It appears I have eaten everything in this house except the last few baby carrots in the bag of Grimmway Farms Bunny-Luv. No, wait, I think there is a small aluminium container of dried scallops in the pantry. Also a last bit of cauliflower pickles and half a lemon and three out-of-season strawberries in the fridge. Whatever. No bloody time for poking around in grocery stores. Some dinnertimes come on the tail end of a week of freakishly focused thesis-writing; a week through which ran a constant and tensely quiet undercurrent of panic; a week of not more than five hours of sleep per night—and that culminated in last night’s power nap between four-thirty and eight this morning.

The strange thing is how well my body seems to be taking this abuse. This regime is far from misery or oppression. I work contentedly into the wee hours of the morning before getting under the covers, at which point I say, into the darkness, “Let’s wake up in five hours, okay?” and then, miraculously, quite refreshed, without the alarm clock, I do.

And then I sit and I sit, and I read, and I write; and sometimes it is frightening, in the buzzing silence, how blank a mind can be; and sometimes the writing comes and then hot damn it’s flying it’s jubilation it’s exhilaration and I am Miracle Genius of the World. Non mais merdeuh ça fait du bien and I think I’m close to done, except for some sort of brilliant conclusion. I got the Freud in there, the Benveniste, the Lacan, the Mauss. Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Sarraute, Perec. Am I dropping names? Hell yeah. And I might even give Montaigne a shout-out to wrap it up.

I gave my pages to Maud this afternoon for a grammatical go-over, (everybody likes a French friend), and if all goes well, tomorrow she will call to say, “I doff my hat in your direction, for your thesis is amazing.” Maud, are you reading this?, no pressure!

We met up at school, lured Jazon out of the library, then sat in the sun and ate toasted bagels and marveled at the shirtless undergraduates with the nipple rings. Like an advertisement for America-Land-of-the-Free, campus on a sunny day is all boys and girls and frisbees and ball games and glowing health and hair in the wind.

And then Jazon left us for the irresistible wiles of Queen Latifah in “Beauty Shop,” and still we sat, me and Maud, and then we sat some more. Saturday afternoon is the warm sun on the wide steps of Low Library, and a homemade Brazilian compilation on a Discman. We solved the problems of the world six times over while moving west with the light every so many minutes till it got too cold and we couldn’t chase the rays any longer, and then one of us went uptown and one of us went downtown.

Which brings us to dinnertime, and the bag of Bunny-Luv in the fridge.

Up till about an hour ago, it’d been months since I’d ordered in a meal. The delivery menus were jammed in behind the foil and the Glad Wrap and the Ziploc bags in the top left drawer. So... many... crumpled... choices... and me... so... hungry. I was paralysed by indecision—

(I originally typed “I was waffling over my options” and then I thought, “Mmm...waffles.” Had there been a menu with waffles— oh, no, wait, crap, the menu I barely glanced at from the twenty-four-hour Donuts Luncheonette would’ve had waffles. O, how I shake my fist at, oh, well, myself, really. Nevermind.)

— I was paralysed by indecision—hunger and indecision—until I thought about what I might be able to cobble together from the can of hearts of palm in the pantry and the frozen walnut agnoletti in the freezer, then called Tofu on Seventh. And truly their Delivery is Fast, because in a matter of minutes (like twelve, not, like, a hundred and twenty-eight) all too soon I had a thing of eggplant and beansprouts, and a thing of tofu and scallops, and even some dubious orangey duck sauce and two fortune cookies. And then, because, shit, just because I felt like it, I sat cross-legged on the floor and read the “Sunday Styles” section of the Times and ate with a Chinese soup spoon. Sometimes some things are just the things you need.

It occurs to me now that there are other things I need, and they are (a) to put on some Benjamin Biolay and Chiara Mastroianni and (b) to get into a hot bath, the kind of hot where you step into the water and your skin prickles. Achieveable goals, people, achieveable goals.

I am so happy to go to sleep tonight.