Manolo says, it is Monday, and you are again back at your desk, although, this morning, when the alarm clock went off and you discovered you were still wearing the same underwear you had put on on Friday morning, you almost didn’t get up.

But, what did you expect on Friday morning, shortly after you donned those panties, when the telephone rang and it was your old college friend, the dangerously dangerous Erika announcing she had just arrived in town for one of her semi-irregular visits?

Ericka?

Ayyyyyyy! Ericka!!! Nooooo!

To say that Ericka is “nothing but trouble”, understates the billowing thunderheads of disaster that trail this beautiful young woman of extravagant prevarications and impulsively erratic behavior.

You know you should avoid her, but like the moth to the white-hot flame of fiery death, you are compelled to be near the sturm-und-drang of Ericka. And so, when the phone rang on Friday morning you tried to pre-limit the damage by agreeing to dinner, “just dinner”, after work.

“And drinks,” answers Ericka. “dinner and drinks. You can’t have dinner without a few cocktails.”

But, naturally, at five o’clock, as you were walking to the bus stop to go home to change for dinner, Ericka appears suddenly in the fire-engine red Ferrari 240 GTO, the car so ridiculously beautiful and so ridiculously costly that you just stand on the sidewalk and stare at it, until she finally reaches across the seat and pushes the passenger door open for you.

“Hey, Popsicle, what’s popping? Get in! Get in!”

And you just slide into the buttery leather seat, not even caring that Ericka has called you by your old hated nickname, earned because you lived on almost nothing but orange Creamsicles, one right after the next, for the first four months you were at college. (Finally, when you went home for the holidays, your parents, together with your dentist, organized the intervention.)

So you get into the car, and there is Ericka, more beautiful than ever, and surrounded by her usual eerie nimbus of crackling electricity and vivacity. And, once more you know, even before she stomps on the accelerator, that you are now stuck on the roller coaster, and that the only way to get off is to be flung from it

By late Sunday night you are so exhausted, that you don’t even want to think about what has happened, so alternately horrible and thrilling had it been.

Indeed, it was the blur: starting with the the best restaurant in town (where the maitre d’ greeted Ericka enthusiastically in French as “Mlle. Yaminichi”, even though, as far as you know, her real last name is Papadopoulo), followed by the most exclusive nightclub, then the charter flight to Cabo, the dawn on the beach, the scorpion bite, the lunchtime pitchers of margaritas with the Cornhusker football players, the third-degree sunburn, the stack of credit cards in the variety of names not to include Papadopoulo, the police station, the largish bribe followed by tequila shooters with the police captain, and finally, “hitching” the ride home with the middle-aged Eastern European toilet-paper mogul named Gheorghe, and his “posse” of grotesques, who insisted on having Kid Rock turned all of the way up on the Gulfstream’s sound system. (The phrase “Cowboy, Baby” is now officially anathema to you.)

And now it is Monday, and you are exhausted, and red, and hungover, your skin is peeling, and you should probably go home right now and fall into bed, but there is that project due on Friday, so there you are, once more left in Ericka’s wake.

Look, here are some sweetly, sensible driving moccasins from Geox to soothe your jingly-jangly nerves.

Ahh, sweet normalcy.