(Ha, imagine the clinical study.)

And speaking of spinART, they have reissued the first Clem Snide album, and I think that this might be an item I need to buy with the Tower gift certificate that one of the Gastro docs gave me for Christmas (and wasn�t that nice?). In my car I am listening to one of those homage compilations, this one of mostly indie-pop bands I�ve never heard covering Shoes songs. It is surprisingly solid and makes me feel nostalgic in all the right ways.

Cheese-wise I am hooked up with a P�tit Basque, a Trappe Echourgnac, a Pierre Robert, Keen�s Farm cheddar, and a four-year-old Dutch gouda. I am feeling rather seat-of-pantsish about the trip, I mean like that�s the way it should be undertaken, and I haven�t even thought about what I will pack or what other food to bring � I figure I�ll run around like a crazy person on Friday between quitting time at Gastro and whatever it is I�m doing that night. If worst comes to absolute worst, I will end up having to stop at a store near the cabin for provisions, wearing the same clothes two days in a row, not going skiing because there wasn�t room in Tara�s car for bulky stuff like my ski pants, and going around with unbrushed teeth. But I will have a book and booze, and there will be fine girly company, so what�s the big deal. I keep telling Steve, who as a heterosexual male enjoys the image of a pack of females sharing a cabin, that we are going to spend the weekend refining our French-kissing skills on each other, squealing through pillow fights while wearing skimpy negligees, and rubbing moisturizer into each other�s thighs. And then maybe the heat will go out and we won�t be able to get a fire started and we�ll have to huddle together for warmth and� sometimes it is so much fun to play with boys! I�ll miss seeing the Bucs-Eagles game but I�ll survive.

I think that the New York Times and that Teddy Roosevelt wannabe Howell Raines are nuts to be looking at one of the brainier-than-thou Slate kids rather than my man Hank Stuever to be the new editor of the Arts and Leisure section. I think that I am going to start a write-in campaign on Hank�s behalf.

Yesterday evening I was feeling like the diary-writing thing is flowing better for me lately, that the act of writing feels more fluent. Then I realized that how I am lately feeling in general could also be described as fluent. It�s a good word, from the Latin fluo, fluere, fluxi, fluctus we get "flux," of course � it is interesting to think of the kind of fluency I was claiming yesterday as being the same thing as a state of flux � and also the root of "affluent," which I at least don�t tend to think of having anything to do with the flow; on the contrary, affluence feels like a static condition. But if you picture a river it makes a pretty kind of sense: the water is, at the same time, the flow and the abundance, the becoming and the being. The etymology and the philosophy.

Last night I was talking to Steve about grad school, mostly about my inability to make up my mind as to whether an MFA program or an Master�s in Teaching is the more advisable course. He is awfully nice to induldge me in the supposition that the former is an option considering that he�s never read a single thing I�ve written, but he likes my e-mail, he says, and he is willing to use it as a benchmark of sorts. His vote was for the former and the reason was that he doesn�t see any evidence that I want to spend my time around kids rather than around grown-ups who, like me � these grown-ups are hypothetical � are involved in, I dunno, critical inquiry and "creating quality" (which he means in an unironic way, which is going to take some getting used to for me) and discovering things in the only way it�s possible still to make discoveries in the industrialized and documented world. One of the problems with pursuing a career path in teaching is that you�re not going to know for sure whether it�s suited for you until you�re in there and actually doing it. You do your classroom observation towards the end of the program and the student-teaching as its culmination, after you�ve already made a huge investment of time, energy, and opportunity cost, and what if at the end of all that it�s the student-teaching that turns you cold? You�re screwed. (This is yet another argument in favor of loosening credentialing requirements, at least during maybe a two-year hiatus. Then you wouldn�t have people teaching out of a sense of might-as-well-since-I-got-the-fucking-degree, at-least-my-job�s-secure-this-way inertia, and those who stayed on would be battle-tested, would be staying in the profession for the right reasons, and in heading to the academic program with that much practical knowledge to draw on would make the classwork more valuable and relevant for everyone else there.) I don�t think this would happen to me, but it could. I also worry that I would either ostracize myself from some of my teacher peers by virtue of the I-know-ridiculously high standards to which I would hold myself or else relax them and hate myself, grow bitterer by the day until I was strangling my students� attitudes towards school and learning the same way the bitter crusty low-expectations-having teachers I�ve had did to mine. Then again, when I think those things I feel like a coward, and I remind myself that the things most worth doing are seldom the easiest and that a good person would not fail to try. I don�t know, though. I see myself totally doing it, I see myself totally not doing it. My crystal ball is schizo. Then as for the MFA, there�s the economic counterargument: you go to school and take out loans for two years and you get this degree, and, fine, what do you do with it? What jobs are you more qualified to do than you had been with just the BA? Because, I�m sorry if this changes how anyone thinks of me, idealism doesn�t pay the rent, and chances are � chances are like 99.999%, is what chances are � that immediately upon getting the degree, I�d have to go back to non-academic, health-insurance-providing work, and I don�t think this is unfair and I�m not bitter about it, I�m only being practical and trying to think scenarios through. I couldn�t answer those questions and in that harsh light I was wondering whether I was being na�ve even to consider MFA school. Steve had some ideas I hadn�t thought of, like being a grant proposal writer for non-profits or working in research for a foundation � jobs that wouldn�t even suck � but then again he also had one about starting in a small pond of media criticism, his example was Topeka, Kansas, and fattening myself up there until I could jump to a slightly larger one, and then a larger one, and then a larger one� But I do not want to live in Topeka, I said, and he allowed that I had a point.

Nobody in Topeka is reading this, are you? If so, I hope you see that I don�t mean this personally and that I�m not slamming on your city, not really. I live in Seattle, is all, and over the past year or two I�ve come to like it here a lot more than I used to, and I�d like to stay if I can. (And I have even learned that it�s possible to buy a condo for less than I thought it was.)

Academia is, more than most people admit, a matter of who you know. In college I chafed at this because I worked hard so naturally I wanted it to be more of a meritocracy. But I think what I did not see then is that the Who You Know aren�t going to give or offer you opportunities unless you deserve them. (Read: I didn�t think I deserved them then, not really.) And in the same way when people have told me that MFA programs are worth it if only because of the contacts one makes which can then be exported to various real-world, if not necessarily health-insurance-providing, scenarios, I have wanted to punch them for being so calculating about something I love so much � which is therefore unquantifiable � and for assuming that it�s all about the bottom line. Now I am less of a hothead and I know two things: one is that yes, in a way it is indeed all about the bottom line, it�s all about getting paid and housed and fed, and beating yourself up about participating in the economy of survival is not about artistic integrity, it is about being a pretentious dumbass. And two is that yes, there are going to be professors who offer to hook you up with, say, freelance gigs or their friends in publishing, but the professors are not dumbasses either and they are going to give you what they feel you can handle, what they feel you�ve earned. Think of it like a guild, maybe. Think of it in such as way as not to feel defensive about it. If you get what I�m saying.

I also wish I could rationalize participating in the circle jerk of liberal-artsy academic research and could therefore justify considering a Ph.D. program in linguistics or cultural history (I have a boffo thesis idea) or something like that. But I cannot.

What I mean to say, I guess, is that I�m more undecided about the grad-school thing than I�d thought I was, undecided in what feels like a peculiarly good way, so that it manifests almost as a sense of relief. Relief and flux simultaneously. Is this fluency too?

I�m also writing faster and trying to spend less time getting caught up in overthinking and editing and in shoehorning entries into logical or thematic coherence. It�s an experiment, we�ll see how it goes. Now I must bid you farewell and head back to some Gastro documents I�m working on. Today I am wearing two-tone semisheer tights, they have vertical seams all down both the front and the back so that the half that wraps around my outer legs is black and around my inner legs it�s red. I can�t decide yet whether this is a bad look for me because the black fades into the background and makes my legs look too skinny or it�s a good look for anyone because the red draws the eye and induces in its possessor thoughts of the soft insides of the tights-wearer�s legs, that red goes all the way up, it�s even like a landing strip or something. If I call it in favor of the latter, maybe I�ll wear them out tonight and look like the hot tomato I � thank you! � am.

(This isn't too much boy stuff lately, is it? I am self conscious.)