Also, my sister sent me a hardbound daybook featuring a cartoon character named Pascualina. Everything�s beautifully illustrated in trippy bright colors, and it�s all in Spanish. Here�s what the page for my birthday says: La envidia y la ambici�n suelen ir de la mano y llevan a las personas a nunca estar conforme con lo tienen. Vigile de cerca sus sentimientos para que extirpe a tiempo estos vicios. Too true.

Ha ha, I am just kidding, you know I don�t know Spanish.

I thought I�d be writing a lot today, but honestly the sense of relief I feel from just these few unmolested hours at the coffee-girl desk is like a tangible thing, I want to sit and wallow in it. I�m so happy I feel drunk. At five I have to go get my car from C.L � is it the battery? Is it the starter? No, it�s both! � then 6:30 haircut then at 8:30 Steve and I have a Linda�s date with my financier friend Joe so we can pick his brain about, ugh, interest rates and stuff. I so so so do not want to be buying property now or even watching from the sidelines as Steve does with a mortgage all his own (I�d eventually be his tenant in that scenario and would also have no veto power if he decided to get something with a tiny kitchen or only one bedroom, and then I�d be stuck in it for years), my blood is already curdling from dread that Joe and then Steve�s real-estate-agent pal Debbie will advise us absolutely to go for it because the interest rates really are all that and a bag of chips and that however much they�re going to tick up in a few months would be more points than what a mortgage application with an unemployed (!!) person on it will get docked now.

Yeah, I also hate myself for polluting my diary with such gauche exposition as this. Sorry, I will try not to do it again. That�s pretty much the whole story anyway. And not that I�m counting chickens but just for your information the job for which I�ll be interviewing does not pay very well, less than the permanent version of the one I�m temping at now. Earlier today I was looking at listings for condos in Miami. For what it costs to buy a fixer-upper in an iffy neighborhood in Seattle, there you could have two bedrooms and a view, a gym, and a pool on the roof within five or so blocks from the ocean.

Remember that time � no, you probably don�t � way back in, what was it, August of 2001 when I made myself take a month�s respite from a certain subject? I hereby undertake to muzzle myself again, except this time it�s the R � real estate. Watch me. Starting now.

I overslept this morning after staying up until one watching "Ali," which a friend of Steve�s had loaned him. Is it a shortcoming in me or in Will Smith that I can�t watch anything he does without thinking, like, Oh, that�s Will Smith playing a guy who got caught up in some spy stuff, now here�s the Fresh Prince imitating a boxer? I feel bad. Smith doesn�t resemble Ali in the slightest, either, except for the meatiness of his face was a nice effect (was that makeup or muscle?) and he�d obviously worked hard to copy Ali�s physical comportment, the way he ran and moved and leaned. Steve has not seen "When We Were Kings"; I will rectify that very soon. As a filmmaker, Michael Mann is less artist than zealot � though let me be clear, that isn�t a takedown. It is less judgment than report.

People are coming back now. They�re crazy. Oh well, time to sober up.