after another late start, becca took ben and me to the garment district. multiple floors of everything from records you've never heard of to housewares you can't use, from colorful vintage clothes to raggedy dollar-a-pound stuff. i waded ankle-deep into the latter and fished out a soft black sweater that fit nicely. couldn't find anything in the books, movies, or video collection but upstairs nabbed another red sweater and lamented that a pair of sturdy, lightblue shoes, of which i was quite enamored, pinched my toes. becca and ben both fared better than i did. we finally pulled ourselves away to meet becca's mom for a vietnamese dinner. (in the streets we saw of chinatown, the only businesses were food and porn, with the latter outnumbering the former by about three to one. i marveled that anything could exist with such competition.)
then to the theater for shaw's heartbreak house. i found it hard to disentangle my issues with the play from my issues with the production. i have unresolved issues with the theater as well. i love films to take all possible advantage of the fact that they're films but i dislike theater that's theatrical. what's the logic of that?

they're discussing the connection between religion and neurosis in the other room. my energy level might be too low for me to join them. ben and i are bussing it out of here at 10 tomorrow morning. i've never traveled greyhound before.
this morning, becca told my fortune and came up with a rather different life for me than did pennbecca this summer. according to swatbecca, i will be married and with one kid, a son, before i'm thirty; stay mostly on the east coast and go through various writing gigs; grad skool at columbia; etc. it wouldn't surprise me really if that's how things ended up, cleanly, conventionally, the way i half-hope for and half-expect. on the other hand, something about the rendition upset something small and internal in me. exitement! high drama! tragedy! success! surprise! where are the exclamation points in the life she laid out for me?
this year, the year swatbecca has known me, hasn't been full of exclamation points. i don't know what that portends for my future in general, if anything. maybe i am just a less dramatic, neurotic person than i used to be. or maybe that part of me is just in a lull right now and exists as much as it ever did. who knows?