1. I had applied for a job at Steve�s place of employment � which in case you do not know this is sufficiently huge so that he and I could both work there for years and never cross paths � for which I was perfectly qualified, it was some kind of editorial thing also involving intranet UIs. Weeks went by and I heard nothing and then one day in my Inbox was a scorching rejection notice from a guy who worked in Steve�s group and who knew him. He wrote that I ought to be ashamed of myself for thinking that I could ever be worthy of a job like the posted one and for wasting HR�s time making them read my crap-ass joke of a resume and also that he was dumbstruck that someone as smart and all-around great as Steve had taken up with a no-count retard like me, he did not know whether to pity Steve or admire his newly revealed spirit of charity.

2. I had no money so I had to rent quarters in the cheapest place I could find, which was a cold and dark, slimy-walled basement room in the house that Rebecca owned. There was no bathroom indoors so I had to use the open-air commode and shower outside, just off her garden (though I was barred from the garden, as access would have cost me extra per month). One night I was making the pumpkin risotto from the NYT recipe last week when I realized I�d misplaced the prepared pumpkin. Where could the pumpkin be? Who loses pumpkin? I looked all over my small-room-and-kitchenette for it, not a lot of ground to cover, and finally I got depressed and gave up and went to bed hungry. The next morning I opened the bathroom gate to wash my face and brush my teeth, and there sitting on a plate was the pumpkin, apparently I had been so spacey the night before that I�d taken it out there with me and not even realized it. Now the bathroom was also cruddy and run-down � and as I was walking back to the house with the plate, I wondered if I could rationalize using it for the risotto after all, because it had been expensive and I didn�t know if I could afford a new pumpkin. I was trying to psych myself up: Oh, come on, the bathroom�s not *that* disgusting! There aren�t *that* many flies! It didn�t get that cold last night, so the pumpkin�s probably barely rotten! Then I realized, My god, my life has come to this.

3. I was having brunch with my sister at a nasty little restaurant in Portland � this continues the poor sanitation theme I guess � that my second cousins favor. She had told me on the phone that she had amazing news for me, she�d done me the biggest favor, I would not believe what a lucky girl I was about to be. The details she was saving for when we met. So I showed up and she was bursting with the annunciation that she�d met a really rich guy who was looking for a personal assistant, and she�d cajoled him into agreeing to hire me, at a white-hot eight bucks an hour. It�s such an opportunity! Mary crowed. You could be making ten an hour within a year, and maybe in a few years if he really likes you he�ll take you on full-time with benefits! Her beneficent new pal would be joining us later to hash out the details of my servitude. She seemed genuinely excited for me so I felt bad about my seething resentment but of course I was seethingly resentful all the same and hating myself for that as well. She went on and on about this guy, how terrifically powerful he was and how well-regarded for one as young as he was, so educated and charming and a repository of savoir faire and by the way so hot, yet for all those superficial trappings such a good person for having been willing to take a chance on someone like me. She bubbled, I seethed, and then she swiveled abruptly towards the door. "Here he is," she said in that deferential Richie-Rich-cult-object tone of voice I was talking about in last Friday�s entry. I turned to look and meet my fate and� it was Terry.

Oh my god, Monday morning breakfast was so bleak. That was how my week started. And here is a question: what do we mean when we tell other people our dreams? Specifically, what do we expect them to do, what action to take? The question was Steve�s. I don�t think I am expecting anything at all � I like mulling over my dreams and recording them, trying to fit words to something that is often so much hazier than words, and I love to hear about other people�s dreams too. But am I being disingenuous?

And this was all after a deep-thinky weekend during which I began to have deep second thoughts about the Latin-teacher plan. The bottom line is that teaching does not pay well, I�d be paying back student loans at a rather advanced age which means another kind of extra per month, and call me bourgeois if you must but I would really like to own property someday. I do not know if that goal is compatible with amassing student loans and then going into teaching, not without making my standard of living pretty goddamn Soviet. And I don�t think I�m willing to do that. Also Steve, who has been scaring me all along with anecdotal evidence that I should not expect to find kindred intellectual spirits sitting around the teachers� lounge � he taught for a little while and met some smart and interesting people but also a great many one-track knuckleheads � had late last week forwarded me an e-mail exchange he had with some of his friends, it was inconsequential but snarky and silly and succinct and correctly punctuated and everyone had an excellent sense of word choice, and for a moment I was so jealous I couldn�t see. There�s a sense in which that�s all I want in a job, the opportunity to send and receive e-mail like that and work with people like them, and is that so wrong? I don�t want to feel so alienated, I don�t want to be the big-words-spouting mascot like I was, for instance, to Suzanne and to the ladies at Gastro. I don�t want the presence of me always to have to be accounted for, an implicit anomaly. I hate how I have to keep saying, at parties full of uniformly blond chicks who drive late-model Jettas, that I worked with one of the guests several years ago and we have kept in touch, saying it reassuringly as though I am conveying the simple explanation for all this. I want not to have to explain myself. I want self-deprecation not to have to be factory standard. I want to have people to talk to over the lunch table or over the cubicle wall. That is what I want. As for a positive impact on the youth of America, I can cover that base in any one of dozens of ways � I can tutor, I can mentor, I can set up that once-a-week program I was thinking about (did I ever mention it here?) and allow the youth of America into my home so I can teach them about the middle voice and stuff, maybe hit �em in junior high so I wouldn�t be competing with the Princeton Review and that lot.

But then again, when I am visited by such revisionary thoughts as these, I never know whether I believe them or I�m being hyperrational and defeatist or too selfish or maybe a combination of all of them.

So the option involving paralegal certification. Steve is a practical realist and believes that no effort to better oneself is wasted, so he thinks that this is not such a bad idea. (I would require a lot more time, on the other hand, before I could consider it unself-loathingly.) Or I could temp days when they�d let me and evenings work my way through the UW Extension catalog, taking � my life has come to this � programming and UI design and program management, I don�t know. Things you have to roll your eyes about when someone asks you what you�ve been up to and this is the answer you�ve got, these are the words you will be saying. I took one of these courses once and if it was representative I don�t put a lot of stock in their quality, but the thing is you get a certificate at the end, and if the growing consensus among my friends and acquaintances on the cover-letters-are-a-waste-of-time issue is to be trusted, then something like certification is all employers are really looking for. Years ago I took another certification course and slept through the two days out of five that I bothered to show up, and although it was ostensibly one of those career-development junkets that my manager wanted me to attend, I was never called upon to display any of the skills I was supposed to have learned there. (I did feel guilty and worked my way through the lectures and exercises over the next several weeks, so I could have displayed them, too.) The thing is that there are all sorts of aspects of my life that are necessarily held in abeyance until I get a job, "job" here defined as a forty-per gig with benefits. Like I want to do something extra-diaratical here on the spacenet, but what if I started something and I liked it and it was going well then the gotten job didn�t permit me to continue with it? What if I didn�t even have internet access? People tell you that sometimes you just have to jump in with both feet, but I have always been the kind of girl who needs to know first how deep the water is, how cold. One would also like to second her co-habitant�s enthusiasm for wanting to move out of the bacon shack soon-ish and into a place that�s roomy enough so that maybe she could even have a desk to work at and from which to maintain such projects as that hypothetical internet one; however, she is in no position to do that as long as whatever paychecks she�s getting are signed by a temp agency. It turns out that there are practical, realistic advantages after all to taking that first dumb secretarial job I can get, perhaps treating it like one of those cross-country ski huts: get out of my wet clothes, eat some food and go to sleep and be ready after that recuperation to redistribute the weight in my pack and hit the trail again. I�m not quite ready to say I should not have quit Gastro and gone on vacation � remember, I was two weeks away from health insurance � but I�m close. And Mrs. Roboto, I have observed, has a job where her brain has long since hit the glass ceiling, and she�s matter-of-fact about it, and well-adjusted and not self-defensive, and she seems not to hate herself much at all. That could be me, right? And if it were (I believe it because I have to), it would not have to be permanent, I could do it for a while and take those certification courses or whatever else and then in x amount of time be in a position where I might actually be able to convince an HR someone at a someplace where the lunch-table conversation is pleasant that I deserve consideration of worthiness to join that number.

I think I might finally be at the point where I�m willing to change my past job titles and lie about my GPA.

(I have the radio on in the next room. Immediately after I typed that last sentence, here is what I heard from the speaker, as though someone were resignedly concurring with me: "It�s just business." Ha ha? If you are interested or if you think I�m Rick Bragg-like making stuff up, the KEXP playlist says this was "The Double Life," Rainer Maria, so there.)

I�m going to call up the temp agencies tomorrow or next week � no, send mail tomorrow and call next week � and tell them that I was high last year when I told them I wasn�t interested in anything secretarial or receptionistical, I will be happy to consider a temp-to-perm gig at whatever glass-ceilinged shithole they want to send me to. As for what I�m going to be up to in New York next month, sorry but no, I�m not going to write about it here, in fact I have nuked the last entry, but suffice it to say that I think for a long time I�ve been half-consciously waiting for something to happen, just any old something � something different. And, OK, it happened, and the same way even a DS job would provide me with some sense of certainty and a resolution to my current lack of self-definition, it�s a thing to focus on, it is an actual fact. It is something to plan for and plan around. To have a benchmark implies a before and an after; I think I�ve been wigging myself out on the absence of "after" in my life lately. Because of what my mission means far more than what it is, I�m relieved. You might expect the assignment to have induced just the opposite, but today I feel much calmer and more settled, also more in-general determined, than I have in a while. (Note: this may change.)

There�s more but I am onto page 3 so I'll quit. The consensus is also that my diary is too too wordy. So goodbye for today.