For the last two days I've been driving around in a behemoth of a vehicle, a Jeep Commander. It looks like a miniature hummer of death. I'd never driven an SUV before; it feels compromising. I keep wondering what other drivers think of me, and I don't usually think that way. Do they think I should drive more aggressively because I'm in such a big vehicle? Are they apprehensive of me, or do they respect me more than they did when I was driving my little Corolla? Do the pedestrians get that sinking sensation I always get when I'm walking an SUV passes me?

And Jesus, it's called a Commander. Did I mention that already? As the name says, I'm not doing the commanding; I'm just following orders.

I guess you're wondering why I'm being commanded. When I went on Wednesday night to get my new Corolla, I took it for a test drive and found that the light on the instrument panel that normally turns on with the headlights was dark. I couldn't adjust it with the dial to the left of the steering wheel, which seemed instead to be linked to the overhead light. The Carmax agent Anne and I had (a very nice, affable and funny young UNM student named Andrew) said that they would fix it for us, free of cost, but they needed to send it to a Toyota dealer to do the work. In the meantime, they would give me a loaner. As I was signing paperwork, a service employee told me that the loaner they were giving us "is a bit bigger than the car you got." Yes indeed.

It's also a bit bigger than African elephants, cruise ships, major rock formations, and I'm pretty sure the moon. I'll have it until Monday, apparently, because that's when Carmax expects the necessary part to come in. Until then, I feel like a pretty big jerk, driving myself around in my ocean liner.

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.