Yes, my friends, I am talking about Barnes & Noble.

I had a $25 gift card burning a hole in my wallet, and as is usually the case when I have a bad week, I wanted to anesthetize myself by shopping. And shop I did. I got another half a dozen books, mostly their classic line, plus a hardback omnibus edition of Louisa May Alcott (that cost thirty-five dollars thank you very much. Jesus) and a Joni Mitchell CD, because the song "Cactus Tree" has been in my head for weeks and the only way to be rid of it was to actually get the CD so that I could hear the real words.

Unfortunately, the plan was foiled when I sat down to watch the first season of The Muppet Show last night. MAHNA MAHNA! (doo dooooo, doo doo doo...) But that is neither here nor there.

The other book I picked up was Cat's Eye, by Margaret Atwood. A lot of people hear "Margaret Atwood" and think A Handmaid's Tale (which I also love), but Cat's Eye is the first Atwood I ever read and it has always been my favorite.

The first I'd ever heard of it was the summer before I left for college; it had been excerpted in, by all things, the back-to-school issue of Seventeen magazine. I still remember sitting in the back seat of Mom's car, coming back from a shopping expedition. It was late afternoon, and the sun was coming in through the window, and I was getting ready to leave home for the first time and here was a story telling me about how shitty it could be for little girls when their friends turned on them, and in fact, stuff like that had been happening to little girls for years.

I mean, I knew it on an intellectual level by that point, and I have never been one to rant for hours on the internet about bullies and how traumatized I was twenty years ago because someone was OMG meen to me (why yes, that stuff still annoys the shit out of me) but it was still a revelation, that here was a character that had gone through something very similar and her mother was similarly concerned and worried and ultimately not sure what to do about it and everyone survived, even if she ever after kept a yardstick in the back of her head and kept trying for the rest of her life to measure up.

What, me, over-identify? Never, I says.

So when I had been away at college for about a month, I hated it. I was too young to be there and I missed my lame-ass boyfriend and I had done too many stupid things already, and I spent a lot of time sequestered in my room eating crap and reading in order to escape how horribly lonely I felt. I was wandering the college bookstore one day and found the paperback on the racks, and remembered the excerpt. I picked it up, devoured it in one night, and that was it.

I read it often over the next semester and it became my frequent companion at my solitary lunches (when I started reading it again yesterday I immediately became hungry and started looking for something to knock into a sandwich, even). I was intrigued at Elaine's future and her career, and how much of that she subconsciously related to the influence of Cordelia. At the time, it was sort of a "look, I will be able to pull myself out of this too!", which got unfortunately subverted into a different "childhood trauma as art" obsession with Sylvia Plath. Heh. Sad dark pain girl, indeed. But that is another story for another time.

I am looking forward to reading it all again; it's been years, though I often list it as one of my favorite novels. If I still get hungry when I open the book, I am curious to see if it transports me back to the dusty lobby of my college dorm, on a Friday afternoon when everyone had somewhere to go and something to do and I was waiting for my life to start. I wonder if, once finished, I will still be waiting.