Your turkey sub, your clothes, the fact that a woman of your resources and position lives like some boxcar hobo, or maybe it’s the fact that while I’m saying all this, you have a piece of lettuce stuck in your hair.

Here is a thing I do: Whenever I am about to go out for the evening -- generally with Mr. Gleemonex, although sometimes with "the gals" because in my Suburban Mom lifestyle I have to invest social time on my kids' behalf so Ava Gracelynne and Tallulah Stringbean and Kal-El Darth Transformer, et. al., will invite my chirren to their parent-child slumber parties (1:1 supervision, can't be too careful) and "fun" soccer-based outings at some steaming sunscraped park or whatever it is instead of shunning them because I'm a social zero -- anyway, whenever I'm about to go out for the evening, I realize I have a closet full of:

• Office clothes I don't wear anymore and wouldn't even if I started back at an office tomorrow because they're all a minimum of four years old at this point and tbh mostly about 6-7 years old
• Evening dresses, like you'd wear to a fancy wedding
• Mom Outfits for a Hot Arid Climate (e.g. J. Jill tank tops, J. Crew chino shorts, stuff from Eddie Bauer)
• Jeans
• T-shirts with words on them (band names, Vandelay Industries, RBG, etc.)
• A shit-ton of workout clothes & athletic bras

What I lack is: going-out clothes, e.g. the kind of top a grown woman wears out with some skinny jeans, like kinda sexy but not trying to be 21 years old, a little more special than plain knit stuff, you know what I mean. I ain't got any of that.

So what I do the day after this inevitable fail is, I go online and look for stuff like what I'm picturing in my head. I troll the sales, I load up carts with this that and the other hilariously aspirational item (while my brain screams GIMME A FUCKING BREAK YOU KNOW YOU CAN'T WEAR A BRA WITH THAT), and I buy -- or should I say, rent -- a bunch of stuff. Then it comes to me, trickling in over the next couple of weeks, and I try it on, and go "UGH NO," and send it all back. I only buy with free shipping and returns, so I'm only out the $$ temporarily (plus also the ass-pain of packaging it all back up and filling out those stupid forms you're supposed to include with the return), but it is a dispiriting process that does cost me, mentally. Christ I wish I knew someone who liked shopping and would do 100% of it for me ...

Plus a whole bunch of New Yorkers

The summer do take a bite, don't she?

Some Books I Have Read Lately, and Brief Thoughts Thereupon

Stone Mattress, Margaret Atwood: Short stories, some of which are loosely connected, all of which are goddamn ridiculously good and stick in the brain like oatmeal in a toddler's hair.

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast: Cartoon memoir, I guess? Powerful, occasionally funny, occasionally bleak, had the side effect of making me see the silver lining of my parents both dying relatively young and suddenly.

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel: Hoooooo boy. Apocalyptic/dystopian, aka right up my alley; Atwoodian, even further up my alley. Absolutely fucking compelling (I mean I for real COULD NOT PUT IT DOWN), and in parts extremely unsettling.

Fun Home, Alison Bechdel: Still not finished, but really liking this -- I'm not generally the graphic novel type (the Chast notwithstanding), but it's the perfect way of expression for this story.

Microserfs, Douglas Coupland: A re-read, at an interval of about 10 years. Still love it (although I skimmed a whole lot of the Deep Thoughts About Man and Machine). Fun to see what has and has not changed in Silicon Valley (Apple, for instance, is circling the toilet at the time of the novel -- people hoping for a buyout package so they can leave, Steve Jobs ousted, etc.). Made me ugly-cry at the end.