By then it was later, and I needed to get second lunch or I would've fallen over, which took some time, and Target is a black hole and it's impossible to just get the three things you came in for, and then I needed to stop (briefly) at Hancock Fabrics, and (briefly) at Michaels, and I was actually quite disciplined at both and just bought the ONE thing I needed, but it turns out that Friday afternoon, which it now was, is a TERRIBLE time to drive around to these sorts of stores.
Tony's groceries was a zoo, and I spent ten minutes waffling over buying a cake for Anand's birthday party or getting the stuff to make it myself (I decided on the latter, which may prove a fatal error). Then I remembered that I needed to make a stop on Lake, by which time it was time to pick up Anand, which I forgot to do on the way home, which meant I had to walk out there. And of course, as the day went on, I moved slower and slower myself.
So the gist of all this is that somehow my supposedly three hours max of errands took me SEVEN hours. Some of it was reasonably pleasant; I haven't had a day with enough time to putter around Target in a long time. But lord.
(The eye doctor was actually kind of hilarious. He was startled that I was old enough to need bifocals, and I said I was 43, and he didn't quite believe me, and then he tried to tell me that my skin looked much younger than that, and I said it was my life of sin, which is my standard line when people say I look young. And he laughed, but then a minute later, after filling out my insurance form, he turned around and asked what I meant by life of sin, exactly. So I told him I was a writer, and he said oh, okay. But then he paused, and said that that wasn't sinful.
So I told him that I spent ten years writing erotica. And then this nice twenty-seven-year-old eye doctor spent about five minutes trying earnestly to reassure me that it was FINE that I wrote that stuff, and I shouldn't feel bad about it, because the way he looked at it, it's a market, and I was just providing something to supply a need in the market. And I'm just nodding my head, because I have no idea how to convey to this young man (who is, remember, SIXTEEN YEARS younger than me), that any guilt I might have felt about writing erotica dissipated about two decades ago. It seemed easier to let him think he'd made me feel better about it all.)