Yesterday, while walking to dinner with Joe and two lesbians, I saw a saw. That is, I beheld a hand tool that cuts wood. Discarded on the curb, it looked new and shiny and perfectly serviceable. How funny, I thought. How incongruous. How New York.

I now believe that, like a dropped fork, the saw was an omen of things to come . . . dire things, things with jagged teeth that snag and maul.

But first: dinner. It was delightful. The food was delicious. The lesbians (brought together by Yenta Joe) hit it off immediately. Sparkling conversation flowed.

And then the saw took over; my doom was assured.

We went to the movies and saw Unfaithful, quite possibly the most anguishing film ever produced. One happy couple's descent into a hell of lies and intrigue is luridly documented through lush cinematography, potent dramatic tension, and exaggerated emotional manipulation. It is basically the story of good people who make excruciatingly bad choices, choices that make the viewer wince in dismay at every turn. My wince muscles have whiplash. Joe and I were so traumatized that we asked the lesbians for their permission to leave halfway through. They did not give this permission. We stayed. In an effort to ignore the movie, Joe took out his knitting and worked on a scarf. With nothing to distract me, I buried my face in his shoulder as the horror mounted and the brutal fist of despair closed around my heart.

Do not see this movie.

The experience was not without its comic relief. At one point, no doubt as overwhelmed as we, a woman at the other end of our row began smoking a cigarette. "Are you smoking a CIGARETTE!?!" a nearby man demanded. "Is that a CIGARETTE?!?"

The woman, flustered, apparently intoxicated, said, "No. I'm just smoking a cigarette." She then began coughing uncontrollably.

The man shouted, "Put out that cigarette! Leave this theater!" Another man stalked out to find an usher (amid cries of "snitch!"), who came and gave the offending woman an ineffectual lecture. She was not, however, ejected, and she spent the rest of the movie enhancing the drama by coughing and banging some sort of alcohol bottle against her armrest.

Eager for serenity, I came home to walk Goblin and stumbled into more madness. Crazy people in the park across the street began shouting at each other, and a nasty fistfight ensued. Horrified, I ran back upstairs and called the police, who never came, but as I watched from the window, the crazy people apparently made their peace and sang happy birthday to one another.

I then wrote my boyfriend a depressing email and went to bed, the twang of that portentous hand saw reverberating in my ears.