the artguy is a man i work with. we’ve been engaging in this incredibly fun e-mail dialog since about november. before that, he was just the enigmatic artguy who never spoke to anyone. i didn’t know anything about him except for his name. we never spoke, at all. but now we e-mail and it’s great fun and he brings out the bitch in me, which is even more fun.

here’s an excerpt from a recent e-mail:
when does the darkside of my 30s start? i think this place is what makes me able to go home and do something completely different than what i do here. when i’m at home and writing i don’t have to worry about being too negative, about customers not having brains and/or senses of humor, i get to say what i want to. when i’m not here i get to use all the words. i am a terrible censor. sadly last night i didn’t get to go home and write, i had a call from a distressed friend and ended up going out to listen. it made me thankful that i didn’t get married and have kids in my 20s. sometimes i want to shake her and ask her if there’s anything else she wants in life. or is she perfectly happy with the SUV kid and house in chaska. i love her dearly but i just can’t help but hope that she’s aching for more in her life.

so how was bowling? i will never, as long as i live, be able to think of anything relating to bowling as a hipster anything. is it supposed to be hip in that super ironic this is so tacky and low-rent and retro we’re so cool sort of way? you know, this is so square it’s cool? bleh. i have a weird thing with bowling. the whole marketing department went bowling at my parents’ alley once. they were all impressed with how old-school, hip and retro it was. like it was some sort of vibe they were trying to cultivate. but really, it’s just the way it was. it’s a 50-year-old bowling alley, there’s nothing hip about it. i don’t work there too often, just during leagues on friday nights. mostly because i love the bowlers, they’re real. not trying to be hip or anything. sometimes before i can escape on friday nights, i butt heads with the pseudo-hipsters. they’re really quite condescending about the whole thing, cooing over the cuteness of it all and the old-fashioned scoring and the quaint bowler men with their schmitts and bud light. i want to punch them all in the face about how all those grizzled old men bowling are more real than they’ll ever be.

as for the time traveller’s wife, i did love it. but it’s really nothing more than a big, fat romance novel wrapped inside a super clever, well-exectued premise. that being said, i still loved it. as far as being a gynocentric reader, that’s not me at all. that’s so not me, it makes me feel like a bad feminist. i’m actually quite disgusted by a majority of “women’s” fiction being written today. chick-lit is ruining everything and making it even harder for female writers who are writing something different to get any notice. sure i read bridget jones and i enjoyed it quite a bit. for the time it was original, bridget had a clear strong voice and what not. but now i curse bridget for unleashing this nauseatingly cookie-cutter brand of literature on the women of the world. it’s the same story over and over. quirky single woman looking for love. she usually has some dastardly bad boy ex in her past. she’s got a dilemma, do i pick the bad boy on the moped or do i go with the quirky corner grocer who may not be as exciting but sure has a heart of gold. of course she chooses the bad boy and he brekas her heart and the great grocer comes by and puts her back together again. there, i’ve just summarized every cotton-candy colored chick-lit book you’ll ever see. now you when you meet some hot literary hipster wanna be who talks about how much she loved jemima j or le divorce you can nod and act like you’ve read it and say something like “i almost died when she chose him!” or something. it just pisses me off that when so many books are not being published, you know when the whole book world is always losing scads of money, they see fit to put this stuff out. this crap that reads exactly like the other 15 books on the shelf next to it. AND well, the stories are crap, there’s no sort of emotional truth in them at all. every quirky single 30something does not end up with the good grocer. please. no, she has to spend years and years being bitter about the moped that broke her heart and become a jaded harpie that chases anyone interested in her away with her lackof trust and her need to cling to loneliness. happily ever after blows, who wants to read that crap? i want ever after, this is what happens and it’s not always happy but here it is.