silver lined, tired with time

i took myself to valentine’s day brunch at 229 today, and read this, sitting alone at the bar with my exquisite expensive breakfast and coffee, sun streaming in behind me, and it confirmed for me that, despite the fact that i’ll apparently owe the IRS money for the first time (turns out all that working i did last summer added up, in a bad way), and that i spent more on restaurants in flagstaff in january than any other month in my life, cappuccino and eggs benedict, alone, on a manufactured romantic holiday was the right thing to do:

…It was mid-February in the late seventies. I was still half there with the elusive man. Barbara and I sat at an antique table under hanging plants in a little restaurant on Rochester’s main chictique street. I am sure we were eating Caesar salad with grilled chicken breast, which was considered cutting edge at the time, and we were both drinking a little too much Bully Hill Seyval Blanc, a beautiful local wine made by a goaty guy who printed his own faintly erotic labels. I was reporting, for the twentieth time, that the elusive man’s other lover had called the house at three AM when Barbara reached across the table, took my hand in hers, and said, “I’m bored. I want to talk about something other than men.”
I swallowed hard. My friend looked scared. The most basic rule of seventies sisterhood had suddenly changed. What smart, funny, terrific women did was take care of each other in their disconnections with elusive men. But the worst sin of the Nouveau Temps was to be boring. “Okay,” I said. “What do you want to talk about?”

-Mary Sojourner, Solace: Rituals of Loss and Desire