i discovered that the leftmost of the interns in my office, sam, has a website. we interns do a decent amount of putzing around the net. in our travels monday we happened upon brain.com where we took the 5-minute IQ test and discovered that three of us scored the exact same non-round number, and the fourth intern, the only catholic, republican, smiley blue-eyed blond, scored one point higher. naturally it was a competition, as our interaction tends to be when we’re not watching movies. today at lunch we made it through best in show. god bless christopher guest.

feminist discussion was so interesting this evening that i didn’t even notice the attendees’ shoes. barbies: in our experience, good, bad or neutral? did we dismantle? disrobe? disdain? did we read sassy or seventeen, or both? (dude, i read zillions.) science and math: easier or harder to be a female presently therein? were the smart girls really treated badly in high skool? most importantly, perhaps, is MTV evil? my Thought is fat with food.

i slept with a koala for the first time last night. my mother, not being able to detect sarcasm long-distance, dutifully dragged a stuffed mama bear, complete with attendant baby, back from australia. or perhaps she could detect the underlying seriousness of my sarcasm. when i was seven or so, i gave my significant collection of stuffed animals away to our housekeeper’s daughter. my barbies, too; but those i was far less attached to.

my animals, which seemed to multiply every time i glanced at their corner, required attention and i was fair: though i had a favorite, a nameless limpid-eyed brown Pound Puppy, i made sure to ration out nights relatively equally among them all so none would feel left out. the responsibility of leadership. or is it ownership? i enjoyed sleeping with the Pound Puppy best and continued stubbornly through fourth grade. one day my brothers and i arrived home from school to find a daft, dopey golden retriever smiling at us on our lawn. we thought there must have been some mistake: my parents had told us, firmly, repeatedly, that we could not have a dog. yet here one was, already named sheba, two years old, and far bigger and stronger than i was. when i timidly attempted to take her around the block, she nearly pulled my arm from its socket: she dashed, i bumped along behind like a parasailer; and my parents, reassuringly, yelled: “remember, you’re walking her!”

last night my arm found the koala rigid and unfamiliar. for ten years, i’d slept holding maybe the corner of a pillow. but deeper down, some primal part of me must have remembered the simple joy of clutching the Pound Puppy, which was the only one of my collection i kept. perhaps i should have parted with it volitionally and spared myself the trauma of coming home one afternoon to find a trail of carnage-crumbs leading to my doorway and sheba’s smile full of cotton. twice, mom sewed up the eviserated Pound Puppy, but the third time there was nothing even jesus could have done. we laid the scraps to rest and i came to terms with the fact that i had a real dog now and that would have to suffice.

the koala is soft. it stares, which startled me this morning. perhaps it misses australia. or perhaps it sensed, over the course of the night, for what it was really substituting.

i only just noticed this: the guardian has listed me as one of its international blogs of note. i’m in such illustrious company as francis and lots of folks i’ve never heard of. kind of exciting, no? someone british, comment!, and find a way to communicate the accent, and i’ll swoon.

and the new harry potter director is none other than the perfect candidate. i’m stuck somewhere between delight and amazement and trying to keep from clapping my hands cuz technically i’m still at work. just think of the possibilities for those increasingly apparent harry/ron undertones!

my brother has returned from the nether regions of the globe, bronzer and buffer, bigger, both hair-wise and in general. suddenly there’re suitcases in the hallway upstairs besides the one i brought back from co|motion a month ago and used as a knee-high shelf on my floor before in a cleaning-panic i moved it out there. suddenly there are two male voices booming in the kitchen again. “you have no answers — you have diatribes.” “a milton freedman acolyte is going to say kaddish for me?” “a solution: free trade solves things.” “adam doesn’t want ranting. that’s like saying a pig doesn’t want dirt.” my brother has been home one hour and my father is already shipping him back to australia and placing an ad for a new firstborn.

after a less-than-successful attempt to have a party last nite, lana liz xandra and i regrouped this evening for more sex and the city and a homebaked cookie cake. nothing, i’m afraid, compares to the sheer joy that was turning 19. but i never expected anything to. it was gratifying enough to realize i still had the same excellent friends (hit up the egypt exhibit with becca and fam. this morning, which amounted to 20 minutes spent speed-walking through tombs and 3 hours chatting with her little boy cousins) with whom i share the same excellent taste in food and fun (tamar brought over a bottle of manischewitz with which to play I Never, a long-held dream of mine. maybe someday.)

the Cutest Person to Wake Up To slept over last night, having sped down from ny to leisure world to unicorn lane. she was waiting on my doorstep when i got back from japanese dinner with my father, grandparents, and elderly neighbors (ave. number of years since they were 20: 40) like a package thrown off a UPS truck. but thrillingly. she administered an abbreviated version of a personality test that involved envisioning 1) a desert and 2) a cube. the latter i described as “shiny, dark blue, small — cute, like a volkswagon.” it turned out that this represents how you see yourself. she, for example, envisioned a completed rubix cube. what do you think that means, i asked. i have no idea, said she. this morning, in pajamas, on connecticut avenue, we looked at each other, volkswagon to rubix cube; she drank her coffee; and i spilled my diet coke all over my lap and the bench below.

file this under Best Ever: listening to little earthquakes, having just returned from a day spent with my oldest friends. we hung out in bethesda, listening to ben’s stories about being objectified and picked up by gay men in coffeeshops and moving from there to sexuality in general. when that paled, we saw lovely and amazing. catharine keener has been my woman since the early tom dicillo days. back in the so familiar setting of liz’s house, we caught up more, noshed on challah, gave each other sex quizzes, and laughed. such gatherings beat all because we remember so much for each other of what was the pain, the beauty, the humiliation of pretending to grow up.

as i was leaving, darling xandra gestured me back. “you’re prettier than he is,” she whispered. now that’s a birthday present.

over the course of the last few days, i’ve amassed through mail more money than i will make this month. some of it — small increments, mostly — is birthday money. the cheery danish $150 made me smile. but the unexpected $400 from swarthmore made me think i should invest in stock. when else will $400 buy you an entire corporation?

other happiness of the day included my father returning. this will in turn make becca happy, my dear readers will no longer be treated to vivid descriptions of my nights kept awake by the intuition that if i let down my guard, not only will i be got, i will deserve the being-gotten. also, i watched aimee and jaguar, at long last, which made me sob — but in, of course, a happy way. lovely movie, that, if at times a little slow. and i finished revamping my 35 pages of screenplay. now i just need to proceed.

AND i got a sinfully-sweet birthday card from illinois. needless to say, illinois has never cared enough about me to send me a card before; i was overwhelmed. in its honor i will make every effort to refer to soda as “pop” tomorrow and … well, gee, what else do ill. folks do? thanks again, miz sarah.

today was my last day to be 19. the ratio of childhood years spent wanting to be 19 as opposed to wanting to be 20, incidentally, was roughly 10:1. 19 seemed like a magic number to me. sure enough, during 19 i stayed romantically in one spot throughout while physically i spent a record amount of time hopping about. i learned not to be afraid of the kitchen or of children. i lived in an apartment for the first time. i befriended midwesterners, identified as a Feminist, co-directed a play in whose cast i was the minority, went skinny-dipping for the first time and dyed my hair, spent an awful amount of time online, met people IRL, read the satanic verses, drank my weight in chai 15 times over, got picked up by a middle aged danish government-worker … a year of achievements. now if you’ll excuse me, i think i’ll go bake some oatmeal raisin cookies, watch the third man and continue to muse.

i came this close to calling an escort service last nite. i figured it’d give both of us a well-deserved break: this way we could both get a decent night’s sleep. but i chucked the plan and braved the dark aloneness alone. those of you wagering on my perserverence and independence over my over-active imagination will be gratified to know i made it through alive. unfortunately, as expected, i didn’t sleep much or well, and i felt crummy enough this morning to justify a call to karen and a delay, if not a cancellation, of our workday today.

to make me feel better, and because tomorrow’s my birthday, and because a check from dk for $150 serendipitously arrived yesterday, i popped into Politics and Prose and bought the poetry speaks book i’ve been lusting after for half a year. i choked up just looking at it on the table.

pursuant to a conversation i had with miss lana before she left, and because i stumbled across it yesterday, i retook the kiersey temperment sorter. for the first time it called me a “SP” rather than an “FP” — suddenly i’m an artisan instead of an idealist. maybe i’ll take it again just to see. like everyone else, i’m a sucker for insightful proclamations from the voices in the sky.

outside of my office, no one, it seemed, was having an overly-good start to the week. ilana called from vassar, despondent that she wasn’t interacting better with her idol. my grandparents alerted me that they returned from vermont early because my grandfather, at a hale 90, discovered that a recurring problem has flared up. jamie, who came over to keep me company during those all-important and frightening night hours, and i took turns venting. my primary frustration was that, naturally, my writing class was less than kind to my fledgling screenplay. although teacher jon called my dialogue “excellent” and made allusions to ghost world before we began the verbal dissection, and half the class whispered praise as they filed out afterwards on break, in the during criticism abounded. the sci-fi carol-kane-clone who so irritated me last week kept sneaking looks at me during the dramatic reading as though if she peered intensely enough she could intuit whether the story was autobiographical. “have you watched buffy?” she asked. “they handle the thing you’re trying to do here really well in buffy.” i smiled thinly at her and willed her head to implode. later, during the critique of her screenplay i observed that we each held in our right hands the exact same pen.

but today began, refreshingly, with breakfast, with jamie, with bantering and chummy paper reading. karen and i spent another efficient day to a soundtrack of npr. we get along well; our work-styles are quite compatable. only the lack of a salary prevents this from being the most enviable position ever. and while i was filing for her, i realized how to fill a signficant hole in my screenplay. it requires much rewriting — i half-wish i had all that empty last-summer time — and research, cuz i’m now placing the girls in columbus, ohio from the get-go. columbus, oh!

welcome, elizabeth, back from the shitlist. please wipe your feet.