Nothing in particular went wrong yesterday, and yet, smack in the middle of it, as I was taking a series of letters having to do with my father's estate to the notary, the old, dark feeling, that heaviness at the bottom of my stomach, pulled me down again. I couldn't figure out what it was. Grief, merely? My mother and father are dead. I am now the Old One in the family.

I think it had to do with more than just me, though. I couldn't really explain it, because I love going to the notary, who is also a friendly Muslim butcher, cook, and grocer who runs a little place near the university where you can get fresh lamb or goat stew. His wife runs the cash register, which is pile high with sweets like sesame cakes and date- and fig-cookies. His sons cut the animals, which are skinned and hanging from hooks in the back, deliver, clean up, hang around. It always smells incredibly good in there, and its usually busy with regulars.

It feels like America because it's so Mom and Pop with the tiny, messy office where the father takes you to sign the documents; and it feels like the Middle East because of everything else. And when I'm in there I think--these are the kinds of people who are dying, every day, in Iraq. I also think about the soldiers, our children, the age of my youngest students, dying over there, three a day.

Yeah. Keep fighting, John Murtha.

I was telling this to a guy I went out with last night. A friend, a colleague. A really nice man, to whom I've been attracted for about six years, I guess. I'm not interested, not really. First of all, he's about 15 years younger than I am. Second of all, he's in my department, if only for a short while longer, before he goes out on the market and gets a job in some remote state. And thirdly, perhaps most importantly, he and I are both involved with other people.

He has a lot of friends in the department. I am trying to get out more, to propel myself into the world. I go for days without speaking to anyone except for the people in my yoga classes. And that's hardly a genuine social encounter. It's a few brief words on the elevator going up, going down. A "sorry" when you brush someone's hand and a "namaste" at the end of class. Actually, it's a lot. I shouldn't complain. There is also the good feeling of community that comes during Sivasana, when we're all meditating together.

And there are the cats, Big Cat and Little Cat, who greet me when I return to the house, swim around my feet at breakfast time, and skulk at the garage as I'm pulling out for the day.

The good thing about last night was that I made--I hope--a new friend. The bad thing--I drank three glasses of wine and ate, what...gluttenously, two bowls of cereal (I had to think to remember) while watching Lost on T.V.

I had worked hard, though---really hard at the library and I'm excited about the paper I'm finishing. Something that should have been published eons ago. But it's taken me all this time--and I don't exactly know why, or whether, had I not come through this long depression, I would have come to its meaning before now. It is not really important to ask about what might have happened. The important thing is that this is happening. The brain--when not drowning in alcohol--is functioning.

I'm also painting. My boyfriend (last night I dreamt that I was embarrassed by him, that I was introducing him sheepishly as 'the man I'm dating") has been gone for over a week and I don't really miss him. I love sleeping alone. I love not having to kiss him or explain why I don't want to have sex. I have started a painting, a self portrait, a nude. The colors of the background are all wrong but it is coming in.

Not unlike the paper I'm finishing. I can tell...I'm growing...and there is promise, like the little buds, the first buds ever, on the ....bush in my back yard, the one that has, year after year after year, put forth only leaves, no flowers.. There is potential for beauty here. But it will not be easy to give him up.

I was talking about this with R last night. He said, basically, "It's in his kiss," you know, that wonderful song? What he actually said was, "if they can't kiss, it's a deal breaker." And it's true.

I only ENDURE the kisses of The Man I'm Dating. I've tried to give him pointers. My friend last night said he thought it was inherent. And I found myself thinking about what it would be like to kiss him, and feeling fairly certain that it would be wonderful. Then I arduously pushed the idea from my mind. Truth is, I don't want to be unfaithful, or break up. I like his friendship. I worry about how I'll get on without it.

I miss my son. As ever. As ever and ever and ever.

It doesn't really get easier. Last night we saw a Bosnian film about a woman living with her daughter, the spawn of one of multiple war-rapes. And even though I know, from experience, how terrible it is to be raped...and could see how hard her life was, how lonely, how penurious...still I envied her. She, after all, got to sit down every night with the person she loves most in the world.

Here is the inspiring thought of the day, which came to me while I was still waking up. and petting Little Cat, who is jet black. Actually this came to me last night, while talking with R, my friend, who is also black. We Americans, we the people of this continent, who have been living with each other for three of four hundred years now, especially those of us whose ancestors come from the same general areas--we're like the Palestinians and the Jews.

We're basically the same people and we have more in common with each other, in blood and culture and understanding, than we do with people from, say, Asia...we are the same people. And yet we go around acting as though we're completely different from one another. Those of us who think at all know full well that it's an artificial construction, race, a preposterous category that is real in the mind only. Chromosonally, surely we are more alike one another, having intermarried with one another, lived with one another for all thesee years, than we are with millions of other people, who are also just people, all descended from the first people on the planet, whom, if we were to see them, we would call animals.