I am feeling a little bit better. I'm feeling like I could get some momentum back, and I'm not talking about the race on Saturday. Unfortunately, I am a little bit regretting my offer to host that welcome-to-Seattle dinner for Terry tomorrow, since this morning I had to get up at five to make a Dutch apple pie and start on the meatloaf, and I didn�t consider a few weeks ago that if I did manage to score some tempage in the meantime I would have to be shopping and cooking at discombobulating hours, burning rubber home on dinner day, and then inviting guests into the kitchen to watch me peel potatoes. Oh well. I am trying to tamp down my fetishization of hostessing, and I am learning how a situation in which I really *have* to shrug my shoulders and say I-can-do-no-more eventually also leaves a corresponding mark on my attitude. As long as the food is tasty and the wine is plentiful, I figure, no one has the right to complain. I got the idea yesterday afternoon to go through my A.D. entires and count up how many mantras I have tried on and either discarded because they were too flimsy or draped on top of what I already had for, you know, the metaphysical layered look. Ingrid Bergman is not a parakeet, only worry about things which are actually within my control, one foot in front of the blah blah blah. I thought that if I made such a list I could enjoy a hearty little laugh at myself, which is also the reason I ultimately vetoed the project.

The picture on my ID at Corporate Temp Gig makes my face look pale and rounder, so that especially considering the Crocodile glasses and how they obscure my eyebrows, I look like Thora Birch in "Ghost World." I can dig it. You can't get any higher up the corporate food chain than CTG, where there are only executives and the executives� assistants. Actually there are two classes of executives, the kind who get their mail opened for them and the kind who don�t. Maybe three: some executives have to share an assistant among them (and don�t you just bet the ones who do secretly feel a little bit emasculated?). The assistant to the CEO, top dog and my supervisor, is the only assistant with her own four-walled office, and it is as posh as those of some of the lesser Directors. I love office Kremlinology. Two or more assistants share the names Nancy, Kathy, Teresa, Judy, and Sue, so I had a bit of a time learning who was who. The coffee is a crime against nature but whenever a meeting is cancelled anywhere in the building, this office gets first dibs on the fruit plate. Some people attend the meetings of the Administrative Resource Group, or � ha! � ARG. There�s lots of confidential confab going on, which is why they�re allowed to tell me how to dress. I look corporate, or I can, and I might as well work with it. There is indeed an internet connection, as you see, and frankly that�s all I care about. It took me an hour and a half to sort the mail yesterday afternoon and today one of the assistants spent more time thanking me for calling IS about her printer than it would have taken her to pick up the damn phone and call on her own, but I think it�s going to be a nice place spending a week and gathering my strength, amassing my personal resources. Getting ready for the race and stuff. You know what I mean.

A topic I�ve been meaning to get to for a while is the good old truth-telling one. "For a while" meaning ever since I realized that on the one hand I was high-mindedly bloviating about how the fundamental principle of this diary is that it will not contain anything that I�d be uncomfortable with any social acquaintance knowing about me and on the other hand with respect to the Tank girls I was mapping out how I was going to lie to them. Which, let the record show, I did not, though I understand if that looks like ethical hair-splitting to you because actually it kind of does to me too. The problem is that part of me is still serving two masters; the truth is that sometimes I don�t know to what extent I�m using this forum as a kind of instant pudding, as in the-proof�s-in-the, against the day when someone I know will find my new diary who has heard rumors about the old one, or about me and what a whatever I am, or about that sick tarantella we used to dance together, my diary and me. Like, if that hypothetical person comes here all ready to have his or her bad opinions of me validated and instead finds the "me" to be some pathetic lonely dork who cries at the drop of a hat and whose circumstances are reduced to the point where she�s applying for the same kinds of jobs now that she was eight years ago (yeah, I didn�t mention that part when I talked about the notebook, did I), then in a perverse and, all right, Minister-of-Information way I will have scored a victory even by having made myself a loser. Do you understand what I mean? It is a variation on cutting off one�s nose (or, egad, lips) to spite one�s face, that�s all, and I�d be lying if I said that, having figured that out, I wasn�t a wee bit disappointed to discover this hidden banality in myself. The question is, do I feel generally positive about the Dishery and what goes on here because it is good and true or because it is embarrassing? And that, Dear Reader, I cannot definitively answer. All I know is that sooner or later, I�m going to get found out here the same way I was at the Monitor site, it�s just a fact. Also that what made the Monitor an implement of doom was the way I used it to diagram and research my feelings about other people � Dear Person Who Will Sooner or Later Read This, despite what you may have heard I was not shooting fish in a barrel, and I am fully entitled to those verbs � so linking doomlessness with giving myself and only myself the same treatment is the easiest logical leap in the world. Then again, like the flagellant in the marketplace I�m not doing this *just* for show, I also mean it in my heart, and can I help it if my debasement is also my salvation? Are art and commerce necessarily exclusive? Of course not. I almost wish I hadn�t loaned that Pam Houston book to Vanessa before I started thinking about these things, because at the end of one of the stories in it, "Sometimes You Talk About Idaho," the narrator has a lovely and unflinching moment of self-diagramming in which she reflects on the relationship between truth and performance � she realizes, kind of ruefully, that in telling certain truths she has come off as a performer in a little one-act about having been emotionally chewed up. That is to say, she recognizes recent events in her life as constituting a good story. Ahem. And she doesn�t want anyone to think that�s the way she thinks of it, but she can�t just pretend for the sake of that kind of propriety that the chewing-up never happened, because it did, and she feels it keenly. It's hers. Sometimes the truth is also a performance, but that doesn�t make it any less the truth: I maintain that this is as applicable here as it was in the Monitor and (let�s revisit this several months down the line) maybe even more so.

So I had that phone screen a week and a half ago that didn�t go so well and I haven�t heard from the recruiter chick. Which I�m not taking to heart not only because I know I wasn�t firing on all cylinders that afternoon but also for a bevy of other reasons including I happen to know that they were looking to hire internally so my callback may have been some kind of regulation-satisfying formality and also I could not have worked at that company anyway ever not in a hell that had been frozen over for a million years so while I chatted with her that knowledge was already arousing a panicky guilt in me for wasting her time. Hell, I was just gratified that one of my new cover letters had made a mark so quickly, and I was glad for the opportunity to practice the phone-screen ritual. But the thing is, the call was on a Friday and she said she would call me on the following Tuesday in any case. She said she would call me even in case of bad news. And did she? No she did not. I hate that shit. And truly I hate that the whole job-application process has become so automated, clicking buttons and faxing in resumes, because when there�s no more expectation of human contact, then as a job applicant you become less than human, you are just an agglomeration of dates and numbers and skills. Oh, and plus it is just bad manners, I do believe that over the past several years automation has engendered all kinds of rudeness and made it socially acceptable in the name of false and self-glorifying fealty to expedience, people like to think that they are too important to have to extend courtesy, and if you don�t know this or if you still expect courtesy it merely confirms that you don�t know the rules of being important therefore must not be important yourself. When I worked at the Tank I used to have to deal with this woman Michelle who worked at Microsoft, and every time I left her voice mail, she�d call back, usually from her car, saying, "Hi, you left me voice mail?" Yes, I would say, so what do you think? And she would huff, "I don�t have time to listen to my voice mail. I just heard it was you, so I deleted the message and called you right back." Many of the temp agencies with whom I have had some form of what passes for contact don�t even make allowances for people to come in and meet with a placement person. I sent my resume, they said Oh how nice and thank you and call in every week to let us know you�re available, and that�s the end of it. I called these places and asked if I could come in and talk to someone, just introduce myself and say thanks in person, and they said no, that won�t be necessary as long as we have your resume on file. But what the fuck � what if someone else has my exact same resume but a surly attitude, a disfiguring (non-corporate front desk, is all I mean) skin condition, and fleas visibly jumping out of her sweater? I make a very nice impression, and it�s difficult for me to believe that that doesn�t count for anything. It�s also disheartening, because said nice impression is something that I�ve worked on and cultivated and has served me well in my past career in the high-tech jungle; I�m not asking for a free lunch here on account of being a reasonably attractive female. I don�t know, it just seems wrong to me. I mean, I feel like when I do get a job it�s going to be partly on account of some je ne sais quoi or other, the same flukiness that accounts for some blind dates ending up gorgeously � in the past, sometimes it�s been my whopper vocab and sometimes it�s been on account of the odd appeal that my radio stories held for the particular interviewer, things like that � and with me not even able to make the vivacious case for myself in person with these outfits, I feel filtered, shunted, like I�m waiting in a bread line and who even knows if there�s any bread. I don�t really know what I�m getting at here, and I�m aware of sounding like a cranky old kook who refuses to get with the times, so I�ll just stop.

Re phone screens, I read an interview years ago with Penn, of Penn and Teller, in which he was talking about negotiating via telephone and how one way to give yourself an extra edge was to have some real-time secret from the person on the other end of the phone that made you feel powerful or outrageous or badass, whatever it was you needed. I believe the context of that discussion was Penn's coy refusal to confirm or deny for the interviewier the rumor that for years he had done all his phone negotiations naked while sitting under a Nazi flag. (I may be remembering incorrectly, however. Please do not sue me for libel, Penn.) In any case, it's a point, though perhaps not an image, to ponder. Don't you think?