� Susan Orlean, in "The Orchid Thief" (I finished it last weekend, so now I get to go see "Adaptation," hooray)

I try very hard not to make this kind of comparison and when I do to make myself stop, but can you even imagine what the difference is between a guy who flips out when you ask him if he�s got any problem with a potential ZIP code change because he can�t deal with the implications of his opinion mattering to you in this regard and one who, listening to you talk about your ideal-world plans to be starting an MFA program in a over a year and a half, comments in such a way as tacitly to suggest that he thinks he�ll still be around? The practical difference, and I have been thinking about this over the past few days and said so to Number Two Wednesday night, is that I�ve completely gotten out of the habit � slipped free of the shackles � of experiencing everything I do and say as potentially in need of a defense. It is another thing I didn�t realize I had been doing with Todd and it is the sort of thing with respect to which I�m finding it�s necessary to maintain a very delicate balance so that I am aware of what happened and on guard against it as best I can be but do not allow this past instance of willful blindness to make me suspect that now when I think things are so aces with Steve I�m just deluding myself too. I don�t want to be second-guessing myself, which devalues my experiences at the same time as it absents me from them, and I also do not want to live my life, ever again, always running on two parallel tracks where one is the actual doing and the other is the contextualization and rationale and justification and implicit apology-if-necessary for the first, like I�m my own Stepin Fetchit. Never never never never never again. I mean, I hope I mean that, because honestly I don�t know how I could have let myself get bogged down in something like that in the first place, I would not have believed that I could except that I did. Sometimes I�m shocked that I�m as old as I am and as dumb as I am, but then again that is a subject it is best not to dwell on.

Steve�s on vacation and gets back next Thursday night. Vanessa leaves tonight to rock East Lansing. Rebecca left on Monday and won�t be back until January 8 or 9. My sister gets in on Sunday. I haven�t written in ages, have I? Yikes and sorry. It�s the usual porridge of reasons: burning the candle at both ends, not home much, busy at Gastro, feeling my traditional holiday-season sluggishness, beating myself up over these too-long entries � also, I started working on that one I wanted to churn out, and I titled it "Dissertation on Flirting," which was kind of an inside-inside baseball reference to one of my favorite Christmas songs, "Dissertation on Santa," rather than a promise I was making about its intended content, but in any case I got what I deserved for my hubris because every time I opened up the file in progress, finishing it seemed terribly daunting, a task beyond the means of a dopey little diary drone like me. Do I dissert? Nay, I demur. Also for a few days I was spending way too much time on the thing, overediting and fretting over punctuation, and I wanted to make sure that the diary brand of writing was something about which I could remain un-hung up. After the new year, though, the deluge will almost certainly be reduced, because I�m going to have to start getting serious about workshops and mentors and that kind of thing; as much as I wish it were otherwise, it�s not kosher to submit a portfolio to MFA programs that�s comprised entirely of diary entries.

Wednesday I took advantage of one of the few real perks of temping, which is the ability to call in sick � theoretically � any old time I want to. The alarm woke me at six and I was tired and cranky and thinking that I would sleep a little longer and maybe go in late, and when it went off again at eight, I decided that for whatever reason I felt strongly enough about not going to Gastro that a hooky day was in order. I had big juicy plans about me and Violet and the D on F and a coffee shop (maybe I�d run into Rohm at Victrola), but as it turned out, I had to go to Des Moines and grapple with my car insurance company, don�t even ask, and then I�d also offered to run some errands for Steve so that he didn�t have to rush around on his last night in town and this ended up taking longer than I�d thought and running them in the red boots more inadvisable than I could have guessed, so I was slow and crabby by late afternoon and didn�t feel like writing. Then on Thursday morning, having faked it the previous day, I woke up sick for real with the bug that�s hit a few of the Gastro gals, which in addition to the standard symptoms involves unslakable thirst and mild vertigo. Ha ha. But the good news is that although the red boots were no friend to my feet, the walking back and forth between Cap Hill and downtown didn�t bother my bad knee at all, so with a few tune-up runs between now and then I will absolutely be in fighting form for the � watch me slip this in here all casual-like � cross-country skiing trip that Steve is talking about for the first weekend in January. Yesterday I got in late and, having felt too exhausted to pack a lunch, subsisted all day on takings from the copious boxes of chocolate that patients send to Gastro at Christmas then went out for a good boozy Ladies� Cocktail Night, and now here I am. Yep, life�s generally good. I am going to see Modest Mouse tomorrow with Art and Julian; they�re giving me more responsibility at Gastro including non-monkey work like research protocols, and one of the nurses told me that I am spoken very well of and sure to be hired; I get to spend the weekend cleaning and organizing and doing Christmas-day shopping and prep; my sister is bringing her recipe for sausage-stuffed mushroom caps; I am one signature away from having the IRS off my back on the persistent tax mess; even though I have no New Year�s party on my dance card yet I am gearing up for my 2003 resolutions of (a) getting on the stick about the MFA stuff and (b) increased fiscal responsibility. You heard it here first.

The fiscal part is going to be necessary because more and more I�m getting hints that one would get hired into Gastro at rather low pay with the understanding that it would increase respectably at intervals over the first few years of one�s employment. Which I understand is the way to build a loyal team or whatever but is not such good news for those of us who don�t intend to make anal warts a motif of our livelong days. I am not rationalizing, though, when I say that I�m absolutely willing to do it for a while, to normalize those aspects of myself and pin them to the grid, like in the Marianne Moore poem (I�ll look it up tonight) where this is necessarily the condition out of which real freedom arises. In the meantime I�m finding little ways not so much to fuck with the system as to put my mark on it, like earlier this week when I made some changes to a wishy-washy letter one of the doctors had written recommending a patient of his for medical school:

• I would think she is capable of functioning in a medical school situation ��> I have no doubt she is capable of succeeding in a medical school situation
• The determination to perform quite adequately ��> determination to perform well
• Her academic success and her personality in general ��> her academic success and her integrity in general

(This is probably not what Marianne Moore had in mind, but, hey, it's my party.)

Vanessa and I went to see "The Trials of Henry Kissinger." My favorite part was when waxy, waning Al Haig, who comes off as balls-out unhinged, described the assassination of Rene Schneider as "mischief" and then tried to explain, as if sighing over how it�s hard to find good help, that murder committed in the course of a botched kidnapping isn�t really murder, just an accident. My least favorite part was actually before the movie, when an REI-looking contingent, one in dreadlocks and at least two in Birkenstocks, were in line for the same film and one of them said, "Three for �Dr. Evil,�" and then when the ticket dude was confused, REI guy brayed the real title in a tone of voice that contained both mockery of the wage slave�s ignorance and deep self-congratulation for having made such a bon mot. I am of course against murder myself, but sometimes I feel that exceptions could be made.

Last night post-cocktails I was supposed to have had dinner with Jeanne, but she wasn�t feeling well and cancelled. I was going to tell her the certain things I�m bound to tell her as my chick friend and sometimes gossip partner, things it would be a lie of omission not to talk about no matter who her housemate is. I was dreading it but also looking forward to it, I confessed to Vanessa when she asked, I had conjured up a cinematic scene in some generic restaurant that featured me serenely stating the facts, holding the stem of my wineglass, sitting up straight and looking dignified and beatific at the same time. Jeanne would probably blanch in the reaction shot, and then she would recover, and then the word would be out. Number Two asked me how I�d feel about that and the ensuing and inevitable accusations from those closer to Jeanne�s camp that I was a whore, had been cheating all along, etc. She thought I was going to say "nervous," but the correct answer was "annoyed." So now the true-confessions dinner has been postponed until next Monday or Tuesday, and joining us at the table will be my sister, which will make for an interesting wrinkle in the proceedings. Tuesday night I met more of Steve�s friends, the old, old kind from like fifteen years ago, his version of the Pennsylvania mafia (for membership in which, by the way, he is technically eligible, due to a short stint in Philly). It was fine, totally painless, and my sensitive nose detected not a whiff of major disapproval, though there was a sensitive moment at the beginning when one of them asked how long we�d been sloping around and the answer caused her to do a different kind of reaction-shot blanching and then to stifle an oh-now smile. It's all right. After all, I can�t really blame her. I am one degree of separation from Maurice Sendak and two from Slobodan Milosevic � oh, and I guess that means I�m three from H.K. himself.