With regard to the temp gig, one of Mrs. R.�s first questions was how old the BB is, because the way I wrote about her yesterday I made her sound like a helpless clinging old lady. And since Mrs. R. is a good reader and if this diary had such a thing as a target aud she would be one of its exemplars, I think I should back up and clarify. The BB, I am sure, is not yet 50. If I had to guess I�d say 46, 47, right in there. She is not even sort of a helpless old lady � in actuality, she�s a sassy broad. After my first day here I described her to Steve as how I�d picture Missy Elliott�s mom. Her fetish for administrative servility is incongruous with other elements of her personality that I like and that put her overall among my favorites of people I�ve temped for, and I suspect that she hasn�t always had it, that similarly to the way spending time in the sun makes you tan, it has evolved in large part due to the environment in which she has built her career. Among other factors, this organization simply attracts people at the entry level who have minimal skills and exactly enough smarts to realize that what they have going for them is, well, Hilaryism � the ability to make those around them feel like hotter shit than they objectively are. I bet if the BB worked in a different industry, say software, she wouldn�t be like this � not that I�m defending her, you understand; just because there are Hilarys in our midst does not mean that we are obliged to draw them close to us and partake of their misinformed adoration � and I bet that if I knew her differently, as a neighbor or as someone who worked at a coffee shop I frequent, I�d be a big fan of hers. And yesterday as I was leaving (after half an hour of legit overtime, score), she told me in fulsome detail how well she thought I�d done that day, slaloming through the crapola surrounding the issue of the missing applications, figuring out in a hurry what calls get put through and who gets told to leave a message, writing clear and decisive e-mail, and having spiffy instincts about when to leave her alone versus when to pester. And, yeah, it�s dumb secretarial work I could do with one lobe of my brain tied behind my back, but it is nice to be recognized for having done whatever constitutes a good job, it is nice to be thanked for having risen to the task even when as far as I�m concerned it was a stretch of only centimeters. Maybe that�s just my vaunted even temperament talking, but I don�t care. The BB is OK by me.

Speaking of temperament, I�ve been meaning to write about this for a while. And by "this" I mean a disagreement that Steve and I keep having that occasionally boils over into something fighty, but that is not the point I want to make about it because to me the matter is (a) indicative of a disjunction in self-orientation or philosophy or something and (b) more interesting than that. As you may have noticed, I read a lot of books. I don�t think I watch an absurd amount of TV but I know I watch more than people always imagine someone-who-reads-a-lot-of-books does. I do the crossword. I try to swim with the popcult current or at least know what direction it�s going in. I�m also a consumer of news criticism etc., and even when I�m not on a spree of acquisition, I like to know what music I�d be buying if I were. I wear headphones at the gym and usually carry a magazine in my purse when I go out just in case I end up with a few minutes to kill. My self-diagnosis is that I am fond of facts and information, I feel like the things I know and therefore can call mine form a grid that anchors me, somehow, to the world. I know the reading thing is annoying, how if conversation flags or other stimuli recede my eyes will drift unbidden to the closest printed matter they can find and all of a sudden there�s an angry voice saying, "Do you *mind*? I was talking to you." It�s not as bad as it used to be, though, and I�m trying to work on it. But to Steve, all of the above spell depression, in particular an unwillingness to engage with myself and fearful passivity with respect to the material (as opposed to the intellectual) world and all its slings and arrows. To that accusation, to the sharper one that I�ve been like that since he�s known me, I have two responses: 1. Yeah, buddy, no shit I�m depressed, I�m so depressed I�m considering law school because my life is currently characterized by such indignities as having to go through two interviews for a Stepin Fetchit coffee-girl temp position that nevertheless pays more as an FTE gig than I�ll probably make again for years if I ever get a job within my area of training and expertise. 2. I�ve been like this since I was little, ask anyone! Now, it�s a given that Steve�s not an idiot, he is a guy who has a record of knowing what he�s talking about. So have I been depressed since I was little, as far as memory reaches? I don�t feel like I have. I feel like I�ve been the way I�ve been. But I recognize that the call isn�t mine to make � it�s Heisenberg, right? I mean, I�ve (almost?) never been what I�d call happy. As a youngster I remember watching classmates of mine running around the Parklet and wondering how they could be so carefree when life was a patent hell and the only certainty it contained is that we would fail ourselves and others � or did they in fact know this and somehow they were better compartmentalizers than I was, that is to say was this yet another ugly deficiency in me. Etc. Not to get all Plath on you and I do not want sympathy, but I was having those fabled suicidal ideations by the time I was nine, and whenever someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I was aware of lying in my reply because in my heart I knew I�d have killed myself by the time I was 25. (Don�t ask me why, that was just the upper limit I set.) I suppose it�s possible that by the DSM-IV definition of depression I have had it all my life and still have it now � Steve may be right. And here would be my automatic response to that: So? If I am a chronically depressed person, I think I am like the high-functioning smack addict of the depressive, I perceive myself to be very seldom and only marginally incapacitated by my maybe-condition. I feed and look after myself, I come off fine in job interviews, I buy and wear slutty shirts, I converse with strangers at parties � so what is the problem? I typed and then deleted a final item in that series, "I have sufficient will to live that I keep reading magazines and seeking out new music," because it occurred to me that it did not belong. This is the part that�s really hard for me to conceptualize, Steve�s suggestion that my preference for immersing myself in facts and media is not a personality quirk but a symptom, the possibility that the-way-I-am I�ve always been is nothing more than a coping behavior that took root and then grew like a cancer. Wait � who am I here? Do you see what I mean? To me that aspect of myself is self-challenging, appetitive, a constituent element of the good life blah blah blah, it is the way I make a place for myself in the world and establish to my satisfaction that the world is also willing to make a place for me. The idea that unconsciously it instead equals my wanting to escape from the world is a much more cumbersome idea than that of a Prozac prescription. (Which, for the record, will never happen. I tried it once and I am not a psychopharmacological kind of girl.) And there *is* a problem, because whatever I�ve got or however I am, it�s not transparent because Steve is noticing it in the first place. What do I mean when I say "it"? Not sure.

Or is Steve wrong and there�s no causality between depression and my strain of manic gnosophilia? What would it mean if it were only the causality he was wrong about? Or is this an objects-in-mirror-may-be-closer-than-they-appear case of him and I being alien to each other�s experience and failing to understand, in this instance, what makes each other tick? Again, I don�t get to make these calls.

I want coffee. I�m going to walk over to Tully�s and get some.

2:42 pm: The BB�s in a meeting so I am slacking and surfing, I�m reading back issues of the NYT magazine, and in a Cathy Horyn piece on Mark Ruffalo that ran in the 2003 Movies issue, there�s this: "In the Cut" deals with female grief and loneliness � specifically, that of a smart, emotionally walled-off writing teacher whose obsession with language serves as a rendering of her engulfed spirit; she's so aware of the shape of her consciousness that she could diagram it like a sentence. Engulfed spirit. Is this something like what Steve is talking about? Steve, is this something like what you are talking about?