Quite ashamed to recount the events of the night - compared pictures of Franz Kafka and Vladimir Mayakovsky, arguing over which of the two was better looking.
Objectively, I believe the fight must fall to the socialist poet, who is broodingly handsome in the style of Laurence Olivier.
However, in terms of personal taste I must bow, as always, to the delightfully neurotic Czech writer, who steals my heart with his tender, boyish charm.
Kafka, appropriately disturbed and lonesome. Mayakovsky, sulking like a Bolshevik.
Taking part in these guilty pleasures was somewhat justified, I may defend, for much of the night was consumed in entertaining Anma, my German grandmother who holds a taste for the bizarre. Were it Anma alone I may have been able to cope without indulging in somewhat disturbing girlish fantasies, but my mother insisted upon acting the part of the deciever. Her time is consumed in entertaining men, and the few short segments where she forces herself away to provide food to her pitifully mewing offspring are similarly dominated by endless conversation about the aformentioned members of her ever-growing menagerie. And so tonight, as she carried on about her intimate liasions, she suddenly feigned fatigue and forced my sister and I to traverse to Publix, accompanied by the grandmother! Moreover, (and my face burns with wrath even as I type) she is leaving us, helpless, tomorrow night to laciviously dine with Herr Richard and his parents at an expensive restaurant on South Beach!
I feel that my mother has been lagging her parental duties to sashay about town acting as if she is thirty, leaving my sister and I to stagnate as Bastille prisoners encased in iron masks, secrets hidden and forgotten so as not to shatter the fragile veil assembled to cover a less than desirable past.