1. The Red Apple was all out of Bridgeport IPA, and god DAMN I was I looking forward to drinking one or two of them as I typed this. Or six.
2. And you know what else would have made me feel better? "The Simpsons." Just one episode, even a mediocre one. But no, there�s no Simpsons for me because I had to go and cancel cable a few weeks ago.
3. And you know what else? Not coming home and finding a package from Todd, that�s for fucking sure. Here was a package for me from a company I don�t patronize, and I figured, OK, maybe it is from my dad, and that would be nice, on this bad day, to know that someone had been thinking about me like that. So I opened it up, expecting to have my ruffled nerves soothed if only by the gesture, and instead of my dad�s address in the Bill To section of the packing label, it�s Todd�s. What on earth is he doing sending me a present, acting like we are on present-sending terms with each other? And to think that I thought getting smiled at was insult and violation enough � ha! Dude, this gesture does not exactly square with your public opinion of me as a lyin� cheatin� head case. When I break up with you, I mean it. I�m tempted to have a Diaryland giveaway, first person to send me e-mail gets a still shrink-wrapped secondhand present from my munificent former associate, but I�m afraid that might be bad karma, and as you will soon read, I can�t risk the payback today.
4. Also I am feeling ashamed of myself on account of how very very much I don�t want my dad to come visit at the end of the month. I feel like if I could just wait until I was solvent and a tiny bit more situationally stable, then it would be OK. (Then again, when is that going to be?) I may send him e-mail about this tomorrow.
5. The thing my college writing professor said about the percentages, which I have only told to LL and Catharine and Vanessa and Steve and which I was dwelling on today. The distinct possibility that anyone in this talent bracket should maybe take up weaving or something.
6. I realized I left my canvas laundry sack at the Laundromat last night. When I called this morning to see if they�d found it, the day attendant, another Lady Elaine, was all kinds of snaps-up snotty to me and asked me what number washers and dryers I had been using. I said I hadn�t taken note of that, and instead I tried to describe where on the premises I�d stationed myself. He kept asking me to describe where I�d been in terms of the color of the nearest folding table, the posters on the wall next to the dryers, that sort of thing, and when I couldn�t, he said, "Well, you�re certainly not willing to be very helpful, are you. I don�t know how you expect me to go crawl around looking for your lost belongings when you can�t even tell me where they might be."
7. The new car stereo is a total piece of shit. Note that I do not say "my" new car stereo, and that�s because part of me needs not even to be associated with such chintzy, low-rent crap. It offends every aesthetic sensibility I have. The deal is that every so often, the stereo turns itself off, and nothing I do will get either the radio or the cd player to work again. At these times, desperate, I keep punching the power button and the cd-eject button over and over again, anything I can think of, and after about half an hour to 45 minutes, it will arbitrarily come back on, and the display will read "code off." Not that the manual says anything about a fucking code. If I had known what junk it was, no way would I have gotten the cheapest model, I would have coughed up an extra hundred or so for something that didn�t feel like it was going to break apart in my hands and that came with a manual that actually seemed to correspond to the product, because, call me shallow if you want (and fuck you if you do) but being able to listen music while I drive really matters to me, it is not a luxury. But it�s too late now.
8. The music deficit wounds especially deeply on those occasions when traffic conspires against me in that way that only Seattle traffic can and the ten-mile drive to Gastro takes about an hour. Like this morning.
9. And while we�re on the subject of the radio, will someone please tell Amanda Wylde that just because a song has (a) African beats and/or (b) someone singing in French, it is not necessarily worth playing? Christ almighty, Lady, this is my drive home. Have a heart.
10. And today was one of those days where for some reason I just looked horrible, I mean unbelievably horrible as in I would not have believed it if I hadn�t seen it in the mirror with my own two eyes, I mean butt-ugly super �Zilla. Who knows why. I thought I looked OK when I left the house this morning, but this afternoon around two I was in the Gastro bathroom and I saw my reflection and I was *flabbergasted.* My hair looked dried-out and greasy at the same time and in dire need of a haircut even though I only had one last week. My shiny face was pallid and puffy and I had the beginning of a sty in my right eye and my lipstick had worn off on the insides of my lips and smeared past my lipline onto my face, and, hell, even my sweater seemed not to fit me right. I looked like I weighed a lot more than I do, and I also looked like a homeless person. A drunk homeless person. How could I have looked so repellent? How was this possible?
11. Nobody updated their diaries today. What is this, a cruel plot against me?
12. I�m sick of doctors and doctors� wives calling me up on the phone and talking to me as if I�m stupid or disgusting or their personal servants, I�m sick of the residents who don�t bother to introduce themselves and who walk into my office and take books off the shelves without speaking or looking in my direction or even acknowledging that there�s another person in this small enclosed space. I�m sick of providing instant tech support and editorial services to everyone in the office when what they propose to pay me is less than what the receptionist pulls in.
13. The new word I learned today is "hematochezia," which means bloody diarrhea. This is what I do all day, get paid less than the receptionist and deal in bloody diarrhea and get attitude from doctors� wives. Rock on. What am I doing with my life? What will I do with the MFA-type percentages so against me?
14. This afternoon when I got to the hospital parking lot to put the day behind me and drive home, I discovered that sometime today I became a hit-and-run victim. On the passenger side near the back, the molding is bent and then detached from the car, and part of one of the side panels is crashed in and shattered near the wheel, as if the person parked next to me was backing up and misjudged badly the angle at which to pull out. I am going to my garage for an estimate first thing tomorrow morning, for which of course I will have to miss work, and I don�t even know how the fuck I�m going to get to the hospital if they need to be working on it for a few days. I imagine the whole panel is going to have to be replaced. I�m guessing about $500.
15. This morning I had thought I�d hit Fred Meyer on the way home and get a new laundry sack, but after the revelation of my ugliness I thought, No way, because don�t you know if I went anywhere like that looking the way I did, I�d run into someone I didn�t want to see, someone whose schadenfreude would be titillated by the sight of me looking so rugged � I was thinking maybe Lori � not to mention whose urge to gossip. I do have my pride, you know. So I took Fred Meyer off the agenda and limited my post-Gastro hag-faced errands to REI, where I had to try on boots before they�d let me rent telemarking gear for the weekend. Of course, who should I see at REI but the cutest, most adorable, most impeccably dressed person I have ever met in Seattle (and she�s in the Top Five of gossips too), Julie, the legal secretary from the firm where many years ago I was the token drug-abusing paralegal. Julie and I didn�t part on bad terms, but there was another chick in the office I chose not to stay friends with and Julie did, and I�ve always suspected that if I ever saw her again she�d be loyal to the other chick and treat me somewhat coldly, and now I can confirm that this is indeed what came to pass. Julie, a tiny blond former aerobics teacher and personal trainer, had just come from running and was wearing what seemed to be a custom-tailored skin-tight Lycra catsuit, and her hair and makeup and body were perfect, and I think she�s had something done to her teeth since I�ve seen her last. After tsk-tsk telling me how hard telemarking was for most people, focusing her eyes on my hips while she did so, she looked me up and down a few times, me in my baggy trousers and too-big hunting jacket over ill-fitting sweater with my boozer's lipstick and my awful hair jury-rigged on top of my head and escaping in unkempt tendrils from something that you couldn't maintain a straight face while calling a bun, and she shook her own darling head with what was supposed to be barely perceptible sorrow, and then she made an enormous show of twitchy-hips mincing up to the cash register while I was there paying and announcing that she needed a smaller size boots because her feet really are that little and narrow, and while she was there waiting for her yet daintier slippers � there is no God � the cash register could not read my credit card and rejected it.
16. After putting the rental on another card, I left the store and headed for my car, which I�d parked on the street rather than in the garage because I hate how the REI garage is designed for Civics and everyone who parks in it drives an SUV, and it wasn�t where I�d left it: Oh shit oh shit oh shit, I thought, smashed up and now stolen, isn�t that the story of my fucking life, and there were a few seconds where I just stood there in the middle of the street getting ready to cry without stopping, my stomach eating itself from the inside out. Then I remembered that I�d parked the car in front of a white Jeep and the empty space was in front of a maroon sedan, and since I�d only been in there about ten minutes, might there be some possibility that I was wrong about where I�d parked? I looked around: one block back, there was the white Jeep. And my car in front of it, good.
17. Is this what my life is like now? I asked myself then, my turn to be sheepish, sitting in the driver's seat with my hands shaking, trying to will my heartbeat back into the normal range. After the car getting repeatedly stolen and hit and broken into, after the mysterious disappearing muffler, after I pay and pay and pay for the biggest joke of a car stereo ever to be manufactured among dozens of other expenses, is this what it�s going to be like for me as a driver, always dreading and fearful, fully expecting to come out of wherever I�ve been and to find it missing or vandalized again? (Yes.)
18. I called Steve on the way home and said I�d had a horrible day and might want to be coming over earlier than I�d said so would he please call me when he got in? He did, and he wanted to take me out for cocktails and dinner to cheer me up. But I look ugly and am terrified of having another encounter like the one with Julie, and the last thing in the world I want is to go out to a public forum and put my pallid puffy trial-frought face on display. I said I�d rather not. A discussion ensued during which he expressed his opinion that I was being silly and ridiculous and I begged to differ, and how it ended up was with him going out to dinner alone, exasperated, and saying he�d call me when he got back, and now I�m afraid he�ll be peeved at me.

That�s about it. There were some bright spots, though: for instance, Mrs. Roboto was such a pal, a real friend, a small-scale hero, and at the Red Apple with my second- and third-choice beeers, I did get carded. And although I could feel how much Julie wanted this, the air between us was heady with it, I would not look at her hand to see whether she�d fulfilled her dream of getting married; even if she had a three-carat ice cube she wanted me to notice, she was SOL. So there, Julie! It�s one of those days where you just want to go to bed and pretend, if only for the few seconds of falling asleep and the few of waking up the next day, that it never happened and certainly never kicked your ass, and maybe in a few hours I�ll be able to do just that. Wish me luck.