Days went by, then weeks. I still did not have a faucet.

People who have no choice are generally unhappy. But people with too many choices are almost as unhappy as those who have no choice at all.

And that was the state of unhappiness into which the web had lured me. [...] on the web, I was alone, adrift in a sea of empty, illusory, misery-inducing choice.

What shall we desperate knowledge workers do? Diffie asked the audience. "Organize!" he said. We need "the rise of labor again," said Whitfield Diffie, renowned cryptographer and former believer in the power of code. "We need to tighten up the relationships among knowledge workers," he said, "and bargain as a whole."

I don't believe in all of this web-stock madness; I know the game is rigged in favor of the VCs. My father, an accountant and small-time real-estate investor, gave me good middle-class advice when he warned me about the market: it's a crap shoot and you should put in only what you are prepared to lose. But there is no escaping one's guts. The air around me is drunken with greed. The rocketing technology stocks create a force field of desire. I am as intoxicated as I was in those fiber optic nights at Infusion, but crazier. I see the startup boys making millions. Why shouldn't I get into the game of betting on technology riches?

[...]

I call Clara Basile, my longtime friend and financial adviser [...] "Do you know what the profit margins are in the grocery business? Three percent, maybe four. Would you buy Safeway?"

The question stayed with me - Do you have to go to the bathroom and eat to be alive? - because it seemed to me that Breazeal's intent was to cite the most basic acts required by human bodily existence, and then see them as ridiculous, even humiliating.

But after a while I cam eto the conclusion: Maybe yes. Given the amount of time living creatures devote to food and its attendant states - food! the stuff that sustains us - I decided that, yes, there might be something crucial about the necessities of eating and eliminating that defines us. How much of our state of being is dependent upon being hungry, having eaten, being full, shitting. Hunger! Our word for everything from nourishment to passionate desire. Satisfied! Meaning everything from well fed to sexually fulfilled to mentally soothed. Shit! Our word for human waste and an expletive of impatience. THe more I thought about it, the more I decided that huge swaths of existence would be impenetrable - indescribable, unprogrammable, utterly unable to be represented - to a creature that did not eat or shit.

In this sense, artificial-life researchers are as body-loathing as any medieval theologian. They seek to separate the "principles" of life and sentience - the spirit - from the dirty muck from which it sprang. As Breazeal put it, they envision "a set of animate qualities that have nothing to do with reproduction and going to the bathroom," as if these messy experiences of alimentation and birth, these deepest biological imperatives - stay alive, eat, create others who will stay alive - were not the foundation, indeed, the source, of intelligence; as if intelligence were not simply one of the many strategies that evolved to serve the creatural striving for life. If sentience doesn't come from the body's desire to live [...], where else would it come from? To believe that sentience can arise from anywhere else - machines, software, things with no fear of death - is to believe, ipso facto, in the separability of mind and matter, flesh and spirit, body and soul.

[...] About her robot Kismet she says, "We're trying to play the same game that human infants are playing. They learn because they solicit reactions from adults."

But an infant's need for attention is not simply a "game." There is a true, internal reality that precedes the child's interchange with an adult, an actual inner state that is being communicated. An infant's need for a mother's care is dire, a physical imperative, a question of life or death. It goes beyond the requirement for food: an infant must learn from adults to survive in the world. But without a body at risk, in a creature who cannot die, are the programming routines Breazeal has given Kismet even analogous to human emotions? Can a creature whose flesh can't hurt feel fear? Can it suffer?

It was like those moments in your most intimate relationships when you look over and are startled to remember: that other person is not you and is not yours to define. He or she suddenly seems to be some alien whom, inexplicably, you have decided to trust. Even as the two of you lie wrapped in each other's arms, you know that he or she can exist without you, and does just that now and again, in moments, and sometimes over longer stretches of time: sheds you. Yet you continue on, together. And that, too, I think, is an imperative of love.

[...] no escaping it, the joy or humiliaton of every decorating decision you've ever madde, the occasion that brought each object into your life perpetually, inflinchingly present: the brutality of the everlasting.

Each character was a betrayer, a thief stealing some part of my own life (adoption, abandonment by parents, therapy, therapist who had something to hide from me), pieces of those interior stories that will not go away. I did not know if bringing them to the fore would purge them from my mind or more firmly install them. In any case, the characters seemed inevitable.

[...] The act of narrration never leaves us. The need for story is in our bodies, in the evolution of our minds. We sleep. The brain is doing its housekeeping, weaving today's experiences into the synaptic connections of all that happened before this day. Shifting moments. Pathways strengthened, or fading.

Meanwhile, we lie sleeping, trying to make sense of it all. We have no choice; we must understand what flickers in our mind. We desperately try to make it coherent - turn the chemical charges into a story, narrate the dream to ourselves. The narration fails. The story will not adhere. The memory of it evaporates upon waking. We fail, we fail. Yet night by night we try. There is no escaping the body that makes us. Sleep is full of storeis trying to unfold.

At seven in the morning, an Edward Hopper white light slashed the facade of the building, and a legless man in a wheelchair sat before the employee entrance, selling yellow number-two Ticonderoga pencils. He was always there, friendly, and I was happy to see him. I bought a pencil every day.

I liked the store in the early morning, the escalators rumbling up and down for no one, the empty selling floor, the mannequins posed to fool you, threatening to come to life. Then up the odd staircase. Past the glass box. Into the gloom of the attic.

Weeks went by. Months. I reached my nine-month anniversary. Two hundred and seventy pencils in a box on the floor.