There may even be benefits involved. Like, the health-insurance kind. I talked this morning to the guy who interviewed me � whom by the way I liked so much, he was confident and well spoken and had a manic giggle exactly like Alan�s � and he said that the offer letter was going out today. So details tk.

Thing Two is, oh man, I will be leaving this desk just as things are getting interesting. Here is a telephone message I took yesterday for the BB from an MD � and believe me, there is no reason that MDs should be calling here: Just a heads-up that the newspapers are starting to nose around and ask questions (as she warned you, she says). She may talk to them. Damn that�s tasty! (And do you like my noir-inflected message-taking style? Top that, Faxy Lady.)

I can�t write much now because I�m working on a report for Pam, whom I am still brown-nosing though word on the street is that the position I covet, for which I will nevertheless prepare an application packet this weekend, has already been promised, Lucille-like, to Trudy. If I could describe Trudy in one word it would be "galumphing." Two? Galumphing and unprofessional. (Three? Add "dirty-haired." I�m sorry � it�s only the truth.) But I don�t know, this office even with an ace job attached to it would be difficult. The egos, the politics, the smugness about imposing politics on that which is nonpartisan, the amount of time spent planning parties and circulating greeting cards, the rudeness to underlings, the self-important sense of entitlement among many who work here. The lack of intellectual curiosity about anything extra-official. The galumphing and the lack of professionalism, of which Trudy is hardly the only practitioner. The fact, for god�s sake, that someone can be hired into a senior budgetary position without knowing jack about Excel. I�ll take a pack of bright IT guys with an ambitious project plan over the henhouse anyday. I also can�t write much now, I realize, because I�m suddenly aware of myself as in possession of a certain degree of optimism, and I don�t know what to do with it or with myself about it; there�s been some offline discussion recently about the extent to which I, pathologically, equate the wanting of things with the not being worthy of them � so it�s absolutely a catch-22, because the only way to be worthy is to be stoic and not to want, which means to sit there and let circumstances pummel the shit out of you and thereby produce evidence, as though any were necessary, of unworthiness � so the feeling of contentedness-ability is also like an electric shock, and I reflexively pull myself up away from the thing that carried the charge. It�s hard, though � after being like this my whole life, I�m a live wire myself.

I�m sick again. I have a cold and I�m coughing, and a few days ago Sandy in this office came by and said, "Oh man, you look like you ache all over." Which, uh, I don�t. Last Saturday night when I apparently looked somewhat better, Vanessa and I went out and each of us got a pickup attempt made, though neither of us got carded so I suppose that�s a wash. Saturday daytime we�d gone thrift-shopping in West Seattle and I did great. I got three pairs of pants including the Ingrid Bergman-looking gray ones I wore to the IT interview yesterday (avec pearls bien sur) and a very fitted brown wool jersey dress with rabbit-fur trim on the cuffs. Among other things: since I have a rule about getting rid of one superannuated item of clothing for each new contender that I bring into the house, Saturday afternoon I got to go through my closet and drawers, and, in the mandated pruning process, basically skim off the crummy bottom layer of my wardrobe, the stratum Vanessa and I defined as things that are benignly suitable as office wear yet also make you want to kill yourself. Ladies, you probably know what I�m talking about. I got rid of a dowdy brown two-piece dress with flowers on it and instated a clingy black one instead. A black cotton cardigan with big buttons � gross! Who am I?! � got the boot in favor of a more adult-looking black wool number with silver beading. It was liberating. I crammed the rejects into paper shopping bags and kept on going once the replacements had been made. If I was ambivalent about it, whatever it was got gone. (And note that not-wanting often has approximately the same absolute value and same function as wanting. So even outside the fact of wardrobe improvement, this frenzy of rejection constituted real forward progress.) My new old glasses are finally here, too, the replacements for my favorites, the ones I lost in the hotel room on my trip to New York last November, and when I see myself in the mirror I look more like myself to me, I feel better. But here�s the thing, I got the glasses in the mail last Thursday, and although I think I knew what the effect would be of putting them on and wearing them, although I wanted to, I didn�t let myself open the package until Sunday night. What am I thinking when I do things like that? I felt, I guess, that I was being stoic and that stoicism was necessarily a virtue, and that I�d appreciate the new glasses more � in the sense of discipline, not of joy � if I�d had to wait for them. When am I not going to be this screwed up?

Steve thinks we should celebrate my new job and go to Brasa tonight. Isn�t he the swellest?