What the doctor should have meant: dishery.diaryland.com

Well, put me in a fuzzy acrylic sweater with sequins on it and let me pour you some coffee, I�m your new temp secretary. I start tomorrow at nine, the office is a 20-minute walk from home, and Temp Pimp A, through whom the newspaper interview scheduled for tomorrow afternoon had been arranged, is pissed as hell. I gave her the info and she said only "Eeew," in a tone of voice to suggest well-*this*-makes a-lot-of-trouble-for-me-you-ungrateful-peon and then hung up on me. So I think we can call that one yet another burned bridge. I guess I�ll deal with it later. About the interview, not much to tell. I knew that it was going to be with the woman who needed the secretary, so I frumped up a little bit, choosing a A-line gray plaid skirt, gray cashmere cardigan � women you�re going to be working for don�t like to see you at the interview looking prettier or more put together than they are. Unless, of course, this is absolutely not the case, and I did lose heart for a few moments when in the reception area I encountered the other chick who was in for the second interview. She had fake tits, a fake tan, pancake makeup, streaky shiny dyed-blond hair in a perfect French twist, a tight navy suit with an extremely short skirt, and a degree � all right, when I sent postmortem e-mail to Steve I called it a "degree" � in Secretarial Studies. I said some things in the e-mail about how if they picked the cover girl over me then I would know that it was an issue not of competence but of type. And yes, I would have known that, but all the same I am glad that I am not in a position to have to know it; I�m actually going to type this sentence: I am glad that the new temp secretary is me.

I forgot to make a crack last time, a la Padgett Powell, about straddling the boundary between Word and word processing. Thought of it as soon as I�d posted, oh well.

I just wrote a long paragraph that started "Portland was depressing" and then got all kinds of depressing about a few topics besides Portland. I don�t know if I can write for a while. There are certain sentences that when you type them, whatever else you�d type in addition seems to matter a whole lot less.