03.19.04 - 1:01 p.m.

I don't understand why they don't make dress shoes for women to wear with pants that look o.k. with ordinary socks. I like wearing ordinary socks. They keep my feet warmer than trouser socks, which are either too big and fall down or leave these weird, whatever marks around your calves, and one can't exactly wear hose with pants, either, because the pants cling weirdly and don't feel right.

I suppose it doesn't matter, because the broken toe is exquisitely painful, now. I think about it all the time. I can't help it, because it throbs constantly, reminding me, somehow, of the flashing lights of a police car, or maybe the light from a lighthouse - regular pulse of intense brightness, a moment, a valley of almost-darkness, followed by another intense flash of pain, in an endless cycle. Sometimes I don't think about it, and then sometimes it returns. Pain is such a personal thing. It lives right here in your head. No one else can see, sense, or otherwise apprehend it. It's just a little world you carry around inside yourself, that only occasionally grazes the rest of the world. Most pain is like that - physical pain, emotional pain - hidden behind your eyes, buried beneath your skin. No matter how much we think we empathize, no matter how much we think we know, we never do. How do you measure it? How do you communicate it? How do you feel for someone else's loss when your own irritations have piled unconscienably up, up and up? It's impossible.