It's late at night & Susannah and I are walking back rfom seomthing. we split up and Sofia & I go on ahead down a hill on a European-looking cobble street. Down the hill sitting at a sidewalk cafe table is Tamara. It's summer but a little cool and she's dressed in a long coat. I apporach her, saying something about her always looking the sme. She stands up and give sme a long hug. I attampt to make small talk with her. Her tone and demeanor is reserved & quietly affectionate. I see Susannah coming idown the heill in the distance in some striped red pajama pants & a t-shirt. They say their hellos and I stand there feeling awkward. A young woman comes along and I introduce myself to her. She begins to serve Tamara like a butler and I almost joke to Tamara about hiring her myself. Tamara asks about how the store's doing and how out progress in NYC is going. I tell her, "Dont ask, everything is kind of fallen apart and we're back to the drawing board. But it's okay." I pick a large piece of flakey skin out of my belly button. Tama ra finally looks down at Sofia and comments on her big shes gottne.

I'm sitting at a communal food stall in China or Chinatown with a food writer & some random patrons. Some old ladies bring over huge bowls of noodle soup & ladles some out for us. The writer gets something pieces of "white chicken", tastes them & gets this disgusted look on his face & spits them out. I laugh & ask him to describe it and he can't seem to find the words. I tease him about being a writer, "Use your words." I dig into my noodle soup as more ladies bring up more plats of fried goodies.

I walk into a quiet library and see the food writer & others studying in silence. I head over to a table & look through a binder full of used paper. All the pages & collated haphazardly & I get tired of sorting through them.

I head over to a small fridge & begin digging through it. I take out a few takeout containers to throw away. A guy sitting nearby looks astonished and asks me how I know they've gone bad & I just give him a knowing smile. I see a bunch of packages of noodles & noodle ingredients& I turn to the food writer & smile, "These are definitely yours, huh?" He can't hear me because he has his head partially shrinkwrapped in plastic.

I'm with Susannah & someone else and we need to get somewhere urgently. We board a small army aircraft & head down the runway. I sit in a backwards-facing seat, then change to a forward-facing one behind Susannah & the other person. We're going slowly but we're off the ground, hovering over a gravel runway.

I'm a film director taking one of my actresses home after a shoot. She's very young & there's the air of impropriety about the whole thing as we ride in my car.

Later, I see the girl's mother (an obese woman in a red grocery store smock) coming from my store. The gate is down but the neon OPEN sign is still on. It's late Saturday night & the store is closed on Sunday. I don't want the sign to be on needlessly for 36 hours so I head into the stor to turn it off. Inside, I can't remember the alarm code & keep punching in incorrect sequences. Finally, someone else comes along & turns the alarm off (the code was 5040).

The next morning, I'm standing in the darkness of the store, making sure there's no one else there. The man from last night rushes in with his gun drawn & questions me. I tell him it's only me & he's irate at me, asking me why I was lurking. as we start to leave, a stranger rushes by and we take him down. He's got a handful of comic books with him. In the book a dog is killed and the man with the gun demands, "So you killed a dog. What else have you done?!"

I'm in a friend's basement looking at his comic books & comic posters. I notice a long line of small bugs going across a table & all the way around the room. I show his wife and we try to figure out what to do about it. He comes back into the room with a prospective tenant and I try to make sure the tenant doesn't see all the bugs.

Now the place is a large factory and we're trying to figure out if something is in the pipes. We see a large slug-like monster creeping through the large pipes and we go into a state of emergency. I close off the factory floor and we make a plan to flush out the monster with fire. I talk with the manager from the other section & I send an employee to get our other flame thrower.

I'm in an ice cream place (Chinatown Ice Cream Factory?) and I ask the guy if I can split a scoop into 2 flavors. He shrugs yes. I ask him for Zen Butter & Black Sesame. He Points to the bucket suspended over the counter & says the Zen Butter is a vanilla fruit swirl this week. I tell him I'll settle for just black sesame & he says they're out. "you're killin' me here." I sigh. I look around at the suspended buckets of flavors & settle on a vanilla Oreo cookie flavor. He gets a waffle cone & puts some ice in it first before scooping the ice cream into it. He shows it to me & I tell him it's enough. He looks at it and thinks for a second and says, "15 cents." I dig in my pockets and pull out about a dollars worth of change and give him everything but the quarter. He seems hesitant to accept such a big tip and says, "They'll think I worked 4 hours." I just smile and take my ice cream & leave.

I'm walking outside towards a parking structure when my coworker Jeremy (from Amoeba) walks by. He hands me two Prince CDs that I need to return. We both walk into the parking structure looking for the Prince store. We come across a tiny elevator inside a clothing boutique (still inside the parking structure) and we wait. Once the elevator arrives, the entire floor moves with it. Once off, we step into a large kids/electronic store. We walk by a table with lots of bubble activities and we make note to take Sofia here later. The store is connected to an architecture firm and I can see Kell inside talking to his coworkers. I point him out to Susannah and we notice he's being affectionate with some woman. "Well, he IS getting divorced." I say.

I'm in a new city separated from Susannah. I walk down the street looking for her and pass some boutique shops. I see a kid's store and wonder if Susannah's been there. I walk up the hill and pass a ethnic drum shop and some craft stores.

I wander into a bar/improv theater and leave my cell phone at the back bulletin board. I go upstairs and get wrangled into participating in an act. When it ends, a woman next to me (a troupe member) holds my hand and we bow together.

I head back down stairs and there's a message from Susannah on the bulletin board. I can't quite read it but the woman back there hands me my cell back. I check my text messages and see that she's left me a recipe on it.

There are a few people lingering around and I see Malena naked.  She's tiny and weirdly proportioned.  She's complaining quietly about how small she is.  I notice huge metal things attached to her lower body and I ask her about it.  She tells me she's been modifying her body.  She shows me her legs.  They've each been spliced in half length-wise and grafted to stainless steel.  There's a Count Grevious look about her.  I ask her if she did all this during her vacation and she says no.  I wonder how I could've missed it.  I tell her I was just talking to Susannah recently about body modification.  "About how people are screwing horns into their heads.  Nothing so extreme as what you're doing."  I tell her I'll be right back and run into a building.

I walk into Amoeba Music (a location I never worked) and show security my phone.  Since I've been there before, they just wave me in.  I walk into the enormous space and try to remember where the break room is.  I wander the  aisles a while and can't seem to find it.  Near the back of the store, I run into Jeremy and ask him.  He asks me why and I tell him I have to get my bag.  He asks me to describe it and I begin to tell him about my nondescript black messenger bag.  He points out a window to the alley behind the store and tells me to look along the back wall (though it's actually the front of the store).

I walk along the hallway (that resembles more a school) and past several bathrooms.  I walk through one and finally come to a door that reminds me of the break room.  The sign over it says AREA and I see employees entering & leaving.  I spot Paul Rudd with a group of familiar-looking people going into the room.  He's making a wisecrack to a woman who isn't Leslie Mann.  I follow them in along with a female coworker.  She ushers one woman (Kristin Wiig) in with a pat on the butt.  I joke to her that it's in appropriate and we all laugh.  I tell her that it should be me harassing her and I show her my hand.  Wiig makes a crack about it and we let them go on their way.  The coworker and I head back and she makes a reference to Wiig.  I try to repeat one of her lines from Knocked Up, "Yeah, I was really surprised, too." but can't nail her delivery.  The coworker makes some reference I don't know and she tells me it's from SNL.  "I don't watch that shit."  I whisper, looking behind me to make sure no one heard me.