It's a book project with a friend of mine I tentatively started in January. I was going to write her one email a day. This is one I liked:

All right, even if it's only short I'm going to try to get in the habit of emailing you every day. For fun! Yes for fun! You can email whatever load you can handle. When you don't have time to read my stuff, just don't read it.

And hey, do me a favor, don't get offended. I lead an offensive life. Thanks.

I had my first glimpse of love today. It was with a doctor. I met him when the fact of my marriage falling apart seemed like a fashionable lark. (What are you doing this April? Mmm. Getting separated maybe? I want to do something different, that's all I know.) I remember smiling a lot when I met the doctor. I tend to smile a lot when I meet men. I want to show them how happy I am.

Sometimes I just keep talking and smiling, talking and smiling. That's how I kept things with the doctor for many months until things were sad and bad and my marriage falling apart became something real. I called him very happy one day, fresh from crying in the bathroom, determined to show him and myself how insanely happy and carefree I still was. At the end of the conversation he said, "Mandy, you seem like someone who is not always honest with how you are feeling." And I wanted to kiss him.

I didn't kiss him when I met him. I did give him a lap dance in a cab on the way to another bar. And then of course, there was the shared lap dance at the Hustler Club but who's counting.

Tonight, though, I had a terrible dinner with a friend who I know is one of those friends who is searching for the little details in your life to feel superior about. And I knew it, and I didn't care. She never cries. She is never sad. She never prays. She is never fazed. She just screws up her face at other people when they experience adversity. She pounces on vulnerabilities. "Do you always stay late at work? Is work something you have to work at? Hmm. Weird." And then she screws up her face. And I was aware of this so I kept stuttering saying, "Uh," and "Ah," until I finally said, "All of my friends are leading their lives to support a big Crate & Barrel brunch having ultimate yuppie lifestyle, and I don't want that. It makes me feel lonely. And it is so much work to maintain this image of beauty for men and then at the end of the day I don't even know that I want most of the guys I am maintaining this image for. I work and work and work to maintain their interest and then a moment of clarity happens and I realize, You're kind of an asshole."

She did not screw up her face. But I still felt alone.

Then I called the doctor. I started smiling and talking, smiling and talking, but I also told him honestly about how confused everything is with me. About using sex, the baiting of your body as power, and the fear that comes with turning things into an actual human encounter because then the humanity can be taken away.

So I told the doctor all this and then a little bit more about men and dating and boys and the many, many complex feelings involved and how my brother in law told me, "Guys don't want to hear girl things but girls are pretty so they will listen" and did the doctor think this was true? And he said, "Mandy, you're in New York. It's okay. You're having fun. Don't worry about that guy. Don't worry." He didn't say that but that's the way that I am going to remember it because oh, it felt so good. Because do you know what happened? A really magical, wonderful thing happened.

I said, "I hope your week was lovely." That's my new thing. I get off the phone before people can get off the phone with me so that I am not needy on my own divorced lonely spinster girl who please keep talking I'm all alone so alone so alone. And that was my transition to the coy hangup.

And he said, "Mandy, do you want to know about my week? Really? I had one of the most stressful weeks I've ever had in my life." Then he told me a story that was perhaps one of the funniest stories I've ever heard about interviewing at a big prestigious medical school for a post-fellowship position (when I met his friends a few weeks back, they inquired, "When did he drop the d-bomb? First five minutes? How long?").

In the story, while he was interviewing for the position, during the cocktail hour someone asked if he had met a certain Dr. Y at the other medical center he interviewed at. It was cocktail hour, so, "Sure," he said, he'd met Dr. Y. Sure. He realized as soon as he said it that in fact he had not met Dr. Y but what was he going to do at that point? The person had moved on, was on to the next phase of the cocktail hour and was he going to say, "Excuse me, I actually did not meet Dr. Y, it's just that this is cocktail hour and I was saying yes because that seemed like the right thing to do and I did in fact hear so much about him so it's almost as if I met Dr. Y."

Well, at the end of the story it turns out that this prestigious medical school is worse than the fucking gestapo and he arrives at the dean's office the next day and the first thing the dean says is, "So, you met Dr. Y, yes?" as if it was a psychological breakdown.

And there was about 20 other things that went wrong like that until he got to the point where as he was making rounds with one of the senior doctors who was pimping him out to all the cancer patients he simply up and said, "I really have to leave and catch my flight" even though his flight was not until the next day and he took a taxi to get away, to get anywhere. And he ended up at a coffee shop and then of course, walking across the street, it's an adminstrator from the prestigious medical school who calls out, "Hey! Hey! I thought that was you. Wait. Didn't you have to catch a flight?"

Oh how we laughed. And we talked about boys, we kept talking about boys and you know the fantasy, the delicious fantasy is as I am counseling him and he is counseling me, the girl part of my brain the really girl part, the Kelly Ripa part, the Martha Stewart part is weaving our story, "Oh kids, it was so funny, how me and your father met at first." Yes that is how low I can be. I can stoop to the "how we met" stories. I can. It's my brain. I wish it was not. But it has several components to it. I even had a dream that the complete prick of an investment banker that I made out with asked me to marry him. Because it would be so easy. So easy to have that checked off. It's also why women have rape fantasies.

So. My love. For the doctor. It sprang from this delicious stream. Oh such a stream. Such a delicious, delicious stream. Because everything we discussed, which included: his odd friend, his crazy friend, and dog fucking, came back to how he should invent a larger than life story for knowing Dr. Y. If challenged by the dean of the prestigious medical school, he would now be indignant that he not only knew and had in fact met Dr. Y but had also gone away to a small cottage in Vermont with Dr. Y and he knew him to be a proven dog fucker. We were rolling. And it was so, so far away from the Crate & Barrel completely yupped out brunches I fear and what's more he was an actual male who I was laughing with. It was love. My first glimpse at love. I'm going to enjoy it even if it's only for tonight.