Of course I fried up the rest of the chicken. I have priorities, you know. The issue seems to be that the heating elements on my stove get much hotter than Mark Bittman�s do, so what for him is Medium-high is medium for me, and his High is my ceiling-scorching conflagration. This is good to know. I only got so far with the scrubdown last night partly because it�s worse than I�d thought it was � Rebecca is advocating Borax, and maybe I�ll try that tonight � and partly because when I got home last night there was a power line down, and I had to sit around in the growing darkness and wait for the Seattle City Light guys to come hook us back up, and in the meantime I couldn�t tell whether I was making progress or just smearing things around. And naturally I got done none of what I�d intended to � did not pay bills, did not purge red dresser � so tonight after the haircut I�m headed straight home to toil. Right now I�m slacking. I should be working on that presentation, but I am not.

This morning Steve said something about having decided to think of me as 26, rather than as my real age, and when I said um why, he said that that�s how old he thinks I look. Friends, I think I have made the right decision as to whom to move in with. And get this, I was naked at the time. Regarding which, in the interest of full disclosure, I should note that during my body scrub on Monday, I was called out for not moisturizing enough. Of all things! This shocked me. The fiftyish Korean woman who was wielding the mitts paused in her endeavor to look down sternly at me and offer a reprimand, and she made me promise that next time I came back I would present less of a task for her. So I bought a bottle of fancy stuff with sesame oil at Fred Meyer last night when I was also getting sponges for the chicken-fire project, and we�ll see how that goes. As for the hair, I think what we�re going to start shooting for is something slightly different, the same in front but with an emphasis on straighter and potentially longer, less what the stylists call textured. I had this haircut before, though with Linda�s-waitress streaks in it, in the spring of, what would this have been, 1999?, right after Adam and I broke up, and this I know because I am looking at a photograph of myself that my sister took when she came to visit me then and we took the fast ferry to Victoria. It�s another one like the Emperor picture where the sharpest focus is on my fingers, which in this case are both wrapped around a Styrofoam coffee cup in the dead center of the frame. I�m sitting at a round table at an outdoor caf�, in the foreground my sister�s splayed copy of "Accidental Empires" and in the background a city bus and a minivan driving down the street. I�m looking off to the side, my right, the same direction in which the vehicles are traveling, and the bus�s headlights line are at the same angle and distance from each other as my eyes. Khakis, red t-shirt and underneath it the great lost continent of the C cup, the gray zippered jacked Vanessa always borrows when she comes over and it�s too cold (Vanessa, by the way, you will never have to worry about that again; that is Steve�s promise to both of us). I like the picture the same way I like the Emperor one, not even because it�s me. I like the way the person seems to be looking at something and sizing it up, half challenging it and half showing, by some fundamental self-containedness, that she could not care less. Her repose contrasts with the motion of the bus and the car behind her, in fact implies a mean of stillness between the moving traffic and the abandoned book. I like the look on her face, which manages to be both louche and distant, and I like her lipstick. It�s a good picture and a good haircut.

Vanessa sent me a link to a Japanese site that makes headgear-and-collar "disguise" sets for cats. Chicken, frog, leopard, etc. It�s funny stuff and the cats look so traumatized and the Engrish is great � If a family and a cat become fortunate, you will take a commemorative photo! Therefore, please photo your cat lovelily with much trouble � but do I put that sort of thing, a link like that, in my diary? I mean, I don�t know � is that what I do, is that what I�m doing here? Thinking more the last few weeks about the blog vs. diary issue, the extent to which it�s relevant: like, if I had a blogspot site and I wrote the same things and kinds of things there as here, with the same frequency, would I be entitled to call it a blog because of where it was, would that trump what it was? I want to be able to refer to things-outside, I do want space to sit and pick my mind and figure shit out but I do not want the whole enterprise to descry the world of Inside My Head, but on the other hand I do not have the constitution to keep posting throughout the day pithy nuggets of commentary around links that I have hand-selected for the delectation of my peeps. First of all, the concept of a thing called "my peeps": bwah ha ha ha ha. And what if I have a busy day and no time to hand-select? What if I�m hung over and hazy and I can�t parse the pith? I am sure that I would crack under the pressure. But are there more good blogs than good diaries, or is that just me? And even if I think so, what makes me think I could write a good one too � then again, this is back to a good one what? � and more to the point, what makes me think I should? Is there an unmet need out there? I remember sometime last year maybe a newspaper columnist in San Francisco got canned and tried to drum up a campaign to get herself re-hired because, she said, nobody else in the Bay Area was doing what she did and covering her beat, and someone pointed out that this columnist�s beat had been whatever she happened to be thinking about the day before her every deadline � this column was apparently more folksy than issues oriented � and that it was difficult to make the argument that the paper�s readers were intellectually bereft without these constant narcissistic bulletins. How it was swell for her that she�d managed for a while to have a career of that but that she had an obligation to see it for what it was, an enormously lucky break, and not as a lifelong entitlement. The implication was, live by the sword, die by the sword. This resonated with me. I write for my ideal reader, Rich in Bellingham or Lothar of the Hill People, how the fuck am I supposed to know. Is it � this just occurs to me � that the question of diary vs. blog has to do with the, I admit, wishy-washyness of I write for an ideal reader vs. slinging it like you mean it, *admitting* that you mean it? But that�s not quite right either, because so much of blogging is snark snark snark and I want to find a way to be sincere and say what I mean and have emotions and all without going over to the Dave Matthews camp and in that sense I am leery that the medium is for me, it would chew me up and spit me out as it let me indulge the full range of chickenheartedness and lack of self-rigor to which I am prone (I hate it when bloggers make entries that comprise only a cut-and-pasted excerpt from something else and an appended "Indeed"). And from which, over the past few years, this diary has been instrumental in helping to deliver me. What do I want? I want what I�ve got, I think. Then why do I keep revisiting the question?

Is this too thinky and navel-gazey, too diaryesque today? Blagh.

Tomorrow Rebecca�s having a dinner party and I am invited. Saturday Joe�s birthday � oh, and here�s the latest, the Somerset and Bridget want to meet me, they told Steve, "not so we can be friends with her or anything, just so we can talk about her." Next! Next weekend a timspartylist event on the same night as Ed Harcourt, must think and decide. I can�t lose my debit card between now and June, ha ha, 26 because I just bought will-call tickets for Vanessa and me for that night, for the Long Winters� cd release shindig at where else but the Crocodile. Get yours before they sell out, because they will. Vanessa, in response to the question I always ask: You should wear something hot to the LW show. Whoa, when's the last time i was out with just females? That totally sucks that you don't get to show off the new cute boy (Steve isn't so new anymore, is he? I still think of him as being your new, smoldering romance, though). And, even though I tend not to write about the smoldery parts, secretly so do I.