If a cow ever got the chance...

Marshall Field's, 4:30 p.m.

Me: "Hi, do you have any pants here that are black, NOT capri-length, boot cut, and not denim?"

Sales Type: "Nnnnno." (presents me with her expensively clad back)

Okay, I know I dress like a penniless fourteen-year-old grunge reject, but come on. If you have to shop in "Women's World," it's either dress like that or like a sixty-two-year-old insurance claims adjuster. Orange blazers with double-wide shoulder pads and skirts printed with purple green and yellow flowers the size of your head? I'll take the less humiliating alternative, which is why you can find me most days in my beloved green corduroy men's work shirt (which functions as a coat) and jeans and a backpack and work boots from Fleet Farm.

Two stores later, I ended up with this long black sheath dress made out of that weird Lycra material that everyone seems to be pushing now. It didn't look too bad.

(I need a dress for my friend Chewy's wedding this weekend. No, I don't know why he's called Chewy--he's my brother's best friend and they've known each other since the dawn of time and Chewy's mother is the only person ever to call him by his real name.)

So I charge it--eighty bucks--and go home. Back at the apartment I try it on again to see if it will go with a black shirt I already had, and notice a small piece of masking tape on the dress. Which I peel off, only to discover a Big Gaping Hole, pathetically concealed until now by the tape. It's right on the butt, too. I can't believe I didn't see it in the store, but I didn't. Because of the material, there is no way to sew or fix it--the dress is just ruined. So now I have to attempt to return it today by convincing them that the hole was already there when I bought it, and that I am a Valued Customer.

I wrote most of that chunk last night but didn't post it. Last night I was so pissed off about the dress, and the staggering amount I've spent on clothes already this month in an attempt to look more like a confident, sexy professional and less like the penniless fourteen-year-old grunge reject I am at heart, that I started drinking. This was a bad move. Eventually I got into my boxes of old writing and found my twenty-page story about How I Lost My Virginity, which made me feel even worse--partly because the subject matter is still kind of painful but mostly because it is clear that I was not the hotshot writer I believed myself to be at age eighteen. I seem to have disliked using one simile when four would do. By 8 p.m. I was calling Outgrabe on his cell phone to inform him that I really liked him in a platonic way and that I thought he was supercool, but he had to go watch the Lakers/Nets game, so I continued with my liquid supper of Johnnie Walker Black Label. An hour or so later C called me--in tears, from the hospital--because his best friend's brother had been hit by a car while walking near his house, is in a coma, and will probably have permanent brain damage.

Sometimes things just really get put into perspective.

Anyway, I hung up the phone, drank about fifteen glasses of water, and went to bed. They should know more about C's friend's brother's condition in "24 to 48 hours," which I guess is how long it will take to stabilize him and get the brain swelling down. C was planning to stay over at the hospital, so I may hear from him later this morning.

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