� Stealthkitty, here. (This girl's the total shit, on the off chance you didn't know that already.)

Dudes, dudes! News!

And I wasn't even going to write today, I was going to enforce a day off as a prophylactic against the craving for diary-style insularity and in case there's some small part of me that's turning into an attention whore � how funny to use "prophylactic" and "whore" together � but I have just arrived at the coffee shop after my appointment with the second of the potential therapists, and all I have to say is Number Three is going to have to be a world-beater indeed to sway me from my new conviction that Number Two is the A-1 headshrinker for me. And this is even though her office is right around the corner from Todd and Jeanne's house, about which as I was driving up my thought was Ha ha, forget it. There were two things that absolutely did it for me. One is that when she said she was a big believer in dreams as a medium of what we are trying to tell ourselves, I said, Oh, I just had one last night, my old friend from high school cross-country, TM, called me on my cell phone and said, "Monitor! It's T!" So she asked me a little bit about TM and how I knew her and what my associations were, just idly, and I told her the last thing I heard she was having to decide between her hunky sweetheart of an American boyfriend and the Indian fellow her parents had selected for her arranged marriage, which if she didn't they were threatening to disown her and cut her off. I never heard which way those chips fell and I am not sure I want to, because the ways I want to think of TM, when I do (which hadn't consciously been in a while) are the ways I remember her, as a mostly Americanized badass cracking jokes in Latin class. So the therapist pointed out that the story of TM is essentially the story of a person at a major major crossroads, having to pick a way to live her life. "And they both have such good and bad in them, it's two hard decisions that both have their benefits and also have a lot of pain," she said, "so it's no wonder that she's who you're thinking of, since in a lot of ways you're in the same place." The flight to health, she called it. Turbulence ahead, but I am starting to get much more unafraid. It is not insignificant that TM seemed happy and excited to talk to me, as if she'd missed me very much. The second thing was as I was gathering up my stuff to leave, having given cursory attention to the DL situation early in the appointment � and then moved on to other stuff, thank you very much; it knocks me out how much that brouhaha suddenly seems to have receded � and explaining the impetus for my having called the referral service last week, online diary blah blah P.S. blah blah Catharine blah blah, she said, "I'm getting the sense that there's something else going on here with the boyfriend and the diary, is that right?" To quote Keanu Reeves: WHOA. And I hadn't even mentioned Todd in at least ten minutes. I hasten to add, it is not on account of her peformance of a Stupid Pet Trick that I am inclined to give her the commission but because she is � somehow � that damn perceptive, perceptive of me.

(Tangent on "dude": I love some of Thomson's characterizations of individual performances. He calls Jeff Bridges in "The Big Lewbowski" "the rare, fragrant Dude." I have half-thoughts towards a maybe-eventual entry on how the best criticism, like Thomson's, comes from a strong moral sensibility which although never articulated is impossible to miss. How the art of not-articulating, as opposed to something like what a Denby does, is as crucial to the effect as having the sensibility in the first place.)

Catharine, I am wearing one of your grandmother's scarves today. The striped one with the thick orange border, the stripes of which match the greater proportion of the colors in the navy blue tights from my sister that have an abstract print of antique cars. And a short black skirt, and the red boots. And no necklace.