What the doctor should have meant: dishery.diaryland.com

I had a completely transparent dream last night. In it, I was cooking six or seven things all at the same time for different people, and it felt like this was part of a long cooking stint in which I would be making one treat for each of my friends. Vanessa was getting mac and cheese (which she really is on Tuesday night when she and Popeye come over), my sister was getting jelly donuts, and Edith P. was getting the cr�me brulee with gold leaf on top that looks so gorgeous in my Nigella Lawson cookbook. I was in some kind of commercial kitchen that had multiple ovens and a big Subzero refrigerator and all the appliances and utensils and counter space I needed, and since I wasn�t feeling like a grumpy martyr about all the dishes I was going to have to wash, I think maybe it wasn�t me who was going to have to wash them. So keeping on top of all the prep work while keeping an eye on pots on the stove and various timers was a challenge, but I was in the zone, concentrating hard and loving what I was doing, and it was all fine. That is, it was fine until I had to finish up the thing I was making for Todd, which I don�t remember what it was other than something on a cookie sheet that I had to put under the broiler and watch closely so that it didn�t burn. It wasn�t cooking as fast as I thought it should, and I couldn�t turn away because once it did start cooking I would only have a few seconds� window between lukewarm and scorched, and I was getting paranoid about whether the reason it wasn�t cooking was that I�d already ruined the dish or maybe broken my oven somehow, so this spoiled my happy competent mood and while I was rooted to the spot and wringing my hands, things began to go awry all over the kitchen. A plate fell off the counter and broke. A pot boiled over. My cat got underfoot and I stumbled and stepped on his foot and he yelped. And the food for Todd still wouldn�t cook and I was becoming anxious, aware of everyone else�s food that I was neglecting, but I was terrified of ruining this one dish if I turned my back even for a second, so I had to stay where I was.

(I cooked French onion soup and roasted tomatoes and made my favorite broccoli thing on Sunday afternoon while I was half-watching "Unfaithful," which has a scene where pots boil over and food gets burned. I was looking at that Nigella Lawson cookbook because Tuesday�s dessert is in it, and late Sunday morning when Steve and I were wandering around the Pike Place Market, he was asking me about Todd and the bust-up more specifically than he ever had before � just interested, that�s all � and I was answering likewise.)

The comedy part was this morning, when I was telling Steve about the dream, and I mentioned what I�d been making for him during my cook-a-thon: some kind of Mexican casserole. He said it sounded good and I started to describe it and here are the words that were coming out of my mouth before I realized what I was saying: "It had sausage in it." Ha!

(Also on the Market errands, I was remembering how, even though Todd was rather a stickler about spending x number of weeknights apart from each other and one weekend night every week, sometimes he�d come over much later, unannounced and unburdened of that resolve. I remembered one time in particular when I was working through a box from the produce co-op and at midnight was still wide awake in the full bloom of a kitchen frenzy and Todd seemed weirdly grateful to see me, had I maybe turned my cell phone off or something? Yesterday I had just been talking to Steve about my supposed shadow identity as an elitist, rabid anti-smoker, keeper of "secret boyfriends," etc. and how this finally made me have to get out, and it suddenly occurred to me that what Todd had been doing with the surprise drop-bys was checking up on me � he didn�t miss me on these nights, he was trying to catch me in The Act with another guy! Doesn�t that make perfect sense? How can I have been so na�ve as not to have seen that before? Duh. But then when I reported this breakthrough to Steve, he smirked and said, Well, either that or he�d been the one who tried and failed to score with someone else, so now he was coming over for the reliable sure thing. Is it also na�ve of me that I see his reasoning but believe that this is not true, that if Todd did cheat on me it was something minor and quickly repented, like maybe a little drunken osculation while dropping off an overeager pal at the end of a night? Is it more martyrdom, me giving him that much credit even though he gave me so little? Or is it arrogance?)

It�s one of those days when despite the yawning hours during which nothing at all is required of me, I am not digging Gastro. I could give you the details, but it�s just dumb shit that would take more effort to write down than I want to expend thinking about it, and the older I get the more I realize that someone else�s quotidian beefs about her workplace are deeply, deeply not interesting, and that it may even be unfair for her to inflict them on someone else. Friends, we have so little time together � don�t we have better things to talk about, aren�t there other issues and factors that are more germane to the project of self-definition? Tell me about your job if you love it or if something funny happens or if a juicy scandal presents itself. Otherwise, there are so many things I would rather know about you. Won�t you please gratify me with them? I will try to do the same with you.

The blurb on the front cover of "Being Dead," which I�m reading for Book Club on Thursday and I must say liking a lot more than I�d thought I would, has a blurb on it from Jonathan Levi of the Los Angeles Times Book Review: An original � an exquisitely gentle and unsentimental tale on the evolution of love. "Tale on"? Shouldn�t that be "tale about"? Again, and grammatically this time: am I being na�ve or am I being arrogant?

I ordered some music online today. I had not bought new music in months. A few weekends ago I had some time to kill and I went into the new Everyday Music on Broadway to poke around, and there�s no other word for what happened to me than that I got spooked � by the selection, by being so out of it music-wise that I didn�t know where to start, by the confident-looking clientele reading the backs of cd cases with scholarly interest � and I left after two minutes or so, dizzy. I don�t have cable anymore and I have therefore resigned myself to being a person who this year will not be following college basketball with her customary avidity, and since I�ve started spending so much time at the bacon shack, there are weeks when my Economist goes partly unread. And I�m OK with both of these things, they do not represent a relaxation of standards and I am not beating myself up; also one of the lessons of getting older is that there�s no inherent shame in doing less. After that incident in Everyday Music I wondered if maybe I was letting music slip away the same way I was basketball, if only temporarily. I told myself, Maybe I�m just not going to keep up with music for a while, maybe I won�t find out about any new bands or buy any new cds for the indefinite future. I thought about that and I tried it on for size, carefully holding it outside the realm of the self-beat-up-able-about, and after a week or so of consideration, I thought, No, that�s insane � who do I think I am? So it�s back into the water, hooray, and I�ve found an independent store where all of their you-might-like-this recommendations based on the first cd I searched for were things I�ve made mental notes about over the past few months, so I am happy and they get my money.

Two people whose diaries I read are going offline, at least for the time being, boo-hoo. As of sometime over the weekend I have reached a new, higher plateau of gaganess about Steve, which I am hereby entering into record. Thank you. Jerry and I are in the process of recruiting our Dream Team for trivia on Wednesday night. Did anyone else think the patronizing tone of Rick Bragg�s lede in Saturday�s story about the Klansman newly convicted of murder veered awfully close to racism? Not Rick Bragg. Sridhar Pappu. Elizabeth Kolbert. Anne Appelbaum.

I got out from under, no lie, a foot-high stack of paperwork on Saturday. This is the first real step I�ve taken and not taken back towards getting my affairs in order � literally and figuratively � since I moved out of my apartment last August. Let the filing begin. But not tonight � I have cooking to do.