For Coworker #1

I’ve been feeling selfish and self-indulgent since my dad died. Those are two of my most hated descriptions, but I can’t seem to get myself out of my funk. My douleur, is the best word I know, and Toots will get it and maybe explain better than I can when she’s up in October. You are now morally obligated (nous vous obligeons…once again Toots and Lumpy will understand and can explain) to meet Toots when she’s here. Once you’re “obligated” in the French way, there’s no backing down. You better have had another death in the family before you miss something to which you’ve been “obligé.” Lumpy and I were discussing French earlier this evening. I don’t even like to say discussing, because in French that has a negative connotation. Isn’t it funny. I am a language perfectionist, so I never think my accent is good enough, but French people think I speak well, because I understand the small senses of the tiniest inflections and the smallest ins and outs of French. It blows up my ego, let’s just say. Or, even better, let’s just say that I love to talk, and the more languages I can do it in, the better. Lumpy and I will be taking Russian in a few weeks. I have a feeling he’ll be sorry he agreed to such nonsense, because I’ll be pissed that I can’t read a Tolstoy novel (in the original Russian) within weeks.

So, here are a few quotes to the unabashed, not afraid to claim it, women-loving, estrogen-laden gals out there. And Lumpy, who is my best and favorite man, forever and always, because he NEVER is the man I’m reading about in my textbooks and the never-ending male-bashing quotes I read.

“Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that that is its not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.” -Andrea Dworkin

Scarlett O’Hara: I’m tired of saying, “How wonderful you are! to fool men who haven’t got one-half the sense I’ve got, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they’re doing it.” -Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.” -Rebecca West