Applying Shakespeare.

If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a gentle kiss

-Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 5


The weirdest things come to one at the most cuttingly dull of moments.

I had a...thing for Romeo and Juliet. The true intellectual will lambast my interest for being piqued by the screen version; "Romeo + Juliet", rather than any study of the greatest love story ever told.

But to the pimply, floppy-haired and clueless teenager I was, the whole affair was outstandingly well done. The movie wore a fedora with a matching overcoat. It had the perfect growth of a 5 o'clock shadow, and the smouldering cigar it held loosely at the corner of the mouth glowed crimson against a backdrop of grimy streets lit by a single, yellow street lamp. Complete with an ever-so-slight drizzle.

That dripping sound is the style trickling off the rim of the fedora onto the streets. Stylishly, of course.

Young minds are stupid. Almost without exception. Let's be nice and liken the analogy to unforged steel. I think I had to watch the movie thrice to understand everything, and one of them was with someone I later went outstandingly psychotic on. There was much moping about and wringing of hands. And a brilliant amount of stupidity.

But hindsight is always 20/20. And we learn from our mistakes. Which is why I now keep a bottle of chloroform handy.

Kidding. I think.

So the brilliant idea was, to set up a table in, say, the middle of Borders. Two signboards. "Free handshakes" on one, and the above quote on the other. Two blokes at the table, one doing the handshake and checking back with the other.


"Am I profaning this one, mate?"

"No, no, that's nowhere near a holy shrine. More of a public restroom, if you ask me."

"This one, then?"

"Not as bad, but closer to 'parking lot'."

"Right then. This?"

"Hell, no. It'd be the other way round, and gods know you've got a face only your mother could love. And that's negotiable if she's got a dog."

"...no need to be like that about it. What about..."


And then Brittany Murphy walks into the store, and the two blokes make strangled noises and drop down dead. Too holy, you see.

I refuse to have my taste in women questioned.

Thou shalt not covet.

...no, my neighbour does not have an ox. Don't particularly want one, either.

Though I must say, there's something about squeezing milk out of an udder that's...

Anyway.

Perhaps it's subliminal Hollywood brainwashing, but there's just something about that classic setup of writer-with-laptop-in-place-with-ambience thing that gets me. It's all over the place, isn't it? Writers are glamorized on the silver screen - no work required, it seems.

Just get a sexy, sexy Apple laptop and you're set, apparently. You'll be sitting at the Starbucks down the road, sipping overpriced designer coffee. In ten minutes, you'll bang out something a paper will pay you thousands for.

Or you'll be curled up in a huge fuck-off bed, soft golden lighting the only illumination as you peck pensively at the keyboard on your lap, putting the final touches to yet another bestseller. Then the drop-dead gorgeous, intelligent, funny, buxom blonde comes out the shower in a flimsy bathrobe, sashays up to you and lets it slide off her.

What follows after is probably not something I should be thinking about at work.

My kingdom for a laptop!

But yes, I'm no diva la obnoxia. Peepur lose camera, got fans buy for her, hor. The way it's going now, I'd be lucky to get a solar-powered calculator if the wheezing computer at home ups and dies on me.