I lost my sense of humor sometime last night. I’m not sure exactly when, but I woke up this morning and it was definitely gone. It’s weird because I didn’t do much yesterday — usually this stuff disappears with your cellphone or car keys when you’re drunk as a skunk in the Mission. Could it be in my building’s laundry room? I looked all over my office but it’s certainly not lying around. I even tried calling it but I didn’t hear anything (though I might have set it to “vibrate” before I left last night).

The Lad and I are hopping a plane to Seattle tonight to gape at Emily’s new sprog so I guess I’ll have to live without it this weekend, unless I can get to a Walgreens and pick up a new one. I just hate to buy another when I know mine is sitting around in some perfectly obvious place waiting to be found.

Actually it might be for the best. I was kind of worried they might not let me bring it on the plane. Southwest will usually let you get away with it, but you know, humor terrorists. It would be so easy for someone to paralyze a pilot with spasms of laughter and then take over the plane and crash it into an amusing orifice of Mount Rushmore.* I hear they won’t even let Sean or Jason within five miles of an airport these days, the poor bastards.

I guess I’ve become too dependent on it anyway. I’m finding I can barely get through a day at work without it. Maybe it’s time to kick the habit once and for all.

*Which is nowhere near Seattle. Maybe my sense of humor ran off to join my long-missing spatial acuity.

Last night I dreamed I was shot in the tongue. Then the doctor who fixed me up tried to molest me. In both cases, a question of speaking out or not.

There was no pain in the dream when I was tongue-shot, but then I don’t remember much pain in real life when I pierced my tongue. Just a sensation akin to the soft give-and-pop of a pencil through taut paper. If we don’t remember physical pain once it’s over with, then why are we so afraid of it? If it doesn’t live in memory, does it count as an experience at all? As with any abstract question, I turn to Buffy the Vampire Slayer for a concrete answer. When Angel had to reverse time to make Buffy forget they’d ever been together, was it easier for her, afterwards? Did it nullify her suffering? (Or use Superman and Lois if you are a classicist, it’s the same thing.) Pain creates a vacuum in our experience, a hole we learn to shy away from. But it cannot be said to hurt once it’s done hurting–the memory or, let us say, the shadow or the echo is gone–so as far as I’m concerned it doesn’t exist. All of which is to say, shouldn’t I stop being such a baby and just pierce my belly button already?

I sold my car today. Because it’s so functional I never got attached to it the way I did with my other cars–the plucky little Honda with no air conditioning, the first Audi whose stereo had to be enjoyed through headphones. Those were the cars that saw me through high school, through Seattle and San Diego, and took me on my farewell tour of Elliott Smith on my 21st birthday. This last car was just a car.

Still, I’m utterly without vehicle now. It’s going to be harder to pull up roots at some point and move to Santa Fe, learn to curry horses, cut my hair short, become a dusty and honest girl who looks you straight in the eye. The Lad suggested that I might take the train when the time comes to leave him, but it has to be about autonomy. A car is integral to this plan.

The whole point of the last three years has been to settle down. Get my degree, get my career, get my fella, get my life in order, quit being the flakey one in my little fellowship of girlfriends. Selling my car is a big step: I’m stuck here now, in this city, with the people I know and the mistakes I will continue to make. I guess I gave up the option of running off with no consequences a long time ago, but this is the first time I’ve had to really think about it.

“It might be better if we don’t get married after all,” I told the Lad last night glumly, my head on our ridiculous table, missing my car. “I don’t think I deal with losing my options very well.”

So long, little horseless carriage. So long, Santa Fe.

Not that I am bourgeois enough to care about things like grades or approval or getting into grad school someday, but I got almost all A’s this semester, which is not so hot if you are Michele, who I think has never gotten less than an A in her life, but pretty great for me. Typically towards the end of each semester I start saying “Well, I’m only in school for my own personal enrichment, and right now it would enrich me more to play baseball/go to Great America/rewatch all seven seasons of Buffy than to really buckle down on this term paper.” I used that reasoning this semester too but I guess I snowed all my profs but one anyway. (I never deserve an A. Never. There is always something more I should have done. Always.) Renaker, the B professor, would have been hard to snow given my method of showing up for about half the classes and spending half of those staring out the window or exchanging significant “can you believe this” glances with classmates.

This is in the way of being a confession. Renaker is a fact-packed trivia enthusiast, and all his trivia was interesting to me. Why then did I scorn his class so much? It’s not like I get to spend the rest of my life listening to entertaining old men tell me stories. (By which reasoning I probably should have scorned my cowboy boss a little less as well.) In all other classes I was always appalled at kids who complained of boredom–don’t you know what else is out there for you? This is as good as it gets, you little punks. But in Renaker I got in the habit of ignorance and never escaped it.

All this soul-searching over a B. Imagine what would happen if I ever failed a class. (Actually, I know what would happen. After I failed Syntax at UCSC I dropped out the following quarter in dismay and spent the next four years wandering aimlessly across the state in a manner which turned out to look really disastrous on my resume.)

It’s possible, though, that Renaker in his aged wisdom has moved into a more Zen-ish grading policy. On the midterm, for example, people who had exactly the same answers (for reasons I’m rather ashamed to post here) were graded wildly differently. Is it possible that he picked an obscure aspect of the course–how many Wednesdays someone appeared, say, or how many questions a student asked beginning with L–and graded based on that? Or is he an academic Anubis, weighing the true nature of our commitment to the course and disregarding its frivolous outward appearances? Or did he just lose half the exams and make it all up? All I know for sure is that I didn’t earn that B by any standards I can imagine.