pastland

if you haven't watched through the end of season 4 of Mad Men, skip ahead to the pictures.
if you've never had midnight revelations about the gory anti-glories of love, turn around now, you'll be lost.

so this is how the finale went down:  don draper proposed to a clueless beauty and broke the heart of a sophisticated equal.  at first i thought it was only a sudden, weak plot point (like so many in season 4), and then i saw a pattern.  the women who get close to draper - the few with whom he shares his deepest and darkest - get thrown to the curb in favor of ignorance and denial.  and then i thought about my own experiences with men.  i'm an open-minded person, with unyielding empathy, so i attract men with needs to be acknowledged and accepted for all their secret identities and hidden shames.  what i've learned is that the more secrets they share, the less liable they are to commit.  they prefer their partners to be slightly blind, or to pretend to be.  they want to dump their trash in the street and go home to a sweet-smelling bin.

in the end, i was reminded of one of my series in progress, which has been neglected for far too long - Romantic Dinners & Walks on the Beach.  i think it's time to add some dynamics to this set; some lightness with the dark, a little jam with the pill...