� You wonder if there�s a difference between whatever might be truth and a performance that isn�t a lie. In your life right now, you can�t find one.

� Pam Houston, in "Sometimes You Talk About Idaho"

i think it is more important to be honest about how you really feel than it is to be "realistic". i think that you need to tell yourself the truth, first and foremost.

� Catharine, in e-mail to me on Wednesday

I had a face that leaked information.

� Harold Brodkey, in "A Story in an Almost Classical Mode"

After I decided not to go running, I thought that last night was going to be all about writing and dishes, but this did not come to pass. Yesterday morning at CTG I started an entry and saved it, and then a bit later when I tried to open it � and, more distressingly, the movie review I�d worked on all Wednesday afternoon and that was three-quarters or so finished � the floppy was corrupted. Why does this happen to me so often? Then I was trying to make myself feel better, oh it�s not so bad, and I dangled the possibility of holing up at my computer for delicious hours late that night and this morning, re-creating the review at least and making it better, giving myself a writerly self-challenge, but that made me even more despairing, and finally I figured out why: I don�t have a comfortable place at home to get work done. Eureka: and I am not talking about a chair that properly cushions my bony ass, I am talking about the fact that my desk and computer are in what amounts to a basement, in a dark unheatable room with deplorable radio reception and no cd player, a room from which my cat is banished and that after last weekend smells faintly of dog piss, that is Rebecca�s office for her consulting business. For me in the office room, there�s always the sense of both exile and trespass. This depresses me. At my old apartment, Monitor readers may recall, the situation was much nicer. From my desk�s vantage point at the intersection of front hallway and living room, I could survey the living room and dining room and kitchen, look out three different windows, and be at my stereo in ten steps. Plus there was an unquantifiable comfort level in having things around me that were mine, being able to look around and see them. I haven�t been writing in my diary from my desk almost at all since the move, and I see now that the reason for this is that I can�t do *my* writing in something that is so fundamentally not my place, which perversely cheers me because it suggests the extent to which the first-person singular is asserting itself, with brio, as central to the larger project. You go, little first-person singular! In the basement now I can look up and see the spines of my books, but the only reason for that is that the shelves were deemed insufficiently attractive for any common living areas, so they seem to regard me back with bewildered sadness. I want to reassure them that I still love them and that they have no reason to feel like also-rans and am finding it very hard to do so when I am flailing for such reassurance myself. So now I�m thinking about maybe trying to score a used laptop, as experience has shown that the slaptop could crash at any moment, so that I could move my desk into my room � move the new bookshelves down so that my main presence in the office would be as a library patron, a guest � and have a pleasant place to write and not incidentally to listen to music while I�m doing it, and then I could keep my PC downstairs and use it to satisfy my far less frequent non-writing needs. And on the one hand I do not have the money to be buying hardware now and if I were going to be buying anything it should be a new hard drive for the existing machine, but on the other hand if I want to be serious at all about the writing and the reviewing and the possibility of MFA program applications somewhere down the road, I can�t afford to be working on that stuff from a place that makes me feel lousy and which is characterized by my wanting to escape from it at as soon as I can. Period. And having figured all this out is something else that makes me feel tough yet charmed: tough because it�s me laying down the smack with myself and having decided This Is The Plan (also, simply being able to do these things), charmed because there�s always something dear and fragile about accidentally discovering how much something means to you, how much you need it � dear and fragile like a bunch of violets, maybe. You should never refuse the gift of a bunch of violets, even from yourself, and if you have them to give, you should never not offer them. It�s only a credit card. And come on, an unglamorous used laptop that only needs to have a floppy drive and to run Word, how much is that even going to set me back? If I have some time, I am going to start looking for it this weekend. When I get it, its name will be Violet.

I wish I could be listening to some old Pretenders right now. That would be just about perfect.

So I didn�t write anything last night. At seven I had that meeting with Laundromat Gary, for whom it does indeed look like I�m going to be the designated freelancer working on packaging, some text parts of his software programs, and maybe web site content. And how funny is it that he solicited me in the first place because I looked smart and had a computer with me in a laundromat, because as it turns out no brag but I�m exactly who he needs for exactly what the projects are, he�s asking me to do things at which I�m great, the best. The pay�s low, but he�s a nice guy with a start-up and products that look interesting � I don�t even have to feel like a whore! � and I�ll be able to put it on my resume and use him as a reference, so it�s more than OK with me. Then I met Vanessa for drinks at Linda�s, where certain subjects are verboten to be discussed per two entries ago, and it struck me that unlike, for example, when I am in my car driving home from CTG, it�s easy not to brood and dwell in the company of other people. You just happen to be talking about something else, big deal. Probably I should have realized this at dinner on Wednesday, but maybe what was going on there is that I was so much talking about other things that the absence of dwelling didn�t even occur to me. I did get self-conscious about my diary and my writing again after talking to Vanessa � she mentioned that whenever she writes an entry and no wow-that-was-a-good one is forthcoming from the cadre of her readers, she briefly doubts herself, and holy shit did self-doubt blow me to tiny smithereens, though briefly, through the implicit suggestion that wow-that-was-a-good-one was, for her, the baseline. In this sense, see the shocking nakedness* of my guestbook. In another sense, rereading the poem has made me feel about ten times better, so once again I�m just going to shut up now. Dishery is the sound of one hand clapping. Dishery is good because I say it is.

One of the executive assistants comes out to relieve me at noon and I haven�t had today�s dose of sniper news yet, so I�m going to post now and spend this afternoon�s downtime working on the review. I may and may not have temp stuff lined up for next week, I have to make some calls this afternoon. We�ll see. In the inside-my-head way that I had hoped it could be, this week has been a success. I�m ready for the race and for what comes after. Hooray.

P.S. (after lunch) I do want to clarify, or to say in defense of the office, that it is perfect for the kind of work that in order to do properly you need to have a sense of grinding dutiful roteness about. Like the Friday night I spent down there working on cover letters and Applying For This Job � walking up the stairs after that to the warmth and color of the living room and the comfort of a TV detective show felt like ascending to heaven. A gift, a reward. My escape. And you will notice that in escaping, I took the slaptop with me. I have been using the writing desk in my bedroom for bill-paying, but if I do end up getting the laptop, I'll probably move that kind of administration downstairs, segregate the grind from the heavenly orange light of the first-person-singular zone. There's no inherent badness in the office. I just don't like it there, and the things I don't like are things I cannot change. That's all.

* May I please make a run at the world championship of pedantry? Good, thank you very much. I think there are some typos in the Schwartz poem at plagiarist.com. In the first stanza, shouldn�t it be "clothing" instead of clothes, and shouldn�t the last line begin "In this sense"? Can someone check on this for me?