Miss Holiday Golightly, Traveling

"...to know the young woman would be to find her a truly awful pest"
- Dorothy Parker, on Holly Golightly

My love for "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (both the novella AND the movie) aside, I have to agree with good ol' Dot.

Sure, there's something positively mesmerizing about that kind of beauty and frivolity with the suggestion of fragility and damage hovering just under the surface.

But on deeper acquaintance, she would be ANNOYING. She would be hard to pin down for drinks, either never showing up or doing so outrageously and unrepentantly late. She'd be in therapy, but never get anything out of it other than the amusement of talking about it over cocktails. She'd either be surgically attached to her cell phone, or stubbornly refuse to have one at all. And just as you throw your hands up in the air and write her off, she'd turn on all her charm (and that suggestion of fragility), and staying mad at her would be like kicking a very cute puppy, so you'd have to forgive her and it would start all over again.

But then, if she were well adjusted and responsible and funny and smart, she would be completely uninteresting to read about.

I woke up in the middle of the night homesick. For Beijing. This struck me as odd. Living there was... well, Dickens already said it best: "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."

So, feeling contemplative and not liking it, I snapped myself out of it by wearing my tiara and watching Hellraiser I. Hellraiser is always a mood lifter and the tiara usually is as well, except that this time, it made me think of Holly, traveling.