� Amar from the block, here. (I felt bad reading about the crappy performance the Apples in Stereo put on when he saw them recently, since they were great last time they were in Seattle, with nary a mention of chicken.)

How is it that the good old my-friends-think-you�re-a-hot-tomato mail, composed of almost the same sentences but at different times from two different dudes, can also come from two such different places in them? Karen says she�s jealous and Catharine says she is happy for me. I am happy for myself too. And also: whew, it is about damn time for the tomato mail, since over the last few weeks it has been an interesting little exercise for my self-confidence hearing from so many admiring females and one gay man what a primo specimen is Steve; there have been brief moments when I could not muffle my internal whimper�s "What am I, chopped liver?" nor tamp down the sense of irony that after ejecting Todd from his passenger seat I was now sitting in it myself. It never lasted, though, not even at the final stop on the Night Of Three Parties where the chicks lined up to talk to Steve like he was giving away free money. So when I refer to an exercise in self-confidence, I mean more like the test of the hypothesis that I have some. I do not think of myself as a particularly self-confident person, but there�s no denying the evidence.

Sometimes when I walk around the hospital, dropping off medical records and picking up lab results, I like to imagine that I am like Diana Prince clicking through the halls of the CIA, confident and competent and doing my job and also existing within an alternate secret life. It makes me stand up straighter and move more smoothly, and however you�d describe the look it puts on my face � hell if I know � it is a fact that it makes other people look at me. Is the metaphor of the light and the bushel, I mean living it, itself a kind of secret life? Isn�t it better to be in a situation conducive to the strangely powerful feeling of secret-lifeness rather than one in which it�s all on the surface? (Answer: that would depend on the pay.) So, OK, I am coming around to coming on board at Gastro. This is something I realized in telling Vanessa about it last night, I think a big part of what�s making me so agitated and ambivalent is the fact, no, the act of making the commitment, sort of the tacit acknowledgment of Yes, this is what my life is and then existing within that as if I�m a hermit crab and this is the shell I�m moving into and will carry around with me, on me, indefinitely. Once you�re in the shell, though, I think you get acclimated fast, you resign yourself to it and then right away recontextualize that so it doesn�t manifest as resignation. You learn to walk around in it because, well, you have to � I am thinking of the Marianne Moore again � and then after a little while, it�s just you, just walking.

This doesn�t mean I�m not going to try to get more money. Have not spoken with HD, have not completed application and am dodging the phone calls of the HR lady until I do. Fortuitously for me, this morning when someone was suggesting that this office had dropped certain balls relating to a medical study, it was I who was able to prove that we had not, it was I who was able to prove that I took care of everything � confident, competent � last week. Then I cleaned up a letter HD had dictated, putting in better vocab and varying his sentence structure so it didn�t sound so boring, and he loves that stuff. He seems like he�s in a good mood today, so maybe I will try to catch him before I leave.

After Gastro today I am stopping at my earthly paradise, the cheese counter at Whole Foods, because I have to stock up for this weekend and much to my excitement I have just learned that book-clubber LL is a fellow cheesehound. Tomorrow night an as yet indeterminate pack of us are going to see the Boss Martians at Chop Suey, and Thursday I might go to a Yeats lecture at the UW (Helen Vendler in the house, yo!) and Steve might take me to dinner or maybe that is going to happen tonight, I don�t know yet. I didn�t get a lot done last night, as if this is going to surprise anyone, but I cleaned the kitchen and puttered around a bit and roasted some of the bargain-basement asparagus. I�m making progress, though.

As I was leaving her place last night after laundry and "Joe Millionaire" (I know, I know) and heading to the bacon shack, Vanessa said, Well, you are certainly spending a lot of time with Steve these days, aren�t you. I could not read the tone of her voice so I tried to make mine come out in a way that combined elements of defensiveness and I could kick your ass, you know, and with it I said, "Yes?" and then she said, No, it was good, it was nice to see me relinquishing some of my independence. But I think we both knew that wasn�t quite right, because she started to make an amendment at the same time as I began to say, suddenly inspired to another level of realization, "You mean it�s nice to see me not acting like such a hardass all the time," and she was agreeing with me before I�d gotten all the words out.

Here�s to the knees buckling and the brain kicking in at the same time. And here�s to no more hardassery, because in the end, that shit just tires a person out.