As for the politics here, what can you do? There’s a lot of posturing, but it’s all kind of meaningless. - Curtis Sittenfeld

Hardly ever did it matter if you brushed your hair before driving to the grocery store, rarely did you work in an office where you cared what more than two or three people thought of you. At Ault, caring about everything was draining, but it was also exhilarating.

Flawed as I was, someone recognized me.

How did you even know if you loved another person? Was it a hunch, like a good smell that you couldn’t identify for sure, or did a time come when you had evidence? Was it like walking through a house and once you’d crossed a certain threshold, that was love and you could never turn back? Maybe you’d go into other rooms, you’d fight or even breakup, but you’d always be on the other side of love, after and not before it. My interest in couples felt anthropological - even liking Cross, even wanting to hear from Martha that she could imagine me dating him, I myself could not imagine us together... When I through of Sin - Jun and Clara - and I did so often- what was hardest to wrap my head around was how they’d been a couple while living in the same room. How had they known when to fool around and when to just sit at their desks doing homework? Hadn’t it been either too intense, too tiring to always be around the person you wanted to impress, or else too familiar? Maybe in such close quarters you gave up hope of impressing them and sat there picking your earwax and not caring if you looked cute. But didn’t you lose something there, too? If that was what people meant by intimacy, it didn’t hold much appeal for me- it seemed like you’d be fighting each other for oxygen.