I entered my computer password, *****, and hit sign on. Nothing could be simpler.

Maybe somewhere in the cradle of humanity was the answer to my question: what the

hell am I doing with my life?

I chatted to a housewife with two kids, expecting her third. She got a degree in psychology from the University of Idaho, but left graduate school when she met husband. He's a cameraman for some local news show, she cleans houses for extra money, and she's totally happy living in Garden Hills-- just outside of Boise.

"Do you want to go back to graduate school?"

"Maybe. I don't know, we'll see."

"Not to be rude," I typed, "but it's that kind of apathy that will lead to never doing anything that you want to do."

"I do what I want to do everyday. I just don't put that kind of pressure on myself. Why do you?"

"What's makes you think that I do?"

"You're freaked out, I can tell. Are you in love?"

"Jesus, I don't know-- maybe. But I got to tell you, I'm gay."

"Not a lot of gays in Garden Hills, Idaho, at least not that admit it. Every once in a while there's a scandal, like when Alfred Kurn took photos of the high school quarter back Toby Scott with the mascot, Dennis Farrakhan (no relation). The photos got around town so Toby and Dennis moved to New York."

I indulged and told her about my residual feelings for both Thea and Christine. Was it love? If so, which one did I truly love?

"Well, seems to me you don't love either."

"What?!" That was the last thing I suspected. Even though I wouldn't trust Thea with a squirt gun and Christine was as flaky as a Martha Stewart pie crust, I was in love with both of them-- couldn't she tell?

She continued. "If you loved them, you wouldn't be thinking of yourself so much.You sound like your just horny."

"I didn't know pregnant housewives from Idaho said such things."

"You don't know a lot of things. You think you do, but you don't."

I knew I was being an LA urban snob, but I couldn't help it. My defenses were rising. "Well," I wrote her. "If you had to choose one, which would you choose?"

I waited. And waited. I thought she might have signed off but then, "Neither."

The thought of having nobody-- of being alone-- shot through me and I remembered the days of sitting alone in front of my television and having no reason to move.

"I said if you had to choose one."

"I wouldn't."

I didn't get it. Here I was this young urban woman in the hub of intellectualism, and this Idaho housemother seemed more independent and relationship savvy than me.