Not Bitter

Congratulations to my two ex-lovers for their recent and/or upcoming nuptials.

(Yes, two. What can I say? I got around.)

Anywho...Seeing as I am off men for a while, the best thing for me to do would be to not read any more of those darn chick lit books. But they are so addictive! Besides, I did take out like 20 of them from the library and so I most plod on and finish them.

I just finished "Bare Necessity" about a woman whose boyfriend finds himself in dire financial straights (so to speak, since he actually has a great car and designer clothes and looks the part of a young entrepreneur but is actually having a meltdown as his 3 dot-com websites are crashing and burning) decides to take the intimate photos he took of her and put them on the Internet for profit.

Feeling rightfully betrayed, she packs up and leaves him and turns up at her best friend's house. Her friend is one of those Dharma types (as in Dharma and Greg) who is very into feng shui and new age crystals and potions and herbal teas (well, the tea thing is a Brit thing, I guess) and all that mish-mesh.

(That might sound like a Christian dismissal of the "mish-mesh" but actually I was very much a New Age person myself prior to conversion and so I always found it a little difficult to sort things out. For example, there was a catalog I would get all the time in the mail and there were pages of stuff like candles, "Out of Body...Back in 20 Minutes" T-shirts, "Expect a Miracle!" mugs and all sorts of crystals as well as faerie nick-nacks. That was the "New Age" portion. Then there was the American Indian portion that mostly consisted of dream catchers and wolf nick-nacks. Then there was the Buddhist/Eastern stuff which included prayer scrolls and incense cones. Finally, it got really heavy with the more Wicca kinda stuff like pentagrams and black cat nick-nacks. I wasn't sure what religion it would all fall under but they seemed to all go under the New Age umbrella somehow. And it was ok, I guess, to believe in all of it at once. There were even a lot of angel stuff, which is in the Christian realm of things but actually it's all a bit gnostic.)

Anyway, this New Agey best friend is in a bit of a crisis of her own as she realizes she really digs her co-worker at the paper. He is a divorced man with a 12-year-old kid who at the moment is very concerned he won't even get weekly visits anymore as his wife is planning to ship off to Australia.

Internet-picture girl finds herself in the middle of a scandal as a sleazy guy at the paper finds out who she is and that she's a schoolteacher and they run a story on her. She becomes instantly infamous. But she ends up getting in touch with a publicist who helps her exploit her notoriety rather than be exploited by it. Which at the moment seems the only way out as she ends up losing her job and her home (the boyfriend also bilked her out of that).

In the end, we go through chapters and chapters where the two best friends are each in love and we, the readers, know it's with the same man. Yes, the divorced guy, who is a photographer, attends a party that the protagonist's publicist insists she go to and there they sort of meet and instantly "fall in love" and pretty soon the two girlfriends are sitting around casting spells trying to hook up with their dream "men" which is really one dream "man".

In the end, though (Spoiler alert- as if you care) it turns out that best friend has apparently secretly harbored strong feelings for the ex-boyfriend who is an okay sort of guy except he got greedy and that clouded his judgment and it cost him dearly. He in turn seems to also have a newfound interest in her now that he's lost all chance with his girlfriend after plastering her naked bum all over the Internet.

So it all works out. She ends up taking her clothes off again this time of her own volition for money and in a more artsy covered-up sort of way, and is reunited with her dream hunk. Her best friend ends up with the ex-boyfriend either because he accidentally drank this wine she spiked with hocus-pocus (meant for her original dream man) or because they liked each other all along (depending how you want to look at it) and the 12-year-old boy doesn't move to Australia afterall.

One final note on that- it was touching the way modern families are touched upon in the book. For the ex-wife is now remarried and she decides (as she is seriously depressed and troubled) to move to Australia alone, leaving behind the boy and her second husband (who promises to wait it out) and the Dream Man magnanimously allows for this second husband to visit his boy. See, the second husband can't have kids of his own has grown to love the boy as his own son and is devastated that he is moving out now that mom is leaving. I thought that was sort of neat.