We've been back from Barcelona for about a week. I've noticed that, insofar as I need to go to work almost every day whenever I hang around the United States, Barcelona may be a better option. But Leah, who remains on vacation, is up in the air.

Since deplaning, we've returned to battling the garden gopher (he's winning), had some people over for dinner, given away a bunch of Spanish candy, and returned to my writing group.

Have I mentioned the writing group? Sometimes it's worth mentioning, if only for its dysfunctionality. While I was in Spain, for example, a flurry of emails circulated regarding the fact that some people felt that "we might not be committed enough - or maybe I'm just not talented enough to get you guys to give me feedback." Ugh. Yes, writing group is often substituted for therapy, but does it have to be so blatant?

One of the first weeks I was involved, we all read a story by Patty, a forty-something mousy blonde woman. She introduced herself - new to the group, as I was - as a laid-off "PR professional." Funny, since the story we had read for that meeting concerned a heroine taking the form of a forty-something laid-off PR professional. In the tale, this PR professional takes on some temp work and winds up going to a surreal office that holds only temp workers doing entirely unrelated tasks. They tend to meet in the kitchen. It is there that the PR professional meets a hunky thirtyish laid-off temping something else, and he tries in vain to win her affections. Alas, she is too het up with her internal monologues to notice and he drifts off with a skinny young intern. O, cruel world.

Like all of the stories everyone brings to writing group, it needed work. No problem there. It was when the first suggestion came - always the same: "I'm not sure I believe that character X would really do Y after Z just happened." - that the fun began.

"No," said Patty.

"No what?"

"No, I'm not ready."

"Not ready...for what?"

"To have this...to have my life, my existence, critiqued."

"Well....uh...we were just, you know, the story..."

"Do you know," she finally said, eyes moist, "how few forty-something unhappy people there are as protagonists in modern fiction?"

I thought about buying her the Philip Roth Reader and a collection of Toni Morrison, so she could enjoy some good old-fashioned middle aged angst, but instead I kept quiet. Luckily, the next thing she submitted was a humorous essay about forks, and that kept the conversation a little further from home.

It was with this history in mind that I shuddered when a new member opened the conversation about his "play that isn't meant to be acted - just read," a lighthearted tale about a theater troupe at a state college that puts on a production in which gay cartoon characters - Tinky Winky, Vanity Smurf - read aloud from the book of Isaiah. I won't tell you exactly how a cucumber was used as a prop, but it was. "It's a real look at homosexuality and Catholicism, especially as it relates to the priest scandal. I'm very interested in that because I'm gay and Catholic."

Ah, fantastic.

I didn't mention that I didn't buy the piety of the protagonist.