corpse in an alley somewhere. Do I have your attention?

Born Eric Arthur Blair in India in 1903, Orwell's family returned to the British Isles not long thereafter, and he spent his formative years attending a prestigious school, learning French from a guy named Aldous Huxley, and, like any good misunderstood teenager, getting really interested in writing, history, poetry, and socialism. He eventually realized that school sucks, and instead of going to college he moved to Burma and joined the Indian Imperial Police because that was way more awesome. He spent the next seven years patrolling the mean streets of Burma, cracking skulls like Dirty Harry and John Shaft, protecting the populace, and keeping the streets clear of hoodlums, vagabonds, ruffians, whippersnappers, and other assorted douchebags. He spent another couple years scratching out a living in London and France, working as a dishwasher, newspaper journalist, and starving artist, and going on frequent expeditions to the slums to see how much being poor sucks goat balls. At some point he decided that he should change his name to "George," of all things, so he did that, too. Why you would want to change your name to George, I have no idea, but there you have it.

"One word of truth will outweigh the whole world"

When you're in a Stalin-era Soviet Gulag, merely managing to haul your ass out of bed, trudge outside into the arctic hell wastes of Siberia in temperatures around 40 degrees below zero and smash frozen, snow-covered rocks apart with a pickaxe for twelve hours a day requires the sort of badass physical and mental fortitude that most people probably couldn't generate if they were being personally pursued by a man-eating bear with a rocket launcher strapped to his back. Surviving that misery for ten long, soul-crushing years, and then going home to write a definitive work on the subject that exposes the horrors of the system to people who had been completely oblivious of it before requires the sort of freeze-proof balls that only Alexander Solzhenitsyn could have possessed.

Born in Russia in 1918, Alexander's childhood home became a collective farm after the Soviet Revolution, and he grew up learning about all the great happy fun party time that was Uncle Joe's Magical Exciting Communist Totalitarian Regime of Awesomeness. Solzhenitsyn ...

Do what thy manhood bids thee do
from none but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies
who makes and keeps his self-made laws
—Sir Richard Francis Burton, The Kadisah

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton was a completely crazy nutjob who had more adventures on his way to the bathroom in the middle of the night than most lesser humans manage to cram into a two-week vacation inside the stomach of a still-breathing whale.  This author, soldier, adventurer, explorer, geographer, translator, linguist, fencer, duelist, anthropologist, and pretty much anything else you can ever think of –ist spoke a mind-crushing 29 different languages and dialects fluently, wrote 50+ books ranging in content and sanity from travelogues to erotic fiction, explored uncharted lands in India, Africa, and the Middle East, and was the first person to translate the borderline-pornographic content of The Kama Sutra and The Arabian Nights into English.  He also had a gnarly attitude, a glorious beard, and a hot temper that drove him to kill more people than a Dirty Harry movie.

Burton was kind of a bastard as a kid, getting into fights all the time and pissing people off all across Western Europe and the British Isles, but he also showed a super-genius aptitude for languages and cultures that can only be described as Indiana Jonesian.  So, despite being kind of a crotch-punching punk hooligan, Burton somehow got himself accepted into one of the best colleges in the world — Trinity College at Oxford.  At Oxford, R-Burt studied fencing and Arabic, challenged a couple of jackass kids to duels when they talked some bullcrap about his totally bitchin' 'stache, and subsequently got summarily expelled for a combination of drinking, gambling, and challenging people to no-holds-barred back-alley deathmatches.  When he left, he made sure to trample the university's flowerbeds with his horse on the way out of town, which kicks ass.