Here�s to crossing the Astoria bridge in the early afternoon with Lucinda Williams in your cd player. Here�s to getting out of town and breathing different air. Here�s to friends with whom it is just as easy to drive in companionable silence for a while as it is to tell raunchy stories of long-past badness. Here�s to the freedom to be able to do and to have all these things: sitting in the bar on Saturday night, it suddenly hit me hard that I have the life that my mother left her kids + husband to go get. (Although I want to, I know I can�t say Think how much she must have wanted it here because I have an investment in believing that the choice was difficult; to make such a comment would be the diary equivalent of advocacy journalism.) And that I�m the same age she was when she did it. It was strange to think of my mother as me, many years ago, having just recently staged her jailbreak, doing such a thing as sucking down drinks with a pal at a strange bar in a strange town, thrilled to death suddenly to have access to all manifestations of strangeness that had been housewifely cut off from her. I started to think of the person across the table from Vanessa as some recombination of my mother and me, what would she think of these things I was thinking, would I like her if I met her then and would I want to hang with her at Mary Todd�s, and then, experiencing her partway like that, I realized how good my life is and the extent to which I take this for granted. Think about it: I do whatever I want, I spend my money how I like � and on myself, Vanessa pointed out � and I get to choose when I want to be around people and when I�d rather be alone. These are incredible luxuries. I fix what I like to eat, I read the books that interest me, when I have insomnia I stay up late and drink beer and watch movies. Remember two summers ago, me writing about sitting on my bed, wearing underwear and eating the Nutella-and-banana sandwich, en route to being late to AcmeWidget.com and awareness crystallizing in that moment that I was operating according to no one�s agenda but mine? Like that. There is a sense in which my whole life, right now, is that moment and that doing exactly what I want to be doing. I think I need to be better about apprehending that recognition and truly making it my own, so that when it ebbs I will not resent whatever replaces it, it will be one more thing I loved as much as I could for as long as I could until it went away.

Today my lips are Fearless although the rest of me is not quite at peak performance level, am heavy lidded yet jittery and a bit wrung out, because I was up well past two last night answering the kind of questions and having the kind of conversations that, I am sorry, nobody should have to have to deal with not even three weeks into the boy proceedings. And irritated: I don�t know why that should be part of the conversational impact on me, but I cannot tell a lie, there it is, and what the fuck is wrong with me that even in the context of the late-night truthtelling session and, all right, some declaration-making (not by me), I am still not going to say "boyfriend"? Or I don�t know, maybe I�m just tired and cranky today and I need to let this new shit sift and settle for a while. And, hello, what the fuck else is wrong with me that I just characterized it as shit? I am very tired. I don�t know. It goes and goes. Obviously I am not going to talk about any of this yet.

I�m having a dinner thing on Thursday night, Steve plus you can probably guess who will sit in the other four chairs, and Vanessa has a secret special duty as the chemistry monitor, after she asked me on Saturday whether Steve and I had this or he was merely one of those good-on-paper guys and then I got panicky that she should have to ask. I�m making white lasagna with b�chamel sauce and I suspect I might end up going kind of overboard on an antipasto plate. Steve�s busy as hell through Wednesday and not only on account of the prep time his schedule affords me, I am grateful for this. I�d like to hang out in the kitchen by myself and grill vegetables and think. Maybe a glass or two of wine. Chemistry. Oy.

I don�t want to get into the specifics of last night�s questions, but here�s their answer and here is what I said: If you are in the habit of walking places on your own after dark, for instance, you need to be aware of certain possibilities. What if someone with a knife walked up to you and demanded all your money or something much worse? You can remind yourself that as a strong person with good reflexes you would have a decent shot at getting away, you can believe that you would kick your assailant hard in the kneecaps and run to the nearest gas station like the quarter-mile sensation you once were, screaming all the way, but the reality is so different from the concept of the reality that this kind of speculation is useless, you think you can maybe begin to imagine such a situation but the fact is that you can't. I said: I can�t handle hypotheticals. I said: Until you�re right there and you can actually see the moonlight reflecting off the switchblade, you don�t know anything at all.