� fancypants surgeon to me today after I sent him e-mail requesting some information

A Porsche SUV. This is what it�s come to, people. Please, stop the insanity.

Steve is feeling semi-cruddy and I was planning to make chicken a la king for Book Club on Thursday anyway and all of a sudden I have two whole consecutive evenings free so I said I would make him chicken soup and now I am trying to tamp down the flashbacks to last October when I did the same kitchen act for Todd. But of course it is not the same, for starters because Steve has requested not the Jewish-grandmother version but the tarted-up one that incorporates cumin and cilantro and coriander and maybe even some miso if I get to feeling wild and crazy. So there.

And here is what I was getting at yesterday linking to that article, have been getting at for a while I suppose, on the off chance that anyone reading this page needs it spelled out for them: For a long time, maybe upwards of a year, I was depressed, and now I am not. I think I knew it and I didn�t know it at the same time; when people ask, "Are you depressed?" if they mean it in the clinical, must-ingest-serotonin-uptake-inhibitors sense, the answer is always no, but if they mean it as shorthand for Aren�t some aspects of modern life pretty disheartening to contemplate?, well then it is a resounding yes. I am literal and I get intellectually hung up on dilemmas like these and I forget that sometimes it�s OK to go on instinct, and to trust that a place that is similarly unquantifiable is also the locus from which the question is posed. So with the spelling-out we also get to the issue of whether all the time I was dating whatshisname the fact of me, the image I was putting forward, might not be the kind of deception that he was so hot to convict me of all along (I don�t think I believe this but I enjoy a good round of devil�s-advocate and I want you to see that I am not unbothered by the tiny timeline of bustup-to-hookup) and the question of whether I bear a greater burden of culpability in his gradual turning away from me than I have previously been willing to carry. I say to myself: No, when you care about someone and say you love them, you are also saying that you want to look after them and to help them in whatever ways they need. But then I answer myself, Yeah, and you sure don�t make that easy for a person, do you? Not that this is a big deal or that I�m going to waste any energy actively puzzling it out, because the important thing to remember is that this was a person who called me a liar when I said I loved him and was secretly reading my diary for many months and letting his paranoia read between the lines to create sexual transgressions against him that simply were not there, etc. Not that I�m going to waste any energy either trying to write that sentence in a righteous rather than a factual manner, because the point to both of the above is that they�re over, past, done, gone, dead. I try to be a documentarian is all, I try to take my lumps, and I have always agreed with the thing about the unexamined life, on the off chance that anyone needed that spelled out too. In order to stick to my high-road itinerary with respect to that former associate and the things that made me take it from him for as long as I did, I need to keep one eye on the map and one on the compass. That�s all. I was depressed, and now I am not. That�s all, too.

Speaking of points, Amy had an excellent one when she signed the guestbook yesterday and called the show "just one more excuse to point out how morally weak and pathetic women are, and then publically humiliate them." This made me feel lousy and of weak ethical fiber and like the world�s most jack feminist (also insert here a conversation from the weekend I am not even going to tell you about), since I do know the qualities that unfairly are often ascribed to women � being catty and bitchy, evaluating dudes� suitability based on how much money they have � and almost nothing makes me angrier than the assumption, by someone who doesn�t know me, that I conform to that stereotype. But then in the car on the way to Vanessa�s, I brought up Amy�s comment to her, and she was not down at all. She noted that the women had signed up for whatever public humiliation they were going to get, or anyway made a calculation that the risk of same was outweighed by the possible reward of becoming Mrs. Joe Millionaire. These are women who saw a Fox advertisement concerning a rich guy who was looking to find a girlfriend through the vehicle of a weekly TV show and said, Sure, sign me up. These are women, in other words, of whom it could be argued that they simply *are* morally weak and pathetic, in a way that has nothing to do with their genders and everything to do with their brains. Vanessa also said that she sometimes feels like there are two different kinds of women, those that she and I (for instance) could be friends with and those with whom we absolutely could not. "Like different species?" said the unrepentant taxonomist who was in the driver�s seat, liking the direction this conversation was taking, and there�s a sense in which I feel like this isn�t even being dramatic � the women at Belltown Billiards, at Axis, the woman who makes a point of telling the guy friend she wants to sleep with that his new lady emits a mysterious bad vibe of untrustworthiness, the other woman who continues to make passes at the guy friend out of one side of her mouth while asking with the other when she and the new lady get to meet, the women who can�t leave their house without the full-face makeup: I look at them and I feel a whole host of disparate things, fascination and self-doubt and awkwardness and disgust and resentment, but most of all what I feel is that I am not looking at myself, I am looking at someone who is fundamentally not like me. I know this is horrible and, again, bad-feminist of me, because there I go reducing a complicated evolving human being to a piece of junk mail, but outside the zone in which I can be judged for that, the fact is that I do it, that I do feel this way. More on this later because it�s almost quitting time � something about the implications, of this two-different-species line of thought, for evolutionary biology.

I was super productive today at gastro! I called, I scheduled, I filed, I researched, I organized. Then I rewarded myself by spending the very last part of the productive day writing in my diary, a short entry that is better than none at all, and I think this is such an excitingly fair trade-off that I plan to try it again soon. And now I am off to the supermarket to get myself a chicken. Bon soir to all.

A rude and abrasive doctor from Harvard, with whom I am regrettably forced to correspond, misspelled "syphilis" on his CV. Ha!

Point-to-point communication P.S. (later) Sorry, to both of the ladies concerned, about the identity mix-up. You know who you are, and � there's no excuse � I do too, so I'm the chump here. I know how it happened, but I should be more on the ball, and I will try to do just that.