And how should I begin?

Item: we, that is to say Steve and I, are plotting a non-desperate escape from Seattle at the earliest possible juncture. Since the nature of desperation is without-ness, one or both of us has to get a with. That is why I am plotting to get into a graduate program. The relative haste and urgency of this decision � application deadlines within a few months � combined with my idiosyncratic psychological makeup are why I�m taking a Kaplan class. I took the diagnostic last week and will get my score back tonight, and I already know that how many I got wrong on the verbal section � on the verbal section! � > 1, so rewind please to despair and also I feel like I�m going to throw up, and all last night I kept choking awake from dreams in which my I got my for-the-record score and let�s just say it destined me for mediocre things at Southwest Louisiana State Polytechnic.

So there is a sense, Dear Reader, in which you haven�t missed anything at all.

I don�t want to write much about the school thing yet, if ever. Partly what I�m thinking is that if I tell where I�d like to go and apply and then don�t get in, I will have to tell that part too and then of course I will die of embarrassment. In addition, because it�s me who�s driving the getaway car here and I have to make sure I get in somewhere that�s in a city where a person who wasn�t in school could get a decent programming job, it also partly has to do with wanting to make a place in which it�s OK not to be acting or thinking in an emesis-provoking manner, to be getting away from puke-and-panic mode. Like:

I saw "Collateral" last weekend. 1. I thought that the script let Jamie Foxx off easily by not requiring him to kill anyone. It would have been much better if he�d become morally tainted. 2. What was Tom Cruise doing at the Department of Justice building at the beginning of the movie? It would not have been to pick up his cardkey from whomever he�d paid off on the inside, because he would have needed that key to get to the places where he was shown. It seems like this was a device to get his escalator crossing Jada Pinkett�s, and that is so lame. 3. Totally blown music cue: in the cab, when Jamie Foxx starts to flip out and speed, what comes on the soundtrack is some Creed-sounding shite that doesn�t fit with either character, the tone of the film, or the context for the scene. What would have been ideal instead is some really crazy Cecil Taylor � or Sonny Sharrock, something like that. I do like Michael Mann though.

I�m working on the new contract � high visibility stuff, which pleases me. I�m volunteering. I�m studying. I�m still going grimly to the yuppie gym, though when I weighed myself after an official six weeks of treating my body like an Iraqi war prisoner, I�d lost one measly pound, and in protest I have not been on the scale since. I have calluses at the bases on my fingers from the rowing machine. I�m going to my doctor for that long dreamed-of pap smear the first week of October, and I�ve got the dental and the optical appointments dialed too. (Contacts? Discuss.) I am trying to convince myself that early September is too soon to start fretting about what I�ll do when my contract is up in mid- to late November. I�m reading "Karoo." We have TiVo again. The Boyce and Karen visited. There have been three weddings.

That Fourth of July party with the law students and their blithe and prolonged chicken-counting about their future financial prospects, I have to say it affected me more than I thought it did, and although I know this is pathetic it was pretty much the impetus for my diary hiatus. On their terms, I was nothing compared to them and always would be. I was ashamed of myself and the worthlessness � literally � of whatever thought process or means of expression or even self-definition I�d undertake. I have always been too susceptible to the climate in this way � if someone else is doing something, sometimes even if it�s a thing for whatever reason I am strongly disposed against, then I second-guess myself and wonder if I ought to be doing it as well; it�s as if anything not chosen by me deserves more consideration and more respect than its opposite. So I crawled into a hole for a few weeks after that, and by then I was in the habit of not writing, and that was that. In the interim I�ve composed maybe five or six entries at least past the halfway point but I�ve never been able to kick my ass into posting them. I read an interview with Ron Reagan Jr. around the time of the Democratic convention in which he talks about Buddhism and its central (?) tenet that every moment contains the possibility for change. Which I thought was so lovely yet could not, for myself, make translate into action. But this week I have selected � not to put too fine a point on it, but I have chosen � as the one that I want to start leaving marks. I will get up on the scale. It�ll be great.