Last week I wasn’t myself. David’s parents took the kids for two nights, which left me three days where I wasn’t a mother, or was only barely a mother. I went into the city. My skirt had been ripped into pieces by the train so I had bought a new skirt at Grand Central, and this was the skirt I wore for the next three days. It was tight, and hard to walk in, and I wore it with high heels. I didn’t feel like I looked like a hooker but there was whistling.

I went to the Benglis/Bourgeois show I’d wanted to see. Bourgeois is a genius, she sculpts in some kind of language that is entirely invented and completely transparent, to express feelings that you have, but that you didn’t know you had. These feelings were mixed up for me with the fact that there were people working in the gallery who wouldn't acknowledge that I was there. I said, Hello, and they looked away. I searched up and down Ninth and Tenth Avenues for the book store I liked but couldn’t find it anywhere. I hailed a taxi.

I met David for dinner and he brought me roses, which I also experienced as not normal, not for me. The food was spicy and my nose ran. We walked back up to our hotel and my legs rubbed together and chafed and in fact I was in some pain. At the hotel, everything was dim, faded, ugly, cheap and old, and the anonymity that I normally love in hotels joined in the general assault on my self. In the morning David left before I got up and I didn’t want to leave the flowers in the room. I knocked on the door to the staff hall and offered them to the people there, who had been laughing and happy. When a woman came forward to take them I said, Happy Valentine’s Day, early? Or late? And she laughed and hugged me.

Crap, I felt weird. I couldn’t write in the blog, I couldn’t shape myself into anything, and I still wonder if I am shapeable, if I am a thing, or if I'm something less defined than that.

But the children are back, which helps. And I know what I am going to write next, which also helps. Tennis team tryouts are next week. Our kitchen has windows and doors. Everything will start to appear orderly again, and I will know my place.

It’s not that I’m not doing things, I am doing things, I am doing a lot of things, I’m taking trains into the city and ripping my skirt on the arm rest so that my underwear shows and I have to run into a store and buy a new skirt, I’m meeting my youngest sister for dinner and getting schmackled on a bubbly red, I’m walking home from the train station at 11 under a full moon, I’m reading the entire New Yorker in bed in the morning while the men hammer and bang things somewhere else on my house. The house! I’m driving to Stamford to look for wood flooring, I’m agreeing to expensive additional procedures for the renovation, I’m calling the tree man in for a consultation, I’m talking to our contractor about our progress and handing him an enormous check, I am in pursuit of the perfect front door.

I'm reserving a room at a midtown hotel, where I'm planning to meet my husband tonight, I'm holding an appointment for a haircut on Wednesday, before I head to the Open with my father. I’m slowly making my way through Saturday, although it’s overdue, I’m going through the children’s papers for the first day of school, I’m following Gonzales’ resignation, and the arrest of Larry Craig. I'm eating breakfast, and I'm even doing the dishes.

The children are gone, is the dramatic way of saying that they are at their grandparents’, and happy, and that they slept through the night. I had so many things to do in their absence, but I didn’t understand how I would feel, doing them.

I spoke too soon when I said I wouldn’t bore you about the renovation.

I’m going to leave that hanging there, like a threat. They’re pulling walls down today. That’s all I’ll say, for now.

Yesterday I tried to make a slide show of the loop I walk for exercise, which for some reason obsesses me. I know why it obsesses me. It obsesses me because it is saturated with crazy meaning only I know. There is the Murakami House, and the place where I saw Flowers in the Wilderness and the Dangerous Curve Where I Will Be Attacked and the House Where I Went to My First Party (Not Really) and the Road To Alien Abduction. Oh, and the Brothel. So, my imaginary world, as it intersects with the real one. I thought you should see it.

The camera batteries are charging.

On the one hand, I feel that I am in the grips of some kind of compulsion that comes from the deepest part of me, and on the other I am undoubtedly under the influence of Sophie Calle. It bothers me a little that when I wrote “I mean, why is no one interested in writers performing? And why aren’t writers interested in being somewhere and writing at some particular point and seeing what comes from that?” I had already read Calle, and read about Calle in Grégoire Bouillier's book, The Mystery Guest. Calle is a performing writer, when she’s not performing other things. In The Hotel, she was hired as a chambermaid in a Venice hotel and used the job to photograph the rooms she cleaned, glean personal information about the inhabitants, and make up stories about them. I haven’t seen The Hotel in person, but as a plan of action this seems to me to be brilliant. She also had her mother hire a private investigator to follow her around, while Calle herself recorded aspects of her life.

I wonder if her mother enjoyed that.

Mine would. If I have a problem with Calle, it’s that I think she’s too satisfied with the punch that aggregation and surfaces can provide. But I love that she makes things up. I love that she takes real things and lies about them.

There are four flies in my office right now. One just flew into me and then fell down dead.