1:10 a.m. It was a gray and gloomy day today, almost a throwback to the overcast bleakness, and I use that term with a straight face, of a typical November day. Bleak here in California often just means gauzy, but compared to the golden maple syrup transparencies of a typical day, it's bleak-ish.

The strange thing for me was the feeling of encapsulated letdown that I felt today. It could be a postpartum project thing, or it could just be the chill air, but I found myself lethargic and hungry and generally off on the wrong foot.

And it reminded me once again how grateful I am for my general and typical personality state of hardly bound enthusiasm. Most mornings I hardly know where to begin, the possibilities are so rich. I bounce from task to task -- really, I do -- quickly finishing things that were awful to contemplate when I abandoned them at 4 p.m. or 10 p.m. the day before. The a.m. solves all problems, sees through solid brick walls of trouble and cleans up niggling details easily and gracefully and ... fast.

Most mornings and early afternoons I am a whiz. After my nap, I am something of a whiz, at least most of the time. But not today. Today all the air had gone out of my fizz and I was flat and uninspired and almost moody. Maybe it was chemical, I reasoned, and I had a cookie. Finished the cookie and waited for my enthusiasm to come back. I was only excited about getting another cookie.

And thus went the low, slow morning and the lugubrious afternoon, and I mused, once again, about how grateful I am that I am not depressed. I don't think I've ever been depressed or depressive, except at PMS time, and then only for the requisite number of hours it takes to hunt Igor down and question him about the bathtub ring or the wadded up napkin that fell behind the garbage bag.

And then I feel guilty and I make some chicken soup or a nice risotto as penance.

Speaking of PMS, I'm going to bravely broach a subject that is so verboten, so dreaded, so sure to clear a room of stouthearted men and fawn-like young women that I fear my journal's readership will suddenly drop into negative numbers, but broach it I must. I am, and have been for the last few years, on a fruitless menopause watch. Yes, I said it: menopause.

It's got to happen sometime, and it's a natural part of growing up, but I can't help but notice that the jury is out. When does it happen? Whenever. What goes on? Whatever.

So I've created some theories of my own for this situation.

1. Do you know how women have four distinct moods each month: ebullient, puffy, beastly, and slob? Well, what if -- depending on when in the month menopause hits -- you end up permanently stuck in one of those phases?

2. Since this thing is testosterone-driven and it's called "men"-opause (how unfair is that?), I plan to emerge on the other side with boyish hips.

3. In addition, I expect I will be decisive, aggressive, and I will have the urge to make numbered lists of salient points.

4. Since I'm always cold, hot flashes will make me tepid.

5. If it doesn't happen in the next year or so, I will officially be a mutant.

So, as you can see, when my mood took a sudden unusual turn today, I thought that maybe today was going to be the big day. The paus that depresses.

But not today. Today I felt as if my yellow ink had suddenly run dry, or the volume had been turned down, or I had the beginnings of a head cold. The yellow ink always seems to run out first, by the way, speaking of inks. In addition, the yellow ink seems to fade the quickest in our blazing sunlight.

We have a local, non-franchise video store here in town and it's in a storefront with two walls of glass that face the unrelenting south and west sides of the street. The sun beats down all day long and leaches the colors out of the video boxes, so all that remains of the pretty picture is cyan and magenta. Yellow is the first to go, and quickly. Meg Ryan is washed out before her movies have had a chance to make it in the Midwest, and all the racks and shelves of boxes have that dusty 1950s look of dead flies in the window and rotogravure and old country road filling stations that the salesman forgot to restock.

You really have to wonder where the yellow went.