Various and sundry:

Thanks, everyone, who celebrated my deliberately-belated birthday with me on Saturday. While the annual soiree no longer involves "S & M Office Boy", blow up dolls, or white Russians spilled on and imbibed directly from tables in the back of the Frontier Room, it does, however, include some mighty fine steaks. Much love to all.

Also, for the second consecutive year, The Believer is a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the category of General Excellence. I've joked that I will be eighty and accosting strangers in Tompkins Square Park with "I was in the Music Issue!", but the Music Issue (June/July) was one of the three issues singled out, so take that, bitches:

Winners and Finalists

When I rule the world:

An El Diablo iced single tall soy mocha will be delivered to my door every morning at 11 am.

Publicists will know when to back the hell off.

Stupidity will preclude breeding.

Real estate will be allocated based on merit.

Writers who espouse astrology will have their laptops confiscated.

Passive agression: punishable by death.

If you ask, "What did you do to yourself?" when you see me on crutches, I get to kick your mom and slash your tires.

Paperwhites and lilacs for everyone.

Part 3:

--Birdnests: functional, artful, optimistic. Evidence that some things in life work as they should.

--"Sittin' on a Fence", the last track from the Rolling Stones' disc, Flowers: wry, apt.

--Those who have grown up without settling, and who pursue what they love with passion, focus and tenacity: yea!

--The barrista who told me, "Your name is a poem": Aw.

Because apparently, a morphine drip is out of the question, Part 2:

--Bunnies: as cute as babies, but smarter and less needy.

--Jumbo fresh-roasted cashews from the stand in Pike Place Market: warm, large and bursting with flavor. Phallic, but with niacin. Once, the proprietor of said stand asked if he could touch my leather pants. (If you knew me then, you know that I did, in fact, rock these pants.) As a rule, I decline thigh-touching offers from unknown men, but the guy I was dating at the time was driving me insane--I was actually walking through the Market to clear my head and figure out what the hell we were doing--and I thought, "Why not? What's one more random man-touch at this point?" As I walked away, the guy at the donut stand across the corridor yelled to me, "I'll be here all day tomorrow!" No, I'm not making this up.

Because apparently, a morphine drip is out of the question:

The fever hasn't broken and I feel like I'm losing my fucking mind. I'm undergoing tests, continuing to employ the best of Western and Eastern medicines, and adhering to a nutritionally sound diet. I drink eight glasses of water a day, routinely stretch, and go for daily short walks. Please don't offer advice unless you're well-versed in the particulars of CFIDS. At this point, unprompted and uninformed counsel is almost as grating as the symptoms.

That said, I've been concentrating on what makes me happy, the persons and things that bring joy to my life. It's with profound gratefulness that I'm going to write about some of them over the next week.

First up: my best friend for the past twenty years, Christy N. Wickedly intelligent, deeply kind, and totally *bad-ass* (she ran her first marathon at the age of 38), C.N. is an awesome mom and one of the most focused individuals I know. If she says she's going to do something, you'd be a fucking ass-clown to bet against her. If I had a million dollars in cash and had to depart for a year, I'd leave it with her and not bother to count it when I returned. She gives good chocolate, has an understated and elegant style, and shuns reality TV. She's 100% German to my 100% Greek and I'm lucky our paths crossed at an otherwise tepid barbeque in September 1985.