There�s no way this part isn�t going to sound pathetic, but it�s true and it�s operative and I�m still in the impatient discovery stage of this diary where the best way to test its firepower with respect to forcing me to be unanonymous and forthcoming is to put it up to my head and pull the trigger. So here goes. As much as I know that I�m supposed to love myself and find strength and validation within, blah blah blah, at some point in my life I would like to matter to someone in a really big and non-unhealthy way, to be a central figure and emotional touchstone to that person the way that Vanessa�s sister is to her, Randal is to Catharine, T. is to Adam, Heather is to Jeanne, Matt P. and my sister in tricky ways have always been to each other. A source of provocation and comfort at the same time, of entertainment and succor, an ever-renewing wellspring of � this is what it boils down to � reasons to stay engaged and, yeah, stay alive. An inspiration, and not in the insipid sense of that Chicago ballad, either, I think you know what I mean. Whenever one of my friends talks about a person who for them fits this bill, and you can see the unqualified adoration and honor and respect across their faces and hear it in their every word, there�s a part of me that almost can�t concentrate I�m so burning up with jealousy, so busy roughing myself up over what it is about me that eliminates me from the pool of people who can be that kind of important to someone else. (I had it once, I think, but I didn�t realize it at the time and only found out later, over absinthe and cheap gin, from a third party whom the situation had wounded. So maybe it was poisonous after all and shouldn't count.) I am loyal, I am nice, I love to help people out in any way I can, I am not a bad listener, I am articulate and can work from both the logical and hyperemotional sides of the spectrum, I have a moral compass, I work very hard at not being judgmental, I am not devoid of a sense of humor, my orientation to life is no way FNGR antagonistic, and my cry-onable shoulders are even especially broad. I am not less than any of the people I�ve named who are lucky enough to be uber-special to someone. So what gives? Back to the conductor and the chocolate bar with almonds: I have no problem with being low on the list in any given case, but can�t I be someone�s one or two or three in an non-incendiary way at some point in my life and in theirs (I recognize that these things shift)? OK, or four. I feel like such a fucking wallflower at ye olde prom of life, and after I�ve foxtrotted alone in my room for all these years, getting the steps just so, training myself to anticipate dips and steps, to follow. Hope deferred dries up the same as a dream does but turns into nothing so edible as a raisin. And of course I feel pathetic for even thinking like this and for using such a ridiculous simile, because grown-ups should not be thinking of Life In General in the same terms as a high-school dance, it is not a contest, etc. I know these things. And most of all I try not to think about what it makes me that I may not be on the chocolate-bar radar of those who mean so much to me, because, as I have noted, it�s best not to dwell on the power imbalances. In a lot of ways I�m more alone now than I was as a hostile and remote and, yes, hopeless teenager, when I thought that surely this must be as hellish as it got.

So I didn�t do anything I thought I would last night, consoling myself with the rationalization/truth that any project I would have undertaken in the king-hell shitty state of mind I was in would have turned out badly and made me feel worse. Instead I talked to Catharine for a while, talked to Rebecca over beer and frozen yogurt, then submitted to the numbing cathode rays of cable TV until I was tired and tipsy (no dinner) enough for bed. Things will get done eventually, if only because they have to, and maybe I�ll play beast girl one day next week instead. On the phone with Catharine there were two main subjects of discussion, and one of them was my abject lack of friends in Seattle. What can I *do*? I was asking, desperate, then suggesting the usual take-a-class, join-a-writer�s-group-even-if-the-writing-is-horrible, do-volunteer-work, and she spoke up that she was worried about me and my constant impulse to �tinker,� she said, to fidget with little stuff like this every time I realized that my life was just not cutting it and that I was fundamentally not satisfied. Which is a good point, and which goes back to strength and validation within and that whole nine yards, but which on the other hand how are you going to know how endemic your engine problems are if you don�t tinker with the valves at first; there�s a plausible argument that if I could just make a few friends in Seattle who unjudgmentally liked me for my own sake (operative word is �make�; I don�t mean to suggest that people like the LCW boys don�t count in that category) then this would be tantamount to a new transmission and a new map both. Rebecca, more sanguine than I am about her smallish social circle here in the Emerald City, matter-of-factly noted that it�s difficult to make friends after college, period, and everyone concedes that the Pacific Northwest�s reputation for insularity and emotional xenophobia is unfortunate but deserved. Difficult, fine, but should it be impossible? People I know in other cities have packs and pockets of friends they can go out or stay in with. I read your diaries and I know this about you. Even people I know in Seattle who work in big places that encourage socialization are much better off than I am (I was much better off than I am now when I worked at TankedStock.com), as are people who play in bands and know all the other musicians and the bar employees and that crowd, so clearly the problem is not insoluable. And, as I�ve said, I�m not a freak. I even clean up nice, and although my chitchat apparently won�t win me any prizes, I�m working on it, and in the meantime it will not get me shown the door. I�m timid at first and I�ve got my issues, but so does everybody, big deal. This still doesn�t make me less than anyone else and less than the people who rise to the top.

It�s time for a prescription. Catharine told me about an exercise she used to do when she was single and didn�t want to be. What she did was make lists of attributes in something like the following categories: qualities it would be cool for a datemate to have, qualities that would be wonderful, qualities that are absolutely necessary, and qualities one (or, say, two) of which immediately eliminate a person from dately consideration. For her it worked every time. It sounds wack and Ouija, but she made the point that the list serves the function of hijacking you from wallowing into purposiveness, from negative reflection upon a void into positive action towards a goal. (The other thing we talked about had a lot to do with how I need to be better at keeping my distance from negativity, especially since I�ve so internalized the good-hostess reflex that I automatically reflect it back, and I also can�t help absorbing it first. That�s what I have to ground myself from.) So it also sounds very Nathaniel Branden, but I am not proud and I am also desperate, so over the next several days I am going to give it a shot and make the lists of my friend. I might need even more time than that, because when I brought up the project in talking to Rebecca last night I guess she asked me what sorts of things I would put on an I-want-it list, and I was sitting at the kitchen table looking at the empty chair across from me and all I could think of was, Someone who would sit there and who would talk to me, with whom I could have some semblance of something that could generously be called a conversation. The prospect of being any fussier than that is daunting; I feel like I�d have to count myself as one of the storied residents of Hell holding out for icewater, and in a tall glass with a wedge of lemon, please. (Also I�m uncomfortable with how the project seems to smack of being judgmental and restrictive, as if I�m a college admissions office.) But I will give it a shot, and I will try not to think of it as a shot in Hell. Then the next step is to hang out in places where I think the hypothetical person corresponding to my list might be found, and to that end, with Rebecca�s help and possibly even with Rebecca, I�m going to find some things to do that, as she puts it, may not be all that exciting but will be *different*, those non-credit �classes� at the community college on topics like crafts and marinara sauce, a monthly discussion group she attends that sounds suspiciously like a hippie salon but I will suspend disbelief and go. And on my own maybe this weekend I�ll look into local workshops and stick it out even if I don�t think the caliber of writing is very good, because wasn�t that judgmental of me when for that reason I always used to bag out after the first session? Yes it was, and anyway the goal is not to have my prose critiqued but just to meet some people, and when I make those lists, �excellent writer� is going to be about as relevant as shoe size. In the longer term I�m going to look into evening audit classes at UW, maybe discussion-oriented stuff like film or, I was thinking, the modern novel. There are little and larger things like this that a person can do, and maybe I�ll make some more lists this weekend, of them. Even without a sense of direction or anyone to guide me, it has to be the case that if I take enough baby steps in a straight line, eventually I�ll be out of the funk zone.

It�s complicated, it feels like what I have to do is some impossible Rubik�s cube combination where one side is getting out of myself insofar as I am prone to brood and fret and wallow and another side is getting back into myself with respect to things that make me feel capable; one side is shaking off the idea and staying away from the people who have it that salary is an accurate measure of worth (or really who want to talk about their salaries or option packages at all, because maybe it's a regrettable failing of mine but the fact is that I just can't handle that) and another side is not drinking the Kool-Aid on that issue to the extent that I end up working as a receptionist for hey-hey health insurance but eight bucks an hour; one side is getting my act together but the other side is not drawing the weave too tight. And, above all, not seeing myself as contemptible that if I want a chocolate bar with almonds, I�m going to have to go get it myself.