� Margaret Sanger, in archival footage in "American Experience: The Pill"

Parked my carcass in front of swimmy no-cable KCTS to eat homemade bread pudding and watch that documentary last night, even though the last thing I needed was yet another one-hour time period in which I was not paying some bills, and good gracious I am glad I did. I went to Steve�s right after and felt all bubbling over about it and told him that watching it had been inspiring. He wanted to know inspiring of what, and, all right, I amended myself and said that I had new respect for both my scientific and feminist forbears and for people who had felt the way Sanger did or had the ethics of a John Rock. Then I finished his crossword puzzle in like three minutes, just in case he gets any ideas about being qualified to perform grammatical nitpicking on a regular basis. But did you see the program? Wasn�t it fine, wasn�t it well made and fair, didn�t it give you a good feeling about being a female and a welling-up of scary gladness that you are one today rather than in the fifties? Eighty percent of women born since 1945 have been on the pill for at least some part of their reproductive lives. Think about that � eighty percent. Whenever I see film of the race riots in the South or the march on Montgomery, it always gives me a sense of anxiety and displacement that this happened so recently. I wear my mother�s high school class ring every day, the one that says 1964. But think about if she�d graduated ten years earlier � the doc also noted that in the fifties, "most women" were married by age 19 � and how different her life probably would have been. Hysterectomies as birth control. I mean, fuck. Also, I don�t know whether I mentioned this before, but I realized only recently that if my mother had wanted an abortion when she got pregnant with me, she would have been s.o.l. That was a sobering thought. I gave some consideration recently to joining the eighty percent myself and decided not to.

I am digging this chick a lot lately. Oh and by the way, I am not going to give up my e-mail address to the friend from long ago, the one who through Adam is sniffing around for it. The bottom line is that she seems to need me in her life, when she does, to make herself feel better by comparison. Like, she is not making as much money as she wants, but at least she�s not as bad off as me; she is not feeling so foxy but at least she�s better put together than me; she wishes she had more friends but then again look at the unwashed dorks I hang out with. And this is very bad for me because not only are her priorities and standards different from mine � she thinks she should be making six figures and dating international jetsetters, and she spends a fortune on her wardrobe and upkeep as well as a lot of time making sure from moment to moment that she is projecting an image custom-tailored to the expectations of the dudes she hopes are noticing it � but also because my self-esteem is a fragile animal, and I was never able to bounce back from her affectionate-with-an-edge perorations by reminding myself that, yo, this was not my chosen lifestyle and therefore I didn�t give a shit about not measuring up to its demands. All I hear is the part about, for example, how I should be getting weekly facials because no offense but I am not getting any younger, and right away there�s a little part of me that wants to shrivel up and die from mortification and apology and ignorance and shame for having made other people look at me. And it doesn�t stop with the facials � it�s my hair, my clothes, my body, my walk, my manner of speaking, my lipstick, the way I decorated my apartment, my disinclination to flirt in the buy-me-some-drinks sense and also to "network" at corporate schmoozefests, blah blah blah. She presents herself as my benefactor, someone who can teach me everything I need to know, and, truly, she�s been a good friend to me on a few occasions. But she is manipulative and egomaniacal and I am not sure that she�s a good person, and whatever she tries to teach me always contains the twin implications that (a) she�s the expert in everything worth knowing about how to be female and (b) in the same department, I am a sad case in need of rescue. And no. I am not going to put up with that shit anymore. I realized this, realized that I felt so strongly about it, on Sunday afternoon while I was making mole sauce, and the song I was listening to as I did was "Jolene." Which is ironic, and which made me cross with myself for even letting her get to me, because with respect to something I don�t talk about anymore she�s the one who should be singing it. So there.

My top four Google searches are as follows: (1) "Hermes wallet"; (2) "fake Kate Spade"; (3) "dating an alcoholic"; and (4) "staying friends with exes." Because that's what I'm all about, you know.

Went to Portland on Saturday and Steve met my great-aunt and although I told him on the way back to Seattle that he hit it out of the park, this is a gross understatement. There is not a stadium metaphor big enough to contain how impressed she was with him. I�d be surprised if I got in five sentences during all of lunch. (Cool: "got in" and "got out" would both work there.) Then later I got macked on in Powell�s. Bald Eurotrash-looking guy: "Are you finding what you�re looking for, can I help you?" Me: "Oh no, I�m just poking around, thanks anyway." Trashy (leering, stepping closer): "I mean, it�s not like I work here or anything, I just �" Gross! I fled. I bought George Steiner�s "After Babel," "Letty Fox: Her Luck," a book of cult-studs essays, and Maria Flook�s "My Sister Life," which I am reading now and about the project of which I have some mixed feelings although the writing is beautiful. Oh, and "Being Dead" for Book Club. In the most recent issue of a zine called Lungfull there was a poem by Noelle Kocot that I liked a lot, but the rest of the publication was ho-hum, and I didn�t feel like paying eight bucks for one poem (was that cheap of me?). Now I have read some Kocot online and might spend the money on one of her chapbooks. It is good stuff. And what the Lungfull site calls their current issue is not the one I read at Powell�s, so that poem is not the one I mean.

I didn�t write yesterday because I was still reeling from the superhuman effort of the mole sauce. I had no idea it is so complicated. Not counting spices there are close to twenty ingredients, and almost all of them require some kind of special pre-preparation before they go into the cauldron to stew. And the recipe said that it made 12 servings, so how did I end up with a gallon? That�s another thing I did instead of paying bills. Maybe tonight, oy. Hey, want some mole?

I have more, including a follow-up to what I was saying about We never fight-type people, but I should at least take a break and get something done. Also I might get dragged into a brown-bag lunchtime presentation at noon.