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"Inside I’m screaming. You can’t walk around screaming, you have to find a way to process all this information and go on with your day."

"During this time I shower and I fix myself up, as my mother would say. On the Upper East Side there’s pressure to look a certain way.... If my boyfriend is here, we’ll do an early dinner at 6 or 7 at Bar Italia or J.G. Melon. If not, I’ll order in Chinese or Indian, have a big feast of food and watch reality shows like 'The Real Housewives' or 'Below Deck.'... As I’ve gotten older I’ve become more solitary. This routine isn’t the routine I had 20 years ago. I wouldn’t have exercised. I would have had a boozy brunch with friends. There’s a shift I went through in my mid-50s where I made lots of changes. There’s less neediness. I feel more settled. I’m hearing my own voice as opposed to hearing everybody else’s."

From "How Candace Bushnell, Writer, Spends Her Sundays" (NYT). Bushnell is the author of "Sex and the City," which was published in 1997. I like the photo at the link — her in bed with 2 big poodles.

By the way, is it politically correct to say "I’ll order in Chinese or Indian"? Seems like you should have to add "food." I think I'm taking a pretty moderate position here. An extreme position would be to say it's cultural appropriation to eat the food of an ethnic group that is not your own. And isn't there something dismissive about grouping "Chinese or Indian" with "The Real Housewives" or "Below Deck"? It's like I'm doing a junk night with the lower foods and the lower TV shows. In that light, it seems anti-feminist to go low quality when the boyfriend isn't there.

The other thing that interests me about the part I've excerpted is the voice inside her head. Is it "screaming" or "settled"? That idea that your reaction to the world is screaming and you've got to process it to get along in life reminded me of that article we were just talking about, "The Decline of Yelling."

Hey, remember when Trump haters did that protest of screaming at the sky?

Do I have a tag for screaming? I see I have "scream," but maybe that was a commenter I frontpaged. (I do a tag for every commenter I frontpage.) I see I have a tag for "The Scream." (How many individual paintings have their own tag? That must be the only one.)

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