So this morning as Steve and I were headed to my car so that I could give him a ride to Montlake, he picked up his mail from yesterday and there was an invitation to the Somerset�s best friend and roommate�s birthday party. I had this idea to stick with the nautical theme and call her the Santa Maria or the Mary Celeste � speaking of the MC, are you still out there, Captain Briggs? � but I vaguely remember something Nils wrote a few weeks ago about how one of the reasons his diary was good, this program is morally good, was that he used people�s real names, and it has vaguely stuck with me as a benchmark for my own performance. So Bridget, her name�s Bridget. Steve pulls this hot pink envelope out of his mailbox and says Ohh, I know what this is, and he tells me about the birthday coming up, and what occurs to me, how nice!, is that in whatever sub-Todd-and-Lori way I used to feel threatened by his association with the Somerset and to a lesser extent with Bridget, I am not anymore. They can slag on me all they want and express skepticism about his chosen course of action in the girlfriend department � though, ha ha, as I type this it also occurs to me how much I�d love to be a fly on the wall for at least part of the dinner-table conversation � and I may never meet them, and that�s fine, none of it has anything to do with me. It was a good way to begin the day. Then I got to Gastro and there was an invitation from Alyssa to a barbecue in honor of Joe�s birthday, and you know I�m a big fan of Joe and I really like his party-party friends and I haven�t seen Tony in a dog�s age and I dig Alyssa, so I forwarded the details to Steve and said how much I�d like him to come, and of course, like you couldn�t see this one coming, Bridget�s party is on the same night, starting at the exact same time. And now my equanimity with respect to Bridget and the Somerset and the early promise of today have receded into resentment. Bah. I�ll go alone and I�ll wear the coconut bra this time and I�m sure there will be laffs aplenty to be had. I will be content but not satisfied.

It will be almost two years since I wore the coconut bra to that Hawaiian party with Vanessa and Fernanda, directly after the Mariners game that was the venue for my first and I hope my last blind date. Two years, man oh man. Last night while I was out with Mrs. Roboto working on today�s hangover � it was only three drinks, and I didn�t start feeling drunk until a few hours later � and we were talking about hold-the-babyism, I realized that it was a year almost exactly since I last had my tentacles on one, that hellishly comic night when I blew off the White Stripes show in favor of being a good girlfriend and getting on board for dinner and chauffeur duties with Todd�s visiting friends and their seven-month-old. And here I curse myself in equal measure for having martyred myself and making such a boneheaded choice, though I could not have imagined how truly bad it was going to be, and for not having had the motivation to post all those old Monitor entries so that I could link to that one now. Now, true, it�s one of those fiascos I referred to last time that it�s fun to tell people about and even more fun to watch their reactions to, but, whoa, at the time I was so barely handling it that I was shaking all night from the effort of not screaming or crying or pulling off to the side of the road and jumping into Lake Union. Good times. And that was only a year ago. That was also at the dawn of the Vanessa and Popeye era, so happy anniversary to you swell kids, and many more to come.

Dude! I just checked my Inbox, and, and, this: I came across your resume on Monster, and would be interested in talking to you about a position with our Client Services Group. If you are still interested in opportunities, please forward an electronic copy of your resume, or call me at your earliest convenience. Client Services?! Client Services happens to be my middle name! And I am totally interested in opportunities; why, opportunities are just about the most exciting thing I can think of! No, seriously, I should take back that snark, but at the same time, I�m way too fucking jaded to let myself see this as anything but a stranger�s unsolicited opinion that I seem at first glance not to be a loser. I�ll check it out and I�ll write the HR primate back and I think that if anything comes of this, if anything seems inceptively to be coming of anything on the job front, I�m not going to be writing about it here until � how�s this for superstitious, my fingers just froze in panic that I�d been too hopeful in typing "until" and then my right hand made a spasm-like sally for the Delete key � I have actual, take-this-hospital-and-shove-it news. Because I would feel so foolish and lousy writing about such things as talking to recruiters, going on interviews, etc. and then having to come back some days later and say "Uh, well, I still work at Gastro." There�s a difference between documentation and, well, martyrdom.

I had such a lovely time at Septieme with Mrs. R last night, I am not exaggerating when I say that I am really overjoyed to have met her. Thank you, Diaryland! And I laughed a snorty little laugh earlier today when I read her entry on that genre of self-consciously poignant a young girl comes of age� films and the comparison to "Rochelle, Rochelle." That is very rude and very funny. Also, Mrs. R, if you�re looking for company for that Gator doc, I could be in. When my father and my stepmother were married, my sister and I often found ourselves banished to our shared attic bedroom because the stairs creaked and Ellen said that the noise of us moving around on the creaky floors and stairs disturbed her sleep. We did have cable up there, though, and many times, late on hot summer nights, what we ended up watching was skateboarding competitions. This was way before the X-Games, you youngsters, this was before "extreme" was a marketing concept � the television coverage was like "Wayne�s World" on location, utterly amateur-hour in an earnest way that was also somehow magical, impervious to snark. This was also when Gator was god. The commentators were all former or wannabe skateboarders themselves who had had no training in the niceties of broadcasting, and as they watched him perform you could watch them lose the ability to speak. When Gator was on the half-pipe there was no talk of ollies and indies and kickflips � all you could hear, over and over again in tones of Spicoliesque reverence, was Oh, Gator� *Gator*� dude. It is a fond memory in the middle of that period�s general murk of the opposite of fondness. That was a long time ago.