My God! When will it stop raining? May FLOWERS, the adage goes. May FLLLLOOOOOWERS.

Anyway, my lemon-scented geranium is going well. I had ice cream for breakfast today and then I went to see my arch-nemesis, Lillian Swift. She lives on the fifth floor of a very expensive apartment building and the walls of her apartment were all this strange but lovely rose-colored stucco or rag-effect or something and she had large faux-cezannes of oranges all over the walls and it was all very expensive. We sat down and drank bowls of coffee (for her) and chocolate (for me) while she cracked open lychees with her large white teeth and slurped up the insides and smoked, languidly, a couple of lettuce-flavored cigarettes, which I tried, but it was kind of like eating bad middle-eastern food. She crossed her legs and looked bored the whole time and told me about her husband's erectile dysfunction, but in such a way that it made him seem cool, like he was Clyde Barrow or something, and had better things to do than use his penis, like find unusual new ways to pleasure her and also new ways to knot his little pale-blue scarf over his little Frenchy coat. He has not very much hair but I admit he is sexy. His name is Arnaud, of course. At any rate, she went on & on, smoking and lowering her eyelids which were covered with a creamy pearly substance and fringed with clumpy mascara, and idly winding a strand of coarse black hair around a jeweled finger, and I sat there hating her, and on a shelf by the door she had at least five jars of beautiful-looking candied orange peel so I stole two when she wasn't looking and stuffed them into my coat pockets and said yes we absolutely should have lunch again soon this was so much fun. When I got home I spread the orange peels luxuriantly on some toast and ate it and used the beautiful iridescent ribbons that I found around the jars as little collars for my little imaginary kittens (I am going to name them Lotus and Second Best.)

I thought I would open up the old journal and uncap the old fountain-blue Pilot and have a go at recording my very secret thoughts again. Of course all of this talk of pens, paper, secrets, thoughts is all a lot of poppycock: the internet bastards have set me up with something they call a blog, which I think sounds like a Nintendo character or possibly some barf. Nevertheless, being a fictional young woman (ssshhh, I didn't let that slip, did I? Truly, I exist, and I can say it as much as you or yours can), I can pretend that these words exist somewhere in the rich thickness of the physical world, rubbed deeply into the fibers of some rare egyptian paper. At any rate, I haven't written since December; what have I done since then?

Well, to begin with, my anthropological project is really beginning to get off the ground: I uncovered one or two really exceptional new women with whom Paul is most assuredly in love, and I'm hoping to get an interview with a couple more of them soon. Sadly, it's harder to get a couple of minutes with Drew Barrymore -- or even the woman who plays Aphrodite on Xena -- than it is to get three hours and four vodka tonics out of some pathetic foreign exchange student in Paris. Who knew? Still, all those charm lessons they gave me in finishing school when I was nine should come to something, right? Certainly, being able to walk six miles with a fucking dictionary on my head has been really useful indeed.

Otherwise I've been decorating my apartment -- mostly boxes of geraniums, ceramic polar bears from the Red Rose tea cartons -- swimming in the local gymnasium (I have a tangerine-colored bathing suit for summer in which I look quite white and interesting), practicing my glottal stops, and experimenting with a number of sea-kelpy fast-hold texturizing gels, which I think might still be fashionable. I've also had six or seven dates with three or four real characters: one was my cousin's boyfriend's uncle, who sells tackle in Sarasota (near the Ringling Museum, where he took me after we knocked back six whiskeys. It was a thirteen-hour drive & we stayed at one motel and three greasy spoons along the way. Our relationship went technically unconsummated but we watched an absolutely stunning episode of Diff'rent Strokes whilst smoking marlboro ultralights 100s in bed together and eating turkish delight which I discovered in the bottom of my purse, much like a moment from The Magician's Nephew). Another was a bag-boy at the organic grocery store, and the others -- this is getting tiresome.

What do you think I should do with myself when my grant money runs out, dear readers? Please write & tell.