If I see you in the bookstore and you're looking at (and even touching) an Elizabeth Gaskell novel, I'm going to tell you where to start if you're just getting to know her work.

And if you call me on the phone while I'm still in my pajamas and you say, "Do you want to go get food?" I will probably say yes, but if I'm perpetually a little sore at you, I'm probably going to take my sweet time getting ready and then also call the shots as far as where we're going to get lunch, which is how we're going to end up eating ostrich burgers outside in the middle of the market square, because I've never had one and I really feel like eating a sandwich. And there won't be a way to ask you whether you feel as awkward as I do, because I'll be trying to figure out why there's no one from whom to buy apples on a Sunday, and I'll probably be impulse buying a chocolate bar because it's rose-flavoured, and I'll be buying my cappuccino while you go look at fossils, and I'll see the coffee guy shoo the pigeons away with his foot, and neither you nor I will really have much to say to one another, which will keep on feeling strange to me, though I won't say anything about it because what would one say? Sometimes life is like this, and so I'll count my blessings that the apples and the organic butter I've bought are going to make a pie that I'll take to dinner with friends, people around whom I am not awkward and brittle.