"I think being a woman is like being Irish." — Iris Murdoch

I just took a little trip.  It was very nice.  Seriously.  I'm not being ironic.

On Tuesday nights I go to a yoga class in Jamaica Plain, which is a part of Boston.

Jamaica Plain:  It's all steel drums and bright colors and rum, man.  (Now I'm kidding.)  Anyway, it takes a half hour to get out there, and a half hour to get back, plus a little walking before, after, and in the middle.

It turned out there was no class tonight.  I knocked on the door and waited and knocked again.  I walked away and looked at my watch and went back and knocked again.

I didn't mind.  I wanted to be home.  And on the subway I read the first half of a super short story by Henry James called In The Cage -- about a girl who works in a telegraph office and imagines the lives of the rich by the telegrams they send.  It's amazing.

Henry James is easily one of the weirdest writers America has produced.  Some of his works are just unintelligible, and if their quality wasn't so perfectly uniform, you'd think he was high when he wrote them.  But others are out of this world, and couldn't have been written by any other man or woman on the planet in this or any age.

This story of one of those.  You would NEVER think, when you were reading Henry James, "Oh, I've thought that" or "I've done that" but what you *do* get is an articulation of the interior life spelled out with an easy clarity that sometimes leaves me breathless.

Plus, on the way home I passed these two old guys talking and heard this:

older old guy:  It's the same old story...
younger old guy:  It's bullshit.

All three of us laughed together.