� Laura Miller, in "'Nobody's Perfect': A Critic's Wit, in Bulk" (review), NYT yesterday

I was disappointed by Hilton Als�s review of Maya Angelou�s memoirs (Books, August 5). Als criticizes Angelou for her �psychological self-involvement,� but Angelou is blunt about her immaturity and selfishness as a young woman; she, at least, finds humor in her youthful arrogance. Als, however, not only deprecates her writing but accuses her of the cardinal sin of standing central to her own story: �The people who come into her life function primarily as props in the ongoing drama of Maya Angelou.� Would it disturb Als less if she functioned as a prop in someone else�s drama?

� Sarah Weiler, in a Letter to the Editor published in the September 2 New Yorker

(Amy, doll, you are goddamn right about that toast. I�m meeting up with Joe T. tomorrow before the Long Winters show, and I promise, I will happily drink one just for you.)

Last night I met Jeanne for beverages at Barca, I had not seen her in over a month during which, ahem, she knows my life has been drama-a-go-go, and she kept asking me, �So what else is new? What else is new?� And not much, all right, and I felt bad for making her think that I had gone into some kind of stasis-of-zero-accomplishments mode and also for causing her to feel that her question had been what made me realize that I had no entries on that what�s-new list and therefore could fairly be judged static and accomplishmentless � I could tell this, Jeanne�s a good egg and wouldn�t want to do anything to make someone feel crappy � but does that have to be a bad thing? Because I do not feel static or stagnant, I happen to be in a stage where I�m quantifying my accomplishments in a different way than she is (I don�t even want to use the word �accomplishments�; I need something that suggests a more organic, less corporate and goal-driven process), and I do not feel crappy. Take a letter, Maria: I do not feel crappy. I feel tentative yet tough, I feel on the verge of something in such a way that the �verge� and the �something� would even with an electron microscope prove to be in perfect harmonious balance, I feel like an inceptive verb. Have I written about those before? Basically the sense of an inceptive verb, what you have to keep in mind when you�re doing translation, is to begin to become. Isn�t that lovely? The root of �adolescent,� for instance, is an inceptive verb. The verge and the something, the beginning and the becoming. And *that* is what�s new around here, Jeanne. I guess because she and I both needed some time to shake off the weirdness of the situation and our changed social orientation to each other, sad but true, the last one-third of seeing her was about one-third as strained as the first two-thirds, which at one point featured the following exchange, after I�d been trying to explain where the new house is.

Jeanne: Oh, you mean it�s kind of near where I work.

Me: It�s funny you should say so, I was out running earlier tonight and I kept going what I thought was north along the main streets, thinking that I would eventually run into Capitol Hill, but then all of a sudden there was Amazon. So that�s where I turned around and started back.

Jeanne: You don�t have to do that, I think it would have been OK. Nobody ever leaves the building, so nobody would have seen you.

Meaning what, meaning that if indeed I were seen near Amazon I would be forcefully driven back from the premises by an angry mob of indie kids with torches and shotguns? Meaning that the company guards against the infection of the workforce by my brand of alleged moral perfidy? Meaning that Todd�s friends would bust me and levy a fine for having left my house without a scarlet �A� sewn to my sports bra? I know I tend to be overly analytical, but am I not correct that the exchange necessarily implies that I am thought of most censoriously by the denizens of the lower floors of the PacMed building? Ohh, my head, my stomach, my life. More perfect harmonious balance: Seeing Jeanne was not as bad and strained and tense as I had feared and I don�t want to have an evening like that again soon.

Oh, and I�m running again, I guess. I�ve been eating food pretty much all week, so last night when I got home I laced up and snapped in and zipped around the new �hood. My claim that the only way really to get to know a place is to explore it on foot is at least a tiny bit disingenuous; I started saying that several years ago when people would react in a horrified poor-baby manner to the fact that I did not have a car. It was a defense mechanism. But the intervening years have revealed my bullshit to be more watery than I�d thought, as I�ve often found places while running that I would never have noticed from a vantage point behind the wheel, or would have been too distracted to remember that I ought to be looking for: a grocery store, the cheapest gas station within a mile or so, a dry-cleaner, an alterations shop, a place to buy the Sunday paper. Also, I discovered a garage with a sign in both English and Korean that advertises its specialty in the vagaries of yon timing belt, and I�m willing to bet a carrot cake that they charge a lot less than $95 an hour for labor. And Filipino take-out, and a Mexican bakery, and an establishment called Lucky Seafood � I hope � where the first letter of the business�s name has fallen off the sign. All in all, I was astonished and surprised, the Happy Runner again, at how good I felt, how good running felt; it almost seemed to have been waiting patiently for me to come back to it so we could partner up again and make the good stuff happen, like there was a groove and I do not want to say I was in a groove because the first-person singular was not the sum total of it. I was out for almost 70 minutes, more than I�d hoped for, and when I got home I stretched the hell out of my hamstrings in the living room as the setting sun put a warm glow in the yellow walls, and then I drank a big glass of water and ate some pasta with the pesto sauce I made on Tuesday night, and how can these small but deeply felt satisfactions not add up to something? Where does it come from, this idea that someone else, some structure or stricture, has to sanction what I do?

(�What I do� vs. �accomplishments.� Interesting sometime to analyze that, too, from an etymological perspective. Take a letter, Maria. Oh, and also: I�m going to start writing film crit again, I have a gig for a no-brag fairly prominent web site just waiting for me to slip it on and start working it. I think I�ll start this weekend.)

I�ve had trouble writing all week. I have an abortive entry from Monday night and then one I�ve been wrestling with since then, trying to get at why Monday�s was so lousy and inauthentic (hi), and that one�s a bit closer but still full of all kinds of disparate parts so not quite the thing it wants to be, like the Chicken McNugget of diary entries. Now, inceptively, I�m feeling much better, more capable, I have no doubts about my own personal timing belt. What I do have are some vague and as yet unarticulatable (but stick around) ideas about the level of candor and forthrightness to which I want to hold myself in the Dishery, and I think they require me eventually to post that dross in some form � remember how in the Monitor one of my goals was to make a historical record for myself � but like I said I am feeling good good good, and besides I have some transcriptions to knock off, so I�m going to put this part up now. I don�t have much to do this weekend, in the way that might make Jeanne caringly want to change the subject but that feels gorgeous to me, the open road in the equation where I am the car and I am the driver, and the idea of spending some solid time writing feels like it could begin to become, well, pretty fucking fantastic.

Thank you for not giving up on me while I figure all this shit out.