I got my car in November of 2004 from a private seller after being told by Geoff Hoffman that it's always possible to get a car (or a place to live), within a week if you have to, as long as you don't care about price or quality. It wasn't so long ago, but when I look back I see myself as younger in some more crucial way than age. I needed advice like that. I'd never made any purchases more significant than getting dozens of CDs at Soundgarden in a single visit. I felt like I didn't have authorization to buy a car, that only more qualified people with more authority than me could buy cars. I didn't see this simply as an issue of age, because I knew younger people who bought cars (and did other authoritative or autonomous actions, like live on their own without going to college or get non-retail jobs). I have always self-consciously identified symbols of authority or autonomy, everything from a person's bearing to the ease with which someone considers performing acts I associated with maturity (and since at times that included performing in a rock band or organizing parties, I might have had an idiosyncratic understanding of maturity).

I was awed at the prospect of buying a car. I didn't know where to begin, and even once I started looking at listings in the newspaper I couldn't take it seriously. It didn't feel like I could actually make an offer on a car, negotiate a deal, pay, take the car away with me, and own it, so looking at listings seemed like play-acting. Geoff's advice was pretty important to me, then, because I had identified him as someone with the autonomy I lacked. I perhaps took other suggestions of his more seriously than he intended, because I also looked for a car with manual transmission and no automatic features after he said that's what he looked for. He's one of those people who have had experience with worst-case scenarios, so it didn't seem so ridiculous to him to think of what would happen if power windows broke during a rain storm, when the windows were all the way down.

I started out looking for Hondas, because at the time I had more experience with Hondas than with any other type of car, but Geoff steered me toward a Toyota. He said that if I was going to get a Japanese car, guys drove Toyotas and girls drove Hondas. I knew at the time how absurd such a statement was, but I was a little more willing to go along with it than I might otherwise have been because my ex-girlfriend had two Hondas and made a rather big deal about her affection for them. Nevertheless, the first car I test-drove ended up being a Subaru Outback. It belonged to a professor of music at the College of Santa Fe, where it was parked until he could get rid of it. I hadn't ever gone onto their campus, and I still felt very insecure about following directions to unfamiliar locations. I also had no idea how to assess the value of the car, and it had been several years since I'd driven a stick-shift, so I asked Geoff to go with me. I think he found it amusing that I thought of him sometimes like an older brother, and so he came along. He even drove when we took the car onto the street to see how it ran, and afterwards he said in a jokingly firm voice that I should buy the car. I thought it would be odd for me to drive a Subaru Outback, but thought I'd probably get it. I asked the owner if I could have some time to decide.

I eventually lost that car to bad cell phone reception on campus; the next time I was able to receive one of the owner's calls, he had sold the car to someone else because he hadn't heard from me in several days. The next one I found that was within my price range was a 1997 Corolla; the owner said I could come by and look at it at his house west of the Paseo, an area I had also never been. I'm pretty sure Geoff drove me to see it again; if so, he may have proven himself to be less assertive than I would have thought, because I never did find out why the Corolla had a hood that was a different color from the rest of the car. It was also probably worth less than the $2500 it was being offered for (and which I eventually paid, with money generously provided by my parents). When I went to pick up and buy the car later I got a ride with Febbie Steve, who came in with me to the guy's kitchen and started leafing through his New Mexican, asked for a glass of water, and asked a few questions about the guy's daughter, who had been the driver of the car.

I reacquainted myself with a manual transmission when driving home from the house, stalling frequently at stop signs and red lights; Febbie Steve was long gone by the time I even got out of the community. For weeks afterward, I stalled epicly. When Geoff and I were headed downtown one night, I stalled in front of a police car and Geoff joked, "well, that's not suspicious." I only really picked up the skill of getting into first gear after the first snowfall that year, because it just so happened that the mixture of caution and skittishness I felt moving around on the snowy streets produced just the right ratio of pushing down on the gas and letting up on the clutch. After that, I just imagined that I was driving on snow and I started getting better at getting into gear.

It would be difficult to number the memories I have associated with that car. I sat in the driver's seat the morning after Senior Prank, having slept on a bed vacated by a friend who was chasing a girl, because I was drunk and sleepy; I sat quietly in the nurse's lot, my hands on my eyes, waiting for an unaccountable burning to stop (for whatever reason it was the first time I got allergies in New Mexico). I was again in the driver's seat when I made a prank call to the radio show of Cobalt Blue, the St. John's College Events Director. I pretended to be Jorge, a huge fan who just wanted to tell him to keep on doing what he was doing, while Geoff held back laughter next to me. A few weeks later, as I was getting ready to leave Santa Fe, I took the car in for a diagnostic and found out that I needed to replace some critical elements before I could drive it across the country, and so my brother Jeff (who had flown out to drive with me) and I got a hotel room and waited for the car to be fixed. When it was ready, I loaded it with everything I had brought to Santa Fe, and we drove it across desert and nothingness to Dallas and then up through the muddy plains to the now unfamiliar green of Maryland, back pretty much only because I'd fallen in love with Anne.

I had to convince my father that returning with the car, rather than selling it and taking a plane, made more sense. I had wanted to make the drive, and also knew that having a car in Maryland would be necessary to see Anne as frequently as I wanted to. Having my own car certainly made it quite a bit easier to drive the 35 miles from Ellicott City to Severna Park. Once I got there, we frequently had no place else to go after Barnes and Noble closed and we'd already sat in the Double T for as long as we could tolerate, so we just stayed in the car into the night, which had the added bonus of getting to know several officers from the Severna Park Police Department, wondering if we were both consenting adults.

The year after I'd gone back to Maryland, Anne moved in with me in my parents house and we saved up enough money to move . . . somewhere. We were commuting every day to Lanham just north of D.C., 45 minutes both ways, and on Saturday mornings we opened the synagogue that my mother worked at and served as Shabbas Goyim. At first I thought we were going to Berlin, where my brother Eric could help me find work teaching English. Then one night, sitting on a wooden bench on the fake dock at the fake harbor of the Annapolis Harbor Center Mall, I got a call from Kay, a friend and my old supervisor at the library, asking me if I'd be interested in taking her position when she left at the end of the summer.

Anne hadn't driven in several years, but she decided to relearn how in order to help me with the driving. She had stopped driving back then out of what sounded like terror. It took about half an hour to persuade her to drive past the stop sign at the end of my parent's street, and even after that she attributed a lot more importance to stalling out than was reasonable, but amazingly, after a week of lessons, she had gotten a couple hours of experience on the harried highways of Baltimore, and she felt ready to do some of the driving on the trip.

And so we loaded up the car again, which had by this point been christened Bukowski because the engine sounded so angry and bitter about everything. We drove through northern Maryland forests into the overgrown highways of Virginia, through Tennessee and over the pot holes of Arkansas, then down into dusty Oklahoma, where we hung out with Wes of St. John's Annapolis fame and St. John's Santa Fe obscurity. Then we spent a day and a night and another day and another night and then a week and then some more nights getting through Texas, and finally arrived here in Santa Fe. Somewhere in all of this, Buchowski lost half of his hubcaps, which had huge, warlike spirally grooves; the other two fell off in Santa Fe.

I write all this because now, after three and a half years, I've traded Bukowski in for a newer Corolla. I spent the last several days cleaning him out, thinking about the things I wrote about here, and focusing on the view while driving. I'm surprised by how difficult it is to let go of a car, how attached I feel to it/him (and I really have thought of it as having a personality, as is probably not surprising to anyone who's named a car). He's gone now, sold to Carmax and soon to be replaced by a 2003 Corolla that just happened to lack power locks, mirrors and windows. Its name will be Hoffman, in honor of Geoff.

When I drive to the post office everyday for my office mail-run, I listen to NPR; I'm usually driving when Fresh Air is on. Today Terry Gross was interviewing Martha Weinman Lear, the author of Where Did I Leave My Glasses, which is about normal memory problems that come with middle age. She recounted how she went to a neurologist because she was afraid her memory loss was an early sign of Alzheimer's. The doctor said it was a normal type of memory loss, that of episodic memory (based on events in one's life) rather than semantic memory (established facts about the world learned in youth). When she asked how to improve her memory, the doctor said that the biggest hindrance to remembering things is not paying attention in the first place. You aren't going to remember the name of a person you're introduced to, or the title of a movie, if you weren't paying enough attention when it was mentioned to you.

This is my predicament nearly all the time, with just about everything. I find that I am almost always attending to nothing in particular. My mind is usually focused inward, but I generally feel unsatisfied with my thoughts; they're more like the drifting that happens just before falling asleep than anything else. I'm not solving problems, or composing stories, or thinking poetically or intellectually. Instead I'm going over the few things from the recent past that I happened to be paying attention to, or (if I'm at work) thinking of how I'd rather be at home reading. I might re-imagine my part in a recent conversation, and while I'm doing it I'll picture myself talking face-to-face with a person who I was actually talking to on the phone or in email. Or maybe I'll call to mind a distant friend who I haven't contacted in a while. Sometimes my thoughts are based on things in my view, like bumper stickers or the fact that the weather predicted snow yesterday but instead it's sunny; so I must notice some things, but I don't know why it is that I notice these things and not others.

Invariably, when it occurs to me to judge my thoughts, they seem banal and uninteresting. In their place I'd probably like most of all to think of stories that I could write, but that doesn't happen naturally and I generally can't when I try. It seems to me that this is probably related to my inattentiveness, since writers very often talk about how they retain details. But then again, some writers are also described as seeming disconnected and fanciful. I tell myself there are simply different sorts of fiction writers, and that maybe I just wouldn't be the type who has an eye for detail.

Because of my inattentiveness, I'm constantly seeing things in my daily drives which I know I've seen before, but wouldn't have recalled if someone had tried to remind me of them. Things like the placement of trees, or the locations of stores; a broken trash can, a bus stop advertisement, the shape of a building. I don't notice big things, too; for example, every time I went to Fell's Point in Baltimore I would not notice the fact that there was a visible body of water unless Anne would point it out to me. If I were to make a model of the scene from memory, the harbor wouldn't be part of it; all of the buildings would be homogeneous, without distinguishing details and likely in the wrong places or just not there. The same is true of the street on which I live, and really every place I've encountered. I'm afraid that it also extends to things I read, conversations I have, pictures or movies I've seen. I have very poor recall for almost everything I've done in my life, because I just don't pay attention.

There have been many times in the past where I've lamented the fact that my attention to my immediate surroundings is so low. I often try to keep my mind focused on noticing things, but I never do it very well and whatever progress I make fades quickly, simply because I forget to try. I find it extremely difficult to keep my mind directed outward, even though when I succeed, I feel more energy from the endeavor rather than less.

The whole thing makes me wonder how other people attend to the world, since it seems like most other people have a higher level of attention than mine. I am always curious about the workings of other people's minds, although I have no idea if I'm any good at imagining them. I'm interested in how other people process the world, what thoughts they have, how their perspectives affect their intelligence, and how to imagine different levels of intelligence. I wish I could have an internal account of why people say or do certain things, one that would describe from their own perspective what the reasoning process was, or their emotional state, and even the mental structures they carry around with them which indicate what certain words or actions mean. I think my interest in these things improves my chances of someday habitually writing stories.

I wonder what capacity I, or anyone else, has for changing these basic elements of personality. More than will I ever be attentive, I wonder, can I ever be attentive?

Just now I was driving back to the office after lunch. I was living in my head, like I always do, listening to jazz on the radio and thinking about what other cars were doing so I didn't hit anything. A black pickup truck turned onto St. Michael's just before me, pulling into the left lane, while I pulled into the right. I saw cars stopped at a red light in front of me; rather than pulling up to them quickly, I kept the speed with which I'd turned so that I wouldn't have to come to a stop before the light changed. Then the black pickup switched lanes and pulled in front of me. I cursed him a little for blocking my acceleration room, ascribing a petty motive to the driver: maybe he did it because it felt like he was going faster, like passing someone on the highway. Just as I was registering his move, though, he disappeared, taking a right-hand exit to get onto St. Francis.

The cars started moving then, and I had successfully kept my speed, just driving now along the road back to work, no new thoughts. Then suddenly, it was as though the lens of my eyes expanded, and I saw the view around me. I looked at the horizon and saw that it was bordered by gorgeous blue mountains, forever in the distance. I leaned over so I could see more of the sky and saw that it was gigantic, an uninterrupted blue landscape all around me. I saw that the view around my car was long and low and had no buildings in it, almost like civilization hasn't quite taken hold here quite yet, even now after ten thousand years of city dwellers throwing up buildings and monuments and other manmade forms that chip away at the landscape. For just a few minutes, I felt once again the thrill of being in New Mexico, a land where it's possible to connect to life beyond modern confines and the day-to-day world of sleeping and eating, bills, national entertainment culture, presidential election year news, renting a cheaply designed house in a dull suburb of a dull city. For just a few minutes, I felt spiritual and imaginitive, the wonder of life, the possibilities of a free mind.

I've been trying to recapture that feeling for the last few years. I haven't had it much; New Mexico first gave it to me when I visited here during two spring vacations from Annapolis. Since then, more often than not, my mind has fallen into avoidance: I avoid remembering that I'm at work for the eight hours that I'm there, and then I avoid doing anything difficult (writing, studying an academic subject, reading German) until I go to sleep. This minor epiphany on St. Michael's, and a few other glimmers of light in the past months, have given me hope that my frozen mind might thaw soon.

It was four degrees outside this morning, colder than the walk-in freezer I remember from working at Main Street Ice Cream in Annapolis in 2002. Nevertheless, there was no moisture on the streets to freeze, despite a reported possibility of snow overnight. I think I'm going to start praying to Bob Dylan to give me snow days. He failed to give me one today, although it was less important than it might be because the office is even more quiet than normal today.

Last night they hosted a Legislative Reception, which they do every year during the single, puny New Mexico legislative session. The length of the legislative session rotates every year between thirty and sixty days. The rest of the year, the legislature meets only if called to a special session by the Governor. I can't imagine how the state government hopes to keep up with changes or impact New Mexico with sessions the length of an aphid's lifespan, but anyway, that's how they do it here.

Everybody in the office was shouting about how much stress they were under organizing everything, reserving hotel rooms, ordering food, training members in lobbying, and coordinating meetings of various organization committees, since all the board members would be in town. We invite all the members of the legislature, as well as the governor and his cabinet, the lieutenant governor, all the public education commissioners, and New Mexico's congressional representatives. I think only legislators and commissioners showed up. Everybody stood chatting in what we call the training room, eating finger food and watching the all-female mariachi band who I first saw in Tomasita's. It was about the same as a St. John's party, except without the altered states, hook-ups, aggressive dance music, indoor smoking, shouting, decorations, and senior residents watching over everything. Oh, also, the lights were brighter.

People kept telling me that I was welcome to come to the reception, as all the staff was invited as well; "You should come tonight, and bring you wife!" No one took the further step of telling me why I should go, but after I picked up Anne from school (where she was working), we stopped in and ate some barbecue sandwiches, chicken kabobs, and cookies. Everybody stood in a semicircle and slowly stopped chatting for first song by the mariachi band, who were all dressed in the same blue dress, with little guitars or violins and shifting singing duties. Then Anne and I left, without even seeing Bill Richardson, as I'd been half hoping.

We went home, and were soon joined by Adam Wilson, who I guess decided to drop by to visit Steven. Scott made pancakes, and then Adam and Steven bought a case of Tecate and made cheese hot dogs covered in bacon. I've quit smoking again, so I didn't join Adam on the porch in the solidifying cold. Adam's been coming over often since Steven moved in, and staying long after Anne and I go to bed. Having Steven live with us is, in general, like living in a part-time college dorm. We never know when we're going to be woken in the early morning by what could be either fearful shrieking or an Allanis Morrissette video on youtube, and sometimes the table is covered with empty beer cans in the morning. I hope that when Steven starts his job at Whole Foods next week, we move back to a quieter existence.

I still feel like a hostage to the seeming necessity of holding a full-time job. Maybe if Bob Dylan proves capable of providing me with snow days every so often, I can set up a sort of religious calendar around him so that I feel less monotony. May 24 would become the new Christmas, but beyond that I don't know what else to put on the calendar.

Today in the office, at least, the monotony is tempered by the feeling of relief from last night. In fact, only five people are here today, and if I were more rigorous about keeping up with my work, I'd legitimately have nothing to do. As it is, there are a few phone calls to make, and a few databases to update. I should also probably clean my desk. I'd just rather be home.

I don't know if I have nothing to say or I'm just lazy. I haven't been writing much of anything in the last months, not even emails. When I came back to work after the Christmas break, I felt demoralized with having to go in to work every day. Every day, even on weekends, I feel the same sense of waiting for the end of the day to come that I get when I'm at work. At work, I look forward to coming home; once I get home, I'm not looking forward to anything, but I'm still waiting for the end.

Today I've been reading online for hours, first blogs (reading each one on the list at Altercation in alphabetical order), then the New York Times. I haven't been reading newspapers much, although I read through them every day while on vacation. There were a couple of years when I read newspapers more than anything else, didn't feel right unless I had read the entire A section because what if I missed something? Now it doesn't seem like I'm missing something vital if I don't read a newspaper, but it still feels stimulating (witness this blog post).

While reading the internet, I also downloaded twenty albums by Miles Davis. I've planned to listen to all of his major albums since 2001, when John Polewach introduced me to a lot of his music as I learned somewhat to play jazz drums (I'd listened to him before that, but only a couple of albums). I played Cookin' last night after getting into bed, after not listening to jazz for about half a year. As with many other things, I wonder how long my interest will last, and whether or not I will ever find an abiding interest.

"Thus, the subcellular distribution of PRAK is determined by multiple factors including its own NES and NLS, docking interactions between PRAK and docking proteins, phosphorylation of PRAK, and cellular activation status. The p38 MAPKs not only regulate PRAK activity and PRAK activation-related translocation, but also dock PRAK to selected subcellular locations in resting cells."

Something's clearly not right with the world when it's nearly 70 degrees in late November. I guess I should write a letter to the National Weather Creation Bureau and find what's going on. Maybe one of the clerks took several months off and, like me after a lunch break, started working again but so slowly that an observer wouldn't see any progress, and that's why we're having September days still. With any luck, maybe the Metaphysical Congress will take up this issue and actually do something about it, instead of just stalling every piece of new legislation in the Antinomy Committee.

Somehow, November seems even more hollow when it's warm outside. The leaves have still fallen off the trees, the grass is dead, and the bushes in New Mexico have changed into skeletons, and with such warm weather this looks a lot more alarming than previous Falls. Maybe there was a nuclear holocaust, and everybody slept through it.

I agree with everything in this post about driving a car with a stick shift. I'm wondering if my readers who don't drive stick think that it makes sense, or if it just looks like bullshit to them.

I'm currently listening to the latest album by the Travis Morrisson Hellfighters, All Y'All. Although I don't like the title of the album, I am, as usual, really impressed with Travis, somewhat bashful about it as though I had a crush, and a little unsure why I don't listen to his music more. For those of you who don't know Travis, he was the leader of the Dismemberment Plan.

I'm also really pleased with a new CD by The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, which I got on a whim after seeing it reviewed in an AMG newsletter and listening to the first song. They're pretty similar to the great, seemingly unknown Comet Gain. I guess it's indie punk: really melodic and bright-sounding songs with a dark undercurrent, tight playing, good lyrics, and poppy elements. Both bands are British. Both bands come up with excellent melodies for both verse and chorus, with varying male and female lead singers, and always lots of energy even on the slower songs. They're both inventive, using all sorts of rhythms, tempos, and supporting instruments, occasional vocal harmonies, and daringly poetic lyrics. I particularly love the Comet Gain, who are reminiscent of the Fall, the Pastels, the Go Betweens, and Dexy's Midnight Runners all on the same album.

Since I got my new job, I've been reading a lot of political blogs because I usually don't have any work, but I can't read books or magazines (I think--I still haven't asked). I'm particularly fond of The Daily Howler, which aggressively presents the case that the mainstream media reports conservative or Republican issues with a free pass, while they treat Democrats and liberal causes shabbily, to the point of lying and distorting things Democrats say in order to keep pounding away with story lines like "Gore is a big liar" or "Hillary is a ruthless faker". Somehow, though, I find that no matter how much time I spend each day reading about news and politics, be it blogs, newspapers or magazines, I never seem to have a good grasp of any issue. I guess I'd have to pick one issue and read just about it for a while, rather than generalized commentary or reporting from people who have been following all sorts of stories for years. Or are there other options? With the few months I read the Economist my knowledge of the world (from basic things like geography, to complex things like the after effects of the cold war) expanded greatly, but I found that it left me no time to read anything else, and I still didn't know much about domestic issues. What do my (what, like 5?) readers suggest?

I am home on a lunch break, and for some reason I am experiencing a sense of lucidity and reawakening that I have somewhat rarely, a feeling of awareness and mental energy. It's hard to explain what it feels like, why it is that my thoughts seem to have a different tone from what I'm used to. I was just thinking about a call I made yesterday to the office of a dentist Anne and I went to early this year. I was calling to make a new appointment, and the receptionist told me that we had missed back-to-back appointments for September which I didn't know we had. He sounded pretty mad at me, and said, "You can't just not show up for an appointment. I called both of your phone numbers, and sent a postcard." I explained that we had moved and gotten new phones, and that I received none of his messages, and also didn't know we had made appointments.

I was left unsatisfied, because the receptionist didn't acknowledge anything I was saying. Just now I wanted to reach out to him somehow, with an email or a visit, and explain again that I was sorry but that I didn't think I had done anything wrong. Then somehow I got to thinking about how strange it was that I had a dentist, a person whose income depended on patients, people coming in for the service of having their teeth cleaned and examined. I am in a relationship with this woman, the dentist, that seems somehow unnatural, a result of the complicated social structure of modernity. Like pretty much everyone alive today, I have indistinct professional relationships with people who have received abstract credentials allowing them to perform well-defined services isolated from all other areas of life. I don't know the dentist as anything other than a dentist, nor her receptionist as anything other than a person who is employed by the dentist to answer a phone in her office, make appointments, and receive payments from patients.

I then thought about how strange it is that the tree in my back yard has a trunk that split early in its growth, so that it has branches and leaves growing out of two separate, equally thick parts; and sometimes the owner of my house hires people to come and cut off some of the branches on this living plant, because they happen to be growing in areas that threaten the house's roof.

What might I call thoughts like these? They seem strangely analytical, putting words to patterns of life that I usually act on without consciousness because I too am a part of the systems I'm examining.

Usually I just think about consuming, with unvocalized thoughts like "what can I eat now, because I'm hungry?" or "it's cold in here" or "maybe I can read Watchmen later today, when I get home." I've noticed in the last few days that my thoughts are usually very boring and relate only to myself, Anne, or Scott, and our immediate needs. I wonder why sometimes I seem to think in other ways, and why it's so rare.

D. H. Lawrence wrote back in 1915 about why I dread going to work: it requires that I "put on the vulgar, shallow death of an outward existence." Every morning my "soul [grinds] in uneasiness and fear" as I see that my time as a hidden being has once again passed. It doesn't seem to matter that I don't have any difficult work, and it's only slightly improved by the light amount of interaction with the public. I felt nearly as much dread going into switchboard just for the call I knew I'd get from Lois and the interaction with security. At least now I don't have to hate the fact that I can't stay home at midnight and sleep in a bed. My current job is the best I've had as far as compensation, but somehow almost the worst for this feeling of soul grinding.

It's been four years since I had to work in a service position at a store, so maybe I've forgotten feeling this way then. My memory, anyway, is that at Safeway I felt like the day was lost if I had to work for part of it, but I don't remember dread. At the Moon Café I didn't really care, but then I barely got customers, and was also mildly insane. I can't remember how I felt about going to work at Barnes and Noble, even though it was the most recent of my service jobs. I know that I feared the supervisors and book floor workers, and mostly disliked the customers rather than shrank from them in my soul. I think I enjoyed working there, but this was tied to the fact that I was young enough to feel at home in a service position, had made friends, and never had to face customers alone.

Certainly my current job isn't the worst I've had. That would be Promissor. It made me feel so awful that I would eventually have swerved my car into one of the numerous trucks on I-95 during the forty-five minute commute if I had to keep working there for just a few more months. I felt the same soul grinding that I now feel once a day, only I felt it every five minutes, between calls. Even that wasn't so bad, because I drove to and from work with Anne, and the waves of calls mostly dissipated by 9:30 p.m.

At my current job, soul nausea comes from the presence of foreign entities in the communicating offices, and to a lesser extent because of the phone. I sit at an exposed desk by the (rarely used) front door, from which I can see the finance manager sitting at his computer, and I'm only paces away from the office manager. I can hear our accountant coughing or shifting in her cubicle, one wall of which is right in front of me. The others walk by frequently to get coffee or visit each other. None of these people are antagonistic, annoying, or stupid; my problem is that we are strangers to each other, even if I come to know their personalities, hear about or even meet their families, talk with them on breaks or at meetings. I could only feel more out of place if I went to sleep here and woke up in Russia.

Moreover, the work will be cyclical, boring, sometimes uncomfortable (if I am asked to help with training sessions), and completely unconnected to my personality. Still better than switchboard, but nowhere near where I want to be. A person could only like this job if they had no desire ever to work outside of offices, even though for an office job, I'm sure it's really quite good. I was scared rather than excited when the finance manager told me that there were a lot of opportunities with this company. I just wish I could make enough money to live without working for other people. I suppose eventually I may have to write just to survive my fear that I'll never do anything with my life.

Yesterday I started a new job at the National Education Association, at their New Mexico headquarters in Santa Fe. The position is titled "Program Assistant/Receptionist"; so far I've only been trained in the receptionist duties. Oddly, it is the receptionist who makes the mail and bank run every day, and also restocks office supplies--I believe because the woman who vacated the receptionist position volunteered for those duties. She seems a lot like my mother, who feels the need to do as much work as there is to do, whether they give her more pay and respect or not, whether she likes the company or not. The former receptionist told me yesterday that she has trouble remembering to take her afternoon break, because she gets so busy, a problem which I presume I won't have no matter how busy it gets. So far the receptionist part has been boring and a little anxiety inducing, as I'll explain later.

I'm hoping I'll like the assistant position more. I'll be helping the "UniServ" who covers the northeastern and central New Mexico school districts. UniServs are the people who handle contract negotiation and conflict mediation, find (or offer, not sure yet) representation for union members who have legal trouble, lobby local governments, and other things I'm not clear on yet. My UniServ doesn't come into the office more than a few times a week, because he mainly does meetings all over the state. He hasn't come in since I started working. Eventually I'll be composing letters, proofreading, designing signs, and whatever else he needs. I'll also be maintaining a database detailing union dues by member. So far I've gotten no work on that end, because the people who are going to give it to me are, I guess, too busy.

This means that I have yet another job which, at least for now, consists of waiting for a phone to ring, and dealing with callers when it does. I wish I could have a job that didn't involve phones. Even though I've had nothing much to do so far, I already dread going to work; there's something awful about being attached to a desk with nothing to do. It's not that I hate dealing with phone calls, exactly. If they were for me, I'd feel a lot better. But the uncertainty of calls--not knowing when anyone will call, who they are, what I'm supposed to do with them--instills in me a baseline of anxiety the whole time I'm at work. When I applied for this position, the office manager seemed concerned primarily that I be able to work with frequent interruptions, which I feel okay about. I'm not upset by the interruptions as much as the anxiety. If I have nothing to do, the phone only serves as a constant reminder that I might, at any time, be required to speak professionally with strangers. I can't retreat into privacy, which is what I tend toward naturally. If I'm busy in the future, as everyone keeps telling me I will be, the phone's presence would mean that I couldn't ever get completely lost in details.

So far, I'm pretty much stuck with surfing the internet or writing emails and blogs; things which I enjoy doing, but usually for less than an hour a day. I have now had nearly every iteration of things I can do while waiting for the phone to ring (or, in the case of QAI, having babies and small children playing in the corner of my eye): first I could read and listen to music, with breaks; then I couldn't do either of those things, but could play lots of Spider Solitaire (Promissor . . . rawr!); next I was able to do just about anything, even sleep, but had to stay at the switchboard the whole time; and now I can surf the internet, but not listen to music, presumably not read a book, and certainly not sleep, but I get two breaks and an hour and fifteen minute lunch (it's a union, what do you expect?).

I miss the library, and it would be nice if I could start graduate school. This new job, at least, pays very well (by my standards, at any rate), provides excellent benefits, and has opportunities for advancement. All told, any problems I have with the job pale in comparison with that lineup. Someday, though, I will have a room without a hideous oversized phone at my elbow, and maybe even the ability to feel like myself all the time.

Last night I was sitting at my kitchen table with a plate of spaghetti that had grown cold an hour before as I'd forgotten to attend to it, and instead was watching the shadows shift as the light spread across the room. When it was cut off by the curtain, I got up and went to the window, and there was the moon looking in on me from across the yard. I greeted her, and she waved. "Do you want to come in?"

"Well, maybe for a few minutes. Why not?"

I pushed the panes open and she floated inside, coming to rest on a chair across from my spaghetti. The room became dark.

"Do you have anything for me to reflect?"

"I'm afraid I don't have anything to compare to what you're used to. My means are limited. How about this, will this do?" I took a table lamp from the living room and plugged it in on the kitchen counter.

"Maybe you could remove the shade? That's better."

"Would you like anything to eat? I have some leftover Chinese if you're interested."

"No, I'm fine, thanks. Unless you've got a pumpkin somewhere."

"Is that what you eat?"

"Yes. As a matter of fact, I'm mostly pumpkin."

"Just a second. I'll be right back." I went to the porch and chose a pumpkin I'd set aside for carving, short and with a broad face. The stars shone impassively in the space vaceted by the moon. I brought the pumpkin back and asked if it would do.

"It looks delicious. Turn away if you don't mind." When I turned back, the pumpkin was gone and the moon had taken on an orange tint in the light from the lamp bulb. It suited her features. "If you don't mind my asking," she said, "why do you keep referring to me as 'she'?"

"Aren't you? A woman, I mean? Luna, you know. I thought it meant . . . "

"It's a common misconception. I'm not really gendered, though. That kind of thing is just myth."

"Still, it seems appropriate."

"I'll admit that it's more poetic, but really I'm just mineral."

"I thought you said you were mostly pumpkin."

"Sure, but do pumpkins have genders?"

I sat pondering that, and the moon started to look a bit restless. I said that I'd understand if it was time to get going.

"Nice seeing you," it said.

"Come back anytime." Then it rose to the window and slipped through the trees to join the watchful stars.

It is that most evil hour, between four a.m. and five; the light looks yellow and uriney, and objects only come into focus when I look directly at them. Even then they look like they're being projected onto some disgusting surface by the illusion-casting lamps of the universe. There's a tingling in my scalp as though worms were crawling around in there. My eyes feel like marbles someone has thrust into a jello mould. This happens even tonight, when I woke up at 9 p.m. I suppose circadian rhythems exist.

Time at the Switchboard is refractory. It's starting to feel, when I turn off all the lights I can and lie down on the rough carpet, like I'm being observed remotely. The dim light is charged with the tension of after-hours; it feels like no one is supposed to be here, ever; it feels like I am taking refuge from a war.

This morning I woke twice: first at 3:45 a.m. from a dream in which Jeff and his friend Rob, and George Wendt, brought pizza to the switchboard, and then to a phone call. I did not get back to sleep. I heard someone unlock one of the doors, and two people talking back and forth for at least twenty minutes, a chatty woman and an inquisitive man, the noise floating above me on the floor preventing me from drifting and sinking into the carpet and through the floor into sleep. I find that when I try to get to sleep and am interrupted, I float down; when there is nothing interrupting me but I still can't lose consciousness, I float up; and when I fall to sleep I am not there to float.

Eric made a website: highqualitytime.blogspot.com. It will not take long to view.

I quite like Santa Fe in fall, although I can't describe it too well because I don't get out much. It hasn't got the elaborate changing colors of Maryland, but leaves still fall, and brown seed pods, and the wind still blows them around, making a delightful whispering swish. The sunlight becomes more noticably slanted, as though it were filtered through water, casting an ambient glow rather than the shocking search-light quality it has in springtime, or the beating waves of light and heat in the summer. I could do without the chamisa, though; it's mostly done blooming now, I guess, because my eyes no longer feel like they're being squeezed with a hot lead vise, but I've still got a useless cough and raspy lungs. The rainy season is mostly over now, but the air often feels like a storm has just passed through and cleared things up. There is a lingering summer heat wave, noticable but thankfullly not overwhelming. At night I wish the mountains would cease their vigil so they could step down into the flat southern part of town, maybe huddle around a campfire and roast the remaining tourists, sparks simmering and flickering in the black around them, and tell me stories that would explain everything I always wanted to know.

I've been reading Iliads, comparing them with the Greek often, wondering why I care so much but trying still, uselessly, to catch a bit of meaning with some tweezers, draw it through the air and snap it out of the book like stubborn sinew clinging to bone, and maybe pin it to my wall like a trophy. I'd make a little plaque commemorating myself: Greg finally got it. Anne's starting school in just two days now, because there was a last minute opening in the Fall Freshman class. I think I'll go through the seminar with her, at least, and perhaps that way finally get away from the lingering feeling that I missed everything, maybe understood broadly some of the philosophy and learned to read Greek passably along with a translation, and French reasonably well, understood most of the math and some of the science, and fell down like a bitch in the ring with religion and literature. Why am I afraid that I didn't understand the Greek plays? Why do I still think that attempting to understand is the right approach?

The mousepad at Switchboard has a blown-up picture of the tower section of Weigel Hall. It was probably created to appeal to nostalgic ex-students, but I wonder if the person who created it was a disillusioned Johnny who wanted to take out his wrath like Godzilla. My mouse crushes.

I can see very starkly now, pretty much for the first time, the difference between "modern novels" and earlier fiction. I don't know why something like this should have taken so long, and it's realizations of that sort which make me question my own intelligence. Why didn't I understand this before now? It doesn't seem difficult or uncommon. It seems like many people are interested in and understand things like this in high school, and here I am at 24 still stuck on things that really aren't very interesting. Am I wrong?

I'm trying to figure out what I meant by "things like this" above. The most simple interpretation is that I mean developments in art. The understanding that there is a qualitative difference between, say, sixties pop songs and punk rock, or between European fashion and American. On another level, I think I mean a level of cognition that would also comprehend the second meanings of politicians, or the fake world of advertising. Behold my inferiority complex: I actually often think that my capacity to understand is lower than aware high school students.

Polewach has (jokingly?) declared the pointlessness of reading 19th century novels (his language is that it's irrelevant, with the joke perhaps being that he doesn't think any literature is relevant). Much reading of old fiction juxtaposed with new is leading me toward the same conclusion that novels, even when they're interesting, are pointless. I probably arrive at this conclusion from a very different angle because, well, I never really know what John's saying or why.

I used to think that I read fiction for reasons beyond entertainment. I'm not really sure what I thought those reasons were, because I've never been a deep thinker. Really I usually read (I'm thinking of high school and into college here) because I was solitary and impressionable, I liked stories, and I believed that reading "important books" was necessary for someone who wanted to be "intelligent". I found reading enjoyable even when I didn't even follow the story, let alone any other meaning of the text, because I responded to the different rhythems and and dictions, and it gave me a vague but often stirring feeling of being somewhere else, as another person, much like in dreams. When I think about why fiction might be worthwhile, I fall back on the following very common postulates: 1. Fiction might help me understand life, or appreciate it better (recognize patterns, experience people and events more critically, appreciate the weight of decisions before making them). 2. Through stories, writers are able to examine and communicate ideas, even complex ones, in a way more immediate and accessible than standard argument.

I look at these postulates now and recognize them as belonging very much to the 19th century. I don't really know how thought about literature has developed since then, if it has. I see also that these postulates are very rarely true, at least for me. I mostly read for entertainment, historical curiosity, and the excitement I get from seeing a writer's abilities. Additionally, I recognize that the better writers tend to consciously examine social conditions and human psychology; but honestly I don't know that I get much out of it when they do. So why do I read fiction instead of quilt, or bet on horses? Dunno. Moreover, why do I stubbornly still think I ought to read, say, Fielding or even, as I did early this year, everything by Flaubert? Dunno.

This is the new face of St. John's College: stone-faced, chill, perhaps taken aback by what he's looking at but trying not to show it. And what is he looking at? I believe it to be a male strip-tease. Notice the excited interest of the dude in the plaid shirt, and the big smile on the girl's face. I believe the strip-tease artist is Mr. Grenke.

I have a new desktop computer. The monitor is huge and black-bordered, the tower is futuristic grey, the mouse is bulbous, the speakers are small and powerful-looking, and the keyboard is soft and fluffy. Now I can finally download music again, and . . . play World of Warcraft, and . . . yes, I said it. And also . . . that's about it, really.

I have been trying to structure my time better, since I get depressed when I don't plan. Pants get tossed all over my sentences, food grime builds up on my words, and I have to pay more per letter. If I could only manage to sleep at work, my collar would slide off. My tea is cooling before I can drink it, and my stomach is probably too floppy anyway, but later I have Lyly and Pullman. Too bad my dry wall is bleeding.

I dreamt that I decided to go home in the middle of a shift, so I took the switchboard radio, the sleeping bag and the pillow, went home and made a sandwich. Jeff was playing computer, and Anne chatted with me while I ate. We were watching a movie when the radio crackled, "226 to base." I walked over resentfully, pressed the transmit button and said, "go ahead," expecting something non-essential like a radio check.

I waited a few seconds, and then heard the voice again, sounding breathy and pained. "Lack of life signs."

I was astounded, and certain that I should never have left the switchboard. They would see that I wasn't there, and whatever happened might be blamed on me. I pressed the button again, feeling chill. "For who? A student, or what?"

"No." A long pause. "Anaya." Anaya is another security guard who, in the dream, was this guard's partner.

"My God, do you need me to call an ambulance?"

"No . . . I'll take care of it . . . Arnand . . . Arnand, noooooooooooooooooo!"

I ran to my car and sped to campus. When I arrived, I saw a huge crowd gathering, hushed and unsure how to act. I overheard a few groups saying things like "did you know him?" "are we supposed to be standing, or is this okay?" and "I guess classes are ccancelled." Meanwhile, I was dodging through the seated groups trying to get back into the building before anyone realized that I hadn't been there. I had forgetten the radio, the sleeping bag and the pillow at home; I thought I would have to call Jeff and ask him to bring them to me. I heard the voice of Chris Nelson, the college president in Annapolis, saying "As you know, we're here for a solemn event."

Then I woke up on the floor at Switchboard.

Geschichte des Altertums is so long that it has an introductory volume of 250 pages, entitled "Introduction. Elements of Anthropology." For the most part, I've read only this volume, and dipped occasionally into the first book proper, which relates the history and culture of ancient Egypt and Babylon. Meyer wrote at the end of the 19th century, at which point it seemed that Anthropology had barely gone beyond comparing ancient summary works, like Herodotus and Strabo, with each other and with what was found in the same areas in the modern age.

Meyer sure hates shamans. He abruptly concludes his chapter on the primitive belief in magic by saying that traditional conceptions, on which the shamans' power is based, hold back and suppress everything from the formation of self-reflection to the development of medical science, and in general the achievements which raise the human condition from barbarism to culture.

I'm at switchboard now, haltingly reading German, then switching to Manuscript Found in Saragossa, then drinking some coffee and playing some Alchemy. I've brought my stuffed owl, Zaditor, to keep me company. For the most part I've been listening to Schubert and Chopin. I've been unable to sleep while at work. Anneis probably right to think that I complain about this job too much. If I manage to use my time well, this job will be a blessing.

I only work at the library for two more hours. I start at the switchboard tonight at midnight, and stay until 8 a.m. I don't know what to do with the two hours here. I just finished work on my last project, and wrote an explanation of it for whoever takes it up. I could look at the shelf for books to weed from the collection, or read College & Research Libraries News.

I don't want to leave.

I've been reading one of the first universal histories through interlibrary loan, Geschicte des Altertums by Eduard Meyer. It's in German, so I've been stumbling through it; and with all five volumes, it's several thousand pages, so maybe even the hundred I've scanned aren't representative; but so far, it seems like nothing more than a gigantic review of all the historical writings before him. It's like an endless special edition of the Times Literary Supplement discussing only history books, perhaps designed to teach scholars how to waste their time. But who knows, maybe he throws in a little synthesis every hundred pages.

New beds comin' in soon. Ayup. Heard about it from that nice man down the mattress store. Why, he even gave me a free sheep. Don't know what I'll do with that'un. Maybe make a sweater. What I hear, though, I hear thurze a queen-sized bed a-comin' round the house next week. Even got a working shower now, not just a bathtub anymore, nope. Working wireless internet connection too. It's like a real residence now. Don't know how we'll pay for it though. Might have to take two jobs; switchboard looks like a real stinker, so it may be that I keep the library job 'swell. Ayup. Lot of hours, that.

I've just checked out about 10 albums of music by Chopin, after browsing the introduction to a collection of Chopin waltzes in score. Here I go again.

Someone just checked out a book of essays by Leo Strauss with his picutre on the cover. I had never seen the man before. He looked very uncomfortable in front of the camera, and had an expression even more blank than is common for portraits. Perhaps, while that picture was being taken, he was wishing that no one would ever look at his face and he could live behind his name alone, perpetually unseen and mysterious.

I guess I've decided to take the job. I'm not very happy about it. I have three meetings on Monday to try to get tuition remission for Anne to take the undergraduate program. First I meet with financial aid, then the assistant dean, and finally the director of the graduate program (for those of you who know him, Mr. Venkatesh). We still don't know if Anne's even gotten in.

Laura told me that I can come back to the library if there's an opening in the evenings and weekends supervisor position; the switchboard supervisor (Kyle) told me that if there was an opening for the daytime operator, I could definitely switch if I wanted to; and the human resources officer (Lois) told me that she hasn't done any interviews yet for the position I applied to in Admissions. Because of all this, I at least have some options.

I haven't told Laura yet; in fact, my last words to her on the subject were that I'd decided to stay at the library through the summer unless I got a salaried position. I guess the offer to start me at the midpoint salary was enough.

It looks like I'll be studying Zen this summer. Jess had suggested it to me a while ago, and then I saw D. T. Suzuki's Manual of Zen Buddhism on a "what are you reading this summer?" library display and thought it would be a good idea to focus my mind while locked up alone in Peterson all night.

I have a meeting today with Lois in Human Resources to discuss a job I've been offered: overnight operator of the St. John's Switchboard. The hourly pay would be smaller, but the paychecks would be larger. I'd have benefits, including vacation and, in two years, I could do the E.C. program for free. That's where the advantages end. I would be leaving a job I actually enjoy, which has got to be pretty rare. I'd also be working at a schedule opposite to Anne's no matter how we worked it, because her job doesn't have much opportunity for overnight work.

Laura told me I could come back to the library if I took the job and the library supervisor position opened up again. Or I could stay at the library until I'm offered a salaried position. I don't know yet what to do.

My meeting with Lois is in less than ten minutes. None of the questions I'm asking her would be hugely helpful in the decision, but I'm going to ask for more time to decide.

I'm thinking of taking some courses at UNM as part of their non-degree program. I got the idea first from Molly Padgett, who is otherwise not a warehouse of ideas. It seems that I may know what to go to grad school for, and it's something I would never have thought of: Anthropology, probably either Biological Anth. or Archaeology. It seems I'm fascinated by the reconstruction of human history and origins. It seems I might want to check this out with some courses.

This started, as my interests normally do, with regression. I was reading Arthur Toynbee's A Study of History when I realized that he wasn't ever going to slow down and tell me what that history was, so I looked for supplementary books. The library isn't very expansive in this field, for obvious reasons (hint St. John's doesn't study history and wants to suppress it hint), but I was able to find a reasonably thorough history of world civilizations. It was written in the early 70's, before some important dating techniques were discovered, but it would do. The first chapter was on prehistory; it contained mostly idle speculation about the mesolithic, and some moderately more informed speculation about the origin of agriculture. Since this is a period I know very little about, and it seemed that, whether or not this book thought so, it would give important insight into the origins of civilizations, I looked in the bibliography for that chapter. The library had a few of the books listed there, and the most general looked like Back of History, by William Howells.

Now Howells, as I was later to learn, was primarily a physical anthropoligst, specializing in prehumanity. And so he devoted more than half of the book to the question of human origins. Now, this book was written in 1953, practically at the beginning of our understanding of human origins. The "Piltdown Man" had only recently been revealed to be a hoax. There was still a different name (indeed multiple names) for each specimen of what is now called Homo Erectus that had been found (e.g. "Java Man", "Sinanthropus", "Pithecanthropus Erectus"). The !Kung San, who were described rather uncritically, were still referred to as Bushmen. Every stone tool was still assumed to be a weapon.

Despite all of this, the book made me realize that there's a hell of a lot I don't know about human evolution and prehistory. So I got a book by Richard Leakey; then one by DonaldJohanson, who discovered Lucy; then a 25-year-old collection of Scientific American Articles; then finally I received the interlibrary loan I'd requested, an up-to-date standard introductory textbook to Anthropology, Patterns in Prehistory.

Perhaps, since I've been studying these things for less than a month, I should wait to say that I might go to grad school for them. But I am certainly looking into non-degree classes at UNM in Anthropology, regardless.

I may have just discovered an essential element of poetry through reading, of all people, Sylvia Plath. I never understood before when people said things like, "poetry's medium is pure language". Now I do, I think. If the purpose of art is to generate feelings, then poetry does this not with ideas or stories or sounds or images, although it may use these insofar as language is connected with them; but it is the language itself that generates the feelings.

I'm taking a second allergy test next Tuesday, since I failed the last one (I was blocking histamine). This means that I can't take allergy medication until then. For a while I doubted that the Clarinex was doing anything; now I know that it was. My eyes feel like a mob hitman is smothering them to death against the inside of my skull. My head is almost too heavy to keep aloft. At least I can still take my nasel spray; without that I'd probably qualify for disability payments.

I slept through Kay's knitting club today, stayed in the bath while Eric called me three times, and haven't done anything at work that was work-related other than find a couple of internet sources for the fact that Horned toads have black eyes. When I go home, I'll have some food, watch some episodse of Homicide, and read some Kurt Vonnegut. (I don't know what I'll eat; maybe chicken. On Friday, I received all seven seasons of Homicide on DVD, having ordered it from Borders with a 30% discount. I started reading Kurt Vonnegut novels when I heard that he died.) This is my day. I just thought I'd blog.

Shortly after I arrived at the library today, I was talking to Laura about how she sets up a spread sheet. "I can freeze this line, if I want, so that it stays on top even when I scroll. So I go to View . . . and then I click . . . ngggggg!" I looked over to see her face suddenly constricted into a look of shock and anger; her index finger had shot up like an attack dog, pointing just past the monitor.

"What is it?"

"Rain! And snow!"

Just then, the whole library rang with a pounding noise from the roof.

"And now hail! This has been happening every day this week, just as I have to ride home"

I looked out the window, where Laura's finger was still pointing rigidly in anger, and saw large streaks of every kind of condensation coming down at once onto the shivering pinyons, the skeletal branches of the newly-budding poplars, and the small juniper shrubs. Within seconds, everyone in the library ran over to press their faces against the windows in glee and wonder. Eight people ran over in a line and, like water from a faucet reaching the bottom of the sink, hit the wall and spread into a new line. Tutors and students stood together and gawked at the sight of the clouds descending to the earth like a mad swarm of bees.

As much as I would appreciate having employer-provided health insurance, vacation time, sick leave, and pay raises, I have to love my job. I am officially allowed to spend as long as I want, while on my shift, browsing through Library Journal and reading about new book releases; and if there's anything that looks interesting to me, I can point it out to the library director, who more likely than not will buy it. So not only do I get to browse and shop for books for free, I get paid to do it. I wish everyone had this job.

Maybe there's something to this whole waking up before noon thing people are always talking about.

Rain, rain, rain, the house is bombarded and the new bikes look like barricades. I don't believe there's anything outside the door except rain. Someone put up a backdrop so that it looks like there are wet dead leaves, droopy budding plants, and Cary Grant approaching the house, smiling and waving. Wait a minute, that is Cary Grant. What does he want?

In the last week, I was offered a job at Borders. This is the first job offer (which, indeed, resulted from the frist interview) I have ever gotten at Borders. I applied in Ellicott City, Annapolis, Los Angeles, Pasadena, and once previously in Santa Fe. They used to have the most annoying paper application of any retail store, two pages front and back with a request that the applicant list and describe employment and account for periods of inactivity over the last five years. I filled out that application maybe eight times, over the course of six years. I still have hand cramps from filling out that application. I never got a call.

Some time around last year they changed to an electronic, internet-based application, which requests even more information (professional AND personal references, area of college focus, reasons for leaving previous positions) and then had a personality test to see if the applicant is a leader, friendly, talkative, enjoys large groups, likes going out or staying in, enjoyed high school or thought about dropping out, likes filling out personality tests, likes lime with restaurant water . . . for thirty-five web pages. Five questions on each page. Filling it out eats up more time than the verbal portion of the S.A.T.s I did the electronic application in November to maybe get a Christmas season job while I wasn't at the library. I called them twice to ask if they were hiring, and went to the info desk to see if I could speak with a manager about my application. No response.

All I wanted was to be a bookseller. Most people might think that three years of supermarket, restaurant and cafe work, a job at a library, a four-year degree from a prestigious book-filled school, might make my application stand out.

I applied one more time last month, finally got an interview which went well, set up a second interview which also went well, and was hired . . . to work in the cafe.

I would have taken it, because I could use the money, and cafe workers still get a store discount; maybe if I stayed there for a few months, I could even be a book seller. Actually, I did take it, but two days ago I called back and turned them down. The other library supervisor quit, and once spring break is over, I will have thirty hours and five work days a week at the library and so I likely couldn't work out a good schedule at Borders. It could have been so beautiful.

I went out today to a place called Bobcat Bite, miles outside of town where the trees form the closest thing to an ocean within two hundred miles, and the road looks like it's going to ascend to the sky after the next turn. The Bite itself is a small shack, about the size of a medium gas station convenience store; only half of that is tables. There's a large, hilly gravel lot, and a roofed porch where people can wait to get inside. The building is wooden, with a picture window and wall mosaics of kachinas on both sides of the door.

(Jess, is this the place you wanted to go to? I'm sorry we didn't make it. Hopefully over the summer. Scott, you might want to consider building up a meat tolerance. Greg, continue writing the blog.)

Alanna asked me if I wanted to go with her, because she felt like having a burger with somebody. She was inviting everybody who's in town over spring break, and two other people came, one a senior in Annapolis, the other a Santa Fe '06 graduate. Alanna and I got there first; she had written my name on the dry-erase board (complete with an inlaid photo of a bobcat) tacked on the outside wall, used as a table list. "I never like writing my own name on those things," she said. I wiped my name off and put hers. I don't like taking the responsibility of communicating with the staff. We talked loosely for a bit, and then a waitress came out and looked at the board. "A-lane-a?"

"Yes."

"We have a table if you're ready."

"You can skip us. Two other people haven't shown up yet."

Then she erased her name and wrote "Byron", the '06 graduate.

Saying that we weren't ready yet was perhaps a bad play. Her friends arrived around 7:15; we got a table a little bit after 8.

When they showed up, I realized that I recognized both of them, and they both recognized me. I stayed quiet for about half an hour, because that's just how I roll. I roll observant. I found that both of them are a type I never really got to know at St. John's: social, thin, aware, a little bit artistic, interested in word play and constantly acting out impromptu comic roles. Then again, maybe that describes most of my friends in Annapolis and I just didn't know it. Yes, come to think of it, that describes most of my friends in Maryland in high school too. Huh. This is something of a revelation. I'll definitely have to think about this more. For some reason I'm fascinated by the sort of relationships I observed tonight. I definitely lack them now for the most part, and even in the past I was always in the outskirts. People who have a response when asked, "What are you doing this weekend?" People who tell stories about things that happened to them in the last month. People who always seem to be keeping an eye on everyone around them to make sure they're being approved of. Does this make sense to anyone reading this? I've always thought that I perceive people in a way others don't recognize, and I feel a bit embarrassed when I try to describe it because it sounds like I'm full of shit.

Anyway, Bobcat Bite. Yes. The woman who had earlier mispronounced Alanna's name popped out every ten minutes and gave us updates on the table situation. We were waiting for one of two parties to leave, because there were only two tables that could seat four people, and each time she had to tell us that we couldn't come in yet. Finally, just before 7:50, she took our order while we were still outside, because they shut down their grill around then. Alanna kept asking people if we were also really hungry, or also excited, because she likes to create bonds, I guess.

Some of the people finally left, and we sat down. Everything looks very humble inside, with a six-stool bar, five round wooden tables, and pictures of Bobcats all over the walls. There isn't much room between any of the tables, and everyone is close to one wall or another. Our food came a few minutes after we sat down, and oh, wow, I've never seen burgers that look quite this good. These things are as thick as two ordinary burgers, perfectly formed and grilled, thick and juicy. This doesn't translate well into words, maybe, but afterward, Alanna asked me, "Do you feel the passion yet?" And I did. It was the first time I ever felt an inward glow after eating a hamburger. It may just have been my body's diversion of energy to my stomach to begin digesting this monster, but I felt it. Like I'd just finished swimming in the ocean, or touring a room full of Klee paintings. I just wanted to smile. It was a hamburger high.

I am nearing the end of Flaubert's works after a month and a half. I've been reading them along with Frederick Brown's biography of Flaubert, published last year. This is the first time I've read everything an author wrote; I did it almost on a whim, although not exactly without reason.

I've read his books so quickly that I don't think I learned much from them, at least not as much as I could, but I've gotten something from them. Each of his books is different from the others, and everything he wrote in maturity is masterful. His interests and affinities were somewhat cramped, but his talent was unbounded. The novels stand apart from their time, as do those of all great writers; but I can't help thinking that something about them is even more set apart than other authors, that they are, in some way I can't place yet, intensely unique. Flaubert seemed to have no direct predecessors or followers. He took influences from many places but made something new with them. Many authors who came after him revered his books, but none that I know of wrote in the same vein. His works aren't part of a literary movement, and they don't seem to be products of their time (aside from the fact that they're set against the noteworthy events that took place in France during Flaubert's life). Even the most original authors, Melville, Joyce, Woolf, Nabakov, seem at least in retrospect to fit in with aesthetic trends and to exist in a community of related ideas. With Flaubert, there's nothing of the sort.

I find his life interesting as well. Flaubert impresses me as almost an alter-ego, if I had more dedication and talent. He revelled in silliness mixed with mockery, chose certain subjects of study and researched them exhaustively, and when he was writing, had style ideas rather than story ideas. But he also had ideas about relationships with women that are completely unlike mine; survived on family wealth, which I can never expect to do; and knew what he wanted to do with his life.

The idea of seriously studying literature has been a half-formed ambition of mine for some time. I still haven't figured out how best to go about it. I started studying Flaubert almost by chance: every month I read Library Journal along with the other librarians, to see if there are any books I think the library might want to acquire. Last month's issue mentioned Brown's biography of Flaubert, stating that Brown was an accomplished scholar who had succeeded at writing a definitive biography. This got my attention, since when I had read "Un coeur simple" senior year, I was impressed by how singular and origingal it was, and I've wanted to examine Flaubert's other works ever since. The library happened to have Brown's book, so I started looking through it right then, while at work, just to see what it was like; my interest grew as I read it, so I checked it out. As it began to describe the periods of Flaubert's life when he was writing his books, I decided to read each one in turn as I got up to them in the biography, so that those sections wouldn't be blank spots for me.

This is pretty indicitive of how I go about choosing what to study. I keep meaning to come up with a more logical plan for myself, but until I do, my passions will ignite and cave in on themselves almost on a regular schedule. I can't tell which of these passions would hold the most interest for me in the long term, which I would like to study in graduate school. I can't even tell if I would ultimately enjoy studying literature specifically, or if it's just curiosity.

My goal with studying German is to commit myself to a single language, randomly chosen for all intents and purposes, and master it. I've always wanted to learn a language but kept cycling from one to the next, and so I decided to pick one and linger with it. I'm hesitant to do something similar with a more broad academic study, such as the study of literature, because it would be an even more extensive commitment; because conceivably not all subjects are equally rewarding; because it's less clear how to go about it logically than it is with langauges; because almost every subject seems related to others. This is one of the great nagging questions of my present life. It seems that up until the day I die, I will be searching for the meaning and direction that should determine all of my actions. My search for meaning is a logical search, based on the clarification and exclusion of options, the desire to gain more complete knowledge so that I can manage my time more reasonably, and constant curiosity about the things I'm not doing, the people I don't know, the times I don't live in. Incidentally, Flaubert parodies just this sort of passion in his last, unfinished novel, Bouvard and Pecuchet. Perhaps if only had finished the book, I would know what to do with my life.

My tongue has blisters all over the side, where it came into contact with a mouth guard a dentist told me to wear while I slept because I was grinding my teeth. My tongue has hurt for four days now. I think if I knew it was going to continue for the rest of my life I'd commit suicide.

When I showed the blisters to the dentist, she told me to take Benedryl, and now I am sleepy all of the time. I have become even more sleepy than I normally am. Even when I wake up, I can't concentrate on anything for more than two minutes before I

I went to the hospital two days ago to get a cocktail frank transfusion. It was risky, but I probably wouldn't be alive to write this without it. I was strapped to a confectionary oven for two hours, receiving liquidized hot dogs in one arm, mustard in the other. Nurses and receptionists were standing around chatting with each other in the hallway in voices so annoying that if I had forgotten where I was, that alone would remind me; and the doctor was busy putting on a puppet show of the temptation of St. Anthony when he should have been taking the needle out of my arm, but thank God, I got enough coctail franks to last me a few more days. I woke up this morning, finally, and found that the transfusion had been entirely successful. The doctor said that if I become hungry again, I should be okay with store-bought cocktail franks. I am eating twenty of them right now.

We have gotten two packages of the highest import in the last week. The first was a small FedEx box which we came home to find on our doorstep on Wednesday the 27th of February. We didn't see it through the gate, but once we turned the corner, we saw immediately what felicity was now ours. Indeed, we felt like documenting the moment, so I unlocked the door and Anne got our camera and took pictures of the box from many angles, then I took pictures of Anne walking into the house with the box, opening the box, and finally removing its contents: a pizza from a Brooklyn pizzeria, frozen and so full of delicious that it cost nothing to ship. It was packaged inside of a plastic bag, with four rows between wax paper, two slices per row. We infused the pizza with heat and crushed red peppers, ate it, and hibernated for the next several days, having taken in enough deliciousness to simply rest in contentment.

The next package came on Friday, this one considerably larger and clearly containing something even more awesome, since it had a physical presence that was difficult to ignore. "It must be Jess's wedding gift!" Anne said, and she attacked the taped center with scissors. Once she got it open, she began to jump and sing impromptu hymns to joy. We now have a fondue pot. Last night we found a can of Sterno, and tonight we will, for the first time in recorded history, melt cheese and dip bread and apples and broccoli into it in our very own home. We are sending a letter of thanks to the Swiss government for the invention of fondue, and another to Jess, for whom we have begun praying that he be accorded the status of a demigod. With this much deliciousness, I will no longer have to be awake more than two hours of the day, just long enough to enjoy the fondue.

I've spent almost the entire day at the library doing work. My bad dog allergy seems to be clearing up. My book dust allergy is reviving.

I've started work again after my epic month-long unpaid vacation. I think I'll be writing at least a bit more now that I'm back at what Kay once called an internet job. My break has been startlingly unproductive, even when I take into account two colds, a stomach flu and dog allergies. My exercise has faded into a memory, and I have grown outwardly. I have finished only one book, which was about 180 pages long. My German lessons have fallen a bit behind, which is particularly critical since I have to return it at the end of this month in order to get a refund. More regularly, I have passed from one obsession of old English plays to another, Roman history, and right back to not caring about much of anything.

Also, Buffy.

Laura's dogs are bad dogs. I tell them often, such as when I come into the house and they jump on me and bark bark bark bark bark bark jump bark and then start chasing each other and barking and whining. I tell them in the morning when they wake me up three times even after Anne has fed them and I tell them they're bad, because they're bad. I don't like the dogs. I want to set them on fire for the heat. Also, they ate my slipper, and Anne's boot, and a box of cookies, two boxes of cereal, a bag of cashews, a box of pizza with green chile and pepper (and the packets of straight hot pepper, and the container of marinara sauce), and the fourth season of Buffy. I tell them they're bad.

Also, I don't like them because they are loud and big and ugly and they smell bad and I don't like them. Well, they're sort of cute, they're just also bad. Especially Rosie and Charlie, they are extra bad. Plus, too, also, they hump each other a lot.

This New Years I have resolved:

1. to eat less puppy meat
2. to be even more like Werner Herzog than I already am
3. to clean up the crumbs that are always falling from my pant legs onto the street
4. to shave less, and jump on the bed more
and finally,
5. to finally beat the first Zelda

Laura offered to have us housesit for her, so we went to learn how to take care of her animals. None of them are as needy as Tesuji, except for the dogs. They tried to give away one of the dogs, Rosie, three times, but she keeps coming back. She is an alarming combination of puppy and train, with the energy and interest in humans of the one, and the massive force onslaught of the other. As soon as the dogs were allowed inside, Rosie ran to each person in turn and jumped onto them with her front paws to sniff their faces. We were standing in a little hallway between three rooms, so Rosie had to make use of every inch to wriggle and turn from one person to the next. The other three dogs wanted rather than demanded attention; they rubbed legs and chased each other, and sometimes they shuffled over to their water bucket to slop some up. If not for Rosie's intense sniffing and slam dancing, the dogs would have seemed normal. Before Laura put the dogs back into confinement behind the office door, she asked us if we wanted Rosie, just in case. Even if I wanted her, I'd be afraid that she'd eat Tesuji like she killed and ate one of Laura's chickens.

For the next couple of hours, while we made a gingerbread house with Laura's children and Kay, the dogs scratched at the office door and howled as though there was a beast after their lives. Laura's five-year-old, Zeb, sprinkled gummi bears on the roof and sides of the house with enthusiastic determination, until they had overtaken the structure. The seven-year-old, Sadie, rammed twizzlers through the windows like a fallen tree. In a sick twist, the manufactureres had added sugar people, a grandmother and two children, to watch as their house was demolished. Anne took particular pleasure in describing the carnage and got Laura's husband Paul to take pictures. She wants to get another house and a video camera to more thoroughly present the tragedy of the grandmother. Shots of monster hands, walls being torn away, and that sugar face staring up at the sky and smiling.

We are goiong to the got to sushi and we eat it in Albuquerquteead. There is the rtsulshsi in there. LI I get some too with the sucashi.

We are goiong to the got to sushi and we eat it in Albuquerquteead. There is the rtsulshsi in there. LI I get some too with the sucashi.

This is content. SCoTt has an elfin FACE. Anne is absent and probably p. p. I just watched the Fall. The Fall. SchTt hasf ne elfinf ACE. ANnnnnne elefant face. Elephant?

I am now winnning thee ellecshun. Peeple frum all over thisgreat nation are voting for mee! I am winnning all of the vots.


Thank you forr yore support.

There is a rat in the wall in the back room of the library scratching out a message in Morse Code. The message warns me of danger. There may be a flood; at the least, a hard rain is going to fall.

I have been reading a book about Gershon Shofman for several days. It seems to be one of the few traces in English of Shofman, who wrote Hebrew short-stories from the early 1900s until the 1960s. I found Shofman's name in an introduction to Knut Hamsun's Hunger, where Issac Bashevis Singer lists him among about ten authors of modern fiction who Singer claims were strongly influenced by Hamsun. I have yet to find any credible evidence of this influence, but looking the authors up has introduced me to people of quite different talents, and also led me to question my abilities to tell a story. These men each told hundreds of stories about people doing everything people are capable of. Sailors play impromptu surgeon at sea and kill their patient; a man whose wife left him while on a honeymoon in Italy kills himself; victims of a plague in a small mountain village amass in a church where the impious mock them; a Russian Jew living in exile in Vienna fears violence from his fellow exiles when he roots for a Russian boxer. I'm afraid that I don't have any stories to tell, and that if I were to write, very little would happen. I have a mundane mind and a static life, where the main elements are simply boring: steady employment, books, colleges; steady employment among books in a college; frequent oversleeping; a collection of idealistic friends, among whom only Steven does anything particularly unusual. I'm not oppressed and I'm not powerful. I have few connections with the world, and I often don't believe that I understand the world. I feel like I would have to find something exciting to write about with any conviction, but nothing is ever in my mind. Mind, why are you so empty?

Today Heather, the Technical Services Librarian, showed me the end result of cataloging, where we take the records we have created and import them into Horizon, the library program used for checking books in and out and as a database for searching.

She was hesitant to come out of her office, as she doesn't like the public. I come into work earlier on Mondays specifically so that our schedules overlap and she can help me with cataloging, but either Laura or I has to get Heather and tell her that I still need instruction. Last week she didn't leave her office. Today I asked her to come.

Once she got behind the circulation desk, she carried a Johnnie chair over to my computer and showed me the steps for importing. Neither explaining nor listening were problems for her: I was able to follow everything she said, and she had relevant replies to my questions and comments. I knew by her pause as I readied a pen to take notes that she interpreted my actions appropriately. An observer might have thought that she was perfectly comfortable. Little things, though, showed that interaction itself was fearful to her. When I spoke, she sat far back in her chair and half-flinched, almost as though she wanted to escape. She continued doing small steps on the computer without any comment while I was turned to help people who came to the desk. Her eyes seemed more active, her hands surer, when she was looking at the computer screen and typing, or manipulating one of the books I had cataloged. Aside from a few small jokes said almost as though for herself, she directed all of her attention to explaining the main task; when I asked questions, she answered them directly and then picked up where she'd left off. She spoke of nothing extraneous, and filtered my presence in such a way that she would be able to respond only to my interest in cataloging. Whatever I said was stipped of color, implication, and alternate directions, and analyzed only for what related directly to cataloging. For her, my role was cataloger and nothing else.

When she was done explaining, she picked up all of her things and went back to her office, and soon after went home. I tried to import some more records after she left, and got stuck on a single point which I was unable to figure out in an hour and a half of experimentation and coaxing of the computer. I tried all the rather few options, looked over my notes, searched my memory of what Heather had said and done, and still couldn't figure out how to proceed. My actions were muddling up the Windows files, and I started to get scared. I had broken Horizon! Eventually I figured out what I had done and managed to import the records in a different way, but I still couldn't figure out what the proper way was.

Two student workers showed up when they were scheduled to, and I decided to leave the computer and move on to a non-desk job. My new task was to spot-check the students' shelf-reading, simply making sure that they had placed all the books on the shelves in the correct order. I started looking at the call numbers, and found that without transition, I felt depressed. I started wandering what the point of this work was, and couldn't see why I had been happy about life just a bit earlier, had been excited about such futile little things like the books I planned to read, the German language.

I examined myself and realized that even so small a failure as not being able to import catalog records was enough to puncture my sense of self-worth. This realization stopped my thoughts from swirling, but I still felt hollow inside and near tears; I was able to laugh at the absurdity of this condition, but I couldn't change it immediately. I wanted control over that computer! I wanted its functions and operations to accord themselves with my will! My inability to control it was like a crack in the foundation of my mind, which caused the superstructure, my priorities and my self-image, to lilt and waver. Only my self-control prevented the whole tower from collapsing. Because Heather was no longer there, I could get no resolution, and even though I tried not to think about the problem, the mood lingered. I wonder if I'll dream about this later, and I wonder what the computer will represent.

We were awoken by a phone call at 8 o'clock one morning; we let the answering machine pick up. Michael's voice said "Leave a message for Anne and Greg after the beep. If you're calling for Ted and Michael, you can reach them at . . ." Then we heard our landlady saying, "I'm calling to let you know that I'll be coming to the house on Wednesday around 9:30 with the plumber to look at the hot water heater. I don't think I'll have to come inside." In the silence that followed her voice, the pale morning sun, usually the sign that we could sleep for several more hours, was suddenly hostile and ominous. Would we have to wake up into this sunlight before she came, or could we stay in bed and hope that she didn't enter the house? The situation seemed unreal, uninterpretable, incommensurable with our lives. I fell back asleep and when I woke up, I was reminded of the call by the message that had been left on the answering machine. I still couldn't incorporate it into my expectations for the future. How could anyone come into the house at 9:30 in the morning? It was like living under a totalitarian police state. I couldn't conceive of having to get up so early, and as a result, I didn't think about it and acted as though it wasn't going to happen. I went to work as normal, and went to sleep at my usual late hour (around 5 a.m.)

The next day, Anne had set the alarm for 8:30. We sat in bed for a while listening for the landlady and waiting for her to be gone. Around 11, I asked Anne if she wanted to go to the Farmer's Market. We weren't sure that it would be safe to leave the house, but when we opened the door there was no one there. We went and got delicious food.

We got another early morning phone call the next day, on the prophesized Wednesday. The machine spoke to the silence of the hollow room at that ungodly hour of 8:30: "Hello, Anne and Greg. Actually the plumber and I will be coming into the house after we look at the hot water heater, so that we can check the gas heater, that little thing in the corner, for carbon monoxide emissions. Also, if it's not lit, we'll light the pilot, or else turn it on low. It won't take more than half an hour, I don't think. I'll be over soon. Bye." Dust began to settle over the horrible words; Anne and I strained our eyes against the sunbeams pouring in from the skylight and tried to make sense of the situation.

"Why is she coming today?"

"I think I remember now, she said Wednesday in the first message."

"What should we do? We can't be in bed. And what if she sees the cat?" We never told the landlady that we had a cat.

"We could put the cat in the car, and all of her things under the bed, and just go driving," I said.

"Why does she have to come into the house? Goddamn."

"I don't know."

For the next fifteen minutes, we descended chaotically upon the mess all around us like lazy maids a few minutes before the master was due home, sweeping up leaves and kitty liter, washing dishes, packing cat-care items and mice toys under the bed. It was 8:57. "The cat carrier!" Anne flung a chair into the bathroom and stood on it to open the storage closet that's in a wall recess above the door, and I arranged the bedclothes so that they covered what was beneath. We then persuaded Tesuji to get into the box, with the rhetoric of our pushing hands. There was still a huge pile of clothes, overflowing from the hamper. "I guess we could do this while we're waiting," I said. I lifted the hamper, Anne grabbed some snacks, and we fled with the laundry and the cat, locking the door behind us. The sun had an evil brightness so early in the morning, and the air smelled busy. We went up to campus to start washes, and on the way we noticed a little strip of a park along Old Santa Fe Trail with a long, columned wooden shelter and benches sitting among an expanse of chimisa, dust and Birch trees. I parked by the laundry room in lowers and we brought the two hampers down; then we realized that we hadn't brought the detergent. The laundry went back into the trunk, and I moved the car to my library spot. Not having anything else to do, we browsed the bookstore for about an hour and then returned to the car, where the kitten was mewing in confusion.

"I hope they're gone. It'll be 10:30 when we get back." But when we pulled up to our street, we saw an telltale white van parked in front of the mailbox. We couldn't get our detergent, because it was in the house. We decided to go buy some at Albertson's. Tesuji cried softly.

"She doesn't like it in here; she must be hungry. Poor Tesuji."

"Maybe we could get her some food and let her outside in a park."

So we did. I drove to Albertsons, where we bought detergent, two cans of wet cat food, a collar and a leash, and then we went back up to the park we had seen. In the parking lot, Anne attached the collar and the leash, and we took Tesuji for a walk over to the first bench beneath the shelter, where there is long pathway bathed in shade. We let the cat down onto the ground and watched as she shivered for a bit at the car noises, and settled in to investigating as she calmed down. She sniffed the ground, lingering over the first small plant she came to, and then started circling around chewing on beech bark that lay in the gravel. A white-haired man walked by, carefully stepping around us and smiling down at the cat. Tesuji started to get more bold, and all the leash could do was restrain her, so we sat on the bench and gave Tesuji her food. She stuck her nose in the can and greedily swallowed what was inside. As she sat licking herself, I wondered if she needed to relieve herself. "This whole place is made of kitty litter," Anne said.

I shifted the dirt beneath my foot. "Maybe she'd like something softer, though."

"You could try over there, by the weeds." I took Tesuji to a patch of more sand-like dirt by a large growth of weedgrass further back from the road. Tesuji sniffed a bit and then wandered off toward a nearby bush. I picked her back up and we went back to the car, drove to campus, and started a wash. The white van was gone by the time we got back to the house, so we let Tesuji roam free once more over the mountainous chairs and the pool of comforter and sheets.

Two days ago Anne and I were sitting on the bed reading at about 2 pm. It was a bright, warm day, one of the rare days lately without precipitation. We had woken up only a few hours before, and once we felt like it, the plan was to drive up to the Ski Basin to look at the trees turn, as Kay had suggested to me. There is fall even here, for those of you who don't know. Anne and I were both just finishing up chapters, about to shower, when we heard a woman's voice through the window shouting "Get off of me! Don't touch me! Get off!" Her voice was full and loud, but she sounded more annoyed than distressed. She was maybe two houses away. "Don't touch me. Oh my God!" She said this last almost like a valley girl, but at a full scream. Maybe she was three houses away; maybe she was the next block over. There was silence, and then she shouted, "Somebody call the police! Don't touch me! Get off me, you jerk!" Anne looked at me. I went to the window to see if I could get any more information, but the situation wasn't any clearer. Anne picked up the phone and dialed 911. She told the dispatcher what was going on as best she could, laughing nervously the whole time because of the uncertainty. What was going on, to whom, and where? Was time running out or wasn't it? What would the police even do when the got here? She didn't know what to say when the dispatcher asked for an address, so she gave them ours and said we didn't know just where the screams were coming from. While she was talking, I ran to all the windows to see if I could tell any better; I could see nothing but the neighboring houses, silent and unmoving. Anne hung up and said the distpatcher told her that someone else had called as well, but she didn't know if they were sending the police or not. We still heard a few screams, still sounding intensely annoyed, perhaps fearful, and saying the same things, with no other person's voice accompanying it. I have no explanations that make any sense. My only thought, and a pretty unlikely one, is that the neighborhood retarded kid had grabbed on to some stranger woman and wouldn't let go, but that doesn't work, as it would most likely happen in the street, where someone close to the scene would soon have come to help her; and for which she probably wouldn't have asked for the police anyway.

Since she was still shouting, if seemingly without much fear, I wondered if I should go out and try to help. I was still in my pajamas, but maybe my presence would scare off whoever was doing . . . something . . . to someone . . . somewhere. I reached for my pants and asked Anne. "What would you do if you went outside?" "I don't know." I put my pants down, but I felt paralyzed and thoguht that I was failing. I wondered if anyone else on the block was trying to help. The screaming came less often, and I didn't know where to go, so I stayed in. A few minutes later we heard police sirens, and then the sounds of an ambulance, winding around the community trying to find the woman. We no longer heard her voice. After a while, the sirens stopped and the afternoon was quiet again. Anne and I went up to the ski basin, and the trees were beautiful.