Bright Lights, Big Ass: A Self-Indulgent, Surly, Ex-Sorority Girl's Guide to Why It Often Sucks in the City, or Who Are These Idiots and Why Do They All Live Next Door to Me? by Jen Lancaster Read Free Book Online

response.
    I sigh deeply again.
    Nada.
    I sigh deeply a third time and add a little moan at the end.
    He presses his lips together and asks in a distinctly patronizing manner, “Jen, can I help you with something?”
    “Yes, now that you’ve asked. I’m bored. Stop working and talk to me.” Seriously, writing is a lonely enterprise. Often I have words to keep me company, but an unproductive day highlights just how isolating this profession can be.
    “For my job, working from home actually entails ‘working.’” He makes air quotes at me when he says this. “I’ve got to get this RFP out today and I’m sorry, but I don’t have time right now. I’ll give you my undivided attention over dinner, okay?”
    “But I need some interaction now. I couldn’t write anything good and I’m so bored I might die,” I reply.
    “Then I’ll miss you when you’re gone. Fortunately, my productivity may improve.” He toggles back and forth between making notes on graph paper with a sleek silver ball-point and inserting objects onto a Visio diagram.
    “Hey, neat pen. Can I see it?”
    “Okay, right now? You’re Homer Simpson and I’m Frank Grimes. 8 I expect you to show me your mansion and your lobsters before you try to drink a beaker of sulfuric acid. Except unlike Grimey, I wouldn’t stop you.”
    Well, that was uncalled for. “You—you’re a mean, mean meanie and I hope staring at your laptop gives you eye cancer.” I grab a pillow from the love seat and throw it at him to punctuate my sentiment.
    “I see all that time with the thesaurus has really paid off.” Oh! Straight to the heart! He sees I look stricken and his voice softens. “Listen, I’ll make you a deal—I’ve got to get this crucial part done. But I’ll talk to you when I finish, okay?”
    “I guess so.”
    “See you in a while.”
    I continue to hover next to him. He scoots down one barstool to get away from me. “For now, you have to find something else to do. Maybe talk to your imaginary online friends.”
    I cross the room to lie upside down on the couch and begin to kick my feet against the wall. It is Time to Whine. “They aren’t make-belieeeeeve. Besides, I already did that. Now I’m booored. If you won’t talk to me—which I’m pretty sure is a violation of those marriage vows that guy in the casino made us repeat—then help me find stuff to doooo.”
    Because we’re on a budget, I haven’t really left the house for a while. And since I’ve not been out in the world having new experiences, I’ve got almost nothing to say. I’m bored and uninspired. I feel like I did in grade school during our vocabulary tests when I forgot a definition—I could write the equivalent of “The girl could not think of a way to use ‘acrimonious’ in a sentence,” but I imagine that would please my editor as much as it did my fourth-grade teacher. Which is not at all.
    “Watch some TV.”
    “There’s nothing on but sports and soap operas. Blah.”
    He throws his hands up and gestures at me in disgust. “You realize this”—he taps the counter with his pointer finger—“this right here is why we aren’t having children.” We plan to remain child-free not because we hate them but because we fear what our combined genetics may create. We think our kid would be some sort of supervillain, or at the very least have the kind of sarcastic mouth that would ensure he or she would never date and would thus live with us forever. (However, we reserve the right to adopt a kid from a foreign country if we ever have a big yard and no riding mower.)
    I throw another pillow at him.
    “Okay, okay, you obviously aren’t going to get out of my hair until you find something to do. Why don’t you go to the gym?”
    I sit up straight. “I’ll never be that bored.”
    “I don’t know then, um, how about…make dinner?”
    “We don’t have any food.”
    Fletch rests his face in his hands. “I don’t know, maybe read a book?”
    “I read them