Conrad, a thick white haired cat, strode majestically across the bare floor of Jean-Michel Pinot’s cramped studio apartment. "You want something to eat?" Jean Michel asked. "Well of course you do, you obese little creature. Eating constitutes one third of your daily schedule." The other two thirds of the day, of course, was filled with lying around somewhere stretching, and sleeping. Sometimes Jean-Michel envied this type of schedule. Most of his friends would, certainly. Theirs were lives of sixty hour work weeks, never having a moment to rest and enjoy the kind of money they were making except for a couple of weeks of vacation every year. How quickly some of them had thrown away their youth in exchange for an escape from their parents home. One prison for another. No matter. Some of Jean-Michel’s older friends had avoided the threat of the so-called real world by extending their education with graduate studies and doctoral programs. These friends, of course, inevitably had fewer financial concerns in the long run, and some of them delighted in being called "Doctor." It was the rare individual who used this as the foundation for their reasoning, thankfully.

Continue reading → Kate : Chapter Two