First order of business: a big round of applause for the can-do folks at Partners Headache Center for failing to call in my prescription today after promising they would. No, tomorrow really isn't good enough when I'm in pain now. Especially since I've been in pain since yesterday.

In other top stories: after Day One of Phase One of Encounters in Real Estate, I've learned enough not to be amorphously afraid of the real estate market. My fear now has much more clarity. One agent, who despite his Southie accent was an unpleasant man and will not get a call back, told me, "Oh no, condos with pahking spaces staht at $600,000." Not an auspicious start.

Eventually, though, I talked with a guy who was not only friendly but much more encouraging about my prospects. He seemed to understand that the priority here is location, not square footage. (He's from NYC. He understands urbanites.) He has a wonderful cross-ethnic name of the Caitlin Abromowitz variety. He's charming and he's probably a snake and I like him. We'll see what he can come up with, and we'll see who else I can come up with who understands me.

I didn't do my laundry or work out. This is not good. I have no clean socks and my gym clothes should be condemned as unfit for human habitation. Also, my jeans are as snug as they were four weeks ago, so I should be doing at least sixty minutes of cardio a day. I'm not happy about missing a workout, but my head hurts so badly that I'm just going to stay the hell home and try to sleep early.

My parents have devised a weird system wherein my father prints out my journal via laser printer in one of his offices at Big Network News (BNN), then brings the hard copies home for my mother to read. He has a laptop that belongs to BNN and my mother has a VTech Connect e-mail appliance, but they don't have a home computer. (In the last two years, I have personally witnessed each of them using a Selectric typewriter. Why they haven't bought themselves an iMac or Wintel box is beyond me, but anyway.)

"I liked your other picture better," my mom said when I called today. What picture? "The one in the top left-hand corner."

I had to think about that for a minute. Then I said, "You mean my icon? As opposed to the one I posted the other day?"

"You look so sad. Sort of dour. I like the other one better."

I wasn't sad, I was thinking. Pensive, maybe. But any shot from a standard webcam printed on a high-speed laser printer would look sad in every sense of the word next to my icon, which began its creation in a 35-mm manual camera with good black and white film and Keith's gifted hands. From there, the shot was scanned, reduced, cropped, and contrastually blitzed out in Photoshop into the printer-friendly pic it is today. I love the picture because I will always remember exactly what I was thinking as it was taken, and no, I won't tell you.

I told her I'd make faces at the cam next time. "Don't do that!"

Anyway. The Leader of the Free World will be addressing us soon to reassure us that he hasn't got a clue what's going on with the economy and we're in for some turbulence.