50 Shades Shadier: Chapter 17 part 2

tldnr
Ana gets promoted to Hyde's job. She and Christian meet with Christian's psychiatrist, and then they drive somewhere. 

Guys! I get it! We're all watching the World Cup of soccer, not reading about this book, which is the World Cup of terrible books. I respect that. So please, you know. After the thing is finished and Costa Rica has won it all (Editor's note: we like underdogs!) come back and catch up on Ana and her adventures or whatever. I wrote this? But I didn't like, edit it? So there you go! This is old-skool blogging! No proofreading! So who knows what I said this week! I don't! I'm like EL. I just write it! I don't pay any attention to it!

But at least I got through this terrible chapter! Lucky me! And lucky you! Wait no. None of us are lucky. We're just whatever. Anyway here's this terrible book!

Where were we?

Our story thus far:

50 Shades Shadier: Chapter 17 part 1

How can anyone do anything at all during the World Cup? I obviously don't know, since I haven't done anything at all. Instead I'll just have to leave you with some bits from the beginning of Chapter 17 that I was working on before the World Cup started. Maybe when this is all done I'll be productive again but I'm just being optimistic. I cannot say for certain.

Somebody sent me a super-nice email about this blog which provided me with a considerable amount of momentum. However, even that is starting to wear off, and now I'm just hoping to be able to post something before I fall asleep. #Discipline.

Wait so where were we?

Our story thus far:

50 Shades Shadier: Chapter 16

TLDNR
Ana narrowly escapes being sexually assaulted by her boss and Christian thinks it's all her fault. 

Chapter 15 ended with a cliffhanger, or as near a thing to a cliffhanger as we’re likely to ever see in this series: Ana, alone in the break room at work, is confronted by her skeezy boss who gives every indication that he intends to rape her.  Dramatic stuff!

Only, not really. The central conflict, to the extent that there is a central conflict in this book, is the conflict between Ana’s boring life and her new life with Christian. Although Christian is the new secret owner of Seattle Independent Publishing and thus, Ana’s boss’s boss’s boss or whatever, when Ana got the job at SIP, she did so on her own merit. So however things play out at SIP is unlikely to have much bearing on that central conflict between life with Christian and life without Christian. And because Jack Hyde, Ana’s boss, is separate from the central conflict, I doubt many readers actually read Chapter 15 and then worried that Ana was actually going to be assaulted. EL is a terrible writer, yes. But if Ana were to be raped by her boss in Chapter 16, the entire story would be overwhelmed, right? I mean, how could we be convinced to give a shit about CG’s birthday party or José’s plan to deliver photos in the aftermath of a traumatic assault carried suffered by the narrator? 

Right so EL’s bad, but she’s not that bad. She’s not going to introduce something so big that it derails the boring back-and-forth she’s got going between Ana and CG, so when I start reading Chapter 16, I’m not thinking, “Holy shit! Is this actually going to happen?” Instead, I’m wondering how, exactly, EL is going to keep the thing from happening that seems like it’s about to happen. 

Here’s how, after the jump:

50 Shades Shadier: Chapter 15

TLDNR
Ana's boss gets super creepy. 

Eight chapters left in this book, and then I'm going to take a break from this shit. If it's insane to keep doing the same thing and expect different results, what do you call it when you keep doing the same thing, knowing that it's going to keep being terrible? Masochism?

Whatever. I hate this book and I hate it all the more now that I can't help but wonder what a man like Christian Grey would be like if he didn't have quite so much money, if he couldn't afford quite the lavish lifestyle that's so central to his ability to arrange for women to come and get beaten by him at his convenience. Would he be writing manifestos and posting videos of himself on youtube? Running over people in his Audi? Because let's be real: his wealth keeps CG from looking like an obvious sociopath. It's not fair, but it's true: if your sex dungeon is actually your mom's garage, somehow that looks worse than a dedicated sex dungeon in your billionaire bachelor pad. "Well, he spent so much money on this! He must be safe!" Right? I mean that doesn't actually make any sense but it's also kind of what's happening here, right? It's like the line between "crazy" and "eccentric."

Anyway. I mean we've made it this far. Might as well continue!

Just before I left New Orleans a dear friend and I went to Creole Creamery and took the Tchoupitoulas Challenge. That is, we each tried to eat the entire contents of a bucket filled with eight scoops of ice cream, eight toppings, and something like a half-can of whipped cream. The interior of the place celebrates those ice cream gladiators who've successfully eaten that much ice cream with photos and a plaque. Makes it seem like they really want you to eat all that ice cream! "Please! Gorge yourself on $25 worth of ice cream! Gorge yourself and be immortal!"

But in practice, when you say you're going to do it, the people assembling your ice cream bucket just see you as a future puker they're going to have to deal with, and they hate you the most. They do everything they can to dissuade you from this fool's errand. My friend did it. He ate the entire thing! And thus is a better human being than I am. (Editor's note: He is a superior human being, but not for any reasons related to ice cream.) I failed. I failed so hard and fast that it honestly shocked me. The main problem is this: Creole Creamery makes wonderful ice cream! But when you mix it all together like that, it just tastes like sugary garbage and your body says, "What the fuck are you doing to me?" And then tries to go into a coma so as to keep your brain from making any more mistakes. I'm confident that I could eat two pints--one quart!--of ice cream right now and I'm not even hungry. But you mix it all up like that and it's just goddamn impossible and I had the good sense to quit well before I hit the halfway point because I knew that the people who built my ice cream bucket were right.

I'm well past the halfway point here. I'm staring into this melting bucket of eight-different, poorly-chosen flavors, my body rebelling against my brain, and yet I carry on. Because who knows why.

Wait where were we?