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

I�m not implying, especially after how I opened my last entry, that this Means Something, but it�s a fact and I report it: at the party on Saturday night, I was the only female not to be asked if I wanted to hold the resident baby. Another one, emphasis again on "report" and not "boo-hoo": it was the first party I can remember attending at which I received not a single compliment from another female � I mean, what else I am not implying is that I�m the very and enviable picture of vibrant glamour, it�s just what we gals do at parties like the equivalent of guys who haven�t seen each other in a while slapping each other on the backs, You look beautiful, Jennifer; Alice, I love your hair this way. These things I said were true but they were also social ritual, the shorthand that I have previously discussed in this space for you are a member of my group and a potential ally, and I hope you will think of me that way too, as a possible friend rather than someone who isn�t your enemy yet. You recognize the effort, you show that you can read the signs. The whole party, I guess, was an experience in my signs not being read and my not being able to read the signs of the socially dominant group � I was invited as Steve�s date, and his friends were the only people I talked to, I tried and was not able to break through to many of those who had been invited as themselves � and I am not complaining, but it�s a fact and I report it. I should also disclose that I�m going to be careful with everything I say about the party and its denizens because if anyone I know is going to start reading my diary, it will be someone who was in attendance there. Not that I have complaints, you understand, I just have to make extra-double-deluxe sure that nothing I say could be interpreted that way. I had not been to a party in ages, not even that Amazon warehouse event where I wore the rock-star coat, where I felt so de facto out of place and so socially adrift and superfluous. I felt like I�d been dropped down into a Deborah Eisenberg short story already in progress � no, better, I felt like Patty from "A Cautionary Tale" or Charlotte from "Flotsam" catapulted suddenly into "The Robbery." I did not have the tools. But I was wearing a dress keyed precisely to the party�s theme and I was as charming and party-positive as I ever am � this is also how females show solidarity, it�s like putting on a common uniform � and I might as well have been fumbling and clueless, myself an ugly unheld baby, and I could not comprehend what the tools might be. There were beer and wine and frozen drinks and baby carrots. The theme d�cor was stunningly coherent, and the hostess, an artist, had put a great deal of effort into it. The baby was a pretty, confident girl with delicate eyebrows who, for the record, I might indeed have liked to make the acquaintance of. The host told me that my hair looked professionally styled. The view from the patio made us all feel posh and cosmopolitan. The music was good. What was a bummer was that at the same time as it was utterly not my scene � and that�s OK, I am not so petulant as to demand that my surroundings conform themselves to me � it was Steve�s scene in spades, and it was a slightly jarring reminder of what it means to be going out with this crowd�s flirt dessert of choice, because he was mobbed, everyone wanted to talk to him, to catch up, to sit next to him for a while and bask in the reflection from his social mojo. One woman in particular, with thin blond hair and the thick chiseled legs of a hurdler, wouldn�t take her eyes off him. When he got up to get another drink or talk to someone across the room, her eyes would follow him in a hungry way and also, weirdly, in an adoring and parental one, and whenever he�d laugh her head would swivel in that direction as if it was a physiological reflex. (When he introduced her to me, she did not say hello or make eye contact, she sort of flickered her eyes sideways while smiling and nodding. Again, in this diary entry I merely make my report.) There was a lot of subtext like that going on, I am not mentioning some of the other more soap-operatic subtext, and gradually it made me both grumpy and paranoid. I was glad that the cocktails began to circulate only after I�d been there a few hours, because if I�d started in on them as the accompaniment to the first twinges of lonely morose what-am-I-doing-here, I might not have been so pleasant and patient � really, I was, I swear: I am a trooper � by leave-takings time.

It wasn�t bad. In sum, for instance � for me � that Amazon party was worse. But I am going to feel a lot less guilty the next time I ask Steve to come as my date to somewhere that�s much more mine than his. The nice part was that I got to talk to Chris a lot, and it turns out I was right when the first time I met him I suspected that he and I might get along especially well, and when I was giving him a ride to the party he referred to some long-past event as if I�d recall it too and I corrected him, pointing out that I have only been and-a-date on the scene for a few months, and Chris said that he tended to forget this, that I fit in so well and so easily already that it seemed I�d been around for ages. And speaking of Chris: no, I didn�t run in the race. I had planned to, he had been instrumental on Saturday afternoon in helping me bank my ridiculous sense of foreboding, but when I dropped him off after the party we apparently had a little communication breakdown, and whereas I thought he would call me in the morning if he woke up and was feeling up to racing, his impression was that we�d meet at Vivace at seven if we both did. So I set the alarm for six and then when a call was not forthcoming by seven I went back to sleep. But fearless Chris was at the same time braving a hangover and getting on a 43 bus to he didn�t know where, a turn of events that happened to have been ideal, because on the bus he struck up a conversation with five (five!) cute girls in Spandex and running shoes who were, he surmised, on their way to the same place that he was, and they took him under their wing and ran the first part of the course with him and got his e-mail address so they can keep in touch and invited him to join them for another race in a few weeks� time. Chris � with ladies! It is wonderful. It was the best good deed I have ever done by sleeping in and then eating bacon.

I saw the X-Men movie yesterday plus one I will review, and I�m probably going to the Matrix one some night this week. I went to Elliott Bay Books on Saturday to get the Book Club book (and "The Red Queen," which I�ve been wanting to read), and in the Used section I found a copy of "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," and since I�m not optimistic that I�ll get mine back from whomever Adam loaned it to a few years ago, I bought it. I mean, I picked it up and I put it with the armload of books I already had, and almost before it was tucked inside my elbow I was thinking of it not as mine but as Rich�s � because he and I talked about it when last we met, and I know he�ll love it, and whenever I feel that strongly that a person and a book are going to be a love connection, I like to facilitate the hookup myself. That may be my favorite category of good-deeding of all. And what I began to realize is that the hypothetical ideal reader I was going on about a few entries ago? It�s Rich, he's Chabona-fide. And of course because of Rich�s sideline experience of me + writing, he will never in a million years read anything I write that contains even trace elements of personal content, he wouldn�t if I asked him to, not that I would. And I also realized that this is fine with me, genuinely and not passive-aggressively fine. In a way, it even settles my heart, it is an instantiation of what I believe in. I�m a tree that falls in the forest with no one within miles to hear it, and did it make a noise? That is irrelevant. The point is, it fell.

I need to write that review plus work on something else. More tomorrow, and maybe more about the something else because it�s a something I need to think about. Oh, and over the weekend, on Amar�s well-considered recommendation, I too dug out "Hello Nasty" and have been listening to it in my car, and damn if he isn�t right, it has aged like a fine fine wine. Thanks, Amar. I am not so much the Diaryland trendsetter and seed-planter myself, but really � genuinely � I�m happy to have, genuinely, name-dropped Deborah Eisenberg in this entry, so that now one more person knows who she is. You don�t have to go read her. I don�t have to have made a noise.