I'm comfortable in a world where the usual tragedies and wars and fights and terrors happen in a place where survival, food, shelter, are not the issue, but the pain and fear and ugliness are exactly the same. If you had no material worries in this world, you'd still feel fucked up and weird and wild the majority of the time, because people fuck each other up regardless. And that means we're all equal, and all equally fucked up on Christmas, which is why nothing Dan pulls is really that awesome to me, but also not that big a deal to me. He appalls me a lot of the time, but I can't get too exercised about it, because he's asking the right questions about the wrong stuff. It's just privileging one kind of pain over another kind of pain, and I cannot abide that: you will never get anywhere in the scale of compassion until you disregard that particular money-related criterion. Pain is the asymptote and we're all trying to angle our way away from it. Like how the real similarity between E and B, or you and me, is Eleanor's ability to turn universal truth into a powerful weapon: "Friends don't steal other friends' husbands." And at this, Roman is sad, but not too sad, because Roman knows about burlesque. Whether it's the world of money you're getting excluded from, or the world of love between two people, as in Eleanor's case, you have two options: get over it and let Serena buy you dinner, or a watch or whatever, or freak. Go for the Silver Fox or let yourself dangle uselessly from your totally gay husband. Either way, your happiness is at stake, and either way, you're the one doing it.