You know what I hate? I hate when a recipe, instead of just telling me to use olive oil, specifies �best quality olive oil� or �extra-virgin olive oil (best available)� or something like that. It�s like whoever wrote the recipe is sneering at me, looking down his or her nose, implying that they know all about me and my big ghetto bottles of Trader Joe�s and I am not fooling anyone, that some part of my kitchen credo intrinsically doesn�t make the grade as far as this exquisite recipe is concerned. It�s like I need to have my baser impulses tamed so that the recipe and its results are protected from them. OK, so I don�t mind being told to use the extra-virgin, that�s fair; I mean, mostly I know already what I�m going to use the top-drawer stuff in and what gets the bargain basement, but I imagine some people do not, and the two substances are very different things. But how often do you see a recipe that calls for �1 pound broccoli (get the best you can)� or �non-store-brand pasta�? Am I right that this kind of arrogance is particular to olive oil? Am I paranoid to believe I detect some class snobbery going on here, a subtle shove that keeps the proletariat in their place and reminds them what is not and will never be their rightful provenance? Because the subliminal message from the recipe publisher is, You know, you cannot economize and at the same time enjoy luscious delicious food like this. (The condescension of that explicit spelling-out is key.) And if you want to try the dish and step out of your humdrum little chicken-breast life for one meal�s time, the best shopping guideline is just to spend as much money on this ingredient as you possibly can; if I don�t know anything about olive oil, how else I am to judge �best� besides by price? If the recipe author�s intent is truly to win converts to the recipe, or to cooking in general, then doesn�t it make sense that the olive-oil line should suggest one or two widely available brands? And if the recipe is preaching to the choir, then why is it necessary to specify that only the �best� will suffice? For anyone who cooks, the basics of olive oil are like the grammar you learn before writing a sentence. The reminder/shove of �best� is wholly unnecessary, in fact glaringly superfluous, and in that instance I can�t think of any rational reason for it to be there.

Last night I made a terrific leek and pasta dish from a recipe that Catharine sent me, and, yes, it directed me to bust out the good stuff, although I would have anyway. I also did this new thing I made up in a fit of inventive desperation one week when I had to confront a carrot surplus. Vanessa, stop reading now and meet us in the next paragraph, because you don�t want to hear this. You take a bunch of carrots, wash and slice and steam them thoroughly. Put them either in the bowl of a food processor or in a regular bowl where you can have at them with a hand blender, and add maybe two tablespoons of maple syrup � Vermont only, best quality please (that�s a joke, people) � and maybe a quarter to a third of a brick of cream cheese, whip it all up, and I swear it tastes like dessert. True, you�re consuming some fat calories and a little extra sugar, but cream cheese isn�t even as bad as butter in that regard, and distributed among the whole batch it�s not consequential. Plus you are eating the carrots you would otherwise have ignored. I eat this for breakfast, it heats up splendidly in the microwave. You could also cut down or eliminate the maple syrup, or not, and serve it with dinner.

Although I don�t know whether this is an accurate assessment or an attempted appeasement, I have heard one report that the rescinded-invitation, no-cake party turned out to be not so much the social event of the year after all. (I said: Oh that�s too bad. I thought: Ha!) Karen was funny on the subject of that party, advising me to put on the cow costume, get drunk, and crash it. This led to many cathartic jokes along the lines of the milk for free, etc. I was pissed and needing to whine to Karen in the first place because my final veto did not come until after I had prepared the filling for the cake, a pecan-cream concoction that is a dentist�s best friend, and since I had all the ingredients ready to go anyway, I offered to make the cake and no-hard-feelings drop it off (pretend no-hard-feelings; I was very hurt, but what was I going to do, I thought, with a pound and a half each of carrots and cream cheese), and Todd told me NO. Fortunately, I am resilient, and I know how to improvise. I froze the filling, and it just so happens that Vanessa, whose birthday is coming up at the end of the month, loves carrot cake.

My plan to go back to school for the Master�s in Teaching is on indefinite hold. I won�t lie, this is because I found out what the starting salary is in King County for teachers holding that credential, and it�s appalling. My hat is off to Jerry and Wendy and everyone from Teachers� Cocktails, because they are better people than I am. I was talking with Mary H. recently about the Weddings section of the New York Times, how frequently the pattern appears of a woman who was �until recently� or �until June,� whatever, some kind of schoolteacher marrying a man who works as a stock analyst, bond salesman, real-estate developer, corporate lawyer. Years ago, when I was much more of a knee-jerk lefty than I am now, I would get mad at these women not only for giving feminism a bad name � their CVs were always demurely blank after the �until recently� � but also for deserting the public school system which so badly needed them and their honors degrees from Barnard and Willams, etc. Now I am older, things are different, and my gut reaction to reading these wedding announcements is not anger but idle curiosity about how exactly it is that schoolteachers are managing to meet these rich dudes who must be considered tremendous catches: surely they don�t hang out in the same bars, do they? (Mary H., who grew up in Darien, enlightened me last month: They�re both from old or at least middle-aged money; the schoolteachers have been doing the idealistic version of slumming until they met their men, which was their raison d�etre all along; the men are looking for a certain type of educated yet ornamental wife; and the marriages are more or less brokered by their high-society families, friends, and alumni networks. If that�s true love, I�ll take a vibrator.) And on the one hand, the wisdom of Mary H. fills me with cynicism and disgust, and in that hope-dampening wind a compensatory image conjures itself up in my mind and tries to unfurl itself like a banner of resistance: there I am some years down the line wearing the same clothes I have now and on the whole looking frazzled and careworn, sticking to a budget for three new cds a month, living in a moderately crummy apartment and never going anywhere grand on vacation, but deliriously happy and fulfilled in my job teaching high-school English, where some of my students genuinely admire me and will remember me later the same way that I think of the greatest and most influential teachers I have had. On the other hand, and I will admit this too, it�s hard not to think of the super-rich software guys who, years ago, pressed their cases to the younger peachier version of Yours Truly partly by making clear that they had so much money I could do whatever I wanted � or nothing at all � for the rest of my life. At the time I thought they were gross for talking like that, and if any of them had had a chance in hell (for the record, none did, and also for the record I still think they were gross) then their balance-sheet approach to courtship would have scuttled it, but now I can also understand that in a sense those guys were just trying to be smart investors, just responding to market conditions, just being honest. Vanessa and I talk about this sometimes, how a fiscal imbalance wreaks havoc on one�s relationship (OPW: imbalances) so that one party is always in thrall, having to be grateful and to show it � like the by-appointment-to-Her-Majesty seal on various British confections � and it�s also hard not to wonder what it would feel like to find the still place at the center of that havoc and give in to it, accept it, let go. It would feel like a hot tub on the balcony of a weekend house maybe in the San Juans, overlooking the water. It would feel like a leisurely trip to Greece, sucking down wine and lying on beaches and eating only the very finest olive oil, the stuff that�s so good they don�t want to share so it is never exported. Of course, it would also feel like becoming the worst, most deplorable sellout piece of shit imaginable, so that you couldn�t even look at yourself in the mirror.

How did that paragraph get from that topic to this topic? There�s a long pause between the question and the answer, which is: I think I�m just generally in a what-will-become-of-me state of mind, everything in flux, flowing around me while sometimes I seem to be the thing that�s sinking. The beginning and the becoming, but, like adolescence, the beginning of something almost always (always?) implies the end of something else. What is ending for me? I can�t tell. There are circumstances under which it would be possible for me to become a schoolteacher, to bring to life that silly wishful cartoon of myself, and despite how much I want that, I am somewhere between ambivalent and depressed about how it would have to happen. How much of that realization is the happenstance of economic disenfranchisement (+, all right, unwillingness to make lifestyle cutbacks of that degree of severity) and how much of it has to do with something biological that is insidiously in me, a secret blood-level bond not with the cards-on-the-table software puppies but rather with the Weddings-section Vows cows? I can�t tell.

(Note to ND: Please read that �badly needed� to modify �them� rather than �their honors degrees...� I�m not implying that a degree from one of these colleges has higher absolute value than one from any of our nation�s fine public institutions, or from anywhere. I cited Barnard and Williams merely as examples of where the women who quit teaching tend to have gone. Just so we�re still clear on that.)

Actually it was a rockier weekend for my emotional state than I�ve let on, though I must hasten to add that this was no one�s fault but my own. I should have been remembering the state of mind in which I composed last Thursday�s entry instead of thinking like this, but it�s so hard sometimes, you know? Why can�t I make that state of mind stick, why can�t I put down roots and live in it? That is a discipline I don�t have yet. I am re-reading �Come Up and See Me Sometime,� which strangely makes me feel both better and worse about the sinking-in-the-water feeling. Better because the women in the stories temp in real-estate offices and can�t afford to go to the dentist, and if they haven�t embraced the flux they have at least made an uneasy peace with it. They take inventory of what it is they have, and that's what they work with, period. I get my Mary Tyler Moore groove on and I think: OK, I can do that too, no problem! Worse because I also think: Well then, where is *my* story? Is this it, right here, the one I�m writing? Is this all of it?

I can�t tell.