My cowboy boss, now sober, explained the way of the world recently. “See, the Chinese believe that everything that has ever existed is still around. I mean, not modern Chinese – the ancient Chinese believed it. Thoughts, words, everything is still there, floating around. When you think you’re having a creative thought, you’re really just recycling someone else’s thought. Your creative ability is way, way smaller than your receptive ability. So, when I was learning to read ancient Chinese, I just got a big antenna and laid back and received all those old thoughts and then it was real easy. But I know darn well those aren’t my thoughts. I never had a creative thought in my life. Anything I create was created by someone else first, and me, I’m just nothing.” Pauses. Looks mournfully at the ground. “This knowledge is the reason why I’ve got low self-esteem.”

I began to present my cowboy boss with the time travel theory, but as soon as I got to my first premise (you cannot just JUMP through time; you have to travel through every second of it) he began to argue with me.

“Listen,” he said, “the theory that time is divided up into these supposed measurements, they are infinitely smaller and smaller, and seconds are just, and see people like me don’t believe in that.”

Pause.

Me: “Okay, but the units that we’re splitting time into are kind of irrelevant to my argument. See, I’m saying–”

Him: “In the beginning, the world was filled with elves.”

Silence. He stares at the carpet.

He was drinking at lunch, so that accounts for the incoherency. Sort of. Except a few days ago when he was sober, I asked him what Christmas present I should get for my friend who is Asia-obsessed (this is you, Michele) and he said that a must-have for every Asian household is a screen in the bathroom to keep out the walking dead.

The fact is, this time machine that I built is never going to work until I get the super computer running.

Consider: when you travel through time, you stay in one place spatially and just move through years. But it’s not like a tesseract or a jump: you have to move through every second of time that happens in that spot before you get to the moment in time that you are aiming for. Just like you have to move through every inch of space between you and the place you’re walking to. Granted, this move will seem to happen instantaneously, because that is what time travel is all about; nevertheless, you’re passing through all that time. And don’t you think that somewhere in the hundred or thousand or million years you just moved through, someone walked right through where you’re standing? Meaning you are dead as soon as you hit that moment. (This might explain spontaneous combustion: if some time traveler just happened to be where you are for a single instant, what else could you do but explode? Wait, I guess that only explains spontaneous explosion.)

Anyway, the super computer will avoid all this, because it will be able to identify every movement of every atom in the Universe from the theoretical beginning of time right up to the theoretical end. So you will know where to stand when you are time traveling, because it will identify the spots where no one else is standing during the period in question. (But you would be wise to pick a different spot for the return trip.)

So, even though I promised a lot of people rides in the time machine as Christmas presents, I think it would be better to get it as your Groundhog Day present. The computer should be working by then. I just have to hack into the mainframe and download the access codes.

All day today, the only sentence I can think is this one:

We’re only afraid of Christopher Walken.

My best friend Anais Nin says that “truth is coarse and unfructifying.” She says this in Incest, which is one of the unexpurgated volumes of her journal.* Anais Nin lied to all the people in her life because she believed in the necessity of illusion and imagination and beauty and D.H. Lawrence; these beliefs are the source of her woozy, circular prose which Allen found so irritating. She made each man in her life believe that he was the true recipient of all her intimacy, but the only one who truly got to know her was her diary. This is very similar to the way I operate, except that instead of only giving my true self to my private diary, I give it to this public blog and everyone gets to know me.

But that’s not actually true. I hold back some. And after we are all dead, I am going to publish my unexpurgated blog and then the world will know the truth about my life. I am certain that the world will be interested, because I find it so very interesting myself.

*It’s great fun to read on the subway, with the word INCEST written in huge letters on the cover, but it sure isn’t making me any friends. Even I am sort of offended to find myself reading it.

I got an A+ on my Shakespeare term paper. I actually feel a little goofy admitting it. If you get an A- or even an A you know you did a good job. But an A+ just means you’ve got the teacher snowed. Now, snowing authority figures is perhaps the most marketable of skills – just ask Ferris Bueller – but it’s not what I went to school to learn.

. . . But really I am pleased and proud. My professor, whom I admire immensely, told the class that my paper presented him with ideas he had not thought of before, and the man is no Shakespeare-come-lately.

In other news, I voted but Matt Gonzalez still lost. I don’t really see the point of voting if my guy is not going to win so I am looking into ways of somehow rigging the system in my favor. Surely, a girl who got an A+ on her term paper is capable of anything.

“The ancient texts say that you will know a wise man because he is running through the forest, flapping his arms, chirping, and slapping his own ass,” my boss explained seriously. “Everyone assumes that this is philosophy, but really it’s just aerobics.”

I stopped and looked around at my life and it was boring. I hold down a job, I make slow progress towards graduation, and my boyfriend is going to work for my father. I cannot continue in this line and must fuck shit up in order to be happy.

My feet are itchy. My Christmas vacation is looming. My bank account is more or less full. I need to do something new and difficult, or the last anyone will see of me is my retreat into the forest, chirping and slapping my own ass.

I had dinner with Frank tonight, because there he was and I also was there as well. He has a boat now – I mean, he had a boat when we were dating, but now he actually knows how to sail it – and is soon to be sent to Belgium to work and live. Where was all this shit when we were together and he was homeless and I paid for dinners? I ask you. But I still had a very nice time and he did buy me some soup.

“I think my favorite thing, of everything there is to do, is reading,” I said, sort of incoherently. He looked at me silently for a minute.

“You are a big dork,” he said finally.

“Whoa, buddy,” I said, “why don’t you take a second look at those fringed loafers you’re wearing before you start getting all personal.”