Blackberry Island is nothing like Fantasy Island. Blackberry Island is the place you go in your mind when you are at your favorite Mexican food restaurant with your family, celebrating the last day of school, and your Blackberry starts buzzing in your purse, and you can’t help but pick it up and read all of the work e-mails on it, even though it’s your day off, and you pay no attention whatsoever to your surroundings during the next five minutes, as you answer every single one of them.

Bob coined the term last week when Girl was yammering in my ear at said restaurant while I was thumbing buttons on said Blackberry.

“Don’t talk to Mom right now,” he told her. “She’s not here. She’s gone to Blackberry Island.”

“Mom,” Girl said, sticking her face in mine, “are you on Blackberry Island?”

That broke the spell and cracked me up. Bob too.

In fact, Girl got such a laugh from her parents that she decided to repeat the joke to all the other grownups she knows.

“Mom was on Blackberry Island. HA!” she told my sister, friends and parents. They’d smile and give me the “huh?” look. Then I’d have to explain while they nodded, looking bored but polite.

Sometimes Girl would forget what berry was so funny and say, “Mom was on Strawberry Island,” and then I would have to explain further, “No, it’s Blackberry Island,” and by then it really wasn’t funny.

I just wanted to take her aside and say, “Honey, it’s what you call a ‘location joke.’ You had to BE there.”

A few months ago, I met someone who absolutely loves his job. He works for a local nonprofit agency, helping hundreds of people turn their lives around. He’d only been on the job a short while when I met him, and he told me how the position came about for him. He said that one day, he declared this aspiration for himself: “I want a job that inspires me daily.” Soon afterward, the perfect position at this agency opened up for him. He suggested that I try doing the same thing — declaring an aspiration and throwing it out to the universe to see what happens.

I’ve heard this idea before. I’m a huge fan of “The Artist’s Way,” a book about creativity and spirituality by Julia Cameron. In it, she says, “Leap and the net will appear.” Which is to say, move forward in faith and the universe will create a path.

Soon after talking with my nonprofit friend, an aspiration came to me. It was that I wanted to write something that would inspire others. To do what? I don’t know. Tonight, as I was looking through “The Artist’s Way,” I found an affirmation that I highlighted 10 years ago: “My creativity heals myself and others.” Others is underlined twice. So maybe that’s what I mean.

Not long after I declared the writing aspiration, I got the idea for this blog. It’s my small hop into the universe, the grand blogosphere where the butterfly effect is in full force. Like a pebble thrown into the roiling Gulf, I have no idea where my ramblings will lead or who may be touched. But it’s a start.

Now it’s your turn. Leap!

One of the most popular stories in the New York Times today was “Backlash: Women Bullying Women at Work.”

This is news? All the long-time working women I know, me included, have invisible scars on our backs from the claws of a mean female co-worker or boss somewhere down the line. Some of us even have a knife wound or two.

Why do women do this to other women? The New York Times speculates that it could be the recession and lack of advancement driving women to treat other women badly. Oh pa-shaw, I say. We’ve always done that.

It’s in our nature to size each other up from head to toe and silently ask ourselves, “Can I take her?” Same as two dogs meeting – one is the sniffer, the other is the sniffee. Who decides who’s who? I don’t know. As the nuns say, it’s a mystery.

In the workplace, those roles are usually pretty clear cut. Just look at the org chart.

So if you’re the sniffer dominant doggy, here’s my advice to you: Don’t be mean to someone just because you can. No matter how much you think she needs to be taken down a notch and shown who’s boss, don’t ever humiliate her, especially not in public. The best boss I ever had was also the kindest. Caring deeply about her employees did not make her a wuss.

If you’re the sniffee doggy, here’s a tip: If your female boss keeps telling you you’re too nice, watch out. You’re fixing to land on your back with your paws in the air.

Here’s my advice to you, puppy: You know that badass look you get when your kids start acting up? That look that says, “Don’t mess with me, I am the mama and I will take you down”? Start cultivating that look at work.

Squinty eyes, hard upper lip. Sarah Palin and Hilary Clinton have perfected it to a “t”. Just look where it’s taken them.