In fact, it was pretty impossible to concentrate on anything advertising-related. My mind kept going back to the jogging trail and my naked chicken song and watching Sarah text her brother all night. During one of my lunch breaks, I started free-writing a scene—not set at the hilly trails of Golden Gate Park, but the paved and shady running paths along Katy Trail in uptown Dallas, where I used to go after work with the rest of the yuppie population. The chick in my story wasn’t only sporting last night’s melted makeup and frizzy hair when she ventured out to walk her dog the “hideous morning after,” but she was also wearing last night’s wrinkled cocktail dress—which I found much more funny than her brother’s holey T-shirt. And she actually did trip the jogging couple, whom she didn’t know. But also, she ended up leaving with the guy in the purple baseball cap. My story: my happily ever after. By the end of my lunch hour and the end of the twenty-page short story, I was giggling at the exploits of my girl hero, a Texas version of Bridget Jones.
