� me, in e-mail to a favorite correspondent Friday evening

When I went to my room that night the world was a better and brighter place, and I was controlled by a new discipline which I imposed sternly on myself.

� Irene Hunt, in "Up A Road Slowly"

Self-love depressed becomes self-loathing.

� Sally Kempton, noted on the page from yesterday�s Wild Words from Wild Women desk calendar that Rebecca tore off and left on my keyboard this morning

(Could you please do me an enormous favor? Tell my sister she should get a diary, tell her how much fun it is. I am working on her to get on board the D-land A-train, and I set this up so other people could work on her too. Come on, it's stupid and hokey, but she'll like it, and then she'll get a diary and you will be able to read it, and I can guaran-damn-tee you it will be a good one. Please? I will owe you one.)

So the fact that I had crippling PMS when I wrote the last entry is relevant, I think, but not up to the point of rendering false the things I wrote. They're true, but the way they're true doesn't burn so hard today, their intensity level is somewhat decreased. PMS: man, it's a bitch. I never used to get it, but more recently I do (remember when I wrote about my blood type changing? It has something to do with that or, oh all right, something to do with [that] � but we gloss over the icky parts here in the Dishery!), and honestly, there were a few days earlier this week where I felt like I might as well have had a sex-change operation. I wrote that stuff and I got it out of me, and there was some other stuff going on that I didn't write about, and then, weirdly, the fact that I wrote it set in motion a chain of events that looks like they might alleviate it. The pen is mightier than the sulk. And I'm not going to write about those events either, or what they might presage, because for one big reason and one small one I'd like to keep them under my hat for the time being.

No, nothing in the above paragraph references Todd. This is something both irritating and amusing these days, how whenever there's something about which they think I'm not telling the whole story, by which they sometimes only mean that I'm not giving them anything sufficiently entertaining � the implication is that this is mean of me � people assume that I must be talking about Todd. Or, more to the point, not talking about him. Once more, with feeling: if you don't get the DL, I am not going to be able to explain it to you, I'm certainly not going to be able to tell you how liberating it is to have my own goings-on going on that have exactly zero to do with Todd, things I want to keep private for other reasons than that thinking about them makes me anxious. Hmm, this is a way to look at the situation that I don't think has explicitly occurred to me before: the wake of the burning-down and the DL and the working-on-self that attends them both is partly a process of sloughing off things that make me anxious to think about. Like when I said that about running, how for so long I didn't do it because it was so scary somehow to be turned loose to the mercy of my rattling scrabbling thoughts. But I can do it now, can't I. Also I am starting to make some progress, mentally I mean, on the job front, although I still do not want to hear how much you make � I came home from tempville yesterday, went directly to the office, and after first-things-first rigging some speaker wire to act like an antenna so I can sort of hear KEXP down there, I worked on my resume, wrote some boilerplate cover letters, then tricked them out special and applied via e-mail for a handful of jobs that don't sound like they'd suck, and two that I had been considering I decided not to go for because I suddenly felt overqualified for them. I was down there for, I hardly believe it myself, close to four hours. And even though the radio was on (it's still scratchy, the office is in a daylight basement after all, but it will do), that's another thing along the same lines as the running: four hours of heads-down just me and the ignominy and I came out of it just fine, I think, at ten I came back upstairs and watched that new Tom Sizemore show that had been so well reviewed, and I wrote the first part of this and I read some Rebecca West in bed and I was asleep long before the other Rebecca came home with Art and Julian. Now it is Saturday morning and we are � I am � half-watching Penn State-Iowa, in exchange for letting him camp over and watch which Art is apparently going to go out at halftime and get us coffee and pastries, so although I'd intended to get an early start on errands I think it can wait. It's nice out today, but I have a lot I want to get done. Oh, and Rebecca is getting a dog. Aces!

Have you signed my sister's guestbook yet and told her to get a diary? I will send you this year's Christmas cd if you do. You don't even have to put your name or URL. Do I ask for so much? No I do not.

I am not done at the temp job yet. The new temp did not show up yesterday and now there's some question as to the validity of her references and no one can find her to ask her to settle the matter. Originally Bill asked me to stay Monday and Tuesday until they figured things out, and I thought that sounded awfully nice, two days on to wrap things up and then I would have the rest of the week to go visit other agencies, where if I got lucky on a few counts I might get sent out the following Monday. But then the HR lady came down and asked me if I could stay all week, and I hate long goodbyes, but, you know, it beats not working. So I think I might try to schedule appointments at other agencies anyway and just take off time for them.

And I'm sorry, but I do have to say something about the Avon catalog after all. The disclaimer is that I know that Avon gives boatloads of money to breast cancer research, is a corporate leader in that kind of charitable giving, and that the CEO is an extremely right-on chick. However. In a catalog that I was perusing on Friday, just to keep my semiotic teeth sharp of course, I saw that the company has a promotion where for a limited time some of their lipsticks have different names and different (pink) packaging, like Crushed Rose becomes Crusade Rose, and a portion of the proceeds from your purchase of them will go to a research fund. Like I said, I have zero problem with that, and I think that Avon is doing a good and admirable thing. The aspect of the situation that strikes me as less admirable, however, is that the name for this promotion � and possibly even Avon's larger involvement, I'm not sure � is that it's called "Kiss Goodbye To Breast Cancer." There's a logo in a square pink box where across the top of the square is a narrow red band that says "kiss goodbye," then a little pink square in the upper left corner for "to, " then the pink-on-red "breast cancer" down the left side. Note the segregation of text into zones, and think about this: Wouldn't "Kiss Breast Cancer Goodbye" be less awkward than "Kiss Goodbye to Breast Cancer"? Yes it would. But the reason Avon couldn't endorse that, I would be willing to bet money, is that it contains the phrase "kiss breast," and that's just too risqu�. So in order not to have "kiss" and "breast" in salacious proximity to each other, they go for the more tortured phrasing that also, when you have to apply it to the product in the promotion, gives you a pretty unfortunate noun string at the end of "Kiss Goodbye to Breast Cancer Lipstick." Breast cancer lipstick? Yeah, and that's *much* better. Silly Avon.

I don�t know, this was kind of a dumb entry. Sorry. It just felt so nice last night to be drinking tea, wearing my orange nightgown, and typing on the slaptop in bed. Now it's game over, visitors gone. This afternoon I have to run some errands, make a cake, pay some bills, and go running. Time by myself � it�s good.