Her ex kept sending her e-cards, asking for a second chance at their relationship. He promised to change, but of course she didn’t believe that.

But she did like the e-cards he sent, erotic pictures from some acronymical organization. So far, her favorites were by Becat. The fairy tale quality of them made her want to be part of that story.

She suspected he must have guessed that, because that’s mostly what he sent her. When he sent a duplicate, she replied that she was seeing someone else, she wished he would stop, though her new guy enjoyed the artwork.

The problem, Rachel decided as she forced herself away from her computer for the rest of the morning, is that even though she never really left the house (except for her morning jog and to go get the mail in the afternoon, groceries once a week), that didn’t mean that she wasn’t spending money. She loved the internet, but it was an ongoing struggle to keep her fingers off her credit cards as Google searches took her to five Ebay auctions or products that she would have never heard about had the internet not made every business so very accessible.

Tina picked up the silver candlesticks, fingering the octagonal bases. She hadn’t wanted to get something so bland as a wedding present. Frankly, she was stunned that Helena wanted them; maybe Mother-in-law had bullied her into putting them on the registry—the corresponding pieces were right up Mother-in-law’s alley. Helena wasn’t a geometric dish person.

The bed that Helena and Lowell had ordered—from an artist in Ohio—was distinctly Helena, all swirly and romantic. A happily-ever-after bed, she called it.

No, Helena didn’t want anything to do with these candlesticks, and Lowell didn’t care one way or the other.

Ashley called me this afternoon. She said she had a fight with Calvin, her boyfriend of the last four months. (They were a Barbie-and-Ken couple.) I tried to answer my boss’s email and listen to her recount the latest argument simultaneously.

She’d asked him about a previous girlfriend they had bumped into last night at a restaurant. He had been totally honest. Ashley clearly expected me to side with her, so my answer (“Don’t ask about ex-girlfriends’ blowjob talents if you don’t want to know.”) wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

Am I really friends with this person?

I knew I put my grocery list in the outside pocket of my purse before I left the house this morning, but when I got to the grocery store, it wasn’t there. I pulled everything out of my purse (good thing I had just cleaned it out a couple nights ago—that could’ve been messy), but nada. I searched under the seats in the car. No luck. Had I been getting something out of my purse and taken it out, maybe leaving it on the corner of my desk? No, I hadn’t even reached for a piece of gum this afternoon.

I left home (Arizona) at fifteen, lived with my aunt in Montana till I was eighteen and got my GED. I’m thirty-eight. I’ve lived in nine states, fourteen cities/towns, and at least twenty-two apartments/houses. Every time I’ve moved cities, I’ve left a good majority of my stuff behind. I took whatever fit in my car, always a small piece of junk. I’ve had twenty years of buying new small appliances, cheap pots and pans, Goodwill furniture. What I miss most are the little things that weren’t supposed to get left behind—pictures, books, the only 24K gold necklace I’ve ever owned.

I painted my nails—fingers and toes—very carefully for tonight. I’m not sure what I thought was going to happen, who was going to be seeing me without my shoes on, who was going to notice that my fingernails had more than their usual clear polish applied. I don’t know who I thought I might meet. A potential boyfriend? A potential boss? A one night stand?

And you know, I didn’t even go out. My friends had things come up at the last minute—one had a last minute project at her office and the other got the flu.

Patty had books to pick up at the library. It wasn’t like her to let books on hold be sent back—she was usually there within a day of being called to pick them up—so the librarian called her again. She left a message; this is Jean calling, just wanted to remind you that you have books to pick up.

Patty couldn’t stand the thought of leaving the house, though. She hadn’t left the house in a week. Her cat had died and her brother was MIA. Her parents were calling every three hours to say she should come home.

It was on old, simple sweeper: it had a power button and something that clearly had a function, a little flat gray plastic thing that looked like it should slide to the right because there was an opening to the right. No indication that it was supposed to move down. I know that sweepers have foot-triggered handle releases, but my only attempt to do that yielded no results, so I kept coming back to the sliding to the right idea. Turns out, it was a foot-triggered release. You just can’t be pulling at the handle when you push it down.

I had a dream that I was teaching again. New students, but the same ones, you know? I did everything right. And the students learned; they became better students of everything. They understood writing as a process instead of a last minute attempt to throw some semi-cohesive sentences onto the paper the night before because they just remembered the assignment, preoccupied as they were with their video games. They took pride in expressing an opinion.

I didn’t mind grading their papers. Not that all the papers were good, but the students were at least trying.

I always was an idealist.

I love my Macbook Pro (17” screen). It’s pretty, it’s convenient, it’s loaded with software I’m learning to use. I have MS Office on it; I’ve learned that one of the bugs in MS Word for Mac is that the word count can be affected by commas. “Flat gray piece” is three words, but “flat, gray piece” is four. Screwy, isn’t it? So now I’m wondering whether my word counts for the last four or five months have been accurate.

My fiancé has suggested that Microsoft designers put the glitch in on purpose, part of their ongoing antagonism of Apple.

Bonnie watched Jason bouncing baby Paul on his knee as she rebraided Lizzie’s hair. Lizzie was in second grade now, but Bonnie found it hard to believe that she and Jason had been married for nearly a decade. She distinctly remembered that when she was sixteen, she’d planned to marry Harrison Weaver, a seldom-noticed geek from her art class. When she was eighteen, she’d sworn never to marry (her aunt had gone through a horrible divorce that year). And then she met Jason.

A friend had asked her once, “When did we get old enough to be wives and mothers?”

Several years ago, I decided to call and spend $50 of my hard-earned teacher’s salary on a fountain pen and some magnetic copy holders from Levenger. The pen was heaven to hold (though it wasn’t as smooth a writer as I had hoped) and the copy holders were both fun and practical. I had to make sure my students didn’t steal them.

Now Levenger’s products are less whimsical. There’s a lot of masculinity—leather, lots of leather. And I don’t care for any of the pens. They’re supposed to be great, but they look chintzy—resin with a textured appearance.

For dinner tonight, I made a very basic pasta with the grape and cherry tomatoes from Mom’s plants. I sautéed some garlic in extra virgin olive oil, then added about a quart of tomatoes, some (sea) salt and pepper and let them simmer about ten minutes while water was heating to boiling on another burner. I added some fajita seasoned chicken meat (Schwan’s) and broccoli florets to the tomatoes. (In the past, I’ve added mushrooms, too.) When it was all heated through, I mixed it with the penne (which was done cooking by then) and added parmesan. Healthy and delicious.

Seka is not doing well, I’m told.

Seka’s a friend’s Rottweiler. She’s a sweet dog—fierce until she recognizes you’re a friend (which is demonstrated to her by being welcomed by her human). She’s the kind of dog I’d like to have guarding my place if I lived all alone out in the country somewhere, though I think that Seka might be okay with town living, too. (You can’t say that about all Rottweilers).

Seka was given an enthusiastic playmate a couple years ago. She’s tried to pretend that she’s not ten years old, but she can’t ignore arthritis forever.

Some guy in Egypt who’s in charge of making sure the national treasures (pyramids, tombs, relics, etc.) get taken care of was quoted as saying something like, “tourists who can only afford to spend a thousand dollars apiece are useless; they should stay in their own country.”

I can’t imagine all the people who (like me) travel on a tight budget taking kindly to something like that. I mean, even if I only spend a thousand, there are thousands and thousands more like me.

Not a brilliant thing to say for a guy whose job exists mostly because of tourists.

I have several recipes for cashew shrimp/chicken which call for ten red chili peppers. I’d love to try these recipes out—I picked up cashews on sale a few weeks ago, and I have shrimp and chicken in the freezer to use. But I can’t find the chili peppers. Seriously, who would have thought finding chili peppers—normally fresh and dried can be found in the peppers section of the produce department—would prove so frustrating?

There is a farmer’s market on Thursdays in a nearby town. We get our corn there. I wonder if anyone would have chili peppers.

Angela glanced at the calendar. Tonight they were having dinner at his friend’s new house; what she really wanted to do was go home and take a nap. Phil could go have dinner if he wanted; Angela couldn’t stand the friend’s wife.

Not for the first time, she thought that if she decided never to go home again—it was his place, really—she wouldn’t miss him as much as he thought she would. She might not miss him at all, except as a general presence at night when she was alone in bed.

What would he think of that?

There’s a fantastic mother to be found regularly at the local community gym. Three days a week, she and her husband do their weight training and cardio while the kids walk the indoor track or play DDR downstairs. When the kids get restless, they come to their mom and ask her to play—and she never rebukes them with an, “I’m busy, just be patient!” or other short answer. She greets them with endearments like, “Hello, my fine young man!” and goes downstairs to play basketball or volleyball with them. I like that she’s encouraging them to be active, too.

Corie and Ryan had been married four years. They presented their happy faces at parties, holidays, and summer family reunions. But they’re not exactly happy not-so-newlyweds.

Corie’s most frustrating problem is that Ryan doesn’t initiate sex, and frankly, she’s starting to feel like she’s begging. Besides, he doesn’t give it any particular effort, so the sex isn’t even good.

Also, he hates oral sex—giving or receiving. There’s something off about that. She’s never encountered a man who didn’t appreciate what she could do with her tongue. He’s never even considered going down on her, even when she requests it.

Walking through the parking lot, I stepped over a moderately smashed creature. Closer examination (identifying roadkill is a game we play), which means I stopped and looked at it for ten seconds or less, revealed that it had once been a field mouse.

When we returned to the car with eight bags of groceries and two gallons of milk, we decided to put them in the back seat, and during that process, Mom looked down and noticed a pair of purple sunglasses, clearly a doll’s, smashed flat. “I think the mouse lost her sunglasses,” she said. It explained so much.

The store clerk stood at the counter idly chewing gum—in a way that my grandad called “like a cow”—taking one of those magazine quizzes where the answers never really apply to anyone in reality and the questions are situations that only happen in daydreams. She clicked her pen while she read the questions, studying each situation as though she were taking the bar exam. Likely, she’d put the magazine back on the magazine rack when she was done. (She wouldn’t like to stick it in her bag in the backroom to hide the evidence—that would be stealing.)

They lay on their bellies on the dock, elbows at the edge. They peered into the water, whose small, choppy waves broke the intense reflection of the sun.

“Look! There’s one!” the little boy shrieked, pointing into the water. “Do you see it? It’s big!”

“I do see it,” the woman, presumably his mother, replied.

“And there’s another one! It’s a baby!”

“Very small,” the woman agreed. “Do you see it, Jana?” She turned her head to look at the very blond girl beside her.

Jana stared into the water, not looking at her mother, though her mother seemed unconcerned.

I hoped that he would do the right thing. He’d been so built up in my mind as that amazing person of true convictions, a genuine idealist—so unlike the rest of us who wither under pressure, cave in because it’s the easy thing to do. Some people call it a judgment call, you only have a few seconds to make a decision and you use your instincts to make it. But instincts are about survival, not about morals. And that situation wasn’t about survival for the two decision-makers.

I guess he’s just another hypocrite like the rest of us.

We took a picture when we were in New York, heading to the ballet, all dressed up. Katie, Ali and I are all in black. Mom’s wearing black slacks and a white blouse (which almost blends in with the fountain behind us). I don’t remember what Aunt Linda was wearing, because she was taking the picture and is, at least in this shot, undocumented.

The only bright colors in the picture are Katie’s turquoise purse and necklace and the red umbrella I’m holding. I don’t remember it being a rainy night, but it must have been at least threatening sprinkles.

Carmen wants us to put up profiles—real ones, not pretend—on E-Harmony to see if they’d match us up as a compatible couple. She swears that it’s just curiosity. She’s never done the online matchmaker thing, and though she knows I have (she’s seen the ridiculous matches I get through whichever site it is that I really should discontinue my free membership of), she wants to see how it works. It feels crazy; we’re married, haven’t we decided we’re compatible?

What if the website algorithm says we’re not? I think it might cause a few unnecessary and unpleasant ripples.

I was drawn to the book because of the cover. Frequently I choose a book based solely (or mostly) on the cover art. My biggest splurge in this category was a book whose title I can’t even think of at the moment, but I can picture the cover perfectly—it’s surprisingly sexy, in a Victorian way—the picture is of the laces of a corset. You can see the corset’s details well, though the shoulders, neck and profile of the person wearing it are shadowed. The story, I’m sorry to say, was really an average teen read, maybe slightly better.

I find myself with an abundance of chili peppers. I don’t even know what kind they are. I bought them at a farmer’s market--$2 for the whole little bush, which yielded a huge bowl of peppers in various, colorful stages of ripeness. They said that most of them should turn red on their own. Not being a person to use chili peppers (I’ve always just kept a big jar of pepper flakes on hand), I’m not sure how accurate that information is. But the ripe ones should dry out all right. I wonder what the unripe ones taste like…

I imagine him waiting at our cottage, four thousand miles from where I sit in what has always been my home, though since we rented our cottage, this has been less of a home than that feels like now. This is where I grew up; that is where my life with him is.

Every night, we talk—sometimes just half an hour, sometimes hours. And we talk throughout the day; we are wake-up calls, reference books, voices saying hi, I love you to a person we haven’t seen in months.

There should be a system to prevent border guard powertrips.

Tomorrow is October. I don’t quite know how I feel about that. October means I shouldn’t be here. (But then, May, June, July, August and September all meant that, too.)

I told myself some time ago that I was going to have to quit thinking in terms of “should be” or “shouldn’t be,” but it’s absolutely surreal to think I haven’t seen my love since early morning January 17, when I clung to him until I absolutely had to go (and I almost did miss my plane).

I’m trying not to resent this apart time we could’ve been spending together.