(And by the way, I have no idea what my deal is with lists here in the Dishery. I am sure I have more lists in this diary already than I did in over a year of the Monitor.)

Bad ways to make yourself feel better include drinking heavily and putting on a fake sarcastic seen-it-all-and-it-all-sucks-the-same attitude, and pretending to others that you are doing better than you are. (So the less said about last weekend, the better.) I mean, obviously one does not want to be the blanket that is wet with self-pitying tears, but it�s perfectly OK to say to people, No, thanks anyway, I think I�m better off hanging out with myself tonight/this weekend/for a while, but maybe next time/sometime soon? I think I might essentially ground myself for a few months. The bottom line is that I am not enjoying enough of what I do with other people. I at least need to be less reflexive and more reflective about that stuff. This all comes under the general heading of Getting Act Together, a long process that involves some variables I can control and some I can�t, so, sorry, people, I can�t give you a fucking timeline for when I�m going to be the way you would prefer that I am, whatever that is, smilier or more bitchy, more tolerant of your navel-gazing or administering the psychic smackdown you secretly crave. And here�s one problem I have, when a funk is operative I never know what level of emotional buy-in it�s appropriate to ask friends for. I don�t know how to ask for understanding or support or consideration of my feelings or even a shoulder to cry on without defensively rolling my eyes so that people think I�m joking and thus offer only the joke version of what I am wishing for. Which I�m sure you see is woefully counterproductive. A lot of this is uncomfortably familiar to me. It all comes under the general heading, I think, of letting people take advantage of me, mixed in with a healthy handful of my natural social I-am-not-worthy. Or, really, now that I think of it these things are clearly tributaries of the same source. More to come on this subject.

Oh, and you know what, I did get that song, that Robert Earl Keen cd, on Saturday, but I forgot all about it until now. Title of this entry is lifted from deep within an NYT profile of Dr. Phil. And I will say one thing, which is when you are in a bad self-destructive mood and driving around boo-hooing into your convenience-store coffee and listening to Bright Eyes (ferchrissake) unable to go home, where you end up is the place you think of as restoring your emotional equilibrium, and you should keep that fully the fuck in mind, always.

Ditched the temp job on Monday to stay home and do house stuff, finally won over by the evidence that I was not, after all, going to get to it little by little on evenings and weekends. Did quite a bit of it, what you might call a good start. My room is starting to look nice, and like a person lives there whom I would like. I did more last night in between the traditional Tuesday night vegetable-cooking orgy, thank god the co-op term is over in mid-October, so that right now, the only cardboard box left in the entire upstairs is one that arrived in the mail from my sister yesterday. Tonight still more is on tap, perhaps enough so that I can start feeling out from under it. Maybe Thursday or Friday if there�s anything good going on I�ll be the solitary purple-lipsticked unbeautiful beast at the bar somewhere. Friday�s the last day at the temp job � I�ll be training �the new gal� (ugh) that day so won�t be able to write here � and, big surprise, the agency is totally blowing me off about a new gig come Monday, it�s as if they�ve squeezed the juice of six fat King County months out of me and are uninterested in the brittle shell that�s left over. Thanks for the memories, assholes. So I�m going to make a few appointments to go to other temp agencies on Monday. I really have no idea which ones are good and no one to ask, either, so it will be a crapshoot. This means that I probably won�t be working next week, which I am trying not to panic about: Imagine finally being caught up on the last year and a half of filing, how great to get a jump start on the Christmas cd, etc. On hooky day Rebecca and I went to all-you-can-eat sushi in Northgate for a ridiculous eight bucks. It is not the best sushi in the world, duh, but at that price if you don�t get ill, you�re doing fine. It was more than edible, even. So all-you-can-eat sushi, too. So there. So, yeah, we�ll see how I do with all that.

Cardboard box from my sister yesterday: Remember I had asked her to go pick me out a wallet, since obviously I had some curse that only allowed me to select those imbued with the wallet version of wanderlust? She sent two: one a small zip-case item with a keyring, like an all-in-one for going out, and one a genuine Hermes. I was absolutely floored. Not that I am a label whore by any means, I have a (phony) Kate Spade that I think it�s funny to use as a lunchbox, but damn. Her rationale is that no way will I let myself lose something with that much glamour and cachet, every time I pull it out to use it I will remember all over again that I have an Hermes wallet, and I will replace it with careful reverence back from whence it came. Implied: no way will I let myself lose something that I know cost that much money. And she�s right about that, too. My sister is the queen and the master of that kind of extravagant gesture, never extravagant for the sake of being extravagant, always thoughtful and considered, extravagance plus logic plus honestly wanting the people she likes to be surprised by an unexpected gift. I am sure the wallet cost as much as a round-trip plane ticket from her to Seattle, though, and I wish I could get it through her head that to me a visit from her would seem a greater extravagance by far. Also in the cardboard box: like sixty pairs of printed and patterned tights and nylons, hosiery, that her company makes, plus samples from its maiden forays into lingerie. It was like Christmas.

I had a dream last night that I�d broken out in big deep cyst-like pimples all over my face. When I woke up this morning and went to the bathroom for the good old daily ablutions, I stopped in front of the mirror, thrilled but also confused as to where all my pimples had gone, how could they have vanished overnight. It took me a full minute before I realized that it had been a dream.

Also, here is something I�ve been meaning to get to. You probably do not understand the DL, the concept and the manifestation, and what you do have to understand is that in a cheerful as opposed to belligerent way, I don�t care. It�s not for you to get it or not � it�s for me, it�s mine. It�s a thing I have decided to believe in and an article of faith. Go ahead and worry about me if that�s what you want to do, but know that you�ll never convince me that I should be worrying about myself.

This is a super lame entry, sorry, but I was starting to feel like if I didn�t throw something up there today then I�d be one step closer to letting the whole enterprise die on the vine. And though today I�m feeling so beat up � I referred in some e-mail earlier to a slug with salt poured on it and automatically congratulated myself for accuracy � that I don�t even care about that, I know I would later. Hoo boy, today is brutal, and it just gets worse and worse the more I think about it. I wish I could crawl into a hole and sleep for decades until I�d be irrelevant and useless anyway. I'm embarrassed to think of how little I wouldn�t do for some live-in-person human kindness right now. Or even its knockoff version like my fake Kate Spade: really, I'm not fussy, I�ll take anything. And why can't people see that?