I am having a really hard time today, feeling all Cinderella-ish. How did this happen? I am happy for you, truly. As I imagine it, it is like heaven, a cruise liner with many, many rooms - heaven on earth. So what am I doing in Chicago? I had my day, on business trips, once, for example, in a beautiful, secluded pool late at night in Hamilton, Bermuda. I could completely go for that again, even though Giovanni didn't speak English. (Okay, now I'm laughing through my tears - but my nose is super-stuffed right now.) Or, less lewdly, simply don lipstick and a slinky dress and heels and go out dancing. Is it over for me at 51? It feels that way to me.
E.D. got more than page hits from her Masters, whoever they were. They at least wrote her back now & then. She didn't spend Christmases alone. I should be happy that I'm alive, not imprisoned in a fashion then deceased like Mr. Judt (whose last Charlie Rose interview I listened to with rapt attention this afternoon). Not trapped for 18 days and counting like a Chilean coal miner - I cannot even imagine the horror of that, walls closing in around as in the Poe story and you're not even alone. But I am not a Prisoner of Chillon who loves her prison. I hate it. I'm the bird who's singing - no one's singing to me. I've been singing and singing and singing. Feed the bird.

Fantasy time: I would love to go to the ball. I've been working out regularly now for two years (thanks to the prompt - of you) and while my body is far from perfect I have quite a nice shape and if I didn't like rosé and sublime (or indifferent) cheese so much then I'm sure I'd have a perfectly flat middle too. My hair has grown long - I have put a stop to submitting to upstate hairdressers except for the occasional, closely supervised trim. (My first hack job up here - unwittingly, I got such a crew cut I was virtually desexed - I don't think it was an accident on the part of the hairdresser - she meant it.) It turns out that I have quite nice hair with a bit of natural wave, and it falls softly around my face. I have a pretty neckline and I do believe quite nice - well, you know. At the moment I do have a few little burn marks on my torso from a completely stupid cooking accident a few weeks ago (do not fry eggplant in the nude) but they're mostly healed. They'll take forever to fade (in my experience) but eventually will.

Anyway, so I'm 51 and attractive and have a nice figure though when I look in the mirror I see - yes, my face, but not a resemblance to Julie Christie, but rather to (to my mind) my maternal grandfather, who had very great imagination, intelligence, and wit, but not, so much, physical beauty. In the pre-blogging days after the War, he wrote a column in a London-based Polish newspaper under the pseudonym "Bonzo," worked in the BBC, and later, moving to Munich, was one of the founding members of R. Free Europe. I never met him, he died the year before I was born. But I've seen photos. He's thoughtful, a bit distant, bug-eyed, bemused - that's who I see when I look in the mirror.

Oh so anyway. I don't have epilepsy or mental illness (other than situational depression) or the pox. Well, maybe I do have the pox - that is, the bit of weeding I did the other day resulted in a mysterious outcropping of tiny welts on my left arm. Truly we are not in control of our own derma. I liked the scene in Eat Pray Love when the Julia Roberts character gets a wound on her leg from when Javier Bardem runs her over while she's bicycling. She goes to a Bali herbalist medicine woman who - to Julia Roberts' character's amazement - heals her wound. She goes out dancing that night, and partying, and meets up with an Aussie, a hung Giovanni, whom she rejects on a nighttime Bali beach in favor of (as it turns out) the Javier who knocked her down --

Okay - wow - how do I end this? Well - just consider this the freeform fashion of some --

Oh, are you asking me to dance? Well, sure. I love this song!