It's so good to be back... went to Botanica last night, sat down on a saggy old couch while my friend was getting drinks, and heard someone talking to my right; it was a sort of old guy sitting in an armchair, alone, and I gave him a quizzical look as if to say, are you talking to me? He just smiled back and I turned around again. He kept talking, though, and I turned around and looked again and he said, very politely and with a bit of Southern twang, "I'm just talkin' to myself over here... hope I'm not bothering you...." I assured him he was not. Then 2 Live Crew came on and you couldn't really hear anything.

What could possibly be the explanation for the baggers who put all the heavy stuff in one plastic bag at the grocery store? There must be one. They all do it. Do most people carry all of their grocery bags in one hand? Even then, it wouldn't really make sense. But there MUST be a reason. Other than they're just doing it to fuck with you. Perhaps that should be my next career investigation: bag girl at supermarket. At least it would get me out of the house once in a while.

Greetings from Seattle.... unlike my more responsible blog friends, I have not asked anyone to write anything here in my absence. But in case you were wondering, I'm having a lovely time out here in the cold and damp... although it, as most places, convinces me that there's no place else for me but New York. There is, stereotypically, a Starbucks on every corner and lots of polarfleece (including on me- I resisted putting it on until today, but finally gave in after four days of shivering in my scant H&M overcoat) and people are nice, but in a way that almost immediately bores me. Kind of longing for the crazy Cobble Hill coffeeshop, the "excuse me, excuse me" homeless lady on the downtown F train, even that terrible smell that wafts from the carts on the street corners when a peanut falls into the roaster....

Things I learned at the graduation/reading for my writing class last night: other people hate those giant, obnoxious golf umbrellas with as much passion as I do; if you go to the doctor in Belgium they just make you get naked and sit around without even one of those paper gowns, which is initially awkward but eventually liberating; not to be late when it says 7:00 because there's a chance your poem could be first, and even though you're not reading it yourself you kind of want to be there to hear it. Oh well- I heard from someone that people laughed, which is good.

Wow, you never know what to expect around here.... I got a new freelance gig that will actually help me not be poor, and an amazing tax refund and a byline in a New York magazine I've been gunning to write for since I moved here AND THEN I got a call yesterday telling me I was being laid off from my initial, main job, and found myself desperately contemplating a move to the middle of nowhere to cover the "cops and courts" beat for a tiny, no doubt David Lynchian town BUT THEN I got a stunning flood of sympathy and job leads from my fantastic friends and wondered how I could ever have thought of leaving this city AND THEN my invitation to a certain person to attend a spring wedding with me was summarily rejected BUT THEN said person made me feel so good in the after-rejection conversation that I managed to come away from it without feeling completely hopeless and, actually, in quite a better mood than I had been for the rest of the godawful laid-off day and maybe in quite some time AND THEN I went to a party in which I had another interesting conversation with a long lost friend who claims to have deleted the link to this blog as she now wants to receive only firsthand, horse's-mouth updates about my life, which is a nice turn of events AND THEN today when my sister and I were taking the subway into the city the R train stopped very suddenly after trying to leave the station and the EMS people and the police were being called and it really seemed like someone had been hit by the train BUT THEN in spite of that horrible probably-accident I went shallowly on to buy myself a nice new lipstick. So- what now. Maybe I'll pull through after all. Or maybe when I walk out my front door next, somebody will be trying to move a piano into an apartment via rope and pulley and all of a sudden the last remaining supporting strand will break and the piano will come plummeting down as I stand, Wile E. Coyote style, underneath it in disbelief as the piano shadow grows bigger and bigger around me and then... yeah. You never know.

Last night as I'm watching TV (the disappointing Greg the Bunny) there's an ad that consists of this montage of all these ordinary people doing ordinary people things, and the narrator is asking something like, Do you really need to be famous to make a difference in life? Do you really need to win awards to know you're important to other people? And I'm thinking, how great is that... and my heart is completely warmed.... until, at the end, it turns out to be an ad for Verizon. Which just makes me feel manipulated. Someone, please, buy me a TiVo so I don't have to watch commercials ever again.

I'm on obituary-writing duty at work today, and in the process of going through the strangely large number of celebrity deaths in the past week, I was reminded of the very odd fact that one of my first really racy teenage dreams involved Dudley Moore. Yes, Dudley Moore. Poor guy. Sad life. But man, was he memorable in that dream.