� unsigned New Yorker "Talk of the Town" listing (January 6 issue) about trumpeter/flugelhorn player Danny Moore

I am playing hooky from Gastro today. I am typing on my laptop in Victrola in one of my little hooky-playing outfits, tights with vertical stripes and a dark green Sonja Henie skirt. I made up a family emergency and called in emergencied this morning, only in small part because I didn�t want to deal with the HR lady and mostly because I woke up not wanting to go, and when I wake up already feeling like that � rather than starting to feel like that � I am generous to myself, I call it a lost cause and give myself the slack day. I might not have that opportunity much longer. So Steve made coffee and toast and bacon for breakfast, and I went home and puttered around and showered and here I am. I�ll post this when I get home then do some administrative stuff then head over to the LCW tonight for the birthday thing Julian is hosting for Rebecca. I�ll worry about the rest of it on Monday. I have some editorial-type Gastro work to do this weekend, a chip with which to bargain with myself.

They�re playing the Magnetic Fields. Perfect.

I think I�m going to see if I can get them to come up on the money but take the job even if I can�t. The same way a Republican is said to be a Democrat who�s been mugged and a capitalist a socialist who got a raise, an underpaid underachiever is a realist in a shitty job market. I�ll get my pap smear, fluoride treatment, new glasses or maybe contacts, and possibly have the therapy covered for a while, and all the time I will probably be looking semi-seriously for a different gig. Thanks for talking sense to me in a nice way, those of you who did � you�re buying the drinks next time.

Last night I caused Steve to be "annoyed" with me on account of the job thing, more precisely on account of my not wanting to tell him the exact dollar amount on the table. He thinks that this constitutes the withholding of information, which he also thinks that I should not be doing where he is concerned, and he said that whatever opinion he would render depended on access to the data point. This is what I get for dating a scientist. I am more word nerd than scientist, however, and while I understand what he�s saying, I make a distinction between withholding information � something active, a resistance � and the choice not to engage, to step back instead from the forum in which that would happen. I don�t like to talk about money shit with anyone, not even my so-called broker, because here in Seattle I�m always the one with less, and it makes me self conscious and the other person or people uncomfortable and the lack of common reference points can be torturous to slog past (you may remember granite countertops and a castle in Slovenia); my mother taught me it was vulgar to talk about money and my father taught me about compound interest by calculating how much he�d have in the bank if he hadn�t had children and anyway I just don�t see the point of such discussion. I mean, why does anyone have to know how much I make or how much I have in my 401(k), what is the practical necessity? I sure don�t want to know this about them. In this Steve is my polar opposite. Rather than avoiding self-consciousness and discomfort and torture, his strategy is to defuse them by addressing them headlong, for example by asking his rich friends in a jovial manner how they manage to spend all that money. Me, I�d rather eat glass. But different strokes! It wasn�t a fight or anything, and actually I was thrilled � and, yes, I told him this � that he brought up the annoyance rather than sitting on it and letting resentment fester (see, that is one instance where I do endorse the defusing-by-addressing), and in the end he acknowledged the logical consistency of my position. Quotation marks around logical consistency, too � what a man, n�est-ce pas? But then this morning as I was leaving the bacon shack, saying that hooky was one of the few benefits of temping so why not take advantage, he said, "Yes, but can you afford it?" And, argh, that is exactly what I seek to avoid, in general in my life, by not talking about the money; the last thing I need is some Mr. Big Bwana Microsoft being tenderly solicitous of my finances, looking out for my welfare for fuck�s sake. Especially in boyfriend-girlfriend situations, it�s just so bad for the power balance, I mean it establishes one in the first place and inscribes the matrix in which it�s indefinitely going to play out. He used the word "advice," and I didn�t like that at all. Oh, and also he said that where information is withheld there cannot be intimacy. I said that I didn�t think that intimacy had anything to do with whether or not I filled him in on my net worth and he said, "Doesn�t it have to do with talking about things you�re not comfortable talking about, though, doing it anyway and maybe even doing it *because* you�re uncomfortable and it�s that discomfort that�s the enemy of intimacy?" and, OK, maybe he has a point there. I suspect that there is further philosophical head-butting to come along these lines � last night was also the big First Night Of The Toothbrush, ooky for me because in a whole year-ish of dating the last person I dated I never had a toothbrush at his house and never was unmindful of what a mistake it would have been to ask for one, and Steve jumped right in by stepping up to the counter at the same time as I was in there and brushing his teeth in front of me. Now, I am not a delicate flower in this regard. But this gave me pause; I was reminded of a girl from my first-semester Speech Communications class who lived with her boyfriend and had taken the bathroom door off the hinges because, she said, there were no secrets between them. Why did it give me pause? I�m not quite sure, and I will have to think about that one.

Again I must stress that the difference of opinion was no fight. The discussion was impassioned yet civilized � I mean, if I may say so myself � and then we proceeded to the boudoir and a fantastically intimate time was had by all, hey hey. This all feels so adult, which is exhilarating and also, if I think about it, makes me sheepish. So I try not to think too hard about it. Steve had a dream a few nights ago that he and I were on a cruise ship with his grandparents, and we went into a room and there was a guy sitting there with his head on the table, so we were talking to him for a little while and then finally realized that he had no torso or limbs and the head was all there was to him. Steve said that the head seemed to know everything. "Like an oracle?" I asked, very interested, thinking Delphi. No, he said, more like tourist information.

Later this month I�m going with some Book Club broads to Antioch�s information session on their teacher-certification program. You go two nights a week and Saturdays, one week on and one week off, and it�s tailored to people who work full-time, hmm. (Read: the student loans wouldn�t bite so hard. Or, and this just occurred to me this minute, in theory a person who�d given in to getting bitten could be going for certification at Antioch while simultaneously getting an MFA at another institution.) On a sheet of Post-It paper to the left of my laptop here, there are some notes I made at Gastro yesterday about the entry I wanted to write today, I mean the things I wanted to write about. What Number Two said about Todd, a dream that I had, my bad day on Wednesday, "The Bachelorette," how much I like Jeanne and am so grateful to her for making sure I stick in her life, the girls in the commuter van to the hospital and how in a different way from what I was talking about earlier this week they are not my species either. I do this a lot � I plot out entries, make a list or a rough outline, and then I sit down and start typing and the entry becomes something alien to my plans for it. At these times I feel like I�ve been let down and also like I�m the let-downer; it feels vaguely like a sense of failure, a wet sweater. But what if I hold onto the lists and outlines and maybe use them later, not in my diary but in something else? For so long there has been no Something Else, and the idea never even crossed my mind. For so long, my mind was stuck. 2003, here I come � I�m unstuck now and ready to rumble. I�m unhinging myself, I guess.

And is anyone following the case of the boys in New Jersey who were locked up in a basement and left to starve? Here�s the detail that does something pretty close to breaking my heart: when Governor McGreevey went to the hospital to visit the two surviving brothers, one of them was eating a banana and offered him half of it. (Also the quote: "I have a brother I haven�t seen in a while." When I read this, my first thought was, There is no God.) If his mother taught him to be nice and share, how on earth can she have then so completely abrogated her responsibility to him, how can it even have been an option? Or is it worse if no one ever taught him to share and the offer was just a reflexive response to what I presume was the governor�s kindness; and if that�s the case, what are we supposed to call its tenacity other than a miracle amid godlessness? When are we collectively going to realize not only that it is obscene that we pay social workers so little and that they are forced to carry impossible caseloads and to run the risk of being made scapegoats later for systemic failures but � this is the bald economic argument � that the looking-after of children is an investment that pays dividends later whereas not to do it is pouring money and resources down the drain for years or decades to come? I don�t know whether to cry or spit. And the story in the New York Times magazine a few weeks back about African orphans � more and more I�m starting to believe that for two-parent setups with the means to do it, adopting may be a moral obligation. I�m serious. Don�t even fucking talk to me about your upper-middle-class uterine yearnings, because I�m too pissed off to listen.

RDG, why does your charmingly outspoken colleague not have a diary here? I wish she did because I know I would love to read it.