Everything Feels Calmer in an Attic

So the world falls to shit as La Ragazza a Roma gets hit by a bus. She’s fine—it was more of a clipping, it appears.

Seriously, though, what kind of shit world is this when one cannot comfort one’s friends with a finely shaken martini with olives?

But back to reality.

Spent the afternoon with a delightful professor with inflections like Glenda, the Good Witch of the North. He teaches English and has a warmly lit attic office. It made me nostalgic for my days in warmly lit attic offices of English professors who were trying to seduce me with critical theory and offerings of free food.

No one gives me free food anymore.

And I thought about, as I wandered the professor’s tree-laden campus, the life I chose not to live—one with more books than computers and a belief that what’s in those books deserves scrutiny. I work now out of a glass box while staring at a glass box. I live for the moments when a story takes me to a warmly lit attic office, where a man with inflections like Glenda, the Good Witch of the North, lulls me with his chatter and my hand tires from writing down his words. It’s a choice I’ve made. And sometimes it seems not a bad one.