And if you turn him away—you will be very lucky if he does not have other plans.
January 30, 2017
I Will Not Take My Husband’s Name
I WILL NOT TAKE my husband’s name. He uses it for work. It would be cruel to leave him without a name, simply because we have told the world that we are in love.
It would be sad to see him drift listlessly through cocktail parties with an empty name tag. “I’m Dave,” someone would say to him, “I work in synergies,” and he would pause, and blink, and have no answer. His business cards would be a job description and a void of white space. He would, I suppose, save money on monogrammed towels, as every towel would be, for him, a monogrammed towel, but equally no towel would be a monogrammed towel.
Suppose we were to become separated in a crowd. If I had taken his name, I would have nothing to call. I would have to stand in the middle of the crowd and scream and scream, and perhaps he would not even turn his head. To take his name would be, for calling purposes, functionally to transform him into a cat.
I will not take his name. I think it looks good on him. I am used to it. This precise arrangement of letters and syllables suits him, and without it, how would I send him emails?
I will take neither his last name nor his first name. I contemplated perhaps the last name. He could get by without one, after all. Cher does. So does Bruce (in Jersey, anyway), although it might be difficult on credit cards.
I will not take my husband’s name. It would make him impossible to enter as a contact in my phone; ten digits with no words attached.
I will not take my husband’s name. How could we sing “Happy Birthday” to him? To start and then fall silent at the climax would depress the other patrons in restaurants.
I will not take my husband’s name. Nor will I take his face nor his reflection nor his shadow (though I did consider, for a moment, taking his shadow). And I will not take his voice; I have no shell in which to store it.
Even if he does not use his name, it belongs to him.
I will not take my husband’s name. I will be merciful.
June 25, 2018
Part VHOW NOT TO DO THINGS WRONG
THERE IS NOTHING MORE EMBARRASSING than to do things wrong! What words are good to say, and what words are bad to say? Which tiny fork should you use to eat salad, which tiny fork is for dessert, and which tiny fork bears a hideous curse and should be destroyed immediately if it is ever placed in front of you? Society is full of these questions! There are many written rules, like, murder is bad—but equally there are unwritten rules, like, if you are responsible for enough murder, far enough away, and wear a nice suit, people still have to be polite to you at cocktail parties. Here is how to say and do things correctly in this wonderful world, with some beautiful guidelines for your speech to be more perfect, and some examples of how to write well and correctly about the news that is going on. You will soon be getting the hang of it! Look no further to be Good and Accurate!
Famous Quotes, the Way a Woman Ought to Say Them in a Meeting
I HAVE TAKEN THE LIBERTY of translating some famous sentences into the way a woman would have to phrase them during a meeting to avoid being perceived as angry, threatening, or (gasp!) bitchy. Start with your thought. Then say it as though you were offering a groveling apology for an unspecified error. This will prevent embarrassing mistakes!
“Give me liberty, or give me death.”
Woman in a Meeting: “Dave, if I could, I could just—I just really feel like if we had liberty it would be terrific, and the alternative would just be awful, you know? That’s just how it strikes me. I don’t know.”
“I have a dream today!”
Woman in a Meeting: “I’m sorry, I just had this idea—it’s probably crazy, but—look, just as long as we’re throwing things out here—I had sort of an idea or vision about maybe the future?”
“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
Woman in a Meeting: “I’m sorry, Mikhail, if I could? Didn’t mean to cut you off there. Can we agree that this wall maybe isn’t quite doing what it should be doing? Just looking at everything everyone’s been saying, it seems like we could consider removing it. Possibly. I don’t know, what does the room feel?”
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Woman in a Meeting: “I have to say—I’m sorry—I have to say this. I don’t think we should be as scared of non-fear things as maybe we are? If that makes sense? Sorry, I feel like I’m rambling.”
“Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”
Woman in a Meeting: “I’m not an expert, Dave, but I feel like maybe you could accomplish more by maybe shifting your focus from asking things from the government and instead looking at things that we can all do ourselves? Just a thought. Just a thought. Take it for what it’s worth.”
“Let my people go.”
Woman in a Meeting: “Pharaoh, listen, I totally hear where you’re coming from on this. I totally do. And I don’t want to butt in if you’ve come to a decision here, but, just, I have to say, would you consider that an argument for maybe releasing these people could conceivably have merit? Or is that already off the table?”
“I came. I saw. I conquered.”
Woman in a Meeting: “I don’t want to toot my own horn here at all but I definitely have been to those places and was just honored to be
