I had a dream that I was in a cafe, looking at the menu, waiting, waiting, when suddenly I realized that I was waiting for my good friend, Jude Law. I am meeting Jude Law, I thought. I wonder how he’s been? I didn’t have to wonder long, because soon he slid into the booth next to me, on my side.

“How’s things, SJ?” he said, in his creamy Jude Law voice. This man is flirting with me, I thought. I am not into this.

I have had enough of the scrawny rake type to last me a lifetime. Rakes are okay, but not scrawny ones. As far as I’m concerned, Jude Law needs to eat more warm pork.

This is the part in the telling where my companion interrupts: “Who’s Jude Law?” he says. The man is a pop-culture sieve, alas.

“Jude Law is the one with the nanny,” I say.

“Oh, yeah.”

In the booth next to us, a man pops and looks at the two of us seated together. “Hey, you’re Jude Law,” he says, and his unspoken, puzzled look at me says, “and you’re the dog’s breakfast.” I suppose he was expecting someone blonde, freckled, and bohoian. He scootched over and sat with us, and began speaking a mile a minute. Now I’ll never be able to tell Jude what the baby’s been doing, I thought.

I went off to use the bathroom, and when I returned, our food had arrived. Jude was surrounded by men, mostly gay ones, and someone was eating his food and Jude was halfway through my hamburger, which I detachedly noted he was eating sexily.

“See you later, Jude,” I said. Too crowded now.

“Mmm-hmm, bye, doll.”

In Other News

My companion, Strudel, and I nicked off to Portland this weekend to visit his family. We stayed at a hotel, which was the best thing we could have done. His brother and his sister were in town, both staying at their mother’s, and that would have gotten crowded, in an uncomfortable, dysfunctional, John-Irving-should-really-follow-this-family-around sort of way, because then he could get some ideas for his next novel. Ahem.

We had a lot of good meals, and saw lots of cool people, including my friend Jiant from library school, who I used to have beers with and shoot pool with. He is about to get a fabulous job offer from a library far away from here, which is just about the only way to get a job after library school. I played THE WORST GAME OF POOL I have ever played in my life in front of him, and for once, getting drunk didn’t make it better. But he still wanted to hang out after that.

Also, we went to the Portland Rose Garden, which whups the Seattle one, and visited Powell’s books twice, because my god, the wall of porn is so big, how can one take it all in the first time? I thought my companion was just kidding when he said that the wall of porn was right next to nautical fiction, but no, there it was. Heavily greased men staring out at me right next to the picture of Russell Crowe on the cover of Master and Commander…greased men…Russell Crowe…after a while, the classification scheme started to make sense.