“Not unacquainted with distress,” she said, “I have learned to succor the unfortunate.”

I spent the day turning into toast. So much for my vow of absence, but a day spent lounging by the swimming pool, reading old sci-fi and drinking the gift of juice was not a day wasted.

Last night I went to Dustin’s house. I always thought of him as the rich one in high school, probably because of the long private drive leading to his parents’ enormous, well-appointed home. I told him this, because of that problem I have with saying everything that enters my head, and he smiled nervously and showed me his goats. (Pygmies.) We watched this movie called Novacaine, which you think is going to be Steve Martin reprising his dentist role in Little Shop, but no. Best part of this movie? Watching Helena Bonham Carter have sex in a dentist’s chair. Worst part? Watching Steve Martin do the same thing.

He is an old man, Helena. He is an old, old man, Laura Dern.

Hanging with Dustin was nice but strange, I think due to the surroundings. Two reasonably attractive people, alone in a house, watching a movie in semi-darkness — in most unwritten languages, this is how you spell “date,” or at least “cheap sex.” On the other hand, this is Dustin. I knew him when he had braces and I had Cousin It hair. So we both sat sort of awkwardly through the movie with enough distance between us that it could go either way. Periodically he would lunge off the couch with a Mongolian war cry and smash an innocent moth with his bare hands — I think to break the tension. I hope this won’t make things weird at baseball practice. I hope he hasn’t found this URL, too.

Happy birthday, Vigils. When we were young we played in plum trees and swimming pools and spoke the irascible language of quarrelsome children in the suburban heat. Now we are old and two of us live extraordinary lives and then there’s me.

This talk pisses Katie off I think. She says, I am living in Boston sick with walking pneumonia. Where do you get extraordinary from that? Dave lives at home and rides bikes. But really I believe it’s all in the presentation. What I hear is, Katie lived on her own in New York for four years and graduated from an absurdly prestigious university, not failing to attend many clandestine poetry readings and tiny Village artist-type actions along the way, and also picking up, like a social disease, a social conscience. Now she lives in a house of poets and sex and works in a battered women’s shelter. Dave rode his bike all over hell and Iowa, spent his senior year of high school in Venezuela (a country I can barely spell), then drifted in and out of the group legend, every so often flattening out in the rumor mill. Right now, sure, he’s home. In a few months he’ll be on a farm in New York somewhere. Beat that with a stick.

Me, I’m just selling my soul little by little to the French department, drinking a lot of coffee and reading books that are bad for me. In August, when I move, my life will start again, but right now I’m hanging out in the place I go to vacation from my life. Not that I don’t love it heres, but neither is it always challenging.

Well anyway. San Francisco rears its bridged dragon head on the horizon. August, my friends. The month when we will all be shaken up like dice and tossed out again. At least some of you are coming closer, not that that makes up for Michele possibly leaving, the dumb bitch. And with this charming descent into profanity: end blog.

Oh, p.s., credit where due: the link to the slang page in yesterday’s blog was courtesy of The Lad.

Last night I dined with the Millers. I am now (not so) secretly in love with both of them. Tracy is 38, gorgeous, and acts like a twelve year old. She’s got this manic energy and, more importantly (for my ego), acts delighted about everything I say. Everything anyone says actually. Ian, her absurdly young looking husband with the dyed black hair and cowlick, spends a lot of time staring glumly at the tabletop in what I fondly imagine to be an Elliott Smith manner and being quietly hilarious. They’ve been married for twelve years and together for sixteen and they still act like I did with certain unnamed boyfriends The Lad in high school. They’re so in love with each other that I just want to sit in their collective lap and wiggle like a toddler.

Some highlights from the evening: They tried to talk me into liking the Cohen brothers — mainly by naming all their films in a pleading tone and saying “that one? You don’t like that one?” I tried to talk them into Buffy. “I just don’t get that Angel guy,” said Tracy. “What’s the appeal? He looks like Frankenstein.”

“You know what they say about men with big foreheads,” I said.

“What,” said Tracy. “They have bolts in their necks?”

Apparently I and all my lucky pals born in ’79 — many of whom Michele probably know this — are the sign of the sheep. (Oh! Brief interlude for my home crew — we HAVE to try Great Wall in Berkeley. It’s on College Avenue and the fake meat is even better than Lotus.) Those born under the Sheep are elegant and creative, but also timid, preferring anonymity. “Yep,” said Ian, squinting at me on one of the rare occasions he was not looking down, “that’s you.” I’d like to think he meant the elegant and creative part. He didn’t.

Those of you born in ’78 The Lad are the sign of the Horse. You are social and attractive to the opposite sex and have a near-manic need for the society of others. I made up the near-manic part. You should marry young in life. Avoid the Rat. Well, that’s good advice for everyone actually.

At work yesterday we had the Commencement reception for the language departments. We also had the Commencement itself but that was nothing to me since I was only in charge of feeding and watering them afterwards. It went pretty well except that what with so many people we had to be opening champagne bottles at the rate of one a minute, and Tracy and I were the only ones not afraid of the big popping sound. And Tracy doesn’t drink so imagine how bad I felt when she came to me after about her sixteenth bottle so soaked in it that she smelled like a walking wedding.

I realize that the reason I wanted my friends to have formal pictures taken together is that I am trying to squeeze them into the vacuum left by the Sicilian. The boyfriend vacuum. I guess that’s a lot of people to squeeze into a space left by only one person–and not an enormously large person at that–but there you are. I go to my uncle’s house and I see the formal photo of my cousin and her brand new husband grinning down from the mantle, and it suddenly looks like indelible proof that her life is going somewhere and she is behaving in an adult manner. I want a boyfriend (and consequently formal pictures) to make me look like an adult. Like a passport I can flash to get me into grownup country.

I also need proof that I have a crew of friends again, after not having had one since high school. All my “we’re having fun” group shots predate my college years, and I see all these huggy waterfight photos from college framed on Michele’s wall and get very jealous. It makes me a litle crazed, and that’s why I am publicly (sort of) apologizing now for sulking at Michele and Nuala a few days back and claiming that we never do anything fun, after they laughed my formal group shot suggestion out of the water.

I am still lobbying for the Edward Gorey Midnight Picnic though. I am on a manic spree of new fun having and cannot be talked down from my Club-Med-Director ledge.