That's an image from an art project called "the world's smallest postal service," which my editor sent me for obvious reasons. I feel a lot better all of a sudden. Not 100% - I had to cancel a film date with my friend Ruby Buck - but well enough to eat some real food and take some much-needed aspirin.

(Slim is playing the prettiest song on his mandolin. I think it's "If I Needed Someone to Love.")

tmi alert

Shortly after completing last night's dispatch, I threw up. It was very abrupt: I'd had a tummy ache, and burped, but instead I threw up and as a result had to throw out all my bedding. It was very miserable, made more so by the fact that Slim and the Engineer were working all night in the kitchen with an amplifier. Anyway, it was the sort of night where the world narrows to the bathroom tile feeling cool under your cheek and a towel seeming like an adequate blanket and reciting as many limericks as you know to distract yourself between bouts of vomiting.

I took a sick day. And had I not already been queasy, Slim's breakfast - a pulled pork and scrambled egg sandwich, chocolate shake and a side of fried okra - would probably have done it. I'm on the Gatorade and broth diet.

Were I not in a benevolent mood, I might be irritated right about now. Slim has had a piece of good luck with one of his inventions and so we planned to have a small champagne gala this evening. Well, he finally did arrive with the champagne, but then realized he had left something in the car. When he walked back in, he had some random dude in Buddy Holly glasses and a deerstalker hat in tow. This, I ascertained, was someone he knew and had run into on the sidewalk. I gave him a cookie. We all toasted; I learned that the guy had been born in 1976 and was from Iowa and still had absolutely no idea who he was. It turned out he was on his way to DJ at a nearby bar's 1950s R&B night, so we all piled into the car to hear him do that. Or, rather, he and I did; we lost Slim on the way. I discovered him in Bonecrusher's apartment, wearing the latter's paratrooper cap. After much persuasion, Bonecrusher agreed to join us.

We hied to the bar, which was filled with hipsters. After a time, Bonecrusher apparently freaked out, so Matt took him home. When they'd been gone half an hour and I was growing weary of glaring at inauspicious fellows, I left. No sooner had I gotten back to the apartment, around 11.30, when there was a knock on the door; it was a shy-looking type who, I quickly ascertained, was the engineer Slim had brought down from MIT to work on one of his inventions. Since Slim doesn't have a phone, I gave the engineer a cookie and drew him a rather vague map back to the bar, and showed him the nude picture of Matt from the "Men of Snowblink" calender so he'd recognize him. He left.

Oh, I hear Matt now.

Now he's gone to find that engineer. It seems Bonecrusher had a crisis so they had to go to this very depressing bar on Meserole, leaving me alone. Fair enough, I guess. Goodnight.

I wrote on my ghostie on the website today; it sparked some really good stories, and of course a few very dismissive skeptics. I get questioning, but that level of certainty always seems to me very presumptuous. How can we know anything? "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio" etc. Okay, I'll admit to not believing in aliens - although I daresay there's some bacteria somewhere - but even then, I'd never dismiss anyone who did. And I'd sort of like to be proven wrong, in any case. More to love, and all that.

(In other news, a handsome boy looked at the Greenpoint apartment this morning. Which is neither here nor there, but I wish I had not been dressed quite so eccentrically. Or at least been wearing some makeup.We have our pride.)

Apparently the costume designer from Mad Men is starting her own line. Which is not to say it'll necessarily be vintagey, because after all that's her job. Still, good to see things launching in this economy! And I'm guessing people take comfort from more traditional shapes nowadays...

Talking of ghosts, a friend of Slim's is experiencing a really bad haunting down in Georgia. Since he moved into his house, he's been awoken repeatedly by the feeling of someone shaking him and the sound of voices, and his dog has been positively freaking out in all the approved ways. It got to the point where he had to crash on friends' couches to get any rest. So he looked into the property and found out that the site had been a major lynching spot - and the lynching tree is still in the yard! Nearly mindless from lack of sleep, he went into the yard and yelled, "I'm not here to harm you; please let me get one night's rest!" He was left in peace that night...and then they came back. Now, he's moving.

I am getting frightened about our spector. I woke up last night very worried about being alone in the new house - when we move, that is. Slim was out and I curled up under the blankets and thought very hard about old musicals until the fear passed. Maybe we should get a dog. Although if his fur was always sticking straight up in panic, I guess that wouldn't be very reassuring.

On an unrelated note, Slim wants us to go to a THREE DAY Charles Ives performance at Wesleyan. Negotiating as fast as I can.

We visited the new apartment today and guess what? It used to be a crack den! And is haunted! By the ghost of "an old, black man" according to Ludivine. She says he's beat a retreat, but Slim did indeed sense something the first time we went in...

I had a talk with a friend the other day that really got me thinking: he said that, although he's doing well in his line of work and generally satisfied romantically and philosophically, he's coming to realize that he's someone who's destined for a "small life" rather than the grander destiny he'd always vaguely envisioned. It made me sad not because there's anything tragic in small scale - I'm firmly of the belief that there are no small lives, only small actors to paraphrase whoever said that - but because he seemed to be giving up on something at an awfully young age.

What is a "big" life, though? Fame? Affecting people's lives? Leaving something behind? Even a large life is made up of tiny things - the decision is in whether to appreciate them, surely. It seems to me that if one is conscious of the scale of his existence, it's a pretty untenable state, and not necessarily a happy one. When I think of those friends I know who are enjoying an unusual degree of success at a young age - some musicians, a couple of very successful writers - I see all the excitement and challenges of a whole life condensed into a few months' time, and both the thrill and the toll of it. If most of life is made up of looking back and anticipation, it must be fairly terrifying to know that you're actually in the eye of the storm.

This has been a week filled with history, delicious meals, a failed batch of mashed potatoes, petty gossip, professional anxt, one new dress, and a redux of The Man Who Was Thursday. Today I had brunch with a friend who had made the most beautiful miniature birthday cake out of Sculpey. Then we took the dog for a walk and there was a lamppost that said "NY City" on the base and looked almost old enough to have been converted from gas. I cut my finger with the vegetable peeler. Slim brought me a sour cream doughnut from Peter Pan. A dear friend's parent is ill. Charlie got a new job at a good bar. I broke my favorite glass, the miniature glass mug with the squirrel embossed on it. And my mom is in California with her brother, trying to help him sort things out.

I'll take it.