Before you end up married and buying a house in the Berkeley hills, before you become respected and a fixture of your community and successful at your profession, before you take your daughter to kindergarten, having played trucks and bulldozers with her for years because you’re so progressive and you’re such a great dad, and before you have a dinner party where you and your wife cook together and she’s not even boring or unattractive in fact I kind of like her, I quite like her, she’s funny in a subtle way and like you she has a good career, a graphic designer, I think, or maybe a psychiatrist, and sure you have your ups and downs sometimes it’s hard, even, but you love one another and you love your daughter and you’re talking about maybe having a second child and you’re fun, you’re fun people, you do strange things and you have costume parties still and in a lot of ways you’re grown up but in other ways you’re still quite raucous, in fact I think she must be a graphic designer or maybe a programmer, freelance, anyway, like you, because even though you’re not rich you still pick up and move from time to time, those three months you spent in Maine house-sitting and clam-digging and that long month in Uruguay where you stayed with friends and the internet connection was poor and you got a lot of writing done, and anyway you’ve decided to buy this house in Berkeley, reasonably close to all of the grandparents and a community garden and when you get up in the morning you usually feel pretty good, at least once you have some coffee, before all of that, before all of that, I’m saying, I’d like to take you out, I’d like to take you out now, when you have a lot of options and let’s face it probably a lot of offers but a lot of things have happened to you already and I think a lot will continue to and all I’m asking is please, before anything else happens, can we please go out. And after that, anything.
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