In other dietary news, yesterday afternoon I was getting water from the cooler in the conference room and I saw a plate of brownies on the table. I picked one up and broke off about a third of it and took a bite as I was walking back to my lair. My brain said This is from a mix and my hand had thrown the rest of it into the garbage can before my butt alit on my desk chair. I congratulated myself for my discipline simultaneously as I was taken aback by the automatic nature of my actions � it felt as though my conscious mind had been left out of the decision-making process, as if I�d executed a computer program. This week for lunches I have had a tomato salad with cucumbers and peppers and red onions and feta and oregano. The only things I still need to get for the d.p. are fennel, yellow onions (I forgot them yesterday), more cucumbers (they were past their prime at the fruit stand), twine (to tie up the pork loin), orzo (argh!), booze, and a clue about an appetizer. I found black sesame oil at the Red Apple, $4.69 for 12 ounces. Rebecca is doing this thing where for a month you keep track of every cent you spend, itemizing grocery lists and documenting such expenditures as mid-morning coffee or a movie rental, and then at then end of it you make your reckoning and with respect to every item you must ask yourself, "Was that worth the money I spent on it?" If yes, you are allowed to have it or do it again next month. If no, it is something to be stricken from your budget permanently and it may also suggest a whole category of things that you would be better doing without. Presumably one repeats the process from time to time, as a fiscal spring cleaning. In principle I see the value of such an exercise, though in actuality I recoil from it as from the knock of the Jehovah�s Witnesses at my front door. First of all, this "better," this lunge for superiority that underlies the endeavor. Superior to whom? And is that my goal in life? Or/and are we talking about a better version of myself, and in that case doesn�t it seem like a cop-out to graft some external and finite standard of measurement onto the more slippery situational lunging and re-lunging that constitutes the process by which we make ourselves into human beings we can live with? Or am I rationalizing? And what about when I go out to a bar and spend a mint on drinks, but I am with my friends and we are talking and having our way with the jukebox and having a time I will remember, a time I will always have been glad to have paid for, to have made mine. (Future perfect tense and perfect infinitive in the same sentence. I am a GOD.) And what if I pay money for a ticket to see what turns out to be a crap band at Graceland one night, am I to curtail my show-going? That sounds extreme but if not, since the whole moneytracker project is about developing a framework and not cutting yourself slack, how do you cut yourself slack without cutting yourself off? There are ways in which I want to live my life in Yes and No modes and making canny tradeoffs between them � Super Nutrition Girl watching the carbohydrates weekdays from nine to five, a little more wiggle room in the evenings for things like chips and salsa and beer and of course bacon once a week � and other ways in which I feel like the effort would drive me to despair and kill me, sap me of the impulse to why-the-hell-not spontaneity that has given me so many of the things for which I will always be grateful to have done. Or maybe that�s just me, a/k/a the person who can�t go on a diet because before she knows it she�ll be eating sprouts out of a Baggie and calling it lunch, calculating the cumulative fat grams per year of the cream she puts in my coffee and deciding to drink it black from now on. To the extent to which Rebecca�s project is within the realm of consideration for me, I have a viscerally hostile reaction to it as if what it would demand of me is a spiritual and aesthetic fast in which, likewise under the thumb of the other kind of diet, I would gradually atrophy and shrink into listlessness. To me, the project seems sinister, joyless and suggestive of � hence perhaps likely also to propagate � an antagonistic and suspicious orientation to one�s own external (sensual?) life. I don�t want to do it. I want to live a full-fat life. Or am I rationalizing? The fact is that I a certain percentage of cds I buy turn out to be duds, that I read so fast that even buying paperbacks is not economical on a cost-per-hour basis, that it�s not cheap to put on a dinner party for seven. What is the tradeoff between budget and gratification? Do I earn the right to wiggle room on that count if I believe that my gratification, on the why-the-hell-not program, burns more brightly if not cleaner than the quality-controlled kind that is the product of the moneytracker�s do loop? I don�t know. I love giving dinner parties. The process makes me happy from the making of the lists through the serving of dessert, it makes me feel both fully and more like myself than practical external considerations allow me to be from minute to minute in my daily life. It is a wonderful feeling to serve my friends tasty food that I have prepared especially for them. I cannot quantify this without becoming a different person from the one who wants to cook.

I don�t think I�m rationalizing. Do you think I�m rationalizing? This is not the same thing as something that Vanessa and I were talking about last night, which is the commitment to living below one�s means � I want to make clear that it�s possible, I believe it is possible, to live below your means without excising the joy. I also want to stress my own commitment, in writing about me vs. moneytracker, to the same kind of cultural relativism that will find me in Turkey in khakis. I am not saying that the program is morally bad � I must assume that for some people it is exactly the approach to life management that they need to thrive or to comport themselves with confidence. In that context it�s interesting to feel the level of revulsion I have for it: we human animals are all such different creatures.

Speaking of different creatures, last Friday night I chanced to visit Art as he was engaged in a game of Ultimate Frisbee, which he plays on a team that belongs to a league. The ethos of supportiveness was so oppressive that it made me want to go kick dogs � team members who were on the sidelines waiting to sub in were constantly, and I mean constantly, clapping and calling out encouragement ad absurdum: "Awesome team play, Wanda! Way to see the field, Clarence! Super effort, Hildy!" (Names have been changed to protect the ridiculous.) Every step merited a shouted response, with the sidelined players in seeming competition with each other for the game�s spirit award, and even when someone made a move that was indubitably boneheaded, the peanut gallery would chime in with something like, "Way to find out your limits, Josephine, fantastic job!" And, Art said, at the conclusion of every game team members stand in a circle, join hands, and make up a song together about some aspect of the day�s play. Understatement of the week: Ultimate Frisbee is not the game for me. It�s funny, for some time Art has been trying to recruit me for his team � "because you can run fast," he says � and I have resisted not only because of, duh, the team-sportiness but also because at the hippy pseudo-high school where I took courses towards a diploma, I once signed up for U.F. for gym credit. The class was taught by Bill, a good old boy who chewed tobacco, a former wrestling star much beloved by all my school�s academically recalcitrant steroid cases, so despite the presence of me and a few of my fellow alterna-nerds, the playing field was dominated by these huge scary guys in tight jeans who�d been held back twice, who took off their shirts for outdoor play in forty-degree weather and who would rush, mullets flying, to tackle us easy targets and bulldoze us into the stone walls that surrounded the field. We rubbed our bruises and complained to Bill and he said we were weak and needed to play more aggressively. We got bruised some more and finally mounted a more organized protest and about halfway through the semester renegotiated the gym contract so that during class time we would jog around the playfield and watch the boys beat up only on each other. "First you say it�s too competitive and then you say it�s too supportive," Art pointed out, "it�s like with Ultimate there�s no room at all for you to be satisfied." Maybe so, Art. Sorry.

Karen sent around one of those internet surveys that is supposed to calculate until what age you will live. I don�t smoke and I don�t do manual labor � the survey was not scientific � and it told me 89. Then, along the same lines, Chris sent around "How Dodgy Are You?" and I learned that under British laws my life of petty and not-so-petty transgressions could have earned me as much as 103 years in jail and �9500 in fines. Note: I have never keyed a car. I also learned that my sister lives in a town where there is an ordinance on the books prohibiting men from becoming aroused in public.

Steve�s dodginess quotient is 13 years and �7000. He says he�ll catch up with me by Christmas. Woof!