So I thought that I�d spend the morning doing actual work here � there�s a paper to edit and one to re-format, a shitload of filing, some grant proposals to send out for review. But I do not feel like it. The time they think it takes me to do something tends to be somewhere between six and ten times longer than it actually does, so I could finish the whole lot of it tomorrow morning in between sending personal e-mail and then start my slacking by one. They�re keeping me busier than usual today sending me on little save-the-day errands, and Dr. Blahblah called me into his office and asked me if I could keep his confidence from everyone else in the office and never reveal a word of a project he was working on. I assured him I was as silent as the tomb (type though I may, ha ha), although I think he underestimates the rest of the clinic staff, because it�s also supposed to be a secret that he�s interviewing at other hospitals around the country, and everyone knows about that to such an extent that they fret about him being late for the plane. He has no intention of leaving, by the way, and he�s just interviewing to make this hospital give him more money. Dr. Carpool, this morning, complimented me on an exemplary editing job I did for her last week. Thank you, Dr. Carpool! She thinks I spent two and a half days on it and really it took closer to three hours, but I burnished my legend further by doing a few dinky things for her � procuring a cv, calling a journal, helping her out with Word. There�s a combination of sophisticated discretion and smiling at-your-serviceness that people don�t know what to do with, and while they are trying to figure out the seeming discontinuity, trying to crack your code, they will give you a wide berth. The trick is to be Ingrid Bergman and Doris Day both at the same time. You wear good clothes that are a little more formal than would be expected, you stand up straight and speak well, you don�t blab about your personal life and in general keep your own counsel while also doing what you can to make sure that the office ladies don�t see you as an enemy agent. At the same time, you smile maybe a little more than you�d like, you accept and even volunteer to do the scut work, you put your well-spokenness to the service of being absolutely tremendous on the phone, and you compliment everyone: nice pants, gorgeous shoes, I love your hair. Rivers fucking part, I swear. I don�t want to brag, but I�ve got a reputation around this hospital and I know it.

Yesterday I was checking out next semester�s science offerings at the local community college. It�s cheap as hell, only $63 a credit. That is the good news. The not so good news is that there are far fewer classes offered in the evenings than I had hoped and expected, and even fewer are beginner-level. However, there are a fair number offered at 8 a.m., and what I started to think was how cool it would be if I could adjust my hours here to accommodate, say, one class a semester for a few semesters just to make sure I wasn�t insane and also to make a potential future application to the UW postbac program more credible. Also to avoid a semester�s worth of full-timing it there, which in addition to requiring the taking out of student loans costs a lot more than $63 a credit. But this job, as posted, is an 8:30 to 5 gig, and I�m afraid that if I went to the Wife of Bath now and asked her about the possibility of going, I don�t know, 10:30 to 7, she would not only shoot the request down but torch my application to go permanent. The plan I have evolved, in concert with that shady character Steve, is first of all not to do anything until (and by this point I sure hope this is not an unreasonable assumption) I�m permanent. Then it gets a lot more Ingrid than Doris, as I continue my program of winning everyone over with my monster overqualification for the job, maybe generously take over a database or two and re-arrange some directories so that they�re even more dependent on me and the position becomes something nobody would ever do again at what they�d be paying me. Then I�d make discreet inquiries of the doctors and the nurses and the office ladies whose shoes I am on record as admiring, asking them if the place would fall apart if I were there doing the heavy lifting to which they have become accustomed � I mean, I�ll have told them that it�s heavy lifting; I reserve the right to be a mercenary on my own behalf � on a slightly shifted schedule, this is nutty but I�m thinking of taking a class. Oh no, they will say. Here it was Steve�s evil-genius suggestion to make it sound like taking a class is a career necessity, to get all apologetic about working with doctors and lab scientists all day long and me with just a silly old liberal arts degree. Saying: I would just be so much more comfortable working on these articles, and golly gosh I know I could do an even better job, if only I had some serious college-level biology and chemistry under my belt. Thinking: Suckers. Then and only then would I present the flextime proposal to the Wife of Bath, and if she didn�t like it, I�d go back to my suckers on the vine and get apologetic again, Well it looks like I might have to quit. And so on. And what�s the worst possible case scenario? It�s that I would have to quit a low-paying administrative job in the Colons�R�Us department of a hospital, for god�s sake, to which bus service is laughable and I won�t even have a swank office come July. Big deal. And then I�d go back to temping through the agency where I Wonderlick all the competition and the temp pimp would, again no brag, salivate at the opportunity to send me out again, and from there I�d figure out the next thing. Maybe try to score another monkey job like this one, maybe go full-time to the community college for a semester, maybe look for silly-old-liberal-arts-major work that pays better than the hosp does. Who knows. None of this represents self-disgrace. So I think with respect to the current and currently evolving plan I am in the neato position of Nothing To Lose.

If the hospital hires me. Please, hospital, hire me already.

I mean, it�s a plan, right? And how much better to have one, any one � let alone one that appeals to both the Ingrid and the Doris in you � than to be twisting in the wind as I was not so very long ago, and, I'm laying down the smack here, nobody gets to tell me any different. It�s not pathetic to want to reinvent yourself or at least to be the architect of a big say-my-name-bitch change to the unsatisfying elements of your life � it�s cool. It�s badass. And wanting to do it? That�s how you know you�re alive.

If you�re in Seattle, you are hereby invited to join me and my as yet indeterminately configured crew at Linda�s tomorrow night around 9:30. I�m not going to say why because I don�t want people to feel obliged to glom up the guestbook with exclamation-pointed platitudes, but if you show up you�ll figure it out.

I saw "Rivers and Tides" last night. Oh, and speaking of intellectual wankers, good god was the NYT Writers on Writing column a howler yesterday. I'm not even going to link to it because I don't want to encourage this asshole in any way. Here is detective novelist Jonathan Kellerman's estimation of his own talents: I created a gay homicide detective because I wanted to avoid clich�s, and a gay officer was a revolutionary concept. But Milo Sturgis's homosexuality would not be glossed over. Being an outsider in a paramilitary organization that one Los Angeles police detective had described to me as "devoted to destroying the individual" would provide great dramatic tension. Milo was created out of whole cloth, as are all the characters in my novels. And also of his smug NPR pseudo-iconoclasm: Professional ethics forced me to imagine, and that made me a better writer. The reading public has been very kind to me. I'm thrilled but puzzled because my tastes are not commercial: movies I admire usually bomb, the music I listen to rarely makes the charts. I don't have anything to add to this, I just thought you, like me, might enjoy the opportunity for pure uncomplicated hooting derision.

Goodbye for today. (Mmm, gin.)