� Dawn Powell, Diaries (January 26, 1938, if you care)

Pete is sweet. I am beat. I'm sick of the sound of my foundering bleat. And: the noise, the noise, the *swarm* of lives that are thusly lived and documented � I have been feeling all Emily Dickinson about it lately, temporarily content to let myself get a little ingrown in the service of what feels like protective self-custody. Or maybe that�s not so, because honestly you should see my fingernails, they are the opposite of ingrown and in fact more disgusting than they have ever been and it�s gotten to the point where I cannot take for granted that I will be able to fasten my shirt buttons; in that sense I am treating myself, sorry, like an Iraqi prisoner.

And why? Nerves, I guess. Nerves and something else. Nerves and the same old thing, which gets us back to the bleating and how I began to feel disgusted with myself, every entry the same old boo-hoo over no job no insurance etc. And ashamed of myself so I didn�t want to write it like I wouldn�t have wanted to read it, and, hey, am I writing in the past tense about the documenting or do I just feel like I am? I�m going to Pennsylvania for the weekend, Thursday redeye through Sunday afternoon, and I can tell already it�s going to be one long exhalation of reprieve and relief � I can make all this not necessarily the story of my life and I�ll breathe back in on the plane back, I guess, and soon my contract gig will be over and if I have to go back to hustling for recep gigs again well then fine I will, because I�ll have to. I think also what�s been getting me down is the institutional culture here at where I�m contracting � so much incompetence, so much entitlement, and no accountability to a performance standard so no one feels obliged to do anything beyond showing up for 8.000 hours a day and gossiping sourly. It depresses me at the same time as it is slightly contagious, I feel my standards slipping because-who-cares and I hate myself for that too. I can�t trust my own exasperation when yet again I�m asked to do something outside the purview of my job function, something for instance that should have been done before I was brought in: am I having a reasonable reaction to the systemic dysfunction here and how no one wants to take the responsibility to address it at that systemic level rather than running around sticking contractors� fingers in the dikes, or am I soaking up by osmosis the whiny and aggrieved attitude that permeates this organization like the smell of mildew?

Here is something I overheard on the job yesterday afternoon while doing one of those somethings at another location: "It wouldn't be a dog, and it probably wouldn't be a cat. Because cats don't have forked tongues." If a person could manage to get in permanently or even as a long-term contractor with benefits, on the one hand she�d be in clover but on the other hand the mildew would get into her joints and her brain and she would begin slowly to biodegrade. On a related topic, a conversation a few nights ago with Steve to the effect of whether, given the hypothetical opportunity, I�d perform a sexual favor (yeah, that sexual favor) in exchange for a job. Of course I would � is he crazy?

And my classes. Bah. Steve was right, I should not have signed up for this term. Though I am trying not to rough myself up over it, because the difference in workload between last semester and this semester is staggering, something I could not have anticipated. The name of the constant vs. the name of the type of the constant. Stipulative definition. Tip, hint, note, caution, warning, danger. Tomorrow I have a midterm and a presentation, which since I�m such a badass, thank you, involves the album cover of "Goodbye Cruel World." Tuesday I got two homework assignments back, one a 3.8 including a 9 of 10 for writing style � this from a guy who crossed out my "is reliant on" and wrote in "relys" � and one a 4.0, which I earned the hard way by working on all afternoon and into the night last Saturday. I do not think I have the temperament both to go to grad school in the humanities and also to sustain myself physically.

But some things are not so bad. I�m moved, if not settled in and organized and filed, and the new place is great. My kidneys are finally back to normal. I�m hosting a ladies� night later in the month while Steve�s in Germany and so far I have six confirmed attendees and two possibles � I am meeting ladies. I have a lead on a place where I can rent darkroom time at non-extortionate rates. Something kind of nice is going to happen in about two months that I�ll tell more about then, and maybe it will alleviate some of this mess. The weekend after PA, we�re ditching what�s increasingly looking to be a promlike Ship Party Weekend in favor of Portland and Hood River. I committed a faux pas recently when my stupid web client forwarded to Friend C as an attachment the entire conversation Friend A and I had been having about Friend B instead of the edited version I conscientiously prepared, and do you know what? It wasn�t bad at all. I had been critical but not nasty, I had not said anything I would not have copped to, I�d only told the truth. And god, what a realization, to see that one is a person who is like that � I really kind of liked myself for a moment. I wondered when I would ever get over the charges (yeah, those charges) that it was and had always been otherwise, that I was a person who was horrible. Why do I enthusiastically torture myself over the things other people say about me when I know that they�re not true? Why does the opinion of someone who apparently doesn�t know me count more than my own and that of all my friends put together?

I was going to qualify that "friends" � friends remains rough, I won�t lie to you, demotion of any kind is a blow to the ego and to whatever else was invested in progress, and I should brace myself for the eventuality that at least half of the people at my ladies� night will be as strangers to me a year or two from now, that this is the way things seem to go and one ought not to take that personally either. But "friends" is what I mean it as, no qualification necessary. Here�s where I�m retarded: I can�t quite accept that something can go from true to not true or from yes to no without there being some kind of moral failing � OK, mine � involved.

Steve and I went to see The Eternal Sunshine etc. a few weeks ago and then we walked down the street to Al�s for a drink afterwards, a place that needed a good hard exorcism and got one. I am interested in how that movie makes everyone who sees it realize that they are in possession of a certain kind of story. At Al�s, Steve told me that the night we met, when I was giving him a ride home from the Cha Cha � and by the way, every time I so much as write that, I am hit by a wave of paranoia that the statute of limitations on such egregious DUI still has not run out and that some cop reading over my shoulder will shout "Aha!" and drag me away in handcuffs before I can finish my sentence: kids, don�t drive drunk � he left his business card in my glove compartment just in case I had given him a bogus cell phone number. And clearly he must have been almost as loaded as I was, because, as I pointed out, that didn�t make any sense, if I were the type of person to give a fake phone number I would likely not be the type of person to suffer a pang of conscience upon later discovering the fakee�s contact info and then to get in touch. And also, the glove compartment? I have papers and maps and manuals and a stuck-in-traffic book and gum and peanuts and pens and sunglasses and all manner of crap in there that surely he would have noticed in the act of planting the card, so why would he think that I�d even notice it, ever? And what if my car got broken into about, oh, say, every month for a while and the glove compartment repeatedly excavated? Of course he hadn�t been thinking about any of that. We both liked the oddness of the gesture. I also liked the idea that it had happened, though, and in an equally odd way I felt comforted. A few days later I was fumbling around in there for my tire gauge and all of a sudden there it was, the business card, friendly but implacable.

I won�t be able to update for a while, but I�ll try to keep it under 19 days next time.