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Lisa Zeidner and John Allen Paulos

the breakfast table
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from: Lisa Zeidner

Half a Degree of Separation

Posted Monday, June 28, 1999, at 4:38 PM ET

Dear John,

Remember the writer who introduced us? His sister is a shrink, in a different city. To someone very close to me. (Wary of libel, I name no names.) Seems to me the global village ought to have a few more pockets to hide things in. I know someone who attends a synagogue presided over by a guy I necked and smoked hash with, in high school--shortly after messing around with me, he decided to become a rabbi.

Al Gore is in town today. I am worried about traffic. That is what Al Gore means to me.

The Monday Times is often a dull Times, is it not? Only thing that sparked me this morning was the small town in Vermont deciding whether it wanted a 350-bed prison, or a 2,500-tourist stargazing convention. I sure do love a good not-in-my-backyard story. Almost every one of them can be made into fiction. How wonderful to picture a $26 million prison in Vermont, those slitty little windows overlooking the cows in their pastures.

You are mistrustful, then, of all anecdotal evidence? Would you take umbrage if I said, for instance, "Housewives with Suburbans make very bad drivers?" You'll be doing 70 in the slow lane and these "light trucks" rear up behind you, ride your bumper. Then get outraged when you don't part like the sea to let them pass. I've learned not to shoot the bird on the road--any of these charmers could be armed--although most times, it turns out to be not Mafia or Gangsta Rappa but a housewife with kids in the back. Ride 'em, cowgirl! Git to that wholesale club! Buy the mulch-sized bag of potato chips, the kilo of disposable diapers that you "needed" this gas-guzzler to haul! I don't need to see the demographics. I'm out there getting left in the dirt by a Hummer driver weaving between lanes at 80 without even looking--she has turned to yammer to an infant in a car seat.

Did these selfsame women like Titanic?

I'm only saying: I feel pretty alienated from the global village.

(Not counting you, of course.)

Love,
Lisa

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314151617
from: Lisa Zeidner

Half a Degree of Separation

Posted Monday, June 28, 1999, at 4:38 PM ET
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John Allen Paulos is a professor of mathematics at Temple University and the author of six books, most recently Once Upon a Number (click here to buy the book). Lisa Zeidner, a professor of English at Rutgers University, is the author of four novels, most recently Layover (click here to buy the book), and two books of poems.
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