Tuesday, while lying on hot moist pads at my physical therapy clinic, I leafed through a fluffy women's magazine. (Funny how you might typically call fluffy things "girlie" yet a "girlie magazine" means something completely different.) A short article in the paltry health section caught my attention: apparently some study found that women are less trusting when our progesterone levels are cyclically elevated – suggesting that we are most paranoid when we are most liable to conceive.

From an evolutionary standpoint that seems good for the species, but it doesn't seem like it could possibly be good for long-term relationships. Certainly it hasn't been conducive to maintaining my relationships for long hauls.

Today a NY Times article about author Anne Carson ended with, "... Ms. Carson lives by herself most of the time, but says she does not mind loneliness: 'Loneliness is not an important form of suffering.... It's undeniable, but it's just not significant.'"

I decided to add Carson (4 years my senior) to my overwhelming reading list when I read the excerpt from her book Glass, Irony and God: "Everything I know about love and its necessities / I learned in that one moment / when I found myself / thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon / at a man who no longer cherished me."

Carson and I are of the first generation (and still counting) failed by the promises of the sexual revolution, I think. I recently went out with a man who told me that he preferred dating "older women" (the twit was actually a few months older than I – it was our final date, by the way). They were, he said, more "realistic" – by which he meant that we thrust our burning backsides while no longer hoping affection to be coincident.

I suppose that's a little less evil than lying about esteem in exchange for a little burning backside. I suspect that the last man who took that tack with me would have thought twice had I been blogging publicly then. So! There's another chit in my mental side-by-side comparison of the pro's and con's of online journaling.