Boxing Day Morning Quotes

And I want to play hide-and-seek and give you my clothes and tell you I like your shoes and sit on the steps while you take a bath and massage your neck and kiss your feet and hold your hand and go for a meal and not mind when you eat my food and meet you at Rudy's and talk about the day and type up your letters and carry your boxes and laugh at your paranoia and give you tapes you don't listen to and watch great films and watch terrible films and complain about the radio and take pictures of you when you're sleeping and get up to fetch you coffee and bagels and Danish and go to Florent and drink coffee at midnight and have you steal my cigarettes and never be able to find a match and tell you about the tv programme I saw the night before and take you to the eye hospital and not laugh at your jokes and want you in the morning but let you sleep for a while and kiss your back and stroke your skin and tell you how much I love your hair your eyes your lips your neck your breasts your arse your and sit on the steps smoking till your neighbour comes home and sit on the steps smoking till you come home and worry when you're late and be amazed when you're early and give you sunflowers and go to your party and dance till I'm black and be sorry when I'm wrong and happy when you forgive me and look at your photos and wish I'd known you forever and hear your voice in my ear and feel your skin on my skin and get scared when you're angry and your eye has gone red and the other eye blue and your hair to the left and your face oriental and tell you you're gorgeous and hug you when you're anxious and hold you when you hurt and want you when I smell you and offend you when I touch you and whimper when I'm next to you and whimper when I'm not and dribble on your breast and smother you in the night and get cold when you take the blanket and hot when you don't and melt when you smile and dissolve when you laugh and not understand why you think I'm rejecting you when I'm not rejecting you and wonder how you could think I'd ever reject you and wonder who you are but accept you anyway and tell you about the tree angel enchanted forest boy who flew across the ocean because he loved you and write poems for you and wonder why you don't believe me and have a feeling so deep I can't find words for it and want to buy you a kitten I'd get jealous of because it would get more attention than me and keep you in bed when you have to go and cry like a baby when you finally do and get rid of the roaches and buy you presents you don't want and take them away again and ask you to marry me and you say no again but keep on asking because though you think I don't mean it I do always have from the first time I asked you and wander the city thinking it's empty without you and want what you want and think I'm losing myself but know I'm safe with you and tell you the worst of me and try to give you the best of me because you don't deserve any less and answer your questions when I'd rather not and tell you the truth when I really don't want to and try to be honest because I know you prefer it and think it's all over but hang on in for just ten more minutes before you throw me out of your life and forget who I am and try to get closer to you because it's beautiful learning to know you and well worth the effort and speak German to you badly and Hebrew to you worse and make love with you at three in the morning and somehow somehow somehow communicate some of the overwhelming undying overpowering unconditional all-encompassing heart-enriching mind-expanding on-going never-ending love I have for you.

On the morning of the fourth day, Jamie tipped a switchblade out of his box of cornflakes.   “I think these promotional campaigns have really got out of hand,” he said, freezing with his hand on the milk carton. “One shiny free knife with every packet of cereal bought is not a good message to send out to the kiddies.

When did they stop putting toys in cereal boxes? When I was little, I remember wandering the cereal aisle (which surely is as American a phenomenon as fireworks on the Fourth of July) and picking my breakfast food based on what the reward was: a Frisbee with the Trix rabbit's face emblazoned on the front. Holographic stickers with the Lucky Charms leprechaun. A mystery decoder wheel. I could suffer through raisin bran for a month if it meant I got a magic ring at the end. I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up feeling fresh every morning, never raise their voices, only cook with organic food, and are equally at ease with the CEO and the PTA. Here's a secret: those mothers don't exist. Most of us-even if we'd never confess-are suffering through the raisin bran in the hopes of a glimpse of that magic ring. I look very good on paper. I have a family, and I write a newspaper column. In real life, I have to pick superglue out of the carpet, rarely remember to defrost for dinner, and plan to have BECAUSE I SAID SO engraved on my tombstone. Real mothers wonder why experts who write for Parents and Good Housekeeping-and, dare I say it, the Burlington Free Press-seem to have their acts together all the time when they themselves can barely keep their heads above the stormy seas of parenthood. Real mothers don't just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady's car, and say, "Great. Maybe YOU can do a better job." Real mothers know that it's okay to eat cold pizza for breakfast. Real mothers admit it is easier to fail at this job than to succeed. If parenting is the box of raisin bran, then real mothers know the ratio of flakes to fun is severely imbalanced. For every moment that your child confides in you, or tells you he loves you, or does something unprompted to protect his brother that you happen to witness, there are many more moments of chaos, error, and self-doubt. Real mothers may not speak the heresy, but they sometimes secretly wish they'd chosen something for breakfast other than this endless cereal. Real mothers worry that other mothers will find that magic ring, whereas they'll be looking and looking for ages. Rest easy, real mothers. The very fact that you worry about being a good mom means that you already are one.

What the hell does it all mean anyhow? Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nothing comes to anything. And yet, there's no shortage of idiots to babble. Not me. I have a vision. I'm discussing you. Your friends. Your coworkers. Your newspapers. The TV. Everybody's happy to talk. Full of misinformation. Morality, science, religion, politics, sports, love, your portfolio, your children, health. Christ, if I have to eat nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day to live, I don't wanna live. I hate goddamn fruits and vegetables. And your omega 3's, and the treadmill, and the cardiogram, and the mammogram, and the pelvic sonogram, and oh my god the-the-the colonoscopy, and with it all the day still comes where they put you in a box, and its on to the next generation of idiots, who'll also tell you all about life and define for you what's appropriate. My father committed suicide because the morning newspapers depressed him. And could you blame him? With the horror, and corruption, and ignorance, and poverty, and genocide, and AIDS, and global warming, and terrorism, and-and the family value morons, and the gun morons. "The horror," Kurtz said at the end of Heart of Darkness, "the horror." Lucky Kurtz didn't have the Times delivered in the jungle. Ugh... then he'd see some horror. But what do you do? You read about some massacre in Darfur or some school bus gets blown up, and you go "Oh my God, the horror," and then you turn the page and finish your eggs from the free range chickens. Because what can you do. It's overwhelming!

(a) Are the skies you sleep under likely to open up for weeks on end? (b) Is the ground you walk on likely to tremble and split? (c) Is there a chance (and please check the box, no matter how small that chance seems) that the ominous mountain casting a midday shadow over your home might one day erupt with no rhyme or reason? Because if the answer is yes to one or all of these questions, then the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair's breadth from the witching hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of that term; it is light, losable like a key or a hair clip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year, under the same cypress tree drawing the figure eight in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow a government on a whim, why not blind the man you hate, why not go mad, go gibbering through the town like a loon, waving your hands, tearing your hair? There's nothing to stop you---or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute. That feeling. That's the real difference in a life.

He is never going to be here, I thought. He is never coming back. Was I okay with it? No. But missing him every day for the rest of my life was still easier than the fight Sebastian had: to stuff himself inside a box every morning and tuck that box inside his heart and pray that his heart kept beating around the obstacle. Every day I could go to class as exactly the person I am, and meet new people, and come outside later for some fresh air and Frisbee. Every day I would be grateful that no one who matters to me questions whether I am too masculine, too feminine, too open, too closed. Every day I would be grateful for what I have, and that I can be who I am without judgment. So every day I would fight for Sebastian, and people in the same boat, who don’t have what I do, who struggle to find themselves in a world that tells them white and straight and narrow gets first pick in the schoolyard game of life. My chest was congested with regret, and relief, and resolve. Give me more of those, I thought to whoever was listening—whether it was God, or Oz, or the three sisters of Fate. Give me those moments where I think he’s coming back. I can take the hurt. The reminder that he’s not coming back—and why—will keep me fighting.

This story was written many moons ago under an apple tree in an orchard in Kent, which is one of England's prettiest counties . . . I had read at least twenty of the [fairy tales] when I noticed something that had never struck me before--I suppose because I had always taken it for granted. All the princesses, apart from such rare exceptions as Snow White, were blond, blue-eyed, and beautiful, with lovely figures and complexions and extravagantly long hair. This struck me as most unfair, and suddenly I began to wonder just how many handsome young princes would have asked a king for the hand of his daughter if that daughter had happened to be gawky, snub-nosed, and freckled, with shortish mouse-colored hair? None, I suspected. They would all have been of chasing after some lissome Royal Highness with large blue eyes and yards of golden hair and probably nothing whatever between her ears! It was in that moment that a story about a princess who turned out to be ordinary jumped into my mind, and the very next morning I took my pencil box and a large rough-notebook down to the orchard and, having settled myself under an apple tree in full bloom, began to write . . . the day was warm and windless and without a cloud in the sky. A perfect day and a perfect place to write a fairy story.

I live in nature where everything is connected, circular. The seasons are circular. The planet is circular, and so is the planet around the sun. The course of water over the earth is circular coming down from the sky and circulating through the world to spread life and then evaporating up again. I live in a circular teepee and build my fire in a circle. The life cycles of plants and animals are circular. I live outside where I can see this. The ancient people understood that our world is a circle, but we modern people have lost site of that. I don’t live inside buildings because buildings are dead places where nothing grows, where water doesn’t flow, and where life stops. I don’t want to live in a dead place. People say that I don’t live in a real world, but it’s modern Americans who live in a fake world, because they have stepped outside the natural circle of life. Do people live in circles today? No. They live in boxes. They wake up every morning in a box of their bedrooms because a box next to them started making beeping noises to tell them it was time to get up. They eat their breakfast out of a box and then they throw that box away into another box. Then they leave the box where they live and get into another box with wheels and drive to work, which is just another big box broken into little cubicle boxes where a bunch of people spend their days sitting and staring at the computer boxes in front of them. When the day is over, everyone gets into the box with wheels again and goes home to the house boxes and spends the evening staring at the television boxes for entertainment. They get their music from a box, they get their food from a box, they keep their clothing in a box, they live their lives in a box. Break out of the box! This not the way humanity lived for thousands of years.

Starting isn’t like that. Starting something is not an event; it’s a series of events. You decide to walk to Cleveland. So you take a first step in the right direction. That’s starting. You spend the rest of the day walking toward Cleveland, one step at a time, picking your feet up and putting them down. At the end of the day, twenty miles later, you stop at a hotel. And what happens the next morning? Either you quit the project or you start again, walking to Cleveland. In fact, every step is a new beginning. Sure, you’re closer than you were yesterday or last week, but you’re still...

I feel completely embarrassed and remember the lock on the door and think: He knows, he knows, it shows, shows completely. “He’s out back,” Mr. Garret tells me mildly, “unpacking shipments.” Then he returns to the papers. I feel compelled to explain myself. “I just thought I’d come by. Before babysitting. You, know, at your house. Just to say hi. So . . . I’m going to do that now. Jase’s in back, then? I’ll just say hi.” I’m so suave. I can hear the ripping sound of the box cutter before I even open the rear door to find Jase with a huge stack of cardboard boxes. His back’s to me and suddenly I’m as shy with him as I was with his father. This is silly. Brushing through my embarrassment, I walk up, put my hand on his shoulder. He straightens up with a wide grin. “Am I glad to see you!” “Oh, really?” “Really. I thought you were Dad telling me I was messing up again. I’ve been a disaster all day. Kept knocking things over. Paint cans, our garden display. He finally sent me out here when I knocked over a ladder. I think I’m a little preoccupied.” “Maybe you should have gotten more sleep,” I offer. “No way,” he says. Then we just gaze at each other for a long moment. For some reason, I expect him to look different, the way I expected I would myself in the mirror this morning . . . I thought I would come across richer, fuller, as happy outside as I was inside, but the only thing that showed was my lips puffy from kisses. Jase is the same as ever also. “That was the best study session I ever had,” I tell him. “Locked in my memory too,” he says, then glances away as though embarrassed, bending to tear open another box. “Even though thinking about it made me hit my thumb with a hammer putting up a wall display.” “This thumb?” I reach for one of his callused hands, kiss the thumb. “It was the left one.” Jase’s face creases into a smile as I pick up his other hand. “I broke my collarbone once,” he tells me, indicating which side. I kiss that. “Also some ribs during a scrimmage freshman year.” I do not pull his shirt up to where his finger points now. I am not that bold. But I do lean in to kiss him through the soft material of his shirt. “Feeling better?” His eyes twinkle. “In eighth grade, I got into a fight with this kid who was picking on Duff and he gave me a black eye.” My mouth moves to his right eye, then the left. He cups the back of my neck in his warm hands, settling me into the V of his legs, whispering into my ear, “I think there was a split lip involved too.” Then we are just kissing and everything else drops away. Mr. Garret could come out at any moment, a truck full of supplies could drive right on up, a fleet of alien spaceships could darken the sky, I’m not sure I’d notice.

You big ugly. You too empty. You desert with your nothing nothing nothing. You scorched suntanned. Old too quickly. Acres of suburbs watching the telly. You bore me. Freckle silly children. You nothing much. With your big sea. Beach beach beach. I’ve seen enough already. You dumb dirty city with bar stools. You’re ugly. You silly shopping town. You copy. You too far everywhere. You laugh at me. When I came this woman gave me a box of biscuits. You try to be friendly but you’re not very friendly. You never ask me to your house. You insult me. You don’t know how to be with me. Road road tree tree. I came from crowded and many. I came from rich. You have nothing to offer. You’re poor and spread thin. You big. So what. I’m small. It’s what’s in. You silent on Sunday. Nobody on your streets. You dead at night. You go to sleep too early. You don’t excite me. You scare me with your hopeless. Asleep when you walk. Too hot to think. You big awful. You don’t match me. You burnt out. You too big sky. You make me a dot in the nowhere. You laugh with your big healthy. You want everyone to be the same. You’re dumb. You do like anybody else. You engaged Doreen. You big cow. You average average. Cold day at school playing around at lunchtime. Running around for nothing. You never accept me. For your own. You always ask me where I’m from. You always ask me. You tell me I look strange. Different. You don’t adopt me. You laugh at the way I speak. You think you’re better than me. You don’t like me. You don’t have any interest in another country. Idiot centre of your own self. You think the rest of the world walks around without shoes or electric light. You don’t go anywhere. You stay at home. You like one another. You go crazy on Saturday night. You get drunk. You don’t like me and you don’t like women. You put your arm around men in bars. You’re rough. I can’t speak to you. You burly burly. You’re just silly to me. You big man. Poor with all your money. You ugly furniture. You ugly house. You relaxed in your summer stupor. All year. Never fully awake. Dull at school. Wait for other people to tell you what to do. Follow the leader. Can’t imagine. Workhorse. Thick legs. You go to work in the morning. You shiver on a tram.

Her stomach lurches. She fancies him sooo much - she is powerless to resist. How can she possibly? She knows it's wrong: he has a girlfriend - he lives with her, for goodness' sake - and what they're doing is unfair, cruel. She is not sure what he's said to his girlfriend to wangle a night away and she doesn't want to know. She would hate it if it was done to her - she has never seen herself as the kind of girl who would steal another woman's man. She and Anna have always been most disapproving about women who do that, arguing through college and beyond that there are plenty of available men out there, that it is quite unnecessary to go for those already spoken for. But she has liked Simon since day one, and he is the one who initiated this whole thing. He is the one who blew her away with a clandestine kiss just a week ago, who asked if he could come back and stay at hers afterwards; he is the one who doubtless made unconvincing excuses when he returned home the next day. And it only took that single night to open this Pandora's box of mutual passion, being together was far, far better than it should have been, were it only a one-night stand. Karen senses that he really likes her.

I was climbing into bed one night, accompanied by all the usual paraphernalia – laptop, Kindle, box of tissues for my early morning nose – my nose will kill me one day – notebook and a couple of pens – because they all run out together – and a Terry Pratchett novel. The great man is probably most alarmed to find that death has not released him from the burden of having me take him to bed every night.

When she was three, I sent her to day care for a couple of hours every morning. After a few weeks, the teacher called me and said that she was worried about Lucy. When it was time for the children to have their milk, Lucy would always hang back until all the other kids had taken a carton before she'd take one for herself. The teacher didn't understand. Go get your milk, she'd say to Lucy, but Lucy would always wait around until there was just one carton left. It took a while for me to figure it out. Lucy didn't know which carton was supposed to be her milk. She thought all the other kids knew which ones were theirs, and if she waited until there was only one carton in the box, that one had to be hers. Do you see what I'm talking about, Uncle Nat? She's a little weird—but intelligent weird, if you know what I mean. Not like anyone else. If I hadn't used the wordjust, you would have known where I was all along . . .

Who trusts the Bridge Builder when you wake to snow on your blankets and winter blasting through cracked walls and dinner for four is a fifty cent box of Kraft Dinner rationed in half and your dad tells you every single day that he just doesn't know how there is ever going to be enough? How do you count on life when the hopes don't add up? A morning in late November, joy shimmers. The hopes don't have to add up. The blessings do. ...count blessings and discover who can be counted on.

There are men who carefully manoeuvre a large limousine out of the garage at eight o'clock every morning. Others leave an hour earlier, traveling in a middle-class sedan. Still others leave when it is not yet light, wearing overalls and carrying lunch boxes, to catch buses, subways, or trains to factories or building sites. By a trick of fate, it is always the latter, the poorest, who are exploited by the least attractive women. For, unlike women (who have an eye for money), men notice only woman's external appearance. Therefore, the more desirable women in their own class are always being snatched away from under their noses by men who happen to earn more. No matter what a particular man does or how he spends his day, he has one thing in common with all other men - he spends it in a degrading manner. And he himself does not gain by it. It is not his own livelihood that matters: he would have to struggle far less for that, since luxuries do not mean anything to him anyway it is the fact that he does it for others that makes him so tremendously proud. He will undoubtedly have a photograph of his wife and children on his desk, and will miss no opportunity to hand it around. No matter what a man's job may be - bookkeeper, doctor, bus driver, or managing director - every moment of his life will be spent as a cog in a huge and pitiless system - a system designed to exploit him to the utmost, to his dying day. (...) We have long ceased to play the games of childhood. As children, we became bored quickly and changed from one game to another. A man is like a child who is condemned to play the same game for the rest of his life.

That’s what you’ll find out here in the wastelands. Almost all of these people are just like you. They want to do the right thing, and every morning, they wake up and go do it. Every. Single. Day.

Every week seems to bring another luxuriantly creamy envelope, the thickness of a letter-bomb, containing a complex invitation – a triumph of paper engineering – and a comprehensive dossier of phone numbers, email addresses, websites, how to get there, what to wear, where to buy the gifts. Country house hotels are being block-booked, great schools of salmon are being poached, vast marquees are appearing overnight like Bedouin tent cities. Silky grey morning suits and top hats are being hired and worn with an absolutely straight face, and the times are heady and golden for florists and caterers, string quartets and Ceilidh callers, ice sculptors and the makers of disposable cameras. Decent Motown cover-bands are limp with exhaustion. Churches are back in fashion, and these days the happy couple are travelling the short distance from the place of worship to the reception on open-topped London buses, in hot-air balloons, on the backs of matching white stallions, in micro-lite planes. A wedding requires immense reserves of love and commitment and time off work, not least from the guests. Confetti costs eight pounds a box. A bag of rice from the corner shop just won’t cut it anymore.

Almondine To her, the scent and the memory of him were one. Where it lay strongest, the distant past came to her as if that morning: Taking a dead sparrow from her jaws, before she knew to hide such things. Guiding her to the floor, bending her knee until the arthritis made it stick, his palm hotsided on her ribs to measure her breaths and know where the pain began. And to comfort her. That had been the week before he went away. He was gone, she knew this, but something of him clung to the baseboards. At times the floor quivered under his footstep. She stood then and nosed into the kitchen and the bathroom and the bedroom-especially the closet-her intention to press her ruff against his hand, run it along his thigh, feel the heat of his body through the fabric. Places, times, weather-all these drew him up inside her. Rain, especially, falling past the double doors of the kennel, where he’d waited through so many storms, each drop throwing a dozen replicas into the air as it struck the waterlogged earth. And where the rising and falling water met, something like an expectation formed, a place where he might appear and pass in long strides, silent and gestureless. For she was not without her own selfish desires: to hold things motionless, to measure herself against them and find herself present, to know that she was alive precisely because he needn’t acknowledge her in casual passing; that utter constancy might prevail if she attended the world so carefully. And if not constancy, then only those changes she desired, not those that sapped her, undefined her. And so she searched. She’d watched his casket lowered into the ground, a box, man-made, no more like him than the trees that swayed under the winter wind. To assign him an identity outside the world was not in her thinking. The fence line where he walked and the bed where he slept-that was where he lived, and they remembered him. Yet he was gone. She knew it most keenly in the diminishment of her own self. In her life, she’d been nourished and sustained by certain things, him being one of them, Trudy another, and Edgar, the third and most important, but it was really the three of them together, intersecting in her, for each of them powered her heart a different way. Each of them bore different responsibilities to her and with her and required different things from her, and her day was the fulfillment of those responsibilities. She could not imagine that portion of her would never return. With her it was not hope, or wistful thoughts-it was her sense of being alive that thinned by the proportion of her spirit devoted to him. "ory of Edgar Sawtelle" As spring came on, his scent about the place began to fade. She stopped looking for him. Whole days she slept beside his chair, as the sunlight drifted from eastern-slant to western-slant, moving only to ease the weight of her bones against the floor. And Trudy and Edgar, encapsulated in mourning, somehow forgot to care for one another, let alone her. Or if they knew, their grief and heartache overwhelmed them. Anyway, there was so little they might have done, save to bring out a shirt of his to lie on, perhaps walk with her along the fence line, where fragments of time had snagged and hung. But if they noticed her grief, they hardly knew to do those things. And she without the language to ask.

As the days grew longer, and the last few touches of frost were melting, in the haze of dappled morning sun, children peered into the yellow window-box, long shadows dancing around their feet, their voices echoing.

He cannot do anything deliberate now. The strain of his whole weight on his outstretched arms hurts too much. The pain fills him up, displaces thought, as much for him as it has for everyone else who has ever been stuck to one of these horrible contrivances, or for anyone else who dies in pain from any of the world’s grim arsenal of possibilities. And yet he goes on taking in. It is not what he does, it is what he is. He is all open door: to sorrow, suffering, guilt, despair, horror, everything that cannot be escaped, and he does not even try to escape it, he turns to meet it, and claims it all as his own. This is mine now, he is saying; and he embraces it with all that is left in him, each dark act, each dripping memory, as if it were something precious, as if it were itself the loved child tottering homeward on the road. But there is so much of it. So many injured children; so many locked rooms; so much lonely anger; so many bombs in public places; so much vicious zeal; so many bored teenagers at roadblocks; so many drunk girls at parties someone thought they could have a little fun with; so many jokes that go too far; so much ruining greed; so much sick ingenuity; so much burned skin. The world he claims, claims him. It burns and stings, it splinters and gouges, it locks him round and drags him down… All day long, the next day, the city is quiet. The air above the city lacks the usual thousand little trails of smoke from cookfires. Hymns rise from the temple. Families are indoors. The soldiers are back in barracks. The Chief Priest grows hoarse with singing. The governor plays chess with his secretary and dictates letters. The free bread the temple distributed to the poor has gone stale by midday, but tastes all right dipped in water or broth. Death has interrupted life only as much as it ever does. We die one at a time and disappear, but the life of the living continues. The earth turns. The sun makes its way towards the western horizon no slower or faster than it usually does. Early Sunday morning, one of the friends comes back with rags and a jug of water and a box of the grave spices that are supposed to cut down on the smell. She’s braced for the task. But when she comes to the grave she finds that the linen’s been thrown into the corner and the body is gone. Evidently anonymous burial isn’t quite anonymous enough, after all. She sits outside in the sun. The insects have woken up, here at the edge of the desert, and a bee is nosing about in a lily like silk thinly tucked over itself, but much more perishable. It won’t last long. She takes no notice of the feet that appear at the edge of her vision. That’s enough now, she thinks. That’s more than enough. Don’t be afraid, says Yeshua. Far more can be mended than you know. She is weeping. The executee helps her to stand up.

I leave entry for the first day of the tenth month in the year the albatross came to the south-western halls This morning I fetched the small cardboard box with the word AQUARIUM and the picture of an octopus on it. It is the box that originally contained the shoes Dr Ketterley gave me. When Dr Ketterley told me to hide Myself from 16, I took the ornaments out of my hair and placed them in the box. But now, wanting to look my best when I enter the New World, I spent two or three hours putting them back in, all the pretty things that I have found or made: seashells, coral beads, pearls, tiny pebbles and interesting fishbones. When Raphael arrived, she seemed rather astonished at my pleasant appearance. I took my messenger bag with all my Journals and my favourite pens and we walked towards the two Minotaurs in the South-Eastern Corner. The shadows between them shimmered slightly. The shadows suggested the shape of a corridor or alleyway with dim walls and, at the end of it, lights, flashes of moving colour that my eye could not interpret. I took one last look at the Eternal House. I shivered. Raphael took my hand. Then, together, we walked into the corridor.

champagne, n. You appear at the foot of the bed with a bottle of champagne, and I have no idea why. I search my mind desperately for an occasion I've forgotten - is this some obscure anniversary or, even worse, a not-so-obscure one? Then I think you have something to tell me, some good news to share, but your smile is silent, cryptic. I sit up in bed, ask you what's going on, and you shake your head, as if to say that nothing's going on, as if to pretend that we usually start our Wednesday mornings with champagne. You touch the bottle to my leg - I feel the cool condensation and the glass, the fact that the bottle must have been sleeping all night in the refrigerator without me noticing. You have long-stemmed glasses in you other hand, and you place them on the nightstand, beside the uncommenting clock, the box of kleenex, the tumbler of water. "The thing about champagne," you say, unfailing the cork, unwinding its wire restraint, "is that it is the ultimate associative object. Every time you open a bottle of champagne, it's a celebration, so there's no better way of starting a celebration than opening a bottle of champagne. Every time you sip it, you're sipping from all those other celebrations. The joy accumulates over time." You pop the cork. The bubbles rise. I feel some of the spray on my skin. You pour. "But why?" I ask as you hand me my glass. You raise yours and ask, "Why not? What better way to start the day?" We drink a toast to that.

Living like this means you don't have a container anymore for the different days, can't hold in a little twenty-four-hour-sized box set of events that constitute a unit, something you can compartmentalize, something with a beginning and an end, something to fill with a to-do list. Living like this means that it all runs together, a cold and bright December morning with your father or a lazy evening in late August, one of those sunsets that seem to take longer than is possible, where the sun just refuses to go down, where the hour seems to elongate to the point that it doesn't seem like it can stretch any farther without detaching completely from the hour before it, like a piece of taffy, like under sea molten lava forming a new island, a piece of time detaching from the seafloor and floating up to the surface.

Set your 3 MITs (Most Important Tasks) each morning. Single-task. When you work on a task, don’t switch to other tasks. Process your in-box to empty. Check e-mail just twice a day. Exercise five to ten minutes a day. Work while disconnected, with no distractions. Follow a morning routine.

In the course of my life I have had pre-pubescent ballerinas; emaciated duchesses, dolorous and forever tired, melomaniac and morphine-sodden; bankers' wives with eyes hollower than those of suburban streetwalkers; music-hall chorus girls who tip creosote into their Roederer when getting drunk... I have even had the awkward androgynes, the unsexed dishes of the day of the *tables d'hote* of Montmartre. Like any vulgar follower of fashion, like any member of the herd, I have made love to bony and improbably slender little girls, frightened and macabre, spiced with carbolic and peppered with chlorotic make-up. Like an imbecile, I have believed in the mouths of prey and sacrificial victims. Like a simpleton, I have believed in the large lewd eyes of a ragged heap of sickly little creatures: alcoholic and cynical shop girls and whores. The profundity of their eyes and the mystery of their mouths... the jewellers of some and the manicurists of others furnish them with *eaux de toilette*, with soaps and rouges. And Fanny the etheromaniac, rising every morning for a measured dose of cola and coca, does not put ether only on her handkerchief. It is all fakery and self-advertisement - *truquage and battage*, as their vile argot has it. Their phosphorescent rottenness, their emaciated fervour, their Lesbian blight, their shop-sign vices set up to arouse their clients, to excite the perversity of young and old men alike in the sickness of perverse tastes! All of it can sparkle and catch fire only at the hour when the gas is lit in the corridors of the music-halls and the crude nickel-plated decor of the bars. Beneath the cerise three-ply collars of the night-prowlers, as beneath the bulging silks of the cyclist, the whole seductive display of passionate pallor, of knowing depravity, of exhausted and sensual anaemia - all the charm of spicy flowers celebrated in the writings of Paul Bourget and Maurice Barres - is nothing but a role carefully learned and rehearsed a hundred times over. It is a chapter of the MANCHON DE FRANCINE read over and over again, swotted up and acted out by ingenious barnstormers, fully conscious of the squalid salacity of the male of the species, and knowledgeable in the means of starting up the broken-down engines of their customers. To think that I also have loved these maleficent and sick little beasts, these fake Primaveras, these discounted Jocondes, the whole hundred-franc stock-in-trade of Leonardos and Botticellis from the workshops of painters and the drinking-dens of aesthetes, these flowers mounted on a brass thread in Montparnasse and Levallois-Perret! And the odious and tiresome travesty - the corsetted torso slapped on top of heron's legs, painful to behold, the ugly features primed by boulevard boxes, the fake Dresden of Nina Grandiere retouched from a medicine bottle, complaining and spectral at the same time - of Mademoiselle Guilbert and her long black gloves!... Have I now had enough of the horror of this nightmare! How have I been able to tolerate it for so long? The fact is that I was then ignorant even of the nature of my sickness. It was latent in me, like a fire smouldering beneath the ashes. I have cherished it since... perhaps since early childhood, for it must always have been in me, although I did not know it!

Every morning when we get up, we relish the day’s upcoming battles. They keep us alive, and they keep Bloomberg’s corporate family thriving. We can’t wait for tomorrow. Who says we can’t do that? What do you mean they’ll beat us? Have them put on their boxing gloves, and send them into the ring. We’re ready!

more than anything else was … CHOCOLATE. Walking to school in the mornings, Charlie could see great slabs of chocolate piled up high in the shop windows, and he would stop and stare and press his nose against the glass, his mouth watering like mad. Many times a day, he would see other children taking bars of creamy chocolate out of their pockets and munching them greedily, and that, of course, was pure torture. Only once a year, on his birthday, did Charlie Bucket ever get to taste a bit of chocolate. The whole family saved up their money for that special occasion, and when the great day arrived, Charlie was always presented with one small chocolate bar to eat all by himself. And each time he received it, on those marvellous birthday mornings, he would place it carefully in a small wooden box that he owned, and treasure it as though it were a bar of solid gold; and for the next few days, he would allow himself only to look at it, but never to touch it.

A diary, the first of a long succession, was given to me for Christmas 1920, and the entry for New Year’s Day might have been written by a child of five. Here was no budding woman, ripe for sex instruction, but someone who perhaps had been left behind on the Never Never Island in Peter Pan. I quote: ‘New Year’s Day. I oversleep myself. We go for a long walk in the morning and stay indoors in the afternoon. It is my teddy-bear’s birthday. I give a party for her. Angela is very annoying. Jeanne and I box, and then I pretend I am a midshipman hunting slaves. Daddy says I have a stoop. I begin to read a book called With Allenby in Palestine.

The question that had bloomed in her mind while sitting on the bench that long ago summer day resurfaced—and rather rudely—earlier this morning as Gwendy was busy cushioning the button box in her carry-on bag with rolled up wads of socks and sweaters: How much of her life is her own doing, and how much the doing of the box with its treats and buttons?

And I want to play hide-and-seek and give you my clothes and tell you I like your shoes and sit on the steps while you take a bath and massage your neck and kiss your feet and hold your hand and go for a meal and not mind when you eat my food and meet you at Rudy’s and talk about the day and type your letters and carry your boxes and laugh at your paranoia and give you tapes you don’t listen to and watch great films and watch terrible films and complain about the radio and take pictures of you when you’re sleeping and get up to fetch you coffee and bagels and Danish and go to Florent and drink coffee at midnight and have you steal my cigarettes and never be able to find a match and tell you about the the programme I saw the night before and take you to the eye hospital and not laugh at your jokes and want you in the morning but let you sleep for a while and kiss your back and stroke your skin and tell you how much I love your hair your eyes your lips your neck your breasts your arse your and sit on the steps smoking till your neighbour comes home and sit on the steps smoking till you come home and worry when you’re late and be amazed when you’re early and give you sunflowers and go to your party and dance till I’m black and be sorry when I’m wrong and happy when you forgive me and look at your photos and wish I’d known you forever and hear your voice in my ear and feel your skin on my skin (...) .

Are you okay?” Polly shrugged. “One of the boats isn’t back yet.” “Is it the one with the sexy beardy?” Polly swallowed and nodded. Several people from the village came up to pat her shoulder and thank her for her contribution. “Move over,” said Kerensa, and she started buttering rolls. “I can’t believe you aren’t charging for this. It’s no way to run a business. Actually you should charge treble to all the rubberneckers.” Polly gave her a look. “Okay, okay, just saying.” A substantial figure approached slowly, holding a large tray. Polly squinted in the watery sunlight. “Who’s that?” asked Kerensa. “Oh, is it the old boot?” “Ssh,” said Polly as Mrs. Manse came into earshot. She looked at what Polly was doing and sniffed. Polly bit her lip, worried that she was going to get a telling-off. This wasn’t her business, after all; she didn’t get to make these kinds of decisions. Mrs. Manse surveyed the makeshift stall, surrounded by people—it had become something of a focal point—and harrumphed crossly. Then she banged down the large tray. It held the entire day’s selection of cream horns and fancies. “I’ll need that box back in the morning,” was all she said before turning around and marching back up the road. “Well, well,” said Kerensa, as Polly started handing out cakes to hungry crew and passing children. As evening fell and the RNLI boat came back for the sixth time, empty-handed, Polly felt her fears beginning to grow again. During the day, as the other boats had

He slammed his cup down. Coffee splashed over the rim and puddled around the base. “What on earth gave you the idea I want space? I want you here. With me. All the time. I want to come home and hear the shower running and get excited because I know you’re in it. I want to struggle every morning to get up and go to the gym because I hate the idea of leaving your warm body behind in bed. I want to hear a key turn in the lock and feel contented knowing you’re home. I don’t want fucking space, Harper.” Harper laughed. “What’s funny?” “I didn’t mean space. I meant space, like closet space, a drawer in the bedroom, part of the counter in the bathroom.” Trent’s mouth twitched, a slight smile making its way to his lips. “Like a compromise. A commitment that I want more. I seem to recall you telling me in the car about something being a step in the right direction to a goal we both agreed on. Well, I want all those things you just said, with you, eventually. And if we start to leave things at each other’s places, it’s a step, right?” Trent reached up, flexing his delicious tattooed bicep, and scratched the side of his head. Without speaking, he leapt to his feet, grabbing Harper and pulling her into a fireman’s lift. “Trent,” she squealed, kicking her feet to get free. “What are you doing?” He slapped her butt playfully and laughed as he carried her down the hallway. Reaching the bedroom, Trent threw her onto the bed. “We’re doing space. Today, right now.” He started pulling open his drawers, looking inside each one before pulling stuff out of the top drawer and dividing it between the others. “Okay, this is for your underwear. I need to see bras, panties, and whatever other girly shit you have in here before the end of the day.” Like a panther on the prowl, Trent launched himself at the bed, grabbing her ankle and pulling her to the edge of the bed before sweeping her into his arms to walk to the bathroom. He perched her on the corner of the vanity, where his stuff was spread across the two sinks. “Pick one.” “Pick one what?” “Sink. Which do you want?” “You’re giving me a whole sink? Wait … stop…” Trent grabbed her and started tickling her. Harper didn’t recognize the girly giggles that escaped her. Pointing to the sink farthest away from the door, she watched as he pushed his toothbrush, toothpaste, and styling products to the other side of the vanity. He did the same thing with the vanity drawers and created some space under the sink. “I expect to see toothbrush, toothpaste, your shampoo, and whatever it is that makes you smell like vanilla in here.” “You like the vanilla?” It never ceased to surprise her, the details he remembered. Turning, he grabbed her cheeks in both hands and kissed her hard. He trailed kisses behind her ear and inhaled deeply before returning to face her. “Absolutely. I fucking love vanilla,” he murmured against her lips before kissing her again, softly this time. “Oh and I’d better see a box of tampons too.” “Oh my goodness, you are beyond!” Harper blushed furiously. “I want you for so much more than just sex, Harper.

But when you’re in love with someone, you’ll still do whatever it takes to get them into bed, but it’s because the next morning you want to wake up with them. You want to listen to her ideas, even the ones that are so fucking crazy you know they’ll never fly. You want to see her smile and hear her laugh. You want to know that you’re the reason for it and you hope that you get to do it day after day after day.

Remain Healthy All Day: Drink a spoonful of oil every morning. Reach up with your arms and extend your body to its full height. Use a warm towel to dry the cat. Consider a philosophical idea larger than your area of expertise. Avoid getting cancer. Chalk up bad decisions to outside influences. Don't take your father too seriously. Play a game where you close your eyes very tightly, and when you open your eyes, you have amnesia and you must draw the details of your life from your surroundings. Give up smoking, drinking, and poetic verse. Remind yourself how important you are to your friends or at least your animals. Wax the floor in socks. Enter into a healthy, monogamous relationship. Consider briefly the idea of a soulmate. Light an entire box of matches and throw it into the sink. Hold a metal rod to the heavens and beg for whatever comes next.

He couldn’t have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life. This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn’t exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges. The owner took her time unpacking the books she’d bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love. She’d never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called 'The Age of Silence.' The owner of the secondhand bookstore lowered the volume of the radio. She flipped to the back flap of the book to find out more about the author, but all it said was that Zvi Litvinoff had been born in Poland and moved to Chile in 1941, where he still lived today. There was no photograph. That day, in between helping customers, she finished the book. Before locking up the shop that evening, she placed it in the window, a little wistful about having to part with it. The next morning, the first rays of the rising sun fell across the cover of The History of Love. The first of many flies alighted on its jacket. Its mildewed pages began to dry out in the heat as the blue-gray Persian cat who lorded over the shop brushed past it to lay claim to a pool of sunlight. A few hours later, the first of many passersby gave it a cursory glance as they went by the window. The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it. And that’s what happened. One afternoon a tall young man saw the book in the window. He came into the shop, picked it up, read a few pages, and brought it to the register. When he spoke to the owner, she couldn’t place his accent. She asked where he was from, curious about the person who was taking the book away. Israel, he told her, explaining that he’d recently finished his time in the army and was traveling around South America for a few months. The owner was about to put the book in a bag, but the young man said he didn’t need one, and slipped it into his backpack. The door chimes were still tinkling as she watched him disappear, his sandals slapping against the hot, bright street. That night, shirtless in his rented room, under a fan lazily pushing around the hot air, the young man opened the book and, in a flourish he had been fine-tuning for years, signed his name: David Singer. Filled with restlessness and longing, he began to read.

A large and comfortable double-bedded room had been placed at our disposal, and I was quickly between the sheets, for I was weary after my night of adventure. Sherlock Holmes was a man, however, who when he had an unsolved problem upon his mind would go for days, and even for a week, without rest, turning it over, rearranging his facts, looking at it from every point of view, until he had either fathomed it, or convinced himself that his data were insufficient. It was soon evident to me that he was now preparing for an all-night sitting. He took off his coat and waistcoat, put on a large blue dressing-gown, and then wandered about the room collecting pillows from his bed, and cusions from the sofa and armchairs. With these he constructed a sort of Eastern divan, upon which he perched himself cross-legged, with an ounce of shag tobacco and a box of matches laid out in front of him. In the dim light of the lamp I saw him sitting there, an old brier pipe between his lips, his eyes fixed vacantly upon the corner of the ceiling, the blue smoke curling up from him, silent, motionless, with the light shining upon his strong-set aquiline features. So he sat as I dropped off to sleep, and so he sat when a sudden ejaculation caused me to wake up, and I found the summer sun shining into the apartment. The pipe was still between his lips, the smoke still curled upwards, and the room was full of a dense tobacco haze, but nothing remained of the heap of shag which I had seen upon the previous night. 'Awake, Watson?' he asked. 'Yes.' 'Game for a morning drive?' 'Certainly.' 'Then dress. No one is stirring yet, but I know where the stable-boy sleeps, and we shall soon have the trap out.

I looked into the display window this morning. On a white marble shelf are aligned innumerable boxes, packages, cornets of silver and gold paper, rosettes, bells, flowers, hearts, and long curls of multicolored ribbon. In glass bells and dishes lie the chocolates, the pralines, Venus's nipples, truffles, mendiants, candied fruits, hazelnut clusters, chocolate seashells, candied rose petals, sugared violets... Protected from the sun by the half-blind that shields them, they gleam darkly, like sunken treasure, Aladdin's cave of sweet clichés. And in the middle she has built a magnificent centerpiece. A gingerbread house, walls of chocolate-coated pain d'épices with the detail piped on in silver and gold icing, roof tiles of florentines studded with crystallized fruits, strange vines of icing and chocolate growing up the walls, marzipan birds singing in chocolate trees... And the witch herself, dark chocolate from the top of her pointed hat to the hem of her long cloak half-astride a broomstick that is in reality a giant guimauve, the long twisted marshmallows that dangle from the stalls of sweet-vendors on carnival days...

There was still some time before the train opened its doors for boarding, yet passengers were hurriedly buying boxed dinners, snacks, cans of beer, and magazines at the kiosk. Some had white iPod headphones in their ears, already off in their own little worlds. Others palmed smartphones, thumbing out texts, some talking so loudly into their phones that their voices rose above the blaring PA announcements. Tsukuru spotted a young couple, seated close together on a bench, happily sharing secrets. A pair of sleepy-looking five- or six-year-old twin boys, with their mother and father dragging them along by their hands, were whisked past where Tsukuru sat. The boys clutched small game devices. Two young foreign men hefted heavy-looking backpacks, while a young woman was lugging a cello case. A woman with a stunning profile passed by. Everyone was boarding a night train, heading to a far-off destination. Tsukuru envied them. At least they had a place they needed to go to. Tsukuru Tazaki had no place he needed to go. He realized that he had never actually been to Matsumoto, or Kofu. Or Shiojiri. Not even to the much closer town of Hachioji. He had watched countless express trains for Matsumoto depart from this platform, but it had never occurred to him that there was a possibility he could board one. Until now he had never thought of it. Why is that? he wondered. Tsukuru imagined himself boarding this train and heading for Matsumoto. It wasn’t exactly impossible. And it didn’t seem like such a terrible idea. He’d suddenly gotten it into his head, after all, to take off for Finland, so why not Matsumoto? What sort of town was it? he wondered. What kind of lives did people lead there? But he shook his head and erased these thoughts. Tomorrow morning it would be impossible to get back to Tokyo in time for work. He knew that much without consulting the timetable. And he was meeting Sara tomorrow night. It was a very important day for him. He couldn’t just take off for Matsumoto on a whim. He drank the rest of his now-lukewarm coffee and tossed the paper cup into a nearby garbage bin. Tsukuru Tazaki had nowhere he had to go. This was like a running theme of his life. He had no place he had to go to, no place to come back to. He never did, and he didn’t now.

Sunday morning dawned bright and cloudless. Ernest awoke early as always. He put on the red "Emporor's robe" and padded softly down the carpeted stairway. The early sunlight lay in pools on the living room floor. He had noticed that the guns were locked up in the basement. But the keys, as he well knew, were on the window ledge above the kitchen sink. He tiptoed down the basement stairs and unlocked the storage room. It smelled as dank as a grave. He chose a double-barreled Boss shotgun with a tight choke. He had used it for years of pigeon shooting. He took some shells from one of the boxes in the storage room, closed and locked the door, and climbed the basement stairs. If he saw the bright day outside, it did not deter him. He crossed the living room to the front foyer, a shrinelike entryway five by seven feet, with oak-paneled walls and a floor of linoleum tile. He had held for years to the maxim: "il faut (d'abord) durer". Now it had been succeeded by another: "il faut (apres tout) mourir". The idea, if not the phrase, filled all his mind. He slipped in two shells, lowered the gun butt carefully to the floor, leaned forward, pressed the twin barrels against his forehead just above the eyebrows, and tripped both triggers.

My mouth went paper-dry as Alis fluffed out the sparkling train of my gown in the shadow of the garden doors. Silk and gossamer rustled and sighed, and I gripped the pale bouquet in my gloved hands, nearly snapping the stems. Elbow-length silk gloves- to hide the marking. Ianthe had delivered them herself this morning in a velvet-lined box. 'Don't be nervous,' Alis chuckled, her tree-bark skin rich and flushed in the honey gold evening light. 'I'm not,' I rasped. 'You're fidgeting like my youngest nephew during a haircut.' She finished fussing over my dress, shooing away some servants who'd come to spy on me before the ceremony. I pretended I didn't see them or the glittering, sunset-gilded crowd seated in the courtyard ahead, and toyed with some invisible fleck on my skirts. 'You look beautiful,' Alis said quietly. I was fairly certain her thoughts on the dress were the same as my own, but I believed her. 'Thank you.' 'And you sound like you're going to your funeral.' I plastered a grin on my face. Alis rolled her eyes. But she nudged me toward the doors as they opened on some immortal wind, lilting music streaming in. 'It's be over faster than you can blink,' she promised, and gently nudged me into the last of the sunlight.

I've read every letter that you've sent me these past two years. In return, I've sent you many form letters, with the hope of one day being able to give you the proper response you deserve. But the more letters you wrote to me, and the more of yourself you gave, the more daunting my task became. I'm sitting beneath a pear tree as I dictate this to you, overlooking the orchards of a friend's estate. I've spent the past few days here, recovering from some medical treatment that has left me physically and emotionally depleted. As I moped about this morning, feeling sorry for myself, it occurred to me, like a simple solution to an impossible problem: today is the day I've been waiting for. You asked me in your first letter if you could be my protege. I don't know about that, but I would be happy to have you join me in Cambridge for a few days. I could introduce you to my colleagues, treat you to the best curry outside India, and show you just how boring the life of an astrophysicist can be. You can have a bright future in the sciences, Oskar. I would be happy to do anything possible to facilitate such a path. It's wonderful to think what would happen if you put your imagination toward scientific ends. But Oskar, intelligent people write to me all the time. In your fifth letter you asked, "What if I never stop inventing?" That question has stuck with me. I wish I were a poet. I've never confessed that to anyone, and I'm confessing it to you, because you've given me reason to feel that I can trust you. I've spent my life observing the universe, mostly in my mind's eye. It's been a tremendously rewarding life, a wonderful life. I've been able to explore the origins of time and space with some of the great living thinkers.But I wish I were a poet. Albert Einstein, a hero of mine, once wrote, "Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open." I'm sure I don't have to tell you that the vast majority of the universe is composed of dark matter. The fragile balance depends on things we'll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Life itself depends on them. What's real? What isn't real? Maybe those aren't the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on? I wish I had made things for life to depend on. What if you never stop inventing? Maybe you're not inventing at all. I'm being called in for breakfast, so I'll have to end this letter here. There's more I want to tell you, and more I want to hear from you. It's a shame we live on different continents. One shame of many. It's so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won't be awake for another five hours, but I can't help feeling that we're sharing this clear and beautiful morning. Your friend, Stephen Hawking

More than even loving your family, there is no more important ambition than finding a job that you love. If you don’t, you’ll reek of self-loathing like a porn star who can’t get the box cover, and your family will hate you for it. Loving your work doesn’t mean finding a job you can tolerate for eight hours a day, but rather a job that gets you flying out of bed in the morning like a Jack Russell who just had a firecracker stuffed up his ass. Was I ever addicted to my job? Damn right I was. You’re fucked if you aren’t. You better scratch and claw like a Chilean miner to find a gig worthy of gettin’ hooked on. Unlike your hobbies or your spouse, you gotta do your job every day regardless of whether or not it gets you revved up.

It is now time to face the fact that English is a crazy language — the most loopy and wiggy of all tongues. In what other language do people drive in a parkway and park in a driveway? In what other language do people play at a recital and recite at a play? Why does night fall but never break and day break but never fall? Why is it that when we transport something by car, it’s called a shipment, but when we transport something by ship, it’s called cargo? Why does a man get a hernia and a woman a hysterectomy? Why do we pack suits in a garment bag and garments in a suitcase? Why do privates eat in the general mess and generals eat in the private mess? Why do we call it newsprint when it contains no printing but when we put print on it, we call it a newspaper? Why are people who ride motorcycles called bikers and people who ride bikes called cyclists? Why — in our crazy language — can your nose run and your feet smell?Language is like the air we breathe. It’s invisible, inescapable, indispensable, and we take it for granted. But, when we take the time to step back and listen to the sounds that escape from the holes in people’s faces and to explore the paradoxes and vagaries of English, we find that hot dogs can be cold, darkrooms can be lit, homework can be done in school, nightmares can take place in broad daylight while morning sickness and daydreaming can take place at night, tomboys are girls and midwives can be men, hours — especially happy hours and rush hours — often last longer than sixty minutes, quicksand works very slowly, boxing rings are square, silverware and glasses can be made of plastic and tablecloths of paper, most telephones are dialed by being punched (or pushed?), and most bathrooms don’t have any baths in them. In fact, a dog can go to the bathroom under a tree —no bath, no room; it’s still going to the bathroom. And doesn’t it seem a little bizarre that we go to the bathroom in order to go to the bathroom? Why is it that a woman can man a station but a man can’t woman one, that a man can father a movement but a woman can’t mother one, and that a king rules a kingdom but a queen doesn’t rule a queendom? How did all those Renaissance men reproduce when there don’t seem to have been any Renaissance women? Sometimes you have to believe that all English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane: In what other language do they call the third hand on the clock the second hand? Why do they call them apartments when they’re all together? Why do we call them buildings, when they’re already built? Why it is called a TV set when you get only one? Why is phonetic not spelled phonetically? Why is it so hard to remember how to spell mnemonic? Why doesn’t onomatopoeia sound like what it is? Why is the word abbreviation so long? Why is diminutive so undiminutive? Why does the word monosyllabic consist of five syllables? Why is there no synonym for synonym or thesaurus? And why, pray tell, does lisp have an s in it? If adults commit adultery, do infants commit infantry? If olive oil is made from olives, what do they make baby oil from? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian consume? If pro and con are opposites, is congress the opposite of progress? ...

But missing him every day for the rest of my life was still easier than the fight Sebastian had: to stuff himself inside a box every morning and tuck that box inside his heart and pray that his heart kept beating around the obstacle. Every day I could go to class as exactly the person I am, and meet new people, and come outside later for some fresh air and Frisbee. Every day I would be grateful that no one who matters to me questions whether I am too masculine, too feminine, too open, too closed. Every day I would be grateful for what I have, and that I can be who I am without judgment. So every day I would fight for Sebastian, and people in the same boat, who don’t have what I do, who struggle to find themselves in a world that tells them white and straight and narrow gets first pick in the schoolyard game of life.

means you don’t have a container anymore for the different days, can’t hold in a little twenty-four-hour-sized box a set of events that constitute a unit, something you can compartmentalize, something with a beginning and an end, something to fill with a to-do list. Living like this means that it all runs together, a cold and bright December morning with your father or a lazy evening in late August, one of those sunsets that seem to take longer than is possible, where the sun just refuses to go down, where the hour seems to elongate to the point that it doesn’t seem like it can stretch any farther without detaching completely from the hour before it, like a piece of taffy, like undersea molten lava forming a new island, a piece of time detaching from the seafloor and floating up to the surface. It’s not comfortable in here.

When she was three, I sent her to day care for a couple of hours every morning. After a few weeks, the teacher called me and said that she was worried about Lucy. When it was time for the children to have their milk, Lucy would always hang back until all the other kids had taken a carton before she'd take one for herself. The teacher didn't understand. Go get your milk, she'd say to Lucy, but Lucy would always wait around until there was just one carton left. It took a while for me to figure it out. Lucy didn't know which carton was supposed to be her milk. She thought all the other kids knew which ones were theirs, and if she waited until there was only one carton in the box, that one had to be hers. Do you see what I'm talking about, Uncle Nat? She's a little weird- but intelligent weird, if you know what I mean. Not like anyone else.

No, you just opened a beverage and took a drink without a second thought. That’s trust! You don’t know any of the thousands of strangers in the supply chain, and yet you took a drink with absolute certainty that it wasn’t poison, or tainted, that there weren’t metal shavings or dead insects in the can. You trusted every one of those strangers so thoroughly that you didn’t even devote one second of thought to it. And you did it because a lifetime of experience has taught you that they can be trusted, almost without fail.” “They don’t do their jobs because they’re trustworthy, they do it because they don’t want to get fired or sued.” “Is that the only thing stopping you from poisoning somebody?” “No.” “That’s what you’ll find out here in the wastelands. Almost all of these people are just like you. They want to do the right thing, and every morning, they wake up and go do it. Every. Single. Day.

Tate was sprawled across the bed in his robe early the next morning when the sound of the front door opening penetrated his mind. There was an unholy commotion out there and his head was still throbbing, despite a bath, several cups of coffee and a handful of aspirin that had been forced on him the day before by two men he’d thought were his friends. He didn’t want to sober up. He only wanted to forget that Cecily didn’t want him anymore. He dragged himself off the bed and went into the living room, just in time to hear the door close. Cecily and her suitcase were standing with mutual rigidity just inside the front door. She was wearing a dress and boots and a coat and hat, red-faced and muttering words Tate had never heard her use before. He scowled. “How did you get here?” he asked. “Your boss brought me!” she raged. “He and that turncoat Colby Lane and two bodyguards, one of whom was the female counterpart of Ivan the Terrible! They forcibly dressed me and packed me and flew me up here on Mr. Hutton’s Learjet! When I refused to get out of the car, the male bodyguard swept me up and carried me here! I am going to kill people as soon as I get my breath and my wits back, and I am starting with you!” He leaned against the wall, still bleary-eyed and only half awake. She was beautiful with her body gently swollen and her lips pouting and her green eye sin their big-lensed frames glittering at him. She registered after a minute that he wasn’t himself. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked abruptly. He didn’t answer. He put a hand to his head. “You’re drunk!” she exclaimed in shock. “I have been,” he replied in a subdued tone. “For about a week, I think. Pierce and Colby got my landlord to let them in yesterday.” She smiled dimly. “I’d made some threats about what I’d do if he ever let anybody else into my apartment, after he let Audrey in the last time. I guess he believed them, because Colby had to flash his company ID to get in.” He chuckled weakly. “Nothing intimidates the masses like a CIA badge, even if it isn’t current.” “You’ve been drunk?” She moved a little closer into the apartment. “But, Tate, you don’t…you don’t drink,” she said. “I do now. The mother of my child won’t marry me,” he said simply. “I said you could have access…” His black eyes slid over her body like caressing hands. He’d missed her unbearably. Just the sight of her was calming now. “So you did.” Why did the feel guilty, for God’s sake, she wondered. She tried to recapture her former outrage. “I’ve been kidnapped!” “Apparently. Don’t look at me. Until today, I was too stoned to lift my head.” He looked around. “I guess they threw out the beer cans and the pizza boxes,” he murmured. “Pity. I think there was a slice of pizza left.” He sighed. “I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten since yesterday.” “Yesterday!

Have you ever wanted something very badly-something that was within your grasp-and yet you were afraid to reach out for it? That night he had answered no. Tonight he would have said yes. Among other things, he wanted to know where she was; a month ago he’d told himself it was because he wanted the divorce petition served. Tonight he was too exhausted from his long internal battle to bother lying to himself anymore. He wanted to know where she was because he needed to know. His grandfather claimed not to know; his uncle and Alexandra both know, but they’d both refused to tell him, and he hadn’t pressed them. Wearily, Ian leaned his head against the back of his chair and closed his eyes, but he wouldn’t sleep, and he knew it, even though it was three o’clock in the morning. He never slept anymore unless he’d either had a day of grueling physical activity or drunk enough brandy to knock himself out. And even when he did, he laid awake, wanting her, and knowing-because she’d told him-that she was somewhere out there, lying awake, wanting him. A faint smile touched his lips as he remembered her standing in the witness box, looking heartbreakingly young and beautiful, first trying logically to explain to everyone what had happened-and when that failed, playing the part of an incorrigible henwit. Ian chuckled, as he’d been doing whenever he thought of her that day. Only Elizabeth would have dared to take on the entire House of Lords-and when she couldn’t sway them with intelligent logic, she had changed tack and used their own stupidity and arrogance to defeat them. If he hadn’t felt so furious and betrayed that day, he’d have stood up and given her the applause she deserved! It was exactly the same tactic she’d used the night he’d been accused of cheating at cards. When she couldn’t convince Everly to withdraw from the duel because Ian was innocent, she’d turned on the hapless youth and outrageously taken him to task because he’d already engaged himself to her the next day. Despite his accusation that her performance in the House of Lords had been motivated by self-interest, he knew it hadn’t. She’d come to save him, she thought, from hanging.

[THE DAILY BREATH] Do you remember the first day of school, when your mom and dad gave you the new uniform, the shiny shoes and a little lunch box with fresh food made that morning? The mystery of your relationship with our Heavenly Father is mirrored in your relationship with your children. For the first 5-6 years of your life, you never asked nor worried about your school uniform, the shoes you will wear or the lunch box for the first day of school. Probably you didn't even know you needed them before school started and you did get them. Your parents knew you needed them, and when the moment arrived, you received them. You didn't get them before or after, but when the moment of need arrived. You might understand now what our Heavenly Father meant when He said: "I will answer them before they even call to me. While they are still talking about their needs, I will go ahead and answer their prayers." Jesus reaffirmed this message when He said: "Your Father knows you need all these even before you even ask Him." Do not worry about the future. There is perfect peace in this moment. Do not worry. Today only remember and trust your Heavenly parent, the One who breathed life into your body and spirit. He will give you all you need. When the moment arrives.

A real house with a copper pot for making jam, and sugar cookies in a metal box hidden deep inside a dresser. A long farmhouse table, thick and homey, and cretonne curtains. She smiled. She had no idea what cretonne was, or even if she'd like it, but she liked the way the words went together: cretonne curtains. She'd have a guest room and- who knows- maybe even some guests. A well-kept little garden, hens who'd provide her with tasty boiled eggs, cats to chase after the field mice and dogs to chase after the cats. A little plot of aromatic herbs, a fireplace, sagging armchairs and books all around. White tablecloths, napkin rings unearthed at flea markets, some sort of device so she could listen to the same operas her father used to listen to, and a coal stove where she could let a rich beef-and-carrot stew simmer all morning along. A rich beef-and-carrot stew. What was she thinking. A little house like the ones that kids draw, with a door and two windows on either side. Old-fashioned, discreet, silent, overrun with Virginia creeper and climbing roses. A house with those little fire bugs on the porch, red and black insects scurrying everywhere in pairs. A warm porch where the heat of the day would linger and she could sit in the evening to watch for the return of the heron.

Once a little boy went to school. One morning, when the little boy had been in school a while, his teacher said: “Today we are going to make a picture.” “Good!” thought the little boy. He liked to make pictures. He could make all kinds. Lions and tigers, Chickens and cows, trains and boats, and he took out his box of crayons and began to draw. But the teacher said: “Wait! It is not time to begin!” And she waited until everyone looked ready. “Now,” said the teacher, “We are going to make flowers.” “Good!” thought the little boy, he liked to make flowers, and he began to make beautiful ones with his pink and orange and blue crayons. But the teacher said “Wait! And I will show you how.” And it was red with a green stem. “There,” said the teacher, “Now you may begin.” The little boy looked at the teacher’s. Then he looked at this own flower. He liked his flower better than the teacher’s. But he did not say this. He just turned his paper over. And made a flower like the teacher’s. It was red with a green stem. On another day, when the little boy had opened the door from the outside all by himself, the teacher said: “Today we are going to make something with clay.” “Good!” thought the little boy. Snakes and snowmen, elephants and mice, cars, and trucks, and he began to pull and pinch his ball of clay. But the teacher said: “Wait!” It is not time to begin!” And she waited until everyone looked ready. “Now,” said the teacher, “We are going to make a dish.” He liked to make dishes. And he began to make some that were all shapes and sizes. But the teacher said, “Wait! And I will show you how.” And she showed everyone how to make a deep dish. “There,” said the teacher. “Now you may begin.” The little boy looked at the teacher’s dish, then he looked at his own. He liked his dish better than the teacher’s. But he did not say this. He just rolled his clay into a big ball again. And made a dish like the teacher’s. It was a deep dish. And pretty soon the little boy learned to wait, and to watch and to make things just like the teacher. And pretty soon he didn’t make things of his own anymore. Then it happened that the little boy and his family moved to another house, in another city, and the little boy had to go to another school. And the very first day he was there the teacher said: “Today we are going to make a picture.” “Good!” Thought the little boy and he waited for the teacher to tell him what to do. But the teacher didn’t say anything. She just walked around the room. When she came to the little boy she said, “Don’t you want to make a picture?” “Yes,” said the little boy. “What are we going to make?” “I don’t know until you make it,” said the teacher. “How shall I make it?” asked the little boy. “Why, any way you like,” said the teacher. “Any color?” asked the little boy. “Any color,” said the teacher. “If everyone made the same picture, and the used the same colors, how would I know who made what?” “I don’t know,” said the little boy. And he began to make a red flower with a green stem.

The man exhaled and wondered. He thought about the squid, and he thought about summers divested of chill and abundant with the strange precocity of wild laughter, of warm days spent tracking footfalls in warm sands, of that electric mane of hair, as black as starlight, wheeling and blowing into her eyes and his mouth as the air accelerated over the water. He thought about the dresses, as candid and diaphanous as photographs captured of butterflies in flight, packed up, boxed in, sent away. He thought about domestic sounds smote to dark corners in dim rooms as vast and terrestrial as forsaken landscape, sounds that should not ever be pursued and evicted from this hillside house, sounds that had as much utility and purpose as the wood fashioned to stabilise the house, sounds who proved the most generous tenants he could have ever invited to share the burdensome wealth of his privacy, sounds who left like friends do when they mean not to return, without word or signal or symbol, but with the cruelty of caprice and the loveless whispers of memories receding to a breakwater of ruin. He thought about how sad he had become, and how ugly, and how fast. He thought about all the mornings covertly spoiled by a ramshackle attack of tears, he thought about the immeasurable distance from his house on its hill to the first forge of shoreline by the bay, he thought about the dialogue of terns and the sordid mystery of snow, but he fell asleep thinking about summers ended and the squid, at rest in a shoebox in the bathroom.

Saturday is birthday cake day. During the week, the panadería is all strong coffee and pan dulce. But on weekends, it's sprinkle cookies and pink cake. By ten or eleven this morning, we'll get the first rush of mothers picking up yellow boxes in between buying balloons and paper streamers. In the back kitchen, my father hums along with the radio as he shapes the pastry rounds of ojos de buey, the centers giving off the smell of orange and coconut. It may be so early the birds haven't even started up yet, but with enough of my mother's coffee and Mariachi Los Camperos, my father is as awake as if it were afternoon. While he fills the bakery cases, my mother does the delicate work of hollowing out the piñata cakes, and when her back is turned, I rake my fingers through the sprinkle canisters. During open hours, most of my work is filling bakery boxes and ringing up customers (when it's busy) or washing dishes and windexing the glass cases (when it's not). But on birthday cake days, we're busy enough that I get to slide sheet cakes from the oven and cover them in pink frosting and tiny round nonpareils, like they're giant circus-animal cookies. I get to press hundreds-and-thousands into the galletas de grajea, the round, rainbow-sprinkle-covered cookies that were my favorite when I was five. My mother finishes hollowing two cake halves, fills them with candy- green, yellow, and pink this time- and puts them back together. Her piñatas are half our Saturday cake orders, both birthday girls and grandfathers delighting at the moment of seeing M&M's or gummy worms spill out. She covers them with sugar-paste ruffles or coconut to look like the tiny paper flags on a piñata, or frosting and a million rainbow sprinkles.

Back in bed I listen to every sound. The plastic tarp over the table on the balcony crunching in the cold wind. the two short clicks in the walls before the heat comes on with a low whoosh. I hear a constant base hum all around, the nervous system of the building, carrying electricity and gas and phone conversations to all our respective little boxes. I listen to it all, the constant, the rhythmic, and the random. It's hard to measure the night by sound, but it can be done. I know that when the traffic noise is quietest, it's about 4:30 in the morning. I know that when the 'Times' hits the door, it's around 5. Now the clock says it's morning, 5:45, but the November sky still says midnight. I hear the elevator ding twenty yards down the hall outside our door. Seven seconds later, I hear his keys in our lock, then his heavy backpack hitting the floor. I hear the refrigerator door open, the unsealing vacuum wheezing as the cold inside air meets the dry heat in the apartment. The cupboard door. A glass. The crescendoing fizz of a new two-liter Diet Coke bottle opening. It's a one-sided conversation with no one actually talking. I lie in the dark, close my eyes, and try not to listen to his movements around apartment. these are the sounds of our life together before it got so messy. I want to say something back. Anything, anything that sounds like things sounded last summer. Even just to myself. Just something out loud. The inside of my eyelids turn pink. My door has been opened and the light from the hallway shines through them. I won't open them. There is no noise. Like an eclipse, the world behind my closed eyes goes dark again. For just one second, before I feel a kiss on my right eye. I keep them closed. A kiss on the left one. I open them. Jack looks down at me and closes his eyes. He leans forward and puts his forehead on my chest and goes limp. ''Blues Clues' is on,' he says softly into my tee shirt. His muffled voice vibrating only a half inch away from my heart.

Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who was admired by all, but no one dared to ask for her hand in marriage. In despair, the king consulted the god Apollo. He told him that Psyche should be dressed in mourning and left alone on top of a mountain. Before daybreak, a serpent would come to meet and marry her. The king obeyed, and all night the princess waited for her husband to appear, deathly afraid and freezing cold. Finally, she slept. When she awoke, she found herself crowned a queen in a beautiful palace. Every night her husband came to her and they made love, but he had imposed one condition: Psyche could have all she desired, but she had to trust him completely and could never see his face.” How awful, I think, but I don’t dare interrupt him. “The young woman lived happily for a long time. She had comfort, affection, joy, and she was in love with the man who visited her every night. However, occasionally she was afraid that she was married to a hideous serpent. Early one morning, while her husband slept, she lit a lantern and saw Eros, a man of incredible beauty, lying by her side. The light woke him, and seeing that the woman he loved was unable to fulfill his one request, Eros vanished. Desperate to get her lover back, Psyche submitted to a series of tasks given to her by Aphrodite, Eros’s mother. Needless to say, her mother-in-law was incredibly jealous of Psyche’s beauty and she did everything she could to thwart the couple’s reconciliation. In one of the tasks, Psyche opened a box that makes her fall into a deep sleep.” I grow anxious to find out how the story will end. “Eros was also in love and regretted not having been more lenient toward his wife. He managed to enter the castle and wake her with the tip of his arrow. ‘You nearly died because of your curiosity,’ he told her. ‘You sought security in knowledge and destroyed our relationship.’ But in love, nothing is destroyed forever. Imbued with this conviction, they go to Zeus, the god of gods, and beg that their union never be undone. Zeus passionately pleaded the cause of the lovers with strong arguments and threats until he gained Aphrodite’s support. From that day on, Psyche (our unconscious, but logical, side) and Eros (love) were together forever.” I pour another glass of wine. I rest my head on his shoulder. “Those who cannot accept this, and who always try to find an explanation for magical and mysterious human relationships, will miss the best part of life.

[T]o look back on our life and also to discover something that can no longer be made good: the squandering of our youth when our educators failed to employ those eager, hot and thirsty years to lead us towards knowledge of things but used them for a so-called 'classical education'! The squandering of our youth when we had a meagre knowledge of the Greeks and Romans and their languages drummed into us in a way as clumsy as it was painful and one contrary to the supreme principle of all education, that one should offer food only to him who hungers for it ! When we had mathematics and physics forced upon us instead of our being led into despair at our ignorance and having our little daily life, our activities, and all that went on at home, in the work-place, in the sky, in the countryside from morn to night, reduced to thousands of problems, to annoying, mortifying, irritating problems so as to show us that we needed a knowledge of mathematics and mechanics, and then to teach us our first delight in science through showing us the absolute consistency of this knowledge! If only we had been taught to revere these sciences, if only our souls had even once been made to tremble at the way in which the great men of the past had struggled and been defeated and had struggled anew, at the martyrdom which constitutes the history of rigorous science! What we felt instead was the breath of a certain disdain for the actual sciences in favour of history, of 'formal education' and of 'the classics'! And we let ourselves be deceived so easily! Formal education! Could we not have pointed to the finest teachers at our grammar schools, laughed at them and asked: 'are they the products of formal education? And if not, how can they teach it?' And the classics! Did we learn anything of that which these same ancients taught their young people? Did we learn to speak or write as they did? Did we practise unceasingly the fencing-art of conversation, dialectics? Did we learn to move as beautifully and proudly as they did, to wrestle, to throw, to box as they did? Did we learn anything of the asceticism practised by all Greek philosophers? Were we trained in a single one of the antique virtues and in the manner in which the ancients practised it? Was all reflection on morality not utterly lacking in our education not to speak of the only possible critique of morality, a brave and rigorous attempt to live in this or that morality? Was there ever aroused in us any feeling that the ancients regarded more highly than the moderns? Were we ever shown the divisions of the day and of life, and goals beyond life, in the spirit of antiquity? Did we learn even the ancient languages in the way we learn those of living nations namely, so as to speak them with ease and fluency? Not one real piece of ability, of new capacity, out of years of effort! Only a knowledge of what men were once capable of knowing!

Gray burst into the galley. “Miss Turner is not eating.” The cramped, boxed-in nature of the space, the oppressive heat-it seemed an appropriate place to take this irrational surge of resentment. If only his emotion could dissipate through the ventilation slats as quickly as steam. “And good morning to you, too.” Gabriel wiped his hands on his apron without glancing up. “She’s not eating,” Gray repeated evenly. “She’s wasting away.” He didn’t even realize his knuckled cracked. He flexed his fingers impatiently. “Wasting away?” Gabriel’s face split in a grin as he picked up a mallet and attacked a hunk of salted pork. “Now what makes you say that?” “Her dress no longer fits properly. The neckline of her bodice is too loose.” Gabriel stopped pounding and looked up, meeting Gray’s eyes for the first time since he’d entered the galley. The mocking arch of the old man’s eyebrows had Gray clenching his teeth. They stared at each other for a second. Then Gray blew out his breath and looked away, and Gabriel broke into peals of laughter. “Never thought I’d live to see the day,” the old cook finally said, “when you would complain that a beautiful lady’s bodice was too loose.” “It’s not that she’s a beautiful lady-“ Gabriel looked up sharply. “It’s not merely that she’s a beautiful lady,” Gray amended. “She’s a passenger, and I have a duty to look out for her welfare.” “Wouldn’t that be the captain’s duty?” Gray narrowed his eyes. “And I know my duty well enough,” Gabriel continued. “It’s not as though I’m denying her food, now is it? I’m thinking Miss Turner just isn’t accustomed to the rough living aboard a ship. Used to finer fare, that one.” Gray scowled at the hunk of cured pork under Gabriel’s mallet and the shriveled, sprouted potatoes rolling back and forth with each tilt of the ship. “Is this the noon meal?” “This, and biscuit.” “I’ll order the men to trawl for a fish.” “Wouldn’t that be the captain’s duty?” Gabriel’s tone was sly. Gray wasn’t sure whether the plume of steam swirling through the galley originated for the stove or his ears. He didn’t care for Gabriel’s flippant tone. Neither did he care for the possibility of Miss Turner’s lush curves disappearing when he’d never had any chance to appreciate them. Frustrated beyond all reason, Gray turned to leave, wrenching open the galley door with such force, the hinges creaked in protest. He took a deep breath to compose himself, resolving not to slam the door shut behind him. Gabriel stopped pounding. “Sit down, Gray. Rest your bones.” With another rough sigh, Gray complied. He backed up two paces, slung himself onto a stool, and watched as the cook grabbed a tin cup from a hook on the wall and filled it, drawing a dipper of liquid from a small leather bucket. Then Gabriel set the cup on the table before him. Milk. Gabriel stared it. “For God’s sake, Gabriel. I’m not six years old anymore.” The old man raised his eyebrows. “Well, seeing as how you haven’t outgrown a visit to the kitchen when you’re in a sulk, I thought maybe you’d have a taste for milk yet, too. You did buy the goats.

Kindness, after all, comes to him naturally; he was hatched in its lucky genre and embraces its attributes effortlessly. Gentleness, generosity and compromise are not for him learned skills; they have always been with him . . . It may, for all I know, have existed in his family for generations. He is not at the frontier as I am. For me kindness is an alien quality; and like a difficult French verb I must learn it slowly, painfully, and probably imperfectly. It does not swim freely in my bloodstream -- I have to inject it artificially at the risk of all sorts of unknown factors. It does not wake with me in the mornings; every day I have to coax it anew into existence, breathe on it to keep it alive, practice it to keep it in good working order. And most difficult of all, I have to exercise it in such a way that it looks spontaneous and genuine; I have to see that it flows without hesitation as it does from its true practitioners, its lucky heirs who acquire it without laborious seeking . . .

Then suddenly Merry felt it at last, beyond doubt: a change. Wind was in his face! Light was glimmering. Far, far away, in the South the clouds could be dimly seen as remote grey shapes, rolling up, drifting: morning lay beyond them. But at that moment there was a flash, as if lightning had sprung from the earth beneath the city. For a searing second it stood dazzling far off in black and white, its topmost tower like a glittering needle; and then as the darkness closed again there came rolling over the fields a great boom. At that sound the bent shape of the king sprang suddenly erect. Tall and proud he seemed again; and rising in his stirrups he cried in a loud voice, more clear than any there had ever heard a mortal man achieve before: "Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden! Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter! spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered, a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises! Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!" With that he siezed a great horn from Guthláf his banner-bearer and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder. And straightaway all the horns in the host were lifted up in music, and the blowing of the horns of Rohan in that hour was like a storm on the plain and a thunder in the mountains. "Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!" Suddenly the King cried to Snowmane and the horse sprang away. Behind him his banner blew in the wind, white horse upon a field of green, but he outpaced it. After him thundered the knights of his house, but he was ever before them. Éomer rode there, the white horsetail on his helm floating in his speed, and the front of the first éored roared like a breaker foaming to the shore, but Théoden could not be overtaken. Fey he seemed, or the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young. His golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shone like an image of the Sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed. For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and darkness was removes, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror overtook them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath overtook them. And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the city.

Amundson’s let his hair and beard grow out. It gives him a bear-like, almost cuddly appearance, in contrast to the sharp, clean-shaven jaw and shaved head of his early photos. His times and weights have not devolved from youthful high-water marks—they’ve gotten better. He’s very conservative in his training, striving for tiny improvements at the margins. He gets to the box at five in the morning and leaves at nine at night. He spends the whole day interacting with athletes, setting goals, teaching private classes, or leading an advanced class where he works out as well.

Promptly, I order a box filled with the doughnuts I know she loves, every autumn recipe rebelling against the Christmas flavors that shouldered their way in the day after Thanksgiving. No chocolate and peppermint or gingerbread and eggnog for Kate. She loves pumpkin pie and spiced apples, cinnamon and maple syrup, everything that reminds her of the grandeur of turning leaves, the cozy joy of starlit bonfires and sipping mugs of cider, the quiet beauty of waking up to a misty autumn morning.

Set your 3 MITs (Most Important Tasks) each morning. Single-task. When you work on a task, don’t switch to other tasks. Process your in-box to empty. Check e-mail just twice a day. Exercise five to ten minutes a day. Work while disconnected, with no distractions. Follow a morning routine. Eat more fruits and veggies every day. Keep your desk decluttered. Say no to commitments and requests that aren’t on your Short List (see Chapter 13, Simple Commitments). Declutter your house for fifteen minutes a day. Stick to

The new congealed selkie skin medicine tasted like eating a stale gummy bear that had spent a few days chilling in a dirty litter box—but choking it down turned out to be the least disgusting part of Sophie and Fitz’s morning. The real prize for Ickiest Way to Start the Day went to the moment Elwin announced that he needed to change out their bandages to give their treatment a fresh start. Even Livvy didn’t stick around when Elwin sliced into the cocoons and unleashed a musky plume—and she kept a running top ten list of the grossest things she’d done.

Embrace Efficiency, Elevate Flavor: Smart Kitchen Tools for Culinary Adventurers The kitchen, once a realm of necessity, has morphed into a playground of possibility. Gone are the days of clunky appliances and tedious prep work. Enter the age of the smart kitchen tool, a revolution that whispers efficiency and shouts culinary liberation. For the modern gastronome, these tech-infused gadgets are not mere conveniences, but allies in crafting delectable adventures, freeing us to savor the journey as much as the destination. Imagine mornings when your smart coffee maker greets you with the perfect brew, prepped by the whispers of your phone while you dream. Your fridge, stocked like a digital oracle, suggests recipes based on its ever-evolving inventory, and even automatically orders groceries you've run low on. The multi-cooker, your multitasking superhero, whips up a gourmet chili while you conquer emails, and by dinnertime, your smart oven roasts a succulent chicken to golden perfection, its progress monitored remotely as you sip a glass of wine. But efficiency is merely the prologue. Smart kitchen tools unlock a pandora's box of culinary precision. Smart scales, meticulous to the milligram, banish recipe guesswork and ensure perfect balance in every dish. Food processors and blenders, armed with pre-programmed settings and self-cleaning prowess, transform tedious chopping into a mere blip on the culinary radar. And for the aspiring chef, a sous vide machine becomes a magic wand, coaxing impossible tenderness from the toughest cuts of meat. Yet, technology alone is not the recipe for culinary bliss. For those who yearn to paint with flavors, smart kitchen tools are the brushes on their canvas. A connected recipe platform becomes your digital sous chef, guiding you through each step with expert instructions and voice-activated ease. Spice racks, infused with artificial intelligence, suggest unexpected pairings, urging you to venture beyond the familiar. And for the ultimate expression of your inner master chef, a custom knife, forged from heirloom steel and lovingly honed, becomes an extension of your hand, slicing through ingredients with laser focus and lyrical grace. But amidst the symphony of gadgets and apps, let us not forget the heart of the kitchen: the human touch. Smart tools are not meant to replace our intuition but to augment it. They free us from the drudgery, allowing us to focus on the artistry, the love, the joy of creation. Imagine kneading dough, the rhythm of your hands mirroring the gentle whirring of a smart bread machine, then shaping a loaf that holds the warmth of both technology and your own spirit. Or picture yourself plating a dish, using smart portion scales for precision but garnishing with edible flowers chosen simply because they spark joy. This, my friends, is the symphony of the smart kitchen: a harmonious blend of tech and humanity, where efficiency becomes the brushstroke that illuminates the vibrant canvas of culinary passion. Of course, every adventure, even one fueled by smart tools, has its caveats. Interoperability between gadgets can be a tangled web, and data privacy concerns linger like unwanted guests. But these challenges are mere bumps on the culinary road, hurdles to be overcome by informed choices and responsible data management. After all, we wouldn't embark on a mountain trek without checking the weather, would we? So, embrace the smart kitchen, dear foodies! Let technology be your sous chef, your precision tool, your culinary muse. But never forget the magic of your own hands, the wisdom of your palate, and the joy of a meal shared with loved ones. For in the end, it's not about the gadgets, but the memories we create around them, the stories whispered over simmering pots, and the laughter echoing through a kitchen filled with the aroma of possibility.

And then the shock she helped give the world: Absolom. It wasn’t the announcement of Absolom that changed the world. It was when they saw its power. That day was a Saturday in November. Adeline thought the government had selected a weekend for the first departure for several reasons. The most important was so that the world could watch. They told the press it was so the victims’ families could be present to witness the sentence carried out. That morning, those families stood in the viewing booth, mothers and fathers and their children—at least, the children the man in the Absolom chamber hadn’t taken from them. He stared at his victims’ families with hate-filled eyes. That fire vanished as the machine began to vibrate. Fear took its place. He opened his mouth and screamed, but no one could hear it. A flash filled the chamber, and he was gone. So was the world before. Overnight, crime rates plummeted. Adeline had always heard the saying that the devil you know is better than the one you don’t. That’s what Absolom was to the world: a new devil. Prison was a known. So was the death penalty. They were the devils the world knew. Conceptually, the world knew what Absolom was: a box that sent a person to the past, in an alternate universe. What they didn’t know was what truly happened there. Exile was certain. A lonely death was certain. But how? An exotic disease? Starvation? Being torn apart by an animal? In the absence of certainty, a mind tends to imagine the worst. That’s what Absolom became to the world. The phrase “A fate worse than Absolom” quickly supplanted its predecessor: “A fate worse than death.” Before the first departure, the Absolom machine had been an idea. In those small moments as it hummed to life, the world saw something else: a person who was pure evil, with hate in his heart, instantly hollowed out, gutted, cowering with fear, and then, gone. In an instant, they saw evil wiped from existence.

After pushing the appliances into place, I emptied our hamper into the washer and started a cycle. As the remarkably quiet load finished, I observed that many of Nia’s clothes, particularly her undergarments, appeared old and worn. “Nia,” I stated, holding up a blouse with an obvious hole in it, “This is unacceptable. You need to go out right now and buy yourself some new clothes.” I didn’t have to ask her twice. The next morning, she went out shopping for a new wardrobe with her friends. While she was gone, my friend Erick and I cleaned up the flower beds in front of our house, planting fresh flowers and shrubs. When we were done, the kids and I decorated the driveway with sidewalk chalk, leaving messages of appreciation for Nia. After putting the kids to bed, I cleaned the house, intent on making everything sparkle on her return. With shopping bags draped over her shoulders, Nia approached the front, radiating a happiness and gratitude I hadn’t seen in her since the day before my confessions to her two weeks prior. Her gaze fell upon her new flower bed. “It’s beautiful,” she said. As she entered the house that smelled brand new, she turned to me with misty eyes and said something that overwhelmed me with emotion. “You’ve been so sweet to me,” she said after dropping her bags, covering her face with her hands. I didn’t deserve to hear those words; the things I was doing should have been done long ago, but they immediately brought me to tears. I walked over and wrapped her up as she sobbed into my shoulder. I reassured her of my undying love for her and reminded her that I was no longer the man I had described in my confessions. “I know you may think I’m doing this stuff just to win you back,” I said, “but I hope time will show how much I truly love you.” I wouldn’t need much time at all. An opportunity to demonstrate my physical and emotional faithfulness to her was on the horizon. 33 Shiny Boxes As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.

By late morning, Joe was cruising east on the state highway that bordered the Thunderhead Ranch all the way to the Bighorn Mountains. It was one of those schizophrenic spring/summer/winter May days when storm clouds shot across the sky in fast motion dumping both slashing rain and wet snow as if ditching their payloads in a panic, then darting away leaving sunshine and confusion, only

The dog account’s popularity spread beyond her family and friends to a few thousand people. But on a Monday night in December 2012, the account started gaining fans around the world. After Toffey posted three pictures of Tuna on the Instagram blog that night, the dog’s following grew from 8,500 to 15,000 within 30 minutes. Dasher pulled to refresh the page: 16,000. By the next morning, Tuna was at 32,000 followers. Dasher’s phone started ringing with media requests from around the world. Anderson Cooper’s talk show offered to fly her to DC; she appeared via webcast, thinking it wouldn’t be feasible to take a vacation day. But as requests for appearances continued to come in, her friends warned her about what was coming before she realized it: she would have to quit her job at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles and run her dog’s account full-time. It sounded ridiculous, so she took a month off to test the theory. Sure enough, BarkBox, which made a subscription box for pet items, was willing to sponsor Dasher and her friend on an eight-city tour with Tuna. People in various cities came up to her, crying, telling her they were struggling with depression or anxiety and that Tuna was bringing them joy. “That was the first time that I realized how much weight these posts had for people,” Dasher later recalled. “And that’s also when I realized I wanted to do this full-time.” Her life became about managing Tuna’s fame. Berkley, part of Penguin Random House, signed her up to write a book titled Tuna Melts My Heart: The Underdog with the Overbite. That led to more brand deals, plus merchandising to put Tuna’s likeness on stuffed animals and mugs. In her book’s acknowledgments, she thanks Tuna most of all, but also Toffey for sharing the post that changed her life. The tastes of one Instagram employee directly affected her financial success, but also the habits of the two million people who now follow that dog—including Ariana Grande.

The Shema was-and is- the mantra of a manna-nourished people, the restorative words of those whose ancestors had wandered the wilderness in search of home. Traditionally, Jews have recited this prayer twice a day, morning and evening; a ritual repetition suggests that we need the regular reminder. Many Jews also have the verses inscribed on miniature scrolls and contained within tefillin, tiny boxes worn during worship, or mezuzot, small cases attached to the doorframes of their homes. The Shema is, like so many prayers, not so much an act of telling God something about what we are experiencing than a ritual of recentering ourselves-not on our own certainty but on our own faith; not on the futile chase for all knowledge but on the path toward relationship with the only One who can be a true know-it-all; not on ourselves but on the One who made us and the One who is with us. "We are all interconnected in this world, every rock and stone, every creature," says Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the senior cantor at New York City's Central Synagogue, who grew up reciting this prayer with her sister every night and now does the same with her own three children. The Shema offers a steady reminder: "God is in all things." But if this were easy to remember, and if this path were painless, and if this journey were easy, and if loving God-or even just recognizing God-weren't so counterintuitive, why exactly would you need all your heart, all your soul, and all your might?

Jessica had gone to church all her life, in her frilly pinafores and white gloves, but when she was young it was only another place she had to go. Home, school, church. She didn’t really learn what faith was until after her father died, when she stood on her toes to see what was in the rose-colored casket. She didn’t know what to expect, why she’d been so anxious to take her place in the line at the front of the church, clinging to her mother’s hand. There, inside, was the grim, washed-out face of Daddy. Daddy was going to stay in this box? And they were going to bury this box in the ground? He had to be somewhere else, like her mother kept saying. That wasn’t him at all. On that day, Heaven kept Jessica’s world from caving in. David, somehow, lived without believing in a better place. And yet he could still wake up in the morning and carry out his day and go to sleep without being frozen awake with fears of death, of darkness, of nothing. She didn’t understand how he could do that. She tried, telling herself one night This is all, there is nothing after this, but she felt swallowed by the vast barrenness. She thought of her father’s bones, crumbling to black dust inside that beautiful casket beneath the ground. Maybe David had a point. Religion was a crutch, a way people rationalized away their pain in life, like the slaves yearning for a better existence. A denial. When there is no fear of death, David had told her once, there is no need for religion.

Starting the day well in the morning is gathering psychological strength against a day that may go badly! Life is a boxing match, every moment you spend well, accumulates the strength to resist the punches of possible bad moments!

The longer I stand here, the crazier the fans get. I’m about to give up and go meet his mom like we planned, but then someone taps my shoulder. I whirl around. And then have to look down. Because Jake is down on one knee, but he’s motioning to Otto. My bodyguard whips out a black box from his jacket and hands it to my boyfriend. I cover my mouth as my eyes sting. Jake gives me the most breathtaking smile. “Charlotte Anne Darling, we’ve had a long and winding road together, and throughout that time, you’ve become the most important person in my life. You’re the woman I want to grow old with. The one I want to kiss first thing in the morning and come home to every day. I’m a lucky man to call you my girlfriend, but I’d be even luckier to call you my wife. Would you do me this honor?” Pretty sure I scream my answer because I have no chill. I barely notice when he grabs my hand and slips a gold band on my finger. When he stands, I leap into his arms, not caring who sees me kiss him.

MY LOVE, The day Prometheus breathed life into the new me, was the day you arrived in a little box. A shiny, futuristic black box, Pandora's box, despite my doubts I couldn't help but open it to finally meet you. Doubts, because I was happy with who I was, with who I saw looking at me through the eyes of others I presented myself to in everyday life. But I was seduced by the worlds that were promised to me if I let you into my life, who I would be with you in my pocket. As soon as the lid came off and I swiped my fingers over your radiant surface for the first time, the world and I were bursting at the seams. What a creation we were together, to what sized we grew! My brain an encyclopedia, my body an unerring compass, my eyes and ears reaching infinitely with you as an extension of myself. Through you, I, the cyborg, could enter bewilderingly virtual spaces in which I was presently absent, meanwhile absently present in the material world of boring train rides, waiting lines, and mindless chit chats with others. I felt invincible, transformed into a citizen of the world because of you, an intellectual of unimaginable proportions for the vast sea of knowledge you allowed me to surf on, a public speaker and influencer of significance because my words and visual snippets of my days could be launched into the world with the flick of a finger, likes enticing and confirming me. How intoxicating! How wonderfully, pleasantly, intoxicating! But I can't help but sometimes lie awake at night, my internal clock slowing down with your seductive blue light illuminating my face with 2, 457, 600 (1920×1080) LED suns. In those moments, as my eyes are captivated by your glow, I can't help thinking about the time before you arrived, and how I sometimes miss my low definition self. You were always there, sometimes it feels like we are in fact one — finally reunited with my other Plato's half, fused into not a circle but a perfect black rectangle. Through your eyes I see the world and myself in Ultra-HD, my pixel density has never been so high. But you are sometimes vicious, my dear — a viper, a temptress, when then again with sweet codes you reflect my most beautiful self, and I cannot help but love me through your gaze, then again with suffocating algorithms you fragment my self and blow it up to grotesque self-distortions, hurling me into an endless me-loop, that eventually disgusts and alienates me. In those moments you are a distorting mirror, a frightening black box, a black hole that swallows my attention in ways I can't see through. I see my old self disappearing in the vague, dark reflection of myself, with double chin and dull eyes, which I sometimes catch in your black glass when your suns stop dazzling me for a split second. And I can't help but wonder if my 'self' in times of its digital recombination, in which the 'I' is a fragmented multitude of pixels that never fully touch at their sides, a simulacrum, maybe has lost some of its aura. But in the morning all is forgotten, my love, all is well. As soon as we merge back into one, as soon as I, panicked, reach for my pocket on the train, only to discover with a glow of relief that you were there after all, I can't imagine an "I" without you. Artificial by nature my self resides within your screen, I would be lost without you.

Of course, Adam was still counting days the old way, as Sunday was the first day of the week, so he was misinforming me as to which day his father actually arrived in Spain, seemingly by accident, by mistake. Perhaps it was a mistake that Adam had confused the European calendar with the Israeli calendar from time to time; perhaps it was not a mistake. Ferran actually arrived the following day, Tuesday, according to the Gregorian calendar and not Monday, when we had all been preparing for his arrival with Martina in vain. I had wanted to introduce her to the old man nicely. However, Tuesday, when he was scheduled to arrive, Mario Larese - Mister Twister - showed up, banging the glass of the store-front door, echoing throughout the entire store and upstairs apartment, as if he was about to break the glass if I did not go down to open it. He was knocking on the plain, large glass of the door with either a lighter or with his metal ring; I don't know which, but it was terrible. I knew Ferran could arrive at any moment, so I told Martina it might be best if she went home to Paola and let me take care of the business. I couldn't ignore Mario, who was almost breaking the glass, seemingly because he had seen my scooter parked in front of the store. I opened the door and he started pushing his way inside, saying, “Let's smoke a joint and drink a coffee.” I replied, “Slow down, cowboy. I've got company, I'm expecting more company, and I just woke up. I have no time now; sorry, Mario.” He kept banging the door because he wanted to smoke somewhere early in the morning, and Canale Vuo was still closed. I was so tempted to slap him. Unintentionally, I let slip that I was expecting Ferran, which only increased his refusal to leave. Theatrical. Dramatic. He wasn't going to get out of my store, my way, my day, my life, my struggle, or my schedule. Meanwhile, the same time, Nico was bugging me on the phone to make sure I delivered a box of 1,000 cones for La Silla because they needed it to make pre-rolled joints for their smokers. They sold 2-3,000 pre-rolled joints a week, ordering two boxes weekly, thus making me waste my time for free. I started to think it had all been planned just to make me lose time every week. They sold 3,000 joints a week and yet couldn't afford more than two boxes of cones to purchase to keep up. Tuesday morning was so urgent for La Silla to get those 1,000 brown cones right then. Just for Nico's 5-euro commission and so he wouldn't be embarrassed in front of his friends at La Silla with his sales performance - no problem. I couldn't kick out Mario, and I didn't want to kick out Martina, who apparently didn't want to leave. I asked them to leave, but Mario was leaning on the kitchen table and unable to look up or turn toward me to meet my gaze. Martina was looking at me angrily. So, I told them both, “OK then, stay here; let the old man inside once he arrives. I have to deliver this box of cones to La Silla right away, but I will be right back. 20 minutes tops.” Adam had also failed to inform me that he had copied a set of keys for his dad at one point, and he had somehow sent them to Israel by mail, I guess. Martina did not need to stay in the store to let Ferran in, but I did not know that. Adam was always secretive and brief with his words, as if it cost him money to say words out of his mouth or dictate to Rachel what to write in an email or what he was supposed to tell me on the phone. I thought that Martina had to stay to let Ferran into the store in case he arrived just when I went to La Mesa to do a favor for Nico. I was on my way back to Urgell from La Silla, when Adam suddenly called me from Amsterdam, screaming on the phone.

I opened the notebook, pausing at Catherine’s handwritten name on the inside cover. This was undoubtedly hers, but when I laid the schedules she’d given me inside, they did not match up. This needed to end now. I refused to go another day without getting to the bottom of this. I looked up at Daniel. “I need your desk. Take your laptop to the break room until I’m finished.” He nodded vigorously and practically sprinted from my office. He’d need to toughen up if he wanted a permanent job at this level. I hadn’t even been mean to the kid this morning. Jesus. I sat down at Catherine’s desk and opened a drawer. Everything was orderly, which I expected from her. At the back, there was an unopened box of tampons. I’d started to bypass, but something scratched at the back of my mind. Catherine had been pregnant when she’d started working for me. She hadn’t needed tampons…so why were they in her drawer? I grabbed the box and shook it next to my ear. Closed and sealed, nothing suspicious aside from its existence. I tossed them on the desk, frustrated by my fruitless search. Then, an envelope that had been tucked beneath the tampons caught my eye. There was nothing remarkable about it, and it definitely wasn’t a notebook, but instinct urged me to check what was inside.

I get up in the morning knowing that I'm going to do my best for the day. Why is that so difficult?

BUILDING RENEWAL INTO YOUR WORKDAY – Tony Schwartz Zeke is a creative director at a large agency. The workday he described when we first met was typical of the managers and leaders I meet in my travels. After six or six and a half hours of sleep—which never felt like enough—Zeke’s alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. each morning. His first move was to take his iPhone off the night table and check his e-mail. He told himself he did this in case something urgent had come in overnight, but the truth was he just couldn’t resist. Zeke tried to get to the gym at least two times a week, but he traveled frequently, and at home he was often just too tired to work out. Once he got to work—around 7:30 a.m. most days—Zeke grabbed a cup of coffee, sat down at his desk, and checked his e-mail again. By then, twenty-five or more new messages were typically waiting in his in-box. If he didn’t have an early meeting, he might be online for an hour or more without once looking up. Zeke’s days were mostly about meetings. They were usually scheduled one after the other with no time in between. As a result, he would race off to the next meeting without digesting what he’d just taken in at the last one. Lunch was something Zeke squeezed in. He usually brought food back to his desk from the cafeteria and worked while he ate. Around two or three in the afternoon, depending on how much sleep he’d gotten the previous night, Zeke began to feel himself fading. Given his company’s culture, taking even a short nap wasn’t an option. Instead, for a quick hit of energy, he found himself succumbing to a piece of someone’s leftover birthday cake, or running to the vending machine for a Snickers bar. With so many urgent demands, Zeke tended to put off any intensive, challenging work for later. By the end of the day, however, he rarely had the energy to get to it. Even so, he found it difficult to leave work with so much unfinished business. By the time he finally did, usually around 7:30 or 8 p.m., he was pretty much running on empty. After dinner, Zeke tried to get to some of the work he had put off earlier in the day. Much of the time, he simply ended up returning to e-mail or playing games online. Either way, he typically stayed up later than he knew he should. How closely does this match your experience? To the extent that it does resonate, how did this happen? Most important, can you imagine working the way you do now for the next ten or twenty years? YOUR CAPACITY IS LIMITED The challenge is that the demand in our lives increasingly exceeds our capacity.

even opened the box?” She parked her fists on her trim little hips. “I have had a very bad day.” “Well, so have I.” He grinned. “But you just made me laugh, so it’s starting to improve.” She gave him a glare. “I don’t find this funny.” He raised the can

Next Day Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All, I take a box And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens. The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical Food-gathering flocks Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James, Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise If that is wisdom. Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves And the boy takes it to my station wagon, What I’ve become Troubles me even if I shut my eyes. When I was young and miserable and pretty And poor, I’d wish What all girls wish: to have a husband, A house and children. Now that I’m old, my wish Is womanish: That the boy putting groceries in my car See me. It bewilders me he doesn’t see me. For so many years I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me And its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me, The eyes of strangers! And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile Imaginings within my imagining, I too have taken The chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog And we start home. Now I am good. The last mistaken, Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm Some soap and water-- It was so long ago, back in some Gay Twenties, Nineties, I don’t know . . . Today I miss My lovely daughter Away at school, my sons away at school, My husband away at work--I wish for them. The dog, the maid, And I go through the sure unvarying days At home in them. As I look at my life, I am afraid Only that it will change, as I am changing: I am afraid, this morning, of my face. It looks at me From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate, The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look Of gray discovery Repeats to me: “You’re old.” That’s all, I’m old. And yet I’m afraid, as I was at the funeral I went to yesterday. My friend’s cold made-up face, granite among its flowers, Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body Were my face and body. As I think of her I hear her telling me How young I seem; I am exceptional; I think of all I have. But really no one is exceptional, No one has anything, I’m anybody, I stand beside my grave Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.

She had spent the last six months of her senior year counting down the days, literally wrote the number on a jotter next to her bed every morning. She thought once she’d escaped that prison, her life would suddenly become fantastic, but it hadn’t turned out that way.

Drive to the expired home, take a photo. Have a unique letter saved in your computer that you can print out that morning.  This letter will have the home owner’s name at the top of the page with the words “Your listing expired at midnight last night.”  Include a copy of the expired MLS sheet.  Hi-lite the date it expired.  In your letter state they’ll be receiving a box from you in the mail in a few days. Insert this letter into a unique mailing envelope.  I use white bubble wrap envelopes (9x12) and brown craft envelopes (9x12).  Write the owner’s name on the front of the envelope and directly below that write “Confidential”.  That’s all. Don’t write their address on the card. Then, back at the office or your home, enter the owner and address in the SOC contact manager.  Upload photo of home to the SOC system.  Send a custom greeting card with box of cookies or brownies. Follow up 3-5 days after you’ve sent the package with either a phone call, knock at the door or another drop off letter.  They will remember you because they just received a custom card with brownies or cookies.  It turns a cold call into a warm call every time.  It works!

This was the day before Christmas. Quite early in the morning came the great box of which Bertie's mother had spoken in her letter. Then, just as dinner had come to an end, there was a peal of the bell, and a voice was heard asking for Tom Egerton. Tom sprang to his feet, and flew to greet a tall, handsome lady, crying, "Aunt Laura! Aunt Laura!" And Laura explained that she and her husband had arrived in London only the day before. "I was so afraid, Tom," she said, "that we should not get here until Christmas Day was over and that you would be disappointed. So I would not let your mother write you that we were on our way home. You must get your things packed up

Ironically both of them were on the pavement that night to escape their past and all that had circumscribed their lives so far. And yet, in order to arm themselves for battle, they retreated right back into what they sought to escape, into what they were used to, into what they really were. He, a revolutionary trapped in an accountant’s mind. She, a woman trapped in a man’s body. He, raging at a world in which the balance sheets did not tally. She, raging at her glands, her organs, her skin, the texture of her hair, the width of her shoulders, the timbre of her voice. He, fighting for a way to impose fiscal integrity on a decaying system. She, wanting to pluck the very stars from the sky and grind them into a potion that would give her proper breasts and hips and a long, thick plait of hair that would swing from side to side as she walked, and yes, the thing she longed for most of all, that most well stocked of Delhi’s vast stock of invectives, that insult of all insults, a Maa ki Choot, a mother’s cunt. He, who had spent his days tracking tax dodges, pay-offs and sweetheart deals. She, who had lived for years like a tree in an old graveyard, where, on lazy mornings and late at night, the spirits of the old poets whom she loved, Ghalib, Mir and Zauq, came to recite their verse, drink, argue and gamble. He, who filled in forms and ticked boxes. She, who never knew which box to tick, which queue to stand in, which public toilet to enter (Kings or Queens? Lords or Ladies? Sirs or Hers?). He, who believed he was always right. She, who knew she was all wrong, always wrong. He, reduced by his certainties. She, augmented by her ambiguity. He, who wanted a law. She, who wanted a baby. A circle formed around

Do you think they’ll ever be a place for us? I mean, do you think there’s a place for someone who lives under the radar, someone who has to pretend, someone who is a spy?” “Yes.” Daly said it with such confidence that I sat up in my bed, my cast dangling over the edge. “How do you know?” I asked. “There has to be. I don’t usually philosophize, but I do know one thing.” “What’s that?” “That even when we’re pretending, even when we’re hiding under wigs or accents or clothes that aren’t our style, we can’t hide our nature. Just like I knew from the moment I met you that you would choose this life. And just like I knew, when you told me about this mission, that you would agree to help the CIA find this girl. You would sacrifice yourself and your time with your brother to save someone. It’s just who you are.” “I’ve already messed things up, Daly. What if I’m not good enough? What if I can’t do it?” “That’s the thing, though. You’ll find a way.” I lay back again and buried the side of my face into my pillow. “I’m just not sure how.” “If you continue to think as you’ve always thought, you’ll continue to get what you’ve always got,” Daly said. I considered that. I wasn’t ready to give up. At least not yet. “That one is Itosu wisdom, in case you wondered.” I yawned into the phone. “It’s good advice.” “I’ll let you go. You should be resting. Don’t you have school in the morning?” He said the last part in a teasing tone. “Yeah, if I make it through another day at school. Maybe they’ll get rid of me—kick me out or something. You’d think I would have inherited some of my mom’s artistic genius.” “Can I give you one last bit of advice, Alex?” “Sure.” “Throw it all out the window.” “What?” I stared at my open window. A slight breeze blew the gauzelike drapes in and out as if they were a living creature. “Everything you’ve learned about art, the lines, the colors, the pictures in your head from other artists—just throw it all out. And throw out everything you’ve learned from books and simulations about being a good spy. Don’t try to be like someone else. Don’t force yourself to follow a set of rules that weren’t meant for you. Those work for 99.99% of the people.” “You’re telling me I’m the .01%?” I asked skeptically. “No, I’m telling you you’re not even on the scale.” Daly’s soft breathing traveled through the phone line. “With a mind like yours, you can’t be put in a box. Or even expected to stand outside it. You were never meant to hold still, Alex. You have to stack all the boxes up and climb and keep climbing until you find you. I’m just saying that Alexandra Stewart will find her own way.” The cool night air brushed the skin of my arm and I wished it was Daly’s hand instead. “You sure have a lot of wisdom tonight,” I told him. I expected him to laugh. Instead, the line went silent for a moment. “Because I’m not there. Because I wish I was.” His words were simple, but his message reached inside my heart and left a warmth—a warmth I needed. “Thank you, James.” “Take care, Alex.” I wanted to say more, to keep him at my ear just a little longer. Yet the words itching to break free couldn’t be said from over two thousand miles away. They needed to happen in person. I wasn’t going home until I found Amoriel. Which meant I had to complete this mission. Not just for Amoriel anymore. I had to do it for me. (page 143)

Well, Francis, here’s five dollars more for the church, but before you put it in the box tell me, what do you want more than anything else for Christmas?” “An electric train, sir,” I said. “An electric train you shall have, my boy. I have a son just about your age at home and that’s what he wants too. You both shall have it.” He smiled at me as I put the five-dollar bill in the church box. I counted the days till Christmas. Christmas morning, when I went down to the big tree in the dining room, I expected to find the electric train, but it wasn’t there. Maybe it didn’t come yet. I couldn’t imagine he would forget. The day passed and no electric train came. I didn’t really give up hope until I had gone to bed. Then quietly I began to cry into my pillow.

Victoria spent most of the morning in the town house's private garden. It was a cool, humid day, the sky liberally laced with clouds, the air stirring with mild breezes. She sat at the stone table and read for a while, then wandered along graveled paths bordered with boxes of lilac, jessamine, and Russian honeysuckle. The carefully tended garden was bordered by poplar hedges and ivy-covered walls. Well-stocked beds of flowering and fruit-bearing paths and filled the air with perfume. In this small, secluded world, it seemed as if the city were a hundred miles away. It was difficult not to be contented in such beautiful surroundings.

Apparently, after returning to class from morning recess that day, he had totally freaked out at another kid for some reason and started swearing and yelling.

How to walk to Cleveland Shipping is an event. There’s life before you ship and then there’s the moment you ship. And then there’s life after you ship. Starting isn’t like that. Starting something is not an event; it’s a series of events. You decide to walk to Cleveland. So you take a first step in the right direction. That’s starting. You spend the rest of the day walking toward Cleveland, one step at a time, picking your feet up and putting them down. At the end of the day, twenty miles later, you stop at a hotel. And what happens the next morning? Either you quit the project or you start again, walking to Cleveland. In fact, every step is a new beginning. Sure, you’re closer than you were yesterday or last week, but you’re still heading toward Cleveland. Keep starting until you finish.

THE NEXT DAY WAS RAIN-SOAKED and smelled of thick sweet caramel, warm coconut and ginger. A nearby bakery fanned its daily offerings. A lapis lazuli sky was blanketed by gunmetal gray clouds as it wept crocodile tears across the parched Los Angeles landscape. When Ivy was a child and she overheard adults talking about their break-ups, in her young feeble-formed mind, she imagined it in the most literal of essences. She once heard her mother speaking of her break up with an emotionally unavailable man. She said they broke up on 69th Street. Ivy visualized her mother and that man breaking into countless fragments, like a spilled box of jigsaw pieces. And she imagined them shattered in broken shards, being blown down the pavement of 69th Street. For some reason, on the drive home from Marcel’s apartment that next morning, all Ivy could think about was her mother and that faceless man in broken pieces, perhaps some aspects of them still stuck in cracks and crevices of the sidewalk, mistaken as grit. She couldn’t get the image of Marcel having his seizure out of her mind. It left a burning sensation in the center of her chest. An incessant flame torched her lungs, chest, and even the back door of her tongue. Witnessing someone you cared about experiencing a seizure was one of those things that scribed itself indelibly on the canvas of your mind. It was gut-wrenching. Graphic and out-of-body, it was the stuff that post traumatic stress syndrome was made of.

Every morning when he awoke to find himself without her was another day in which his heart broke anew. Cade’s

edge of the box. “Hungry, are you?” laughed Zack as the bird pecked the feeds. “Eat some more, pretty little things!” said Clare as the others flew one by one to Zack. It was a fine and cold morning, and feeding the birds is the beginning of a wonderful day for Zack and Clare. When

You wouldn’t be going away for Christmas, sir, I take it?” Hugh was a kind-hearted man. “I begin to perceive your drift, Ethel,” he said. “I could go to my London club, if that would suit the convenience of the staff. Er—what amount of licence is customary on these occasions?” “Christmas Day and come back the morning after Boxing Day would be appreciated, sir, I’m sure. Not that we had it with Mr. Paul, but us thought you might be different.

Huh?” she said. “What’s this?” “I think you have a fever. Might be from damn near freezing to death, might be from something else. First we try aspirin.” “Yeah,” she said, taking them in her small hand. “Thanks.” While Marcie took the aspirin with water, he fixed up the tea. They traded, water cup for mug of tea. He stayed across the room at his table while she sipped the tea. When she was almost done, he said, “Okay, here’s the deal. I have to work this morning. I’ll be gone till noon or so—depends how long it takes. When I get back, you’re going to be here. After we’re sure you’re not sick, then you’ll go. But not till I tell you it’s time to go. I want you to sleep. Rest. Use the pot, don’t go outside. I don’t want to stretch this out. And I don’t want to have to go looking for you to make sure you’re all right. You understand?” She smiled, though weakly. “Aw, Ian, you care.” He snarled at her, baring his teeth like an animal. She laughed a little, which turned into a cough. “You get a lot of mileage out of that? The roars and growls, like you’re about to tear a person to pieces with your teeth?” He looked away. “Must keep people back pretty good. Your old neighbor said you were crazy. You howl at the moon and everything?” “How about you don’t press your luck,” he said as meanly as he could. “You need more tea?” “If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll nap. I don’t want to be any trouble, but I’m awful tired.” He went to her and took the cup out of her hand. “If you didn’t want to be any trouble, why didn’t you just leave me the hell alone?” “Gee, I just had this wild urge to find an old friend…” She lay back on the couch, pulling that soft quilt around her. “What kind of work do you do?” “I sell firewood out of the back of my truck.” He went to his metal box, which was nailed to the floor from the inside so it couldn’t be stolen if someone happened by his cabin, which was unlikely. He unlocked it and took out a roll of bills he kept in there and put it in his pocket, then relocked it. “First snowfall of winter—should be a good day. Maybe I’ll get back early, but no matter what, I want you here until I say you go. You get that?” “Listen, if I’m here, it’s because it’s where I want to be, and you better get that. I’m the one who came looking for you, so don’t get the idea you’re going to bully me around and scare me. If I wasn’t so damn tired, I might leave—just to piss you off. But I get the idea you like being pissed off.” He stood and got into his jacket, pulled gloves out of the pockets. “I guess we understand each other as well as we can.” “Wait—it’s

Then the heavy lifting began. For the next six months, our employees rarely saw their families. We worked deep into the night, seven days a week. Despite two hit movies, we were conscious of the need to prove ourselves, and everyone gave everything they had. With several months still to go, the staff was exhausted and starting to fray. One morning in June, an overtired artist drove to work with his infant child strapped into the backseat, intending to deliver the baby to day care on the way. Some time later, after he’d been at work for a few hours, his wife (also a Pixar employee) happened to ask him how drop-off had gone—which is when he realized that he’d left their child in the car in the broiling Pixar parking lot. They rushed out to find the baby unconscious and poured cold water over him immediately. Thankfully, the child was okay, but the trauma of this moment—the what-could-have-been—was imprinted deeply on my brain. Asking this much of our people, even when they wanted to give it, was not acceptable. I had expected the road to be rough, but I had to admit that we were coming apart. By the time the film was complete, a full third of the staff would have some kind of repetitive stress injury. In the end, we would meet our deadline—and release our third hit film. Critics raved that Toy Story 2 was one of the only sequels ever to outshine the original, and the total box office would eventually top $500 million. Everyone was fried to the core, yet there was also a feeling that despite all the pain, we had pulled off something important, something that would define Pixar for years to come. As Lee Unkrich says, “We had done the impossible. We had done the thing that everyone told us we couldn’t do. And we had done it spectacularly well. It was the fuel that has continued to burn in all of us.” T

Roommates ...the door opened and the most improbable trio walked in: a tiny dark-haired man, a very tall and big-nosed guy with long hair like a rock star, and a girl in a white nightgown with a toilet seat around her neck. They were Edmondo Zanolini, Michael Laub, and a fifteen-year-old girl named Brigitte—an Italian, a Belgian, and a Swede— and they were the performance-art trio who called themselves Maniac Productions. They gave themselves this name because, among other things, they would enlist people from their own families to do strange things. For instance, Edmondo’s grandfather was a pyromaniac. And since he was also a bit senile, he was very dangerous—he had set his house on fire a number of times. His family was very careful to keep matches out of his reach at all times, except when Maniac Productions was performing. Then Edmondo would invite his grandfather to the theater and give him a big box of matches; the grandfather would wander around the theater lighting fires while the group performed and pretended not to notice him. This was his maniac thing. It was very original theater, and very satisfying to Edmondo’s grandfather. He didn’t care if the audience was looking at him or not, because he had his box of matches. Edmondo and Brigitte moved into our flat. Michael came from a family of diamond merchants in Brussels and stayed in five-star hotels. Another tenant was Piotr from Poland. Piotr had a book of logic—I think it was Wittgenstein translated into Polish—and for reasons best known to himself, he kept it in the freezer. This book was his favorite thing in the world. And every morning he would wake up with this imbecilic smile on his face, take his book out of the freezer, wait patiently until the page he wanted to read unfroze, read to us from it in Polish, then turn the page and put the book back in the freezer for the next day. Brigitte’s father had started the pornography industry in Sweden—a very big deal; the porn revolution really began there—and she hated her father; she hated everybody. She was a deeply depressed person: she literally never spoke a word. All of us in the flat ate all our meals together, and she would just sit there, completely silent. Then in the middle of the night one night, Edmondo knocked on our door. I opened it and said, “What’s wrong?” “She talks, she talks!” he said. “What did she say?” I asked. “She said, ‘Boo,’ ” he said. “That’s not much,” I said. The next morning, she packed and left. (...) “I’m so happy,” Michael told us one day, about his pair of girlfriends. “The two of them complement each other perfectly.” Marinka and Ulla knew (and liked) each other, and knew (but didn’t like) the arrangement. Then Ulla got pregnant—not only pregnant, but pregnant with twins. When Michael told Marinka about it, she moved to Australia. And Piotr followed her there, and committed suicide on her birthday.

I’m twenty-seven years old. I’ve worked all morning at the lab, and things are going so well I almost shrug off the party. I’ve been doing that a lot lately—neglecting friends and social engagements to steal just a few more hours in the cleanroom. I first notice you in the far corner of the small backyard as I stand on the deck, sipping a Corona-and-lime, my thoughts still back at the lab. I think it’s the way you’re standing that catches my attention—boxed in by a tall, lanky guy in tight black jeans who I recognize from this circle of friends. He’s an artist or something. I don’t even know his name, only that my friend Kyle has said to me recently, Oh, that guy fucks everyone. I can’t explain it, even to this day, but as I watch him chatting up this dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in a cobalt-blue dress—you—a flash of jealousy consumes me. Inexplicably, insanely, I want to hit him. Something in your body language suggests discomfort. You aren’t smiling, your arms are crossed, and it occurs to me that you’re trapped in a bad conversation, and that for some reason, I care. You hold an empty wineglass, streaked with the dregs of a red. Part of me urges, Go talk to her, save her. The other half screams, You know nothing about this woman, not even her name. You are not that guy. I find myself moving toward you through the grass, carrying a new glass of wine, and when your eyes avert to mine, it feels like some piece of machinery has just seized in my chest. Like worlds colliding. As I draw near, you take the glass out of my hand as if you had previously sent me off to get it and smile with an easy familiarity, like we’ve known each other forever. You try to introduce me to Dillon, but the skinny-jeaned artist, now effectively cockblocked, makes his excuses and bails. Then it’s just the two of us standing in the shade of the hedgerow, and my heart is going like mad. I say, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but it looked like you might need rescuing,” and you say, “Good instincts. He’s pretty, but insufferable.” I introduce myself. You tell me your name. Daniela. Daniela.

For thirty-five years Sanderson had watched policemen near the end of their careers, and he knew there were two distinct leanings. Most pulled back and coasted onto the off-ramp of retirement. They put checkmarks in boxes and answered phones when it suited them, showed up at the station a few minutes later each morning. When the halfhearted party finally came, with its backslapping and cake and embarrassing gifts, it was no more than a ripple, quickly lost in the ongoing storm of day-to-day operations. But there was a second path. Men and women who went out on less subdued terms, the results either noble or ruinous, but always spectacular.

I’m amazed at how this has snowballed into such a media event. It began last week when I saw a national news report by Tom Brokaw about this adorable little lady from Georgia, Mrs. Hill, who was trying to save her farm from being foreclosed. Her sixty-seven-year-old husband had committed suicide a few weeks earlier, hoping his life insurance would save the farm, which had been in the family for generations. But the insurance proceeds weren’t nearly enough. It was a very sad situation, and I was moved. Here were people who’d worked very hard and honestly all their lives, only to see it all crumble before them. To me, it just seemed wrong. Through NBC I was put in touch with a wonderful guy from Georgia named Frank Argenbright, who’d become very involved in trying to help Mrs. Hill. Frank directed me to the bank that held Mrs. Hill’s mortgage. The next morning, I called and got some vice president on the line. I explained that I was a businessman from New York, and that I was interested in helping Mrs. Hill. He told me he was sorry, but that it was too late. They were going to auction off the farm, he said, and “nothing or no one is going to stop it.” That really got me going. I said to the guy: “You listen to me. If you do foreclose, I’ll personally bring a lawsuit for murder against you and your bank, on the grounds that you harassed Mrs. Hill’s husband to his death.” All of a sudden the bank officer sounded very nervous and said he’d get right back to me. Sometimes it pays to be a little wild. An hour later I got a call back from the banker, and he said, “Don’t worry, we’re going to work it out, Mr. Tramp.” Mrs. Hill and Frank Argenbright told the media, and the next thing I knew, it was the lead story on the network news. By the end of the week, we’d raised $40,000. Imus alone raised almost $20,000 by appealing to his listeners. As a Christmas present to Mrs. Hill and her family, we’ve scheduled a mortgage-burning ceremony for Christmas Eve in the atrium of Trump Tower. By then, I’m confident, we’ll have raised all the money. I’ve promised Mrs. Hill that if we haven’t, I’ll make up any difference. I tell Imus he’s the greatest, and I invite him to be my guest one day next week at the tennis matches at the U.S. Open. I have a courtside box and I used to go myself almost every day. Now I’m so busy I mostly just send my friends.