Who could have telescoped

that I will have arthritis in my left hip but Dr. M who was a good 40 minutes late. Apparently, there is nothing to be done save to plug on, plunket onward, do what I have always been doing: impulse-buying cookies that are a bit too stubborn to the tooth, peddling my bicycle slow enough for comfort, pining away for cats I may never own.

I hope this fit of the blues passes as it's slowing things down. We're off to the Mayan ruins for spring break next weekend. When we come back there is that scramble for door tickets to the hottest event in town: the Association of Asian Studies' annual conference, this year unfurrowing like a kingly array of weighted intellectual brows in the most dangerously shoppable city by the Bay.

But in the face of all this and that last bedraggled final I have yet to crack open like some sort of puzzling stone egg, I bought a proper red lipstick today. Wonder how it will look in daylight.

It is also comforting that Jamaica Kincaid is still listed among the English faculty at Hahved. I've heard that Marjorie Garber also walks her precious pooches in the common green. A girl is allowed to be star-struck from afar, isn't she?