Yes, I am self-conscious and feeling like a dork about all the links to poems so far. Sorry. I do not intend to make a habit of it.

I am back from my little breakdown. And I think what makes difficult both the current period of Dudeless Limbo and the adjusting to a new way of diary-writing is that they have to happen at the same time. There are things I want to write about the DL, how it irrationally makes me feel and how it works on my tiny little mind, and I can�t, because they�re too private and because I am afraid of again having my words and the intentions behind them misread at such a basic conceptual level. And I want to talk about how strange and scary it is to go from Monitor to Dishery, to go public, how that changes the project and changes me, but who I want to talk to about that is Todd. Or something like that. I don�t know, when I write it out it sounds so maudlin and reductive, an equation, when what it feels like is a matrix. The issues are all glommed together, and intellectually I know that I have to get past both of them, snap out of it, and start making my way through all that they imply. But they�re like a snarl of string, and as I run my fingers along it trying to unravel the knots, I keep realizing that in fact there are two lengths of string, that without realizing it I�m not tracing the same piece anymore. And then I think Oh oh, I need to write about this in my diary � matrix, snarl, yeah! � and then I remember that the diary is not what it has always been to me, the diary is not the same kind of repository. So there�s something in here, another instance of the intellectual vs. the irrational, of me still trying to tamp down petulance/insecurity/loneliness/exasperation/etc. on the DL tip even as I know know *know* that it is the correct prescription, and I guess if there�s one upside to feeling muffled in print, it�s that in having to do my thinking-out in a different forum � Tom, this will get your vote � I am re-acclimating myself to the telephone as a viable means through which people can make themselves understood, or maybe it�s even bigger than that, maybe it�s a feeling my way back to having the kinds of conversation which for so long I didn�t because there was so much bottled up *except* in the diary. In the same way that a chapter title jumps out of a conversation the way I wrote about a few days ago, presents itself with that oh yes, lately I keep hearing myself say things that have more of a my god feel to them. Like last night I was chatting with Vanessa while I was doing some stuff around the kitchen, casual-like, talking about clothes and makeup and bars and work, and all of a sudden my voice was telling her that there are ways of being a girl that not only do I think I�m not capable of but that have never even occurred to me, and how the fact that I�m only realizing this now makes me anxious about my whole female identity. All of a sudden there I was, leaning against the back of the sofa and speaking with urgency into the cordless phone: �Do you think I�m asexual?� Comparatively asexual, was how I meant this in context, I must quickly add, but, holy shit, just the fact of having to ask, you know? Just the fact of realizing that I did have to ask, that for a moment I needed reassurance.

Is this making any sense at all? I�ve been annoyed with my reflexive recourse to the checklist mentality where the current self-Roto-Rooter project is concerned, the project that simultaneously does and does not have to do with the DL; I had thought that this frame of mind was something I�d arrived at � unaccustomed good luck to have gotten there so soon � but it turns out to have been something I was passing through, or had stopped at to refuel. To find my way there again I need to give myself both the more and the less credit of admitting how long the trip will actually, realistically take. When I went out running last night, I did it thinking that I would use the inside-my-head time to start writing lyrics to �Half a Fifth in Half the Bed,� to be *productive*, and instead I just ran, I had that conversation with myself I�ve written about before that is conducted wholly physically, and when panicky or insecure or Hank Williams-ish thoughts threatened to interrupt, I drowned them out with that other language. I took what I needed from the time and the circumstances rather than imposing my agenda on them. I need to practice doing that more often, regularly, without apology or self-recrimination. Now I sound like a self-help book. Shit.

Oh, and I should admit this too: I�ve also got the heebie-jeebies about writing about the DL in the diary because if it should happen that sometime over its duration Todd decides that I am in fact not worth it to him, when all along what�s been fundamentally implicit in every word I�ve written is how very very much he is to me, then won�t I feel like a jackass. (I mean, of course I would feel other things way more than that, oh man would I ever, but the jackass thing would be one tiny public-diary-related part of it, part of the matrix. Again, about both the confession and its qualification, I am only trying to be forthcoming.)

Friends assure me that years from now, this period of statelessness and uncertainty will, at least in a practical sense, seem inconsequential, that Everything Will Be OK even if it turns out not to be the everything I think and hope it is. And I�ve already decided that August is basically a write-off; I was such a basket case, helpless and fragmented, that I barely even remember packing up my bookshelves and driving around looking at houses, these things feel like the smoke trail of a fading dream. I don�t know what my visceral recollection of the DL will be, but it�s for sure that I�ll associate it with good food. I�m cooking like crazy these days, and I don�t care if you want to tsk-tsk that it�s a coping behavior, feeding a need one way because I can�t do it in another, because yadda yadda I have heard it all before and because if I get to eat this well, that can�t possibly be all bad. Last night I made a tomatillo sauce with shallots and garlic and cilantro and jalapenos, and I cooked some scallops in a little butter and a lot of lime. I cut up half an avocado and put it in a bowl with the scallops, poured the tomatillo sauce on top, and ate it with tortilla chips, and, oh my god, was it delicious. I also made up another batch of the carrot thing, because carrots take up too much space in the refrigerator, and this time I put in some chili oil. Chili oil and maple syrup? you are asking with great skepticism, chili oil and cream cheese? Oh yes. And Mary still wants her long-distance lesson in how to roast a chicken, and Vanessa likes roast chicken too and is looking to drum up her domestic skillz, so maybe one day soon the three of us will get together over some raw poultry, a couple bottles of wine a la Julia Child, and a speakerphone. I'd like that a lot.

(Now it is time in the Dishery where we smack ourselves in the head and also acknowledge what a prince of a guy Todd is. I just got mail from him that makes clear that the thing I was particularly torquing myself over yesterday and last night is a total non-issue except inside my own damn head, also that he knew I was torquing myself even though I never said so. Argh. Why am I such an idiot?)

I told Sam on Wednesday night, I am still not sure that having moved was a good idea, and I don�t know whether I ever will. This is true. Not that I am saying it was a mistake, and not that I am unhappy or dissatisfied. I think sometimes, though, there are decisions to be made where there�s no such thing as the good choice or the best choice as opposed to all of the other possible choices, where the only course of action that will truly have mattered is having decided at all. You become stuck in a rut and you just have to get out, and sometimes being conscientious and trying to figure out the optimal next move is counterproductive, because as long as you�re doing those things you are doing them from within the same old rut. Sometimes you have to jump out and run away. There�s this old saw about me being the Yes Girl, based on some advice I gave to Suzanne about a million years ago when she�d just dumped the chiropractor and had to re-equip herself for life in general. I said, When someone invites you to a party, suggests an adventure, tells you about someplace you�re not familiar with, whatever, just say yes: go and do the thing instead of not doing the thing. And she took my advice and she went to parties and on adventures, and all in all she considered the acquiring of her new life to have been such a success that she would often tell the story of how I had been indirectly responsible for it, referring to me, yes, as the Yes Girl. Somehow over the years this got twisted up into a bad and wrong idea of me as being indiscriminate, unthinking, a slut, a wrong idea that people have themselves unthinkingly adopted and that they feel gives them license to say things like �You�re not exactly the saying-no type.� To say things like that and not even imagine that I might be hurt or insulted. How can they not see the difference, how can they not see that one thing has nothing to do with the other?

Also I found out from Sam that I am three degrees of separation from Joey Fatone hence four from Miss Britney Spears. Also somehow we got on the subject of Lady Elaine from �Mr. Rogers� Neighborhood,� her butch and wizened appearance, and I remembered this: for years, certainly all the time that I was her target demographic, I didn�t know that Lady Elaine was a woman. She didn�t look like one so I took for granted that she wasn�t, and I thought that �Lady Elaine� was something like Ladiolane, a long and unusual but perfectly acceptable boy�s name like Constantine or Bartholomew.

I have more I�d like to write but want to spend some time doing the things that I am ostensibly paid for � it will be a drag when this contract ends in more ways than one � so maybe I will come back again this afternoon. Another forum in which I�m being press-ganged by insecurity and idiocy is the one where I compare what I�m doing with the DL to what Todd�s doing. He�s playing and recording music, playing racquetball and joining a soccer league, doing woodworking, going out with friends to see bands several times a week, and has come up with and is leading a revolutionary and sure to be big-revenue-generating project at work. For starters. And me? I�m reading, feeding myself, cleaning up after Rebecca in the kitchen, still failing fully to unpack and move in, doing the kind of writing that could be mistaken for 180-proof solipsism, and soon may not even be temping. Sometimes it�s hard not to feel like a loser, like *the* loser. But why is it my default to feel like there was a contest? That is what I want to try to figure out.