Me and Joan

I was thinking about my apartment the other day and how it’s full of books – I have to go through them and donate some (many?) to a book sale – and cats – well, not a lot of cats; there are only three but three make up a lot of cat hair as in the arms of my dark green sofa look grayish.

I mean I was really beating myself up over it. I did houseclean my bedroom – even put down new rugs and got a new bedspread. Granted, I couldn’t get all the cat hair off the thin velvet curtains, but the room was clean.

So in the middle of this beating I was giving myself, I remembered Joan Wilder, the character played by Kathleen Turner in “Romancing the Stone”. In one of the first scenes of the movie, Joan is finishing her romance novel. She is so moved by her own prose that she begins to cry. She gets up from her desk to search for tissues. There’s nothing – not even toilet paper – she has been so absorbed in her writing.

I’m absorbed in my job during the day and my reading and writing at night.

I figure if it’s good enough for Joan Wilder, it’s good enough for me.
I just buy extra toilet paper and ignore the cat hair.