[b]Jenny Offill
And that phrase - ‘sleeping like a baby.’ Some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.[/b]
Of course being a blonde has nothing to do with it.
Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friend calls it.
Sure enough there it is on mine.
The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering.
But my agent has a theory. She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.
Unless, of course, like mine, it was a shotgun wedding. True story.
How had she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.
Let’s call this the human condition.
The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out. A home has a perimeter. But sometimes our perimeter was breached by neighbors, by Girl Scouts, by Jehovah’s Witnesses. I never liked to hear the doorbell ring.
Apartments too.