What happened to exercise 11, you ask? Well, I spent yesterday evening working on a character synopsis for the next RPG I’m playing in. She’s terribly enigmatic and not an entirely nice person. But that is part of what makes her interesting. Anyway, I didn’t see a reason to post it here, but I will if anyone is interested.

Now then. I have never considered myself to be a particularly domestic person, but I’m slowly coming to the realization that I am. It is a strange progression that we go through. One day you’re a crazy liberated partying college kid, the next you’re a go-getter, career-minded, fully modern woman. Then you get married and while you lose serious Cool Points, you still firmly believe that you are DIFFERENT from all those other extremely uncool married people. And then, one Tuesday morning, you wake up and realize that in your spare time you’re knitting scarves and making tablescapes and sewing curtains for your kitchen. Not that you aren’t still all the other things, but just that this habit of priding oneself on your lack of domesticity, which I would argue is typical of my generation, is total self-delusion. You have become a Domestic. And I’m not talking beer.

I suppose from the outside looking in, the thoroughly modern domestic career-woman is quite humorous. Tonight, if you peeped in my kitchen windows (which I hope you didn’t do), you would see a blond bent over a sewing machine on the kitchen counter, with a set of carefully pinned, open-weave curtains strewn all over between last week’s mail and her glowing laptop. She is slowly, painfully sewing channels in the fabric panels for the curtain rods on the sewing machine she’s used maybe twice since she got it. This woman is also biting her lip and swearing under her breath in the most colorful language imaginable while she tries to avoid sticking herself with the needle or any of the pins sticking out of the slippery fabric at odd angles. Add into the picture the blinking bluetooth headset hooked over her ear and the command prompt on the laptop and you can begin to get the full picture …