The Adventures of Sally Tomato, Cosmonaut

She was a reluctant trailblazer, preferring a spectrum of established models to choose from. Unfortunately, she was also too neurotic to settle.

Her personal life suffered from a similar paucity of alternatives.

Sex and the City: the Movie suggests that (SPOILER ALERT) only 25% of women reach contentment sans partner. All the women she knew were planning weddings and house hunting, nesting, or home improving with their significant others.

That fulfillment required partnering was simply not a logically defensible position, she felt. But, then again, there was no use lying to herself; she too had been quite disappointed by Samantha and Smith's breakup.

She began to feel marginalized by a system she never even wanted to matriculate into.

Upon awakening, she decided productivity was far more likely following a protein-rich (and usually labor-intensive) breakfast--steak and eggs, cheesy mushroom risotto, or similar.

She knew the whole day would be wasted should she remain in her pajamas. We are who we pretend to be, after all, and, as any dramatis persona will tell you, costume is absolutely essential for convincing pretense.

Always fascinated by the Method, she tried to recall a day when she felt entirely effectual as an employee. It was not recent. In fact, she could not remember any such day. She was certain, however, that had it actually occurred, it would have begun with her arrival at the office feeling and looking her most professional, probably in purple suede Marc Jacobs pumps.

Through further imaginary deduction, she determined that efficacy depended on cleanliness. She allowed the pouf to linger languorously on every part of her body as she washed. She cleaned behind her ears and between her toes, noticing the deplorable state of her pedicure as she did so.

By noon, she was dressed for success. She was also quite hungry. Her office had a full kitchen, so she felt it was just as likely that she would be cooking a meal for herself there as in her own home. Besides, the law did require a half-hour lunch for eight hours of work. And who was she to fancy herself above the law?

She arrived at the coffee shop at 1:36 to work. As a salaried worker, she could take a long lunch, she reminded herself. There was no need for guilt, a rather unproductive emotion at best.

Her primary role was writing proposals to secure program support from various institutional funders. Business writing, though perhaps not as creative as flash fiction writing, was still an imaginative exercise, and would undoubtedly benefit from a stream of consciousness warm up.

Time was especially gracious this morning. It opened wide enough to allow the selection of clothing that expressed her emotional state (elated). Her 18 minute toilette afforded all manner of indulgences - leg shaving, eyelash curling, French braiding - that on ordinary days it simply would not accommodate.

She bought Turkish coffee and a breakfast cookie, which she ate during her 15 minute commute.

The far left tile showed water damage.

Eight days prior, while walking together, diesel fumes transported her back. When they previewed the barely furnished apartment four days later, the scent of nag champa elicited a similar experience. Nine hours ago, afterwards, it was the fragrance of time on plaster that did it.

(The fact that the smell of time and, for that matter, plaster, is barely perceptible made the force and immediacy of the association all the more striking.)

She climbed back into bed - in between white, lent sheets, under a brown down comforter - and felt chronologically disoriented. Suddenly quite hungry, she craved the pan y laminas de gouda she used to eat daily during class breaks.

Her head, buoyant with exhaustion, heavy with anxiety, rested on his chest, lifting and descending with his every breath. Her mental noise receded, and she fell still.

Then I realized: Tuesday is a free day. It's just not possible for anyone to get anything done after a two-hour time loss. If it were, the workday would always start at 10. You can totally use piousness to sleep (I furrow my brow, sigh importantly, and bow my head in a holy nap), and you can extend break time by ministering to your co-worker with something called "words of encouragement".

Here's how Tuesday goes down:

8:00-8:40 - Check emails, then mill about waiting for prayer time to start.

8:40-8:50 - Congregate in break room, wait for senior staff, lighthearted mockery.

9:00-9:45 - Devotions, prayer requests, prayer requests, and about 100 more prayer requests.

9:45-10:06 - Chat with people in break room then head back to your office.

10:15 - Sit in chair with full intent to do something useful... then realize it's break time! Head back to the break room to play cards.

10:45 - After doubling your break, head back to office.

11:00 - Start thinking about lunch, put out feelers via interoffice email to see if anyone's going to Quizno's or Qdoba.

12:00 - Lunch.

12:35 - Because no actual work has yet been attempted, there's no great incentive to get back to your desk. You feel "led" to follow up with a co-worker about a troublesome prayer request she mentioned that morning. You share an encouraging Bible verse, preferably an excerpt from the minor prophets that requires all-out exegesis to make it even passably understandable, much less applicable to your friend's dilemma with the in-laws. You grab the nearest staff member with an M.Div to elucidate finer points you suspect are of "great doctrinal import".

1:00 - Finally arrive back at your desk, and answer emails from off site staff.

3:00 - You sit back, self-satisfied after completing TWO whopping hours of actual work. In victory, you round people up for the 3:15 break. Anybody up for 7s?

3:25 - A VP pops in after a grueling conference call and wants to get in on a round of 7s. Everyone pretends they are in a mad rush to get back to their desks, but the VP eventually "talks everyone round". Everyone gets an extra 10 minutes for break; everyone retains the moral high ground.

3:30 - You meander back to VP's office and ask him a question about, say, predestination. He is only too pleased to indulge you, half sighing/half smiling in a fatherly way, delighting in your inquisitive nature. Predestination segues into pluralism and non-Western Christianity. He tells tales of his missions work, which leads to numerous travel anecdotes.

3:47 - After finally extracting yourself from the conversation with the VP, you pop into your boss's office. You ask her thoughts on one of a number of projects with no clearly defined goals, timelines, or key leads. This of course turns into a bitch fest. The door shuts, and before you know it, you're lightheartedly mocking board members and swapping stories about your B.C. ("Before Christ" - read, "last Saturday") substance abuse shenanigans.

4:18 - You head back to your office and spend the next 12 minutes cleaning your desk.

Obsessive attention to detail regularly brought her into conflict with supervisors, gridlocked interdepartmental relationships, and stalled projects. She was too honest, too much her mother's daughter, really, to refrain from challenging myopic choices or criticizing pedestrian aesthetics.

On a good day she fancied herself a minor prophet, the last neon warning before a precipice of professional mediocrity and organizational stagnation. Most of the time, however, she felt the way eyes feel when they start to glaze over.

Sadly, I really don't really remember our positions. And now that a week or so has passed, I kind of don't care. But I did just read eight of 20 pages of Wikipedia commentary on the subject, so I imagine it's better to post something than not. Also, I promised myself that after I wrote something, anything, I could watch Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Here are few contextless observations:

1. Individual free will can be limited/expanded (infinitely?) based on fixed natural laws, context, enculturation, and other people's choices. Some choices like, "What sexual organs should I have?" are severely limited by genetics, legality, available funds, access to Thai doctors, etc. While others like, "What should I think about?" have far more potential outcomes associated with them. Perhaps a better question than "do humans have free will?" is "to what extent do humans have free will in varying contexts?"

2. In an American context, it seems that those who prize destiny over free will, like those who believe in past lives, always believe that their destiny is positive. No one imagines they were a cockroach in a past life; similarly, none of my free will-discounting friends believe that they are destined for a life of poverty, desperation and loneliness, or a meaningless existence of routine and mediocrity. No, it's all falling in love, life milestones, and changing the world.

3. Eliminating free will is a particularly effective way to disempower. Dominant groups' ability to secure power, wealth, and influence is inversely proportionate to the level at which underclass members conceptualize their own will and choice. Strict socio-political hierarchies - e.g., caste, gender inequity, religion - depend on the lowest, and usually the largest, group being unaware of or forfeiting their ability to exercise free will. Eradicating free will and doing it under the auspices of divine inspiration is especially successful. I imagine the next best thing would be limiting personal freedom under the guise of utilitarian benefit.

4. "The Judeo-Christian God knows everything, so our actions are predetermined." Really?

I can't imagine that this is the case, if only because I think God would self-destruct under the crushing weight of His own infinite boredom.

Supposedly, God knows everything that was, is, and will be. Does He also know everything that could have been and could be? If so, I don't see that His knowledge of infinite possibilities would necessarily predetermine our choices. (I think a finite set of possibilities might work differently, but I'm too lazy to think about that right now. Flan and HP call...)

What if God were only relatively omniscient? That is, He could only make an educated guess about the future, based on the most logically probable outcomes of an infinite set of possibilities. This could explain why God occasionally responds to advocacy and intercession, and why He suffers.

When you are aware of the infinite options for better choices, and the ripple effect of poor choices, it must be excruciatingly painful to watch people consistently choose the latter. And yet, a good choice, selected from a limitless sea of (un)desirables must be amazingly uplifting.