is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.

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Tale of Two Parties.

I am exhausted. But first: yesterday I (alongside Marco, Evany and Heidi) was at Leah�s huge castle of a home and estate for Norio�s birthday party. When I say castle I am perhaps understating the size and grandeur of the home in which L and N live in Portola Valley. After entering the driveway it takes fifteen minutes to reach the residence. In the meantime you have ushered your car through some beautiful forested hills and discussed plunging into ravines never to be found again. Outside the house there is a lit-up fountain in a basin of a yard lined by statuary. To the left there is a reflecting pool with more classical statuary and alcoves with benches. These benches want you to make out on them. They do. So far I have never. The house really looks like a castle, and the entry hall and ballroom directly to its right are all marble. I once got distressingly lost on the second floor, or was it the third, when I first started visiting. Straight through the entry hall to the back of the house there is a lovely manicured yard with pool and spectacular view. There are hiking trails and maze-like paths leading to different features of the estate. And a sauna.

The fete began with food and drink down at the conservatory, which is directly below the tennis courts, next to the vineyard, and above the old pool (which is drained, picturesque, and surrounded by lush landscaping and a forest of old-growth redwoods). To get there you travel past some impressive topiary art. I got right down to business and ate some bread and frittata and had two glasses of wine, happily talking to Leah until guest duties reclaimed her. Then I walked down the path to the old pool in my heels and party dress. I climbed down into the pool and then stood there (perhaps looking like a crazy person to anyone observing, but, well, OK). The pool walls make any sounds in evidence more pronounced, or perhaps they simply allow the ear to focus in on some things that it normally would filter out. So I stood there in my pool basin looking directly up at the blue, blue sky and watching and listening to the wind blowing through the high tops of the redwoods. It was a beautiful moment, and so I allowed it to draw itself out for as long as I could.

(That is a favorite activity of mine, listening to wind in trees. And also allowing beautiful moments to draw themselves out. When I was at the three-week philosophy conference on a beautiful estate in Italy three summers ago, our lunch breaks were two hours long. At first I spent them talking to philosophers. Then I figured out that I could eat, disappear, walk out into the grounds, and then find some isolated spot to lay on a bench or the ground and look up at the trees and the wind.)

Meanwhile, back in the empty pool in Portola Valley, I heard a voice say, �HEY! What are you DOING?!� Evany and Marco had followed me after stopping to take some photos from a higher vantage point. So I jumped on the child-sized pedal-operated construction tractor that for some reason lives on the floor of the pool and began riding it around like a circus clown. That was a lot of fun, because the pool�s floor is both smooth and sloped, which made for fun dashes and challenging ascents and crazy turns in my tiny farm vehicle. I�m guessing it was a fairly comic scene as well, since not only did Evany and Marco laugh and take photos, but, like I said, I was wearing a party dress and heels, and the wind kept blowing my dress up so that I had to struggle not to reveal my underwear (um, by this time everyone was gone from the conservatory because there was a vocal recital about to begin in the ballroom, so I wasn�t very worried about showing some leg to my long-standing date, M and E). But I�m not a bad guest, and there was a vocal recital in the offing, so I somewhat unwillingly gave up the tractor and the pool-floor and made my way up to the house with M and E, where we watched a soprano sing some lovely songs. Then we ate dinner, drank more, watched a violinist, had dessert, talked.

Friday night Marco and Evany had a party for me at Marco�s place. Lots of good people showed up. Early in the evening there was a marked gender imbalance and Stephen said to me, �Jill, apparently every man in the bay area wants to say good bye to you.� Ha. �Yes, Stephen. Men love to say goodbye to me.� (Frownie.) Drinking happened, and dancing, and joking, and laughing. Emma and I even had a conversation about how the will to power is a pathos. Some of my old crew of boys came, like Halliday, and Steve Dye and Keith. A friend of Marco�s showed up late, who had been at a Dave Matthews concert (yikes! Strike one) and proceeded to molest, drunkenly (I suspect other substances were involved as well), all the women at the party, including the lesbians. The next morning Marco was wishing we could view a film montage of him walking various people out to the street towards the end of the evening so he could apologize for his friend�s behavior. On the plane today (where I am right now as I write this) one of the flight attendants won�t stop flirting with me and he made sure to mention that he wishes he had gone to the Dave Matthews concert this weekend. (yikes!) Ah, failed bonding attempt. It�s like the time I was in a long line for popcorn at the movies and the guy in front of me turned around and said, �Man, this is like a Phish show,� and I responded, �But luckily we don�t have to watch Phish later!� He looked crestfallen.

On Saturday morning, post-party, we all woke up slightly hungover, but Stephen and Scout still came back over, ate breakfast with us, and then posed in various snuggly bed positions for a camera mounted on Marco�s ceiling. For Evany�s sleeping positions book. The first day we took photos, earlier this summer, we only had Marco, Evany, Heidi and I, so we had no boy-on-boy action represented. The photos are only for an illustrator to use, so none of them will actually appear in the book. Still, Stephen kept joking and saying things like, �But what if I want to be a senator?�

You are well on your way, my friend.

But right now I am tired, and am anticipating further exhaustion. I spent the last two nights at Marco�s house (pleasantly, on his lovely couch), having only 30 minutes in my SF apartment yesterday, on the way from Leah�s to Marco�s, to pack my suitcases for today. Evany and Marco drove me to the airport at 5:30 this morning. Today I�m on a flight from Oakland to Los Angeles to Nashville to Hartford (oy!). Then I have to take an infernally slow and expensive shuttle from Hartford to Amherst (where are you Chris, where?!), where I spend a night at the Lord Jeffrey Inn (named after Jeffrey Amherst, the man whose idea it was to give plague blankets to the Native Americans). If I am not collapsing by the time I get there I will have drinks with John, because apparently I have changed my name to Boozy McDrinker this summer. Tomorrow morning I have to walk to my old farmhouse from last year, put labels on my 14 UPS boxes, load additional boxes and things into my car (it is 90-100 degrees and humid right now. Plus thunderstorms. The farmhouse is not air-conditioned, nor is my car, and I don�t have an umbrella), wait for the UPS guy, have lunch with Martha, and then do the seven hour drive to Haverford. I�ll probably get in fairly late, at which point I�ll have to figure out where on the campus is the security office so I can get keys to my apartment and to the Campus Center where I have a hotel room reserved for a few days, so I can sleep in a bed instead of on the lovely wood floors of my new apartment. It is tiring just to consider it all, don�t you think?

11:39 p.m. - August 14, 2005

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