Today after work I met Sam for drinks then dinner on Capitol Hill. We were talking about �Six Feet Under� (he and Dan recently got HBO and are already big fans), and he mentioned that his godfather had been a mortician � no, this is what he said, verbatim: �My godfather is a mortician named Babe.� So I taught him the game of coming up with chapter titles for your autobiography and how the really marvelous ones are those you just stumble on like that, the things you hear yourself saying and then think oh yes, stuff you couldn�t make up if you tried. Later he taught me one right back: we had not enjoyed some easy time across the table from each other in, good god, almost a year, and before I could fill him in on the stories I had to cover the backstories first, and in among the gaping in disbelief and the polite supportive (yes, supportive) nodding, he said, Now, if your life right now were a movie, what would the title be? He suggested a few that followed the two-word formula of �Fatal Attraction� and �Chubby Rain,� and we were cackling for a while, and the one I proposed before I actually got a little sick to my stomach and had to change the subject was �Ideal Girl.�

I would like to disavow a certain amount of backstory. I would like to pretend it never happened, I was never even there. Can I do that? Can I say, The story starts *here*? Because the backstory has never done anything except fuck me over and fuck me up, and I am sick and tired of even having to tell it, and as far as I�m concerned it is entirely beside the point. Get me rewrite.

Sam also said, and I told him that it was going right into the diary, that when he watches �Sex and the City,� he sees Carrie and thinks of me. He�s just back from a visit to NYC, and we were also backing each other up on the nice-place-to-visit-but-etc. tip; the dearth of greenery, the madding crowd, the constant and exhausting sensory onslaught. I said that I thought I could do it for about six months or a year and have no problem with it, but that one day I would realize that I�d turned into a person I absolutely hated, and then I�d truly have nowhere to go to get away. Sitting in the booth, I did an imitation of how this person would walk down the street with her shoulders twitching self-importantly and her neck taut and chin high above arrogant collarbones, a half-sneer on her face. Sam said, �No, I picture you as being just like Sarah Jessica Parker,� and for a moment I wanted to move to Manhattan right that minute in case there was a ghost of a chance that he could possibly be even an iota correct.

I clocked it on the odometer both Tuesday and tonight, and the numbers don�t lie: when I went running on Monday, I covered 6.8 miles in 48 minutes. I am gobsmacked.