Every day I set little secret goals for myself. I don't tell anyone what they are. Partly because they are boring as dirt, partly because if I don't get them accomplished I will feel incredibly inept. Weeks of getting settled in have turned into months, and it's not an unsubstantial task of sifting, melding, sorting, discarding, replacing. Watching people as they sit or sprawl or offload bags or pile papers, so I can set up systems that maintain some kind of order while accommodating how people move through space, what their natural order is.

I had a boyfriend once who was a son of wealth, wildly creatively talented, and disgustingly messy. One time, he called me "tidy" and even though he might have been admiring the difference in our operations, I felt slapped, like he had said I was small-minded or petty or stupid. It took me a very long time to realize that I set a neat daily framework not to ward off chaos, but to be able to let it strike as it would. Any number of unexpected things could happen in the exterior world, things delightful or distressing, and I would be able to accept or deflect them because uncertainty and crisis points were not coming from me. Example: if I get stuck in a subway tunnel until after the laundry store closes, it's ok, because either I didn't wait so long to take my laundry in that I am out of socks or because I picked a laundry place that is open early in the morning and it only takes 4 minutes to walk out and get my stuff in the a.m. That's a lot of thinking about a system for getting your clean underwear, but once it's done, you don't ever have to think about it again. In my world, that's what makes for artistic freedom.

Still, sometimes, I feel terribly bourgeoise with my little accomplishments: ordering a couch; getting all of the recycling and garbage from the last move picked up; taking a load of surplus to Goodwill; unpacking a box. I know that taking care in setting up this household will pay off in any number of ways once I start back to work, but right now it feels so small.

This book is not doing it for me. Written 10 years after the last set of bank failures and housing slumps and 10 years before this round of same, I thought it might be either amusingly prescient or hilariously pious. Look, if this art history major knows where you, world macro economics guy, are going 15 pages before you get there, it's just a sad day. Or I'm a genius. OK, which I am, but I expect you to be geniuser.

I surely am putting all my mighty brain power to good use. Today, I was overwhelmingly frustrated at the princess parking brigade at the grocery store. I called someone a bitch out loud in the parking lot, not that she could hear me, hermetically sealed in her SUV. There were two parking spaces available but she had to wait for the one that would make sure she and her slumping spawn would be 8 feet closer to the store. One of the other Mercedes princesses got so upset at the hold up she actually honked her car horn. Same scene again at the donation bay at the Goodwill. I cannot figure out how these women get to be about the size, shape and flavor of a tongue depressor. They are so insubstantial they disappear when they turn sideways. Really, how do 2 dimensional people even get a drivers license?

So I need a new book. I've had half of my evening drink and put a Zyrtec on top of that and I am fuzzy at the edges. Life after 40 is a festival of awesomeness. Woozing over to the bookcase I think I have my antidote "Thinking Insects." Oh, that looks interesting. Except it's one of the man's geek books "Thinking in Sets." I guess I'll just sit here and suck on my brain for a while.

I've got the attention span of a gnat on crack today. My face is cleaned but my teeth aren't. The dishes are half done, a box in the bedroom is half unpacked, half of a recycling project is completed. Maybe I should just unload something.

I have been thinking about Michael Allen's first day of high school as a freshman. I stole his lunch. Stealing is perhaps not the right term, as is connotes a sneakiness and a wrongness. I simply expropriated it, in front of his and my friends, by sliding it along the table where it was resting, and onto my lap. "Hey! That belongs to Mike the Indian Guy! You can't do that!" Sure I can. It's my first day at this school too, but I'm a junior. I'm a bigger, barelegged dirt girl coming off a six month stint in foster care. That ended when my mother called, crying, begging me back home, telling me she was on a new medication and that "it won't happen again."

When I look into Mike the Indian Guy's lunch bag and see his neatly wrapped sandwich, a little box labelled Dinosaur Egg, his special treat for his first big day at the big school, I know I have swiped the right lunch. His mother loves him. There will be more food for him when he gets home. His lunch will be packed for him again tomorrow, and the next day, and there probably won't even be any screaming involved. So I don't mind at all practicing my petty Marxism on him, everybody gets according to their need, and my need is greater.

I am thinking about this because I have been packing the boy's lunch for his first days at his new high school. I want to make sure he has enough to eat, that it's what he likes to eat, that it will take care of him without making him look over-protected, or attracting the attention of girls like I was. I don't want him to meet a girl like me. I don't want him to know about that kind of life, not yet, at least.

It's dark out and I am watching the lights of the cars on the bridge. I am thinking about the times my father beat me. It was not often, but notable in the suddenness, the viciousness. The boy comes into the room, wobbling an arc on his way to the back balcony. I show him the fog pouring over the the shoulder of the mountain, how it moves in front of the full moon.

Today is the New York Times fall fashion magazine. There are 94 pages of ads before you even get to the index of articles. The regular Sunday Style section has pictures of handbags, and more handbags, and a article about a woman who is spending a year of her life trying to live by Oprah Winfrey's tenets. How to dress, how to resolve fights with her husband, what products to use to dye her hair. A photo accompanying the piece is a coffee mug with an Oprah quote on it "live your own dream."

I don't know how to sew these things together. I am not sure what is relevant . Here is classic beauty and contemporary blindness like two shades occluding each other. I don't know what to make of it.

What I like about living on the side of a high hill is the community cooperation needed for anyone who lives here to get home. The road is snaky, with five blind curves between the bottom of the hill and our driveway, and in some places not much more than one lane wide. Or it could be as generous as a lane and a half, with little niches carved out of the hills flanks for additional parking. In most places there is no guardrail, so a miscalculation could send you tumbling down a steep slope into someone's yard, or more likely, into their hot tub and outdoor fireplace. So this means if you are coming up the hill and someone is coming down at the same time, you both have to figure out who is going to pull over onto the not-really-a-shoulder so one of you can creep by, or back up to the last little side niche you can remember passing. It's a small collaborative effort that I rather enjoy and appreciate the good-natured eye contact and hand wave that goes with it.

That makes the people who refuse to engage in this politesse stand out rather starkly. Occasionally someone will barrel past, forcing you to stop short or cut over hard. In my experience to date they have always been women. They drive cars that look like mine, slick, foreign made, silver (because white is too princessy, black is too mafia, and red is too LA). But they don't look like me. They are all pale-skinned, sheltered indoor creatures and blonded and sporting enormous glamour sunglasses. They look like those albino cave fish, driving blindly with huge blank eyes, unaware of their freakishness.

This morning he pulls his arm over me and it is rough where he was a good father, fighting thorns to pull down more blackberries. I've left the door to the deck open all night and now fog is rolling over the eaves. The air is so chill I can feel the warmth rising from his arm. He smells good. I make a point to tell him this. In some ways, it's more important than telling him I love him.

The day is fading now and I would like to do something today other than spend money. So I rearrange garbage, compact recycling, boxes and wrappings from other days of spending money. I like to rustle around out in the carport at this time of day. This time of day my favorite neighbors come out, the deer that emerge to go up the slopes to forage, the buck that sits with his neck braced under his crown of antlers and works his cud with surety. I look down the side of the property line, the path they like to mosey up to the road. They are not there, but a new nest of beer cans is.