You�ve got a nerve to be asking a favor: 6.14.04

This is precisely what happened. I walked in and sat at the bar. M. opened a beer for me and said, �What are you reading?� I showed him the Moody I had carried in. He said, �A downer, right?� I said, �Exactly.� He said, �Like the year I had five addresses. It was when I lived with my mom,� which was apropos of nothing, really. Then Pharaoh Sanders started up on the jukebox. I looked down and read a sentence that included this phrase: ��at that hour even irony begins to degrade the ironist.�

Someone made a point of asking me out for a steak dinner. Someone I didn�t feel like seeing made a point of asking, �Are you ready to get out of here?� like we were in cahoots for the evening, and I dodged that to walk home slowly alone, singing that criminally romantic Jets to Brazil song that is haunting this summer so far. I got plenty of sleep and went to Chicago for my bro�s wedding. The best part of the whole weekend was when my leetle sister was helping me zip up my dress, she disintegrated all the annoyances that had been crowding me into a very tightlipped, unpleasant humor simply by using a few words from our childhood idioglossia. Made me utterly complacent in an instant, and the rest of the night was quite fun. It helped that R. invited me on frequent but brief junkets to indulge in various other inducements to wax nostalgic and bittersweet�which we certainly did. Having my entire family in one room was endlessly amusing and choice members chose to prolong this luxury with late night drinking and conversation, and it was sad that it had to end at all.

And there is some sour anger, hence today's title. All weekend, I only wished that I didn�t have the niggling reminder of failed chances and untidy breaches to snarl otherwise happy confusion and what might be called, optimistically, some kind of optimism that things are going to turn.