I better have passed that exam.

Last week was the bar exam, and since then, I've been catching up on the things I would have normally been doing instead of studying/taking the bar exam -- namely, showering, Seinfeld re-runs, and reading the NY Times.

Mainly I read the Style section. I haven't read a newspaper for 'news' for at least five years. (Let's also face that gawking at the digital slide shows of other people's homes is more fun than doing what needs to be done at our own homes.)

I also, sometimes, read Modern Love. Often it's too sappy (mother/Alzheimer's/forgetting) or too disconnected from my own experiences (father/child/remembering) to be worth finishing, but sometimes it's good. I don't buyLaura Munson's July 31 column though.

Let me clarify: I get what she's saying, I get what she went through, and I even see why, for her situation, it might have worked. I just don't buy it. To summarize, a husband tells a wife that he doesn't love her anymore, and she refuses to accept it. She doesn't argue or plead; she just ignores him. He proceeds to act like an ass for a few months, which she also ignores. Then by Thanksgiving, he realizes his mistake everything is fine again.

My friend CC took issue with the piece, too -- he felt it wasn't her place to decide what was right for her husband. I agree with him to an extent. My main problem, however, is the neatness of the situation. At each turn following the initial dilemma, the twist always goes to the author/protagonist's favor. She accepts, the kids accept, and the husband, after awhile, capitulates.

For the last three months, I've been reading narratives that describe just the same sort of story but in the opposite direction. The prep for the bar exam involves reading dozens upon dozens of factual situations where every twist goes the wrong way, widening and complicating the dispute. The task is to unravel the mess (all the while being irritated by how stilted and synthetic the whole situation is). More often than not, the method for being successful is to ignore the artificiality of the situation and look for that one seemingly innocuous fact where you can point a finger and say, "That's the key to figuring this out."

You'll note at the bottom of Laura Munson's Modern Love column that her occupation is not a rancher as the column's text suggests but rather as a writer. That's how Munson's recollection reads -- as if a writer carefully chose each piece and then placed them together. The key to understanding Munson's column is not that she said what she did or that acted how she did. Rather, it's that she wrote it how she did.