Didn't some pop songstress, possibly Madonna, have a tour called that? Well, so do I, I guess; I'm going to visit mama mia there for a couple of weeks, in Florence, & perhaps there will be updates & perhaps there will not. Orange-flavored Dramamine and original-flavored chewing gum and light-and-easy crossword puzzles, don't fail me now!

Let us stop, stop, stop talking about how much our friends eat! (How much, of course, encompasses how little.)

Let us stop being catty about it. But for God's sake, let us also stop being sage!

Today is one of those bright, cold, beautiful days when it is necessary to put on a large black Laura Ashley hat and a long coat and a pair of excellently patterned stockings and buy a baguette and take it to the park with you. So that is what I did. I ended up eating very little of the baguette, because it was more fun to crumble it into little pieces and feed them to the ducks and geese, some of whom did me the exquisite favor of scraping their little raspy not-teeth against my palms and fingers. (Yes, I know geese can hurt you; once I saw a goose totally bite the crotch of a little boy I knew, and it was pretty awful.)

Since I didn't get to eat my baguette, I was all ready to leap into a waiting car & be sped to a rice-pudding restaurant to eat two different kinds of rice pudding with sour cherries all over them, when the IR called me on her cell phone. "Do you think it's okay to leave your baby with some people at the gas station?" she said.

"No, I don't," I said.

"Well, they're reeeally nice people," she said. "The wife already has her own baby. It's a smart baby. It can play the xylophone."

"You really can't leave the baby with some people at the gas station," I said. "Why do you want to, anyway?"

"Well, it's just that I ran into Melvin, you know Melvin, and, like, they're doing a photo shoot at his space right now, or like, in five minutes or something, and they want me to be in the photo shoot, and there's, like, a tank of water I could go in and stuff, and I think it would be really good, you know, and Melvin says they would give me five hundred dollars, and I could really use a new lens, you know, and they could get it for me for cheap, so I wanna do it."

"Can't you bring the baby?"

"Nonnie! I can't bring the baby! Somebody there would totally eat the baby."

Well, maybe she was right. "Listen, why don't I come take care of the baby?"

"Wow, that's a great idea. Maybe you could take the baby to the zoo or something."

So now I have the baby and we are going to the zoo. But not until after we eat some rice pudding.

I wonder if this baby can play the xylophone.

It's mean to make rats depressed on purpose, but what about me?

Okay, no one's making me depressed on purpose. But I recently came out of one of those months where you can't get out of bed and are always thinking about whether it's late enough for you to acceptably go to bed, because you basically aren't interested in being awake. And your room gets really dirty and you don't care, and you can't e-mail your friends, and you feel kind of a sooty residue around your brain. And you think it's probably your period coming, but your period's taking an awfully long time to come! (Don't worry, the secret answer is NOT that I'm expecting a tiny, anonymous, genderless blonde baby. Poll: do any of you have friends who don't tell anyone what their baby's sex is, and name it something like Kyle? Someone told my mom in a feminist art class that that's normal.)

Anyway, I'm feeling okay now, but I just had a bunch of margaritas with a really wonderful girlfriend of mine, who works in teen magazines and is sick of it, but who is to the world of teen magazines what I once was to the world of phone sex: smart and actually really smart about it, and expecting the teens to meet her halfway with the smartness, just like I expected my clients to meet me halfway with Pindarean odes about what they imagined my toes tasted like. Anyway, she was saying she had been depressed, and I remembered I had been depressed, and I also remembered this thing the MB and I used to wonder, which was whether maybe we were just depressed all the time. And maybe we thought we were always going into ecstasies when we saw some landscape or ice cream sundae, & thought we had access to some glittering corridor of human experience that regular people didn't experience, but maybe that's how everyone else always feels! O my chickens, I think I am a brain in a vat!

But here is a funny story: I went with a different friend to see "Good Bye Lenin," with which we were very pleased, at a movie theater that had two sinks in the ladies' room. So afterwards, we have to "change the bottle," as a terrible Italian gnome expressed it to me in a bar the other night, and when I come out of the stall I see her standing behind maybe fifty other ladies waiting for one of the two sinks. And we both stand there for ten minutes or so, and it kind of seems like the line isn't moving, and slowly it becomes clear that one sink is occupied by a couple of teenagers with long, abundant curls which they are liberally sprinkling with water, and the other sink is occupied by a well-coiffed middle-aged woman who is meticulously applying mascara. So my friend kind of makes her way to the door, and I say, "Do you have an alternate plan?" and she says, "No, I'm giving up, I'm not washing my hands."

My dear readers, I am not a sanitary lady. I observe the ten-second rule like it was gospel. I share toothpaste like it's nobody's business. I have never in my life purchased anything that guaranteed any kind of intimate freshness. I have slept on the subway with my fresh cool cheek against a pole that is teeming with homeless-people germs (I don't know why this is unsanitary, since my cheek is no more a mucus membrane than someone else's pole-clutching hand, but some fucking do-gooder told me it was.) And I contracted oral herpes from a dental hygienist & did not sue her. But I am a woman of principle, so I herded my friend back into the bathroom, and waited patiently for the toilettes to be completed, and exchanged furtive looks with the other women, and finally I said, "Um, we'd like to wash our hands, please."

The teenaged girls immediately started, and turned, and squealed. "Oh, we're sorry!" they cried, smoothing their pre-Raphaelite tresses in one last, desperate, guilty motion. "We're just standing here because there's nowhere else to stand!" They made a glittering and shameful exit, and one by one, we, their attendants, washed the urine from our delicate hands.

But the middle-aged lady obstinately remained, despite our many comments about how we wouldn't care about washing our hands, but we don't want to make anybody sick, and so on. She had finished with her mascara and was now (counter-intuitively, really) carefully washing her contact lenses in saline solution and affixing them to the delicate, oblivious, curved jellies of her faulty eyes. O middle-aged lady, I have often monopolized a mirror, but you are a new and fabulous rival.

In other news, I keep offending lesbians, for which I apologize. I mean, I already made that beaver-time comment, but that was honestly disturbing. But I've been watching the L-Word lately and now have a tendency to yell pretty loudly about different lesbian stereotypes. In context, really, it's cool. But I think my two lady-neighbors, with their Cambodian baby, may think differently. Sorry, girls! I suppose it doesn't make a difference to you that I made out with the IR once? What about when me and Iola used to lick each other's nipples through the pasties when we were strippers? We didn't REALLY care about the male gaze. Come on!