I say, where are my cute boy flunkies?

subtitled: Why I may be a modern Emma Bovary (except for that bit about adultery)

It is a sad state to be in, where your imaginary fantasy life is flourishing over your day to day ordinary life. I've currently become obsessed with my lack of boy flunkies. All of my current significant relationships are with other women, but in high school, I ran around with a co-ed pack of boys and girls, with the default Gay Boyfriend as boy #1, and then other guys. And then I went off to college and proceeded to become a commuting shut-in, with only one real friend (hi Annie!) made during the entire experience. And the guys sort of disappeared after that - I broke up with my best friend on account of him being a flaky, emotionally retarded asshole, not that we're reiterating character faults right now - but with him, I also lost links to just the guys. Which always sucks in a break up, because you say it won't happen, you do lose custody of friends.

So I'm mostly mourning the loss of male-bonding time, I miss just going out with a group of guys and wryly delivering commentary while they goofed around and got drunk and I made fun of them, and I miss quiet times when they were being sensitive and told me stories about their cats and we made burnt cookies and I told them my viewpoint as a girl* and I miss having them fix stuff for me and I miss shopping for clothes because otherwise they'd go out in hobo wear and their girlfriends would never speak to me again, and I just miss being one of the guys.

I love and adore my girlfriends, but there's just a different level of emotional connection.

Which comes back to my appalling lack of boy flunkies (obviously, in a serious vein, I just miss having boy friends). I want to be having exciting adventures and not so exciting adventures with them and them doing everything I say (or not, and pretending to do, in real-life fashion) and then being all overprotective and scheming. I want cute boy flunkies. Am I not cute enough to attract cute boy flunkies? I almost want to go back to that time in my life just on that cusp of it being fine having friends of opposite genders without it being all weird and nobody had to be attracted to each other - just to have hilarious hijinks. We'd form a band. It'd be called Mad Girl and Two Flunkies, and we would have no drummer. Because of the new wave factor!

And now a poll.

[Poll #976160]

I need to cut back on the novels and daily diet of tabloid glamalism, because I'm finding academic or historically based biographies incredibly difficult to get through these days, which is sort of terrible. I could barely read Antonia Fraser's book about Marie Antoinette. Any recommendations for scholarly/or historical books?

I just reread A Wrinkle in Time and I'm rereading all of my Asian lit this weekend, with some new Japanese short stories thrown in as a reward. The local Japanese store also has some Chinese authors I haven't heard of, which is a nice surprise.