Categories Of Friends Quotes

I explained that when our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends aren’t welcome at the table, then we don’t feel welcome either, and that not every young adult gets married or has children, so we need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people.

A 'very good friend' is a dangerous category with Indian girls. From here you can either make fast progress or if you play it wrong, you can go down to the lowest category invented by the Indian women ever - rakhi brother. Rakhi brother really means 'you can talk to me, but don't even freaking think about anything else you bore'.

Mental illness" is among the most stigmatized of categories.' People are ashamed of being mentally ill. They fear disclosing their condition to their friends and confidants-and certainly to their employers.

All men fall under 5 categories: The assholes are by far the worst. Then there are the dumbasses, the smartasses, the sorryasses, and last but not least, the wiseasses

Tod's eyes widened and his irises swirled in tight twists of blue. "Well, I don't see that I have much of a choice, considering that's part of Reaper Law." "There's a Reaper Law?" "Of course. 'A reaper is Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous...'" He shrugged. "It gets boring after that. But this situation is clearly covered under the 'helpful' category." I rolled my eyes. "I think that's the Boy Scout law." "They took it from us. But they left out all the good stuff.

If hatred strikes you, if you get accused, thrown to the lions, you can expect one of two reactions from people who know you: some of them will join in the kill, the others will discreetly pretend to know nothing, hear nothing, so you can go right on seeing them and talking to them. That second category, discreet and tactful, those are your friends. 'Friends' in the modern sense of the term. Listen, Jean-Marc, I've known that forever.

The richest relationships are often those that don’t fit neatly into the preconceived slots we have made for the archetypes we imagine would populate our lives—the friend, the lover, the parent, the sibling, the mentor, the muse. We meet people who belong to no single slot, who figure into multiple categories at different times and in different magnitudes. We then must either stretch ourselves to create new slots shaped after these singular relationships, enduring the growing pains of self-expansion, or petrify.

Two main categories of people are needed in your circle; those who give you the necessary support to accomplish your dreams and those who become beneficiaries of what you achieve.

It's always gratifying to share a hobby with a friend, and pining for erstwhile suitors falls into that category. In the months to come, Libby and I would analyze our respective exes with the gusto and intellectual rigor of Jesuits.

As a teenager, I began to question the Great Christian Sorting System. My gay friends in high school were kind and funny and loved me, so I suspected that my church had placed them in the wrong category... Injustices in the world needed to be addressed and not ignored. Christians weren't good; people who fought for peace and justice were good. I had been lied to, and in my anger at being lied to about the containers, I left the church. But it turns out, I hadn't actually escaped the sorting system. I had just changed the labels.

Quite the social butterfly, Gilbert Alwyn Jones operated an open house policy when it came to friends and family... However, the unexpected visitor now standing on his verandah fell into neither category.

I had to take a moment to wonder who else fell into this category of default enemy. I went through a mental list of people who, in theory, I’d want to hit in the face with a meat tenderizer. My coworker from ten years ago who owes me like three grand? It was ten years ago! You were addicted to OxyContin! Go! Be free! My seventh-grade teacher, who told me that most child actors don’t succeed as adult actors? You just wanted to scare me into having a backup plan! Farewell! Good luck! Tori from fourth grade, who accused me of writing mean stuff about all our friends on the playground wall? BURN IN HELL, TORI. I KNOW IT WAS YOU!!! I’m still working on it.

In those days, and still now, I had a lot of women friends -- mostly in the black swan category-- who ignored convention and things society expected women to be, but didn't fuck your boyfriend, no matter what. Fucking people's husbands is for people from Ivy League colleges who read too much John O'Hara.

Sam was her friend, but “friend” was a broad category, wasn’t it? “Friend” was a word that was overused to the point that it had no meaning at all.

If by ‘foe’ you mean a brutal killer, then I suppose I’d fall into the ‘friend’ category,” I replied cynically. “Although in your case, we may have to find a secret option number three.

I send my friends e-mail messages about the progress of my garden, especially of my roses. It left them with the impression, I think, that I was concerned with nothing else. I felt no urgency in correcting that notion. People obsessed with their gardens have probably caused the least suffering in the world of any category of men.

The Japanese have two words: "uchi" meaning inside and "soto" meaning outside. Uchi refers to their close friends, the people in their inner circle. Soto refers to anyone who is outside that circle. And how they relate and communicate to the two are drastically different. To the soto, they are still polite and they might be outgoing, on the surface, but they will keep them far away, until they are considered considerate and trustworthy enough to slip their way into the uchi category. Once you are uchi, the Japanese version of friendship is entire universes beyond the average American friendship! Uchi friends are for life. Uchi friends represent a sacred duty. A Japanese friend, who has become an uchi friend, is the one who will come to your aid, in your time of need, when all your western "friends" have turned their back and walked away.

Life is precious; good friends are not numerous, but their actions are significant. Cherish them. Feel grateful for them. Show them that you appreciate them. And do all this as often as possible. Be grateful for the bad ones too, as they helped you see the good ones for who they were. I am grateful for any friend that has come into my life and proved to be in the bad category, because it helped me to recognize and appreciate the good ones.

In one way, at least, our lives really are like movies. The main cast consists of your family and friends. The supporting cast is made up of neighbors, co-workers, teachers, and daily acquaintances. There are also bit players: the supermarket checkout girl with the pretty smile, the friendly bartender at the local watering hole, the guys you work out with at the gym three days a week. And there are thousands of extras --those people who flow through every life like water through a sieve, seen once and never again. The teenager browsing a graphic novel at Barnes & Noble, the one you had to slip past (murmuring "Excuse me") in order to get to the magazines. The woman in the next lane at a stoplight, taking a moment to freshen her lipstick. The mother wiping ice cream off her toddler's face in a roadside restaurant where you stopped for a quick bite. The vendor who sold you a bag of peanuts at a baseball game. But sometimes a person who fits none of these categories comes into your life. This is the joker who pops out of the deck at odd intervals over the years, often during a moment of crisis. In the movies this sort of character is known as the fifth business, or the chase agent. When he turns up in a film, you know he's there because the screenwriter put him there. But who is screenwriting our lives? Fate or coincidence? I want to believe it's the latter. I want that with all my heart and soul.

There are very few people in the world with courage enough to admit that they do not care for music (dogs and children come into the same category) and so brand themselves forever as Philistines in the eyes of their friends.

From invisible girlhood, the Asian American woman will blossom into a fetish object. When she is at last visible—at last desired—she realizes much to her chagrin that this desire for her is treated like a perversion. This is most obvious in porn, where our murky desires are coldly isolated into categories in which white is the default and every other race is a sexual aberration. But the Asian woman is reminded every day that her attractiveness is a perversion, in instances ranging from skin-crawling Tinder messages (“I’d like to try my first Asian woman”) to microaggressions from white friends. I recall a white friend pointing out to me that Jewish men only dated Asian women because they wanted to find women who were the opposite of their pushy mothers. Implied in this tone-deaf complaint was her assumption that Asian women are docile and compliant. Well-meaning friends never failed to warn me, if a white guy was attracted to me, that he probably had an Asian fetish. The result: I distrusted my desirousness. My sexuality was a pathology. If anyone non-Asian liked me, there was something wrong with him.

If I could just get the one I’m infatuated with to just look in my direction. I’m firmly stuck in the friend category, though, and I don’t know how to get out of it. I’m afraid to tell her how I feel because the look on her face will break me. I know she doesn’t want me the way I want her, and I’d rather be her friend than not have her in my life at all.

There were different categories of friends in Vince's opinion. Golf friends, work friends, old school friends, shipboard friends...but friend friends were harder to come by.

It is far better to have 10,000 Facebook friends who are in the same category or aligned with your values or a common inter- est than 100,000 random robot followers from around the world.

Prejudices emerge from the disposition of the human mind to perceive and process information in categories. “Categories” is a nicer, more neutral word than “stereotypes,” but it’s the same thing. Cognitive psychologists consider stereotypes to be energy-saving devices that allow us to make efficient decisions on the basis of past experience; help us quickly process new information and retrieve memories; make sense of real differences between groups; and predict, often with considerable accuracy, how others will behave or how they think.24 We wisely rely on stereotypes and the quick information they give us to avoid danger, approach possible new friends, choose one school or job over another, or decide that that person across this crowded room will be the love of our lives.

Instead of letting labels like romantic and platonic (or friend versus partner) guide actions and expectations, it is possible for the desires themselves to guide actions and expectations. More effective than relying on labels to provide instruction is skipping directly to asking for what we want—around time, touch, commitment, and so on as David Jay wrote—regardless of whether those desires confuse hardline ideas of what these two categories are supposed to look like. When the desires don’t fit the labels, it is often the labels that should be adjusted or discarded, not the desires. If everyone is behaving ethically, it doesn’t matter if a relationship doesn’t fit into a preconceived social role, if it feels neither platonic nor romantic or if it feels like both at the same time.

He loved the idea behind the Chinese concept of guanxi. It fit in the same general category as the concepts of friends, family, acquaintances, but it was more based in business and politics. Guanxi was about being able to call up a person one hadn’t seen in years and ask for a favor. To have enough people in one’s debt that there was more implied leverage to use when seeking favors from others.

How they became friends was no great mystery, but now they remained so, braided together beyond their shared college quarters, this transcended the usual alchemy of optimism and obligation that kept friendships intact, kept people from fading into other categories: old friend, college friend, just someone I once knew. None of the four would ever be just anything to the others...

Among the many symbols used to frighten and manipulate the populace of the democratic states, few have been more important than "terror" and "terrorism." These terms have generally been confined to the use of violence by individuals and marginal groups. Official violence, which is far more extensive in both scale and destructiveness, is placed in a different category altogether. This usage has nothing to do with justice, causal sequence, or numbers abused. Whatever the actual sequence of cause and effect, official violence is described as responsive or provoked ("retaliation," "protective reaction," etc.), not as the active and initiating source of abuse. Similarly, the massive long-term violence inherent in the oppressive social structures that U.S. power has supported or imposed is typically disregarded. The numbers tormented and killed by official violence-wholesale as opposed to retail terror-during recent decades have exceeded those of unofficial terrorists by a factor running into the thousands. But this is not "terror," [...] "security forces" only retaliate and engage in "police action." These terminological devices serve important functions. They help to justify the far more extensive violence of (friendly) state authorities by interpreting them as "reactive" and they implicitly sanction the suppression of information on the methods and scale of official violence by removing it from the category of "terrorism." [...] Thus the language is well-designed for apologetics for wholesale terror.

In medieval India, the Hindu Vaishnava system of bhakti-yoga (devotional yoga) developed highly sophisticated categories of relation (rasa) to God, including santa (awe and reverence), vatsalya (parental attitude toward God), dasya (servant of God), sakhya (being friends and playmates with God), and madburya (passionate, romantic love).

To regard the categories of the bourgeois system as eternal and natural is most typical of bourgeois philosophers.

On the wings of market-friendly feminism, the idea that personal advancement is a subversive form of political progress has been accepted as gospel. The trickiest thing about this idea is that it is incomplete and insufficient without being entirely wrong. The feminist scammer rarely sets out to scam anyone, and would argue, certainly, that she does not belong in this category. She just wants to be successful, to gain the agency that men claim so easily, to have the sort of life she wants. She should be able to have that, shouldn't she? The problem is that a feminism that prioritizes the individual will always, at its core, be at odds with a feminism that prioritizes the collective. The problem is that it is so easy today for a woman to seize upon an ideology she believes in and then exploit it, or deploy it in a way that actually runs counter to that ideology. That is in fact exactly what today's ecosystem of success encourages a woman to do.

Two aspects of thinking in particular are pronounced in both creative and hypomanic thought: fluency, rapidity, and flexibility of thought on the one hand, and the ability to combine ideas or categories of thought in order to form new and original connections on the other. The importance of rapid, fluid, and divergent thought in the creative process has been described by most psychologists and writers who have studied human imagination. The increase in the speed of thinking may exert its influence in different ways. Speed per se, that is, the quantity of thoughts and associations produced in a given period of time, may be enhanced. The increased quantity and speed of thoughts may exert an effect on the qualitative aspects of thought as well; that is, the sheer volume of thought can produce unique ideas and associations. Indeed, Sir Walter Scott, when discussing Byron's mind, commented: "The wheels of a machine to play rapidly must not fit with the utmost exactness else the attrition diminishes the Impetus." The quickness and fire of Byron's mind were not lost on others who knew him. One friend wrote: "The mind of Lord Byron was like a volcano, full of fire and wealth, sometimes calm, often dazzling and playful, but ever threatening. It ran swift as the lightning from one subject to another, and occasionally burst forth in passionate throes of intellect, nearly allied to madness." Byron's mistress, Teresa Guiccoli, noted: "New and striking thoughts followed from him in rapid succession, and the flame of genius lighted up as if winged with wildfire.

Much of the wisdom I have gained was gained through failure. I have failed an insane amount of times. And I've probably failed at everything it's possible to fail at. I've failed in every category of life - from family to money to business to marriage and more. I've had small failures, big failures, and even disastrous life-altering failures. I've even failed at some of the same things multiple times before I learned the lesson I needed to learn. I've had failures that cost me personally, failures that cost my family and friends, and even failures that cost a lot of people I never met. But with every failure, I gained new wisdom. And all of this failure has allowed me to cultivate success.

Of course, Cato did not fall into this category. But his inability to compromise made him as fatal to his cause, Cicero believed, as the moral dereliction of the others did. “As for our dear friend Cato,” he observed to Atticus while the land bill was being debated, “I have as warm a regard for him as you do. The fact remains that with all his patriotism, he can be a political liability. He speaks in the Senate as if he were living in Plato’s Republic instead of Romulus’s cesspool.

The childish levels, the undersoil of the mind, had been turned up. She wanted to be with Nice people, away from Nasty people—that nursery distinction seeming at the moment more important than any later categories of Good and Bad or Friend and Enemy.

Separate your life into categoriesfn1 Split your vision board into six categories: ◦ Personal development (i.e. your personal growth/how you want to feel within yourself) ◦ Love and romance ◦ Career ◦ Friends and family ◦ House/home ◦ Hobbies/leisure

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.

TRY THIS: AUDIT YOUR TIME Spend a week tracking how much time you devote to the following: family, friends, health, and self. (Note that we’re leaving out sleeping, eating, and working. Work, in all its forms, can sprawl without boundaries. If this is the case for you, then set your own definition of when you are “officially” at work and make “extra work” one of your categories.) The areas where you spend the most time should match what you value the most. Say the amount of time that your job requires exceeds how important it is to you. That’s a sign that you need to look very closely at that decision. You’re deciding to spend time on something that doesn’t feel important to you. What are the values behind that decision? Are your earnings from your job ultimately serving your values?

Dear Forrest, I am sorry there was no time for us to speech other before I left. The doctors made their decision quickly, and before I knew it, I was being taken away, but I asked if I could stop long enough to write you this note, because you have been so kind to me whileI was here. I sense, Forrest, that you are on the verge of something very significant in your life, some change, or event that will move you in a different direction, and you must seize the moment, and not let it pass. When I think back on it now, there is something in your eyes, some tiny flash of fire that comes now and then, mostly when you smile, and , on those infrequent occasions, I believe what I saw was almost a Genesis of our ability as humans to think, to create, to be. This war is to for you, old pal - nor me - and I am well out of it as I'm sure you will be in time. The crucial question is, what will you do? I don't think you're an idiot at all. Perhaps by the measure of tests or the judgement of fools, you might fall into some category or other, but deep down, Forrest, I have seen that glowing sparkle of curiosity burning deep in your mind. Take the tide, my friend, and as you are carried along, make it work for you, fight the shallows and the snags and never give up. You are a good fellow, forrest, and you have a big heart. Your pal, Dan

And so, I chalked up what had happened in the cabin as an anomaly. That cabin mom just didn’t get it, I decided. She didn’t understand what we were all trying to do here. But in the years to come, I would encounter some version of this scenario again and again. My friends and I were told in one breath we were loved unconditionally, accepted just as we were, and headed for Heaven, and in the next we were warned of the evils of feminists, homosexuals, women who had sex outside of marriage, and other Hell-bound individuals. It didn’t even occur to me then that some people in youth group might already see themselves as fitting into some of these categories that I wouldn’t see myself in for years, and how that must have felt to them then, but what did occur to me was this: That unconditional love that I had fallen for in my early days in the church? It was conditional.

That’s why I didn’t tell you. I didn’t know how.” Her father rubbed his hand over his jaw. “God, I loved your mother. But she was very, very sick. And even so, I wouldn’t have traded a single moment of the time I had with her. Not even when she was throwing up or when she cried herself to sleep. Love isn’t Hallmark movies, Melina. It’s Jeopardy! but with categories so narrow only two people in the whole world know the answers. Have you seen my reading glasses? and Do I have a tick on my back? and Will you be there for me when it’s time for me to go?” He shook his head, laughing ruefully. “Mind you, when people say this is what your mom would have wanted for me, I don’t believe a word of it. Your mother would have come at me with a hatchet at the thought of me with some other woman. But…I also think she’d forgive me.” A small smile ghosted over his face. “Because that’s what best friends do.

so much of what we see lies in the name; that is an apple tree, that is an elm, that is a cherry tree, that is a spruce. If we look at it for longer, we might get beneath the name and see it as a unique, singular tree and not merely as a representative of the category it belongs to. And eventually we may even be able to see what it 'is', its presence in the world. But by then we will have come to know it so well that it will seem familiar to us, which in turn creates a distance, for that's how it is with the familiar, isn't it, friends we've known for years - we no longer see them, we just note their presence, allowing it to fill the category we have created for them.

In some cases, perfectionists may forgive other people’s sins, but be unable to receive forgiveness themselves. Many perfectionists will sabotage potentially good relationships for one reason: being found out. They are afraid to get too close to someone, because their bad self might start leaking out, and the shame and self-condemnation they feel is unbearably painful. Generally, perfectionists opt for isolation rather than to be exposed in their failings. It is sadly ironic that perfectionists shun the very safety that could heal them. The well-known “commitment-phobic” man is often in this category. He’s the type who starts a relationship, gets close, and then disappears. As a single woman friend of mine said after one of these episodes, “I’d understand it if he’d bailed out after a fight. But on our last date, we both started sharing our fears and insecurities. Silly me. I thought that tended to bring people closer together.” What actually happened to the man was just the opposite: He started trusting my friend, and his defenses began slipping.

Whenever you start coaxing a new Focal Point to life, think about the categories of help you might need. For each category, come up with three friends, associates, or contacts who could supply it. (A person can supply more than one form of help, but remember that the point here is to avoid leaning on any one person so hard that you push him or her over the edge.)

She observed the dumb-show by which her neighbour was expressing her passion for music, but she refrained from copying it. This was not to say that, for once that she had consented to spend a few minutes in Mme. de Saint-Euverte's house, the Princesse des Laumes would not have wished (so that the act of politeness to her hostess which she had performed by coming might, so to speak, 'count double') to shew herself as friendly and obliging as possible. But she had a natural horror of what she called 'exaggerating,' and always made a point of letting people see that she 'simply must not' indulge in any display of emotion that was not in keeping with the tone of the circle in which she moved, although such displays never failed to make an impression upon her, by virtue of that spirit of imitation, akin to timidity, which is developed in the most self-confident persons, by contact with an unfamiliar environment, even though it be inferior to their own. She began to ask herself whether these gesticulations might not, perhaps, be a necessary concomitant of the piece of music that was being played, a piece which, it might be, was in a different category from all the music that she had ever heard before; and whether to abstain from them was not a sign of her own inability to understand the music, and of discourtesy towards the lady of the house; with the result that, in order to express by a compromise both of her contradictory inclinations in turn, at one moment she would merely straighten her shoulder-straps or feel in her golden hair for the little balls of coral or of pink enamel, frosted with tiny diamonds, which formed its simple but effective ornament, studying, with a cold interest, her impassioned neighbour, while at another she would beat time for a few bars with her fan, but, so as not to forfeit her independence, she would beat a different time from the pianist's.

Melians: And how, pray, could it turn out as good for us to serve as for you to rule? Athenians: Because you would have the advantage of submitting before suffering the worst, and we should gain by not destroying you. Melians: So that you would not consent to our being neutral, friends instead of enemies, but allies of neither side. Athenians: No; for your hostility cannot so much hurt us as your friendship will be an argument to our subjects of our weakness, and your enmity of our power. Melians: Is that your subjects' idea of equity, to put those who have nothing to do with you in the same category with peoples that are most of them your own colonists, and some conquered rebels? Athenians: As far as right goes they think one has as much of it as the other, and that if any maintain their independence it is because they are strong, and that if we do not molest them it is because we are afraid; so that besides extending our empire we should gain in security by your subjection; the fact that you are islanders and weaker than others rendering it all the more important that you should not succeed in baffling the masters of the sea.

There is an ethnic component lurking in the background of my story. In our race-conscious society, our vocabulary often extends no further than the color of someone's skin - black people, Asians, white privilege. Sometimes these broad categories are useful. But to understand my story, you have to delve into the details.I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty's the family tradition. Their ancestors were day laborers in the southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and mill workers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends and family.

It’s not always hatred or disdain that makes your skin crawl. In fact, sometimes, it’s the exact opposite: Some people will easily love your Blackness. They will respond to it, gravitate toward it, see it before they even see the rest of you. And once they see it and classify it into their preferred category, they won’t bother to look any further. The rest of you is just a skeleton holding up that beautiful Black skin.

People will love people no matter what terrible shit they do.   We forgive people, even when they don’t ask for forgiveness.   When there is no atonement, no penance.   Why do we love people? Why do we forgive evil? Stupidity— Shallowness— the darkest motives. We forgive because we are attached, we have known them a long time, we have put them into the category of family or friend. We want to have sex with them. Because they entertain us.   We even forgive child molesters if they make good movies.   The unspeakable truth is that we need written laws that have mystic origins— with weapons to keep them upheld.   Because we are too forgiving of our friends and family. We take their side, even when we know they are wrong, and lying.   The world would collapse into chaos without law not because we are savage beasts, but because we are so forgiving.

Similarly, whenever old friends meet up with me for the first time since my transition, they almost invariably comment on how strange it is that I seem like the exact same person to them, except that now I am female. It’s as if our compulsion to place women and men into different categories of our brain, to see them as “opposite” sexes, is so intense that we have trouble imagining that it is possible for a person to change their sex without somehow becoming an entirely different person.

But people are most likely to think that they can do wrong without paying the penalty if they are good speakers or men of affairs or have wide experience of litigation, or if they have many friends, or if they are rich. Their confidence is greatest if they fall into one of these categories themselves, but otherwise if they count these types among their friends, supporters, or accomplices. For these are the factors that enable them to carry out their crimes, avoid detection, and remain unpunished.

The last time I’d been unwell, suicidally depressed, whatever you want to call it, the reactions of my friends and family had fallen into several different camps: The Let’s Laugh It Off merchants: Claire was the leading light. They hoped that joking about my state of mind would reduce it to a manageable size. Most likely to say, ‘Feeling any mad urges to fling yourself into the sea?’ The Depression Deniers: they were the ones who took the position that since there was no such thing as depression, nothing could be wrong with me. Once upon a time I’d have belonged in that category myself. A subset of the Deniers was The Tough Love people. Most likely to say, ‘What have you got to be depressed about?’ The It’s All About Me bunch: they were the ones who wailed that I couldn’t kill myself because they’d miss me so much. More often than not, I’d end up comforting them. My sister Anna and her boyfriend, Angelo, flew three thousand miles from New York just so I could dry their tears. Most likely to say, ‘Have you any idea how many people love you?’ The Runaways: lots and lots of people just stopped ringing me. Most of them I didn’t care about, but one or two were important to me. Their absence was down to fear; they were terrified that whatever I had, it was catching. Most likely to say, ‘I feel so helpless … God, is that the time?’ Bronagh – though it hurt me too much at the time to really acknowledge it – was the number one offender. The Woo-Woo crew: i.e. those purveying alternative cures. And actually there were hundreds of them – urging me to do reiki, yoga, homeopathy, bible study, sufi dance, cold showers, meditation, EFT, hypnotherapy, hydrotherapy, silent retreats, sweat lodges, felting, fasting, angel channelling or eating only blue food. Everyone had a story about something that had cured their auntie/boss/boyfriend/next-door neighbour. But my sister Rachel was the worst – she had me plagued. Not a day passed that she didn’t send me a link to some swizzer. Followed by a phone call ten minutes later to make sure I’d made an appointment. (And I was so desperate that I even gave plenty of them a go.) Most likely to say, ‘This man’s a miracle worker.’ Followed by: ‘That’s why he’s so expensive. Miracles don’t come cheap.’ There was often cross-pollination between the different groupings. Sometimes the Let’s Laugh It Off merchants teamed up with the Tough Love people to tell me that recovering from depression is ‘simply mind over matter’. You just decide you’re better. (The way you would if you had emphysema.) Or an All About Me would ring a member of the Woo-Woo crew and sob and sob about how selfish I was being and the Woo-Woo crew person would agree because I had refused to cough up two grand for a sweat lodge in Wicklow. Or one of the Runaways would tiptoe back for a sneaky look at me, then commandeer a Denier into launching a two-pronged attack, telling me how well I seemed. And actually that was the worst thing anyone could have done to me, because you can only sound like a self-pitying malingerer if you protest, ‘But I don’t feel well. I feel wretched beyond description.’ Not one person who loved me understood how I’d felt. They hadn’t a clue and I didn’t blame them, because, until it had happened to me, I hadn’t a clue either.

It is always revealing to see how a person responds to those situations where he’s told: “There’s nothing you can do about it. This is the way of the world.” Peter Thiel’s friend, the mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, has a category of individual he defines as a “high-agency person.” How do you respond when told something is impossible? Is that the end of the conversation or the start of one? What’s the reaction to being told you can’t—that no one can? One type accepts it, wallows in it even. The other questions it, fights it, rejects it.

For a while, every smart and shy eccentric from Bobby Fischer to Bill Gate was hastily fitted with this label, and many were more or less believably retrofitted, including Isaac Newton, Edgar Allen Pie, Michelangelo, and Virginia Woolf. Newton had great trouble forming friendships and probably remained celibate. In Poe's poem Alone, he wrote that "All I lov'd - I lov'd alone." Michelangelo is said to have written "I have no friends of any sort and I don't want any." Woolf killed herself. Asperger's disorder, once considered a sub-type of autism, was named after the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger, a pioneer, in the 1940s, in identifying and describing autism. Unlike other early researchers, according to the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, Asperger felt that autistic people could have beneficial talents, especially what he called a "particular originality of thought" that was often beautiful and pure, unfiltered by culture of discretion, unafraid to grasp at extremely unconventional ideas. Nearly every autistic person that Sacks observed appeard happiest when alone. The word "autism" is derived from autos, the Greek word for "self." "The cure for Asperger's syndrome is very simple," wrote Tony Attwood, a psychologist and Asperger's expert who lives in Australia. The solution is to leave the person alone. "You cannot have a social deficit when you are alone. You cannot have a communication problem when you are alone. All the diagnostic criteria dissolve in solitude." Officially, Asperger's disorder no longer exists as a diagnostic category. The diagnosis, having been inconsistently applied, was replaced, with clarified criteria, in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; Asperger's is now grouped under the umbrella term Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD.

It is important to note that the relevant factor to sexual harassment in this story is not gender identity but gender perception. Some friends and acquaintances who have experienced harassment do not, in fact, identify as women; they were perceived as women. As I sought support, the key issue was not their gender identity, but the gender signifiers that led them to be perceived as women. If we don’t admit that sexual harassment is a gendered experience, we can never shed light on the sexism implicit in many cases of harassment. However, in addressing these sorts of gendered experiences, we may find that gender identity is not the most useful category.

What I hadn’t realized was that, above all else, Favs was a prodigy. Speechwriters, even great ones, tend to lead either from the head or heart. I was a head-first writer, connecting logical dots and only later adding emotions. Heart-first people went the other way around. Favs was the only true switch-hitter I ever met. His writing was both lyrical and well organized, arcing between timeless values and everyday concerns with astounding ease and grace. Perhaps because he possessed innate talent, Favs tended to separate people into two categories: those who had it and those who did not. I was lucky enough to be lumped into the haves. From the day I arrived he acted as if, all evidence to the contrary, his team benefited from having me around. “So, is it amazing?” friends would ask. Of course it was amazing. Sometimes Kathy, Valerie’s assistant, would explain that we needed to reschedule a meeting because Valerie had been called into the Oval. She said this casually, as though her boss had been put on hold with the cable company and not summoned by the leader of the free world. Other times I would watch Favs and the POTUS speechwriters spitball lines for a set of remarks. A few days later, I would see those exact same lines on the front page of the New York Times. It was unbelievable. I felt like Cinderella at the ball.

Just like that, we started to see each other most mornings, which meant we quickly went from two guys who liked each other and kept saying they wanted to hang out to actual full-blown bros. This of course meant that every woman who knew us...was falling over herself to label our relationship a 'bromance.' That's a term that was coined in the nineties by the skateboarding magazine -Big Brother- to describe skaters who spent a ton of time together, but it has morphed into a gentle insult for any guys who dare to get too close. It's not as condescending as 'bros,' and it doesn't cut quite as wrong as being shouted down with 'gaaay.' No, the bromance lived in the category of the oh-aren't-you-cute pat on the head.

that? Masculinity is and was a broad category that encompassed many forms of behaviour; the manliness of these particular men was inflected by identities of class, ethnicity and profession. Yet it is striking how often the key protagonists appealed to pointedly masculine modes of comportment and how closely these were interwoven with their understanding of policy. ‘I sincerely trust we shall keep our backs very stiff in this matter,’ Arthur Nicolson wrote to his friend Charles Hardinge, recommending that London reject any appeals for rapprochement from Berlin.156 It was essential, the German ambassador in Paris, Wilhelm von Schoen wrote in March 1912, that the Berlin government maintain a posture of ‘completely cool calmness’ in its relations with France and approach ‘with cold blood’ the tasks of national defence imposed by the international situation.157 When Bertie spoke of the danger that the Germans would ‘push us into the water and steal our clothes’, he metaphorized the international system as a rural playground thronging with male adolescents. Sazonov praised the ‘uprightness’ of Poincaré’s character and ‘the unshakable firmness of his will’;158 Paul Cambon saw in him the ‘stiffness’ of the professional jurist, while the allure of the reserved and self-reliant ‘outdoorsman’ was central to Grey’s identity as a public man. To have shrunk from supporting Austria-Hungary during the crisis of 1914, Bethmann commented in his memoirs, would have been an act of ‘self-castration’.

A few days after the fireworks, I gave them a lesson on category nouns versus exact nouns. I hadn’t heard of this distinction prior to opening the textbook. It transpired that a category noun was something like “vegetables,” whereas exact nouns were “beetroot,” “carrots,” “broccoli.” It was better to use exact nouns because this made your writing more precise and interesting. The chapter gave a short explanation followed by an exercise: an A4 page divided into columns. On the left were various category nouns. On the right, you had to fill in at least three corresponding exact nouns. I told the kids they could use their Cantonese-to-English dictionaries. Cynthia Mak asked what to say for “people.” Did it mean “sister,” “brother,” “father,” or “teacher,” “doctor,” “artist,” or— “They’re all okay,” I said. “But if I put ‘sister,’ ‘father,’ ‘brother’ in ‘people,’ then what about here?” She pointed to the box marked “family.” “Okay, don’t do those. Do ‘teacher’ or something.” “But what about here?”—signaling the “professions” row. “Okay, something else for ‘people.’” “Happy people, sad people?” “‘Happy people’ isn’t an exact noun—it’s an adjective plus a category noun.” “So what should I write?” We looked at each other. It was indeed a challenge to describe people in a way not immediately related to how they earned money or their position in the family unit. I said: “How about ‘friend,’ ‘boyfriend,’ ‘colleague’?” “I don’t want to write ‘boyfriend.’” I couldn’t blame her for questioning the exercise. “Friend,” “enemy,” and “colleague” didn’t seem like ways of narrowing down “people” in the way “apple” did for “fruit.” An apple would still be a fruit if it didn’t have any others in its vicinity, but you couldn’t be someone’s nemesis without their hanging around to complete the definition. The same issue cropped up with my earlier suggestions. “Family” was relational, and “profession” was created and given meaning by external structures. Admittedly “adult,” “child,” and “teenager” could stand on their own. But I still found it depressing that the way we specified ourselves—the way we made ourselves precise and interesting—was by pinpointing our developmental stage and likely distance from mortality. Fruit didn’t have that problem.

The concierge, before she became a concierge, had owned a drink-selling concession at the Paris race-courses. Her life-work lay in the pelouse, but she kept an eye on the people of the pesage, and she took great pride in telling me which of my guests were well brought up, which were of good family, who were sportsmen, a French word pronounced with the accent on the men. The only trouble was that people who did not fall into any of those three cat-egories were very liable to be told there was no one home, chez Barnes. One of my friends, an extremely underfed-looking painter, who was obviously to Madame Duzinell neither well brought up, of good family, nor a sportsman, wrote me a letter asking if I could get him a pass to get by the concierge so he could come up and see me occasionally in the evenings.

Well, she would marry a man who didn't need or want her fortune. Mr. Pinter didn't fall into that category. And given how blank his expression became as his gaze met hers, she'd been right to be skeptical. he would never be interested in her in that way. He confirmed it by saying, with his usual formality, "I doubt any man would consider your ladyship unacceptable as a wife." Oh, when he turned all hoity-toity, she could just murder him. "Then we agree that the gentlemen in question would find me satisfactory," she said, matching his cold tone. "So I don't see why you assume they'd be unfaithful." "Some men are unfaithful no matter how beautiful their wives are," Mr. Pinter growled. He thought her beautiful? There she went again, reading too much into his words. He was only making a point. "But you have no reason to believe that these gentleman would be. Unless there's some dark secret you already know about them that I do not?" Glancing away, he muttered a curse under his breath. "No." "Then here's your chance to find out the truth about their characters. Because I prefer facts to opinions. And I was under the impression that you do, too." Take that, Mr. Pinter! Hoist by your own petard. The man always insisted on sticking to the facts. And he was well aware that she'd caught him out, for he scowled, then crossed his arms over his chest. His rather impressive chest, from what she could tell beneath his black coat and plain buff waistcoat. "I can't believe I'm the only person who would object to these gentlemen," he said. "What about your grandmother? Have you consulted her?" She lifted her eyes heavenward. He was being surprisingly resistant to her plans. "I don't need to. Every time one of them asks to dance with me, she beams. She's forever urging me to smile at them or attempt flirtation. And if they so much as press my hand or take my for a stroll, she quizzes me with great glee on what was said and done." "She's been letting you go out on private strolls with these scoundrels?" Mr. Pinter said in sheer outrage. "They aren't scoundrels." "I swear to God, you're a lamb among the wolves," he muttered. That image of her, so unlike how she saw herself, made her laugh. "I've spent half my life in the company of my brothers. Every time Gabe went to shoot, I went with him. At every house party that involved his friends, I was urged to show off my abilities with a rifle. I think I know how to handle a man, Mr. Pinter." His glittering gaze bored into her. "There's a vast difference between gamboling about in your brother's company with a group of his friends and letting a rakehell like Devonmont or a devilish foreigner like Basto stroll alone with you down some dark garden path." A blush heated her cheeks. "I didn't mean strolls of that sort, sir. I meant daytime walks about our gardens and such, with servants in plain view. All perfectly innocent." He snorted. "I doubt it will stay that way." "Oh, for heaven's sake, why are you being so stubborn? You know I must marry. Why do you even care whom I choose?" "I don't care," he protested. "I'm merely thinking of how much of my time will be wasted investigating suitors I already know are unacceptable." She let out an exasperated breath. Of course. With him, it was always about money. Heaven forbid he should waste his time helping her.

But people are most likely to think that they can do wrong without paying the penalty if they are good speakers or men of affairs or have wide experience of litigation, or if they have many friends, or if they are rich. Their confidence is greatest if they fall into one of these categories themselves, but otherwise if they count these types among their friends, supporters, or accomplices. For these are the factors that enable them to carry out their crimes, avoid detection, and remain unpunished. Their confidence is also high if they are on good terms with the victims of their wrongdoing or with the judges. For friends take no precautions against being wronged by friends and would rather make up with them than prosecute; and judges are biased in favour of their friends, and either let them off scot-free or give them an exiguous penalty.

Now, heavy socks removed, stepping tentatively, trying the pressure of the leather against the toes, the argument past, she wanting not to suffer, but to keep up and please Mr. J. P., me ashamed at having been a four-letter man about boots, at being righteous against pain, at being righteous at all, at ever being righteous, stopping to whisper about it, both of us grinning at what was whispered, it all right now, the boots too, without the heavy socks, much better, me hating all righteous bastards now, one absent American friend especially, having just removed myself from that category, certainly never to be righteous again, watching Droopy ahead, we went down the long slant of the trail toward the bottom of the canyon where the trees were heavy and tall and the floor of the canyon, that from above had been a narrow gash, opened to a forest-banked stream.

I also became familiar with an entirely new category of people: the unhappily married person. They are everywhere, and they are ten thousand times more depressing than a divorced person. My friend Tim, whose name I've changed, obviously, has gotten more and more depressing since he married his girlfriend of seven years. Tim is the kind of guy who corners you at a party to tell you, vehemently, that marriage is work And that you have to work on it constantly. And that going to couples' therapy is not only normal but something that everyone needs to do. Tim has a kind of manic, cult-y look in his eye from paying thousands of dollars to a marriage counselor. He is convinced that his daily work on his marriage, and his acknowledgement that it is basically a living hell, is modern. The result is that he has helped to relieve me of any romantic notions I had about marriage.

And yet it seems to me that the thought and activity of those friends who have never given up direct political work and who are always ready to assume direct political responsibility very often suffer from one chronic fault: an insufficient understanding of the historical uniqueness of the posttotalitarian system as a social and political reality. They have little understanding of the specific nature of power that is typical for this system and therefore they overestimate the importance of direct political work in the traditional sense. Moreover, they fail to appreciate the political significance of those "pre-political" events and processes that provide the living humus from which genuine political change usually springs. As political actors-or, rather, as people with political ambitions-they frequently try to pick up where natural political life left off. They maintain models of behavior that may have been appropriate in more normal political circumstances and thus, without really being aware of it, they bring an outmoded way of thinking, old habits, conceptions, categories, and notions to bear on circumstances that are quite new and radically different, without first giving adequate thought to the meaning and substance of such things in the new circumstances, to what politics as such means now, to what sort of thing can have political impact and potential, and in what way- Because such people have been excluded from the structures of power and are no longer able to influence those structures directly (and because they remain faithful to traditional notions of politics established in more or less democratic societies or in classical dictatorships) they frequently, in a sense, lose touch with reality. Why make compromises with reality, they say, when none of our proposals will ever be accepted anyway? Thus they find themselves in a world of genuinely utopian thinking.

It is always revealing to see how a person responds to those situations where he’s told: “There’s nothing you can do about it. This is the way of the world.” Peter Thiel’s friend, the mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, has a category of individual he defines as a “high-agency person.” How do you respond when told something is impossible? Is that the end of the conversation or the start of one? What’s the reaction to being told you can’t—that no one can? One type accepts it, wallows in it even. The other questions it, fights it, rejects it. This choice defines us. Puts us at a crossroads with ourselves and what we think about the kind of person we are. “Anyone who is threatened and is forced by necessity either to act or to suffer,” writes Machiavelli, “becomes a very dangerous man to the prince.” And Peter Thiel was driven into a desperate position, of and not of his own making, that had started with a matter of his identity and become about a deeper identity. Now he had not only decided to act against Gawker, but he would conspire to destroy them.

however, I evaluate a problem and decide that it really is a big deal, I move to step two of what I will call my method for dealing with problems. Look at me; I have a method. In my life, most of the problems that fall into this category have to do with my disease. Some examples include: realizing my arms are a lot weaker than they were a year ago, thinking about my long-term future, and being unable to do things because of my wheelchair. These are problems that, no matter how you look at them, just plain old suck—a lot. But therein lies the key to step two of my method. As long as I’m not thinking about these problems, they can’t bring me down, so I simply don’t think about them! It’s not rocket science. There’s nothing I can do to solve any of those above-mentioned problems, so what good will come from spending my time being sad about them? Instead, I focus my mind and energy on doing things that make me happy like laughing, joking, eating, and spending time with friends. The more I think about it, the more I realize that there really is no other way to live.

Some of my friends in concerned and committed activist organizations think that psychological analysis is actually the enemy of finding solutions. They think anyone with deep interest in psychology must be a total “navel gazer,” trying more to get away from the world's problems than to solve them. Some of these people believe that the world's problems would disappear if they could just translate all religious categories into Marxist terms and get everyone to be socialists. They assume, for example, that Marxists would never engage in cocaine trafficking, that a Marxist country would never have to shoot its generals for smuggling in cocaine, and that Marxists would never execute people who were longing for freedom. Did you know that? We would not have to execute students, or shoot them in the streets, if we were Marxists. You can go on and on with that, and it makes me sick, because it shows such an incredible naiveté about the realities of life. They need to read Reinhold Niebuhr's classic works on the dynamics of human pride that afflict all ideologies left and right (Niebuhr 1941–1943). The human predicament does not result from having the wrong ideology.

I’d just settled into bed when Sophie hailed me. Somehow she hurt herself bottling starlight for her Universe assignment. (Always an adventure with this girl!) SYMPTOMS/INJURIES: Major burns with blackish, purplish blisters. Looked super painful. Glad she set aside her fears and hailed me. TREATMENT: I started with my strongest burn salve mixed with painkiller and a Youth soak. But her skin still looked raw, so I ran home for something a little more extreme. (I figured Sophie wouldn’t want to know that her hands were covered in yeti pee, so I left out that detail—but I did warn her to wash her hands thoroughly.) NOTES: I also wrapped up the starlight to make sure she couldn’t hurt herself again. Weird thing was, it felt cold—not hot. And I’ve never seen light like that before—or heard of UPDATE: Sophie stopped by early (I think she didn’t want her friends to see her in the Healing Center again), and her hands looked perfect! But I still gave her one more elixir, just to be safe. ADDITIONAL NOTES: In the category of Proof That Things Keep Getting Weirder Around Here, a couple of Councillors showed up and asked me a billion questions—and made me black out the star’s name from this record. Pretty sure I know what that means.…

I told them we’re tired of the culture wars, tired of Christianity getting entangled with party politics and power. Millennials want to be known by what we’re for, I said, not just what we’re against. We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. We want to talk about the tough stuff—biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice—but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers. We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors, without leaving our hearts and minds behind, without wearing a mask. I explained that when our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends aren’t welcome at the table, then we don’t feel welcome either, and that not every young adult gets married or has children, so we need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people. And I told them that, contrary to popular belief, we can’t be won back with hipper worship bands, fancy coffee shops, or pastors who wear skinny jeans. We millennials have been advertised to our entire lives, so we can smell b.s. from a mile away. The church is the last place we want to be sold another product, the last place we want to be entertained.

Each of the three recognized categories—care, service, and education—would encompass a wide range of activities, with different levels of compensation for full- and part-time participation. Care work could include parenting of young children, attending to an aging parent, assisting a friend or family member dealing with illness, or helping someone with mental or physical disabilities live life to the fullest. This category would create a veritable army of people—loved ones, friends, or even strangers—who could assist those in need, offering them what my entrepreneur friend’s touchscreen device for the elderly never could: human warmth. Service work would be similarly broadly defined, encompassing much of the current work of nonprofit groups as well as the kinds of volunteers I saw in Taiwan. Tasks could include performing environmental remediation, leading afterschool programs, guiding tours at national parks, or collecting oral histories from elders in our communities. Participants in these programs would register with an established group and commit to a certain number of hours of service work to meet the requirements of the stipend. Finally, education could range from professional training for the jobs of the AI age to taking classes that could transform a hobby into a career. Some recipients of the stipend will use that financial freedom to pursue a degree in machine learning and use it to find a high-paying job.

A friend I’ll call Kate took an Introduction to Theology class. Her professor told the class to “write their personal creeds.” For the next week, Kate kept writing and rewriting. She kept asking herself, “What do I believe?” As she honestly reflected on that question, she realized that she believed many things. At the same time, she couldn’t say how strong any of these beliefs were. Should she have a “definitely believe” category, along with sections for “probably believe” and “might believe”? Should she have a “I believe usually, but not necessarily today” category? She struggled with what she thought she believed versus what she acted like she believed. The assignment took a great deal of her time and energy.   After a week, the paper came due. Kate took a deep breath and turned in a handwritten copy of the Nicene Creed, the great orthodox faith statement of the church. She told her teacher that some days she believes the creed with her whole heart. On other days, she isn’t so sure. But the creed isn’t about her. It’s about the faith of the whole church. On the days that she believes it all, she’s in harmony with “the great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1). On days when she doesn’t believe it, those witnesses carry her along. The creed shows that we’re all in this together. It’s not a consumerist document; it’s not based on what’s popular or unpopular. It’s the confession of the saints and sinners, martyrs and betrayers.

The most important form of selfishness involves spending time on your fitness, eating right, pursuing your career, and still spending quality time with your family and friends. If you neglect your health or your career, you slip into the second category—stupid—which is a short slide to becoming a burden on society. I blame society for the sad state of adult fitness in the Western world. We’re raised to believe that giving of ourselves is noble and good. If you’re religious, you might have twice as much pressure to be unselfish. All our lives we are told it’s better to give than to receive. We’re programmed for unselfish behavior by society, our parents, and even our genes to some extent. The problem is that our obsession with generosity causes people to think in the short term. We skip exercise to spend an extra hour helping at home. We buy fast food to save time to help a coworker with a problem. At every turn, we cheat our own future to appear generous today. So how can you make the right long-term choices for yourself, thus being a benefit to others in the long run, without looking like a selfish turd in your daily choices? There’s no instant cure, but a step in the right direction involves the power of permission. I’m giving you permission to take care of yourself first, so you can do a better job of being generous in the long run. What? You might be wondering how a cartoonist’s permission to be selfish can help in any way. The surprising answer is that it can, in my opinion. If you’ve read this far, we have a relationship of sorts. It’s an author-reader relationship, but that’s good enough.

Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female world. The obsession of the former is lyrical: what they seek in women is themselves, their ideal, and since an ideal is by definition something that can never be found, they are disappointed again and again. The disappointment that propels them from woman to woman gives their inconstancy a kind of romantic excuse, so that many sentimental women are touched by their unbridled philandering. The obsession of the latter is epic, and women see nothing the least bit touching in it: the man projects no subjective ideal on women, and since everything interests him, nothing can disappoint him. This inability to be disappointed has something scandalous about it. The obsession of the epic womanizer strikes people as lacking in redemption (redemption by disappointment). Because the lyrical womanizer always runs after the same type of woman, we even fail to notice when he exchanges one mistress for another. His friends perpetually cause misunderstandings by mixing up his lovers and calling them by the same name. In pursuit of knowledge, epic womanizers (and of course Tomas belonged in their ranks) turn away from conventional feminine beauty, of which they quickly tire, and inevitably end up as curiosity collectors. They are aware of this and a little ashamed of it, and to avoid causing their friends embarrassment, they refrain from appearing in public with their mistresses.

My Little Pony Game Helps You Get A Creator With My Little Pony games, you can enjoy many categories such as Dress Up games, Makeover games, riding games, racing games,...Each game brings you the different sentiments and it depends on your hobby that you can choose the suitable game for your free time. At our website, there are many My Little Pony games with full My Little Pony characters and you can meet them such as Twilight Sparkle, Rarity, Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie and Applejack,,They have the good friendship and relations as well. Now, you will go to our new game called My little pony hairstyle. This is a creator game for you that you can get an opportunity to make new hair for Rainbow Dash. As you know, she has a hairstyle attached to her name. Now, you will help her to change Little about her hairstyle. Not difficult to play this game , you just use your mouse and follow step by step instruction that you can find in this game at our website. I can tell more here to help you play this game easier. In the first game, you will choose a hairstyle in six styles. Then you will choose the color for her hair. You can take one in ten colors in this game such as blue, green, red, purple, yellow, light purple,.. And you mix color as your favorite color. With each my little pony character, you can see the different personality and fashion style. My little pony Rainbow Dash has always the unique hairstyle with the mixing color. This is the creator game because you can show your fashion style about the hair. Besides the dress up game and make up games, we have others games categories such as riding, racing, caring, cooking, fighting,,,All are free here, you can enjoy them at anytime and anywhere. Please recommend our website to your friends as well, you will have the more human counterpart. You will have the good experience, adventure when you come to our website. We provide also descendants games, Elsa games, Daby games, Io games,...It depends on the age, the hobby that you can choose the game in your free time. You can enjoy the life as a child with our games and forget all the worries and stress in your life. I hope that you will like our games as well. My Little Pony Angry is a puzzle game and your task in this game is to use your mouse to drag and drop the pieces and make a complete My Little Pony pictures. In this game, you will get an opportunity to meet again six main My Little Pony such as Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, Rarity, and Twilight Sparkle of the cartoon My Little Pony, they are all very aggressive and angry. We think that this way they want to scare off enemies from Ponyville. You know that My Little Pony or Friendship Is Magic has the content that tells about six main My Little Pony and other supporting characters but with My Little Pony, the content focuses primarily on Twilight Sparkle and her friends, they find out the way to rescue Equestria Land. Each My Little Pony game can give you a good lessons about family, friends, relationship...This is a cheap entertainment and designed for everyone. I hope that you can get the perfectime here and we can make the relationship thank to My Little Pony games on our website. Have fun on our site Gamesmylittlepony.com

That must be my surgeon coming aboard. You will like him; a reading man too, most amazing learned; a full-blown physician into the bargain, and my particular friend. But I must tell you this, Yorke; he is wealthy – ‘ In point of fact Captain Aubrey had little idea of his surgeon’s fortune, apart from knowing that he owned a good deal of hilly land in Catalonia with a tumbledown castle on it. But Stephen had done pretty well out of the Mauritius campaign; his manner of living was Spartan – one suit of clothes every five years and perhaps a couple of shirts – and apart from books he had no visible expenses at all. Jack was no Macchiavel, but he did know that to the rich it should be given; that capital possessed a mystical significance; that even the most perfectly disinterested respected it and its owner; and that although a naval surgeon was ordinarily a person of no great consequence, the same man moved into quite a different category the moment he was endowed with comfortable private means. In short, that whereas an ordinary surgeon, living on his pay, might not readily be indulged in room for exotic livestock, an imperfectly- preserved giant squid, and several tons of natural specimens, in a stranger’s ship, a wealthy natural philosopher might meet with more consideration; and Jack knew how Stephen prized the collection he had made during their arduous voyage. ‘ – he is wealthy, and he only comes with me because of the opportunities for natural philosophy; though he is a first-rate surgeon, too, and we are lucky to have him. But this voyage the opportunities have been prodigious, and he has turned the Leopard into a down-right Ark. Most of the Desolation creatures are stuffed or pickled but there are some from New Holland that skip and bound about: I hope you are not too crowded in La Fleche?

I've encountered no greater mystery in life than myself. In a just society I'd be warehoused somewhere. But of course what really threatens the scofflaw is not the just society but the decaying one. It is here that he finds himself becoming slowly indistinguishable from the citizenry. He finds himself co-opted. Difficult these days to be a rake or a bounder. A roué. A deviant? A pervert? Surely you're joking. The new dispensations have all but erased these categories from the language. You can no longer be a loose woman . For instance. A trollop. The whole concept is meaningless. You cant even be a drug addict. At best you're just a user. A user? What the fuck is that? We've gone from dope friends to drug users in just a few short years. It doesn't take Nostradamus to see where this is headed. The most heinous of criminals clamoring for standing. Serialkillers and cannibals claiming a right to their lifestyle. Like anyone else I try to sort out where I fit into this menagerie. Without malefactors the world of the righteous is robbed of all meaning. As for myself again if I cant be decorum's sworn enemy while savoring its fruits I simply see no place for me at all. What would you recommend, Squire? Go home and draw a warm bath and climb in and open a vein? Never mind. I see you weighing the merits of it. Anyway, Hoffer has it right. Real trouble doesn't begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they'd never imagined. Boredom. Squire, I'm a scoundrel very nearly without peer. But in our time decent people actually attract comment. We dont know what to make of them. They have few friends, while I have more friends than I know what to do with. Why is that? I dont know. I think it's because people are bored out of their fucking minds. I cant come up with anything else.

I still remember a small story from the Pañca Tantra which I was told as a small child. One rainy day, a monkey was sitting on a tree branch getting completely drenched. Right opposite on another branch of the same tree there was a small sparrow sitting in its hanging nest. Normally a sparrow builds its nest on the edge of a branch so it can hang down and swing around gently in the breeze. It has a nice cabin inside with an upper chamber, a reception room, a bedroom down below and even a delivery room if it is going to give birth to little ones. Oh yes, you should see and admire a sparrow’s nest sometime. It was warm and cozy inside its nest and the sparrow peeped out and, seeing the poor monkey, said, “Oh, my dear friend, I am so small; I don’t even have hands like you, only a small beak. But with only that I built a nice house, expecting this rainy day. Even if the rain continues for days, I will be warm inside. I heard Darwin saying that you are the forefather of human beings, so why don’t you use your brain? Build a nice, small hut somewhere to protect yourself during the rain.” You should have seen the face of that monkey. It was terrible! “Oh, you little devil! How dare you try to advise me? Because you are warm and cozy in your nest you are teasing me. Wait, you will see where you are!” The monkey proceeded to tear the nest to pieces, and the poor bird had to fly out and get drenched like the monkey. This is a story I was told when I was quite young and I still remember it. Sometimes we come across such monkeys, and if you advise them they take it as an insult. They think you are proud of your position. If you sense even a little of that tendency in somebody, stay away. He or she will have to learn by experience. By giving advice to such people, you will only lose your peace of mind. Is there any other category you can think of? Patañjali groups all individuals in these four ways: the happy, the unhappy, the virtuous and the wicked. So have these four attitudes: friendliness, compassion, gladness and indifference. These four keys should always be with you in your pocket. If you use the right key with the right person you will retain your peace. Nothing in the world can upset you then. Remember, our goal is to keep a serene mind. From the very beginning of Patañjali’s Sūtras we are reminded of that. And this sūtra will help us a lot.

A few years ago, a couple of young men from my church came to our home for dinner. During the course of the dinner, the conversation turned from religion to various world mythologies and we began to play the game of ‘Name That Character.” To play this game, you pick a category such as famous actors, superheroes or historical characters. In turn, each person describes events in a famous character’s life while everyone else tries to guess who the character is. Strategically you try to describe the deeds of a character in such a way that it might fit any number of characters in that category. After three guesses, if no one knows who your character is, then you win. Choosing the category of Bible Characters, we played a couple of fairly easy rounds with the typical figures, then it was my turn. Now, knowing these well meaning young men had very little religious experience or understanding outside of their own religion, I posed a trick question. I said, “Now my character may seem obvious, but please wait until the end of my description to answer.” I took a long breath for dramatic effect, and began, “My character was the son of the King of Heaven and a mortal woman.” Immediately both young men smiled knowingly, but I raised a finger asking them to wait to give their responses. I continued, “While he was just a baby, a jealous rival attempted to kill him and he was forced into hiding for several years. As he grew older, he developed amazing powers. Among these were the ability to turn water into wine and to control the mental health of other people. He became a great leader and inspired an entire religious movement. Eventually he ascended into heaven and sat with his father as a ruler in heaven.” Certain they knew who I was describing, my two guests were eager to give the winning answer. However, I held them off and continued, “Now I know adding these last parts will seem like overkill, but I simply cannot describe this character without mentioning them. This person’s birthday is celebrated on December 25th and he is worshipped in a spring festival. He defied death, journeyed to the underworld to raise his loved ones from the dead and was resurrected. He was granted immortality by his Father, the king of the gods, and was worshipped as a savior god by entire cultures.” The two young men were practically climbing out of their seats, their faces beaming with the kind of smile only supreme confidence can produce. Deciding to end the charade I said, “I think we all know the answer, but to make it fair, on the count of three just yell out the answer. One. Two. Three.” “Jesus Christ” they both exclaimed in unison – was that your answer as well? Both young men sat back completely satisfied with their answer, confident it was the right one…, but I remained silent. Five seconds ticked away without a response, then ten. The confidence of my two young friends clearly began to drain away. It was about this time that my wife began to shake her head and smile to herself. Finally, one of them asked, “It is Jesus Christ, right? It has to be!” Shaking my head, I said, “Actually, I was describing the Greek god Dionysus.

THE VISION EXERCISE Create your future from your future, not your past. WERNER ERHARD Erhard Founder of EST training and the Landmark Forum The following exercise is designed to help you clarify your vision. Start by putting on some relaxing music and sitting quietly in a comfortable environment where you won’t be disturbed. Then, close your eyes and ask your subconscious mind to give you images of what your ideal life would look like if you could have it exactly the way you want it, in each of the following categories: 1. First, focus on the financial area of your life. What is your ideal annual income and monthly cash flow? How much money do you have in savings and investments? What is your total net worth? Next . . . what does your home look like? Where is it located? Does it have a view? What kind of yard and landscaping does it have? Is there a pool or a stable for horses? What does the furniture look like? Are there paintings hanging in the rooms? Walk through your perfect house, filling in all of the details. At this point, don’t worry about how you’ll get that house. Don’t sabotage yourself by saying, “I can’t live in Malibu because I don’t make enough money.” Once you give your mind’s eye the picture, your mind will solve the “not enough money” challenge. Next, visualize what kind of car you are driving and any other important possessions your finances have provided. 2. Next, visualize your ideal job or career. Where are you working? What are you doing? With whom are you working? What kind of clients or customers do you have? What is your compensation like? Is it your own business? 3. Then, focus on your free time, your recreation time. What are you doing with your family and friends in the free time you’ve created for yourself? What hobbies are you pursuing? What kinds of vacations do you take? What do you do for fun? 4. Next, what is your ideal vision of your body and your physical health? Are you free of all disease? Are you pain free? How long do you live? Are you open, relaxed, in an ecstatic state of bliss all day long? Are you full of vitality? Are you flexible as well as strong? Do you exercise, eat good food, and drink lots of water? How much do you weigh? 5. Then, move on to your ideal vision of your relationships with your family and friends. What is your relationship with your spouse and family like? Who are your friends? What do those friendships feel like? Are those relationships loving, supportive, empowering? What kinds of things do you do together? 6. What about the personal arena of your life? Do you see yourself going back to school, getting training, attending personal growth workshops, seeking therapy for a past hurt, or growing spiritually? Do you meditate or go on spiritual retreats with your church? Do you want to learn to play an instrument or write your autobiography? Do you want to run a marathon or take an art class? Do you want to travel to other countries? 7. Finally, focus on the community you’ve chosen to live in. What does it look like when it is operating perfectly? What kinds of community activities take place there? What charitable, philanthropic, or volunteer work? What do you do to help others and make a difference? How often do you participate in these activities? Who are you helping? You can write down your answers as you go, or you can do the whole exercise first and then open your eyes and write them down. In either case, make sure you capture everything in writing as soon as you complete the exercise. Every day, review the vision you have written down. This will keep your conscious and subconscious minds focused on your vision, and as you apply the other principles in this book, you will begin to manifest all the different aspects of your vision.

প[Buy Verified Revolut Accounts ➤Email: usaseostore@gmail.com ➤Telegram: @Usaseostore ➤Skype: USASEOStore ➤WhatsApp: +1 (213) 373-3139 Buy Verified Revolut Accounts $390.00 – $890.00 Buy Verified Revolut Accounts Features Of Our Stripe Accounts: ✅ Fully Verified & KYC Approved – No hassle of manual verification. ✅ USA-Based Credentials – Ensures smooth international transactions. ✅ High Transaction Limits – No restrictions on sending or receiving money. ✅ Instant Delivery – Get your account details immediately. ✅ Secure & Private – 2FA and encryption for maximum security. ✅ Multi-Currency Support – Hold and exchange multiple currencies. ✅ Crypto-Friendly – Easily manage cryptocurrency transactions. ✅ Ideal for Businesses & Freelancers – Perfect for international payments. ✅ 24/7 Customer Support – Assistance whenever you need it. Contact Us for support Email: usaseostore@gmail.com Skype: USASEOStore Telegram: @Usaseostore WhatsApp: +1 (213) 373-3139 Buy Verified Revolut Accounts Choose an option Buy Verified Revolut Accounts quantity 1 Add to cart SKU: Buy Verified Revolut Accounts Category: Bank Accounts Tags: Best Place to Buy Revolut Account, Buy Pre-Verified Revolut Account, Buy Revolut Account with High Limits, Buy USA Verified Revolut Accounts, Buy Verified Revolut Account, Buy Verified Revolut Accounts, Instant Revolut Account Purchase., Online Banking with Revolut, Revolut Account for Sale, Revolut Business Account, Safe Revolut Account Purchase, Secure Revolut Accounts, USASEOStore Revolut Accounts, Verified Financial Accounts, Verified Revolut Account Instant Delivery Description Additional information Reviews (0) Buy Verified Revolut Accounts With instant delivery Managing purchases in this generation of technology should be simple, easy, and accurate but let’s face it, setting up and verifying a Revolut account is time-consuming and frustrating. Picture yourself waiting for days, or sometimes even weeks, facing unwarranted verification issues. It’s the reason why USASEOStore exists. We give our clients fully verified Revolut accounts, allowing users to bypass verification procedures and get straight into secure transactions. We know how frustrating getting limited transactions, denied verifications, or missed opportunities feels. We have a solution to your struggles. A verified Revolut account provides instant access to limitless financial success. Buy verified Revolut accounts today. What is a Revolut Account? Revolut is an online banking service that changes the whole experience by offering accounts with multiple currencies trading, cryptocurrency, and global transactions with minimal fees. As opposed to conventional banks, Revolut caters to modern consumers. Whether you are a freelancer, a globetrotter, or a budding entrepreneur, Revolut simplifies fiscal management to unprecedented levels. Why Use a Verified Revolut Account? A verified Revolut account is not just an ordinary account; it is an account that has been upgraded. It offers premium features, it removes transaction caps, and helps users meet important regulation requirements. Why go through the hassle of manual verification when you can purchase a fully verified account and use it instantly? So buy verified Revolut accounts from USASEOStore! Buy Verified Revolut Accounts Buy Verified Revolut Accounts The Pillars of Struggling to Verify a Revolut Account Most of us have been in the struggle of uploading endless documentation, waiting for a response and getting constant rejections. The struggle is real and certainly not easy. Here are some common problems associated with Revolut verification: Revolut takes what seems to be ages to verify accounts, which can be quite draining and tedious. Buy Verified Revolut Accounts ➤Email: usaseostore@gmail.com ➤Telegram: @Usaseostore ➤Skype: USASEOStore ➤WhatsApp: +1 (213) 373-3139

Breakups tend to fall into the category of silent losses, less tangible to other people. You have a miscarriage, but you didn't lose a baby. You have a breakup, but you didn't lose a spouse. So friends assume that you'll move on relatively quickly, and things like these concert tickets become an almost welcome external acknowledgment of your loss - not only of the person but of the time and company and daily routines, of the private jokes and references, and of the shared memories that now are yours alone to carry.

Since coming across Tennov’s book, I’ve bored a significant number of friends and acquaintances with my excitement about the concept of limerence, and (possibly somewhat impertinently) asked them what they think of it. Their responses have tended to fall into two categories: That’s just love. You don’t need a special word for that. That’s crazy. There’s something wrong with people like that. Curiously enough, that is exactly the reaction that Dorothy Tennov got after publishing her work.

Here is your clue: anyone who would harm or disregard you for an opportunity is not someone who should be in the friend category.

Adults with ADHD as a group have often experienced more than their fair share of disappointments and frustrations associated with the symptoms of ADHD, in many cases not realizing the impact of ADHD has had on them. When you reflect on a history of low grades, forgetting or not keeping promises made to others, repeated exhortations from others about your unfulfilled potential and the need to work harder, you may be left with a self-view that “I’m not good enough,” “I’m lazy,” or “I cannot expect much from myself and neither can anyone else.” The end result of these repeated frustrations can be the erosion of your sense of self, what is often called low self-esteem. These deep-seated, enduring self-views, or “core beliefs” about who you are can be thought of as a lens through which you see yourself, the world, and your place in the world. Adverse developmental experiences associated with ADHD may unfairly color your lens and result in a skewed pessimistic view of yourself, at least in some situations. When facing situations in the here-and-now that activate these negative beliefs, you experience strong emotions, negative thoughts, and a propensity to fall into self-defeating behaviors, most often resignation and escape. These core beliefs might only be activated in limited, specific situations for some people with ADHD; in other cases, these beliefs color one’s perception in most situations. It should be noted that many adults with ADHD, despite feeling flummoxed by their symptoms in many situations, possess a healthy self-view, though there may be many situations that briefly shake their confidence. These core beliefs or “schema” develop over the course of time from childhood through adulthood and reflect our efforts to figure out the “rules for life” (Beck, 1976; Young & Klosko, 1994). They can be thought of as mental categories that let us impose order on the world and make sense of it. Thus, as we grow up and face different situations, people, and challenges, we make sense of our situations and relationships and learn the rubrics for how the world works. The capacity to form schemas and to organize experience in this way is very adaptive. For the most part, these processes help us figure out, adapt to, and navigate through different situations encountered in life. In some cases, people develop beliefs and strategies that help them get through unusually difficult life circumstances, what are sometimes called survival strategies. These old strategies may be left behind as people settle into new, healthier settings and adopt and rely on “healthy rules.” In other cases, however, maladaptive beliefs persist, are not adjusted by later experiences (or difficult circumstances persist), and these schema interfere with efforts to thrive in adulthood. In our work with ADHD adults, particularly for those who were undiagnosed in childhood, we have heard accounts of negative labels or hurtful attributions affixed to past problems that become internalized, toughened, and have had a lasting impact. In many cases, however, many ADHD adults report that they arrived at negative conclusions about themselves based on their experiences (e.g., “None of my friends had to go to summer school.”). Negative schema may lay dormant, akin to a hibernating bear, but are easily reactivated in adulthood when facing similar gaffes or difficulties, including when there is even a hint of possible disappointment or failure. The function of these beliefs is self-protective—shock me once, shame on you; shock me twice, shame on me. However, these maladaptive beliefs insidiously trigger self-defeating behaviors that represent an attempt to cope with situations, but that end up worsening the problem and thereby strengthening the negative belief in a vicious, self-fulfilling cycle. Returning to the invisible fences metaphor, these beliefs keep you stuck in a yard that is too confining in order to avoid possible “shocks.

Spanning from the turn of the twentieth century to the mid-1960s, [D. T.] Suzuki's work played a major role in the constitution of a Zen discourse in Japan and the West. In the wake of Suzuki, a significant contribution to the elaboration of a Zen philosophy was made by the so-called Kyoto School, which was founded by Suzuki's friend Nishida Kitaro (1870–1945). Despite their different intellectual itineraries, both Suzuki and Nishida were still speaking from within the discursive arena opened by Western Orientalism. That is to say, their description of Zen is in many respects an inverted image of that given by the Christian missionaries, and they relied on Christian categories even when rejecting them.

Depression rates have been surging since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Between 1999 and 2019, American suicide rates increased by 33 percent. Between 2009 and 2019, the percentage of teens who reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 37 percent. By 2021, it had shot up to 44 percent. The percentage of Americans who said they have no close friends quadrupled between 1990 and 2020. In one survey, 54 percent of Americans reported that no one knows them well. The number of American adults without a romantic partner increased by a third. More to the point, 36 percent of Americans reported that they felt lonely frequently or almost all of the time, including 61 percent of young adults and 51 percent of young mothers. People were spending much more time alone. In 2013, Americans spent an average of six and a half hours per week with friends. By 2019, they were spending only four hours per week with friends, a 38 percent drop. By 2021, as the Covid-19 pandemic was easing, they were spending only two hours and forty-five minutes per week with friends, a 58 percent decline. The General Social Survey asks Americans to rate their happiness levels. Between 1990 and 2018, the share of Americans who put themselves in the lowest happiness category increased by more than 50 percent.

When Job’s poor friends equated Job’s suffering with God’s judgment of sin in his life, they “were up against something far too big for them, something their categories did not cover. So, rather than admit to ignorance, they resort to oversimplifications, snap judgments, easy cliches—which amount to lying.

The typifications of social interaction become progressively anonymous the farther away they are from the face-to-face situation. Every typification, of course, entails incipient anonymity. If I typify my friend Henry as a member of category X (say, as an Englishman), I ipso facto interpret at least certain aspects of his conduct as resulting from this typification—for instance, his tastes in food are typical of Englishmen, as are his manners, certain of his emotional reactions, and so on. This implies, though, that these characteristics and actions of my friend Henry appertain to anyone in the category of Englishman, that is, I apprehend these aspects of his being in anonymous terms. Nevertheless, as long as my friend Henry is available in the plenitude of expressivity of the face-to-face situation, he will constantly break through my type of anonymous Englishman and manifest himself as a unique and therefore atypical individual—to wit, as my friend Henry.

If I’ve chosen the future over the present, then I’ll be tempted to use that future to judge the present. I’ll be tempted to use that future to decide who’s worthy of my care and attention and who isn’t. Those who get in the way of that future are my enemies. Those who can help me secure that future are my friends. But, if I’ve chosen to let my future die and, now, live in Christ, then I won’t be able to carve up the world this way. I will see only one category: those who need care. Friend or enemy, helpful to my future or not, everyone will show up as needing me to bless them and care for them.

After the first series of Citizen Labs reports and articles came out in 2012, Hacking Team had apparently paused to take stock of some of its customers. The firm had ended its support for Russia in 2014 because, a spokesman said, “the Putin government evolved from one considered friendly to the West to a more hostile regime.” Apparently, Putin’s raid on Crimea pushed Russia into a different customer category—never mind that for years, Russian journalists and activists had disappeared under Putin’s watch. As for Sudan, Hacking Team cut its contract in 2014 “because of concerns about the country’s ability to use the system in accordance with Hacking Team’s contract.” This after hundreds of thousands of Sudanese were already dead and millions more displaced.

An unfamiliar kind of break survived at that table. The three of us, Marcel, Olivia, including myself hunkered down on the steep southerly end of the table. Now that is ‘superb’ and scarier (in Emmah's case, unquestionably.) The Natalie siblings had finished. We were gazing at them; they're so odd, Olivia and Marcel arranged not to seem quite so intimidating, and we did not sit here alone. My other compatriots, Lance, and Mikaela (who were in the uncomfortable post-breakup association phase,) Mollie and Sam (whose involvement had endured the summertime...) Tim, Kaylah, Skylar, and Sophie (though that last one didn't count in the friend category.) Completely assembled at the same table, on the other side of an interchangeable line. That line softened on sunshiny days when Marcel and Olivia continuously skipped school times before there was Karly, and then the discussion would swell out effortlessly to incorporate me. Marcel and Olivia didn't find this minor elimination fragmentary or dangerous the way I would hold. They scarcely noticed this at all. Characters always felt remarkably hostile at leisure with the Barn’s, around anxious for some purpose they couldn't justify to themselves. I implied a unique exemption to that precept. Seldom confused Marcel whence very satisfied I was withstanding adjacent to him. He deemed he was dangerous to my health-a feeling I rejected vehemently whenever he uttered that. The midday moved briskly. School completed, and Marcel walked me to my truck as he customarily prepared. Disregarding this time, he held the pilgrim entrance open for me. Olivia must have obtained it using his automobile home so that he could restrain me from making a charge for this. I wrapped my arms and performed no move to get out of the downpour. ‘It's my birthday, don't I get to drive?’ ‘I'm faking it's not your birthday, just as you yearned.’ ‘If it's not my birthday, then I don't have to proceed to your home later…

Wishes Mindfulness is nevermore a good thing, as any other accident-prone fumbler would accept. No one wants a floodlight when they're likely to stumble on their face. Moreover, I would extremely pointedly be asked- well, ordered really-that no one gave me any presents this year. It seemed like Mr. Anderson and Ayanna weren't the only ones who had decided to overlook that. I would have never had much wealth, furthermore, that had never more disturbed me. Ayanna had raised me on a kindergarten teacher's wage. Mr. Anderson wasn't getting rich at his job, either; he was the police chief here in the tiny town of Pittsburgh. My only personal revenue came from the four days a week I worked at the local Goodwill store. In a borough this small, I was blessed to have a career, after all the viruses in the world today having everything shut down. Every cent I gained went into my diminutive university endowment at SNHU online. (College transpired like nothing more than a Plan B. I was still dreaming for Plan A; however, Marcel was just so unreasonable about leaving me, mortal.) Marcel ought to have a lot of funds I didn't even want to think about how much. Cash was involved alongside oblivion to Marcel or the rest of the Barns, like Karly saying she never had anything yet walked away with it all. It was just something that swelled when you had extensive time on your hands and a sister who had an uncanny ability to predict trends in the stock market. Marcel didn't seem to explain why I objected to him spending bills on me, why it made me miserable if he brought me to an overpriced establishment in Los Angeles, why he wasn't allowed to buy me a car that could reach speeds over fifty miles an hour, approximately how? I wouldn't let him pay my university tuition (he was ridiculously enthusiastic about Plan B.) Marcel believed I was being gratuitously difficult. Although, how could I let him give me things when I had nothing to retaliate amidst? He, for some amazing incomprehensible understanding, wanted to be with me. Anything he gave me on top of that just propelled us more out of balance. As the day went on, neither Marcel nor Olivia brought my birthday up again, and I began to relax a little. Then we sat at our usual table for lunch. An unfamiliar kind of break survived at that table. The three of us, Marcel, Olivia, including myself hunkered down on the steep southerly end of the table. Now that is ‘superb’ and scarier (in Emmah's case, unquestionably.) The Natalie siblings had finished. We were gazing at them; they're so odd, Olivia and Marcel arranged not to seem quite so intimidating, and we did not sit here alone. My other compatriots, Lance, and Mikaela (who were in the uncomfortable post-breakup association phase,) Mollie and Sam (whose involvement had endured the summertime...) Tim, Kaylah, Skylar, and Sophie (though that last one didn't count in the friend category.) Completely assembled at the same table, on the other side of an interchangeable line. That line softened on sunshiny days when Marcel and Olivia continuously skipped school times before there was Karly, and then the discussion would swell out effortlessly to incorporate me.

Asoka World School is a reputed international school in Kochi affiliated with CBSE. We have a student-friendly environment and has a very interesting syllabus. The STEM enriched curriculum helps to provide an in-depth learning experience for the students. We have a wide range of extracurricular activities for nurturing and developing a child’s creativity and imagination. Asoka World School can be an ideal option for your child. Here are some key reasons why Asoka World School is the best for your kid. Individualized attention in classes: Our student-teacher ratio arrangement is standardised in such a way that teachers are able to give individual attention to each child. Our teachers are well educated, experienced and constantly inspires their students. We follow the golden teacher-student ratio of 1:20. This helps students to gain the concepts of each subject easily hence they become more confident. This also enriches their knowledge, and they get more quality time to interact with their teachers. image Child Safe Environment: At Asoka World School, you will find your child is in extremely safe hands. Our classrooms are aesthetically designed and technologically equipped to disseminate learning through very many fun ways. Asoka World School has a world-class building design, infrastructure, fully integrated wireless network, climate-controlled smart classrooms, security features and no compromise hygiene and safeguarding policy that offers everything you have been dreaming for your child. Updated Curriculums: We have 4 levels of programmes prepared for our children. Foundational - KG - IInd Preparatory - IIIrd - Vth Middle School - VIth - VIIIth Senior School - IXth - XIIth These programs are framed by our school to focus on developing various vital skills in the students. Our teachers adopt a customised teaching approach that can help students of every category. Our flexible curriculum enhances the communication between the teachers and students to a great extent. Our school has result-oriented teaching methods, qualified and responsible teaching staff to help facilitate a learning environment that is both safe and nurturing. As the best CBSE school in Kochi, Asoka World School is a leader in its sector and we hope to continue rising and come out as the best school in Kochi.

Start a regret circle. Think of regret circles as close cousins of book clubs. Gather five or six friends over coffee, tea, or drinks. Ask two of them to come prepared with a significant regret. Let them tell the story of their regrets. Have the others respond to each regret first by categorizing it. (Is it action or inaction? Into which, if any, of the four deep structure categories does it fall?) Then, for each regret, the group works through the Disclosure-Compassion-Distance process. When the gathering ends, the two people commit to adopting a specific behavior (for example, speaking up to an unpleasant boss or asking out a crush). At the next meeting, the others hold the regretters accountable for that promise—and two new people share their regrets.

As I arrived to work one day early that summer, I received a frantic call from a Palestinian friend in the United States. At that point, the kidnapped Israeli boys had not yet been killed, and my friend had discovered a Facebook page threatening the murder, every hour, of a “terrorist” until the boys were found. The page, in Hebrew, was quite clearly using “terrorist” as a stand-in for “Palestinian” and included comments such as “Kill them while they are still in their mother’s [womb],” but when my friend reported it, she received a message that the page was not in violation of the community standards—despite existing prohibitions on both hate speech and credible threats.25 I emailed a contact on Facebook’s policy team, who responded: “Seems like a violation of our terms. I’ll run it by people here.” As I awaited my contact’s reply, the page began calling for the deaths of specific individuals. I wrote back to share that new information, and my contact replied to say that although they were still chasing down an answer, “if it’s threatening people’s lives, it seems to qualify, right?” But later that day, my contact informed me over the phone that the page was not, in fact, in violation of the rules. The threat wasn’t deemed to be credible, and on top of that, “terrorist” wasn’t a protected category under the prohibition on hate speech. In a statement, Face-book’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, explained: “We clearly list the characteristics that we consider to be hate speech, and if it doesn’t come under one of those categories, we don’t consider it hate speech under our policies.”26 The page remained up.

I was finding it hard to manage my negative thoughts because, outside of Wendell’s office, they didn’t have much of an outlet. Breakups tend to fall into the category of silent losses, less tangible to other people. You have a miscarriage, but you didn’t lose a baby. You have a breakup, but you didn’t lose a spouse. So friends assume that you’ll move on relatively quickly, and things like these concert tickets become an almost welcome external acknowledgment of your loss—not only of the person but of the time and company and daily routines, of the private jokes and references, and of the shared memories that now are yours alone to carry.

The white middle-class kids were looking forward to high school, academically and socially. The black kids and the white working-class kids had mixed feelings about the transition. For them high school meant an end to the one big happy family they had experienced in their grammar school. Because these students were a minority, they spent some time hanging out within their groups, building identity, and part of the time with the majority kids, building bridges. In high school, though, as they had heard from older siblings and friends, the black kids hung out with the black kids, the Asian kids with the Asian kids, and so on. There were big enough groups in each of these categories that identity politics often took precedence over friendship. Friendships across those lines weren’t impossible, but they were much harder.

A reading list that Jefferson first drafted in 1771, five years before he wrote the Declaration, provided an answer. Jefferson sent the list to his friend Robert Skipwith, who had asked for books to include in a private library, and revised it over the years. Under the category of “religion,” Jefferson’s reading list includes Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, as well as a top ten list of other works of classical and Enlightenment moral philosophy:11 Locke’s Conduct of the Understanding in the Search of Truth. Xenophon’s memoirs of Socrates, translated by Sarah Fielding. Epictetus, translated by Elizabeth Carter. Marcus Aurelius, translated by Collins. Seneca, translated by Roger L’Estrange. Cicero’s Offices, by Guthrie. Cicero’s Tusculan questions. Ld.