Badly Missing Someone Quotes

Sometimes if you want something badly enough, you can make it happen. If you miss someone so desperately that it wrecks your insides, you say their name over and over until you conjure then. It's called sympathetic magic and you just have to believe in it to make it work.

I wonder if that’s just how it feels to miss someone so bad – like being stabbed in the gut a little bit, each time you think of them.

Henry was learning that time apart has a way of creating distance- more than mountains and time zone separating them. Real distance, the kind that makes you ache and stop wondering. Longing so bad that it begins to hurt to care so much.

Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else -- an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood -- or it may be easier to blame the map you were given -- folded too many times, out-of-date, tiny print -- but mostly, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself. One day I'll tell my daughter a story about a dark time, the dark days before she was born, and how her coming was a ray of light. We got lost for a while, the story will begin, but then we found our way.

How many times did we pass each other before we met? If only I’d known…. I would have searched for you endlessly. If only I’d found you before it was already too late.

I’ve learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights. I’ve learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you’ll miss them when they’re gone from your life. I’ve learned that making a “living” is not the same thing as making a “life.” I’ve learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance. I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back. I’ve learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision. I’ve learned that even when I have pains, I don’t have to be one. I’ve learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back. I’ve learned that I still have a lot to learn. I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

You know what's lame, Pudge? I really care about her. I mean, we were hopeless. Badly matched. But still. I mean, I said I loved her... I mean, it's stupid to miss someone you didn't even get along with. but I don't know, it was nice, you know, having someone you could always fight with.

And yet I want to be human; I want to be thinking of him because then I feel he is alive somewhere, if only in my head.

One: He's Michael. Two: he's scheduled for a meltdown. Three: Lia had been miss Rosy Sunshine since she got downstairs, and Lia doesn't do roses or sunshine unless she's screwing with someone or deeply upset. -Dean Redding

I've had it with both of you." He pulled his own bag higher on one shoulder and turned to me. "You let me know when you decide what the hell you want from me. I love you, and I miss you, and I'll be waiting, whenever you're ready. But don't spy on me again. Ever." I nodded miserably as he twisted to face Sabine. "And you! You come find me when you're ready to be my friend, because that's all I have to offer right now. But as badly as I need someone to talk to, I don't need another complication in my life. And as for the two of you!" He stepped away from us, already walking backward toward the school entrance. "Work it out. Or don't work it out. But leave me the hell out of it.

For you see, when us people who know run into each other that's an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That's a bad thing. It's happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.

I'll teach you later, but for now I just need someone to watch the signs for me. Come on up to the copilot chair." I jerked a thumb in the direction of Chubs. Liam only shook his head. "Are you kidding me? Yesterday he thought a mailbox was a clown." I unbuckle my seat belt with a sigh. As I climbed over Chubs's outstretched legs to the front, I glanced over my shoulder, my eyes going to his too-small glasses. " Is his eyesight really that bad?" "Worse," Liam said. "So, right after we got the hell out of Caledonia, we broke into this house to spend the night, right? I woke up in the middle of the night hearing the most awful noise, like a cow dying or something. I followed the wailing, clutching some kid's baseball bat, thinking I was going to have to beat someone's head in for us to make a clean getaway. then I saw what was sitting at the bottom of a drained pool." "No way," I said. "Way," he confirmed. "Hawkeye had gone out to relieve himself and had somehow missed the giant gaping hole in the ground. Twisted his ankle and couldn't climb out of the deep end. I tried so hard not to laugh, but it was impossible. The mental image was just too damn good.

Dear Camryn, I never wanted it to be this way. I wanted to tell you these things myself, but I was afraid. I was afraid that if I told you out loud that I loved you, that what we had together would die with me. The truth is that I knew in Kansas that you were the one. I’ve loved you since that day when I first looked up into your eyes as you glared down at me from over the top of that bus seat. Maybe I didn’t know it then, but I knew something had happened to me in that moment and I could never let you go. I have never lived the way I lived during my short time with you. For the first time in my life, I’ve felt whole, alive, free. You were the missing piece of my soul, the breath in my lungs, the blood in my veins. I think that if past lives are real then we have been lovers in every single one of them. I’ve known you for a short time, but I feel like I’ve known you forever. I want you to know that even in death I’ll always remember you. I’ll always love you. I wish that things could’ve turned out differently. I thought of you many nights on the road. I stared up at the ceiling in the motels and pictured what our life might be like together if I had lived. I even got all mushy and thought of you in a wedding dress and even with a mini me in your belly. You know, I always heard that sex is great when you’re pregnant. ;-) But I’m sorry that I had to leave you, Camryn. I’m so sorry…I wish the story of Orpheus and Eurydice was real because then you could come to the Underworld and sing me back into your life. I wouldn’t look back. I wouldn’t fuck it up like Orpheus did. I’m so sorry, baby… I want you to promise me that you’ll stay strong and beautiful and sweet and caring. I want you to be happy and find someone who will love you as much as I did. I want you to get married and have babies and live your life. Just remember to always be yourself and don’t be afraid to speak your mind or to dream out loud. I hope you’ll never forget me. One more thing: don’t feel bad for not telling me that you loved me. You didn’t need to say it. I knew all along that you did. Love Always, Andrew Parrish

You don't have to know someone all the way to miss them. Or to feel bad when they're gone" -Leo

There’s something so beautiful about people who are heartbroken; they think about how they’re feeling much more. I think when you’re happy and when you’re in love, you don’t need to think about it, it’s just there. Love is one of those things that is so simple, you don’t need to think about it when it’s good, you only need to think about it when it’s bad, so when music is all that you have and you’re lonely or you’re missing someone and you write a song that says exactly how you feel, there is sort of a gratification you get from that, it almost helps you move on.

How can I miss someone so badly when we're in the same room?

Hear carefully when someone is speaking, if you missed it, too bad

Just bad sex, just poor relationships, just missed opportunities and flowers someone never gave you. Everybody thinks it’s just spoiled romance that breaks your heart. They never consider the bad days and the kitchen scissors and the way rain looks smashed up against a window pane, the way people mill about in train stations, the way it feels when you walk down to the mailbox and always find it empty.

Ean seems like the ‘not here to make friends’ type, but I don’t think anyone could go through this without getting close to someone. It’s too hard. As difficult as it is for me, I know it’s just as bad for you all.” “We definitely get the better end of the deal though,” he said, winking at my reflection. I tilted my head. “I don’t know about that. The more I think about it, the sadder I get about having to send all but one of you away. I’ll miss having you here.” “Have you considered a harem?” he said, deadpan. I bent over in laughter and was rewarded with a pin stabbing my waist. “Ow!” “Sorry! I shouldn’t joke when there are needles around.

We have good reasons to fear saying no. We worry we’ll miss out on a great opportunity. We’re scared of rocking the boat, stirring things up, burning bridges. We can’t bear the thought of disappointing someone we respect and like. None of this makes us a bad person. It’s a natural part of being human. Yet as hard as it can be to say no to someone, failing to do so can cause us to miss out on something far more important.

THE DAY YOU READ THIS On this day, you read something that moved you and made you realise there were no more fears to fear. No tears to cry. No head to hang in shame. That every time you thought you’d offended someone, it was all just in your head and really, they love you with all their heart and nothing will ever change that. That everyone and everything lives on inside you. That that doesn’t make any of it any less real. That soft touches will change you and stay with you longer than hard ones. That being alone means you’re free. That old lovers miss you and new lovers want you and the one you’re with is the one you’re meant to be with. That the tingles running down your arms are angel feathers and they whisper in your ear, constantly, if you choose to hear them. That everything you want to happen, will happen, if you decide you want it enough. That every time you think a sad thought, you can think a happy one instead. That you control that completely. That the people who make you laugh are more beautiful than beautiful people. That you laugh more than you cry. That crying is good for you. That the people you hate wish you would stop and you do too. That your friends are reflections of the best parts of you. That you are more than the sum total of the things you know and how you react to them. That dancing is sometimes more important than listening to the music. That the most embarrassing, awkward moments of your life are only remembered by you and no one else. That no one judges you when you walk into a room and all they really want to know, is if you’re judging them. That what you make and what you do with your time is more important than you’ll ever fathom and should be treated as such. That the difference between a job and art is passion. That neither defines who you are. That talking to strangers is how you make friends. That bad days end but a smile can go around the world. That life contradicts itself, constantly. That that’s why it’s worth living. That the difference between pain and love is time. That love is only as real as you want it to be. That if you feel good, you look good but it doesn’t always work the other way around. That the sun will rise each day and it’s up to you each day if you match it. That nothing matters up until this point. That what you decide now, in this moment, will change the future. Forever. That rain is beautiful. And so are you.

Not listening because you don’t agree with someone, you are self-absorbed, or you think you already know what someone will say makes you a bad listener. But not listening because you don’t have the intellectual or emotional energy to listen at that moment makes you human. At that point, it’s probably best to exit the conversation and circle back later.

Bit by bit, I found myself relaxing into the conversation. Kitty had a natural talent for drawing people out of themselves, and it was easy to fall in with her, to feel comfortable in her presence. As Uncle Victor had once told me long ago, a conversation is like having a catch with someone. A good partner tosses the ball directly into your glove, making it almost impossible for you to miss it; when he is on the receiving end, he catches everything sent his way, even the most errant and incompetent throws. That’s what Kitty did. She kept lobbing the ball straight into the pocket of my glove, and when I threw the ball back to her, she hauled in everything that was even remotely in her area: jumping up to spear balls that soared above her head, diving nimbly to her left or right, charging in to make tumbling, shoestring catches. More than that, her skill was such that she always made me feel that I had made those bad throws on purpose, as if my only object had been to make the game more amusing. She made me seem better than I was, and that strengthened my confidence, which in turn helped to make my throws less difficult for her to handle. In other words, I started talking to her rather than to myself, and the pleasure of it was greater than anything I had experienced in a long time.

You will go through your life thinking there was a day in second grade that you must have missed, when the grown-ups came in and explained, everything important to other kids. they said, 'Look, you're human, you're going to feel isolated and afraid a lot of the time, nad have bad self-esteem, and feel uniquely ruined, but here is the magic phrase that will take this feeling away. It will be like a feather that will lift you out of that fear and self-consciousness every single time, all through your life.' And then they told the cildren who were there that day the magic phrase that everyone else in the world knows about and uses when feeling blue, which only you don't know, because you were home sick the day the grown-ups told the children the way the whole world works. But there was not such a day in school. No one got the instructions. That is the secret of life. Everyone is flailing around, winging it most of the time, trying to find the way out, or through, or up, without a map. This lack of instruction manual is how most people develop compassion, and how they figure out to show up, care, help and serve, as the only way of filling up and being free. Otherwise you gorw up to be someone who needs to dominate and shame others so no one will know that you weren't there the day the instructions were passed out.

All I know is that it was very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen. I could no longer sit in little bars near Grand Central and listen to someone complaining of his wife's inability to cope with the help while he missed another train to Connecticut. I no longer had any interest in hearing about the advances other people had received from their publishers, about plays which were having second-act trouble in Philadelphia, or about people I would like very much if only I would come out and meet them. I had already met them, always.

Anytime I talk about my work informally, I inevitably encounter someone who wants to know why addicts become addicts. They use words like “will” and “choice,” and they end by saying, “Don’t you think there’s more to it than the brain?” They are skeptical of the rhetoric of addiction as disease, something akin to high blood pressure or diabetes, and I get that. What they’re really saying is that they may have partied in high school and college but look at them now. Look how strong-willed they are, how many good choices they’ve made. They want reassurances. They want to believe that they have been loved enough and have raised their children well enough that the things that I research will never, ever touch their own lives. I understand this impulse. I, too, have spent years creating my little moat of good deeds in an attempt to protect the castle of myself. I don’t want to be dismissed the way that Nana was once dismissed. I know that it’s easier to say Their kind does seem to have a taste for drugs, easier to write all addicts off as bad and weak-willed people, than it is to look closely at the nature of their suffering. I do it too, sometimes. I judge. I walk around with my chest puffed out, making sure hat everyone knows about my Harvard and Stanford degrees, as if those things encapsulate me, and when I do so, I give in to the same facile, lazy thinking that characterizes those who think of addicts as horrible people. It’s just that I’m standing on the other side of the moat. What I can say for certain is that there is no case study in the world that could capture the whole animal of my brother, that could show how smart and kind and generous he was, how much he wanted to get better, how much he wanted to live. Forget for a moment what he looked like on paper, and instead see him as he was in all of his glory, in all of his beauty. It’s true that for years before he died, I would look at his face and think, What a pity, what a waste. But the waste was my own, the waste was what I missed out on whenever I looked at him and saw just his addiction.

Now that I am older, I am rounder and softer, which isn’t always a bad thing. I remember fewer names so I try to focus on someone’s eyes instead. Sex is better and I’m better at it. I don’t miss the frustration of youth, the anticipation of love and pain, the paralysis of choices still ahead. The pressure of “What are you going to do?” makes everybody feel like they haven’t done anything yet. Young people can remind us to take chances and be angry and stop our patterns. Old people can remind us to laugh more and get focused and make friends with our patterns. Young and old need to relax in the moment and live where they are. Be Here Now,

Sometimes, someone can enter your life and remind you just how much you’ve been missing out on. Bruno was mine once, and nothing in the world has ever compared to the thrill of belonging to him.

I miss him.  I miss him so bad it hurts.  My chest aches when I think of him.  But I can’t let myself be that girl – the girl that just forgives someone for betraying her, just because she loves him.

The missing comes in waves, some more intense than others. I miss the toothpaste globs he left in the sink, how he’d watch the morning news while I ate breakfast. I miss crying on his shoulder, talking his ears off, being the first person to hear about his good days and the first to embrace him on his bad ones. I miss the small things more than the big things because the small things proved he was mine.

When elderly Cypriot women wish ill on someone, they don't ask for anything blatantly bad to befall them. They don't pray for lightning bolts, unforseen accidents or sudden reversals of fortune. They simply say, May you never be able to forget. May you go to your grave still remembering.

In the days that followed I thought about grief; how nothing and nobody can prepare you for it. People tell you their stories but until you experience it for yourself you can't possibly understand. There's no going around it. Or under or over it. You've got to go through it. It will hit you in waves so enormous that the you are smacked against the shore. It will fabric of your life, so that everything you do is stained by it; every moment, good or bad, is steeped in sadness for a while. Even the nice moments, the achievements and successes, are permeate very tinged with the knowledge that someone something is missing. And the first time that you smile or laugh, you catch yourself, because happiness feels so unfamiliar.

I wondered why my husband couldn't have just been all bad. Why couldn't he have been a cartoon villain, someone I could have fled from and known I had made the right decision? Why must there be nice memories of him sitting beside the ugly ones, both of them oblivious, strangers on a bus?

If I’ve learned one thing in my life it’s that most people act out of fear. When I look back on every bad decision in my life, that’s where it came from. Fear of missing out, fear of losing someone or something, fear of getting my ass kicked, or even fear of getting my heart hurt. Fear is the worst reason to do anything.

The worst part about missing someone is when you forget for a second that they're gone. When you remember, the pain hits you harder than before. Forgetting can feel like a gift, but a lot of the time it's just hurt lying in wait.

Your life is written in indelible ink. There's no going back to erase the past, tweak your mistakes, or fill in missed opportunities. When the moment's over, your fate is sealed. But if look closer, you notice the ink never really dries on any our experiences. They can change their meaning the longer you look at them. Klexos. There are ways of thinking about the past that aren't just nostalgia or regret. A kind of questioning that enriches an experience after the fact. To dwell on the past is to allow fresh context to trickle in over the years, and fill out the picture; to keep the memory alive, and not just as a caricature of itself. So you can look fairly at a painful experience, and call it by its name. Time is the most powerful force in the universe. It can turn a giant into someone utterly human, just trying to make their way through. Or tell you how you really felt about someone, even if you couldn't at the time. It can put your childhood dreams in context with adult burdens or turn a universal consensus into an embarrassing fad. It can expose cracks in a relationship that once seemed perfect. Or keep a friendship going by thoughts alone, even if you'll never see them again. It can flip your greatest shame into the source of your greatest power, or turn a jolt of pride into something petty, done for the wrong reasons, or make what felt like the end of the world look like a natural part of life. The past is still mostly a blank page, so we may be doomed to repeat it. But it's still worth looking into if it brings you closer to the truth. Maybe it's not so bad to dwell in the past, and muddle in the memories, to stem the simplification of time, and put some craft back into it. Maybe we should think of memory itself as an art form, in which the real work begins as soon as the paint hits the canvas. And remember that a work of art is never finished, only abandoned.

Then someone else appeared from the crowd, and Annabeth's vision tunneled. Percy smiled at her-that sarcastic, troublemaker's smile that had annoyed her for years but eventually had become endearing. His sea-green eyes were as gorgeous as she remembered. His dark hair was swept to one side, like he'd just come from a walk on the beach. He looked even better than he had six months ago-tanner and taller, leaner and more muscular. Annabeth was to stunned to move. She felt that if she got any closer to him, all the molecules in her body might combust. She'd secretly had a crush on him sonar they were twelve years old. Last summer, she'd fallen for him hard. They'd been a happy couple together for four months-and then he'd disappeared. During their separation, something had happened to Annabeth's feelings. They'd grown painfully intense-like she'd been forced to withdraw from a life-saving medication. Now she wasn't sure which was more excruciating-living with that horrible absence, or being with him again... Annabeth didn't mean to, but she surged forward. Percy rushed toward her at the same time. The crowds tensed. Some reach d for swords that weren't there. Percy threw his arms around her. They kissed, and for a moment nothing else mattered. An asteroid could have hit the planet and wiped out all life, Annabeth wouldn't have cared. Percy smelled of ocean air. His lips were salty. Seaweed Brain, she thought giddily. Percy pulled away and studied her face. "Gods, I never thought-" Annabeth grabbed his wrist and flipped him over her shoulder. He slammed into the stone pavement. Romans cried out. Some surged forward, but Reyna shouted, "Hold! Stand down!" Annabeth put her knee on Percy's chest. She pushed her forearm against his throat. She didn't care what the Romans thought. A white-hot lump of anger expanded in her chest-a tumor of worry and bitterness that she'd been carrying around since last autumn. "Of you ever leave me again," she said, her eyes stinging, "I swear to all the gods-" Percy had the nerve to laugh. Suddenly the lump of heated emotions melted inside Annabeth. "Consider me warned," Percy said. "I missed you, too." Annabeth rose and helped him to his feet. She wanted to kiss him again SO badly, but she managed to restrain herself. Jason cleared his throat. "So, yeah…It's good to be back…" "And this is Annabeth," Jason said. "Uh, normally she doesn't judo-flip people.

No matter how good or bad you have it, wake up each day thankful for your life. Someone somewhere else is desperately fighting for theirs. Instead of thinking about what you’re missing, try thinking about what you have that everyone else is missing.

Ruby and Aaron are both crazy patient; they’re good parents.” “I could be a good dad,” Ivan whispered, still feeding Jess. I could have told him he’d be good at anything he wanted to be good at, but nah. “Do you want to have kids?” he asked me out of the blue. I handed Benny another block. “A long time from now, maybe.” “A long time… like how long?” That had me glancing at Ivan over my shoulder. He had his entire attention on Jessie, and I was pretty sure he was smiling down at her. Huh. “My early thirties, maybe? I don’t know. I might be okay with not having any either. I haven’t really thought about it much, except for knowing I don’t want to have them any time soon, you know what I mean?” “Because of figure skating?” “Why else? I barely have enough time now. I couldn’t imagine trying to train and have kids. My baby daddy would have to be a rich, stay-at-home dad for that to work.” Ivan wrinkled his nose at my niece. “There are at least ten skaters I know with kids.” I rolled my eyes and poked Benny in the side when he held out his little hand for another block. That got me a toothy grin. “I’m not saying it’s impossible. I just wouldn’t want to do it any time soon. I don’t want to half-ass or regret it. If they ever exist, I’d want them to be my priority. I wouldn’t want them to think they were second best.” Because I knew what that felt like. And I’d already screwed up enough with making grown adults I loved think they weren’t important. If I was going to do something, I wanted to do my best and give it everything. All he said was, “Hmm.” A thought came into my head and made my stomach churn. “Why? Are you planning on having kids any time soon?” “I wasn’t,” he answered immediately. “I like this baby though, and that one. Maybe I need to think about it.” I frowned, the feeling in my stomach getting more intense. He kept blabbing. “I could start training my kids really young…. I could coach them. Hmm.” It was my turn to wrinkle my nose. “Three hours with two kids and now you want them?” Ivan glanced down at me with a smirk. “With the right person. I’m not going to have them with just anybody and dilute my blood.” I rolled my eyes at this idiot, still ignoring that weird feeling in my belly that I wasn’t going to acknowledge now or ever. “God forbid, you have kids with someone that’s not perfect. Dumbass.” “Right?” He snorted, looking down at the baby before glancing back at me with a smile I wasn’t a fan of. “They might come out short, with mean, squinty, little eyes, a big mouth, heavy bones, and a bad attitude.” I blinked. “I hope you get abducted by aliens.” Ivan laughed, and the sound of it made me smile. “You would miss me.” All I said, while shrugging was, “Meh. I know I’d get to see you again someday—” He smiled. “—in hell.” That wiped the look right off his face. “I’m a good person. People like me.” “Because they don’t know you. If they did, somebody would have kicked your ass already.” “They’d try,” he countered, and I couldn’t help but laugh. There was something wrong with us. And I didn’t hate it. Not even a little bit.

I always believed that first love would stay in my heart the longest, that it would be reminded through every man I met, through every song and every place I had been too, it hurt like hell to experience my heart crashing into a thousand pieces amongst the floor & the feeling of missing them so bad that my body ached that I spent a lot of time alone wondering if I deserved to be loved the way I love and then I met you & you gently reminded me that I was worthy and in your actions taught me to give love one more chance. So I did and as vulnerable and uncertain it all is, im glad my heart has met someone it wants to open for again.

Is his eyesight really that bad?" "Worse," Liam said. "So right after we got the hell out of Caledonia, we broke into this house to spend, right? I woke up in the middle of the night hearing the most awful noise, like a cow dying or something. I followed the wailing, clutching some kid's baseball bat, thinking I was going to have to bad someone's head in for us to make a clean getaway. Then I saw what was sitting at the bottom of the drained pool." "No way," I said. "Way," he confirmed. "Hawkeye had gone out to relieve himself and had somehow missed the giant gaping hole in the ground. Twisted his ankle and couldn't climb out of the deep end.

You know, sleeping outdoors isn’t all bad. You get to stare up at the stars and cool breezes ruffle your fur after a hot day. The grass smells sweet and,” he made eye contact with me, “so does your hair.” I blushed and grumbled, “Well, I’m glad someone enjoyed it.” He smiled smugly and said, “I did.” I had a quick flash of him as a man snuggled up next to me in the forest, imagined him resting his head on my lap while I stroked his hair, and decided to focus on the matter at hand. “Well, listen, Ren, you’re changing the subject. I don’t appreciate the way you manipulated me into being here. Mr. Kadam should’ve told me at the circus.” He shook his head. “We didn’t think you’d believe his story. He made up the trip to the tiger reserve to get you to India. We figured once you were here, I could change into a man and clarify everything.” I admitted, “You’re probably right. If you had changed to a man there, I don’t think I would have come” “Why did you come?” “I wanted to spend more time with…you. You know, the tiger. I would have missed him. I mean you.” I blushed. He grinned lopsidedly. “I would have missed you too.” I wrung the hem of my shirt between my hands. Misreading my thoughts, he said, “Kelsey. I’m truly sorry for the deception. If there’d been any other way-“ I looked up. He hung his head in a way that reminded me of the tiger. The frustration and awkwardness I felt about him dissipated. My instincts told me that I should believe him and help him. The strong emotional connection that drew me to the tiger tugged at my heart even more powerfully with the man. I felt pity for him and his situation. Softly, I asked, “When will you change into a tiger?” “Soon.” “Does it hurt?” “Not as much as it used to.” “Do you understand me when you are a tiger? Can I still speak to you?” “Yes, I’ll still be able to hear and understand you.” I took a deep breath. “Okay. I’ll stay here with you until the shaman comes back. I still have a lot of questions for you though.” “I know. I’ll try to answer them as best I can, but you’ll have to save them for tomorrow when I’ll be able to speak with you again. We can stay here for the night. The shaman should be back around dusk.” “Ren?” “Yes?” “The jungle frightens me, and this situation frightens me.” He let go of the apron string and looked into my eyes. “I know.” “Ren?” “Yes?” “Don’t…leave me, okay?” His face softened into a tender expression, and his mouth turned up in a sincere smile. “Asambhava. I won’t.” I felt myself responding to his smile with one of my own when a shadow fell across his face. He clenched his fists and tightened his jaw. I saw a tremor pass through his body, and the chair fell forward as he collapsed to the ground on his hands and knees. I stood to reach out to him and was amazed to see his body morph back into the tiger form I knew so well. Ren the tiger shook himself, then approached my outstretched hand and rubbed his head against it.

The idea of coming back to you was something like giving money to a beggar: a person feels bad himself if he gives money to a beggar or if he doesn’t do that

Their missed connection was the rare kind of adolescent regret that, with time and maturity, became more rather than less painful. She was now, in his mind, far more than a person. She had to come to represent every decision he hadn't made, every opportunity forgone. She was regret personified. One can get over bad decisions, lovers lost. But it is impossible to get over someone you never really had.

Left unchecked, discouragement will become your eyes and ears, determining what you see and hear and how you see and hear it. Unchecked, it will become the master of your emotions and the ruler of your choices and actions. Unchecked, discouragement will rob you of your hope and motivation. It will steal your reason for doing good things. It will rob you of your ability to trust. It will make you closed, self-protective, and easily overwhelmed. Discouragement will sap you of your strength and courage. It will cause you to see negative where nothing is negative and miss the positive that is right in front of you. If given room, discouragement will tell you lies that have the power to destroy your life. Discouragement is natural for someone who is suffering, but it makes a very, very bad master.

Mother, stop it!” I shout. She takes a step back as if I’d physically slapped her. “Not all guys that look a certain way or dress a certain way or act a certain way are the same. You’ve tried all my life to drive me toward the kind of guy you wanted me to be with. You made me feel as though there was something wrong with me for liking anyone who rode a motorcycle or drove a muscle car or played in a band. But there was never anything wrong with them, Mom. They just weren’t for me. I wouldn’t have wanted to end up with any of them. Not now. But you don’t see that. You don’t see that now and you didn’t see that then. You could never be like a normal mother, one who holds her daughter when she cries and tells her that one day she’ll find Mr. Right, that one day love will be worth it. That was just beyond you. You had to do your best, at every possible opportunity, to convince me that the only way I’d ever be happy would be with a guy like Lyle, one who is so focused on his job and his money that he doesn’t have time for love. But Mom, if falling in love means risking getting hurt, then I’m okay with that. Because finally, for once, I’ve found someone worth the risk. I wouldn’t have missed out on Cash for the world, Mom. Did it ever occur to you that it took all those heartbreaks, all those tears, all those failed attempts to be able to recognize something real when I found it? Can’t you just be happy for me and leave us in peace?

I believe this movement will prevail. I don’t mean it will defeat, conquer, or create harm to someone else. Quite the opposite. I don’t tender the claim in an oracular sense. I mean that the thinking that informs the movement’s goals will reign. It will soon suffuse most institutions, but before then, it will change a sufficient number of people so as to begin the reversal of centuries of frenzied self-destructive behavior. Some say it is too late, but people never change when they are comfortable. Helen Keller threw aside the gnawing fears of chronic bad news when she declared, “I rejoice to live in such a splendidly disturbing time!” In such a time, history is suspended and thus unfinished. It will be the stroke of midnight for the rest of our lives. My hopefulness about the resilience of human nature is matched by the gravity of our environmental and social condition. If we squander all our attention on what is wrong, we will miss the prize: In the chaos engulfing the world, a hopeful future resides because the past is disintegrating before us. If that is difficult to believe, take a winter off and calculate what it requires to create a single springtime. It’s not too late for the world’s largest institutions and corporations to join in saving the planet, but cooperation must be on the planet’s terms. The “Help Wanted” signs are everywhere. All people and institutions including commerce, governments, schools, churches and cities, need to learn from life and reimagine the world from the bottom up, based on the first principles if justice and ecology. Ecological restoration is extraordinarily simple: You remove whatever prevents the system from healing itself. Social restoration is no different. We have the heart, knowledge, money and sense to optimize out social and ecological fabric. It is time for all that is harmful to leave. One million escorts are here to transform the nightmares of empire and the disgrace of war on people and place. We are the transgressors and we are the forgivers. “We” means all of us, everyone. There can be no green movement unless there is also a black, brown and copper movement. What is more harmful resides within is, the accumulated wounds of the past, the sorrow, shame, deceit, and ignominy shared by every culture, passed down to every person, as surely as DNA, as history of violence and greed. There is not question that the environmental movement is most critical to our survival. Our house is literally burning, and it is only logical that environmentalists expect the social justice movement to get on the environmental bus. But is actually the other way around; the only way we are going to put out this fire is to get on the social justice bus and heal our wounds, because in the end, there is only one bus. Armed with that growing realization, we can address all that is harmful externally. What will guide us is a living intelligence that creates miracles every second, carried forth by a movement with no name.

In the days that followed, I thought about grief. How nothing and nobody can prepare you for it. People tell you their stories, but until you experience it for yourself you cannot possibly understand. There’s no going around it, or under, or over it - you’ve got to go through it. It will hit you in waves so enormous that you are smacked against the shore. It will permeate the very fabric of your life so that everything you do is stained by it. Every moment, good or bad, is steeped in sadness for a while. Even the nice moments - the achievements and successes - are tinged with the knowledge that someone or something is missing.

When someone listens to you it can feel so much like love, some people may not know the difference. Part of being a good listener is knowing your limits and setting boundaries. Not listening because you don’t agree with someone, you’re self absorbed, or you think you know already what somebody will say makes you a bad listener. But not listening because you don’t have the intellectual or emotional energy to listen at that moment makes you human. At that point it’s probably best to exit the conversation and circle back later. If you half-listen to someone or listen as if you are skimming through a book, the other person will pick up on it.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder; I spun around to see Asher and ten other Vamps standing behind him. All of the Vamps were dressed in military fatigue. Asher smiled and looked down at my bare legs, he shook his head. “Why Kitten, what did I miss?” I dropped my head. “You wouldn’t happen to have something for my legs?” Besides, I thought, only having a shirt on sucks and was a little chilly. Asher chuckled, a deep sound that washed over my body sending shivers up and down my spine. His laugh spoke of bad things he wanted to do to me. I hated it with a passion; I didn't want anything intimate with Asher. Never, ever again. ~Asher & Charlie~

You can eliminate depression without making someone happy. You can cure anxiety without teaching someone optimism. You can return someone to work without improving their job performance. If all you strive for is diminishing the bad, you’ll only attain the average and you’ll miss out entirely on the opportunity to exceed the average.

When you’re a kid, you don’t think about big stuff that could change your life. You think about small things that might terrify you –like a bad report card or missing a goal in front of all your friends or your friends no longer wanting to play with you. Because that's the biggest stuff you know. The biggest disappointments are all tied to this small little universe of yours, because bigger things cannot fit into a small universe. If you wanted bigger things in there you needed to have more room –or make more room. Perhaps you thought about your parents or your pets dying, which was rare. But all you knew was you would be terribly sad and lonely. And on those occasions when people or pets actually died, someone usually came along and distracted you from feeling too much of your actual feelings. Grownups did that –they never left you alone to feel alone or think alone too much. They tended to think you are too small to know how to think and feel in big heaps, so they took parts of your heap onto themselves. To help – but in the long run –it doesn’t help at all. Because if you do not see, or feel or think, or taste the bitter things in life, you don’t know they exist. You have not seen enough of the world to know how terrible it could be. And unfortunately for Sam, this inability to process change persisted into adulthood.

She was thinking a million things, some of which had plagued her even before she'd found out: What if the state floods; we reelect that terrible man; if I'm bad at it; I do it and then I decide I don't want to do it; if I don't do it and miss it; what if someone shoots me in the grocery store, the movie theater, my own home; what about the revisionist histories taught in schools; what if I'm not self-sacrificing enough; if I'm too self-sacrificing; if me and Liam get divorced, shit happens; what if the kid hates me; if I'm cruel; if I really really love it and lose it; if none of this can be sustained, not our love or our planet? What if, in the end, we just dye the ocean and wish it well? For better or worse, she didn't know if it was responsible to bring new life into this world, but she couldn't spend all her time agonizing. She had to keep moving, keep breathing, or else she'd cease to exist, so she gave Pia the simplest of answers, what it could all boil down to: 'Honestly? What will this baby do to me?

I think most of us moms think it’s wrong to do nice things for ourselves, thinking we’re someone who should always be humble. Maybe God wants to bless our socks off and let us know it’s more than okay to get a manicure and a massage in the same year! We need to stop feeling bad when God wants us to feel cherished, pampered, and special. If a shiny purse or a pair of high heel shoes puts a spring in your step, work those heels girl! God created you to rock it! You still got it and show your kids and family that “Mommy’s Still the Hot Chick”! Maybe it will inspire your husband to get out of his sweat pants from 1987 and take you out in public to a restaurant that has menus you can’t color on!

Not listening because you don't agree with someone, you are self-absorbed, or you think you already know what someone will say makes you a bad listener. But not listening because you don't have the intellectual or emotional energy to listen at that moment makes you human. At that point, it's probably best to exit the conversation and circle back later.

When someone asks me what kind of Christian I am,” says Brent Bill, a Quaker writer, “I say I’m a bad one.” He goes on to say, “I’ve got the belief part down pretty well, I think. It’s in the practice of my belief in everyday life where I often miss the mark.” Finally, he states, “I see myself as a pilgrim—traveling the faith path to the destination of being a good Christian—and into the eternal presence of God.

That week—the week of the rain—was one of my dad’s bad times. So I went out to the site a lot. One day, I was just picking around one of the foundations. It was all cinder block and pits; hardly any of the building had actually gotten done. And then I saw this little box. A shoe box.” She sucks in a breath, and even in the dark I see her tense. The rest of her story comes out in a rush: “Someone must have left it there, wedged in the space underneath a part of the foundation. Except the rain was so bad it had caused a miniature mudslide. The box had rolled out into the open. I don’t know why I decided to look inside. It was filthy. I thought I might find a pair of shoes, maybe some jewelry.” I know, now, where the story is going. I am walking toward the muddy box alongside her; I am lifting the water-warped cover. The horror and disgust is a mud too: It is rising, black and choking, inside of me. Raven’s voice drops to a whisper. “She was wrapped in a blanket. A blue blanket with yellow lambs on it. She wasn’t breathing. I—I thought she was dead. She was … she was blue. Her skin, her nails, her lips, her fingers. Her fingers were so small.” The mud is in my throat. I can’t breathe. “I don’t know what made me try to revive her. I think I must have gone a little crazy. I was working as a junior lifeguard that summer, so I’d been certified in CPR. I’d never had to do it, though. And she was so tiny—probably a week, maybe two weeks old. But it worked. I’ll never forget how I felt when she took a breath, and all that color came rushing into her skin. It was like the whole world had split open. And everything I’d felt was missing—all that feeling and color—all of it came to me with her first breath. I called her Blue so I would always remember that moment, and so I would never regret.

Kev was out running an errand, and because asking one of his drunken regulars to chaperone me seemed like a bad idea, I went into the nearest shop to ask someone who was at least gainfully employed. The door read FISHMONGER. I pushed it open to find myself cowering before a bearded giant in a blood-soaked apron. He left off decapitating fish to glare at me, dripping cleaver in hand, and I vowed never again to discriminate against the intoxicated. “What

University?" Mr Wormwood shouted, bouncing up in his chair. "Who wants to go to university, for heaven's sake! All they learn there is bad habits!" "That's not true," Miss Honey said. "If you had a heart attack this minute and had to call a doctor, that doctor would be a university graduate. If you got sued for selling someone a rotten second-hand car, you'd have to get a lawyer and he'd be a university graduate, too. Do not despise clever people, Mr Wormwood.

Emma, I came out here to tell you that you don't have to mate with Grom." I raise a brow. "Uh, I was never going to mate with Grom." "What I mean is, Grom is mating with someone else who has the gift of Poseidon. Which means that-" "I don't have to mate with Grom," I finish for him. "That's what I just said." "I mean, I don't have to feel like I've let the entire species of Syrena go extinct because I won't mate with Grom." He grins. "Exactly." "But that doesn't change what I am-a Half-Breed. You still can't be with me, can you?" He rubs his thumb over my bottom lip, thoughtful. "The law forbids it right now. But I think if we give it time, we could get it overturned somehow. And I'm not going anywhere until I do." He turns us toward the SUV, stopping to retrieve my heels from the side of the road. He helps me in the passenger seat of the Escalade, then hands me my shoes. "Thank you," I tell him as he walks around to the driver's side. "It's a little late to blush," he says, strapping in. "I don't think I'll ever stop blushing." "I really hope not," he says, shutting his door. Taking my face into both hands, he pulls me to him again. His lips brush mine, but I want more. Sensing my intention, he puts his hand over mine and the seat belt I'm trying to unsnap. "Emma," he says against my lips. "I've missed you so much. But we can't. Not yet." I'm not trying to do that, I just want to get in a better position to accept his lips. Telling him so would just embarrass us both. But he says yet. What does that mean? That he wants to wait until he can get the law overturned? Or will he give it time, and if it doesn't work out, break Syrena law to be with me? For some reason, I don't want the answer bad enough to ask. Images of "that girl" flare up in my head. I don't want Galen to break his laws-it's a big part of why I love him so much. His loyalty to his people, his commitment to them. It's the kind of devotion almost nonexistent among humans. But I don't want to be "that girl" either. Syrena or not, I want to go to college. I want to experience the world above and below sea level. But it's not like any decisions need to be made right now, do they? I mean, life-changing decisions take time to make. Time and meditation. And physical space between my lips and his. I pull back. "Right. Sorry." He seizes a few tendrils of my hair and runs them along his face, grinning. "Not as sorry as I am. You'll have to help me keep my hands off you." I laugh, even as a charge runs through my veins. "Yeah. No." He laughs too and turns to start the car, then stops. Letting go of the keys, he says, "So. About breaking up." "Let me think about it some more," I tell him on the brink of giggling at his expression. "I'll see what I can do to help you make up your mind." We stay parked for another fifteen minutes. But at least we're not broken up anymore.

Let me paint a picture for you: The full moon was bulbous and yellow like the blind and rotted eye of a witch that peered down from the murky sky with bad intentions, and a million little stars shone down on the sleepy Southern town of Evelyn. The breeze was gentle and cool, carrying on it the scent of flowers and wet earth from the recent rain spell. The only thing missing was the children singing hymns, and I'm sure it would have been enough to make someone happy to be alive.

Those who sat with him saw his eyes go moist when they spoke about something horrible, or crinkle in delight when they told him a really bad joke. He was always ready to openly display the emotion so often missing from my baby boomer generation. We are great at small talk: 'What do you do?' 'Where do you live?' But really listening to someone -- without trying to sell them something, pick them up, recruit them, or get some kind of status in return -- how often do we get this anymore?

But why shouldn't I thank someone for doing me a service?" he heard Lillian ask with genuine perplexity. "It's polite to say thank you, isn't it?" "You should no more thank a servant than you would think a horse for allowing you to ride it, or a table for bearing the dishes you place upon it." "Well, we're not discussing animals or inanimate objects, are we? A footman is a person." "No," the countess said coldly. "A footman is a servant." "And a servant is a person," Lillian said stubbornly. The elderly woman sighed in exasperation. "Whatever your view of a footman is, you must not thank him at dinner. Servants neither expect nor desire such condescension, and if you insist on putting them in the awkward position of having to respond to your remarks, they will think badly of you... as will everyone else. Do not insult me with that vapid stare, Miss Bowman! You come from a family of means- surely you employed servants at your New York residence!" "Yes," Lillian acknowledged pertly, "but we talked to ours.

He shut the door, and stood looking across the room at her. 'Cressy, what did you mean when you told that harridan that your affections were engaged?' The colour deepened a little in her cheeks, but she replied lightly: 'Well, she talked so much like someone in a bad play that I became carried away myself! Besides, I had to say something to convince her! I could see she didn't quite believe me when I said I wasn't going to marry your brother.' He let his breath go in a long sigh, and walked forward, setting his hands on her shoulders, and saying: 'You don't know how much I have wanted to tell you the truth! Cressy, my dear one, forgive me! I've treated you abominably, and I love you so much!' Miss Stavely, who had developed an interest in the top button of his coat, looked shyly up at this. 'Do you, Kit?' she asked. 'Truly?' Mr Fancot, preferring actions to words, said nothing whatsoever in answer to this, but took her in his arms and kissed her. Miss Stavely, who had previously thought him unfailingly gentle and courteous, perceived, in the light of this novel experience, that she had been mistaken: there was nothing gentle about Mr Fancot's crushing embrace; and his behaviour in paying no heed at all to her faint protest could only be described as extremely uncivil. She was wholly unused to such treatment, and she had a strong suspicion that her grandmother would condemn her conduct in submitting to it, but as Mr Fancot seemed to be dead to all sense and propriety it was clearly useless to argue with him.

Kvothe?” Auri said softly. I clenched my teeth against the sobbing and lay still as I could, hoping she would think I was asleep and leave. “Kvothe?” she called again. “I brought you—” There was a moment of silence, then she said, “Oh.” I heard a soft sound behind me. The moonlight showed her tiny shadow on the wall as she climbed through the window. I felt the bed move as she settled onto it. A small, cool hand brushed the side of my face. “It’s okay,” she said quietly. “Come here.” I began to cry quietly, and she gently uncurled the tight knot of me until my head lay in her lap. She murmured, brushing my hair away from my forehead, her hands cool against my hot face. “I know,” she said sadly. “It’s bad sometimes, isn’t it?” She stroked my hair gently, and it only made me cry harder. I could not remember the last time someone had touched me in a loving way. “I know,” she said. “You have a stone in your heart, and some days it’s so heavy there is nothing to be done. But you don’t have to be alone for it. You should have come to me. I understand.” My body clenched and suddenly the taste of plum filled my mouth again. “I miss her,” I said before I realized I was speaking. Then I bit it off before I could say anything else. I clenched my teeth and shook my head furiously, like a horse fighting its reins. “You can say it,” Auri said gently. I shook again, tasted plum, and suddenly the words were pouring out of me. “She said I sang before I spoke. She said when I was just a baby she had the habit of humming when she held me. Nothing like a song. Just a descending third. Just a soothing sound. Then one day she was walking me around the camp, and she heard me echo it back to her. Two octaves higher. A tiny piping third. She said it was my first song. We sang it back and forth to each other. For years.” I choked and clenched my teeth. “You can say it,” Auri said softly. “It’s okay if you say it.” “I’m never going to see her again,” I choked out. Then I began to cry in earnest. “It’s okay,” Auri said softly. “I’m here. You’re safe.

Colby’s resourceful, I’ll give him that.” “You used to be good friends.” “We were, until he started hanging around Cecily,” came the short reply. “I’m not as angry at him as I was. But it seems that he has to have a woman to prop him up.” “Not necessarily,” Matt replied. “Sometimes a good woman can save a bad man. It’s an old saying, but fairly true from time to time. Colby was headed straight to hell until Cecily put him on the right track. It’s gratitude, but I don’t think he can see that just yet. He’s in between mourning his ex-wife and finding someone to replace her.” He leaned back again. “I feel sorry for him. He’s basically a one-woman man, but he lost the woman.” Tate packed back to the wing chair and sat down on the edge. “He’s not getting Cecily. She’s mine, even if she doesn’t want to admit it.” Matt stared at him. “Don’t you know anything about women in love?” “Not a lot,” the younger man confessed. “I’ve spent the better part of my life avoiding them.” “Especially Cecily,” Matt agreed. “She’s been like a shadow. You didn’t miss her until you couldn’t see her behind you anymore.” “She’s grown away from me,” Tate said. “I don’t know how to close the gap. I know she still feels something for me, but she wouldn’t stay and fight for me.” He lifted his gaze to Matt’s hard face. “She’s carrying my child. I want both of them, regardless of the adjustments I have to make. Cecily’s the only woman I’ve ever truly wanted.” Matt spread his hands helplessly. “This is one mess I can’t help you sort out,” he said at last. “If Cecily loves you, she’ll give in sooner or later. If it were me, I’d go find her and tell her how I really felt. I imagine she’ll listen.” Tate stared at his shoes. He couldn’t find the right words to express what he felt. “Tate,” his father said gently, “you’ve had a lot to get used to lately. Give it time. Don’t rush things. I’ve found that life sorts itself out, given the opportunity.” Tate’s dark eyes lifted. “Maybe it does.” He searched the other man’s quiet gaze. “It’s not as bad as I thought it was, having a foot in two worlds. I’m getting used to it.” “You still have a unique heritage,” Matt pointed out. “Not many men can claim Berber revolutionaries and Lakota warriors as relatives.

The truly awful thing about depression is that comfort is impossible because comfort is haughtily dismissed. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. And yet as you watch someone churning away at the bottom of their pit, never missing an opportunity to try and drag you down with them, you start to want to kick their arse. You want to scream “Do something, anything, but stop whining,” and cut off all food until they go out and earn it. But this you must never never do. Even thinking of it is bad. Somebody who is depressed isn’t selfish, or self-obsessed or lazy or arrogant or a drunk, they’re ill. They are.

Drawing near the family parlor, Marcus paused beside the half-open door as he heard his mother lecturing the Bowman sisters. Her complaint appeared to hinge upon the sisters’ habit of speaking to the footmen who served them at the dinner table. “But why shouldn’t I thank someone for doing me a service?” he heard Lillian ask with genuine perplexity. “It’s polite to say thank you, isn’t it?” “You should no more thank a servant than you would thank a horse for allowing you to ride it, or a table for bearing the dishes you place upon it.” “Well, we’re not discussing animals or inanimate objects, are we? A footman is a person.” “No,” the countess said coldly. “A footman is a servant.” “And a servant is a person,” Lillian said stubbornly. The elderly woman replied in exasperation. “Whatever your view of a footman is, you must not thank him at dinner. Servants neither expect nor desire such condescension, and if you insist on putting them in the awkward position of having to respond to your remarks, they will think badly of you…as will everyone else. Do not insult me with that vapid stare, Miss Bowman! You come from a family of means—surely you employed servants at your New York residence!” “Yes,” Lillian acknowledged pertly, “but we talked to ours.

Why is it that when you’ve lost someone your thoughts go back to the beginning? The first shy meeting of eyes. The first tentative kiss. The happy times together. He’d heard people say that the mind plays tricks, remembering good over bad or sad. Maybe it was nature’s way of keeping a sane person from going crazy with guilt. Not him. From sunup to sundown he remembered his mistakes. All of them. In vivid Technicolor. On a good day, it felt like a fist shoved down his throat and into his stomach to turn him inside-out like a sock. Nothing looks normal, nothing’s the same, until it can be turned right-side-out again.” ~ Dylan Clark

Diana” was the first thing out of her mouth. “I’m dying,” the too familiar voice on the other end moaned. I snorted, locking the front door behind me as I held the phone up to my face with my shoulder. “You’re pregnant. You’re not dying.” “But it feels like I am,” the person who rarely ever complained whined. We’d been best friends our entire lives, and I could only count on one hand the number of times I’d heard her grumble about something that wasn’t her family. I’d had the title of being the whiner in our epic love affair that had survived more shit than I was willing to remember right then. I held up a finger when Louie tipped his head toward the kitchen as if asking if I was going to get started on dinner or not. “Well, nobody told you to get pregnant with the Hulk’s baby. What did you expect? He’s probably going to come out the size of a toddler.” The laugh that burst out of her made me laugh too. This fierce feeling of missing her reminded me it had been months since we’d last seen each other. “Shut up.” “You can’t avoid the truth forever.” Her husband was huge. I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t expect her unborn baby to be a giant too. “Ugh.” A long sigh came through the receiver in resignation. “I don’t know what I was thinking—” “You weren’t thinking.” She ignored me. “We’re never having another one. I can’t sleep. I have to pee every two minutes. I’m the size of Mars—” “The last time I saw you”—which had been two months ago—“you were the size of Mars. The baby is probably the size of Mars now. I’d probably say you’re about the size of Uranus.” She ignored me again. “Everything makes me cry and I itch. I itch so bad.” “Do I… want to know where you’re itching?” “Nasty. My stomach. Aiden’s been rubbing coconut oil on me every hour he’s here.” I tried to imagine her six-foot-five-inch, Hercules-sized husband doing that to Van, but my imagination wasn’t that great. “Is he doing okay?” I asked, knowing off our past conversations that while he’d been over the moon with her pregnancy, he’d also turned into mother hen supreme. It made me feel better knowing that she wasn’t living in a different state all by herself with no one else for support. Some people in life got lucky and found someone great, the rest of us either took a long time… or not ever. “He’s worried I’m going to fall down the stairs when he isn’t around, and he’s talking about getting a one-story house so that I can put him out of his misery.” “You know you can come stay with us if you want.” She made a noise. “I’m just offering, bitch. If you don’t want to be alone when he starts traveling more for games, you can stay here as long as you need. Louie doesn’t sleep in his room half the time anyway, and we have a one-story house. You could sleep with me if you really wanted to. It’ll be like we’re fourteen all over again.” She sighed. “I would. I really would, but I couldn’t leave Aiden.” And I couldn’t leave the boys for longer than a couple of weeks, but she knew that. Well, she also knew I couldn’t not work for that long, too. “Maybe you can get one of those I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up—” Vanessa let out another loud laugh. “You jerk.” “What? You could.” There was a pause. “I don’t even know why I bother with you half the time.” “Because you love me?” “I don’t know why.” “Tia,” Louie hissed, rubbing his belly like he was seriously starving. “Hey, Lou and Josh are making it seem like they haven’t eaten all day. I’m scared they might start nibbling on my hand soon. Let me feed them, and I’ll call you back, okay?” Van didn’t miss a beat. “Sure, Di. Give them a hug from me and call me back whenever. I’m on the couch, and I’m not going anywhere except the bathroom.” “Okay. I won’t call Parks and Wildlife to let them know there’s a beached whale—” “Goddammit, Diana—” I laughed. “Love you. I’ll call you back. Bye!” “Vanny has a whale?” Lou asked.

My Ren & Stimpy reference wasn’t all that funny when written in the center of someone’s CONDOLENCE CARD. “Fucking Leslie,” I spat. “She threw a bunch of cards on my desk and said they were birthday cards.” Dean proceeded to lose his shit, his cackling laughs echoing inside my office. I glared at him. “It’s not that funny.” “Oh, hell yes it is. You referenced Ren & Stimpy on a sympathy card,” he wheezed. Seriously, fuck you, Leslie. Fuck you, hard. I was convinced I could blame her for everything wrong in my life. Lost my keys? Goddammit, Leslie! Missed the subway? Fuck you very much, Leslie. Another awful dick pic sent to my phone? You’re such an asshole, Leslie.

But to be clear, I had not, at any age, desired a specific male body in the way I did now. While all my boyfriends and crushes had been reasonably good-looking, my attraction hovered up near their face, where they kept their talent and power. Lusting for the whole length of a person, head to toe, was what body-rooted fuckers did, Jordi, and men. Now, for the first time, I understood what all the fuss was about. How something beautiful could strike your heart, move you, bring you down on your knees and then, somewhat perversely, you wanted to fuck that pure, beautiful thing. Sex was a way to have it, to not just look at it but to be with it. I suddenly understood all of classical art. The endless carved nudes, Venus in her shell, David. And sexy clothes. I had worn them without really understanding why, thinking of sexy as one of many styles, not realizing it was the only style. You should always be emerging from a shell if possible. Without knowing it, without really understanding it, I had been a body for other people but I had not gotten to have one myself. I had not participated in the infuriating pleasure of wanting a real and specific body on Earth. I lay in the center of the bed, unblinking. Wanting a body had a seriousness to it. When you said you might never recover, you really meant it. This kind of desire made a wound you just had to carry with you for the rest of your life. But this was still better than never knowing. Or I hoped it was. Because in truth it was like a bad dream, a nightmare. Life didn’t just get better and better. You could actually miss out on something and that was that. That was your chance and now it was over. I wondered if I would continue with my work and then I realized that my work was all I had now. I had gotten it completely wrong—I thought I was laboring toward a prize, but the prize was right there, I already had it, and work was something I could do afterward, after I was no longer young enough to be beautiful and could no longer be wanted by someone beautiful. — How’s

Anyway how are you doing, crybaby? You’re fifteen now right? Crazy huh? How is school going? If you ask someone out, don’t make her kiss you right away. Also, don’t make her keep it a secret. It will make her feel bad. Are you still watching too many cartoons? What do you do in your free time? Jake does karate. I think it’s very manly. Not like someone like me needs protecting, but it’s nice to know he could, you know? My teachers say I’m good at English. My aunt thinks I should be a writer, like her of course. What do they even do? I miss you. I haven’t had a friend as good as you. Remember how scared you were I would lose your address? I showed you. Well I don’t have anything else to say. I love you. Yours, Nicole

What’s the matter, Rea?” he said, still sounding half asleep. “What makes you think . . .?” “You wouldn’t have called this late unless you need to talk. Give me a minute to pull my jeans on and I’ll go out in the hallway so I won’t wake the other guys.” Reagen heard several men moan or swear in the background. When times were good, Noah had a room to himself, but when times were bad in the road game he’d sometimes bunk on the floor in someone else’s room. “I’m listening,” he said after a minute. She wanted to hear his voice more than talk, but that would sound strange, so she told him about her dream and how frightened she’d been. “I wish I were there to hug you, Rea. We could cuddle up. You could tell me everything while I slept.” “I wish you were too.” Neither one said anything for a few breaths, and then she whispered, “I miss you so much sometimes. They’d probably never be as close as they’d been in high school. He was a different man and she’d changed as well, but she still missed the Noah who was half kid, half man. “What are you wearing?” he whispered, and for a moment she swore she could hear him smiling. “Shut up.” He laughed. “Just asking. Who knows, one night I might get lucky and you’d be just out of th shower.” “You never give up trying to make me blush.” Her bad mood had vanished. “Come on, Rea, give me a break. I’ve been wondering what you like naked for years. If I ever get too old to wonder, I hope you just shoot me.” “Go to bed, Noah.” “Good night, Rea. Maybe when you go back to dreaming, you’ll dream of me.” “Not likely.” She closed the phone, thinking how he always had enough magic in his pocket to change her mood even if he didn’t have enough to change his dreams.

The Major's laughter boomed out again. "And I never kept a diary in my life!" he cried. "Why there's enough cream in this situation to make a dishful of meringues. You and I, you know, the students of Tilling! The serious-minded students who do a hard day's work when all the pretty ladies have gone to bed. Often and often has old--I mean has that fine woman, Miss Mapp, told me that I work too hard at night! Recommended me to get earlier to bed, and do my work between six and eight in the morning! Six and eight in the morning! That's a queer time of day to recommend an old campaigner to be awake at! Often she's talked to you, too, I bet my hat, about sitting up late and exhausting the nervous faculties." Major Flint choked and laughed and inhaled tobacco smoke till he got purple in the face. "And you sitting up one side of the street," he gasped, "pretending to be interested in Roman roads, and me on the other pulling a long face over my diaries, and neither of us with a Roman road or a diary to our names. Let's have an end to such unsociable arrangements, old friend; you lining your Roman roads and the bottle to lay the dust over to me one night, and I'll bring my diaries and my peg over to you the next. Never drink alone--one of my maxims in life--if you can find someone to drink with you. And there were you within a few yards of me all the time sitting by your old solitary self, and there was I sitting by my old solitary self, and we each thought the other a serious-minded old buffer, busy on his life-work. I'm blessed if I ever heard of two such pompous old frauds as you and I, Captain! What a sight of hypocrisy there is in the world, to be sure! No offence--mind: I'm as bad as you, and you're as bad as me, and we're both as bad as each other. But no more solitary confinement of an evening for Benjamin Flint, as long as you're agreeable.

It's okay to feel like shit. It's okay to feel worthless. It's okay to feel insignificant. It's okay to miss someone you can't have. It's okay to have a tightness in your chest or a burning sensation on your arms or legs and it's okay to not want to eat or sleep or just overall hurt yourself or worse. It's okay to feel like your world is crashing down and it's okay to feel like you can't do this. But the point is that you try. And no matter who you are, or what age you are. Whether you're my ex from third grade (if I had one) or a random three year old who's just had a bad day. If you're 56 and your wife just divorced you and you just wanna think or get advice or anything. I'll be here. It's okay to think you're a whore, but you aren't. It's okay to feel really dumb. But I'll do my best to convince you otherwise. Cuz I can't do much, I can't. I can't completely understand what you're feeling. And I'm sorry about that. But I can sure as hell try. And I'll try my very best.

After they hung up, Hunter took aside Renaat Van den Hooff, who was in charge of the pilot on the Walgreens side, and told him something just wasn’t right. The red flags were piling up. First, Elizabeth had denied him access to their lab. Then she’d rejected his proposal to embed someone with them in Palo Alto. And now she was refusing to do a simple comparison study. To top it all off, Theranos had drawn the blood of the president of Walgreens’s pharmacy business, one of the company’s most senior executives, and failed to give him a test result! Van den Hooff listened with a pained look on his face. “We can’t not pursue this,” he said. “We can’t risk a scenario where CVS has a deal with them in six months and it ends up being real.” Walgreens’s rivalry with CVS, which was based in Rhode Island and one-third bigger in terms of revenues, colored virtually everything the drugstore chain did. It was a myopic view of the world that was hard to understand for an outsider like Hunter who wasn’t a Walgreens company man. Theranos had cleverly played on this insecurity. As a result, Walgreens suffered from a severe case of FoMO—the fear of missing out.

American Baseball It's for real, not for practice, and it's televised, not secret, the way you'd expect a civilized country to handle delicate things, it's in color, it's happening now in Florida, "This Is American Baseball" the announcer announces as the batter enters the box, we are watching, and it could be either of us standing there waiting for the pitch, avoiding the eye of the pitcher as we take a few practice cuts, turning to him and his tiny friends in the outfield, facing the situation, knowing that someone behind our backs is making terrible gestures, standing there to swing and miss the way I miss you, wanting to be out of uniform, out of breath, in your car, in love again, learning all the signals for the first time, they way we learned the rules of night baseball as high-school freshman: first base, you kiss her, second base, her breasts, third, you're in her pants, and home is where the heart wants to be all the time, but seldom can reach past the obstacle course of space, the home in our perfect future we wanted so badly, and want more than ever since we learned we won't live there, which happens to lovers in civilized countries all the time, and happens too in American baseball when you strike out and remember what the game really meant.

We walk around inside that house like everything is okay, but it’s not, Quinn. We’ve been broken for years and I have no idea how to fix us. I find solutions. It’s what I do. It’s what I’m good at. But I have no idea how to solve me and you. Every day I come home, hoping things will be better. But you can’t even stand to be in the same room with me. You hate it when I touch you. You hate it when I talk to you. I pretend not to notice the things you don’t want me to notice because I don’t want you to hurt more than you already do.” He releases a rush of air. “I am not blaming you for what I did. It’s my fault. I did that. I fucked up. But I didn’t fuck up because I was attracted to her. I fucked up because I miss you. Every day, I miss you. When I’m at work, I miss you. When I’m home, I miss you. When you’re next to me in bed, I miss you. When I’m inside you, I miss you.” Graham presses his mouth to mine. I can taste his tears. Or maybe they’re my tears. He pulls back and presses his forehead to mine. “I miss you, Quinn. So much. You’re right here, but you aren’t. I don’t know where you went or when you left, but I have no idea how to bring you back. I am so alone. We live together. We eat together. We sleep together. But I have never felt more alone in my entire life.” Graham releases me and falls back against his seat. He rests his elbow against the window, covering his face as he tries to compose himself. He’s more broken than I’ve ever seen him in all the years I’ve known him. And I’m the one slowly tearing him down. I’m making him unrecognizable. I’ve strung him along by allowing him to believe there’s hope that I’ll eventually change. That I’ll miraculously turn back into the woman he fell in love with. But I can’t change. We are who our circumstances turn us into. “Graham.” I wipe at my face with my shirt. He’s quiet, but he eventually looks at me with his sad, heartbroken eyes. “I haven’t gone anywhere. I’ve been here this whole time. But you can’t see me because you’re still searching for someone I used to be. I’m sorry I’m no longer who I was back then. Maybe I’ll get better. Maybe I won’t. But a good husband loves his wife through the good and the bad times. A good husband stands at his wife’s side through sickness and health, Graham. A good husband- a husband who truly loves his wife - wouldn’t cheat on her and then blame his infidelity on the fact that he’s lonely.” Graham’s expression doesn’t change. He’s as still as a statue. The only thing that moves is his jaw as he works it back and forth. And then his eyes narrow and he tilts his head. “You don’t think I love you, Quinn?” “I know you used to. But I don’t think you love the person I’ve become.” Graham sits up straight. He leans forward, looking me hard in the eye. His words are clipped as he speaks. “I have loved you every single second of every day since the moment I laid eyes on you. I love you more now than I did the day I married you. I love you, Quinn. I fucking love you!” He opens his car door, gets out and then slams it shut with all his strength. The whole car shakes. He walks toward the house, but before he makes it to the front door, he spins around and points at me angrily. “I love you, Quinn!” He’s shouting the words. He’s angry. So angry. He walks toward his car and kicks at the front bumper with his bare foot. He kicks and he kicks and he kicks and then pauses to scream it at me again. “I love you!” He slams his fist against the top of his car, over and over, until he finally collapses against the hood, his head buried in his arms. He remains in this position for an entire minute, the only thing moving is the subtle shaking of his shoulders. I don’t move. I don’t even think I breathe. Graham finally pushes off the hood and uses his shirt to wipe at his eyes. He looks at me, completely defeated. “I love you,” he says quietly, shaking his head. “I always have. No matter how much you wish I didn’t.

He swore sharply, David Jones’s still-so-familiar voice coming out of that stranger’s body. “Do you have any idea how unbelievably hard it’s been to get you alone?” Had she finally started hallucinating? But he took off his glasses, and she could see his eyes more clearly and . . . “It’s you,” she breathed, tears welling. “It’s really you.” She reached for him, but he stepped back. Sisters Helen and Grace were hurrying across the compound, coming to see what the ruckus was, shading their eyes and peering so they could see in through the screens. “You can’t let on that you know me,” Jones told Molly quickly, his voice low, rough. “You can’t tell anyone—not even your friend the priest during confession, do you understand?” “Are you in some kind of danger?” she asked him. Dear God, he was so thin. And was the cane necessary or just a prop? “Stand still, will you, so I can—” “No. Don’t. We can’t . . .” He backed away again. “If you say anything, Mol, I swear, I’ll vanish, and I will not come back. Unless . . . if you don’t want me here—and I don’t blame you if you don’t—” “No!” was all she managed to say before Sister Helen opened the door and looked from the mess on the floor to Molly’s stricken expression. “Oh, dear.” “I’m afraid it’s my fault,” Jones said in a British accent, in a voice that was completely different from his own, as Helen rushed to Molly’s side. “My fault entirely. I brought Miss Anderson some bad news. I didn’t realize just how devastating it would be.” Molly started crying. It was more than just a good way to hide her laughter at that accent—those were real tears streaming down her face and she couldn’t stop them. Helen led her to one of the tables, helped her sit down. “Oh, my dear,” the nun said, kneeling in front of her, concern on her round face, holding her hand. “What happened?” “We have a mutual friend,” Jones answered for her. “Bill Bolten. He found out I was heading to Kenya, and he thought if I happened to run into Miss Anderson that she would want to know that a friend of theirs recently . . . well, passed. Cat’s out of the bag, right? Fellow name of Grady Morant, who went by the alias of Jones.” “Oh, dear,” Helen said again, hand to her mouth in genuine sympathy. Jones leaned closer to the nun, his voice low, but not low enough for Molly to miss hearing. “His plane went down—burned—gas tank exploded . . . Ghastly mess. Not a prayer that he survived.” Molly buried her face in her hands, hardly able to think. “Bill was worried that she might’ve heard it first from someone else,” he said. “But apparently she hadn’t.” Molly shook her head, no. News did travel fast via the grapevine. Relief workers tended to know other relief workers and . . . She could well have heard about Jones’s death without him standing right in front of her. Wouldn’t that have been awful?

It was normal, then, that he should be missed, even mourned—for it’s a hard thing when someone dies at a school like Hampden, where we were all so isolated, and thrown so much together. But I was surprised at the wanton display of grief which spewed forth once his death became official. It seemed not only gratuitous, but rather shameful given the circumstances. No one had seemed very torn up by his disappearance, even in those grim final days when it seemed that the news when it came must certainly be bad; nor, in the public eye, had the search seemed much besides a massive inconvenience. But now, at news of his death, people were strangely frantic. Everyone, suddenly, had known him; everyone was deranged with grief; everyone was just going to have to try and get on as well as they could without him. “He would have wanted it that way.” That was a phrase I heard many times that week on the lips of people who had absolutely no idea what Bunny wanted; college officials, anonymous weepers, strangers who clutched and sobbed outside the dining halls; from the Board of Trustees, who, in a defensive and carefully worded statement, said that “in harmony with the unique spirit of Bunny Corcoran, as well as the humane and progressive ideals of Hampden College,” a large gift was being made in his name to the American Civil Liberties Union—an organization Bunny would certainly have abhorred, had he been aware of its existence.

Really, was everyone aboard this ship slightly mad? Much of Arsenic's initial conversation with the decklings was beginning to make sense. All the crew seemed, in a word, eccentric. Mr. Tarabotti smiled. "Too late, little cousin. I stay here. You done almost? You maybe do not wish late, no? Your father, he will throw a fop." Miss Tunstell said, "Throw a fit, I think you mean, Rodrigo." "Si?" "Yes. He is a fop, but he throws a fit." The captain interrupted, "Yes yes. Soon. But this is more important." "Si?" Mr Tarabotti shrugged and left. He said something in Italian to someone waiting in the hallway as he closed the door. Arsenic turned to look curiously at the cheerful captain. "He tried to kill you?" "Obviously he wasn't successful." Arsenic nodded. Obviously. "My mother would say that shows a lack of follow-through." The captain grinned. "Your mother sounds logical." Miss Tunstell added, although not critically, "And a little bloodthirsty." It was a fair assessment. "You've no idea," replied Arsenic, because it seemed they really didn't. The captain wrinkled her nose. "Old cousin Roddy there is not so bad. He's been reformed through excessive reading. Percy was in charge of extensive literary recuperation efforts." Arsenic smiled at Professor Tunstell, not quite sure what to make of this explanation, but knowing that books could be good medicine. The man dipped his head and blushed. The two ladies looked at him as if he'd done the most unusual thing ever.

■​Let what you know—your known knowns—guide you but not blind you. Every case is new, so remain flexible and adaptable. Remember the Griffin bank crisis: no hostage-taker had killed a hostage on deadline, until he did. ■​Black Swans are leverage multipliers. Remember the three types of leverage: positive (the ability to give someone what they want); negative (the ability to hurt someone); and normative (using your counterpart’s norms to bring them around). ■​Work to understand the other side’s “religion.” Digging into worldviews inherently implies moving beyond the negotiating table and into the life, emotional and otherwise, of your counterpart. That’s where Black Swans live. ■​Review everything you hear from your counterpart. You will not hear everything the first time, so double-check. Compare notes with team members. Use backup listeners whose job is to listen between the lines. They will hear things you miss. ■​Exploit the similarity principle. People are more apt to concede to someone they share a cultural similarity with, so dig for what makes them tick and show that you share common ground. ■​When someone seems irrational or crazy, they most likely aren’t. Faced with this situation, search for constraints, hidden desires, and bad information. ■​Get face time with your counterpart. Ten minutes of face time often reveals more than days of research. Pay special attention to your counterpart’s verbal and nonverbal communication at unguarded moments—at the beginning and the end of the session or when someone says something out of line.

You know," he said, 'for what it's worth, the justice system is supposed to be this purveyor of right and wrong, good and had. But sometimes, I think it gets it wrong almost as much as it gets it right. I've had to learn that, too, and it's hard to accept. What do you do when the things that are supposed to protect you, fail you like that?? 'I was so naïve,' Pip said. 'I practically handed Max Hastings to them, after everything came out last year. And I truly believed it was some kind of victory, that the bad would be punished. Because it was the truth, and the truth was the most important thing to me. It's all I believed in, all I cared about: finding the truth, no matter the cost. And the truth was that Max was guilty and he would face justice. But justice doesn't exist, and the truth doesn't matter, not in the real world, and now they've just handed him right back. 'Oh, justice exists,' Charlie said, looking up at the rain. 'Maybe not the kind that happens in police stations and courtrooms, but it does exist. And when you really think about it, those words - good and bad, right and wrong- they don't really matter in the real world. Who gets to decide what they mean: those people who just got it wrong and let Max walk free? No,' he shook his head. 'I think we all get to decide what good and bad and right and wrong mean to us, not what we're told to accept. You did nothing wrong. Don't beat yourself up for other people's mistakes.' She turned to him, her stomach clenching. But that doesn't matter now. Max has won.' 'He only wins if you let him.' 'What can I do about it?' she asked. 'From listening to your podcast, sounds to me like there's not much you can't do.' 'I haven't found Jamie.' She picked at her nails. "And now people think he's not really missing, that I made it all up. That I'm a liar and I'm bad and -' 'Do you care?' Charlie asked. 'Do you care what people think, if you know you're right?' She paused, her answer sliding back down her throat. Why did she care? She was about to say she didn't care at all, but hadn't that been the feeling in the pit of her stomach all along? The pit that had been growing these last six months. Guilt about what she did last time, about her dog dying, about not being good, about putting her family in danger, and every day reading the disappointment in her mum's eyes. Feeling bad about the secrets she was keeping to protect Cara and Naomi. She was a liar, that part was true. And worse, to make herself feel better about it all, she'd said it wasn't really her and she'd never be that person again. That she was different now... good. That she'd almost lost herself last time and it wouldn't happen again. But that wasn't it, was it? She hadn't almost lost herself, maybe she'd actually been meeting herself for the very first time. And she was tired of feeling guilty about it. Tired of feeling shame about who she was. She bet Max Hastings had never felt ashamed a day in his life. 'You're right,' she said. And as she straightened up, untwisted, she realized that the pit in her stomach, the one that had been swallowing her from inside out, it was starting to go, Filling in until it was hardly there at all. "Maybe I don't have to be good, or other people's versions of good. And maybe I don't have to be likeable.' She turned to him, her movements quick and light despite her water-heavy clothes. "Fuck likeable You know who's likeable? People like Max Hastings who walk into a courtroom with fake glasses and charm their way out. I don't want to be like that." 'So don't, Charlie said. 'And don't give up because of him. Someone's life might depend on you. And I know you can find him, find Jamie. He turned a smile to her. "Other people might

We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit. And if our bosses proved mean, why then we’d evoke their whole and genuine meanness afterward over vodka cranberries and small batch bourbons. And if our drinking companions proved to be sublime then we would stagger home at dawn over the Old City cobblestones, into hot showers and clean shirts, and press onward until dusk fell again. For the rest of the world, it seemed to us, had somewhat hastily concluded that it was the chief end of man to thank God it was Friday and pray that Netflix would never forsake them. Still we lived frantically, like hummingbirds; though our HR departments told us that our commitments were valuable and our feedback was appreciated, our raises would be held back another year. Like gnats we pestered Management— who didn’t know how to use the Internet, whose only use for us was to set up Facebook accounts so they could spy on their children, or to sync their iPhones to their Outlooks, or to explain what tweets were and more importantly, why— which even we didn’t know. Retire! we wanted to shout. We ha Get out of the way with your big thumbs and your senior moments and your nostalgia for 1976! We hated them; we wanted them to love us. We wanted to be them; we wanted to never, ever become them. Complexity, complexity, complexity! We said let our affairs be endless and convoluted; let our bank accounts be overdrawn and our benefits be reduced. Take our Social Security contributions and let it go bankrupt. We’d been bankrupt since we’d left home: we’d secure our own society. Retirement was an afterlife we didn’t believe in and that we expected yesterday. Instead of three meals a day, we’d drink coffee for breakfast and scavenge from empty conference rooms for lunch. We had plans for dinner. We’d go out and buy gummy pad thai and throat-scorching chicken vindaloo and bento boxes in chintzy, dark restaurants that were always about to go out of business. Those who were a little flush would cover those who were a little short, and we would promise them coffees in repayment. We still owed someone for a movie ticket last summer; they hadn’t forgotten. Complexity, complexity. In holiday seasons we gave each other spider plants in badly decoupaged pots and scarves we’d just learned how to knit and cuff links purchased with employee discounts. We followed the instructions on food and wine Web sites, but our soufflés sank and our baked bries burned and our basil ice creams froze solid. We called our mothers to get recipes for old favorites, but they never came out the same. We missed our families; we were sad to be rid of them. Why shouldn’t we live with such hurry and waste of life? We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to decrypt our neighbors’ Wi-Fi passwords and to never turn on the air-conditioning. We vowed to fall in love: headboard-clutching, desperate-texting, hearts-in-esophagi love. On the subways and at the park and on our fire escapes and in the break rooms, we turned pages, resolved to get to the ends of whatever we were reading. A couple of minutes were the day’s most valuable commodity. If only we could make more time, more money, more patience; have better sex, better coffee, boots that didn’t leak, umbrellas that didn’t involute at the slightest gust of wind. We were determined to make stupid bets. We were determined to be promoted or else to set the building on fire on our way out. We were determined to be out of our minds.

It is strange how this fails to annoy me, although as a rule I am sensitive to bad manners. It is just that occasionally, very occasionally, one meets someone who is so markedly a contrast with the general run of people that one’s instinctive reaction is one of admiration, indulgence, and, no doubt, if one is not very careful indeed, of supplication. I am not arguing the rights and wrongs of this: I am simply stating the facts as they appear to me. And not only to me, for I have noticed that extremely handsome men and extremely beautiful women exercise a power over others which they themselves have no need, or indeed no time, to analyse. People like Nick attract admirers, adherents, followers. They also attract people like me: observers. One is never totally at ease with such people, for they are like sovereigns and one’s duty is to divert them. Matters like worth or merit rarely receive much of their attention, for, with the power of choice which their looks bestow on them, they can change their minds when they care to do so. Because of their great range of possibilities, their attention span is very limited. And their beauty has accustomed them to continuous gratification. I find such people – and I have met one or two – quite fascinating. I find myself respecting them, as I would respect some natural phenomenon: a rainbow, a mountain, a sunset. I recognize that they might have no intrinsic merit, and yet I will find myself trying to please them, to attract their attention. ‘Look at me,’ I want to say. ‘Look at me.’ And I am also intrigued by their destinies, which could, or should, be marvelous. I will exert myself for such people, and I will miss them when they leave. I will always want to know about them, for I tend to be in love with their entire lives. That is a measure of the power they exert. That is why I join Nick in a smile of complicity when he spares himself the boredom of a conversation with Dr. Simek. It is a kind of law, I suppose.

Maybe they’d give her everything she wanted. All it would cost was her secrets. Charlie pasted a smile on her face. Glanced at the old “fear less” tattoo looping across the skin of her inner arm. “Fine,” she said through gritted teeth. “In that case, I’d like to confess.” “Confess?” Vicereine echoed, puzzled. “Do you remember when Brayan Araya had his secrets written with a laser on grains of rice and kept them in a glass jar under his pillow? I snatched that like I was the tooth fairy. Or remember when Eshe Goodwin got that book with all the detailed illustrations and no one could make head or tail of it? The secrets were written in the artwork, so I cut those pages straight out. I’m not sure she’s opened it up to know they’re missing. I took Owain Cadwallader’s eighteenth-century memoir and discovered a whole pile of notes stitched into the interior binding of another book—I forget the title, but it had these cool metal catches on the side—and took those without letting anyone be the wiser. Oh, and I grabbed Jaden Coffey’s whole collection of seventies shadow magic zines. Want me to go on? I’ve been doing this for years.” She felt giddy, like she was sliding down a hill, no way to stop now. All the exultation of finally admitting to something. “You cut out pages from Eshe’s book?” Vicereine sounded pissed. “I’m a bad person.” Charlie reached into the pocket of her jeans, took something out, and threw it to Malik. Startled, he caught it. When he looked at what was in his hands, his brows drew together. “I also grabbed your wallet when I brushed by you. Sorry.” “You are making some very dangerous enemies,” Vicereine told her. “What’s this all about?” Malik was tight-jawed. “What are you doing?” “Punish me,” Charlie said. “I’m loads worse than Adeline.” “You want it tied to you?” Bellamy asked. The idea of someone inside her head, someone she couldn’t hide her worst thoughts from, someone she loved, made her feel a little queasy. “Yes. Reward or punishment, give him to me. I’ll be the Hierophant.

August 18, 2006 It was so nice to talk to you tonight. I always wind up in a better mood after talking to you. Somehow you always manage to brighten my life even when in a hell hole like this. You are the greatest woman ever, and I will never understand how I got so lucky to have been blessed with you. I appreciate all you do. You are the strongest person I know, and I admire you, and respect you. I am always extremely proud of you. I know with all that has happened with Marc and Biggles, you have gone out of your way to try to make everyone feel better. Even though I know that is your worst nightmare. I don’t know many people who could be there, and put themselves through the pain just to make someone you don’t even know more comfortable. You are an angel sent by God. Now you have given me two more angels. Remember Satan was once an angel of God, so Bubba is an angel, but just which side is sometimes debatable. Just joking. I know he can be very trying sometimes, and you have kept your cool way better than I ever could have. Our kids are so lucky to have you as their mother. So am I. I cannot wait to get back into your arms. Talking about it tonight felt so good. Knowing that this whole thing is coming to an end. I dream about the day I step off that plane to see you. Hope you have no plans for the rest of your life, because you’re gonna be a little busy. I miss you so much!!! I loved talking to Bubba tonight. I love hearing him tell me he loves me, but I also don’t want to force him to say it. I know inside that he loves me. He just gets a little busy with everything going on around him. I can’t wait to play with him and chase him around the house. I was also thinking, all this time I’ve been wanting to talk to Bubba because he can talk back to me, but I want Angel to hear my voice, too. I want her to be a little familiar with me if at least my voice. Anyway, I love you with all my heart, and can’t wait to see you again. I am gonna smother you like crazy. You’ll be begging me to go on another deployment so you can get a little break. Too bad. You’re stuck with me now. I love you, sexy! XOXOXOXOXOXOOX

HOW TO CREATE A GOOD HABIT The 1st Law: Make It Obvious 1.1: Fill out the Habits Scorecard. Write down your current habits to become aware of them. 1.2: Use implementation intentions: “I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].” 1.3: Use habit stacking: “After I [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].” 1.4: Design your environment. Make the cues of good habits obvious and visible. The 2nd Law:Make It Attractive 2.1: Use temptation bundling. Pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do. 2.2: Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. 2.3: Create a motivation ritual. Do something you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit. The 3rd Law: Make It Easy 3.1: Reduce friction. Decrease the number of steps between you and your good habits. 3.2: Prime the environment. Prepare your environment to make future actions easier. 3.3: Master the decisive moment. Optimize the small choices that deliver outsized impact. 3.4: Use the Two-Minute Rule. Downscale your habits until they can be done in two minutes or less. 3.5: Automate your habits. Invest in technology and onetime purchases that lock in future behavior. The 4th Law: Make It Satisfying 4.1: Use reinforcement. Give yourself an immediate reward when you complete your habit. 4.2: Make “doing nothing” enjoyable. When avoiding a bad habit, design a way to see the benefits. 4.3: Use a habit tracker. Keep track of your habit streak and “don’t break the chain.” 4.4: Never miss twice. When you forget to do a habit, make sure you get back on track immediately. HOW TO BREAK A BAD HABIT Inversion of the 1st Law: Make It Invisible 1.5: Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment. Inversion of the 2nd Law: Make It Unattractive 2.4: Reframe your mind-set. Highlight the benefits of avoiding your bad habits. Inversion of the 3rd Law: Make It Difficult 3.6: Increase friction. Increase the number of steps between you and your bad habits. 3.7: Use a commitment device. Restrict your future choices to the ones that benefit you. Inversion of the 4th Law: Make It Unsatisfying 4.5: Get an accountability partner. Ask someone to watch your behavior. 4.6: Create a habit contract. Make the costs of your bad habits public and painful.

CHANGING YOUR LIFE TO ACCOMMODATE THE SIXTH SECRET The sixth secret is about the choiceless life. Since we all take our choices very seriously, adopting this new attitude requires a major shift. Today, you can begin with a simple exercise. Sit down for a few minutes and reassess some of the important choices you’ve made over the years. Take a piece of paper and make two columns labeled “Good Choice” and “Bad Choice.” Under each column, list at least five choices relating to those moments you consider the most memorable and decisive in your life so far—you’ll probably start with turning points shared by most people (the serious relationship that collapsed, the job you turned down or didn’t get, the decision to pick one profession or another), but be sure to include private choices that no one knows about except you (the fight you walked away from, the person you were too afraid to confront, the courageous moment when you overcame a deep fear). Once you have your list, think of at least one good thing that came out of the bad choices and one bad thing that came out of the good choices. This is an exercise in breaking down labels, getting more in touch with how flexible reality really is. If you pay attention, you may be able to see that not one but many good things came from your bad decisions while many bad ones are tangled up in your good decisions. For example, you might have a wonderful job but wound up in a terrible relationship at work or crashed your car while commuting. You might love being a mother but know that it has drastically curtailed your personal freedom. You may be single and very happy at how much you’ve grown on your own, yet you have also missed the growth that comes from being married to someone you deeply love. No single decision you ever made has led in a straight line to where you find yourself now. You peeked down some roads and took a few steps before turning back. You followed some roads that came to a dead end and others that got lost at too many intersections. Ultimately, all roads are connected to all other roads. So break out of the mindset that your life consists of good and bad choices that set your destiny on an unswerving course. Your life is the product of your awareness. Every choice follows from that, and so does every step of growth.

Keep Your Ego at Bay; Stay Humble   Have you felt that urgent desire to feel important, to feel special and to feel way above over other people? As a graduate, do you think you have the best education and do you think you deserve that job opening more over the other guy? Do you think you have accomplished so much in life that you deserve better than your peers? If so, maybe your ego is getting the best of you. When you act based on your ego, there is a great chance that you will be at odds with the world and the people around you. You feel that you are more special than others because of your accomplishments, your education, your work and your possession. Because of that, you are failing to see others’ worth and importance. You only act based on what you think, because your opinion is the only one that matters. You barely admit mistakes; hence, you are depriving yourself of the opportunity to grow because you believe that you got everything you need. You are tarnishing your relationship with others by alienating them with your attitude. Ultimately, you are missing a lot in life! Dr. Dryer preaches about a life of humility and respect for one’s self and others. He always reminds his readers, students and followers to keep their ego at bay and stay humble. He believes in the universal truth that individuals are more common than different with each other; that no one is above someone or more special than others. He believes in the perfect being, the invisible force that created all of us, and so we are one and the same, just performing our own duty in this universe. Our ego stems from our desire to gain recognition from our achievements and hard work. There is nothing wrong with that. Humans crave to be recognized because it is one of the best feelings in the world. However, when you become overly attached to that idea and your entitlement, that is where ego comes in and it does more bad than good to you. The best way to be recognized is to stay humble and modest of your accomplishments. Your achievements sound the loudest when you are not telling it to everyone. You can only earn the highest of respect when you give the same amount of respect to others and to yourself. You can only feel truly special when you are not trying to be over someone else’s head, but rather carry others on your back to lift them up. That is what matters the most.

She faced her pretend Arin. His scar was healed. His gray eyes were startlingly clear. “You’re not real,” she reminded him. “I feel real.” He brushed one finger across her lower lip. It suddenly seemed that there were no clouds in the sky, and that she sat in full sunshine. “You feel real,” he said. The puppy yawned, her jaws closing with a snap. The sound brought Kestrel to herself. She felt a little embarrassed. Her pulse was high. But she couldn’t stop pretending. Kestrel reached beneath her skirts to pull down a knee-high stocking. Arin made a sound. “I want to feel the grass beneath my feet,” Kestrel told him. “Someone’s going to see you.” “I don’t care.” “But that someone is me, and you should have a care, Kestrel, for my poor heart.” He reached under the hem of her dress to catch her hand in the act of pulling down the second stocking. “You’re treating me quite badly,” he said, and slid the stocking free, his palm skimming along the path of her calf. He looked at her. His hand wrapped around her bare ankle. Kestrel became shy…though she had known full well what she was doing. Arin grinned. With his free hand, he plucked a blade of grass. He tickled it against the sole of her foot. She laughed, jerking away. He let her go. He settled down beside her, lying on his stomach on the grass, propped up by his elbow. Kestrel lay on her back. She heard birdsong: high and long, with a trill at the end. She gazed up at the sky. It was blue enough for summer. “Perfect,” she said. “Almost.” She turned to look at him, and he was already looking at her. “I’m going to miss you when I wake up,” she whispered, because she realized that she must have fallen asleep under the sun. Arin was too real for her imagination. He was a dream. “Don’t wake up,” he said. The air smelled like new leaves. “You said you trusted me.” “I did.” He added, “I do.” “You are a dream.” He smiled. “I lied to you,” Kestrel said. “I kept secrets. I thought it was for the best. But it was because I didn’t trust you.” Arin shifted onto his side. He caressed her cheek lightly with the back of his hand. That trailing sensation felt like the last note of the bird’s song. “No,” he agreed, his voice gentle. “You didn’t.” Kestrel woke. The puppy was draped across her feet, sleeping. Her stockings lay in a small heap beside her. The sun had climbed in the sky. Her cheek was flushed, the skin tight: a little sunburned. The puppy twitched, still lost in sleep. Kestrel envied her. She rested her head again on the grass. She closed her eyes, and tried to find her way back into her dream.

I had the most powerful magic, and the need to use it.  Lifting my right hand, I summoned forth my Mana, converted it into magic, and spoke my own word of power.  Much to her surprise, I could still cast with my right hand, despite its missing digits.   “You aren’t really going to do this, are you?” Shart asked.  He was making his way over to me with only the barest hint of floundering. “Hoopie!” The spell pierced her barrier, turning the now useless boundary a bright blue.  Her expression was a mix of terror and amazement as the spell bypassed her defenses and impacted her.  Her ass exploded in an echoing cacophony of flatulence. It was literally the loudest fart I’d ever heard.  As someone whose mother-in-law used to regularly drive people from the room with her anal symphonies, I considered myself an expert.  I highly suspected Bashara was the kind of lady who didn’t fart in public; she must have been saving that one up all day.  She blinked several times, as she checked her status log.  It was time to execute the second part of my plan. Grabbing Shart, amidst his squawking protests, I yelled my battlecry. “Poke-Shart, Go!” Then, I flung the invisible demon straight at her head. Shart only weighed thirty pounds or so; I was more than strong enough to fling him at a pretty good clip.  His cry of “you bastard” slowly faded the further he flew.     I had hoped that being hit in the face would knock her off balance.  That would have given me a moment to pick up my sword and close.  Actually, I hoped it was possible to hit her at all; despite Shart’s ability to fly, he wasn’t very aerodynamic.  I couldn’t win a spell duel, considering I had only one good hand and didn’t know any good spells.  I was going to have to engage her in combat.  I sincerely hoped that my invisible familiar would give me an advantage. I hadn’t calculated on hitting the top of her head with Shart’s Belly Button of Holding.  Her head disappeared, completely buried down to the top of her shoulders.  Her body, however, still worked.  She was careening around, her hands furiously pushing on the demon.  The remaining bandit, coincidentally, looked at Bashara just as her head vanished.  Incorrectly assuming that I had some sort of head vanishing spell, he tried to break and run.   You can’t run away from a homicidal badger.   I managed to get within arms’ reach of Bashara, just as she had successfully begun pushing Shart off her head. She had freed her mouth and was screaming.  As she continued pushing, her nose popped free.  I felt only slightly bad when I grabbed the demon and pushed him all the way down.  In seconds, only her feet were exposed.  Then, I pushed those in as well.

She thinks no one would ever marry ‘a reckless society miss’ and a ‘troublemaker.’” He winced to hear his own words thrown back at him. Celia was all that…and so much more. Not that he dared tell her. Bad enough that he’d revealed too much of how he felt yesterday. For now, she could chalk it up to mere desire. If he started paying her compliments, she might guess how far his feelings went, and that wouldn’t do. So he tempered his remarks. “Your grandmother is merely worried that you will waste yourself on some man who doesn’t deserve you.” Like a bastard Bow Street Runner. “I suspect that if you tell her you’re going to marry the duke, she won’t be a bit surprised. And she certainly won’t agree to rescind the ultimatum, now that she’s finally achieved what she wanted.” “Yes, I’ve come to that conclusion myself. And besides…well…it wouldn’t be fair to involve him in such a plot behind his back when he’s a genuinely nice man offering marriage. If word got out that he had offered and I’d accepted, only to turn him down, people would assume I’d done it because of the madness in his family. That would just be cruel.” Now that Jackson knew she wasn’t actually going to marry the duke, he could be open-minded. “It certainly wouldn’t be kind,” he agreed. “But I’d be more worried that if word got out, you’d be painted as the worst sort of jilt.” She shrugged that off. “I wouldn’t care, as long as it freed me from Gran’s ultimatum.” It took him a moment to digest that. “So you lied when you said at our first discussion of your suitors that you had an interest in marriage?” “Of course I didn’t lie.” Her cheeks pinkened again. “But I want to marry for love, and not because Gran has decided I’m taking too long at it. I want my husband to genuinely care for me.” Her voice shook a little. “And not just my fortune.” She cut him a sidelong glance. “Or my connections.” He stiffened in the saddle. “I understand.” Oh yes, he understood all right. Any overtures he made would be construed as mercenary. Her grandmother had made sure of that by telling her of his aspirations. Not that it mattered. If he married her, he risked watching her lose everything. A Chief Magistrate made quite a lofty sum for someone of Jackson’s station, but for someone of hers? It was nothing. Less than nothing. “So what do you plan to do?” he asked. “About your grandmother’s ultimatum, I mean.” She shook her head. “If presenting her with an offer and begging her forbearance didn’t work, my original plan was just to marry whichever of the three gentlemen had offered.” “And now?” “I can’t bring myself to do it.” He stopped clenching the reins. “Well, that’s something then.” “So I find myself back where I started. I suppose I shall have to drum up some more suitors.” She slanted a glance at him. “Any ideas?

You know," he said, 'for what it's worth, the justice system is supposed to be this purveyor of right and wrong, good and had. But sometimes, I think it gets it wrong almost as much as it gets it right. I've had to learn that, too, and it's hard to accept. What do you do when the things that are supposed to protect you, fail you like that?? 'I was so naïve,' Pip said. 'I practically handed Max Hastings to them, after everything came out last year. And I truly believed it was some kind of victory, that the bad would be punished. Because it was the truth, and the truth was the most important thing to me. It's all I believed in, all I cared about: finding the truth, no matter the cost. And the truth was that Max was guilty and he would face justice. But justice doesn't exist, and the truth doesn't matter, not in the real world, and now they've just handed him right back. 'Oh, justice exists,' Charlie said, looking up at the rain. 'Maybe not the kind that happens in police stations and courtrooms, but it does exist. And when you really think about it, those words - good and bad, right and wrong- they don't really matter in the real world. Who gets to decide what they mean: those people who just got it wrong and let Max walk free? No,' he shook his head. 'I think we all get to decide what good and bad and right and wrong mean to us, not what we're told to accept. You did nothing wrong. Don't beat yourself up for other people's mistakes.' She turned to him, her stomach clenching. But that doesn't matter now. Max has won.' 'He only wins if you let him.' 'What can I do about it?' she asked. 'From listening to your podcast, sounds to me like there's not much you can't do.' 'I haven't found Jamie.' She picked at her nails. "And now people think he's not really missing, that I made it all up. That I'm a liar and I'm bad and -' 'Do you care?' Charlie asked. 'Do you care what people think, if you know you're right?' She paused, her answer sliding back down her throat. Why did she care? She was about to say she didn't care at all, but hadn't that been the feeling in the pit of her stomach all along? The pit that had been growing these last six months. Guilt about what she did last time, about her dog dying, about not being good, about putting her family in danger, and every day reading the disappointment in her mum's eyes. Feeling bad about the secrets she was keeping to protect Cara and Naomi. She was a liar, that part was true. And worse, to make herself feel better about it all, she'd said it wasn't really her and she'd never be that person again. That she was different now... good. That she'd almost lost herself last time and it wouldn't happen again. But that wasn't it, was it? She hadn't almost lost herself, maybe she'd actually been meeting herself for the very first time. And she was tired of feeling guilty about it. Tired of feeling shame about who she was. She bet Max Hastings had never felt ashamed a day in his life. 'You're right,' she said. And as she straightened up, untwisted, she realized that the pit in her stomach, the one that had been swallowing her from inside out, it was starting to go, Filling in until it was hardly there at all. "Maybe I don't have to be good, or other people's versions of good. And maybe I don't have to be likeable.' She turned to him, her movements quick and light despite her water-heavy clothes. "Fuck likeable You know who's likeable? People like Max Hastings who walk into a courtroom with fake glasses and charm their way out. I don't want to be like that." 'So don't, Charlie said. 'And don't give up because of him. Someone's life might depend on you. And I know you can find him, find Jamie. He turned a smile to her. "Other people might not believe in you but, for what it's worth, your neighbour from four doors down does.

It’s strange to miss someone so badly when they’re right there in front of you. Strange to be so angry at someone you care about so much.

What was the very FIRST GAME Mario appeared in? a) Super Mario Bros. b) Donkey Kong c) Super Smash Bros. d) Super Mario World. What is the newest Mario game out today? a) New Super Mario Bros. b) Super Mario Galaxy. What does Luigi say when he wins a race on Mario Cart 64? What is Mario’s last name? a) Costanza b) Italiano c) Mario d) Luigi. Who is the LAST person you play in Mario Party 3 (64 version)? a) Millennium Star b) Waluigi c) Daisy d) Bowser. Correct answers: b b Letsa go (let’s go, here we go) c a. Results: 0 out of 5 – did you play any Mario game at all? The game itself isn’t very complicated. Start playing and you’ll definitely get a higher score. Right now, this is bad. These answers make Mario question his own abilities to do something right. 1 out of 5 – you have probably played Mario games, when someone made you. Come on, you can do way better than this. Even Koopas can get a higher score and you’re way smarter than them. Plus, Princess Peach is most certainly not impressed with this score. 2 out of 5 – well, you’re not totally bad, but you’re also far away from an expert. Let’s just assume you hurried to answer as faster as possible and you made a couple of mistakes. You know what they say, everything gets better with practice. 3 out of 5 – you’re in the middle; still a long way to go to become an expert, but you’re not an amateur at the same time. However, Princess Peach doesn’t want someone who’s going to be happy being “in the middle”. What does this tell you? To do your best, achieve a greater score and, of course, to improve your overall game style as well. 4 out of 5 – very good. You are just one step away from being an expert. If you continue like this, you would be able to do a better job than Mario. You know the game quite well and you would gladly go on an adventure in Super Mario style. 5 out of 5 – expert. Congratulations! You love the game, your favorite pastime is playing Super Mario and let’s face it; you’d give Mario run for his money. You know the game “inside and out” and unlike Mario, you’d actually find princess in the right castle. But, don’t let this get into your head. Always strive to do better. Conclusion Thank you again for downloading this book!  I hope you find the third volume of Super Mario joke book as equally entertaining as previous two volumes. In case you haven’t read Super Mario joke book volumes 1 and 2, this is the perfect opportunity to get those books and see what jokes, memes, and other useful and entertaining info you missed out on. Throughout this book, you got to see various jokes, memes, comics, and read about interesting Mario fun facts you didn’t know before. Besides that, the book also included quiz where you had the opportunity to test your knowledge of Mario games. Hopefully, you got the top score and even if you didn’t, you can always retake the test. This joke book is ideal for all people who love Super Mario and it’s impossible to hate this little, chubby guy. With good humor, funny memes, interesting comics, and special Princess Peach section, this book is everything you need whenever you feel sad, bored, or in the mood for a good laugh. I hope this book was able to help you understand the importance of Super Mario as well as to understand

See, someone upstream from you fucked up badly. When the sky falls, it means someone, somewhere underestimated the project, didn't make a decision, or let a small miss turn into a colossal disaster, and while fixing a disaster feels great, you're not actually fixing anything.

Someone once tried to explain to me why football is so endlessly fascinating to its fans. It was all to do with unpredictability and consequences, he said. If you studied any match closely, you could trace how one bad pass, a missed tackle, a fluffed corner, a reckless clearance or an untrapped ball could, after seven, ten, fifteen further moves, be responsible for a crucial goal. It was, I suppose, a version of that

Working out with a bad partner sucks. It drains your energy and motivation and can even cause you to lose enthusiasm for working out altogether. On the other hand, working out with a good partner can go far in keeping you on track and making progress. He helps keep you accountable and wanting to show up every day, and having a spot on certain exercises helps push you for another rep and encourages you to move up in weight as you should. These things can make a big difference as time goes on. Those workouts, additional reps, and progressions in weight that wouldn’t have happened if you were solo add up to real gains. So, I recommend that you find someone to work out with before you start, and the two of you should agree to the following code. 1. I will show up on time for every workout, and if I can’t avoid missing one, I’ll let my partner know as soon as I know. 2. I won’t let my partner get out of a workout easily. I will reject any excuses that are short of an actual emergency or commitment that can’t be rescheduled, and I will insist that he comes and trains. In the case where there’s a valid excuse, if at all possible, I’ll offer to train at a different time so we can get our workout in. 3. I will come to the gym to train—not to chat. When we’re in the gym, we focus on our workouts, we’re always ready to spot each other, and we get our work done efficiently. 4. I will train hard to set a good example for my partner. 5. I will push my partner to do more than he thinks he can. It’s my job to motivate him to do more weight and more reps than he believes possible. 6. I will be supportive of my partner and will compliment him on his gains.