What the doctor should have meant: dishery.diaryland.com

Sorry about my self-hate.

� Conan O�Brien, responding to the question, �If there were a talking Conan doll, what would it say when you pulled the string?� (interviewed by Dan Snierson in the September 20 issue of Entertainment Weekly)

I�ve got half a mind to lay down and die over all the things you said
I can halfway try to say goodbye, but I can�t get you out of my head
Have half a heart, baby, can�t you see that without you I�m half dead
I�m alone and I�m drunk and all I�ve got left is half a fifth in half the bed.

So, so, so what do you think? Yeah, it�s only the chorus so far, but I�m working on the verses, I have some ideas percolating. And I realize that the trope of half this and half that is not the most original in the world: a few days after writing this, I had an oh-shit moment when I remembered that a song I have, ahem, heard several times in the last few months also employs it, and then I had a few beat-self-up moments during which I was the prosecutor and jury in a case alleging unconscious plagiarism; then, however, I remembered very similiar lyrical phrases from a song I used to play on the radio in college, and then I thought of another also-similiar song, and then I bailed myself out, won the appeal, and decided just to calm down about it. It�s only a stupid little diversionary project, anyway, I don�t mean it seriously or as something that�s ever going to be recorded. But do you like it so far? Please say yes.

I started an entry yesterday and junked it a page or so in when I got all, like, I�m writing about this because *why*? Here is the upshot: I went running on Monday night and it was great except the parts with dogs in it or more to the point Seattle dog owners, one of whom had an unleashed guard dog that charged me while snapping and barking furiously � I didst scream real loud � and the second of whom, in response to my request that he hold his also unleashed dogs while I ran past them along a trail, offered the alternate suggestion that I merely cross the (busy, uncrosswalked) access road, run on the other side of it until I was out of sight and the interest zone of his animals, then cross back. I could go on and on about the arrogance and reverse speciesism of what seems the vast majority of Seattle dog owners and apparently I sometimes do, but I like to think that my diary is constructed of better stuff.

Also, I�d been feeling sensitive about the recent stint of being rather down on myself, whining and bitching, and the dog report just seemed like tiresomely more of same � why couldn�t I come clean instead, for instance, about how for months I could only run while listening to music because I was that terrified to be left alone with some of the thoughts in my head? Why couldn�t I describe how content with myself I felt last Friday afternoon and evening until being unable to find parking on Capitol Hill irritated it out of me?

Very important note: It�s true that I have mostly not been composing entries lately from the sunshiniest state of mind � though I honestly did mean last Friday�s more as a recitation of absurdities than as bitter spleen-venting) � but somewhere around half (ha) the time and gaining, I�m pretty much OK, and I don�t feel the need to defend myself merely for being emotionally volatile, which after all only shows that I do not shrink from the risk posed by life�s slings and arrows, I am out there making myself at least sort of vulnerable and saying, Bring it. Even if �out there� is mostly inside my head. The point is that my apology for being a whiner is not entirely ingenuous. When I refer to the recent stint of being down on myself, really what I mean is more like �the recent in-diary proliferation of topics and attitudes and vocabulary that would lead the average or occasional reader, or one who perhaps has a personal ax to grind, to view me as a whiner.� The breach in the fifth wall is permanent. In the A.D. era � that�s After Dishery, of course � I have to remember that a diary necessarily invites reductivism on the part of the reader in that it presents itself as a coherent narrative and presents increasingly self-referential content to back up that claim; the reader�s mind will automatically provide interstitial material based on, this is key, his or her own issues, experiences, set of biases, hypotheses about the diarist that he or she wishes to have confirmed or not. (Not that I think I am such writerly great shakes that every stranger who reads this must be sitting around hatching hypotheses about me. I think you know what I mean.) I spent a lot of time during the diary-down days of August hitting my head into a wall over how anyone could have read the Monitor as broadcasting, rather than, Monitor often analyzes, in a way that is equally unsparing of herself and others, issues of female competition and social signalling, her perceived not measuring up in various contexts, how these insecurities bog her down, the inherent biological difficulty of female bonding vs. her pathetic wish for chick friends, and where she fits in as a parakeet among peacocks simply as Monitor hates and despises X. (For X read la la la la la NO, this isn�t that kind of diary anymore: ahem, and by the way I feel contrite about some things I said and did last Friday at the Comet; I was only lashing out because I was stung from having been great-lady snubbed a few days earlier. Dear La la la la la, I am sorry. But the way you handled the situation was not cool either.) The latter is not true and never was, and more than any other slanderous horseshit about me that now may or may not be the word on the street � really � that�s the thing that induced real despair and made me think about bailing out of the diary game forever, that in the end the game was fundamentally fucked. This goes back to the words-betraying-me theme. But did they? I am a close reader of text, a detective and an analyst, and in college I was all about the New Criticism and thought those Reader-Response types were even worse than the Frenchies. Asked to work within the Reader-Response paradigm (and I think you do have to say �paradigm� here, although you are allowed to snicker as you do), I balked, I said no and pushed the book off my desk and went back to my Spenser. And I hate when this sort of thing happens to me now, at my advanced age and in the era when I�ve put the angry snotty college kid behind me for good, because I see how easy it would be for someone to attribute it to Oh, look how much more mature she is but the way it is meant, the word means or implies soft, rotting, having given up the fight, sharing the first three letters of �matronly� � I want very very much to believe there is another kind of mature, like I wrote about in the Monitor while wearing khakis and thinking about radio that time, do you remember that? � yet I can�t lie about the way I think now, which may be soft or rotting, fine, but which leads me inexorably to seeing that Reader-Response, removed from the sterility of academia, is not just a theory. It is a *phenomenon.* It *happens.* It is also nothing personal. And in the same way in which someone could read my diary and get it that back-asswards, I could do the same thing, say, at a party or something where I imagine myself to be the world�s biggest dud making the world�s deepest bad impression. Ahem ahem ad nauseam. N�est-ce pas?

You see how I am working on myself, or what I mean when I say that I am. I mean, don't you?

OK, so that was a tangent. Please don�t tell me how mature I�m being. Anyway! I�m probably doing at least somewhat better than you think I am, and every day whatever it is I�m slogging through gets a little less viscous. When the jig is up at my temp job next Friday, if I don�t have anything lined up I�ll make appointments for Monday at a couple more agencies, and if I continue not to have anything lined up for a little while, I�ll read and write and go running and cook food and find a gym and continue (yes you read that correctly but shh, I am self conscious) to apply for real jobs, some of them such that I wouldn�t even be demoralized or Gaitskilled to work at them. Amy, have you read Gaitskill? Read the story collections first. And I won�t starve or get evicted, and my hair continues to grow out and I have at least three people who are willing to help me replace all the music I lost in the three installments of theft, and things with Todd are going well in such a salutarily non-preoccupying way that I�m not being dishonest by referring to them in this glancing manner. And I may have a new hangout in the Beacon, where I went (with Todd) to inspiringly godawful karaoke last night and where the bartender, get this, Vanessa, even complimented me on the photo on my new driver�s license. And my sister is not only my friend again but one of my top three psychological bulwarks.

Oh my god, do you know what I am doing? I am making that list of things to be grateful for. Uh-oh, time to wrap this sucker up.

Random: (1) I decided I�m keeping the Monitor moniker. I told Q last Friday, it�s not like I got divorced or anything. So don�t call me Dish, but by all means feel free to call me Dishmail. (2) There is going to be a movie adaptation of Diane Johnson�s �Le Divorce,� to star Naomi Watts. Kick ass! (3) Why did so many news outlets � yes, including you, NPR � feel it necessary to point out that one of the Buffalo-based terrorism suspects recently arrested was nabbed as he was preparing for his �arranged marriage�? Is this a salient detail? Does it serve any other purpose than underscoring his alienation from what people consider normal and American, that is to say than prejudicing us against him? Why couldn�t they just say that he was getting ready for his wedding? Note too the connotative difference between the m-word and the w-word; one is a transaction and the other has powerful emotional associations. (4) Treat Williams is so not my type, but damn if he wasn�t super sexy and capable and appealing on the premiere of �Everwood,� which Rebecca and I watched Monday night while I was putting together the new bookcases for my bedroom. And right on to the writers of �Everwood� for the first explicit visual reference to a wet dream that I�ve ever seen on network TV. (5) I would never have admitted this about Treat Williams if my sister had not cautiously brought it up via e-mail the next day. See, we still share a brain. (6) Tom Shales must be on drugs to have given such a fond review to John Ritter�s new sitcom, which I watched last night while I was making pesto. Here�s my review, Tom: it sucks. (7) Above, with reference to the Spenser? I almost typed �went back to my Jonson.� Ha.

This afternoon I�m meeting Vanessa, whose life is about to become interestingly interesting (see title, and that�s all the clue you�re getting), at Septieme. From tonight through Friday morning my old pal Don, that radio sweetheart, is in town on a quickie business trip. I met him when I was four and haven�t seen him in eight years � read that part over again, it knocks me out every time � and even if he�s so busy all we have time for is breakfast, I know it�s going to be aces.