I�m applying for jobs, a little. Think good thoughts for me.

So I never did tell about last weekend, the one with the skiing in it. Telemarking is cool. Basically it�s a hybrid of cross-country and downhill skiing, and your skis are suitable for all kinds of trails. When Steve and I went away a month or so ago, parts of the cross-country trail we took were steep in places so difficult to navigate in our Nordic skis, and he told me that if we had telemarking gear we�d be set, because the skins that adhere to the bottoms of your skis allow you to climb uphill without slipping, and then you just pull off the skins and ski back down. That is the background. Also the background is that I am very afraid to go downhill skiing. I did it maybe a dozen times as a lass of fourteen when we were living in the Poconos, and I got good enough at it to take some moguls and go down the blue slopes without falling, but I never loved it and I never missed it or wanted to go again, especially not in the last few years since the combination of gravity and speed and no barrier protecting me from the elements has for some reason become much more scary. Other factors argue against downhill skiing as the sport for me include the cost, the crowds, the noise and the pep-rally atmosphere at the base of the mountain, the fact that you have to spend so much time in line for and then sitting on the lift when I would much rather be moving around the whole time, the in-general snob factor of those who live the lifestyle, and the risk of injury, which for someone who has no health insurance is a serious one but I told Steve that if he really wanted to go downhill skiing with me sometime and was willing not to be an asshole about the skill imbalance, then I would go when my Gastro coverage kicked in. You see, one has to compromise sometimes, and I have no problem with that. That is where we left the downhill-skiing issue. For last weekend, he warned me that there might be some steep trails, and I said that anything along the lines of what we�d faced on the previous ski trip would be fine with me. Then we got out of town and drove halfway across the state to the place he�d scoped out for telemarking, and there was almost no snow and the least of it was on the overplowed trails. Which sucked. So the plan was the next day to go to a ski area within reasonable driving distance, which advertised lots of telemarking trails. Now I�m going to skip over some narrative details, because my abject humiliation is one thing I feel no need to taxonomize in this forum. Suffice it to say that what the ski area called telemarking trails were the same thing as the downhill trails, only you were supposed to walk up them first with the skins on and then remove the skins and ski down. To me, as much as I liked not having to deal with the lift and getting to be all badass by marching up the side of a steep hill, this was still downhill skiing, which is to say not what I bargained for and what I said I absolutely would not do. So I was not very open to criticisms of my downhill technique � I was terrified, positive I was going to break my leg, and also feeling like I�d been railroaded, therefore an ugly combination of livid + bitchy + defensive � which even under the best of circumstances I don�t think men tend to do as well as women; they are impatient drill sergeants with blind spots for the memories of their own learning curves and beginners� frustrations. Oh, and my lungs also still hurt from having been sick, so it was hard for me to breathe and I kept coughing and choking and then hyperventilating, plus I was right on the verge of a bladder infection. Suffice it to say that I did not have a good time and that the first hour or so of the car ride home was spent mostly in prickly silence. But, not a big deal. Really! And isn�t that all you could want, to know that you can weather a bad time and abject humiliation and the whole nine yards, you can spit your venom and speak your piece about expectations and outcomes that did not jibe, you can even be a baby enough to start crying about this, and then a few hours later it�s all copacetic and you�re listening to "White Light White Heat" in the swirling snow as you make the treacherous ascent to the pass. Mrs. Roboto and I agree that people who declaim in a self-congratulatory manner about how they never fight with their boyfriends or girlfriends or whatever actually deserve a response somewhere between skepticism and pity. A big part of life and of interpersonal association only takes place when the hammers are down. That�s where you find out not only what the other person is made of and what he thinks is worth standing up for, but the same things about yourself. I think that if you�re not having disagreements with someone from time to time, disagreements I mean as opposed to snit fits or passive-aggressive episodes, then you are essentially stagnating. And if it matters so much to you to be recognized as two people who never fight, then no offense but I think your priorities are fucked up and also that you have gotten into the habit of lying to yourself, and although it�s nice to see the young people getting along and I wish you all the best, I am, well, skeptical. Give me a fight any day. In retrospect, now that I think of it, the weekend seems better than it probably was, and the good, fair fight was partly what made it so. And the Lou Reed tapes.

Isn�t it hilarious how I got through that entire paragraph without using the word "relationship"?

You Book Club girls, are any of you interested in/available for some kind of activity next Saturday night, the first of March? Steve has to go to a dinner party at the house of the hounds of hell, those chick friends of his who like to tear up his girlfriends so I am not going to meet them. (You may ask why he is friends with such nasty people. The reason, he says, is that he has known them for so long, 10+ years, that blowing them off would be a horrible dramatic recriminatory scene, and also keep in mind that he doesn�t see them all that often, and far less often than they would wish. I am not making excuses for him but want you to know that there�s nothing funny going on here. I too have an aversion to horrible dramatic scenes and a tendency to friend-inertia, present readership of course excepted, and I know all about how it goes down when the chick friend wants what the girlfriend�s getting � and, don't you know, I�m still thrilled that right away he was straight up with me, he was forthcoming about these friends and what they were like and how they would react to me � so while I�ve had a few flare-ups of the sulk reflex over being left to my own devices on a Saturday night, I know that he�s playing this one exactly as he should.) Dinner, movie, party, dancing, rawk show, moisturizer and pillow fights? RSVP. Tonight it�s Steve who�s having the dinner party, the one that was rescheduled from a few weeks ago, and I am leaving here early to go home and frost a cake. Then tomorrow I am hauling his ass to Portland to get checked out by my great-aunt, wa wa wa.

And this is strange: the woman who worked in the same law office with cutie-pie Julie and me years ago wrote to Adam and asked him if he and I still kept track of each other: "Funny, I've been thinking about her a lot lately. Hope she is well. If you see her, please tell her I said hello, and would like to get in touch."