coordinated with the usual amount of artful guile and smiles to get her through life. She knew a little about the Department of Social Services from firsthand experience with them when she first moved to Ithaca. It was in a day in December as cold and merciless as February when she went there. Nathaniel or Adagio was a newborn at that time. Back then, resigned to the fact that she needed assistance so that she might continue with her contemplation of life, she went into the New York Department of Social Services with him in a bassinet. She discovered how her laser beams went through bullet proof glass separating the intake workers from the waiting area and seemed to set fire to the cubicles housing the IM workers. In her first hour there she considered this agency a demeaning place in all respects and that she shouldn't be partaking of services here; and yet her feelings were muted by logic. and Gabriele was, after all, a very logical person. She told herself that being here with illiterate, drug dependent, and lethargic characters was not all that different than her work as a staff psychologist in parole assessment at the state prison. Encountering client abuse or being in the thickets as one of the worms were just two equally uncomfortable situations. It was really nothing more than a substitution of one form of abhorrence for that of another. Examined further, she couldn't see any difference between being a freeloader and a worker apart from the worker's obsession to think that his manner of wasting time was respectable. Since they were the same apart from the means by which they chose to fritter away their existence-the bums wanting to spend their time getting something and the workers in producing it--she couldn't see any sense in feeling more abhorrence from being behind the glass than in front of it. Besides, this experience here also provided her with a new perspective of what life was like to be one of the besmirched masses on the opposite side of the fort. Knowing multiple perspectives made her contemplate the entity like Parmenides and contemplating the entity brought her more in the realm of truth. Looking onto it now, she did not think that these clients of hers were any more or less degrading than collecting food stamps or in having worked as a counselor in social services. It had only been the need for money that made her deign to any of this prostitution.