Every year on March 17th many of my good friends
get together for a party to which I am not invited.
It’s an annual St. Paddy’s Day dinner and reading
and it is unfortunately, prejudicially, ridiculously, for
men only.

So after a few years of such rubbish a few women
began to get together for our own version of the
same thing. A small dinner, then we each have to read
something. I came to the event unprepared. Luckily
our hostess had a copy of Ulysses on her shelf. So I
read one of my favorite passages from Ulysses, one
that I though especially appropriate to the group
gathered there:

“Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain
of ink, a snail’s bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne
him up in her arms and in her heart. But for her the
race of the world would have trampled him underfoot,
a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak
watery blood drained from her own. Was that then
real? The only true thing in life? ....” (23)