After holding a potluck dinner* at your apartment on Friday evening at which the table groaned with food and the strawberry cheesecake made everyone groan too, it is wise to sleep in a little on Saturday, wake up to a happy Ross, and go for a seven mile bike ride by the lake before you come home to eat leftovers. Then, too, it is wise to spend a few minutes mending a dress you haven’t been able to wear for months because its straps were broken, and put it on in a state of high delight, in preparation for a night out at the theater. The wisdom of taking headless pictures of yourself wearing the dress afterwards is not clear.

*We were celebrating the end of the first year of graduate school for Ross and his friends. Good job, computer scientists!

We took a walk around the university campus tonight that felt like this; empty, but full, unfamiliar, but nostalgic. As spring turns into summer in this beautiful neighborhood and our cooking, biking, walking, baking, reading, planting, humming days are full of promise and delight, I feel luckier than I have in a long while. There are things I am planning and hoping for, of course, and change (or is it improvement?) is never far from my mind—but in many ways the life I am living right now, right this moment, is the life of my waking dreams. I hope I remember that the next time discontent takes a turn down my way.

I don’t know, Wong Kar Wai. I don’t know if it was such a good idea to cast Norah Jones as the main character in your film. A beautiful singing voice and perfect lips that look sexy in a close-up when they’re covered in ice cream do not a lead actor make. She wasn’t grating (not for me, anyway—Ross, on the other hand, turned to me after the credits started rolling, shook his head, and said “I can’t stand Norah Jones. Everything she said sounded like it was coming out of the mouth of a Valley girl.”), but she wasn’t great. And I don’t know why you decided to confine Jude Law, who is an experienced and capable actor, to the tiny set of his café and give him no discernible personality whatsoever beyond his ability to bake, his incredible niceness, and his obsession with finding a girl who clearly doesn’t want to be found (yet).

I forgive you for Natalie Portman, because she was honestly much, much more convincing than I had imagined she would be as a peroxided gambler with a sad past, a sassy tongue, and a sweet streak—but did you really have to make her put on an accent on top of all that makeup? And I thank you for David Strathairn, whose alcoholic, stalker-ex-husband character was the only one I really believed in for a moment and really felt for, and whose end was as fitting as it was inevitable. The Otis Redding that you kept playing during those scenes at the bar was pretty wonderful, too.

I don’t know. You can’t help but make a gorgeous movie, and you have such a deft hand with interweaving periods of silence and sound; and the story of Jeremy and Elizabeth is engaging enough, as romances go—I just don’t understand why you wanted to make a romance, a straight romance, anyway. There was a dark heart missing from the sweet dessert of My Blueberry Nights that I wanted to taste and just wasn’t there.

I’ll never be one myself, I don’t think—but I do like to watch their handiwork.

More tomorrow. You can hold me to that.

After my beautiful weekend I’ve been rather out of sorts for the past couple of days, partly because on Monday I did something apparently very cruel to my left leg and my quadriceps ache so I can’t go up and down stairs, or stand up from a chair, without pain. I took today off from the gym and feel vaguely nervous about it, as if I’m suddenly going to flop over in an ecstasy of being out of shape, and by tomorrow morning my heart will have forgotten how to be strong and healthy.

But I talked to Jenn and I talked to Avi and I wrote two letters, and Ross and I have been laughing ourselves to tears over this. Also, the entire neighborhood smells like lilacs right now. The world has a tendency to make itself worthwhile.