October 02, 2001, 2:15 p.m.

prendi questo mio strale...

back & forth

Greetings from my new job, which is ... uh, well, I don't have one. Yet. I keep wanting to say, "yet", but it sticks in my craw. So today my job was getting up at noon, making coffee in the precious little cafeti�re, listening to Handel's Tamerlano (and having the time to encore my favorite arias, as is proper). Most rewarding today: a little casserole of ceci, spinach, and gemelli, with touches � la grecque, which, in honor of the gemelli in it I wish to christen "Chickpeas Dioskouroi". I christened it so, while anointing it with another coat of olive oil. Dish out, serve with bread and a few gratings of cheese, in this case, fontina danoise.

DS, DS, DS. Contented sigh. What a nice lad. Spent all of Sunday being completely useless with him, smoking too much, listening to CD's of prank phone calls. I wonder what that means, that I'm some sort of aesthetic pushover who will like anything anybody else likes (to make a point) or else they were really funny or ... Of course It's Awkward, that's The Point. He showed me dozens of pictures of The Kid (and Kin), and taught me a new dance step. Why the hell not, then? I want to buy him shit. Tacky shit, bright orange shit. Shit that he can use in his teensy new apartment. I want to take him to cheaper and better restaurants than the one we went to for lunch. I want him to (a) stop eating meat because everybody should, really, especially the people I care about and (b) stop being so suspicious of me wanting him to stop eating meat... Hell, some of my best friends are omnivorous.

MG seems both jealous and envious of me in this case:

OK -- digression time. The folks I know generally do not have conventional Relationships. But the relationships they have with something-or-other in their lives usually maps pretty neatly onto the ordinary Way Relationships Go. E.g., EN tends to break up with bands the way the rest of us break up with boyfriends. MG tends to treat his friends the way a two-bit Don Juan treats his harem of ladies: it's all very well for him to have lots of friends, but his friends had generally better not get to close to anybody else without risking his hurt feelings. Which I understand. I don't like sharing people either.

-- End digression. MG asked me with more than the usual note of terror in his voice the other night if we were friends. I guessed so, but, put that way, [St. Jacques Derrida be my guide!] hell, I didn't know what we were. I, and every other over-educated twat I know, am pathologically gunshy of the overengorged prick of terminology. Practically speaking, though, I don't get that warm fuzzy feeling that I used to associate with friendship from anybody these days.

This question of his came while MG and I were in the midst of a long conversation about, among other things, whether or not I was enough of my own person or whether I had got myself typecast as a secondary character in everybody else's lives -- in essence, it was a question of my existential autonomy. In that 1. I ride other people's coattails, since I doubt my own ability to fascinate 2. I have difficulty relating to others without a concrete intermediary (like an introduction, a strongly-defined common interest, or sex) 3. When I got to college, I found I couldn't compete with the other attention-whores. So {sniff, sniff} a little part of me died, in particular, the part of me that could command a room. Which is exactly why I'm on diaryland. My boards, my spotlight, and nobody to upstage me.

I love it.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I'll be here all week.

a