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lovely woman at synagogue the day before, and wondered if she had no-
ticed me, wondered if she had realized that I was a gentile in their midst.
More importantly, I wondered if she had found me in any way attrac-
tive-after all, I was no plainer than the man she was with at the time,
and, at least unless I had been mistaken, I was closer to her age than he
was. I wondered if perhaps he hadn't been her spouse, and if perhaps my
hotel fantasy could become reality after all. I found a block of cheddar,
which was still good according to the expiration date, and shredded
some up into a small dish. The microwave yelled at me, and I pulled the
chili out of it and dumped the cheese on top.

As I sat down with my bowl of bean- and-meat paste and
shredded cheese, I wondered if that girl observed kashrut, and if so,
what she'd think of my current meal. Absently, I stubbed out my ciga-
rette on the nearest dish I could find, realizing I had put out a cigarette
in my cheese dish-either that or I had put shredded cheese in my
ashtray.

§

On Monday I went to work and had a dull twelve hours at
the call center. At around noon, someone had mistaken IT for the
suicide hotline and spoke through heavy tears about how his life was a
wreck, how his wife had left him and how he had violently yelled at his
supervisor at work and gotten fired for it, and how after he had been
fired he had gotten into a fight at a bar after calling a fellow bar patron
a racial slur and had gotten three of his ribs broken in the ensuing fight.
I informed him that I wasn't qualified to handle this sort of situation
and that he must have had the wrong number, after which I looked up
the number for a suicide hotline and referred him to it. Through thick
sobs and hyperventilation he thanked me and hung up. On the way
home from work I picked up tacos from a cheap Mexican restaurant and
wondered whether or not the poor guy had decided to live another day.

I went back to my apartment and ate my tacos alone, listened
to a Steely Dan album on the stereo and read the New York Times. In
it was an article about concerns over the possibility that the recent elec-
tions in Egypt were rigged. The article was four pages long, and Egypt

is pretty far from New York, so Idecided to skip it and watch television

instead. A romantic comedy was on, but the woman looked nothing
like the one at the synagogue. The woman in this movie was boxy and

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