Hello, sorrow

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Excerpts, Fiction - Novel, Françoise Sagan, HarperPerennial, Irene Ash, Translation

#50 of 2012 • Bonjour Tristesse, by Françoise Sagan;
translated by Irene Ash.

A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me, but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.

It’s amazingly French, this book—as French as my keep-things-neatly-catalogued mind makes it seem like. It’s recklessly decadent, more than a little sensual (alarmingly so, at times), and full of brats—young and old alike—that could rival any in Fitzgerald’s drawing rooms. Everyone is bored; everyone is a little in awe of the summer and of the many possibilities it offers.

It’s the fifties. We have Cécile, seventeen and self-absorbed—the latter because there’s never been reason to be anything else. It’s the height of summer, and Daddy’s girl is lounging with him and his mistress in the French Riviera. Widower Daddy Raymond is more than a little “amoral,” too suave and seductive for his own good, whilst mistress over there is too-young and too-fluffy in the noggin. To add to the salad of franco-fied Electra complex—Cécile likes to go around baring her finely corded shoulders at Daddy’s friends, feels the tiny twinge of jealousy over Mistress Elsa (a jealousy never fully realized because, lo and behold, Cécile figures she’ll soon be out of his life anyway; that’s Daddy’s thing). Eventually, Cécile realizes she’s seventeen and hooks up with Cyril, a boy still a lot older than she is. This more legitimate sexual exploration is jeopardized, of course, by Raymond’s continuing treatment of Cécile as an adult, complete with jaunts at the casino in a sparkly slinky dress.

Enter Anne, a friend of Cécile’s dead mother—come to visit the trio and wreck the nearly-sybaritic hodgepodge in the seaside cottage. Anne is an adult (finally), sophisticated, a little snooty, but lady’s got class. And she’s quick to act as a mother’s figure to Cécile, who’s obviously been lacking in one. Cécile accepts this—she loves Anne, doesn’t she? Well, she does, until Raymond breaks up with Elsa and announces his engagement to Anne. Cécile goes bonkers, managing to both act with an adult deviousness and hold on to her childish self-absorption—and convolutedly, Hollywood-movie-ly plots to eject Anne from their lives.

Yeah, healthy role models right there, guys.

Cécile , make no mistake, is a little brat. But I liked her. I could tolerate her. Because what saves this novel from Cécile’s push-and-pull of admissible naïveté and plain cruelty is the self-awareness of the adult-Cécile that narrates this story. We’re not talking to seventeen-year-old Cécile here—we’re being told about her by a decidedly more sane version of her. We can share in that Cécile’s careful remorse, her frustration with herself, her younger self, and her shenanigans. It’s the gift of hindsight, one that’s never abused as to coerce us into un-subtle meditations on the follies of youth. And it’s this hindsight that, somehow, lets us forgive Cécile her faults—it’s what lets one deal with the seventeen-year-old running amok the French Riviera; after all, who among us haven’t been this stupidly full of ourselves—or wished we were, then. And, perhaps, even now.

Yes, I liked the sensuality. Of course I did. I liked the suggestions of illicitness, the flagrant amorality and the faux. The possibilities, the wrongness of certain thoughts. But I liked its simplicity too, and the crispness of the storytelling—another thing that “saves” this book from utter melodrama. Here’s the sea, it says, its strong and humid breeze pressing against your face. The sun’s unrelenting against sin, straps of thin summer dresses catch on shoulder blades. Those long , lazy stretches of the afternoon and, later, the weight of the nights compelling you to youth—are an approximation of it.

I’ve missed these kinds of books. Slim and spry on its feet—a thin book, a Why Not? book—even if the little pocket of respite from real life comes in the form of this privileged, scheming, sorrow-a-greeting sensualite.

PSA: I bought Bonjour Tristesse on sale (20% off during the Summer Sale) from National Bookstore (the Cubao branch, methinks!). Original price is PhP395.

“The churn of a secret life.”

Tags

Erotica, Fiction - Novel, HarperPerennial, Nikki Gemmell

Our unnamed diarist in her happy-enough marriage with the Dependable Husband. Sure, he’s flawed, but these aren’t shattering imperfections. They’ve dealt with it—she has, she loves him, she knows she does. Why wouldn’t she otherwise? She’s not really unhappy. But. You know. Being not unhappy yet happy-enough doesn’t guarantee your being happy. Being not unhappy yet happy-enough doesn’t guarantee you won’t think about what life would be if, say, it were just a little bit more complicated, a little messier—if life made you breathless every once in a while. But she can’t say that, nope. People would think her unhappy. And this makes her—anyone, I suppose—just a little bit more reckless.

No one, though, has any idea of the churn of a secret life. Your desire to catch catastrophe into your world is like a tugging at your skirt. But only sometimes, then it’s gone. With the offer of a bath, or a cup of tea, or the dishes done.

But a little nudge here and there, and dissatisfaction rears its ugly head. And gives way to an awakening, too: The Bride Stripped Bare by Nikki Gemmell is a defiant confession of a slow, sexual awakening that begins with this unnamed young wife. She has fantasies of other lives, other beds to wake up in, other faces to glance against. And she lets herself acknowledge that she wants something else, that she’s been putting up with things she doesn’t even like for the longest time.

I hereby decree every woman to write her own sensual/sexual history, because, more than anything else, Gemmell’s book—although whole in the limitations it sets for itself, although a good book—most importantly stirs and incites the reader, reminds one of pains and frustrations thought best left unacknowledged.

It’s almost a knee-jerk reaction: Read of this young wife saying, “. . .you wonder why some people have a compulsion to allow chaos in their lives,” and you start to nod, thinking, yeah, I’ve had those times, I should write them down, paying careful attention to the myriad chaos-in-plural.

You know, those times—say, when you enter the home you’ve lived in for quite a long time now (with this other, necessary person) and you realize that, “An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying good night, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone’s passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it simultaneously like a cat. An emptiness when you realize that the loneliest you’ve ever been is within a marriage, as a wife.” Nothing-spectacular language aside, variations thereof are allowable, even expected.

It’s the affected reader allowing those variations that likewise compels her to realize she must have a chronicle of her own, that everyone must. This book speaks certain truths, but it isn’t universal enough—it can’t be the book for everyone.

And even then, even with one reader nodding every couple of pages or so, that reader will, sooner or later, realize that this book isn’t hers as much as she wants it to be. That this isn’t truly the book she would have written.

Well, you know, of course not.

* * *

Damn those variations! Or, in more heated moments, this reader screaming at the page: You’re wrong; that’s not how it is. I don’t agree with everything Gemmell wrote. This is personal history as well as a less emotionally invested witness.

Note that it’s Gemmell I’m now referring to as author, and not our unnamed diarist. Because, see, Gemmell’s politics is palpable here. She’s all yip-de-doo regarding the sanctity of monogamy. Of course, in an interview included in the book, Gemmell states, “There is a moral code to The Bride Stripped Bare. My protagonist respects the sanctity of monogamy.”

But I have the benefit of having extra features in my book, okay? See, as I neared the end, I started to scowl, seeing how things began to veer off. I was horrified with the authorial hand’s determination to let our unnamed diarist play the good wife, after such an enriching digression, as though it were just that—a phase in an otherwise okay-enough life.

Or, as Gemmell insists, that’s just part of a much bigger picture. Naturally. It’s the marriage, you see, with all its “compromises inherent within that particular relationship, all the mess. Nothing is clean, nothing straightforward, but there can be a ferocious love nonetheless.” Sure. But what about this anonymous woman’s adventures? What about her finding her desires, as well as the will to act upon them?

It’s annoying, it’s frustrating, and it’s goddamned disrespectful to that unnamed diarist. [I reject Gemmell’s attempts to situate this diary as though it were an actual, physical thing—that is, that some mysterious woman left this record behind when she disappeared from her near-perfect life for good. Cheap shot, cheap.]

Oh well. I’ll go for a little walk now, and convince myself of certain things.

Thirteen Points on The Gospel of Anarchy, Justin Taylor, and my confused sense of Reader Self

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Fiction - Novel, HarperPerennial, Justin Taylor

#40 of 2011 • The Gospel of Anarchy, by Justin Taylor

1 – September if last year, I read Taylor’s debut short story collection, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, and found the experience rather disquieting. There’s immense talent—this author’s voice is definitely fresh [meandering at times, taut at others, glib, sometimes tender—but I constantly felt “that nagging feeling that something’s missing, and that no matter how many times you agonize over defining that something, it’s always out of reach.” Yes, that. I’m looking at his first novel as a second date. Not necessarily to put the past behind us—I know, even now, that I’m going to look back on my previous experience with him, if only to more or less settle on my impression of him as a writer. Second date, we’re going to figure out where we actually stand.

2 – I like malaise. I like characters with seemingly no direction in life, or even the urge to look for that direction. I like jadedness too. There’s a lot of these in college dropout David—telemarketer, porn addict of the late 90s. When I read, I realize that I don’t demand the characters to change—for the span of the narrative, I need to put myself in the author’s hands, and allow him to lead the characters wherever the, well, wherever the narrative tells them to go. But for me to completely, helplessly trust the author’s decisions, to respect it—it boils down to the execution. Taylor’s got a vibrant voice, we’ve covered that. But the structure is all over the place. And don’t tell me that because the novel is about pseudo-anarchic-Christian-lifestyle-tourist shizniz, the novel can be splat-bam-boom on the pages.

3 – When the characters choose to stay put—or, when they take up their directionless luggage into the land of Ironic Directionless-ness—the story has to support that. The storytelling is required at some point to offer a logic to the aimlessness.

4 – What logic was offered felt feeble to me. A poor execution of slapdash characters who all sound alike, a dizzying romp from condo unit to garbage bin to halfway house to abandoned tent to Anarchist Zine. And so, the characters, well—it occurred to me, what I found so discordant about these characters and their preoccupations:

5 – I am 21 years old, but reading Taylor has me chirping, “Oh my, this must be what the kids are up to these days.” [Or, well, what the kids were up to in the late 90s.] I’m crustily banging my metaphorical cane against the floor and cackling, “Ach, anarchy, they’ll grow out of it.” Beside the feeling of traversing foreign waters—what do I know about anarchy?—I became steadily impatient with what I was tempted to classify as punk posturing. They’ll grow out of it. Nothing’s at stake, because everything was in a haze of Well, I’ve Got Nothing Better to Do. By the end of the novel, I was pretty certain that they’ll move out of the house and get back to “normal,” vanilla lives.

6 – Good lord, the urge to clap my hands and say, “Now, now, children.”

7 – I wrote on a margin: “I don’t understand this anarchy. Anti-capitalism, anti-Marxist, hippie, Christ-babble; a hodge-podge of available and accessible philosophies, flourishing under the fever of this aimless youthfulness. Dude. WTF.”

8 – I wouldn’t be prattling on like this if the structure weren’t as taut, as structured as it ought to have been. See, that’s the root of the problem. You take an intriguing premise, characters with the limitless possibilities for implosions and explosions—and then let the form run roughshod over them? See, aside from the survey of malcontents David meets, beyond them—The Gospel of Anarchy, the center of the novel, the supposed center of these characters lives-for-the-moment.

9 – The Gospel of Anarchy: the ramblings of an elected mystic, the disappeared leader of this merry band. A journal left, abandoned: a jumble of aphorisms, contradictory manifestos, that will naturally stand as, well, gospel to the children of Fishgut. It’s amazing—it’s where Taylor’s capacity to switch voices and forms shines. Perversely pedestrian one moment, running into the euphoric, Eucharistic, existential exultations the next—man, that voice is kicker.

10 – The problem was building a story around it. Building actual people like David, like lesbian lovers Katy and Liz, like the hippies, like David’s long-lost friend Thomas around this gospel. The supposed lynchpin of this novel—just, well, unjustly lost in the muddle.

11 – Why I still can’t, for the life of me, dismiss Justin Taylor’s fiction is, well, heart. I like heart. I like it as much as content and characters and craft. Taylor’s earnestness is palpable. It’s in that voice. It’s in the quiet moments of David uploading his girlfriend’s nude pictures on the newly-christened Interwebz; it’s David stuck on the phone with a baffled widow, feeling that rare sensation of his heart actually beating for a real, if disembodied person. It’s knowing that the characters are alive in there somewhere, the problem is, they’re actually just one image, just streaming through a prism. It’s having something so grand and gritty as an unearthed Gospel of Anarchy, holiest of holies, in the dirt-bag that is Fishgut. Come on, children, shape up.

12 – Justin Taylor will write again—there is way too much Story inside him. I will read him when he writes again. Heart, kids, heart. I’ll probably grow more and more frustrated, question my own wonky judgment, rail at myself, “Let yourself hate this already.” But, well, there.

13 – Oh my. Look at what you’ve gone and done now, Sasha.

My copy was sent by the folks at Harper Perennial. I’m not grumpy, swearz.

marginalia || Girl Trouble, by Holly Goddard Jones

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Fiction - Short Stories, HarperPerennial, Holly Goddard Jones

Have read Girl Trouble, debut collection of short stories by Holly Goddard Jones. Stories set in small town in Kentucky and oh-so-Southern — but that didn’t really come across strongly for me; that is, what I know of the American South’s already been filtered through. And, well, I’m one of those unenlightened ones who are yet to discover the gravity, the necessity, of setting. So.

It’s a confident first collection of short stories. First of all, Jones displays such mastery of the craft; she knows just how to manipulate the elements of the form. That just-right handling of chronology, of points of view, of revelations. It’s refreshing to read someone who’s obviously taken upon herself to study fiction, and excel at it — and I love that it’s palpable how she respects it so.

Does this make the stories conventional? Safe? To most people, I suppose so. But I found them really solid. Refreshing, in a Dear god, finally kind of way. It makes the stories fine examples of what a confident and learned writer can do with the craft, without needing to subject the reader to hoop-jumping, without the text appearing stale in the process.

And that’s another thing: the stories are fluid, a joy to read. Never mind that the shortest stories are 25 pages long, and the longest span more than sixty. She packs whole lives into these pages — choice triumphs and disappointments. Just the right details to mention.  It’s quite Munro-esque.

And I love how it’s a conscious decision to write in the short story form: There’s no need for the novel’s length, because she could say what she wanted to in the short story. There’s not even that feeling that she’s shortchanging the characters — on the contrary, she has this admirable investment in her characters, both emotionally, and how she devotes the narratives to them. Wahoo.

One of my favorites — the most memorable to me — is “Parts.” The story traces the development of a mother’s grief following the brutal murder of her daughter, and how this grief stalls her life. It was gripping, and it was visceral, and it’s ridiculously biased. I mean, hats off to the first-person POV: it was the best choice to present the most honest reactions, given the context, and it was always juxtaposed with other people looking in, the possibility that these might not be true after all. An unreliable character, out of necessity. One of the best stories I’ve read. It begs emulation.

However. The mmm-hmmm-ness of this story was jeopardized with the last story: “Proof of God,” which is a freaking tell-all, revealing what really happened with Felicia’s murder, but in the point of view of one of the suspects. Normally, it’d be all and good to humanize this Simon, to inform us of the “real” events that occurred that night. BUT, it was so off-putting in its very presence in the collection, I really felt that it was a bad decision to include it in the collection.

I mean, what made “Parts” work was my surrender to the unreliability of the narrator. And now I’m being urged to let go of that? It gets all hokey and corny now. And although both stories are good in their own ways, I wish Goddard Jones — and her editor — had sacrificed one of them. I felt that it was of the utmost importance to let one go. [I vote for “Proof of God,” because “Parts” is too awesome.] Because, well, as evidenced in my experience, one story negates the other. And it’s not the kind of, Ooh, I like you better now, no, wait, the other kind of negation. It’s the Yech, you had me, now I might just not like anything at all. See? Shit’s just counter-productive.

Ahem. So. In my lurking through the book blogosphere’s posts on the short story, and prevailing attitudes, one of the most common things I’ve encountered is that, well, short stories are too short. For character development, for emotional investment, for satisfaction. Aside from my gut reaction to scream Fuck no! at all the nay-sayers [because, well, a lot of the nay-sayers are friends, hahaha], I do urge you guys to try out Goddard Jones’ book, among others — they’re longer stories, for one, and she just respects the short story form so much, confident that the story she wants to say can be crystallized in so-and-so pages.

Besides, why is it such a bad thing to feel But I want more with short stories? Yes, there’s the whole This is unsatisfying because the writer wasn’t capable to make the story whole. But there are partial wholenesses to the short form, written by really good writers, and I hope people would appreciate more of those kinds of stories.

Let Us Not Forget About Sadness: A Letter to Ben Greenman, A Week After Reading His Book

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Ben Greenman, Excerpts, Fiction - Short Stories, HarperPerennial

Dear Mr. Ben Greenman,

Some books just hit me the right way. Your short story collection, What He’s Poised to Do, sure as hell did, and in my saner moments, I wonder if I should be embarrassed. I’m furious with love for your book, and a part of me wants to distance myself from this furious love, and wonder where it came from. What my motives were, if there are any. What could have been happening inside me – perhaps it’s still happening now – when I picked up your book, when I set it back down. Perhaps I am a sad person. Then again, I know that already. Perhaps I like reading the work of someone who has confessed, rather matter-of-factly, that he likes sadness too, or, well, is accustomed to it:

I write often about sadness and loneliness, which are present in all of us but which are harder to detect (if easier to feel) amid the modern-day rush of communications technology. The only cure, I think, is intimacy, which is what the people in my stories are struggling to achieve.

It seems like a very indulgent thing, no? To focus on the sorrows of the world. I do that too often, and it’s not always a wonderful feeling. It rarely leaves something good inside you, if you trap all this fascination inside you. I guess I should let you know that I write. Or, well, that I used to write. It has been more than two years since I wrote a story I was confident in sending out to the world, a story that I could say, “Yes, I am proud of that.” I’ve examined this drought, and have wondered if there aren’t any more stories left inside of me, that maybe I have to really go out there and get it, but I always come up with excuses from doing so. I have wondered, too, if I’ve lost the ability to distance myself from my sadnesses. Because, really, there’s a lot of it inside me, and I am all too attuned to its presence all around me. Who knows?

The conversation you had with a friend, where she accuses you of refusing to acknowledge the sadnesses of people, that you “felt compelled to push forward with a kind of dumb combination of empathy and superiority.” And the way you mulled this over in your head:

Isn’t that where much art comes from? You feel the pain, it starts to drive you to your knees, you bring yourself back up by telling yourself you don’t belong down in the pain, you move forward on this cushion of temporary superiority, and then you use the energy generated by this process to create something. In fact, after a few times, you come to value the sadness, to receive it with a kind of joy, because you know that it will, in time, bring you to creative work.

It’s such a mercenary way of thinking about things, how nobly arrogant. I wish I’d touched upon it first. Oh, the superiority is there – and I like to think the empathy is too – but I’m waiting for something, for things to click. For that decisive step backward, to survey, thinking myself untouchable from it all – but, really, I think you and I both know that that’s not possible, and that’s what makes it work. This delusion that what we hold up to the light can’t possibly filter down towards us. And yet we write on. Or I will, soon. Eventually.

I have rambled.

So, yes, I loved your book. I read this more than a week ago, and I know this to be true: I love your book. Your collection, there is not one story I didn’t like. Some, of course, I loved more than others, but there is not one story I didn’t like.

The men and women in your stories – so very restless, and yet very reflective without being self-indulgent, without being off-puttingly self-conscious. How you handle the basic question of yearning through correspondences – letters! Connections: Correspondences. [You know of this pun too, so I feel free to use it.] How to solve this self-replicating problem of intimacy, or lack of it, or too much of it, or the wrong kind.

In “Against Samantha,” a young man finds himself [what a passive phrase, no?] in love with the mother of his fiancée. There’s nothing sensational about this. You’ve made it so still, so inevitable. You’ve told your story, unraveled this man’s feelings so simply, there’s no room for distaste:

She was the smartest woman I had ever met, and she was the mother of the woman I was to marry . . .

. . .  Samantha wanted her mother’s wisdom but feared the rest: She worried that the ravages of time would erase her beauty, which was substantial, and turn her into something more ordinary. “We all become our mothers, she said, by way of apology. I did not tell her I was banking on it.

What I admire, and envy, is your range. You don’t let yourself get boxed in. You span decades, centuries, men and women, their joys, their heartbreaks, their relentless hoping. There. In the story titled – simply and gravely – “Hope,” Tomas Tinta [tinta=ink, my goodness!]spends most of his lifetime writing letters, mostly unsent, to the woman he loves. It could stop at this romantic-ness but you didn’t settle. How you apply your tone, your voice. Oh, the narrative too, yes, it’s there, but it’s the storytelling that really had me kicks me where it hurts. In every single story.

And your language! In your story, “From the Front,” you described this slowly-going-mad man thus: He believed that his wife was also a character in a book he had yet to read. I got the chills. Such beautiful madness. But I’m biased. Although you probably know that by now.

You’re occasionally violent and disquieting. But your inherent fascination with sorrow, and the language you use – it’s all just beautiful to me [excuse me for overusing that word]. And so even something as potentially icky [my language is corroding, haha] as what’s hinted at, and eventually revealed, in “Country Life Is the Only Life Worth Living; Country Love Is the Only Love Worth Giving,” works. It’s a creepfest, but you revealed it so well, so classy. In “Barn,” one of the longest in the collection, and one of my favorites: More violence here, more shady familial ties, more potential soap opera. But you lend a dignity to it. I think that’s amazing. Your control, your restraint. How you can temper these kinds of situations, and how you’re still able to use language that makes people – me! – breathless.

In the [too-McSweeney’s-ously titled for my tastes] “The Govindan Ananthanarayanan Academy for Moral and Ethical Practice in the Treatment of Sadness Resulting from the Misapplication of the Above,” an inventer then businessman then professor spends his life answering the unending question of sadness. “How do you feel when the person who made you the saddest feels sad?” he had printed on his “Karmic Boomerangs.” Does she want my sadness? Mr. Ananthanarayanan eventually asks in a letter.

Ah, connections, misconnections, miscommunications. And intimacy. And sadness. Let us not forget about sadness.

I leave you with your own words, from “What We Believe But Cannot Praise:” I felt lonely, and in full possession of my loneliness. It was the first time I had owned anything of value. Perhaps I should start thinking this more, feeling this more. Cradling something so potentially destructive, yet working to be diligent in controlling it, in holding it at length, holding it up to the light. Knowing I can create something from it, something that’ll be more beautiful than any sadness that had borne it.

We’ll see, Mr. Greenman. But thank you for your time. Thank you, too, for your book. I thought it was perfect. I guess those two sentences preceding this one was all I really wanted to say. So. Take care. I wish you,

All the best,

Sasha Martinez

“It took us some time. We knew I knew me but we wasn’t sure, and so stood there trading platitude futures while we plumbed every inner depth, searching for what had to be there. Each of us trying to remember our name, force it first onto the other one.” — Coming to grips with Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever by Justin Taylor

Tags

Excerpts, Fiction - Short Stories, HarperPerennial, Justin Taylor

I’ve taken a lot of time thinking about what to say about Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, debut short story collection by Justin Taylor. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I convinced myself that it was going to be my new favorite book although it was months [of agony] before it finally landed on my desk.I wanted to love this book — heck, a chunk of me already had. You know that feeling you get, that conviction of YayLiterarySoulmates? I got that. And in this case, I was wrong. And it’s rather distressing. [This has happened before, with Alicia Erian’s collection.]

Book-Disappointment has always been a difficult thing for me to write about. The more I read, it became more and more apparent that Taylor’s collection had turned into such a different book in my head now, because of all that anticipation.

And I’ve pretty much sorted it out: It’s not so much that the collection failed to live up to my expectations — Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever is just pretty much not the kind of book I’m inclined to like. Jacket copy + early reviews be damned. I’m confident that during my read, I was able to step away from that pseudo-relationship, and focus on what the book itself held for me. And I was still disappointed, perhaps more so. [I mean, I think it would be a better deal that the book itself holds merit, but it just wasn’t for me -- than what happened in this case.]

Let me be brief about the bad news, as I’d rather focus on the good news — days of agony, I tell you, thinking of how to say all this, how to break it gently to myself, to the world, to this book. [Bring on the metaphors: Like a blind date with a someone you really wanted to like, only s/he doesn’t seem as yummy as he had on the phone / when a well-meaning friend set you up, and before the possibility of a second date rolls around, you’re going to have to say, “Well, hun, I like you and all, but, uhm.”]