HOW TO SALVAGE A STORY

or YOU CAN'T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT, BUT IF YOU TRY SOMETIMES YOU MIGHT JUST FIND THE *SECOND* DISC OF GOSSIP GIRL SEASON TWO AND DECIDE THAT YOU CAN FILL IN THE BLANKS FOR YOURSELF

the window in my bedroom has been propped open against the heat since saturday. i'm using a snow globe made from a mason jar and a miniature bust of dorothea dix which raises the window about nine or so inches from the sill. it was nearly twenty degrees cooler this morning than it has been on any other morning since friday, and it took my wondering why my room wasn't less comfortable to identify the storm window still shutting the room off from the outside. i wonder if my weekend guests wondered about me...because i wondered about myself.

so this evening i decided to eat cookies. many cookies. buying prepared dough would have been easier than putting the dough together myself, but my legs were tired enough after the first half of my first dance class that i didn't want to ride any further than it would take me to get home, and i was sure that i had ingredients enough to make something. that something turned out to be ginger snaps, because the recipe i know calls for oil instead of butter, and our stock of butter needs replenishing before i exhaust it on a frivolity like cookies (though i suppose they're an important part of the self-medication diet).

the ginger snaps turned out awful, because i did not in fact have the ingredients to make them, having used the last of the baking soda on the bathtub. i knew well and better as i was mixing the dough that, although they're all three white powders, one teaspoon of baking powder and one teaspoon of cornstarch were not going to substitute for two teaspoons of baking soda. the cookies pretty much stayed dough in the oven -- but burned around their edges to help ruin the taste. i had (sincere and honest) hope for adding soda water to the last sheet as an experiment. you can do that to help relieve the density of a cake, but it did nothing to activate my ginger snaps. insult to injury: the only soda water in the apartment was left over from our mojito party and was flavored lemon-lime.

lingering heat or not, the summer's almost over and i've all but abandoned my published summer reading list (which, you might remember, was deadlined for early july). there are two cheap review copies of day for night at powell's, but i won't likely buy one. aimee bender's book fell off the radar after i saw how many autographed copies were left for the shelves after her reading. (only exclusivity could have saved that book for me in the end.) the first twenty pages of breaking dawn in japanese translation were so painful that i've almost entirely given up on it, though i'll have to think up a way to let down the friend who lent me her copies (the japanese version is in three volumes). if i'm reading something in japanese, i should just finish the woman in the dunes, right? it is, after all, on the list. but i've gone ahead and read so many off-list books (my reviews of which you might have to read elsewhere) that the list just feels like a petty nag that i worry on only because i posted it. mind you, readers, the LIST does, and not you for expecting me to make good on completing it. (i did finish watching brideshead revisited, but still have no plan to read waugh's book, though i glanced through it at the bookstore on sunday.)

you're here for the story though, no? and that, maybe i can save. the truth is, there was an earthquake. that devastating heretofore-unheard-of-in-the-northwest earthquake that the geological survey has been predicting for decades now, and man oh man, it was a doozie. i was at a hot tub party in the west hills when it happened, and the only reason the host's house didn't slide down the cliff side was because of the best reason that any of you can think of. there was, however, something special floating on top of the water (you know how hot tub parties get), and when the quake hit it splashed up into my eyes. both of them! can you imagine? it really does sting, by the way, and i could hardly open my eyes for almost a month. it's a wonder i've been able to write as much as i have since then, but once you've gotten practice with the keyboard it's no big feat to tap something out and then have someone proof it. the real pain of the ordeal wasn't that i couldn't bear the emotional burden of reading anything but those books that i really wanted to read, but that i really despise hot tubs and can't think of why i went to that party in the first place.

the kids of the upper east side are doing fashion week and college visits. you have to turn this show off as soon as you remember how awful the dialogue is and how bromidic the scenarios and saccharine the characters. (that's usually about thirty seconds from the credits of the first episode.) otherwise, you're stuck until the end of the disc. it's a morbid pleasure; the result, i think, not so much of fawning aspiration but of dwelling on idle or forgotten potential. you are, after all, watching episode after episode of gossip girl instead of diligently rounding off that reading list. but you don't have to worry anymore about getting into yale like blair does. and your chances of becoming a fashion sensation at age fifteen are completely shot. plus, you know that the lives of the gossip girl cast are nowhere near as glamorous as their characters', and those characters are flat and pitiful (though their wardrobes almost seem worth it). so strangely, the make-believe lives of manhattan's elite manage to quell your self-pity instead of feed it, and that almost saves the taste of the ginger snaps.