Why does it bug me when people use the phrase "my muse"? I mean, there are nine of them. Why can't someone have a personal one?

Oh, wait. BECAUSE WE ALL HAVE TO SHARE THOSE SAME NINE. So, you don't get to have one of your OWN. Unless you're selfish. Which I am. So, I choose Melpomene. She's MINE. You can't have her!

What I have been reading this month:
Mary Morris, Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone
Moon Publications, Northern California Handbook
Tony and Evan Worobiec, Ghosts in the Wilderness: Abandoned America
Jerry Kobalenko, The Horizontal Everest
P.D. James, Devices and Desires
S.J. Perleman, short pieces (duh)
P.G. Wodehouse, Life with Jeeves
Edith Wharton, Old New York: False Dawn (The 'Forties)
Elizabeth George, With Noone as Witness

The Wharton has one of the best descriptions of a sweaty fat man I can imagine ever having been written: "Mr. Raycie was a monumental man. His extent in height, width, and thickness was so nearly the same that whichever way he was turned one had an almost equally broad view of him; and evey inch of that mighty circumference was so exquisitely cared for that to a farmer's eye he might have suggested a great agricultural estate of which not an acre is untilled. Even his baldness, which was in proportion to the rest, looked as if it received a special daily polish; and on a hot day his whole person was like some wonderful example of the costliest irrigation. There was so much of him, and he had so many planes, that it was fascinating to watch each runnel of moisture follow its own particular watershed. Even on his large fresh-looking hands the drops divided, trickling in different ways from the ridges of the fingers; and as for his forehead and temples, and the raised cushion of cheek beneath each of his lower lids, every one of these slopes had its own particular stream, its hollow pools and sudden cataracts; and the sight was never unpleasant, because his whole vast bubbling surface was of such a clean and hearty pink, and the exuding moisture so perceptibly flavoured with expensive eau de Cologne and the best French soap."