How Often Do You Spill Your Food or Beverage?

Apparently the reason why I never found love post-divorce is because I failed to spill my coffee or tea or Diet Coke on some hapless fellow. I never (as far as I know) dropped food on a man either. But according to contemporary romance novels, clumsiness with comestibles is the key to true love. While you don't see many governesses or companions in the Regency Romances getting scone crumbles on a duke or earl, in contemporaries it's de rigueur. I'm getting to the point where I want to DNF a book as soon as I see it ~ I even listed it as one of my Persnickety Peeves over a year ago. Back then, I called it an awkward meet cute, but I've since realized that it can happen anytime during the get-to-know-you stage. 

The latest one I read was in Life Derailed, for which I had high expectations as an exploration of how we feel about AI in our lives, and in particular would we rather have a customized, sensitive, kind, understanding, funny, and always available to chat AI boyfriend or an annoying human male? Alas, this was just a typical workplace romance with the usual tedious misunderstandings that melted away when the epiphany occurred. Regarding the spilled food, somehow our heroine Remi managed to get salad on poor Jason while he was sitting across the table. Salad! I had to stop reading to try to imagine how you could accidentally flip greens and pieces of tomato across the table onto a guy's shirt. I'm still having a hard time envisioning it.

I finished this book because I really hoped that more in depth discussion of AI with respect to relationships would materialize, but it never happened. I suppose I have to rewatch Her for that or one of the many various movies centered on this theme. I don't want to see robots gone bad; I want to see people preferring AI conversation to human interaction at least for a while. Anyway, I had other issues with Life Derailed, such as a mom character that could have been funny and interesting, but the author made her so over the top ridiculous that it ruined her, plus the author completely forgot about Remi's precious doggie Fitz, and she had Remi run off to an island for a month to write her novel without telling us what she did with poor Fitz. The novel did have some interesting scenes, so I gave it two stars instead of the one I was initially contemplating. 

What else? I read His and Hers, a mystery/ thriller, which was pretty good, but I liked the Netflix series more. One of the reasons is because they had only six episodes, so they had to discard some of the bloated side-plots, and that made the story more streamlined and easier to follow. The show made me realize that one of the things I dislike about first-person narration, which is "I have a big secret I am not divulging to the reader even though we are in my head and I am obviously thinking about it," works perfectly well on the screen because that "nyah nyah" doesn't occur. We didn't even need to see the protags getting blackout drunk all the time so they (and the reader) wouldn't remember/ know what they did because there was very little narration. I'm also getting to the point where I'm tired of excessive alcohol consumption used as a plot device. Be more creative! 

Yesterday I went to the Orange County Zoo with a friend. It was the first time I'd been there. Small zoo, but easy to walk the whole thing (twice) and see a variety of cool beasties, such as owls, eagles, snakes, lizards, big cats, peacocks, parrots, etc. There was a petting area as well, but I didn't want to touch any animals. It's always so weird to see the goats with their rectangular pupils, and they probably think the same thing about my human eyeballs. One of the things I enjoy most about a zoo is how excited the little kids get to see all the creatures.

Hope all my readers are having a good Monday!