� fortune-cookie slip that Art put in my sunglasses case before returning it, the time I left it in his car

What�s up with this? I�ll miss that Beotch. Me, soon I will have been diary-ing for two action-packed years, though I�m including in that tally the hiatus month after I got rash and hasty and deleted all the Monitor entries (have I mentioned, I did it while watching the VH-1 special on the making of Bon Jovi�s "Slippery When Wet"?) and then went offline for a while before I started this bitch up. I still haven�t made much headway restoring them. I should fill up a floppy with the Word docs, then bring it here and give myself a quota of x per day until I�m done. I have said that before. And maybe I shouldn�t pat myself on the back so hard for the lack of photos or a designed-by template at this site and ditto a Cast page, because really if I did not also want some of that kind of attention, I would have consigned the Monitor pages to rest in peace on my hard drive at home. Right? It�s a different kind of Notice me, please notice me, is all. I have had daydreams, all right, of someone in a distant land whom I will never meet finding my diary and, I guess, thinking of me as worthy of notice, gradually reading through every archived entry and picking up on the references. Realizing, with a thrill of the unexpected, that there are such references (shutup, there are) and there are also odd random strands of continuity. I would love to find something like that myself one day, and so part of the reason I do it like I do is for the benefit of this odd random half-imagined stranger, which makes the act of diary-writing, in addition to everything else, both an act of faith and a demonstration of incredible arrogance. That�s how I�m living.

Visitors� night at Vanessa�s kung fu dojo tonight. I didn�t realize until last night that visitors are expected to make their martial-arts curiosity manifest by getting out on the mat and allowing themselves to be taught a basic move or two, and now I am less looking forward and more apprehensive, though I won�t puss out and not go. I exercise alone because I the kind of thinking I do when my bod is in motion or stress and the kinds of things I think about are private � and, no, I don�t mean censored. Running, for instance, is like a little vacation to myself, and regardless of what I plan to do on my trip, the fact is that it�s good to get away. When I am the car and I am the driver, it needs to be just me and the open road and as thin a membrane as possible between these elements. Having someone else in the passenger seat totally fucks up the paradigm. That said, I also exercise alone because I fear the learning curve and the your voice is flat, your ass is flat, you don�t even know how to hold a pool cue judgment-passing and ongoing commentary of my friends. If I were to go running with someone else, even if we had a pact not to speak, the whole time I would be chewing myself up over what an incomp I surely was compared to him or her, and frankly the commentary would probably be a series of apologies from me, beating the other person to the you-suck punch, and that�s no fun. I would pay a thousand dollars right now to be able to swallow a capsule that would give me sufficient tennis ability to play with Steve or quadriceps to go riding with him, or kung fu-ition to spar with Vanessa, because they are my friends and I wouldn�t wish on them having to suffer through the ordeal of my education. I want them to be able to enjoy themselves. When I go running, nobody�s going to give me shit about my stride or my ass or the severe Bjorkish way I arrange my hair so it doesn�t flop into my eyes, and I like that. Maybe running is a vacation from other things too.

I got mail from Karen yesterday: "Dave wanted me to ask you if you wanted to get into this year's striper tournament. We could use another babe in the boat! It's 36 hours of straight fishing. May 17-19." Naturally intrigued, I wrote for more info, and here�s what she said: "I was only half serious about the tournament because it's actually not all fun. It's Friday night (starts at midnight) and you have to be totally sober, can't drink or anything. (I know � it makes it more like work than fun.) Plus you fish all night and it gets tiring. If we could drink, well, I would have REALLY invited you." Should I go? So true that fishing without drinking is like church without religion, but when am I going to get the opportunity to babe out � thank you, Karen! � in a day-and-a-half fishing tournament ever again? And as for the part about being totally sober, does that also rule out amphetamines? I have to think about this one. You can find some good deals on plane tickets these days. I also promised my sister that one day soon I would take a long weekend and visit her, into which deal she threw a side trip to NYC to hang with that captain of industry Matt P., and I�m also supposed to be saving my hypothetical vacation days and hypothetical drachmas (wait, which I�m also supposed to be spending so I can qualify for the loans) for a hypothetical week in Greece in September, but, hmm, a fishing tournament. With Karen and Dave! In Dave�s boat! This is going to be tough � I may need a slide rule.

I should stop prefacing my week-in-Greece references with adjectives like that. It�s not nice or fair. Also, I should confess that this entry contains exactly one smoke bomb. Sorry � old habits and all. Also, I was thinking about this last night and I may have given myself too much credit for integrity when I was telling about the pharma-whore gig dangled and refused: 50 grand was a lot of money, a lot, more than even some pretty smart engineers were getting, and I think that I must have felt a combination of revulsion (self-revulsion?) and suspicion, as if there had to be a catch to this. For 30 or 40, who knows, I might have been all in.

Last night? Lovely. Thanks. Now I�m extra sorry I have to miss Book Club tonight.