Migraine last night that in the wee hours featured my stomach�s hours-long threat to unload itself. Interesting category: fights, w/ boyfriend or girlfriend, that are too embarrassing even to dish about with sympathetic friends. Like, what is implied there? Glossing right over! Or is it just me being the M of I again and everyone talks about things like that and I just happen never to have been a party, among my friends, to any such conversation? It sounds dubious but I suppose it is statistically possible. And then, oy, I get embarrassed to write about the fact of things that are too embarrassing to talk about, to do so much as reify that category, so there is a sense in which I am livin� the good old lie; what I do write about while under that dark cloud of shame, if anything (long pause for significance to sink in), is necessarily fraudulent.

But I am better now, mostly. I never wanted the easy thing, did I.

I had a job interview yesterday afternoon that I ended up ditching. Sit down, it�s not that big a deal. This was for the position where I would have had to pee in a cup because they get Homeland Security money. The desired education level was high school, but the listing wasn�t written like that and the job sounded fast paced and high pressure and generally cool, so I applied anyway. Between my applying and the callback, though, the position was changed from full time to part time, per-hour approximately half of what I�m making now and less than a person would make temping almost anywhere, no benefits � go, federal government! Outsource those jobs! � and the guy who called me to schedule it was distracted and kind of a knob and the offices are way up north, so I wasn�t 100% keen on going. I thought about telling the knob thanks but no thanks. But I keep an open mind, and if nothing else it�s good to have practice interviewing, and then I started thinking about how a part-time job would actually fit right into my plans for a while, so I left here early and went home and at 2:20 started driving towards Northgate for my 3 pm appointment. That drive should not have taken forty-plus minutes � Mapblast says it�s 8.3 miles. But it did, and at five after three I was sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic in strip-mall hell with driving directions that did not correspond to the streets I was encountering, and although I�d managed to put the latest fight night out of mind long enough to spend Wednesday morning powering through the high-priority work project I�d taken on Tuesday afternoon now it was ebbing back to me and reasserting its primacy and I started getting weepy. I called my sister on my cell phone and she assured me that all things considered, it would be reasonable for me to crap out, so I turned the car around and forged my way back home.

I think I might not want to work in July. Is that reasonable of me too? Here�s my official rationale: what with the Boyce and Karen�s visit in the first part of the month and my trip to Maryland for Catharine�s wedding in the later part, there are a lot of days I would not be available to work, and the agencies hate that, every time they call to offer you something and you reject their largesse by turning it down you can hear in their voices a black mark being entered against you, they think you�re uncooperative or uppity and sometimes they insinuate that this is the last call you�re going to get. Since I can afford to take a break � and, here�s my unofficial rationale, since I am incredibly beaten down and dispirited and even I can recognize in need of a major attitude overhaul; also since, hello, it is summer, and when am I next going to get to take a vacation � I am toying with the idea of doing so, kind of simultaneously kicking up my heels and preparing to buckle down and study in pursuit of the bold program for 2006. Look for a coffee table and a used sewing machine, do some sit-ups and maybe swim some laps, go running and think about anonymity and the issue of things that are too embarrassing to talk about. Write some gunning-for-internship letters that I would send right towards the end of vacation month, at the same time as I would put myself back on the map as far as the temp agencies are concerned. I don�t know, though � I feel like I desperately want such a thing and like the argument could even be advanced that I need it, but at the same time it feels decadent and unearned. Bill C. to Dan Rather on Monica L., as reported in today�s Wash Post: "I think I did something for the worst possible reason � just because I could. I think that's just about the most morally indefensible reason that anybody could have for doing anything." Well, yeah.

I got within two feet of a rattlesnake when we went hiking last weekend. Not on purpose. We ended up establishing HQ at Yakima, since it was graduation weekend at CWU and traffic was like midafternoon at Northgate (and wow, I don�t want to know what rush hour is like up there) and there were no hotel rooms. We climbed up the side of the Yakima River canyon, very steep and rocky and almost certainly stupid of us, and walked around for a while on the Martian-landscape-looking crest, where we liberated an Opuntia polyacantha and brought it home with us.

Can I go yet?