� Morgan Bushey, a UNC senior, quoted in David Leonhardt�s "Graduates Lower Sights in Stagnant Job Market" (NYT today)

"I don�t know. It�s just *work*."

� Vanessa, last night, providing a practical counterpoint to my righteous fury

Since I read that article I have been trying to focus on the fingertips � I hate to be the one to break this to you, Kiddo, but it�s not just this year�s crop of graduates � and then a few minutes ago I realized that mine are all blistered from mowing the lawn last night so maybe this is not the best metaphor for me to be endorsing right now. And not even the whole lawn, because the p.o.s. mower conked out between side yard and back yard and when I got the whiff of something burning in there I gave up trying to re-start it. I will focus instead on the attitude. I will finish the mowing tonight.

It occurred to me yesterday that a good way to count down my tenure in the Beacon Hill house � and, not to put too fine a point on it, holy fucking Christ do I need one � would be in terms of lawn-mowings, as in how many more I have left. It should really be done every week but I can�t commit to that and the neighbors haven�t minded enough to complain, so let�s say every other week. Half of May and June, July, August. Eight. That�s nothing, that�s not even two hands! That makes me think that I can start packing any old time I want. Does anyone need a sofa?

Didn�t e-mail the temp pimps after movie and beer at Vanessa�s last night. Didn�t do anything on my evening to-do list. Went to bed with "Giovanni�s Room," which is totally begging for Kevin Williamson to adapt and direct the megaplex version, and put everything on hold for one more day or maybe two. I want to think, and often in the past I�ve had a tendency to hit the ground running with guns a-blazin�, which has led to situations in which I shot myself first, too late for the questions. And now is the time in my diary when I officially give the Wife of Bath some heartfelt props for being a stand-up broad: this morning I went up to her office to get some invoices signed and the subject of my orientation came up, did I have it on Monday or was it scheduled for next week, and even though I had not planned to bring up the matter to her for another few days or so until I figured out how to frame my major complaint and in what order to rank all the lesser ones, I answered that it was (a) a total waste of my time, (b) a poor reflection on the hospital, and (c) the most demeaning workday I have spent in my adult life. (Last night I was telling Vanessa about it and she said that the last time she got talked to like that on job she was in high school and it was Burger King. Dear Reader, I think that says it all.) I told her that at the end of the day when we were filling out evaluations, I had replied Strongly Disagree to This orientation day made me even more excited about starting work at the hospital. (And those evaluations were so bogus, by the way � there were maybe two dozen adjectives you could circle as describing what you thought of the day�s presentations, and only three were bad: boring, long, and unnecessary, and you had to hand the evaluations in at the same time as another form with your name and signature on it, so the fact that they were anonymous meant nothing.) And much to her credit, the W of B was horrified. Then I told her about how I was having serious doubts � I told her how I got in my car, called Mary on the cell phone, and cried her a river � as to whether I could work for a place that demanded I check my personal life at the front door, no phone calls no e-mail and Holly�s sister even said we should try hard not to think about it, and where the assumption was that I was a criminal to the extent that my calls and internet usage were being monitored. That is an insult to my dignity and individuality, I said, I work for the hospital but I am not the hospital�s robot. And here is where the Wife of Bath got really angry. Because guess what, what HR said about keeping track of all of us is not true � managers can request a report on someone�s calls or a list of sites visited, she said, but she would not do that unless she had some solid information that I was abusing the privilege to the detriment of my job. (I believe her.) Someone in her family currently is having some medical problems, she said, and she makes no apologies for using her work phone to call doctors and make arrangements or for having that person on her mind while she goes about her business. She told me to disregard basically everything HR had told me on this count. And here is where it gets interesting: until recently, every hospital department conducted its own new-employee orientations independently, but HR fought for a long time to have them centralized and to win that account, so to speak, and finally a few months ago they won their case and designed this day-long program full of fun and games and motivational videos and getting-to-know-you shit. HR has been telling all the other departments that it�s a huge improvement this way because everyone loves the videos, loves playing Hospital Jeopardy (I kid you not), loves meeting their fellow new employees and supporting each other as they begin their new careers, blah blah blah. HR has said that the evaluations of the new orientation are uniformly excellent, but here�s the thing � nobody has ever asked to see any data to back that up, and they�ve never offered any. I told the Wife of Bath that I would be very surprised if this were actually the case, as everyone with whom I chatted in the course of orientation day agreed that it was a demeaning waste of time and that sweet death would be like a first-class upgrade. Sure, it�s a statistical phenomenon that when people are presented with evaluations and told that they are ranking a presenter as well as a presentation, as we were, they tend to be charitable; the hypothesis is that they don�t want to get the presenter into trouble. But talk to anyone who was there with me, I said, and you will hear a different story. Hmm, she said.

(It�s unanimous!

Steve: "That�s fabulous news. I�m glad it�s more 'Great and Terrible Oz' and less 'Big Brother.' HR is truly the corporate equivalent of flipping burgers. We should just put them all on welfare so the people they hinder can get on with productive work."

Vanessa: "HR is almost always retarded, am I right? They should stick to payroll and telling me about my health insurance."

Every time someone I actually have respect for, like our Chicago correspondent (my very own slut!), starts the diarist�s self-scrutiny of What does it all mean and Why am I doing this and Good lord I�m a narcissist, I feel like I owe it to whatever I might have in common with that person, or imagine I have, to scrutinize myself likewise. Or I just don�t feel like it � like now � and I feel like a bad and insufficiently introspective person, someone with an unexamined life that is you know what. I�m going to try not to beat myself up this time. I write in the diary because I�m happier when I do than when I don�t. Because as long as I have this slack time, I want to use some of it on something creative, making something that�s mine. Also because, as I have said, I don�t know if the person I�m writing for, for whom I would engage and pace and tease and flirt, is reading this or even exists, but if he or she is then this is what I want that person to have, merely by virtue of being that ideal reader: thank you. Why do I write, why do I write like this? I don�t know and I don�t know if I want to spend the time figuring it out rather than in the writing and I don�t know that I don�t like it better this way anyway. The mystery! The hocus-pocus. With all due respect to Nils, I�m an interesting person *and* an interesting process, I�m a rara freakin avis. I haven�t had enough of my own voice after a few years more than two years of this gig. I don�t know if I ever will, and that�s not an apology. If I want to talk about me and really have it mean something, I claim the authority to do it on my own, and if other people want their stories told then my opinion is they should do the same.

I am going to a Hawaiian-themed party on Saturday night. Tiki torches, I imagine, and drinks with rum (the night before I have to get up around six and go run that 8k race, ha ha). I want to wear the orange strapless dress but, uh, it doesn�t stay up like it did a few years ago when I had a little more flab in the cab, so I bought a yard of resilient gold dress trim, like a ribbon wrapped around a core of fiber and then sewn across itself, and I am in the process of turning the orange strapless dress into the orange halter dress. Wish me luck. I think I�ll pack a skirt and the coconut bra, that timeless old standby, for in case my seamstresship sinks.

News flash: I will be spending Thanksgiving in Morgantown, West Virginia. And I could not be happier about it.