Mrs. Dalloway's Coffee Break

The two cups of coffee I have already had really put me right on the edge. It really makes me angry to see so much human emotion go to waste, Friducha. Today, let us put on our suits and ties, and walk into the world with all our womanness blazing: (in your case, never wasted, never) Let us have a drink then another for both legs, even if you must remain seated, even if legs isn’t exactly right, (but I feel you would love the joke) (when I saw the picture of you for the first time, posing with your family in your father’s suit, in a book, for a school assignment, I immediately knew what kind of girl you were, the same as me. And although you were a painter, and I, a writer, there was the moment of recognition) It doesn’t always happen, you know, some breathtaking artists and writers, but you feel an adoration that is remote and intellectual. Those who hit us on a gut level are the ones that make the blood rush to our heads or elsewhere, they are perhaps not th...

One It is a little before noon, and Alexandra has wandered inside a mall. The doctor she just saw was a man. A man, and so mean to her, she is having trouble collecting herself now. She sits on one of the benches where the mall teens usually hang out, and stares in front of her, vacantly. When she calls her husband to tell him what happened at the doctor’s, she has a hard time creating the words, they just won’t come, and instead, she starts sobbing, feeling her face distort into a horrible grimace. Just walk out of the goddamn mall, Alexandra, her husband says, but she can’t answer, or stand up, or say anything to him. She just sits there, crying. Just get out of there, I’ll come get you from out front, ok? No, not okay, but she is mute, she is unable to speak. People are staring. She is humiliated, but there is no way she can stand. Alexandra? Alexandra? Jesus, okay I’ll come get you. Don’t move, just wait for me to come get you, ok? Can you do that for me, darling? Will you wai...

The bad kids wear now Adidas sweats and have their ears cleaned regularly  and they don’t smell like sweat and earth at all, they just smell like boys, the musky smell of the herd, of a group with name-brand hoodies peer pressure and similar smart phones and scrolling through Facebook updates and Instagram photos of their classmates, swearing with great gusto, the swears of young people who have only just learned how to say those words in a bus and look at old people the other passengers defiantly and proudly, and the little kids are riding the bus, too, it’s their English conversation class and they are talking in broken English because they are little enough to abide by the rules even on a bus, the boys sit in the back next to me, their handsome teacher sits in the middle, surrounded by the girls who all desperately want to talk to him and just to be close to him and have him smile at them, because he is nothing like the disgusting boys, he has long unruly hair and a low voi...

It was a sunny mid-morning, when Mimou parked her forest green Mazda too widely in the driveway of Dina’s parents’ house. She always did her best not to hog the entire space in case Dina’s father suddenly decided to pop by on his lunch break, which almost never happened, but worrying that she would ruin the lawn on the other side, she managed to end up taking two thirds of the two-car driveway. It was ridiculous, really, since her little green car was one of those minuscule early-Seventies miracles. Mimou was wearing the following garments: 1.   Her blue-and-white vintage Adidas tennis shoes; 2.   Her father’s pinstriped jacket; 3.   An olive-green supply bag from an army surplus store. Ellen was already there. She was sitting on the huge sofa, surfing the channels. They gathered familiarly around the large round kitchen table, took out their books and school assignments and other needful things from their young women’s treasuries that were their enormous...

There really is no end to strong female heroes for the viewer to pick her favorite from these days on TV, and no end in general to all kinds of series enticing folks to bring their money and time over to this or that specific network, in order to spend their leisure time couch-potatoing it and thus becoming part of the modern Netflix/HBO/Fox et cetera -community. I, too spent my childhood, my teens, my early adulthood and, hell, half my life really, glued to the TV, watching the weekly escapades of a wide range of television people, hence molding my world views accordingly. I was just discussing the endless variety of different kinds of shows available now with my friend H. from work, and we both came to the same conclusion, that nowadays it is so easy to just not watch the next episode if there is even the tiniest smidgen of something wrong with the pilot of a given show. It is a cruel world out there, for the show business, perhaps crueler than ever before, with people’s attenti...