up-front warning: this is to be a gushy entry.

i just spent an hour and 20 bucks at a real live organic foods market and i was in absolute heaven. there is no doubt in my mind that when the day i can afford to cook myself such food arrives, i will have no problem at all being a vegan. everything looks so yummy, much better than anything you'll find in your ordinary american grocery store. i got myself a pita wrap for lunch, and i think it just might be one of the top ten best tasting things i've ever eaten. simple pita bread filled with stuffed grape leaves, hommus, rice, lotsa fresh veggies, and tahini. completely different in taste and texture than anything i've ever put in my mouth before. if only i could eat this way every day! gamely, i also picked up a container of soy milk. i'm still skeptical; we'll see how that works out.

and i am reading what will probably end up being one of the top ten best books i've read to date. the hours by michael cunningham. you may have seen the previews for the movie with meryl streep, nicole kidman and julianne moore? naturally, one must read the book first, and it is brilliant and amazing and other nice things. i can't write a book review, but it's impossible to gush enough about this book. and i can't really summarize it, because it's emotion more than plot; but the way the three women's lives are woven together creates intellectual puzzles, it's exciting, shocking, heartbreaking... i don't even want to write about it anymore, i don't want to do anything really but finish reading it.

lani (and andy), i especially recommend this book to you. it is the fictionalized form of our entire here-not-now theory.. except place and time seem to be one thing, sometimes identical and sometimes opposite, but something entirely else is what binds it together - i don't know what to call that yet. it's fascinating. and our every moment, every choice decides a new future thing, we have a hundred futures ahead of us at every moment, and what if we'd chosen another? every other sentence i'm thinking wow, this is so us! no point in regrets: your life can go in any one of infinite directions, and they all suck. oh, this book is so great. you do not read this book; you add to it a fourth life...

still, she loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows other people must love it too, poor as well as rich, though no one speaks specifically of the reasons. why else do we struggle to go on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed?

there is no comfort, it seems, in the world of objects, and clarissa fears that art, even the greatest of it, belongs stubbornly to the world of objects.

it seems that at that moment she began to inhabit the world; to understand the promises implied by an order larger than human happiness, though it contained human happiness along with every other emotion.

here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. you try to be grateful.

it could be a good day; it needs to be treated carefully.

it is better, really, to find the elevator frankly inoperable, and to walk up five flights. it is better to be free.

i wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. i wanted to write about all the ways we might die.

it seems possible (it does not seem impossible) that she's slipped across an invisible line, the line that has always separated her from what she would prefer to feel, who she would prefer to be.

she and sally bought all these things, she can remember every transaction, but she feels now that they are arbitrary, the spigot and the counter and the pots, the white dishes. they are only choices, one thing and then another, yes or no, and she sees how easily she could slip out of this life - these empty and arbitrary comforts. she could simply leave it and return to her other home, where neither sally nor richard exists; where there is only the essence of clarissa, a girl grown into a woman, still full of hope, still capable of anything. it is revealed to her that all her sorrow and loneliness, the whole creaking scaffold of it, stems simply from pretending to live in this apartment among these objects, with kind, nervous sally, and that if she leaves she'll be happy, or better than happy. she'll be herself. she feels briefly, wonderfully alone, with everything ahead of her.

it isn't failure but it requires more of you, the whole effort does; just being present and grateful; being happy (terrible word).

venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. you end up just sailing from port to port.

still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. maybe it's as simple as that. richard was the person clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment.

it had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize it *was* happiness... there is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. now she knows: that was the moment, right then. there has been no other.

oh i so am the fourth character in this book!