Prior to meeting Lola-despite my marriage, my son-I felt alone. We are constitutionally drawn to the art of grossing each other out. I feel a little happy surge when I can make Lola groan with laughter. Still: there is black mold in my dishwasher, a rotting ham sandwich discovered in the backseat of the car, ingrown hairs morphed to suppurating boils-the world rampant with revulsions when you only pause to look. I devise ways to one-up her, which is difficult because I work from home, hunched over a laptop, scrolling through accounts receivable. A polished pebble that might have been from the bottom of a fishbowl. Hardened ear wax ( cerumen, Lola insists, avoiding lazy colloquialism) resembling the face of Donald Trump.

Roaches of various sizes, a wasp, a small beetle. A green Skittle, a watch battery, the tarnished back of a gold earring, a bunched-up bit of mint floss, a Lego head. You name it, Lola’s found it in someone’s ear. You’ll understand that sometimes, it’s better not to ask. How much is it okay to want? How deeply are we allowed to love? Who are you, really, on the inside? But by the end, you’ll realize the questions have changed. (It was.) At first, it’s a story about asking questions. It’s the kind of story that you’ll immediately want to read again, if only to reassure yourself that what you think you’re seeing was actually in plain sight all along.

It is a credit to Pearson’s particular genius that the end of “The Oracle” is both shocking and inevitable. And yet, as Pearson’s perfectly calibrated story unwinds, Nell begins to wonder how much of her friend she’s actually seeing-and whether there might be value in simply closing her eyes. They have, Nell believes, revealed the disgusting truths of themselves to one another and managed to continue laughing. “Constitutionally drawn to the art of grossing each other out,” their friendship is built on vomit noise-inducing anecdotes and an ability to see life for what it is: a house of horrors. She knows that marriage and motherhood, however happiness-filled, cannot replace the life-affirming experience of having someone who looks at the world and finds the same things revolting as you do. She is, therefore, old enough to understand how rare and special it is to find an adult best friend. Nell, the narrator of Joanna Pearson’s “The Oracle,” is forty, married, and the mother of a teenage son. If a woman my age is sitting next to me at a coffee shop reading a book that I love, how can I approach her and communicate- without it getting weird -that maybe we should meet for dinner to talk about the book and not have sex? Is it weird to give her my number? Is it possible to find out her dietary restrictions in advance? Is a mutual appreciation for caffeine and literature really enough to justify this stressful internal monologue? Is there an app for this?! Unlike dating, which at least pretends to have “rules,” friendship initiation lacks a template. Without the sandboxes of primary school, the classroom corrals of high school, or the undergraduate campus, finding your people can be harder than finding your soulmate. Anyone older than roughly twenty-four-the age I associate with the end of college and its embryonic, adult-lite cocoon-is probably aware that making new friends is a Herculean task.

Last of us porn the lie we live part 1