Babs lays it down.

When they'd first arrived, Greta had run into some friends at the pub with good weed - Greta knew half the city. She and Babs had stepped out into the snow for a toke while Lucy ordered the beer.

"Seriously guys," Babs' eyes were red as she held her hands up near her face, turning them over and repeatedly looking up to see if the other two women were paying attention. They weren't.

"I know just how this is going to end up," Lucy took another gulp of her beer. "I'm going to see him in the hallway on Monday and he'll say 'hey' like shared a table at the cafeteria - where the food is SHIT by the way..."

Lucy was getting loaded. She was doing this because she was slowly filling up with regret. She'd already had an intense loathing for her academic department and all the reprobates in it, now she had gone and fucked the only person who seemed remotely cool and she knew how the rest of the story would go - it always had the same ending. Lucy always thought she should write a movie about her love life - she knew the script by heart now but she had the vague suspicion the film would be co opted and result in a Reality Bites for the millennium kind of feel. Lucy could never put her name on such a project.

Greta nodded as Lucy ranted on, her chin in her hand, stoned as well but not displaying any outward signs of it. The dull light of the pub glinted off her bangles. This was her only night off for the next three weeks and here she was, spending it with her two other single friends in a dingy pub in Cabbage Town. Greta had been in school for the last 15 years. Two undergrads, two masters (one of them an abandoned PHd) and then med school. She was still young despite all that academia; she'd finished high school two years early, and been nothing but blond ambition since. But what, she asked herself, did she have to show for it in the love department? Why couldn't she focus her ambition to find someone half decent? Hey was that guy with hockey hair checking her out? Oh god.

Lucy's rant had subsided into gloomy drinking when she looked up at Babs who was trying to get their attention. "What?"

"I said we need to make over our love lives!" Babs said again, wiping a chunk of hair out of her face. Babs had gone from thinking about her hands to Lucy's Man Hands academic to her own male troubles. Babs hadn't told either woman yet but she was having an affair. It was with a lawyer at the court who had been married for 10 years. The attraction between them had been instant and Babs hadn't known about his wife until it was much too late to turn the attraction off. The sex was fantastic (usually in his office which made it even more fantastic) but afterwards, always afterwards, Babs felt like hot garbage. Not to mention an intense loathing towards him.

"What do you have in mind?" Greta asked.

"Well look at us," Babs said "three over educated successful young women with zero prospects in the love department. I don't mean sex department-" Babs said as Lucy opened her mouth. Lucy closed it again. "I mean Love. You know, like spend the night, read the paper, fight over who is going to clean the toilet love? I mean, what the hell is going on?"

Greta and Lucy exchanged a look - Babs tended to get preachy when she'd had a few too many.

"Obviously we are doing something wrong!"

"Maybe we should take a course?" Greta suggested.

"Or fix our feng shui" Lucy added "I think one of my plants is blocking a mirror or something."

"No no no," Babs said, getting testy. "We have to do something much more drastic!"