We read Arabian Nights for the penultimate Finer Things; it was a not-so-subtle joke as one of our members prepares to move to Morocco. Well, you won't get far with my leash around your neck, Duckface.
I don't know what I'm going to do when FT collapses. I may have to join a real book club, the boring kind without champagne cocktails and dressing up.
More FT here.
One tugs and tugs at her tunic-length top to cover a perfect behind.
One wears a scowl, hunched shoulders and a cheerful turquoise bandana.
One wears a new outfit and sits up straight, talking to an older man who seems to be holding his breath when he looks at her.
One turns her back to the crowded street and casually yanks at her skirt, freeing her wedgie.
My ears and whiskers, how do the men of this city get anything done when every corner is full of these women? Tenderness swamps me before the bus has driven a block.
I think it's weird that there's an infinity of porn to be found on the internet and I still spend my lunch hour online-shopping for housewares.
This is not my $170 cup. Because that is stupid.
Boys are giving me sweets today. At my cafe, the cute barrista came over at random -- perhaps attracted by my divine glow from having written seven pages -- and gave me a free cheesecake cupcake. ("Why is it blue?" I asked like a moron, as if I were an alien only just being introduced to the concept of a frosted cupcake.) And after that, the cute boy at the chocolate store gave me free truffles.
Maybe I should go hover on the street corner looking wistful and see if anyone cute stops his car to hand me a layer cake or plum pudding or something.
These are totally my sweets.
I have too many options. (Suffragettes in graves around the world are rolling over restlessly, or perhaps heaving a finally-satisfied sigh.) I have only to turn on the computer to know that this is true. Because in the computer age, my office (the computer) is also my shopping mall, my newspapers and magazines, my cinema, my water cooler.
Of course you know all this.
But more than that. Because even when I squint my brain into a tight-winched focus, even when I bypass the gossip and the models and the housewares on sale today only and go straight into Microsoft Word, even there I have too many options. Before I even start, rows of icons are offering to emphasize my text, check my errors, capitalize my sentences for me, and am I writing a letter? And would I like help with that?
My personal Moms is awesome, but Word is the hovering, anxious, art-crushing mother I never had, so solicitous to make me lunch, to brainstorm with me, to quash my errors in advance so I get a good grade. I long for the zombie silence of a blank piece of paper.
I will be thirty soon. For god's sake, somebody buy me a typewriter.
