Today I wrote a flash of sex in my novel, just a bitty 200-word scene. Yet I am completely drained, I think I may have to step away from the book for today. I don’t know why this story–especially the sexy parts–is taking so much out of me, like my brain has to make this incandescent effort to extrude a mere paragraph and then it is done. It needs a glass of warm milk and a nap. And a hug.
The novel features a bad, bad man from Romania. Why are evil Eastern European dudes so extremely hot? I must have watched too much Cold War agitprop growing up. Or maybe it’s the accent. Nom nom nom that accent. Anyway, I can tell this guy is going to be great fun to write because I find myself wondering aaaaaah why doesn’t he exist so that I can have sex with him?! (Of course if he existed I would never have sex with him; I always wind up with soft-spoken intellectual types.)
So, like most of America I filed my taxes yesterday and I must say SELF-EMPLOYED TAXES = OW. So much for all the bullshit about how our pioneer nation favors a spirit of independent entrepreneurship. What pisses me off isn’t so much the amount, though the amount is substantial. I wouldn’t be nearly this irritated if my money didn’t go towards bank bailouts and troup surges. I wish I could earmark my tax contribution for our crumbling social safety net and educational systems. And goddamn universal health care, but what kind of crack am I smoking?
Also: if I were some trust fund baby who’d “earned” that money from interest and dividends, I would have gotten to keep a lot more of it. This gets my goat like nobody’s business: our nation likes to pretend that there’s no such thing as social class while ridiculously favoring the idle rich and blatantly screwing the working poor. Seriously, I would walk around humming L’Internationale for a few days except my fury has been soothed by the arrival of the festive purple sneakers I ordered (even though with all the money I coughed up yesterday, I could have purchased about 250 pairs of those suckers). I’m sure Marx would chide me about the weakness of my convictions, but I am no revolutionary. Merely a malcontent wearing new shoes.
Elena Mauli Shapiro 
