Nancy: Good morning, AcmeWidget.com, this is Nancy.

Me: Hi, Nancy, it’s Monitor. Let me ask you something. In your opinion, is 103 a high temperature? Is that necessarily bad?

Nancy: Oh my god, do you have a 103-degree temperature?

Me: Well, yeah, but it’s crazy, I don’t feel all that rotten, I just have a little fever. In fact I felt like a real hypochondriac when I was taking my temperature, I almost didn’t do it. But I took it twice and that’s what it said.

Nancy: You have to go to the doctor!

Me: No, I think it sounds worse than it is. I’m fine. I’ll be there in like half an hour.

Nancy: No way. You’re not coming to work today. Call your doctor right now, OK? Do you promise?

Me: Well, yeah, but –

Nancy: Good. And for goodness’ sake take care of yourself, all right?

You know, sometimes I do this shit just to see what I can get away with. And it doesn’t exactly make me feel good to take a long look back and realize that I can get away with basically whatever I want to. It’s almost like I’m testing people, giving them the opportunity to express doubt or call my bluff, and when they don’t there’s a part of me that’s disappointed – part of what’s being tested is how well they’re paying attention, the degree of reflective thought they bring to bear on a given set of circumstances, whether they apply evaluative criteria to something or just take it at face value. I prefer to be around people who are constantly engaged with information, weighing it and questioning it and slapping it this way and that to see how it makes sense and when it begins to settle, and when Nancy doesn’t say something like, “103 is *awfully* high. Are you sure your thermometer’s not broken?” then, well, there are certain facts I must face. A few nights ago, apropos of my serial-killer documentaries which he expressed amazement I could watch as much as I do, I taught Adam the word “ratiocination.” It’s not the blood and guts and psychosis, I said, it’s the ratiocination that appeals to me, the logical deductive process by which the detective and then the prosecutorial work is done. Also, the fact that each criminal who is eventually apprehended can be seen as a victim of his or her own record of mistakes and of the mighty power of objective science. (Mistakes I mean in the sense of the perfect-crime concept, I do not mean to suggest that what a criminal is mostly guilty of is having made mistakes.) So in a strange way these programs comfort me; they reaffirm what I value and how I believe the world works.

But less loftily, I do this shit because I plain old do not feel like going to work. Don’t let me rationalize my way out of that one. And, Tuesday morning, I didn’t. I’d actually wanted to call in sick on Monday after my ehh weekend, but I’ve always felt that the Monday and Friday sick days are a little too transparent, a little too amateur hour for me. I know what I think when someone calls in sick on a weekend-bumper day, and I don’t want other people thinking it about me. So I bagged the Tuesday. Monday at the Widget we were to have received a term sheet from the company that’s been dangling the cash for the past few hungry months, and it had not arrived and did not arrive, and the snappishness-mania-exasperation-resignation that this provoked in us Widgeteers made Monday afternoon positively godawful. That evening I was very aware of as being the time period during which I was gradually expelling from my system the various kinds of tension that the day had built up in me, and that this dialectic had been going on for quite a while, daytime accumulate and evening expel, and that deflated me and made me even less inclined to go to work the next day. Plus – and, yeah, maybe this is the part where I rationalize – there are a lot of people who haven’t been showing up to work, or only for a few hours a day, on a regular basis. Plus, let us not forget, I am owed four months of payroll and I have as yet refrained from disrupting the workplace by describing, in my clinical, caustic, go-to-hell voice that is famous for carrying across great distances just how I feel about the execs’ demand that in order to preserve some hollow sense of normalcy, we all keep showing up even though we have no work. I think that I have been sufficiently accommodating to deserve a mental-health day. Actually, two of them, because after being fake sick on Tuesday I woke up sick for real on Wednesday, feverish and sleep-crashing. I slept until 1 pm. That’s not the first time that’s happened to me, although I have seldom had the luxury of having the days off to stay home for two days in a row, and the punishment of having to go to work sick has sometimes felt like cosmic retribution for having lied on the previous day, so that now I think I might have figured out how to brew my anxiety over the *possibility* of retribution into its real manifestation. But in any case, I badly badly badly needed to sleep, and I took it where I could get it. That is one nice thing I have to say about my Widget comrades, they have been more than sympathetic during my sleepless periods. Oh, and it looks like the creepy downstairs neighbors are gone – the new name is scribbled off the mailbox plate, and I think those are Amy’s galoshes drying out on the front porch, though I do not see her car or Bryan’s parked outside.

So Tuesday afternoon I worked obsessively on the compilation cds, and I cooked. It’s just beginning to un-summer here, still-bright but sunless skies and a chill in the air – I broke out the suede pants today – and to me fall has always been the time when a young woman's fancy turns lightly to thoughts of soup. I made a nice thick mushroom-barley item and a beef stew that turned out so damn good that my Irish ancestors sat up in their moldering graves with grumbling stomachs. I cooked up some squash so that this weekend I can turn that into soup too, and I made bread and an apple crisp. Today my sister, whose oven was once broken for three months without her noticing, wrote asking me how to make chicken quesadillas for a party she’s having tonight, and I went to Epicurious and got a recipe and revised it for her, tricking it down a little to allow for her decreased comfort level in a kitchen and so she wouldn’t have to go out and buy any ingredients which she’d use part of and which then would rot in her refrigerator. I have to say, that was great fun – I love cooking and am happy to do what I can to make it a less arcane art for people like Mary so they can maybe start to love it too, and it’s always such a pleasure to be of service in that way, in this instance to have drawn the line connecting “my sister” and “chicken quesadillas." If the recipe turns out well, then she is going to name it after me. It is not just anyone who has a quesadilla named in her honor.

Speaking of being of service, I also took some time the last few days to consider again the possibility of the Defense Language Institute. As you have read, one of the factors that has stymied the CIA, etc. in their ability to keep an eye on various terrorist groups is an insufficient pool of translators. I will confess, I have been having strong put-me-in-coach feelings about this – I’m smart and I learn languages with relative ease, and when I have something to work on, I work hard, I am a veritable monster of academic dedication. They could teach me Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, whatever they wanted, and they would be glad they did. CT says they’re actively looking for people to train as translators, I just ran into him in the hall, and that they sure would love fresh-faced female me and my college degree. I don’t experience patriotism the same way that most people do, as has been made abundantly clear over the past few weeks, ha, but this just seems like a no-brainer to me, almost as simple as volunteering to take over the reception desk while Nancy is on lunch. This is how I can make myself singularly useful, if they want me. And if they don’t, hey, no hard feelings. As of the writing of this paragraph, I have left a message on the voice mail of the Air Force Officer Training School recruiter in Tacoma. I do want to stress that also as of the writing of this paragraph, this is only an idea. I know I have other options and I’m not going to cut them off at the knees. But I could get serious about this one in a hurry.

Last night hung out in the hot tub on the posh deck of Adam’s friend John. Hung out way too long for my taste, as Adam and John frequently became engaged in Talmudic analysis of various NHL and English Premier League soccer teams, leaving Vanessa and me to float and nod like mute belugas – but no hard feelings, Adam, since after all it’s that great to have a hot-tub connection, it’s just that next time we’ll go in two cars. The house John shares with two roommates is lovely, painted in an appealing if girly apricot color that gives a faux Southwestern feel, and it is so clean and tidy – also mark the flowery incense burning on the mantelpiece – that you can hardly believe guys live in it. Even in the little room with the bar, which they’re setting up as an in-house pub, there’s a feeling of conscientiousness about the framed Liverpool poster and the arrangement of the college-logo throw blanket draped over the couch, an earnestness and a concern that such items make the right impression which struck me as perhaps not conventionally masculine but, for that, very dear in their own way. Let there be no doubt, though, the resident males are heterosexual. (In fact, they are considering having a Halloween party, which if they did would probably be such a good one in terms of guest caliber that I might have to put aside my current costume idea for something more alluring.) I counted three large TV sets just in the rooms I walked through, and from the hot tub I thought I saw the glow of another through the windows of what I presumed to be a back bedroom. In between the sports talk, there was talk of men and women, dating and romance, sensitivity and vulnerability. This depressed me vaguely. All parties present agreed that I am cynical, what a surprise. John said that he didn’t imagine he’d be dating anyone for about three years – though he was kidding, he’s a good-looking guy whose description of recent bad luck on the social scene would be my idea of good fortune so incredible as not to be audaciously wished for – and before I even thought about it, I was saying that yeah, this was the time frame I was looking at myself. And I don’t even really mind, I think, it just feels to me like a fact, something that can be plausibly estimated. But should I mind? CT was telling me all about Air Force postings and he said, in a tone of voice that suggested Potential Drawback, that officers could expect to move around about every two years. OK, I said, and my first thought was not of how this would hinder personal involvement with others but of Marcus, who does not travel well. Should I mind the hindrance of personal involvement, too? And should I mind that when he cautioned me, my reaction was just that, not to mind?

I do not like Gillian Welch, though I have tried. She reminds me of Sada Thompson, who used to play the mother on “Family.” Her character was supposed to be so giving and nurturing, such a beacon of love to her husband and children – you know, like all mothers are – but I always felt that the casting was egregiously wrong, because Sada Thompson’s acting is so cold and remote, she does not give of herself emotionally to whomever she’s working with. It is her you look at, not the interaction or its resonance within the larger narrative. I could never look at her and believe her as someone who was essentially defined by how much she cared, and when the other characters on the show talked about her like that, it struck a false note and made me hyperaware that this was all just television, ac-ting, from a script. Likewise Gillian Welch, whose bruised dignity and resoluteness have always seemed artificial to me, even in those Dorothea Lange-like pictures of her where she looks into the camera with a challenging and unfriendly stare. I can’t enjoy her songs through the false role she assumes and the put-on burden with which she decorates herself. Also I do not like Holly Cole, who privileges her own vocalization above the interpretation of the lyrics, though I have to say that in her version of “Que Sera Sera,” changing sweetheart-singular to lovers-plural (When I grew up and fell in love / I asked my lovers…) was a stroke of genius.

The you-don’t-even-know-how-sexy-you-are guy? Today he told me how much he missed me the past two days and insisted on welcoming me back to work with a hug. Me standing, him sitting in his chair. What part of my anatomy do you suppose ended up right next to his head? Gross.