wednesday june 27 2001    |    5:10 p.m.

mr cabdriver, fuck you-- i'm a survivor

this is what i keep letting myself forget: it's all about surviving. no, about being a survivor. it's too damn bad that now the word has those awful reality show connotations.

patrick asked me a while ago if i could remember the last time, the last moment, that i was completely, unadulteratedly (?) happy. i told him i couldn't remember, and i honestly couldn't.

and now i say: right now. i am elated. i'm completely sleep-deprived and uncoordinated and still a little on edge but wow i feel great.

i think i just helped steer my dad through a pretty radical change in attitude. i got him up for lunch at three and he was completely lethargic, someplace i couldn't quite reach him, someplace he wasn't shaking himself out from. but we spent the next two hours talking, first about stupid things like the food and my mom at work, then progressively about the news and whatever else, and finally about things that really matter, things in the foreground. by the end of the conversation he was up and calling his friend manolo and talking about possibly going to see the new house and . . . this might not seem like much, but it is so much. it is leaps and bounds. it is mountains moving! whatever you like: that's what it is: and it is great.

now he's taking a nap and i'm writing this before finally getting to the damn cover letter. blasting mr kravitz because it fits. because right now his brand of rocking out is my brand of rocking out. because sometimes it's as simple as singing "let love rule."

the moments i'm happy and confident and comiéndome el mundo like this are the times when the pieces fall back into their natural places and suddenly i can see what's coming up round the bend, even if it's fuzzy. i have perspective. and perspective reads like this: network of ties. network of unconditional love because oh my GOD that is such a hard thing to achieve. i am amazingly, ridiculously, blessedly, fabulously, extravagantly, exuberantly lucky.

as a sidenote, boys come and boys go. the interchangeable transient ones, which basically means everyone except your daddy and your best friend and maybe some year down the line some dude who turns out not to be just some dude. but for right now, this cd-booklet picture of lenny with the lip print (julie or me or both of us maybe in a drunken dance-around-the-room revelry?) is more than enough, thank you.

so! a large, triumphant FUCK YOU to those that deserve it.

and MAD LOVE to those who deserve that.

i have absolutely no aesthetic pretensions right now. this is the kind of mood that inspires knee-high boots and short skirts and getting wasted at some booty club and just LIVING and shaking the groove thang for a while.

'cos baby it ain't over 'til it's over