The Rosie Project

Because after a while I would stop noticing them. The human brain is wired to focus on differences in its environment – so it can rapidly discern a predator. If I installed pictures or other decorative objects, I would notice them for a few days and then my brain would ignore them. If I want to see art, I go to the gallery. The paintings there are of higher quality, and the total expenditure over time is less than the purchase price of cheap posters.’ In fact, I had not been to an art gallery since the tenth of May, three years before. But this information would weaken my argument and I saw no reason to share it with Rosie and open up other aspects of my personal life to interrogation

Gene has a joke: ‘How can you tell if someone is a vegan? Just wait ten minutes and they’ll tell you.’

“How can you be so organized at one thing and so disorganized at everything else?” I’d asked Rosie, following her installation of the incorrect driver for her printer.
“It’s because I’m concentrating on my thesis, I don’t worry about other stuff. Nobody asks if Freud checked the use-by date on the milk.”
“They didn’t have use-by dates in the early twentieth century.”
It was incredible that two such dissimilar people had become a successful couple.

“The watch,” she said. “I say ‘I need a minute’ and you start timing. Don is not dead.”

Then, in this vanishingly small moment in the history of the universe, she took my hand, and held it all the way to the subway.

“How was it?” asked Rosie, as we walked back to the hotel.
“The best day of my adult life,” I said. Rosie seemed so happy with my response that I decided not to finish the sentence: “excluding the Museum of Natural History.”

“I haven’t really noticed,” I told the most beautiful woman in the world.

“Since when do women discuss anything explicitly?” said Gene.

“Just a friend,” said Rosie.
If she knew how many friends I had, she might have realized what a great compliment she had paid me.

I have heard the word stunning used to describe women, but this was the first time I had actually been stunned by one. It was not just the costume or the jewelry or any individual characteristic of Rosie herself: it was their combined effect.