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

Mine is also a thong, off-white and semi-sheer with a raised pattern of velvety black roses on them. Sophisticated yet trashy, you know? The runner-up is black silk. See, I chanced upon the previous entry yesterday, since I have done pretty much nothing at Gastro since Wednesday morning, and last night when I was over at Steve�s he was online and got the idea to read German war coverage out loud � I am sorry, but SO hot � and then translate it and parse the syntax for me � I am SO lame, but ditto � and since we were on the subject of the language anyway, I pulled up the page and showed it to him too. German and underwear and the war, it is a combination that makes a person think very hard about herself and not like the things she comes up with. So is that diary, though the thought of someone not much older than I am going in for plastic surgery is a sobering one (like I need one more thing to get on my own case about for not correcting): I started to dwell on the old old subject of my diary as a tree falling in the forest, how many people have told me it�s too damn long for them to read, the Fun Clubs that are the guestbooks and real-time Diaryland social lives of several people I know, and I wondered whether maybe I want to think about revamping this beast with a fun-club layout that would be the psychic equivalent of lucky underdrawers � I like to think that it�s the words that are important (duh, of course I do) and not the roses that matter and that those words should make the only case my diary needs to, but but but, boo-hoo.

I�m a delicate flower w/r/t this general subject because I am also boo-hooing today for something I can�t much get into, except to say that on that fateful night when I first met Steve and I ascertained that no, he did not listen to Dave Matthews, yes, he ate bacon, no, he did not wear Birkenstocks, etc., maybe I should also have asked the question that I�d been threatening for months to add as an amendment to my list of weed-outs, which is, "Is your best friend a straight female?" You know, the one that would have saved me all that agony on the previous go-round. I am dealing with issues today of left-outness and seeming hypocrisy (note: I am referring to no one who reads this diary and that is a guaran-damn-tee) and potential future friend-poaching and what is a stupid, stupid, humiliating situation for a grown adult of my advanced years to have to face but one for which there is no end in sight like maybe ever. And I know that I�m overreacting and that anyone who talks trash about me behind my back isn�t anyone whose to-my-face respect I should esteem. OK. I also wrote to Vanessa about all this, asking her to calm me down, and she agrees with me and refers me back to "Love Is Not A Pie," so true, and she also shares my big all-consuming fear of being left out. So. I will have to figure out a way to get over this.

But can I tell one thing, and I mean tell it not with the self-assured grace with which I would like to comport myself � and have that comportment fucking *noted*, if you know what I mean � through these interpersonal travails? The person in question has a name that has three syllables, and every time I hear it, I could not make this up, I can�t help thinking of these lines from "Paul Revere�s Ride" but substituting the person�s name for the name of the ship.

The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison-bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

She�s not even British! My brain is some piece of paranoid work. I am dumbfounded as to what screwy synapses can have been responsible for the kiddie poetry/playa hater connection, but there you go. Let the record show this too.

German�s cool, by the way. A lot like Greek. The grammar is very different from English but nonetheless intuitive. Maybe I�ll try to pick up the rudiments, maybe that would be a thing I could spend some chunks of slacky daytime studying. (Although even as I type that I am thinking, Careful now, one baby step at a time please and be careful not to overreach because even something so minor could become provocation for terrible swift self-judgment; May Sarton would be proud, no?) It would be good for my crossword-puzzle skills. I can�t pronounce the "r" correctly though � mine comes out too Frenchified, isn�t that hilarious? Yeah, hilarious. (Thanks too by the way to my friend for the guestbook reassurance a few days ago. You are a cupcake, and we really have to schedule that dinner thing, all right?)

Here is something else I wrote to Vanessa: I'm getting a little more excited about how neatly this gig would work with classes-taking, all that time to do homework, hubba hubba. And if I could pick up two shifts (typo: "shits"; ha!) a week at a bookstore or something, that would be a little bit of pin money. I'll work Saturdays, I don't care. Then Deb came in and told me that one of the new supervisors, who sounds like she should be working for the Justice Department, has been requesting records from the garage that show what time people used their badges to drive in and drive out, because she�s got a bug up her ass about people giving themselves an extra five minutes or whatever on their time cards. Beware, Deb told me. On the one hand, I don�t have to worry, because the one perk to parking in the vandalism zone down the street is that no access card is required, I just pull into a lot. On the other hand, if the initiative for punctiliousness is not merely this supervisor�s personal crusade, I could get zapped at any time. Fortunately I have not yet submitted my own time card for last week, so today when I fill out that one and this week�s, I will cop to some lateness. And then next week I�ll try to do better about being on time. I passed the Wife of Bath a few hours ago as I was on an errand, and she said she�d received my application. Whatev. This means that my start date wouldn�t be until sometime in April hence the 90-day countdown to health insurance would begin on the first of May, so the pap smear I pine for couldn�t happen until not July but August. It sucks but what can you do. If you say that often enough, I have learned, sooner or later you will barely feel it.

More later, maybe. I have to go to Pathology now.