Quotidian.

Who wrote the mean-nasties about you? I was asked, and I naturally replied. Oh, just some boy I used to date. Of course it doesn't mean anything; it's just that I like to pretend that everyone I've ever been with sits around and pines for me only. This is a little bit of an ego blow if it's anything at all. But I've saved the paragraph in question for rereading every couple days or so, to ground me anew and get my blood good and boiling in the cool autumnal air. It's a task I usually save for the whiskey, but the whiskey has been slacking in recent weeks and now I find myself relying increasingly on good old-fashioned American ire.

I know what the other Cat means when she sings of living in bars, and over the weekend I sang Oasis with a lovely Irish fella down at the pub, introduced by my favorite bartender to the tipsy crowd as "the prettiest alcoholic in the Washington metro area." It's a title I like to wear unironically on Saturday nights, long hair pulled back into a sloppy ponytail, bags of loose morals beneath my eyes. A competent if affected "Wonderwall" was followed by a rocking but goofy "D'you Know What I Mean," and for the rest of the night all my people right there right then passed me Jameson after Jameson until the punchline of last call. But I'm only as funny (not looking; I only befriend two-percenters, thankyouverymuch) as the company I keep, and with great joy I've begun work on a very top secret project with three of the funniest and smartest and prettiest people I know.

At 4:30 tomorrow I part ways with no less than four and one half inches of filamentous protein, twenty-three months of tangles and knots and strange pillows and rain from two continents and many more time zones. Would that it were so simple to cut ties to the past. I'd wear my hair close-cropped-- scalped even--and give Sinead O'Conner a run for her money.