The chapters get shorter and it felt to me that she just wanted to be finished with this book, perhaps in order to start collecting royalty checks. Don't get me wrong, I loved her writing style and her humor, but I just felt a little rushed at the end. After all, I'm a lazy self-helper who wanted an ending that pointed me toward the self-help idea or at least taught me what she'd learned.

She indicated that during this journey she had wanted to do some practical chores, such as painting the inside of her house and obtaining an earthquake preparedness kit. She did neither, even after three tremors occurred near her home. This struck me as sad.

By my accounting, she did manage to read several books, master the art of actually wearing the goofy nametags they hand out at conferences, partially organize a few rooms of her house, decrease her credit card APR, and learn to fly while she was dreaming.

She also seems to have become depressed. She describes a young actor in a school play as "fake-tending a fake fire," which she uses as a visual metaphor for "going through the motions without being alive or present." This is the perfect description of the last scene in the book.

The Afterword comes in July, 2007, when she is passing out bananas in her banana suit and gets mocked by a marathon runner who has lost all his body fluids pursuing his own dream. Her parting summary indicates that, "we may be humming along just fine for a while, but we also can't help but compare our tests and goals to those of other people...All we're ever going to do is stumble around."

She did not succeed in learning how to do the splits on her other side, and sadly, nowhere therein will you find a banana split joke.