I took Henry to the big-city style magazines and smokes store today, so he could get his Pokémon fix. They have the Pokémon packs stuck to the window with numbers on them, so you have to stand outside the store for a little while, while Henry studies his choices and picks a number. Then you go in and say, Number 28, Please and the man behind the counter silently reaches back and hands you a Number 28 with the manner he must use on the people buying dirty magazines. We also bought a pack of Lifesavers, one of which disintegrated into powder in my mouth. The Lifesaver I ate was so strange that I actually took the pack back out of my purse and studied it carefully, to see if I’d bought some variation on the normal Lifesaver—Now More Crumbly! Now Older Than Ever Before! Short-Lasting! Worse!

I don’t know if you noticed this, darlings, but yesterday was my one hundredth post. David said we should celebrate with Champagne, but I said I still had a head cold and would rather not, and we paid bills and then watched reruns of The Office with little half-smiles on our faces. So celebrate however you would like.

I gave blood again today. I have rare and valuable blood, and was most particularly requested to give some more of it by the blood people, who called my house and sent me persistent emails on the subject, but they needn't have hounded me, because I am either a saint who likes to do good for others even at the cost of some personal discomfort or a crazy person who likes to get attention by giving blood. Only time will tell. For now all you need to know is that when asked to give blood, I mostly do.

So there I was lying on the big rubber slatted outdoor chaise longues that they use for blood donors, a needle in my arm drawing my blood rapidly down to a big plastic bladder, balancing my enormous biography of Virginia Woolf by her nephew Quentin Bell on my lap and attempting to turn the pages one-handed, so as not to disturb my blood-giving arm, when the nurse who was in charge of my blood complimented me on my ability to balance the book and turn pages with one hand. Bragging, I told her that I could also read and walk, and was drawn suddenly to the path in camp from my cabin to the lake, down which I used to walk, slowly, reading—so slowly, once, that by the time I got to the lake everyone else was coming up the hill again, free swim being over. I was at the time very pleased by this little evasion but I never thought of a grander one, never dreamed that the four weeks I spent there for three summers running, being the most unpleasant twelve weeks of my youth, could be avoided altogether, and spent somewhere better and happier. What I lacked when I was younger was, despite all my reading, an imagination.

I haven't had an interesting thought in my head for two days. I'm filled with thoughts, of course, as I am, for better or worse, a consciousness that cannot be turned off, but they are all stupid. It's icy in the driveway. Don't hit it to her forehand. There's nothing good on television. I wish my head cold would go away. Our kitchen is nice. I like sugar.

I can go on, if you'd like. No, really I can.

For relief from myself I picked up Quentin Bell's biography of his aunt, Virginia Woolf. He wrote, about a Woolf forebear:

He was known as the greatest liar in India; he drank himself to death; he was packed off home in a cask of spirits, which cask, exploding, ejected his unbottled corpse before his widow’s eyes, drove her out of her wits, set the ship on fire and left it stranded [darlings, wait for it] in the Hooghly.

About another relative:

He was, I believe, the author of One More Passionate Kiss; this embrace was reserved, however, not for his beautiful wife but for the second footman.

However real life may seem, says Bell, it is a story, and not only a story, but a joke.

Once David almost died. He had appendicitis but it went undiagnosed, and his appendix had burst by the time we got him to a doctor. When they operated on him to remove the appendix they didn’t clean him out well enough and he remained very ill and they had to operate again, and then he had to stay in the hospital until his temperature went down and they could be sure there was no risk of infection. We were in Brussels, I was eight months pregnant, and the whole period was very horrible, but we remember it fondly now that it’s over. We talk about it all the time. We never want to forget it. If you want I’ll tell you the story again.

I went to the second most horrible children’s birthday party ever, but it’s not nice to talk about it. It made me sad. I think I hit the car on something on the way out. I pulled over—it was raining—and put on the hazard lights and went out to check the car and then was like, I must leave here now. Got back in the car and drove John home.

I’m too susceptible, I realize, to other people’s situations. I get uncomfortable in, for example, expensive houses that are poorly decorated. I feel like there are no values in the world. This house had an enormous basement covered in yucky carpeting and I thought, These children are going to smoke pot here later. I will not let my children come over. All of which is ridiculous. I will say that no one, including the little birthday girl, face buried in her father's neck, liked the clown they got. John was initially critical because she didn’t have a red nose. She was otherwise dressed from head to toe in extremely distinctive clown gear (right before I did or did not hit the car on something I watched her drive away in her car still wearing the wig, the hat, the makeup and the shirt), but he felt the lack of nose was significant. Darlings, why can’t everything be nice in the world? Alternately, Why must everything have meaning?

The children are fighting downstairs. I can hear them thudding into the walls. Early this morning I thought that one of the children was upstairs, dropping marbles on the floor above my head, but it was squirrels dropping nuts in the gutter, instead. The children were asleep in their rooms.

Now the children are fighting downstairs. Henry has a friend over and I’m sure this is part of the fight—John would like to be included in the play date—but the boys don’t need something to fight about in order to fight. They have all of childhood and adulthood to fight about. They can fight about the possibilities of outer space and endless time.

Yesterday morning David left for work and the children woke and came into my room. I turned on the bedside lamp and everything was cozy and nice. You’re warm, Henry said, getting under the covers. John sat on the floor reading. Then I went to the bathroom and closed the door and they started hitting each other. On the phone later David and I imagined what happens when I close the door. The children turn to each other. What should we do? one of them asks. I could hit you in the head, says the other. You hit me in the head last time, says the first one. Anything else? Naw, all out. All right, all right, hit me in the head. Then, cooperatively, lovingly, they hit each other and cry.

I made a lot of lists last week, and I ran a lot of errands. I chopped a lot of vegetables. I chopped so many vegetables that I became seriously fatigued, and, as I watched my hands chopping vegetables, some of my fingers holding the vegetables down and then four other fingers on the handle of knife, which wasn’t as sharp as it should have been, I thought, I am so tired but I must focus, so that I don’t cut off my own fingers. Focus. And I did focus, and I cut all the vegetables into very thin batons and teeny tiny little mince and I did not chop off even one of my fingers, not even one.

Lately I am estranged from my own hands, I look at them on the steering wheel, or taking off their rings to wash the dishes and am interested by them in a friendly but, given that they’re my hands, kind of distant way. Of course this is because they look like my mother’s hands, as they were when I was young, and they are doing what her hands used to do. And they are glamorous as my mother’s hands used to be for me, bony and veiny and useful.

Very busy. Loads to do. Will write soon.