When I back out of the driveway mornings and turn the car around, preparing to make the left turn that will put me on the road that leads to I-5, I am driving east, and for a block or so the sun is directly and malevolently in my eyes, bright enough to make my windshield seem a neon smear even if I have my badass sunglasses on, and I have to inch up the street almost foot by foot, squinting and getting my bearings and then stopping to squint again. I don�t know whether I think this is a good or a bad way to have to start my day, I don�t know whether I want to believe it�s a metaphor or not.

Argh, am feeling scattered, spread so thinly I might as well be sprinkled. As of the writing of this paragraph I have three e-mails in my Inbox, all essentially asking me to give reports and cough up some details on three different subjects, and although I owe each one and more, I can�t focus on any one of them for long enough to string together something coherent and thoughtful, a response of the type that in each case is deserved. I�m thinking about calling in sick tomorrow just so that I can have the day to get out from under all the little ticky-tacky stuff I embarrassingly cannot seem to motivate myself to slog through. I think the main thing is that I�m letting me confuse myself as to what activities should be my priorities right now and what I�m using to distract myself from the priorities. Or, no, in some cases I am not even sure. Do you mind if I think onscreen for a little while here?

Running. Must do. (I didn�t even know it was going to be the first thing I thought of here.) Three times a week-ish, keeping it under 75 minutes or so until I�ve been going out for about a month, at which time can bump up to 90 minutes. Bottom line is that when I�m being smart about it and doing it regularly, running just plain makes me feel great.

Diary writing. Really I would like to get into the habit of posting at least a little something here almost every workday, even if it�s short and on the superficial side. Even if it�s only a stupid list.

Posting old Monitor entries. All right, fine, if anything has to get postponed, I suppose this should be it. There is no better evidence for my natural apocalpyticism than the fact that when I took them down at the beginning of August, I did not save them as easy-to-put-back-up-there text files; it was inconceivable to me that they could have a second life, so I buried them on a sub-sub-directory of my hard drive, I buried them up to their neck in Word, and the exhumation turns out to be a major pain in the ass. Saturday morning I woke up early to go run some errands and then decided I might as well resurrect a handful of entries over a cup of tea, and I got so carried away that it was almost noon and the ignored tea cold before I thought to think of the time; I know I have more important things to be doing but I can�t help feeling that by letting the old entries speak again in the forum for which they were composed and from which I had no right or cause to remove them, I also earn back for myself the voice of Kushner�s angels: I, I, I, I, I. (Note to self: note reference to earning. You don�t have to climb up on the self-analyst�s sofa right this minute, but try to stay aware of which of your own organizational paradigms are operative these days.)

Review writing. New entry on the priorities list going straight to the top of the charts, since I need to be cranking them out at a rate of approximately one a week. Note that time commitment involves not only review-writing but also movie-watching and getting to and from the theater. I�ve done this before but have long since been out of the habit, and I�m hoping that the anxiety I feel at the looming reduction in free time will be lessened when I start making my brain happy by providing it the opportunity to do that kind of writing again, when I start seeing my pseudonym up in pixels and, maybe, real actual people send me mail to say Right on or to pick fights. Not to go all Pollyanna on you or anything (and not to get too self-congratulatory, either) � it�s not like that, my first review references both Edgar Allan Poe and Scooby-Doo.

Miscellaneous administrative stuff. You know how when you know you�re about to move, you let things go a little bit, the vacuuming and the dusting and the filing, whatever, because you know you�re out of there soon anyway? I have an unfortunate tendency to let that laissez-faire attitude carry over into other aspects of my life, and when I moved I basically swept all the accumulated detritus off my desk and into a box. Now I have some serious unpacking of boxes to do, and, as you have probably surmised, I mean that literally and figuratively. (Am reading �Jernigan,� which Vanessa loaned me, and holy cats is it good.)

Larger-scale unpacking of boxes. Books, shoes, various accoutrements of the boho-consumerist lifestyle in which I am irrevocably mired. Differs from previous category in that failure to address this one only affects me and my personal living space, not potentially, e.g., my credit rating or the goodwill of housemate Rebecca.

Seeing and being in touch with/getting back in touch with friends. Important to do so because, and I never realize this until after the inevitable explosion, the hothouse aspect of things with Todd had me seized up and three-quarters preoccupied for longer than any self-respecting autonomous adult should admit. The institution of Ladies� Cocktail Night should be resurrected. I should have dinner with Sam, call up Jeff, see what Cheryl�s been up to, get back on some kind of a Portland schedule, return Jason M.�s letter and send some of my own to Shannon and Shelly and Jim and Doug, and organize the TankedStock.com bitter-and-unemployed event that Joe and I talked about last week. And that�s just for starters. Not to sound pathetic or anything, but I should be around people who like me, since left to my own devices I am no way my own best friend.

Ditto Todd. I mostly haven�t had the time and partly haven�t had the inclination to go into this in the Dishery, but I guess here�s as good a place as any to report that we�ve stopped acting spiteful and smiteful with respect to each other; are getting along all kinds of fine though live-and-in-person seeing each other much less; that there is non-idle talk of an eventual rapprochement x amount of time down the line after we both have proved to ourselves that the exploded hothouse has indeed burned down (see, that�s all that needed to be salted); and that Jeanne got angry with me and righteously in my face on Saturday night when I referred to myself as the Scarlet Whore of Amazon, so who knows, maybe that�s not as bad as I think it is either. (Though also that night, one of his friends avoided making eye contact with me for over an hour despite being within five feet of me the whole time. Jeanne called him on this � his weak excuse was that I had been talking to other people and he didn�t want to bother me � and then we chatted a bit, tensely tensely but chatted, and then, ha!, he asked me to do some free editorial work for his business. Which, since I am the bigger person, of course I will.) Maybe Todd and I should get a theme song we can share, maybe Tracey Ullman�s �They Don�t Know,� or, better, �In My Own Peculiar Way,� Willie Nelson version only please, don�t give me that Perry Como shit. More on the Todd scene in general, or at least more on generally why I won�t be writing that much about it, will follow in a future entry.

Cooking. I get a giant box of vegetables every week from the co-op, and, here�s the funny part, I actually have less refrigerator space than I used to in the apartment, because, duh, I have to share it. And there is a school of thought in which even if the other half of the refrigerator is not being used, I should not claim squatters� rights and let my lettuce into it. Which: fine. But this means that as soon as the vegetables arrive, I have to cook them up into various dishes that can fit into stackable Tupperware containers, the better to maximize my paltry shelf space. I guess one option would be just to throw away some of it every week, but I chafe at that; I�d rather stay up all night steaming and chopping (and I probably will tomorrow, since it looks like I�m going to see another movie) than let go to waste food that I�ve paid for, and very tasty and nutritious food at that. And movies : cooking :: transportation to theater : doing the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen. Even when the co-op season has ended, I should point out, I�ll still be doing a fair bit of cooking. I would also rather be up all night steaming and chopping than make E-Z, microwaveable, take-out, or processed foods a big part of my diet, and I�m such a food snob that even most restaurant food does not appeal.

The get-a-job thing. Blah blah blah. Self-explanatory. Cover letters, research, the occasional resume version that�s individually tweaked for a particular job. (I had to do one of those last week, for an admin-type job that pays barely more than temping � but with health insurance, so one tries to swallow one�s pride � for which it was necessary to make myself appear less intimidating and more �normal�: off came the summa and one of my college majors, each of the top two bullet points, the publications... man, that was weird.) Probably a good idea to get on a schedule, like, wake up an hour early every day and see what�s new on Monster and HotJobs, then mandate a certain number of blocks of time, each of some prescribed length, that can be distributed throughout a week as my schedule permits. A Saturday morning, too? Oh hell, I don�t know. Todd says I need to have a super positive attitude and just tell myself, Within six months I will have a full-time job that is suited to my abilities and pays decently and then just set myself to making that happen, and, lo, it will. There is value in what he says, but personally I think *he* needs to remember what it�s like not to work at a place where everyone loves you and you love them back, you have your dream job and a flexible schedule to get it done in, and you are handsomely remunerated with crazy phat benefits including stock options and beaucoup beaucoup de vacation. Then again, I also know that there is a very fine line between asking people to be sympathetic, considerate, understanding, etc. � I paused for a long time there, wondering whether I wanted to add �supportive� to the list � and making oneself ignoble and pathetic. One thing I�ve learned over the last several months, albeit in a different context (Monitor readers will know what I�m talking about): sometimes just in the act of acknowledging a power imbalance in a given situation, you make it impossible for things ever to be evened out, and it�s you who will always be on the bad end of it. The messenger is presumed to have delivered the news out of self-interest and perceived personal threat (the messenger is presumed to be a whiny-bitch tattletale rather than a documentarian); it becomes a case of He who smelt it dealt it. It is the course of maturity that sometimes one should keep one�s big mouth shut, thus ensuring that skirmishes will take place and regiments be depleted only on the battlefields inside one�s own head.

Suddenly this list bores me at the same time as it�s beginning to scare me. And is anybody going to notice I haven�t done any work at all yet today? Note to self: note also second reference in the past few entries to pride comma swallowing; add that to the � oh no, not another one already � list.