It's already been a hell of a week, and I'm dragging. I feel sort of done. Done with all of it.
Do you want to know the only thing that's keeping me going?
There's this test you can take on the New York Times website. It's called Can You Read People's Emotions? Well, I do love a personality test -- can still remember how avidly I participated when they were published in Teen Magazine or Young Miss back in the dark ages. There's nothing like the self-satisfaction gained when you find out whether you're an INFP or an EJFX or whether your breasts can hide a pencil and are therefore sagging too early or perky enough that a pencil drops to the floor. I dropped a lot of pencils in my teen years, and when I stood with my legs together, there were three distinct triangles of space from my thighs to my ankles. Remember those markers, all you ancient comrades?
Anyway.
I took the reading people's emotions test and scored a whopping 35 out of 36 which evidently makes me some sort of mind reader, and all week I've been wondering how I can parlay this new-found skill into an occupation. Someone suggested the FBI, but my absurdist streak is too high for such an earnest position. Someone else suggested poker, but the last time I played cards I won sort of effortlessly because I'm lucky, and I pissed off the Card Powers That Be which kind of bewildered me. Today, I actually read an article about some study that found that those who read literary fiction were more empathetic than those who read popular or regular fiction. Examples for literary fiction were the obvious: Don Delillo, Chekhov, etc. Examples for popular or regular fiction were Danielle Steele and, not surprisingly to me, Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (a book that I read and felt insanely jealous about, again, that such pablum was devoured by so many). See those glasses in that photo above? Well, I'm a literary snob, and I don't give a damn about claiming that.
Given that I scored near perfectly on the reading people's emotions test and am an unapologetic reader of literary fiction, my empathy skills know no bounds. Dump it on me, people. I can empathize.
Oh, and see those breasts up there? They're currently holding a Kindle Fire under them, so don't be imagining that my head is getting too big.
***First person to guess my emotions when I took that selfie up there gets a cupcake.
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