2003-04-02 - 10:26 p.m.

That's not true, actually. I've been reading James Salter, and I find his writing compelling; it's not the stories, it's the writing itself, his style.. I read on the subway in the morning, and when I emerge onto the street I find myself thinking in his manner, mentally writing what I see, in his voice.

So I spent a lovely birthday weekend on Key Bisc@yne, and the weather was glorious and the resort beautiful, and we ate well and swam in the pool and walked on the beach. My brother and his family drove down for the day on Sunday, so I got to see them for my birthday. There's a picture of my niece on the desk where I'm typing, and I look at it and my heart swells. I love my nephew, too, dearly, but she... she's my girl. My heart. I look at her and I hope that I get to have that someday, get to have a daughter and see her turn eight, have her look up at me over her iced tea, with a backwards baseball cap on her head, and see her break into a grin around her straw. It's strange, the bond I feel with her, how I feel like I know her every feeling.

But did you see what I wrote up there? 'I hope I get to see her turn eight..' and I'm feeling a little of that these days. A little morbid, a little dark. Today I sat across the table from a woman I despise, an arrogant, condescending bitch I will now have to work with, and we were talking business. She sat across from me and, in a nasal Long Island drawl, wondered why business... the FASHION FUCKING business,mind you.. has been down these last few weeks. I sat there, seething, and finally exploded, "It's because we're AT WAR." I may choose to ignore it, to listen to music in the morning instead of CNN, to take breaks from the coverage and the interviews and the analysis, but it colors the world, nonetheless.

And the only thing that marred my blissful weekend was that the resort lost one of the boyfriends bags, loaded it into someone else's trunk, in fact, and stood around looking at each other when I asked what they planned to do about it. I interrogated everyone, while the boyfriend calmly filled out some report, and I hissed at him, "Aren't you MAD? Don't you care? Your bowling shoes you got in Italy, and your stuff? They have to do SOMETHING..." And so I worked my way through a stupefying maze of utter incompetence, until we got the basics and the boyfriend dragged me out. On the way to the airport, he laughed about it, "Trouble, you should have SEEN yourself with that manager. 'What do you MEAN you don't know? Who DOES know? Can you find him, please?' " And I said, I can't believe you didn't say anything, that is RIDICULOUS, and he said, "I was mad, it's just not my nature to engage like that. That's why I love when you do it, I love to watch you." And I realized, yes, that makes sense, he's extremely tolerant, extremely laid back (although very responsible) and this is the flip side. And then I thought, wait a second. I get to be the muscle in the relationship?

RIGHT. ON.

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