got no time for compromise
1. Seen on the train: young woman with rolled-up yoga mat, spendy Lululemon gear, I Heart Bikram tote bag, and paperback copy of Atlas Shrugged. Yoga and Ayn Rand: together again! I mean, together for the first time! Because that makes no sense at all! I like imagining the hypothetical Objectivist Yoga Studio though. Find your center, lest you be a miserable groveling worm. Let us give thanks that we are superior to the non-yogis out there. And for savasana we will all have cigarettes and admire the lines of our slim straight bodies wearing devastatingly simple sheath dresses in the city twilight.
2. Is anyone else absolutely shocked that a movie was made of Atlas Shrugged? Besides being a horribly written book, it is so stilted and dated and weird! Railroad tycoons! WTF?
3. I ran into the guy who did our house inspection. We kind of eyed each other for a split second, as I knew he looked familiar (as well he should, we spent nearly an entire afternoon crawling all over a house together), and then he said: “Heeeeey! Bungalow! How you doing?” I love that he identified me by my type of house.
4. Books: I recommend The Bucolic Plague, a surprisingly funny and well-paced memoir about two gay men who buy a farm in upstate New York. There are also some snarky Martha Stewart anecdotes, if you like that sort of thing. (I do! Not proud of it, but I do!) I also read another Shitheads On Everest book, this one called Dark Summit, and LT said, “I think you read that already” and I said “No I don’t think I did” and then I literally had to go to my Goodreads account and see who was right. Because I have a bit of thing for books about the morons who die in the Himalayan troposphere. Oh, and Room, which got a lot of press and made it onto a lot of shortlists, but which left me underwhelmed.
5. Also in my to-read stack is, of course, The Pale King. I stroke its cover every so often but I am not ready to dive in just yet. Who knows why. I keep reading ABOUT it, though—spoiler-free reviews and book-blog chatter and this terribly sad interview—so I should probably butch up and dive in.
6. I checked Facebook during a slow moment at work, and my gym had a post saying I could get a free pedometer if I was one of the first people who called a certain number. Well, I got my free pedometer, but they also sneakily drafted me into some sort of “walking challenge,” and now I have to wear the thing for a week and try to take ten thousand steps a day and all that. Darn, because really I just like free shit. Urban living rules, though, because I routinely have ten thousand steps before I even leave work, and it is spring break so that is even without the usual detour to walk Nora to school.
7. Do not let my good-health smugness fool you, however. My sister threw a housewarming at her new place, and despite it being the middle of the afternoon I managed to drink a fair amount of wine, beer, and “riot punch.” This was unlike me as usually I am weirdly superstitious about not mixing my drinks. AND NOW I REMEMBER WHY. YES I DO. It would not have been so bad except that the next morning some freelance doctor lady was scheduled to come to our house to examine us, as LT and I are finally doing the mature thing and getting massive amounts of life insurance on each other. Freelance doctor lady came and took our fluids. And I had hungover rockstar blood. But I am still a good risk, insurance company! I promise!
—mimi smartypants can’t fight the seether.