� Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, quoted in "The Literary Freud" (Daphne Merkin, NYT Magazine yesterday)

Yesterday I scrubbed mildew off some shower curtains. Later, bivalves were consumed.

As of today, I have 25 more days of work here at Gastro, that's 33 calendar days, and after today only four more Mondays. And I�m leaning towards giving just one week�s notice � they had me in for a day and a half of training when I came to replace Kathleen, and a weekend plus two and a half days is plenty of time to round up the next victim, isn�t it? I don�t even want to conduct myself as if the job and the fact of my dissing it are any kind of a big deal, since the whole situation is so low-rent that my responsibilities as its tenant are likewise reduced. Maybe they�ll give the job back to Kathleen, who quit to go RVing for a few months with her husband but has made it known that she is not satisfied with the number of hours she�s getting in her new hospital gig up in the fecal bacteria lab. (Yes.) It�s getting bad, though � that pre-workweek dread is infiltrating my weekends earlier and earlier; this weekend I got my first flash of panic early Saturday evening. I must be strong, especially because I�m already starting to imagine what the rude shock will be like of my first Monday back in Seattle after vacation, new digs no job and another round of the temp agencies and the calculatedly assured yet beseeching cover letters that I�m probably deluding myself to think anyone ever more than skims anyway. See? There I go again. I think what I have to do is accept the fact for the next month and a half or so before vacation, my life is going to be alternately (simultaneously?) both hectic and a drag. I am going to make monkey money at a job I don�t like working mostly with people who don�t treat me nice, and in my free time I am going to pack, file, lift heavy objects and drop them on my sandaled feet, sweat, clean things, drive monotonously between the same few points on a map, be moved to powerful self-resentment on account of my acquisitiveness and ditto sadness at having to put so many of my life�s acquisitions into storage, and probably eat poorly because I�ll keep forgetting to go to the store. Then I will go away for three weeks and the messy part will be over and my challenge will be figuring out how to adjust to a different kind of calmness (stasis?) and, here�s what I�m hoping, I will learn how to do it simply because I�ll have to, moving out of the bacon shack cannot happen until I am on the payroll of a corporate entity. (Except that it could. Theoretically. But I have resolved to pretend otherwise.) And then the much longer-term plan, unless that job is interesting and challenging and pays reasonably well and doesn�t fuck me w/r/t vacation time and sick days � which is to say, almost certainly � will be to decide on a course of schooling and consequent degreeing and/or credentialing that affords me a better shot at not having to settle like that for the rest of my working life or at least at being able to engineer interesting intercriteria compromises, and then to begin putting it into action. Big deal. This is all nothing to be afraid of. Steve says that as long as I�m coming up with the rent � which the landlords are raising by over ten percent since now there will be two people in the unit instead of one; is this legal? � he doesn�t care what I�m doing or not doing, which I think we both know is an exaggeration but to me indicates that he will be unlikely to harass me about why I don�t have a job yet. So that�s fine too. Maybe I should try to figure out a way to turn off this reflexive anticipatory self-schadenfreude and prepare for the possibility that things really won�t be so bad.

I was startled awake early-early this morning by something from within my own head: a sense of a blog as a gilded cage, so that if I decided to keep one on subject x, then everything outside of x that I also liked or read or thought about would have to be sublimated to the master project, and because of the obligation I would feel to x I would gradually lose touch, if only a little � but probably more like a lot, since I would also only be able to give myself to such a project if I gave all of myself � with the rest of the alphabet, and then I would be sad; it seems to me like it would necessarily all come down to choosing between feeling inadequate because the x I was doing wasn�t good enough, I wasn�t posting enough times per day or pithily enough or linking from sufficiently diverse sources or getting a respectable measure of recognition from other bloggers�, or feeling inadequate because of what the blog�s circumscription had made me back-burner. Or, knowing me, probably both. I think I�m thinking about this stuff mostly because last week at Book Club some ladies were talking about JournalCon, and, whoa, I like these ladies and I like their journals but the extent to which I have zero interest, below-negative interest in getting anywhere near anything like that, the extent to which I cannot fathom what I�d begin to get out of it, kind of blows my mind and makes me feel like I�m both doctor and corpse at the alien autopsy, knocks me out that there was ever a time last fall when I was open to the idea of signing on for a book club with people with whom I had in common pretty much only online diaries or connections to the online diarists in their lives � don�t get me wrong, I�m so glad for the friends I�ve met thereby, but holy shit was that ever a fluke. But on the other hand, I am also thinking about about the diary-blog-half-sharkalligator issue because of hypothetical Lucille and her hypothetical home page: if I had some kind of stalkers-be-damned, non-anonymous, more reality-bitey, quirkily x-centric online presence, my prose brightened and freshened for mass consumption and with all the "shit" and "fuck," etc., excised, would that make me a more attractive job candidate in general? I mean especially because a big part of what I have to sell is that I wield the English language better than whomever else has made it into the conference room, did you like how I deployed "whomever" so smooth and easy like that? I�d have recipes, links to my friends� sites and to pages about things I was interested in, pretty and cleverly captioned pictures I�d taken with the digital camera I carried everywhere with me, and of course my resume. Do employers consider it de rigueur, yet � and if not now, what�s the ETA? � that job applicants maintain a personal web page advertising their skills and voice and technology savvy? Because unless I have to, I don�t want to do that � one, there�s the stalker factor; two, as a subset of one there�s the privacy factor, I don�t want to be gratifying the Gosh, I wonder what ever happened to � of every moron I�ve ever met; and three, getting back to what I was saying in the first place about blogs, I don�t want to be living my life in the service of making myself look like what potential employers think looks good, I don�t want to be obliged to preen online at the expense of actually existing offline (the uneasy collusion that, to me, JournalCon seems to want to put a happy face on and teach to sing and dance), and I don�t want to give employers the impression that they�re entitled to my time and consideration when I�m off the clock, that they�ve bought me like a condo.

Then again, if I�m being idealistic, for god�s sake somebody tell me. I don�t want to be a whore unless I have to. But if I have to, I want to become the whoriest whore you�ve ever seen, I will smile and sing and dance like I�m in a freakin J. Lo video, and I will make you think that it is my fondest sweetest dream come true. And I guess then I will find a way to find something of myself to salvage, because I�ll have to do that too.

Incidentally, from the site linked above: In 2000, journallers gathered to discuss their craft/hobby at the first JournalCon in Pittsburgh. At the coy and self-congratulatory slash-descriptor, am the only person cringing?

I learned while I was typing this entry that a recent report, by a group at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, ranking "educational or intellectual quality of life," has Seattle Town scoring second overall and 16th in terms of newspapers. (See page 7 here.) Oh fuck no, fucking shit no, this is simply not possible. University of Whitewash is more like it � you�ve listened to me bitch and bitch about what a complacent and intellectually timid bestseller-chewing backwater this outpost is, self-validation uber alles, and the truth is, well, my standards aren�t even that high. All the real intellectuals have long since committed suicide or moved to Pittsburgh, I am sure. The second most brainy metropolitan area in the whole country? I�d laugh but I�m catatonic with disbelief. That�s it, the apocalypse starts now. The apocalypse has begun.