kerouac says

i'm looking everywhere for the thing that will make the different. voice lessons. new pills. a plan. i'd like to be unquestioningly hungry for something i can work for and then get.

in the midst of it all, the monkey continues charming. we went to the berkshires for the weekend, figuring cheap motel nookie was easter's most glorious gift. we rambled, we ate, we gave each other candy in baskets. on sunday we had brunch with friends of mine who have produced a beautiful baby. we watched this baby grokking his bouncy seat for a long time, and then the monkey said, "i want one."

really? i asked. you really want a baby? the monkey has been nothing but ambivalent about potential babymaking, even going so far as to intimate that the only real reason to procreate is that i find it necessary and he'd hate to make me unhappy. i started to get tears and i touched him tenderly on the arm.

and he said:

"i meant the bouncy seat."

oh, hilarious! it took me twenty minutes to come with something both honesty and only minimally embarrassing, and blogger ate it when i tried to post. i guess it'll be another ten days. i'm going to go eat some more fucking chocolate cake.

"reliably unhappy."

so tiresome. so unattractive. so . . . not interesting.

for the last few years, my mother has been sending me an email about this time in march that says: where were you one/two/three year(s) ago today?

the first time, i had to admit i didn't know. the answer was: in paris, with my mom. i went with the baron to see amelie on a saturday, realized i was free of most of the things that keep people home and had seven hundred bucks saved, and bought airplane tickets on monday. my mom happened to have had a horrendous and humiliating experience at work that week, and took me up on my offer to come with (the room had two beds, and i thought . . .). at first i was disappointed. i'd gotten used to the idea of being in france alone; i thought the solitude would be romantic.

really, though, it would just have been lonely. i was glad she was there. we ate potato chips in afternoons back at the hotel room, we shoe shopped once. i spent lots of time out by myself photographing cemetaries and eating bread. we went to see an english-language movie one night, and she went back the next night without me to see part of a david lynch retrospective. my mom's usual taste runs more to mary higgins clark and big budget flicks. paris is a magical place.

i was in a relationship when i went, but i ended up fooling around a little with an expatriate. mostly, i think, in order to have kissed someone on the pont neuf. i remember ruminating, and being frightened, about how i couldn't seem to make out with someone with out eventually becoming either bored, disappointed or bereft.

i'm glad that got resolved. i wish the life i had now lent itself to more paris excursions, but the making out is stellar.

the one who's least afraid came to the city for a week, and it was grand. mostly grand to have her on my couch in my little apartment in queens. of all the friends, the big ones, she's the one i'm most often so protractedly away from. that makes couch and coffee time somehow more the more satisfying, although the traipse through manhattan's value clothiers was nice, too.

i saw her dance, and i felt like it must feel when you see your kid up there. it just melted me, seeing her face. one of the ways i know her is by knowing what she looks like in motion, and it'd been a long time. she was always good, but she got gooder. gooder and grown-up. and, man, she is one of the most beautiful things.

i got this sort of mildly inappropriate clinginess, watching her. it's happened before, with the pretty princess and the best one and some other friends, so i have to believe it has more to do with what is and isn't going on in my own life, that i feel the need suddenly to give someone a kidney to prove how much she matters to me. i'm sure it's because things are iffy right now in my own doings. but i'm also sure it was because she's intrinsic, she's built-in, and she's necessary. in this sort of basic, indoor-plumbing kind of way, life would seem like a big step backwards without her.

in a city in which very few things are reliably pleasant, i have to give it up for the russian coffee cart guys. they are delighted to see me. they teach me new names for doughnuts. their accents are, pardon me, adorable. and their coffee costs sixty cents, which is about what i can afford for a warm welcome, these days.

the grandmother has survived the operation. she's now just a sad old lady without a leg. my mother says she doesn't seem to realize it's gone yet, but i suppose there's plenty of time for that. she says, also, that my father is exhausted. it makes me want to give him something. nothing will work, so i'm going to send a giant hallmark card to my grandmother in the hospital. something very gilt and cabbage rose.

in other news, i've taken a hiatus from the show. despite mounting evidence (see above), i'm tempted to say life is too short--at least to pour energy you can't spare into a big pit.

what is up with my being prohibitively busy all the time, my whole life?

suspect. it sounds very suspect. we'll see what this experiment yields.