� Ivan Kreilkamp, in "Rock and roll report card: Critic Robert Christgau turns the capsule review into an art form" (Boston Globe, December 29)

i am SO interested in your changing "personality" to "integrity" in one of the medical school letters.

� Catharine, in e-mail to me this morning that had the subject header "whoa!"

Discuss amongst yourselves: Kushner vs. Dawkins. Discuss amongst yourselves: straight guys who use the words "fabulous" and "delighted." Discuss amongst yourselves: Erika Krouse�s "No Universe" and the concept of zero population growth. Discuss amongst yourselves: exactly when � it is post-Milton � did "complacency" come to acquire a negative connotation, the one of stagnation and smugness? Discuss amongst yourselves: being careful what you wish for because you just might get it. Discuss amongst yourselves: the many reasons why dating an alcoholic would, theoretically of course, be much uglier than dating a committed pot smoker. Discuss amongst yourselves: how to distinguish in a definitive manner between, on the one hand, the kind of rational, practical compromises that adults are regularly called upon to make and, on the other, selling out. Discuss amongst yourselves: whether the Hal Hartley line, What�s so practical about being levelheaded?, that comes to mind in response to the last discussion topic is (a) the voice of reason; (b) the devil on my shoulder, at least as far as finding an answer is concerned; (c) Calculator Brain showing off its own personal IMdB; or (d) all of the above.

You would not believe all the stepping up to the plate and facing the music that your humble correspondent is having to do these days. Jesus. Floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, sucking it up and swallowing it down like a C-H-amp. Sorry, that sounded gross, but I�m going to leave it in, partly because I meant the swallowing-down to indicate an act of taking things in and also incorporating them, willfully making them a part of the sustaining system because I (I, I, I) want to and therefore one of those acts of self-assertion � I mean "having to do" as an act of obligation to myself and to how I want to be able to regard myself � that nobody has the right to diminish, to the person doing the asserting, by taxonomizing it with a noun; it�s a triumph because I fucking *say* it is.

(Discuss amongst yourselves: should I or should I absolutely not be thinking about the katto ceremony right now?)

Am I making zero sense? Yes, probably I am, and that is a shame but I will not be providing footnotes. When people ask me, sometimes crossly (that aspect of the inquiry is always fascinating to me), why I am still maintaining the diary long after I should have absorbed the habit of regular writing and proved to myself that I�m capable of it, I tell them, in a vague and distracted tone of voice that�s meant to suggest that the subject fails to engage me, that it helps me explain things to myself, it gets me sorted. I do the voice on purpose, and the voice somehow reflects on my answer and makes it seem far away from me, but the answer is mostly true, and I tweak its context like I do so that I don�t have to cop to it unless I want to. I have learned some lessons, and there are a very few people to whom I even want to acknowledge the fact of the diary, hence Minister of Information-like I will not be bringing up the subject with new acquaintances. One: I fall off the wagon sometimes with respect to my stated program of only writing about things and ideas and people (and in ways) that I would be unthreatened to discuss in public. And while such indiscretions represent getting so caught up in wanting the writing to be true that I forget to be objective and keep foregrounding the differences between the truth, the whole truth, and the truth that hurts � and therefore make me perversely happy, that my demonstrable default is to foreground the writing instead � well, they happen and they�re there, and once they happen I feel like they�re entered into historical record and to go back and expunge them would be to commit a series of little murders. They�re entered into record and they�re also part of the record. I pretty much know who among my real-life pals reads my diary now, and for the most part I�m good at remaining true to what I want to say while not writing anything that makes either of us uncomfortable, them by too much candor or me by a shiny happy lack of it. But I think I can be na�ve about the facts that today�s reader roster may not be tomorrow�s, or next week�s, or April�s, and � this is key � that I don�t get to be the Minister of Information. (Discuss amongst yourselves: do you suppose that subconsciously, also perversely, this is what attracts me to the idea of an online diary? That if I don�t have anything in my life pulling me in opposite directions, I�ll build something that will?) Like, I can say to Ian, Here is my diary and you are welcome to read it, and I�d appreciate it if you didn�t go whoring the URL around. But Ian is under no obligation to me, and what if his own ethical universe is better served, for whatever reason, by telling some friends that they should check it out, or what if he�s talking to some people at a party and it just slips out? I need a replay of Todd�s unexpected bourbon-fueled confessions and accusations like I need a hole in the head, and I don�t even want to go through the five stages of feeling like a total monster that started over a year ago with the other Steve�s morning phone call. I need to be more careful. I need to find a way to write things so that they are not incomprehensible to you but maybe, when I reread them later, will speak a little bit louder, in a more familiar language, to me. Two: Some friends of Steve�s apparently want to read my diary, the existence of which they apparently know about. And while I think that Todd was a shit for playing secret reader for so long, filling in the narrative blanks with poison that he then let fester in himself, I�m still not willing to say that he was horrible for having Googled me up in the first place. I think it�s human nature to want to know things, at least until you�ve had your wings melted as a consequence of that particular quest and maybe for some people not even then. I think � no, I know � that what I do here tends to go past what most people imagine when you say to them, online diary, and I guess I understand, logically not pridefully, one potential outcome of that surprise, which would be to want to keep reading, Well now, this is something else. And, pridefully not logically, I�ll say it: I *want* to be something else, and probably that�s also a big part of why I keep on typing. So in an ideal world I will find a way to combine the self-explaining with the something-elseness, a way that also will not blow up in my face later and that makes zero sense as seldom as necessary (though, apologies in advance, it will be necessary). That is what I will work towards.

In an ideal world I will combine the telling and the telling-about, and such digressions as above that focus on the telling-about-the-telling will be few and far between. It is my story, with that equal balance I keep harping on precisely between the "my" and the "story." In an ideal world I�ll get to go to MFA school having abandoned neither that equation nor the diary that inscribed it in me. In a different arena and with a different purpose, I will be working towards the same thing.

I saw "Personal Velocity" and the Star Trek movie, and I implore you not to waste your time and money on the latter. I got whiny this weekend over having been described as a person who really knew how to turn a phrase; it reminded me too much of the scene in "Metropolitan" where Serena tells Audrey that Tom finds her very well read, because don�t you know, from there it�s less than half an hour to getting called a flat-chested goody-goody. I�m not even sure what attracts me to the Kreilkamp quotation above, since parsing it discomfits me � Is it ever creditable to want to sentence anyone to a terrible fate? Is it cool for a critic to "despise"? Whither the critical respect for the basic analysis that goes in tandem with judgment? Yet there is something in it I like, I think that being "at once unreasonable and bracingly authentic," for instance, would be a pretty good goal to have. What interested Catharine about my stealth editing of the letter of recommendation � and see, that�s a more concrete example of something I shouldn�t be writing about in a public forum � was whether "integrity" was what the doctor meant or what the doctor should have meant, and I�m guessing also how I thought I knew this. The skiing thing is happening, I�m leaving next Friday night. ("We�re leaving"? Don�t get me started, and, no, though I disgust myself on this account, I still have not said the b-word.) I have big things to be thinking about and am going to hang out quietly with myself and my poor neglected cat tonight, puttering about the house and trying to think about them. I like the Eagles to win the Super Bowl.

Oh, and here is the Marianne Moore poem I mentioned � end of the third stanza and beginning of the fourth � and footnotes for which a Mr. Maurice J. O�Sullivan, Jr. is glad to provide you. Happy New Year to one and all, and wish me luck abating the strawberry pimple on my upper lip (how old am I, for fuck�s sake?) before I go out to ring it in. I am hitting the Body Shop on my way home tonight, armed with a shopping list from my sister, and even if I don�t look any better by tomorrow night but don�t look worse either, well then that is good enough for me.

P.S. (the next morning) I just want you to know that yes, I am aware of how my divergent attitudes towards (a) secret reader and (b) stealth editor smacks of moral relativism. But it's this simple: there's a difference between using your powers for evil and using them for good, there's a difference between suspicion and the benefit of the doubt. Cosmetic program working reasonably well, with the help of some ancient cover-up I found, though I did not get stuff done last night, I had a sore throat and was generally feeling lousy so went to bed at a kiddie hour. It is likely that I am getting sick, a fact about which I choose to remain in denial until tomorrow. So there.