Fuck. What did I even do at Gastro today, how did the time go? I don�t know. And I feel lousy because I�d meant to get a lot done, and I failed at that endeavor while failing also to muster the inclination to write a diary entry about said failure. I vex myself. What I did was a lot of filing, OK, which I guess is a good thing and now my office looks visibly more organized, though I will here reveal the secret that when I can�t figure out where exactly to file something I make a new folder called Misc. and play the rest by ear. What I did was spend a few hours working up the weaselly pseudo-courage to fill out an official institutional application, backdated to last Saturday, for the other hospital job � you know that application, it�s the one designed with assembly-line experience in mind, where you have about six square inches to write what you did in the course of employment at each of your previous jobs � and then finally filling it out and on the way to the drop box realizing that in copying from my resume I�d skipped a job and would have to start all over again. This is a very important realization to have when one of things that you�re touting in both institutional application and cover letter is your project-management skills and superhuman attention to detail, but, argh, the thing took just forever this afternoon, all that wretched copying, and the act of doing it made me so nervous, I felt like a traitor � people I�ve schmoozed at the hosp keep calling and those in the office keep taking me aside and excitedly asking me if I�m going to be around for good, oh they hope so, and I happen to know that there is a message on my voice mail inviting me to new employee orientation three workdays from now that I can�t bring myself to listen to until I have perfect-tense sent out these smoke signals to the other department, by which I mean I have inserted the application in the drop box and walked back to my Gastro desk � and then I had to go get a fresh application and take it home and start over. Much anxiety!

But am I doing something so wrong? Washington�s a right-to-work state, Gastro pays chump change, the other job is a better match for my skillz anyway� oh hell, and even to reassure myself like that implies a situation that requires reassurance, when most likely all that�s going to happen is they�ll look over my application packet and chuck it in the trash, though even I must admit that the cover letter is magnificent, maybe my best ever. I should look at it this way, it�s the first job I�m applying for in the new era where I take no guff and I do take action, where I am involved in the pursuit of looking for a job. I am done now. The packet is in the red plastic envelope in which I carry around personal stuff. Tomorrow morning, in the same early-morning trip where I go to the bank and deposit some checks, I�ll photocopy it at Kinko�s � and maybe for the sake of good karma I really do mean the early morning, maybe I will make a special effort to be on time. I�m going over to Steve�s later and will probably take my laptop and finish this and post from there� or, no, maybe not, because here it is later, a few hours later, and I what I�ve been doing is going through my disgustingly bloated Inbox on my PC downstairs and deleting without mercy (over 500 down in one session � the champ is here!) and because I haven�t done that in so long there is still a lot in there that can bestir my memory, so I�ve come back to the laptop a little on the shaky side, looking forward to the in-fifteen-minutes when I can bust out of here and head over to the bacon shack and greet its inhabitant upon his triumphal return from Pub Trivia with some chick friends neither of us are interested in my meeting whom because they are apparently, like, licking their leathery chops in anticipation of tearing me to shreds. But that is another story.

This is something I was thinking about, against my will as I was driving back from Number Two�s, Wednesday night. When you start dating someone and the first thing his best friend, a female, tells him about you is that she finds you nice but inapprehensibly untrustworthy, you�re screwed from that point on, aren�t you? You should just shake hands and go home. Especially if the best friend knows that he has layer upon layer of paranoia along the lines of women = them that cheat, especially if the best friend is on record as wanting herself not you to be his girlfriend. I just mean, what a horrible, sad, bad and unfortunate, ugly situation for all parties concerned. Especially me. Where I gave up on the e-mail was around early October of last year, when it briefly looked as though everything had been confessed to between Todd and me � there was one where he asked me flat out if it had been something he said or did that made me write a entry called "I Hate Men" last spring (answer: actually, no, not at all), and I remember thinking, Oh at last at last, finally the history and neuroses were all on the table, the same table, and it would be revealed to me what it felt like to have a great boyfriend, flat out and uncomplicatedly. There was another one in which he painted me a picture of his insecurity with respect to me, which I had not imagined would be so vivid, and I remember how touched I was by his honesty and self-scrutiny and, I thought, willingness to come clean so as to stay clean, and to keep staying clean. Lots of nice things about me over the course of a few of them, and not in line with the stupid reductive Iris-Murdoch-and-John-Bayley paradigm he would later adopt where a nice thing said about me necessarily implied the absence of the same in him, a closed system that only he and I inhabited. (Again with the algebra.) In early October, I thought things were good. I thought they were what they were said to be � *I* sure as hell wasn�t misrepresenting anything. But then gradually over the next few weeks you can see the e-mails become impersonal, reportorial, caustic, obscure, brittle, less, all the niceness and self-scrutiny and honesty backed away from amid the still absurd to me argument � which was always posed as more of an accusation � that I ought to be dating. No fucking wonder this is when I started to go off the deep end, right? It really was surreal, it made no sense, it was incoherent. Argh, sorry � we have picked over these old bones before, there�s no need to make soup out of them. Anyway, the point I was making is that in going over the glut of mail from Todd, that glut in particular glutted on my screen into a long column, I became hyperaware of the sad, bad and unfortunate narrative that it comprised, should I have seen it then?, and how different it was from the sweet hopeful major-key song I was all the time whistling to myself instead, should I have slapped myself in the face?, and I felt a little bit knocked down by late-blooming hopelessness and incoherence, and, yeah, sadness. Have you heard that song on KEXP that goes something like, The only thing I�d change would be the ending? Something like that. And yes I know that he was reading my diary all along and getting shady ersatz intel on me from the best friend in question and intimidated by me because he had screwed-up ideas about what he deserved and about trust in general and because of the pizza-shop backstory, and you can make the argument � I mean, hell, everybody does � that things were doomed from the beginning, from the first Google search for Mulholland Drive + diary + kissing or from the best friend leaning in with sympathetic lipsticked mien and seeming to level with him about me, but you can also make the counterargument, because if you can�t then there is something wrong with your heart, that this is not necessarily so. That people can be good for each other and help each other, that you need to assume they're telling the truth when they say they love you. Argh again, we have been over all this too. I am sorry. I think it was the combination of seeing all the e-mails, the weight-bearing column of them, and sitting at home in the freezing cold house while Steve was out with chick friends who had been assembled in the same laboratory of anathema as someone else I used to know, could the same narrative write itself all over with different characters? How would I know if I was making a huge mistake � if I wasn't even as smart as a Skinner rat, I also wouldn't be smart enough to see that deficit in me. And: Jesus Christ, why are some women *like* this? I was getting all weepy and sad for myself, and also I am still in withdrawal from television, I don�t even have rabbit ears hooked up yet, so I had no escape. I�m fine now, though. It was one of those nights and that�s all it was. There�s a downside, I think, to not having had that time in the good old vast desert of loneliness to get over Todd � or, more precisely, to get over the way things happened with Todd and how they kicked my ass. I suspect that this pot is going to boil over from time to time until, gradually, I do that.

I don�t feel as though I�m done with an entry, but I think I�d like to be done with this part of it.

P.S. (later): I forgot to note this earlier. Even though Steve�s team won at Pub Trivia, one question they didn�t get was Who was the first president to ride in a car? When I got to his house he asked me, and I knew it. I knew it I knew it I knew it! Ha! I knew it � ha! Ha ha ha ha ha! And I am chagrined that this gave me such a sense of gratification and smug take-that-you-bitches and that it was the thing that made me start to feel better, but it did and it was, I cannot tell a lie.