ME: (Tries to work)

MY BRAIN: Do you think Dagny Taggart ever had PMS?

ME: ?

MY BRAIN: Some of that book looked kind of hormonal is all I’m saying.

ME: No. We are not going there.

MY BRAIN: It’s important.

ME: Whether Dagny Taggart got PMS is not important.

MY BRAIN: Oh yes it is. She’s absolutely perfect! She never has problems, she –

ME: Rand talked about this. It’s a heroic presentation.

MY BRAIN: It’s stupid to espouse a philosophy and then make your examples cardboard cutouts whom no one could possibly emulate.

ME: Perhaps.

MY BRAIN: And a female hero? Ha. Her only overt feminine characteristics involved playing “hide the manifesto” with John Galt and Hank Rearden and Francisco.

ME: (“Hide the manifesto”?)

MY BRAIN: Awake three days in a train going cross country, and does she show up with leg stubble and two chin hairs? Nope, because she’s perfect Dagny Taggart.

ME: I think it’s kind of demeaning that you’re simplifying the meaning of being female down to hormones and leg stubble.

MY BRAIN: Not any more than simplifying it down to submissive sexuality. Rand never acknowledges Dagny Taggart as a female in any other way except with a crying jag.

ME: Oh, come on, she –

MY BRAIN: A whole month in Galt’s Gulch. Smoldering hots for John Galt? Check. A trip into town for some hand-rolled objectivist tampons? No way.

ME: No no no. I’m done. We’re not going there. Go away. I have to work.

MY BRAIN: Fine.

ME: Fine.

ME: (Tries to work)

MY BRAIN: Look, if — at certain times of the month — someone had given her a dollar sign made out of chocolate —

ME: SHUT UP.