All right, that�s it until at least next Monday. The week�s wank is done.

False memory is a weird thing, isn�t it. I was thinking about this over the weekend, and mine that apparently has a greater affinity for wardrobe than soundtrack. When I was a freshman in college, my mom went to a Halloween party where you had to come dressed as a pun. There was a guy in doctor�s whites with a comb in his pocket who was a surgeon with a fine-toothed comb, and someone dressed as B.F. Skinner and carried all kinds of laboratory accoutrements, maybe there was even a cage with some mice in it, so he was pulling a habit out of a rat. She gave me the report the following day or a few days later and we were riffing on possible costume ideas for her to wear to the next year�s party (it was an annual event), things I�d wear if I ever got invited to one, and I had an inspiration: I would rent a police officer�s uniform and make a sandwich board advertising a new microwave entr�e for veal parmesan, cooks in five minutes, great homemade taste, etc., and I would be � can you guess, can you guess? � copping a quick veal. I�m a clever girl, I am. So we cackled about that and agreed it would be pretty damn funny, and she went to the party for a few years and then stopped, and some years ago she was visiting me and in the context of our reminiscing about the godawful yet desperate way I used to dress in college � we were talking about a pink slip I liked to wear under skirts that were slightly too long for it, hoping someone would get the joke, and a rhinestone pin in the shape of a heart that I would fasten to sweaters right over my bicep � the pun party came up. My mom was ticking off some of the classic costumes from the years during which she�d attended. "And then there was this great one," she said, "someone had a police uniform and on top of it a sandwich board �" I interrupted her, saying, "No, that was my idea. Remember the time you were giving me a ride to campus and we were thinking up all those ideas and I came up with copping a quick veal?" She was adamant, almost angry � no, she said, she�d definitely seen the costume at a party, she could picture the lettering on the sandwich board, how could I appropriate her memory and call her wrong, what was wrong with me? And I was hurt and bewildered because she'd been right next to me in the car and had been witness and spark for my flash of insight; how could she not remember the sweet cackly little moment we'd shared, how could the idea and its originator not, for her, be bound up together and mutually identified? She maintained that I did not come up with the idea myself and that she must have told me about it and I was the one misremembering it as something original to me, not that that was normal or anything, and for a while there things got way more tense than they should have, neither of us willing to back down until we both backed all the way off and dropped the subject for good. Over the weekend I had to get something out of my trunk, and some of the books had fallen out of the box of sellables back there, and as I was putting them back I reconsidered the status of one of them, Stacy Schiff�s biography of V�ra Nabokov, did I not after all wish to keep that in the permanent collection? Steve was driving and I took it up to the passenger seat with me to decide. As I did with the Costello, I opened it at random and fixed my eyes at a random place on the page my hands had found, and here is the sentence I read: And obscuring the truth with the literal worked well for someone as compulsively candid as V�ra. "Obscuring the truth with the literal"! Isn�t that lovely, isn�t that fine? I�m keeping the book, as if there could be any doubt. I will insist to my grave, though, that I came up with the costume idea all by myself.

The new and current plan w/r/t Turkey is to fly into Istanbul and fly out of Izmir. This presents a problem, I learned this weekend, because the religious culture is so dominant that there are separate sections of the buses for single men and single women. So the ingenious workaround we�re looking at is � can you guess? � to borrow wedding rings to wear while in Turkey and fake it. I think this is (a) disrespectful (b) hilarious and (c) unfortunately probably not such a bad idea, because in a place where the buses are segregated there might be some issue with the room-renting; women are also discouraged from traveling alone in Turkey, and wearing shorts in public is considered insulting no matter how foxy your legs are. Cultural relativism, people. And I am allowed to say it is hilarious, I wish the record to show, because Project Bands Of Tin is one I for which I can take no credit. On Saturday I read the part about the buses to Steve out of the guidebook, and what was going through my mind was All right then, I will have take another book or two to read during the trip but as it happened dude was thinking outside the box, and he had other ideas. This will be interesting, as I have never pretended I�m married before. I have decided to imagine that I�m on an episode of "I Love Lucy" and hereby resolve to ignore the air critic who points out that really it is much more like "Friends." I told Steve we�re going to have to rehearse, with him taking the part of the inquisitive Turkish hotel desk clerk, so that I can practice responding to questions with neither flush nor snicker. In that area let's just say I have a long way to go. As for the faking it, we are practicing our pained sighs and passive-aggressively martyring expressions with drama-camp gusto � we�ll look and act married in no time.

OK there is more � hiking! botany! Sat nite out with the ladies! � but I�ve just killed like an hour and a half looking at recipes for a dinner thing I�m doing later this week (no, not veal), and my reign as PowerPoint goddess and genome-modeler extraordinaire is supposed to run through Wednesday, so maybe for the first time ever at Gastro I can say I�m behind in my work. Did you know that if you Google for "biscuit recipe," most of the first fifty pages you get are for animal biscuits? Kind of gross.