� Cameron Diaz, quoted in "Ladies� Might" (by Gillian Flynn, in this week�s, yes, Entertainment Weekly)

How was your weekend? Mine was more excruciating than I could possibly have anticipated, a brew of martyrdom and awkwardness and anorexia and things I know to be lies and guilt guilt guilt guilt guilt guilt guilt. I will not let anything like that be perpetrated upon me again. Period. Today I�m sad, angry, humiliated, and wanting to order a pizza and eat the entire thing without using my hands; there�s a Buster Keaton program on at the Swansea but I�m thinking that the likelier outcome features me sitting in the bathtub with my new (Herbert Mason) copy of "Gilgamesh" and a bottle of wine. (Unless anyone wants to come to Buster Keaton with me? Steve�s in the middle of a test pass and we�re going away for the holiday weekend, so he has to be a good little worker boy this week and put in some late days and I am happy to accept a raincheck for the 611 thing. RSVP. 8 pm, part of the Dennis Nyback series, I promise I won�t go off like a crazy person about the emotional shitstorm of the last few days.)

I don�t want to write much today, since I need the time to ratchet down from the internal screaming I�ve been doing since Friday afternoon, talk myself back from the edge, like. The short version is that no, I didn�t tell my father I�m moving in with Steve. With apologies to Salter, the bullshit is the vessel itself. The bullshit abides. Maybe I�ll write about it in more detail some other time. But not now.

In addition to the Mason, I bought some S. Olds, "The Tremor of Forgery," and a collection called "The Dictionary of Failed Relationships," which is not only the kind of thing I feel embarrassed to be buying but was assembled by someone for whom I feel embarrassed when I read her writing, but on the other hand it contained new fiction by Erika Krouse and Pam Houston and apparently these one-click times have made for straitened circumstances at the Elliott Bay Book Company, so all bets were off. (Krouse is working on a novel, the author note reveals!) Here�s my defense: I bought it for research. I will say no more. The subtitle is "Original Stories by Women Writers of Betrayals, Jealousy, Misdeeds, and Other Relationship Disasters from A to Z" and the gimmick is that each of the stories addresses a theme or concept, one for every letter of the alphabet. The Krouse is Zero; the story originally appeared in Ploughshares under a different name that does not start with Z, which, I know, kind of indicates the integrity level of (a) the book project and (b) me but there you go. The editor is one Meredith Broussard, whom I know from my occasional trolling of the Philadephia press. From the intro it�s clear that our Meredith believes herself to be cut from the Carrie Bradshaw cloth � how nice for her. In the introduction, she tells in cringeworthy and embarrassment-provoking detail the story of the failed relationship that made her want to write a book that was "the literary equivalent of Ben & Jerry�s ice cream � delicious anytime, but especially appropriate for times of PMS or heartbreak." She also uses the word "bonking," eew. She implies that "wanting to get married and have babies" and "fear of commitment" are opposites and in general comes across as immature, indiscreet, vindictive, and very likely making stuff up about the ex-boyfriend � I bet I wouldn�t want to know her in real life. Still, Pam Houston. And research. And in a way that�s a lot like picking at a scab, I am interested in my relationship with chick lit and chick lit lite; *why* do I chafe and feel persecuted by it, why am I embarrassed, when I say it�s shit could I please be more specific and unstinting with the citations, and if it�s shit now then what might it have looked like in the parallel universe where it is possible to imagine what it would have been like as food. Plus, frankly, if I�m ever going to try writing for any kind of a mass audience � no specific plans, but it could happen � then I am going to have to have learned what chick lit has to teach me.

I hate books though that position themselves as remedies for a certain problem or situation, PMS or heartbreak. Like that terrible demeaning cable show "Cinematherapy." We females are active participants in the homogenization of our own responses; it�s like we�re Eskimos and chick-lit crap like that is taking away all our words for snow one after the other, telling us we don�t need them � snow is snow and heartbreak is heartbreak, and isn�t that kind of certitude comforting, isn�t it nicer to have one less word to remember? This does not just take away our words. This takes away our snow. (Hmm, this kind of thinking is research too.) And what about Cameron Diaz up there at the top of the page � is she part of the solution, or part of the problem?

Also I saw "Capturing the Friedmans" and "Spellbound." I have a gripe about the latter that I�ll address here some other time, after people will have had a chance to see it, because it�s great and you will want to. I was in love with April, the droll, preternaturally world-weary barkeep�s daughter from my home state of Pennsylvania. I won my school spelling bee at the grade level three years in a row. Sixth grade I got to County and I was so shaking so hard the metal feet of my chair were rattling against the wooden stage; it wasn�t fear of missing a word but terror that in a less quantifiable way I didn�t belong there, everyone else was better than I was. I don�t remember that night, but history records that I got up to the mike, stammered, proved my hypothesis by managing to misspell "precipitation," and got out. The second year I�d seen a list of all the words from the previous year�s bee and I knew every one of them, so I was irritated and even did some halfhearted studying. At the event, however, I got out on "abscess," which improbably but truly I had never encountered in my long productive acquaintance with the English language. I had resolved not to beat myself up like the previous year and I thought I�d done OK, getting to a late round and then missing on the one word in the whole bee I couldn�t have spelled, but this was when we lived in a rural and inbred part of the Poconos and the next day at school my classmates were stunned to hear of the class brain�s poor showing, digusted by my ignorance. "Ain�t you never had an abscessed tooth?" several people asked me in disbelief. The third year I was exasperated, enough-is-enough, and I decided to win and I did, first correcting the runner-up�s "pharaoh" and then batting cleanup with "guttural." Sadly, the school forgot to submit my paperwork to Regionals, so my saga ended there.

Oh! I was about to post this and then I remembered: the interview on Friday went well (she said cautiously, holding herself in abeyance between optimism and pessimism). There was a mockup of the front page of a newspaper that constituted a copy editing test and then a writing test where from source material provided I had to compile an AP-style article and format it, according to specs, for a web site. One hour for both of these, and Scully said I wouldn�t have time to finish the writing part but I did, exceeding the minimum requirements by three paragraphs and two quotes. Then an hour�s interview, some of it hardball and some of it softball, with Scully and a guy named Ryan. We had all been English Lit majors and we shared a ho-ho about that, sheepish-but-not-really-sheepish-at-all because English Lit majors like us don�t regret anything: that part I liked, it was as if we all knew the same code or belonged to the same guild. Yes, emphasis on "belonged." I feel good � the people I�ve briefed, I told that if I don�t get the job, it will not be for having been judged wanting, it will rather be for not quite the right kind of having. And even I can�t beat myself up for that.