Letter from SSAAH Cadet LuAnn

A wonder to parse:

"The self-policing that goes with being moderately high up the food chain in such a loosely knit organization does create a lot of anxiety--the only time we know we're for sure working hard enough is when we're too exhausted to do anything further. I'm glad to hear about the relatively relaxed travel style of people who aren't you or me. I'll check the Metro situation before I go. And I will try to stop obsessing about whether Pam Rawlins thinks I'm a lush. (Maybe I'm just eternally youthful--the level of drinking that goes on among 20- and 30-somethings in Chicago is sort of alarming, the equivalent of overindulgence in acid in the late 1960s.

Or maybe I'm choosing to concentrate all my anxieties about a possible move to the east coast, or about the company in general, or about the bacchanalian behavior of my late father and his third wife, into this one silly pattern of anxiety about someone who probably hasn't thought about it at all. I mean, I took impeccable care of! the cats, and Pam said at the time of her return that she was pleased that they were happy to see her but not hysterical. That is what cat owners say when they're happy with how you took care of their cats. Probably the fact that Lauren, the lovely scrawny working-class waitress at the Rosebud, had gotten me fascinated about her life (I don't tend to meet those Irish American impoverished New Englanders normally) and fed me three manhattans while telling me her life story was not the PR disaster I tend to think of it as in retrospect.

I was perfectly coherent . . . Sorry to go on about this. It was a cool trip in some ways anyhow, seeing you among them, and seeing how San Franciscan the hills around there can get! I think the interesting part of Somerville that you reported driving through after dropping me off in Porter Square was Union Square?"