April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers

It's as if Robin Abrahams can read my mind:

"I use a huge number of first-person pronouns in my work–a measure sometimes used as a dependent variable to determine a writer’s level of narcissism! But it doesn’t stem from that at all. I mean, of course I’m in love with my own words, that’s why I’m a writer. But my compulsion to keep qualifying them as my words comes less from hubris than humility. This is my opinion of what your mother-in-law said at the last family picnic. Not God’s. Not Jane Austen’s. Not Oprah’s. Just mine, influenced by my own unique experiences and education. Don’t take it for more than that."

I've really liked Abrahams ever since I first read one of her Miss Conduct columns in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine--her approach to etiquette is from the school I adore, which is the etiquette-should-be-about-making-people-comfortable school, as opposed to the school that say that There Is A Right Way To Do Things, and god help you if you address an envelope using the improper form of address, you peasant. She's an interesting and personable writer, and always comes across as thoughtful and sympathetic to how people feel and act in a way that I think comes from being really interested in how people feel and act, not just in in judging them for it. It hews very close to my worldview (I was thiiiiiiiis close to majoring in sociology), thus validating me. Yay!

Also? She looks like a female Spock, and she knows it.