Sorry for the long shhh, but I've been busy! Busy, busy.

So, quickly, the rest of my New York trip: I did get a doughnut from the Doughnut Plant (blackberry, insanely good, so buttery and moist I could have squeezed it for juice), then Paul and I went next door for a fresh bialy, and then we went up the street for a pickle, and then I got roasted, candied almonds from a nut cart, and then I shopped at overwhelming, exhausting Century 21 for three hours (nothing! I got nothing!), and then I felt very woozy, kind of like I was dying of scurvy, then Paul and I went for super yummy pasta, then I went to see Todd's show, where I received and ate my own private baggie of animal crackers.

The next day I got a dozen cupcakes (vanilla ones and chocolate ones and lavender ones) at Billy's Bakery to bring to Linda and Marian's as a dessert capper to Linda's freakishly tasty homemade Indian grubbing festival. And the day after that, Todd, Josh, Alexis and I went to Chibi's Bar (Chibi is a dog, and the bar is a sake bar) for beer and edamame, and then we went up and around the corner for good, slender pizza (to the pizza-rock strains of Boston and The Guess Who) and then we went across the street for rice pudding at "Rice to Riches," the nothing-but-rice-pudding shop ("so threatening to other desserts," the take-away menu reads, "that we were told by the government to keep our recipes 'top secret'"), which is completely insane, what with the outer-space-age architecture inspired by the organicky oval shaping of rice grains. Even my bowl and spoon was rounded and designy. But I got the most wow out of the loony naming convention they use for all the puddings. First of all, the place is called "Rice to Riches." Along those lines, some of the puddings also have names that sound kind of like puns, such as "Cinnamon Sling" (riffing off Singapore Sling, I guess) and "Forbidden Apple." Then there are the pudding names that seem to have come into being for no other reason than their alliterative allure: "Pistachio Protest" and "Coffee Collapse with Cardamom." My favorites, though, are the complete huh?s, such as "Qualified Lemon" and "Stubborn Banana" and "Chocolate Carnivore." Anyway I ate a bowl of half "Sex and Drugs and Rocky Road" and half "Understanding Vanilla" (or maybe it was "Old Fashioned Romance"?), and it was good. Lumpy and weird like something removed during an elective surgery, but still ... good!

The next day I got a chocolate and pistachio ice at Louis G's (Ali G's? Kate and Allie's?) in Brooklyn with Colin and his girlfriend, Katy (sorry, Catie? Katie? Katey? Oh), and then we walked around and walked around and shopped and shopped. The day after that I met up with Jay and his girlfriend Marisa for breakfast (I had, I think, waffles with some kind of nut topping).

I didn't spend every last second of the trip eating, though. I did pause to let a cab driver advise me that I was going to burn in hell (re: being from San Francisco, and not opposing gay marriage, and being nuts enough to think we descend from apes, and not knowing the history of the demise of holy empires, and not particularly worrying about the apocalypse, et cetera). And Jay and I toured some blossoming cherry trees at the Botanic Garden, followed by the newly revamped Brooklyn museum (the Patrick Kelly exhibit was especially confusing the way we viewed it, backwards and with no idea of the theme, meaning we started with the big finale of the exhibit, a dress covered in buttons flanked by a blowup of Kelly's life philosophies, which went like, "Things I Love: backrubs, friends, chocolate ...").

And I saw Honey, finally. (Sucked! Did Missy even know she was being filmed? Was she completely blue-screened in after the fact?) Then, and this was highly coincidental and satisfying, the very next night Todd and I, while waiting for a table that would enable us to eat, eat, eat CUBAN FOOD, spied David Moscow strollng down the street. David Moscow, the actor who played the bad guy in Honey! He was awfully short. Incidentally, and this might be irony, I don't know ... Canadian irony, maybe ... or "fitting" ... or just "kind of surprising" ... he also played the short boy who wished he was wasn't and then became Tom Hanks in Big! The short actor who got his break in Big? Isn't that some kind of something?

After dinner, Todd and I, drawn up the street by ferocious growls punctuated by sharp, pointy barks ("Do we need to call 911?" Todd asked), caught a rare show of Chibi, the dog of the saki bar of two nights previous, franticly chasing and and chasing and jumping on and falling off a skateboard, again and again, up and down the sidewalk in front of the bar. It was really great and magical and worth the trip, alone, right there.

Then I flew home and immediately got that terrible, awful flu. For the first few days I thought it was a late-life onslaught of allergies, really terrible allergies, like, how on earth do allergy sufferers stand this in silence, I really can't believe it, I feel so utterly SHITTY, but ... okay, sure, I'll go out for 4 hours of private-room karaoke? "9 to 5," I guess I'll sing? And "Patience"? And "Ebony and Ivory"? I woke up the next morning just frozen with the ache of flu. Two days later, I peeled myself out of my flu-bed and forced myself to start writing my two fat final papers, which were both due four days later, the same day as the crazy final for the crazy Nabokov class. Lingering flu aside, I made the paper-writing insta extra horrible by snagging my foot on the phoneline to my laptop and irritably yanking it floorward, where the screen shattered, shattered, shattered. So to be able to see what I was writing, I had to go down to Liz's apartment to use her computer. And then for the final stretch, she let me just borrow her one and only monitor. Steve has since loaned me a monitor that he's not using anymore, which I can use indefinitely (and which made it possible to deal with the 12-page take-home Holmes final I had to slap out last Tuesday), but it was prohibitively difficult during the interim to, say, update this site. Not that that's any excuse!

Oh and somewhere in there, the day before everything was due, I got a complete Brazilian wax as a favor to Leisa, who needed someone to demonstrate her pubic waxing knowhow on as an audition for a new job. And it turns out that tearing out all your pubic hair ... sure does wake you up! Rise and shine! I've never even had so much as a bikini-line wax before, so it was kind of startling. Plus there was a woman there, sitting on a stool, eye-to-eye with my holes? Watching on with meticulous care?

After I left the salon, my crotch sending off stunned sort of buzzing signals to the rest of my body, "umm, hello? peep?" I raced back home to resume writing, writing, writing. Of course I neglected to shower and pat myself down with tinctures and ointments, as Leisa had recommended, because I was just too frantic. Instead I stayed up until six AM, then slept for three spare hours in my clothes, then got up, printed my papers, and went to school. (For the last Sherlock Holmes class, we ate sugar and drank mulled wine and staged a reading of "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle." I -- drunk, sleep-deprived, waxed -- played the goose salesman.)

Thirty-six hours after the waxing, I finally derobed to find myself covered with ingrown hairs. Bald and zitty, I felt completely foreign to myself, like I was starring in some sort of porno version of Freaky Friday (Freaky Fuckday?) and had switched vaginas with a pre-pubescent girl. Even now, three weeks later, with the ingrown hairs all healed, it still feels like I'm molesting some young thing whenever I shower.

Oh and in the middle of all THAT, I started a freelance job. I now sporadically go into a gray-cubed office to write catalog copy for 700-dollar shoes. Which involves trying ON those 700-dollar shoes. Also: free sodas.

(PS: My diary has officially moved over to my official evany.com website. Let's meet up over there!)

(PS: My diary has officially moved over to my official evany.com website. Let's meet up over there!)