Classmates Friends Quotes

Damen is gorgeous. I know this without looking up. I just focus on my book as he makes his way toward me since I know way too much about my classmates already. So as far as I'm concerned, an extra moment of ignorance really is bliss. But according to the innermost thoughts of Stacia Miller sitting just two rows before me - Damen Auguste is totally smoking hot. Her best friend, Honor, completely agrees. So does Honor's boyfriend, Craig, but that's a whole other story

No one in my family, not one of my friends or classmates realized that I was going through life asleep. It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. 'Hold tight,' I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.

The thing suicides don't focus on is their wake. Not just your parents and siblings, but your friends, your girlfriends, your classmates, your teachers.' I like the way he seems to think I have many, many people depending on me, including not just one but multiple girlfriends.

I am not bothered by the silence. For all the noise I make with my friends, I am still not comfortable talking about my feelings in front of others - especially not classmates.

He was considered to be by far the smartest boy at Briarbush and was therefore envied and hated by the 95 percent of his classmates who feared he would become president of the United States before they did.

You must be frank with the world; frankness is the child of honesty and courage. Say just what you mean to do on every occasion, and take it for granted you mean to do right. . . . Never do anything wrong to make a friend or keep one; the man who requires you to do so, is dearly purchased at a sacrifice. Deal kindly, but firmly with all your classmates; you will find it the policy which wears best. Above all do not appear to others what you are not.

I did feel a concentrated dislike for those boys, who couldn't submit to the odd faithless girlfriend, needling classmate, or dose of working-single-parent distraction--who couldn't serve their miserable time in their miserable public schools the way the rest of us did--without carving their dime-a-dozen problems ineluctably into the lives of other families. It was the same petty vanity that drove these boys' marginally saner contemporaries to scrape their dreary little names into national monuments. And the self-pity! That nearsighted Woodham creature apparently passed a note to one of his friends before staging a tantrum with his father's deer rifle: "Throughout my life I was ridiculed. Always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, blame me for what I do?" And I thought, Yes, you little shit! In a heartbeat!

No one in my family, not one of my friends or classmates, realized that I was going through life asleep.

The thing suicides don’t focus on is their wake. Not just your parents and siblings, but your friends, your girlfriends, your classmates, your teachers.” I like the way he seems to think I have many, many people depending on me, including not just one but multiple girlfriends.

But as a kid, I preferred the black side, and often wished that Mommy had sent me to black schools like my friends. Instead I was stuck at that white school, P.S. 138, with white classmates who were convinced I could dance like James Brown. They constantly badgered me to do the “James Brown” for them, a squiggling of the feet made famous by the “Godfather of Soul” himself, who back in the sixties was bigger than life. I tried to explain to them that I couldn’t dance. I have always been one of the worst dancers that God has ever put upon this earth.

Everything they see, hear, feel, touch, or even smell impacts their brain and thus influences the way they view and interact with their world—including their family, neighbors, strangers, friends, classmates, and even themselves.

Class, I'd like us all to give a warm mayflower elementary welcome to your new friend and classmate Jing Jang!" "Jin Wang" "Jin wang!" "He and his family recently moved to our neighborhood all the way from China!" "San Francisco." "San Francisco!" "Yes, Timmy." "My momma says Chinese people eat dogs." "Now be nice, Timmy!" -km sure Jin doesn't do that! In fact, Jin's family probably stopped that sort of thing as soon as they came to the united states!" The only other asian in my class was Suzy Nakamura. When the class finally figured out that we weren't related, rumors began to circulate that suzy and I were arranged to be married on her thirteenth birthday. We avoided each other as much as possible. (30-31)

Asking for a friend," Asher clarified. Then he nudged his best friend. "Henry, my good man, tell Tess she's pretty as a picture when she's preparing to unleash her wrath on the delightfully unsuspecting father of one of our classmates." "Kendrick?" Henry Marquette said. "Yes?" I replied without taking my eyes away from the street. "You are utterly terrifying when you are plotting something.

He looks at me again and the flames vanish and the knife is gone and his voice goes light and breezy and all coffee-shop conversational, as if he wasn't just one second ago impaling me with fiery eyes and discussing the dark fate of my best friend and the souls of all my classmates.

Aloneness – that is what SM feels like to me. Isolated, alone, separated, left out as I silently stand by watching others experience life while the words freeze inside me, afraid to speak up or join in a conversation. Actually feeling the anxiety shaking inside my chest as I try to get up the courage to speak to someone or call or text a friend. SM feels like the child standing alone behind the door watching the other kids in the playground – afraid to ask, 'may I play?' It feels like the teenager standing silently against the wall, listening to classmates laugh and chat, invisible to everyone and wondering what it would be like to have a friend. It feels like the 50-year-old office worker, alone in her cube while others chat and laugh in the aisle, still left out. I live inside a shell, a mask that looks like me, but isn't me. I am in here, but it is really hard to let others see. I'm so grateful for the few dear friends I have now. Most people, though, only see the shell and assume I'm aloof and uncaring because I am quiet. I feel very deeply. I feel others' joy and pain intensely, yet they rarely know. I'm not quiet because I am uncaring. I'm silent because I'm afraid.

Books are part of how we understand ourselves. They shape our identities, even before we can read them. They accompany us throughout our lives. [...] They get tangled up in our relationships with parents, siblings, classmates, teachers, friends, lovers and children. They are part of how groups of people, and even nations, imagine and represent themselves. Books become meaningful objects in all sorts of ways: treasured possessions, talismans, bearers of significance. This book is about how that happens.

No one in my family, not one of my friends or classmates realized that I was going through life asleep. It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. 'Hold tight,' I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to

All of this resulted in my classmates laughing at me, which, thanks to what my therapist describes as habitual disassociation, I did not process in real time.

I watch my classmates spilling out of school, in groups of two or three, their formations intimidatingly organic. Atoms into molecules. Like usual, I am alone.

JB's friends were poets and performance artists and academics and modern dancers and philosophers -- he had, Malcolm once observed, befriended everyone at their college who was least likely to make money -- and their lives were grants and residencies and fellowships and awards. Success, among JB's Hood Hall assortment, wasn't defined by your box-office numbers (as it was for his agent and manager) or your costars or your reviews (as it was by his grad-school classmates): it was defined simply and only by how good your work was, and whether you were proud of it.

The Westcotts differed from their friends, their classmates, and their neighbors only in an interest they shared in serious music. They went to a great many concerts—although they seldom mentioned this to anyone—and they spent a good deal of time listening to music on the radio. Their radio was an old instrument, sensitive, unpredictable, and beyond repair. Neither of them understood the mechanics of radio—or of any of the other appliances that surrounded them—and when the instrument faltered, Jim would strike the side of the cabinet with his hand. This sometimes helped. One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of a Schubert quartet, the music faded away altogether. Jim struck the cabinet repeatedly, but there was no response; the Schubert was lost to them forever.

Finally, as the sky began to grow light in the morning, I’d feel that I might be drifting off. But that wasn’t sleep. My fingertips were just barely brushing against the outermost edge of sleep. And all the while, my mind was awake. I would feel a hint of drowsiness, but my mind was there, in its own room, on the other side of a transparent wall, watching me. My physical self was drifting through the feeble morning light, and all the while it could feel my mind staring, breathing, close beside it. I was both a body on the verge of sleep and a mind determined to stay awake. The incomplete drowsiness would continue on and off all day. My head was always foggy. I couldn’t get an accurate fix on the things around me—their distance or mass or texture. The drowsiness would overtake me at regular, wavelike intervals: on the subway, in the classroom, at the dinner table. My mind would slip away from my body. The world would sway soundlessly. I would drop things. My pencil or my purse or my fork would clatter to the floor. All I wanted was to throw myself down and sleep. But I couldn’t. The wakefulness was always there beside me. I could feel its chilling shadow. It was the shadow of myself. Weird, I would think as the drowsiness overtook me, I’m in my own shadow. I would walk and eat and talk to people inside my drowsiness. And the strangest thing was that no one noticed. I lost fifteen pounds that month, and no one noticed. No one in my family, not one of my friends or classmates, realized that I was going through life asleep. It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think that my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. Hold tight, I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.

Oh, home. Where there are no laughing classmates pointing at me, whispering behind their hands. Where there are no ex-friends calling me a bitch or a liar. Where I could curl up, throw a blanket over my head and pretend nothing happened.

The funny thing about labels is that most of them come from other people- our parents, teachers, friends, classmates, colleagues, bosses, professors, boyfriends, husbands and children. These labels have the power to build us up or knock us down.

I am not bothered by the silence. For all the noise I make with my friends, I am still not comfortable talking about my feelings in front of others—especially not classmates. I could sit in the quiet for hours if that is what the class demanded.

When I was ten years old, one of my friends brought a Shaleenian kangaroo-cat to school one day. I remember the way it hopped around with quick, nervous leaps, peering at everything with its large, almost circular golden eyes. One of the girls asked if it was a boy cat or a girl cat. Our instructor didn't know; neither did the boy who had brought it; but the teacher made the mistake of asking, 'How can we find out?' Someone piped up, 'We can vote on it!' The rest of the class chimed in with instant agreement and before I could voice my objection that some things can't be voted on, the election was held. It was decided that the Shaleenian kangaroo-cat was a boy, and forthwith, it was named Davy Crockett. Three months later, Davy Crockett had kittens. So much for democracy. It seems to me that if the electoral process can be so wrong about such a simple thing, isn't it possible for it to be very, very wrong on much more complex matters? We have this sacred cow in our society that what the majority of people want is right—but is it? Our populace can't really be informed, not the majority of them—most people vote the way they have been manipulated and by the way they have responded to that manipulation—they are working out their own patterns of wishful thinking on the social environment in which they live. It is most disturbing to me to realize that though a majority may choose a specific course of action or direction for itself, through the workings of a 'representative government,' they may be as mistaken about the correctness of such a choice as my classmates were about the sex of that Shaleenian kangaroo-cat. I'm not so sure than an electoral government is necessarily the best.

One day, an unusually exciting event interrupted the rhythm of our regular middle-class teenage lives. A Russian woman, the mother of a girl in our class, was run over by a New York City bound train right in the center of town. Our classmate left school in the middle of the semester. The gossip was that the woman must have thrown herself under the train. The adults whispered about reasons, usual ones, but my friends and I were too busy planning what to wear to the prom to wonder about the savagery of adult passion.

once knew an imaginary friend named Philippe. He was the imaginary friend of one of Max’s classmates in preschool. He lasted less than a week. One day he popped into the world, looking pretty human except for his lack of ears (lots of imaginary friends lack ears),

When introducing someone to another person, use words like acquaintance, wife/husband, fiance/fiancee, half/step-sibling, best friend, schoolmate, flatmate, classmate, In-law, cousin, nephew, neighbor, colleague and client to normalize the situation. Everyone is not your friend.

Here's one way that we try to actively and immediately bring in kindness in our meetings and camps: we ask our girls to stop before they speak and reevaluate what they're going to say based on this acronym: True Honest Important Necessary Kind Is what they're out to say True? Is it Honest? Is it Important? Necessary Kind? We ask the to T.H.I.N.K. before they speak text, or type, and try to incorporate it into their daily lives -- especially within their interactions with their friends and classmates -- as much as possible. It's a choice girls can make: Do they want to encourage others with their words, or bring others down? You might think this won't resonate with your middle school girl, but I promise that it works. It's not about self-editing or asking her not to speak her truth, of course; it's about thinking of others too.

Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him.

When I was a child, I believed God would set everything right. When I found out about the Nakba, I was sure that one day my friend Ahmad's grandmother would be able to return to her house in Palestine. I waited for the day our teachers would explain the theft of the land we lived on, the way our textbooks spoke about Indigenous people like they no longer existed and all the books we read were written by dead white men. I was sure that the school bullies would be punished, that the police would stop pulling over my Black friends' parents late at night, and that my classmates with undocumented aunties or grandparents would one day be able to stop worrying they'd be taken away. Allah is the remover of obstacles. But after the fire, after your burial, after the police dismissed the threats you'd received—by then I'd understood for a long time who had built this system, and for whom, and I'd long since let go of my ideas of justice.

Finally, as the sky began to grow light in the morning, I’d feel that I might be drifting off. But that wasn’t sleep. My fingertips were just barely brushing against the outermost edge of sleep. And all the while, my mind was awake. I would feel a hint of drowsiness, but my mind was there, in its own room, on the other side of a transparent wall, watching me. My physical self was drifting through the feeble morning light, and all the while it could feel my mind staring, breathing, close beside it. I was both a body on the verge of sleep and a mind determined to stay awake. The incomplete drowsiness would continue on and off all day. My head was always foggy. I couldn’t get an accurate fix on the things around me—their distance or mass or texture. The drowsiness would overtake me at regular, wavelike intervals: on the subway, in the classroom, at the diner table. My mind would slip away from my body. The world would sway soundlessly. I would drop things. My pencil or my purse or my fork would clatter to the floor. All I wanted was to throw myself down and sleep. But I couldn’t. The wakefulness was always there beside me. I could feel its chilling shadow. It was the shadow of myself. Weird, I would think as the drowsiness overtook me, I’m in my own shadow. I would walk and eat and talk to people inside my drowsiness. And the strangest thing was that no one noticed. I lost fifteen pounds that month, and no one noticed. No one in my family, not one of my friends or classmates, realized that I was going through life asleep. It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think that my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. Hold tight, I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.

A man could be at the coffee-house every evening laughing and playing cards with his friends, he could have so much fun with his classmates that there is never a moment they arent´t exploding into laughter, he could spend every hour of the day chatting with his intimates, but if that man has been abandoned by God, he´d still be the loneliest man on earth.

At this point, the particles came in two types, called quarks—which rhymes with marks—and leptons. Quarks are quirky beasts. You’ll never catch a quark all by itself; it will always be clutching others nearby. I’m sure you have at least one friend or classmate who behaves similarly. Quarks are like those kids who never want to do anything alone, not even walk to the restroom.

And slowly a discussion begins—as Morrie has wanted all along—about the effect of silence on human relations. Why are we embarrassed by silence? What comfort do we find in all the noise? I am not bothered by the silence. For all the noise I make with my friends, I am still not comfortable talking about my feelings in front of others—especially not classmates. I could sit in the quiet for hours if that is what the class demanded.

ou must make friends with at least one student from the year above you. This is so that you learn the secrets of how to pass exams. You can learn about the grading methods of the teachers in this way. In addition, find one classmate of the same year who is very talented and become best friends with him. Have him lend his notebook to you, and during exams, have him sit right next to you. Those two are all you need for school friends.

When he got out, I rolled my window down. “You look like you’re going to throw up.” He grimaced, pressing a hand to his stomach. “I don’t know if it’s from this, or if I actually am sick. I think Avery got sick from the weekend. She was puking this morning when I left.” “Avery, huh? At your place?” He rolled his eyes. “Don’t even start.” “But you see, I have to. I have to start. Avery’s my friend. I’m hanging out with your brother. You and I are classmates. I think we can develop our friendship to the stage where I give you shit. We should even start sitting next to each other in class.” “Don’t press your luck.” I kept going, “It’s a natural progression. Don’t fight it, Marcus. It’s like evolution. Don’t fight evolution. You’ll never win. Mother nature is a bitch. She’s always going to win.” “What the fuck are you talking about?” “How I get to give you shit. It’s an amazing experience in life, like giving birth. It’s painful for one person, but breathtaking for another. I’m the baby here. I get to feel air for the first time on my skin. Let me breathe, Marcus. Let me put my baby lungs to work and scream.” “I swear you’re making me even sicker.” “If you gotta puke, don’t suppress. It’s a natural body process.” He eyed me a moment. “Did you rhyme that on purpose?” “Maybe. Or I might be crazy?” I winked. “Or just a classy lady?” “Stop. I’m really going to puke now.” He groaned, pressing his arm against his forehead. “I was going to tease you back about Caden, but forget it. I don’t think I have the energy to deal with your rhyming.” “I’ve been told I’m amazing like that.” “Who told you that?” “Who hasn’t is the real question.” “You’re not making sense.” “I do that too. That’s very true.” I wondered if I should find him a bag, in case he actually was going to upchuck.

I have found a church in art, a form of work that is also a form of worship—it is a means of understanding myself, all my past selves, and all of you as beloved. This is why I will never stop doing it, even if no publisher ever again wants to share the results. Ironically, this kind of investment in the process is a boon to those who seek publication. Tenacity is often cited as the most common characteristic of successful authors. Of the many talented people I’ve met—classmates, students, friends—many of them no longer write.18 The ones who have kept doing so have made it central to their lives both external and internal. Writing is hard. It is not the most apparently useful kind of work to do in the world. Most of us are not out here saving any lives but our own, though its power to do that (at least in my case) is uncontestable. The older I get, the less convinced I am about most things, but this is one of the great facts of my life.

... I was disturbed by how many of my classmates disliked Thoreau, railed against him even, as if he (who claimed never to have learned anything of value from an old person) was an enemy and not a friend. His scorn of commerce--invigorating to me--nettled a lot of the more vocal kids in Honors English. "Yeah, right," shouted an obnoxious boy whose hair was gelled and combed stiff like a Dragon Ball Z character--"some kind of world it would be if every-body just dropped out and moped around in the woods--

Munich before we reached a small town called Dachau. Of course, I knew my closest friend was Jewish, but I only thought of him as a classmate, and we never quarrelled about anything except who should open the batting for Yorkshire. And when Ben once told me that his grandmother kept a packed suitcase by the front door, I had no idea what he was talking about. When the bus came to a halt outside the entrance of the concentration camp, we all got off in an uneasy silence and stared up at the uninviting rusty gates. I

As the school year progressed, my learning window would get smaller, and smaller, and by the year’s end, it would be closed tight by morning break, if it opened at all. This had always been the case, but in primary school I had a chance of keeping up because there were significantly fewer variables in my day. High school in comparison was a cluster-fuck of environmental shapeshifting, with no day ever looking the same as the one before, and as you’ve probably picked up by now, change was not my friend anymore than my classmates were

You were almost right. But unfortunately, Horikita, you were wrong about one thing. Right now, just for this moment, I'll tell you. I have never thought of you as my friend. I've never cared about you as a classmate. In this world, winning is everything. Your methods don't matter. I don't care what I have to sacrifice. As long as I have my victory in the end, I'll be fine.You, Hirata - no, all other people are nothing more than tools. I was complicit in what drove you to this. So, don't blame yourself, Horikita. You were useful to me.

He had in fact gone to the office, ignoring Willem’s texts, and had sat there at his computer, staring without seeing the file before him and wondering yet again why he had joined Ratstar. The worst thing was that the answer was so obvious that he didn’t even need to ask it: he had joined Ratstar to impress his parents. His last year of architecture school, Malcolm had had a choice—he could have chosen to work with two classmates, Jason Kim and Sonal Mars, who were starting their own firm with money from Sonal’s grandparents, or he could have joined Ratstar. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jason had said when Malcolm had told him of his decision. “You realize what your life is going to be like as an associate at a place like that, don’t you?” “It’s a great firm,” he’d said, staunchly, sounding like his mother, and Jason had rolled his eyes. “I mean, it’s a great name to have on my résumé.” But even as he said it, he knew (and, worse, feared Jason knew as well) what he really meant: it was a great name for his parents to say at cocktail parties. And, indeed, his parents liked to say it. “Two kids,” Malcolm had overheard his father say to someone at a dinner party celebrating one of Malcolm’s mother’s clients. “My daughter’s an editor at FSG, and my son works for Ratstar Architects.” The woman had made an approving sound, and Malcolm, who had actually been trying to find a way to tell his father he wanted to quit, had felt something in him wilt. At such times, he envied his friends for the exact things he had once pitied them for: the fact that no one had any expectations for them, the ordinariness of their families (or their very lack of them), the way they navigated their lives by only their own ambitions.

He was excited by his generation's idealistic dreams of the future, and particularly enjoyed a fanciful poem written by one of his prep school classmates in 1906, titled “In 1999”: Father goes to the office In his new bi-aeroplane And talks by wireless telephone To Uncle John—in Spain Mother goes a-shopping She buys things more or less And has them sent home C.O.D. Via “Monorail Express.” Sister goes a-calling She stays here and there a while And discusses with her many friends The latest Martian style And when her calling list is through She finds a library nook And there with great enjoyment hears A new self-reading book.

Teenagers without strong family ties can become so dependent on their peer group that they will do anything to be accepted by it. About twenty years ago in Tucson, Arizona, the entire senior class of a large high school knew for several months that an older dropout from the school, who had kept up a “friendship” with the younger students, had been killing their classmates, and burying their corpses in the desert. Yet none of them reported the crimes to the authorities, who discovered them by chance. The students, all nice middle-class suburban kids, claimed that they could not divulge the murders for fear of being cut by their friends.

any of the level roads or tracks in the area. It meant running through broken, uneven ground, up hills and across streams, through heavily overgrown thickets where hanging vines and thick underbrush would claw at you and try to pull you down. Horace had just completed one such run. Earlier in the day, one of his classmates had been spotted in Tactics I, passing a note to a friend. Unfortunately, the note was not in the form of text but was an unflattering caricature of the long-nosed instructor who taught the class. Equally unfortunately, the boy possessed considerable skill as a cartoonist and the drawing was instantly recognizable. As a result, Horace

If you can, it’s best to teach your child self-coaxing skills while he’s still very young, when there’s less stigma associated with social hesitancy. Be a role model by greeting strangers in a calm and friendly way, and by getting together with your own friends. Similarly, invite some of his classmates to your house. Let him know gently that when you’re together with others, it’s not OK to whisper or tug at your pants leg to communicate his needs; he needs to speak up. Make sure that his social encounters are pleasant by selecting kids who aren’t overly aggressive and playgroups that have a friendly feel to them. Have your child play with younger kids if this gives him confidence, older kids if they inspire him

We worry so much about negative peer pressure- whether from the toxic coworkers who infect us with their pessimism, the classmates constantly getting our kids into trouble, or the wealthy friends who pressure us into taking vacations we can't afford- that we often forget all about the power of positive peer pressure. Just as being around negative, unmotivated people drains our energy and potential, surrounding ourselves with positive, engaged, motivated, and creative people causes our positivity, engagement, motivation and creativity to multiply. In my work with companies, I created a formula to highlight the basic principle at the heart of this strategy: Big Potential = individual attributes X (positive influences - negative influences)

Still, when I went back home I searched my father's face for what I thought was Mexican-ness, something still visible in him but diluted in me. I had his mouth, his brown eyes, but my skin was lighter. My hair was fine and dark brown, while his was thick and silvering at the temples. What was I looking for, though? Who knew how much of his ancestry, and thus mine, was indigenous and how much European? I realized I was seeking a trace of purity, as if such a thing existed - as if one's roots could be a single clean bright plunge like a carrot, instead of the complicated dirty tangle that most of us actually had. Essentialist was an accusation my friends and classmates had flung around liberally in arguments, yet secretly maybe we all wanted it for ourselves in some way or another - to have an essence. To be an identity.

Thoughts of my family, my husband, my friends, classmates, and most of all my children, came to mind. They were still on earth. I instantly knew where they were and that they were safe and happy. And I knew exactly what they were doing. My children were my greatest gift and the most important thing to me. I loved them beyond measure, but here, in the presence of God, the strangest thing happened. I didn't want to go back to be with them. I wanted to stay in Heaven with God. Not even the deep love I had for my children could override the overwhelming sense of peace and love I felt in God's presence. I was Home and nothing else mattered. Not even my children because I was given the knowledge that one day we would all be together again and until then they'd be fine. In fact, we are always together. There is a bridge between Heaven and earth. It really does exist.

A unexpected result of having written Letters to Men of Letters is the pleasure I have felt at introducing my favorite authors to those who did not know about them before. Ralph is an example. We were in the same schools since kindergarten, but had not been in touch for 55 years. We recently reconnected. Although unfamiliar with most of my authors, Ralph read my book, and then he was inspired to go to the library! I was surprised and touched that what I wrote was having an effect on my classmate. His helpful advice to me about how to approach today’s presentation was “Just think of your talk as introducing your author friends to your other friends.” A further benefit for me in writing Letters to Men of Letters is that I got to show who I was and who I am. A longtime family friend who doesn’t usually read books like mine recently said, ‘Diane—I read your book and it sounds just like you.' I had been worried about what anyone not familiar with my particular Men of Letters would make of my letters to them. And now thanks to Ralph and Anne, I am finding out. This has been an unexpected gift.

Studies say that it takes six to eight meetings to feel like someone is our friend. When was the last time you saw someone new who you didn’t work with six to eight times in a year? Unless you’re dating, on a sports team together or flatmates, the answer is never. By this definition, my best friend is the route 19 bus driver. Other research says that, on average, it takes fifty hours of time with someone before you consider them a casual friend and ninety hours before you feel comfortable updating them to a ‘friend’. Fifty hours? I’m not so sure. Add a little light trauma, and you can get there ten times as fast. At journalism school, I was paired with a classmate to work on a TV report. You can bet that a few hours of sobbing in the editing suite brought us together like nobody’s business. Same goes for surviving turbulent plane rides, sadistic teachers and punishingly long jazz concerts. If you make it out alive, you are usually bonded for life. Personally, I think meeting someone you really connect with twice, for a few hours, followed by extensive, emotional texting, is enough to feel like friends. And I think I’m on my way with Abigail.

When I was a child, my father forbade me to read science fiction or fantasy. Trash of the highest order, he said. He didn't want me muddying up my young, impressionable mind with crap. If it wasn't worthy of being reviewed in the Times, it did not make it onto our bookshelves. So while my classmates gleefully dove into The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, A Wrinkle in Time, and The Borrowers, I was stuck reading Old Yeller. My saving grace- I was the most popular girl in my class. That's not saying much; it was easy to be popular at that age. All you had to do was wear your hair in French braids, tell your friends your parents let you drink grape soda every night at dinner, and take any dare. I stood in a bucket of hot water for five minutes without having to pee. I ate four New York System wieners (with onions) in one sitting. I cut my own bangs and- bam!- I was queen of the class. As a result I was invited on sleepovers practically every weekend, and it was there that I cheated. I skipped the séances and the Ouija board. I crept into my sleeping bag with a flashlight, zipped it up tight, and pored through those contraband books. I fell into Narnia. I tessered with Meg and Charles Wallace; I lived under the floorboards with Arrietty and Pod. I think it was precisely because those books were forbidden that they lived on in me long past the time that they should have. For whatever reason, I didn't outgrow them. I was constantly on the lookout for the secret portal, the unmarked door that would lead me to another world. I never thought I would actually find it.

The tie that bound them to their neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters—about one-third—believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure—which means that a majority of white conservatives aren’t certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him.

Researchers who study peer relationships have found that there are actually two different kinds of peer popularity. Sociometric popularity is the term used to describe well-liked teens with reputations for being kind and fun, while perceived popularity describes teens who hold a lot of social power but are disliked by many classmates. These two distinct groups emerge in studies that employ a simple peer-nomination method to examine social dynamics in school settings. Girls are given lists naming all the girls in their class (and boys are given lists naming all the boys) and asked to circle the names of the three girls they like the most, the three girls they like the least, and the girls who are considered to be popular. With this technique, researchers have found that many well-liked girls aren’t considered to be popular, and that many girls who are considered to be popular aren’t actually well liked. In fact, the disliked-but-popular girls are described by their classmates as domineering, aggressive, and stuck up, while the liked-but-unpopular girls are described as kind and trustworthy. A third group also emerges: well-liked girls who are identified by peers as being popular. They are amiable and faithful but differ from their liked-but-unpopular peers in that they aren’t easy to push around. In other words, the girls in the liked-and-popular group have found the relational sweet spot of being both friendly and assertive—a skill set girls often struggle to master and to which we’ll return soon. So we know from the research that when teens use the term popular, they’re likely to be describing girls with perceived popularity—girls who use cruelty to gain social power. Adults would like to think that girls who are mean would be shunned by their peers, but unfortunately, the opposite tends to occur. A girl who allows herself to be mean enjoys many “friends” who are eager to stay on her good side, and she is often

Strong underneath, though!’ decided Julian. ‘There’s no softness there, if you ask me. I think Emma’s got authority but it’s the best sort. It’s quiet authority . . .’ ‘Rita wasn’t exactly loud, Martin!’ Elizabeth pointed out, rather impatiently. ‘I bet Rita was very like Emma before she was elected head girl. Was she, Belinda? You must have been at Whyteleafe then.’ Belinda had been at Whyteleafe longer than the others. She had joined in the junior class. She frowned now, deep in thought. ‘Why, Elizabeth, I do believe you’re right! I remember overhearing some of the teachers say that Rita was a bit too young and as quiet as a mouse and might not be able to keep order! But they were proved wrong. Rita was nervous at the first Meeting or two. But after that she was such a success she stayed on as head girl for two years running.’ ‘There, Martin!’ said Elizabeth. ‘Lucky the teachers don’t have any say in it then, isn’t it?’ laughed Julian. ‘I think all schools should be run by the pupils, the way ours is.’ ‘What about Nora?’ asked Jenny, suddenly. ‘She wouldn’t be nervous of going on the platform.’ ‘She’d be good in some ways,’ said Belinda, her mind now made up, ‘but I don’t think she’d be as good as Emma . . .’ They discussed it further. By the end, Elizabeth felt well satisfied. Everyone seemed to agree that Thomas was the right choice for head boy. And apart from Martin, who didn’t know who he wanted, and Jenny, who still favoured Nora, everyone seemed to agree with her about Emma. Because of the way that Whyteleafe School was run, in Elizabeth’s opinion it was extremely important to get the right head boy and head girl. And she’d set her heart on Thomas and Emma. She felt that this discussion was a promising start. Then suddenly, near the end of the train journey, Belinda raised something which made Elizabeth’s scalp prickle with excitement. ‘We haven’t even talked about our own election! For a monitor to replace Susan. Now she’s going up into the third form, we’ll need someone new. We’ve got Joan, of course, but the second form always has two.’ She was looking straight at Elizabeth! ‘We all think you should be the other monitor, Elizabeth,’ explained Jenny. ‘We talked amongst ourselves at the end of last term and everyone agreed. Would you be willing to stand?’ ‘I – I—’ Elizabeth was quite lost for words. Speechless with pleasure! She had already been a monitor once and William and Rita had promised that her chance to be a monitor would surely come again. But she’d never expected it to come so soon! ‘You see, Elizabeth,’ Joan said gently, having been in on the secret, ‘everyone thinks it was very fine the way you stood down in favour of Susan last term. And that it’s only fair you should take her place now she’s going up.’ ‘Not to mention all the things you’ve done for the school. Even if we do always think of you as the Naughtiest Girl!’ laughed Kathleen. ‘We were really proud of you last term, Elizabeth. We were proud that you were in our form!’ ‘So would you be willing to stand?’ repeated Jenny. ‘Oh, yes, please!’ exclaimed Elizabeth, glancing across at Joan in delight. Their classmates wanted her to be a monitor again, with her best friend Joan! The two of them would be second form monitors together. ‘There’s nothing I’d like better!’ she added. What a wonderful surprise. What a marvellous term this was going to be! They all piled off at the station and watched their luggage being loaded on to the school coach. Julian gave Elizabeth’s back a pat. There was an amused gleam in his eyes. ‘Well, well. It looks as though the Naughtiest Girl is going to be made a monitor again. At the first Meeting. When will that be? This Saturday? Can she last that long without misbehaving?’ ‘Of course I can, Julian,’ replied Elizabeth, refusing to be amused. ‘I’m going to jolly well make certain of that!’ That, at least, was her intention.

It wasn't only my friends who suffered from female rivalry. I remember when I was just sixteen years old, during spring vacation, being whisked off to an early lunch by my best friend's brother, only to discover, to my astonishment and hurt, that she was expecting some college boys to drop by and didn't want me there to compete with her. When I started college at Sarah Lawrence, I soon noticed that while some of my classmates were indeed true friends, others seemed to resent that I had a boyfriend. It didn't help that Sarah Lawrence, a former girls' school, included very few straight men among its student body--an early lesson in how competing for items in short supply often brings out the worst in women. In graduate school, the stakes got higher, and the competition got stiffer, a trend that continued when I went on to vie for a limited number of academic jobs. I always had friends and colleagues with whom I could have trusted my life--but I also found women who seemed to view not only me but all other female academics as their rivals. This sense of rivalry became more painful when I divorced my first husband. Many of my friends I depended on for comfort and support suddenly began to view me as a threat. Some took me out to lunch to get the dirt, then dropped me soon after. I think they found it disturbing that I left my unhappy marriage while they were still committed to theirs. For other women, the threat seemed more immediate--twice I was told in no uncertain terms that I had better stay away from someone's husband, despite my protests that I would no more go after a friend's husband than I would stay friends with a woman who went after mine. Thankfully, I also had some true friends who remained loyal and supportive during one of the most difficult times of my life. To this day I trust them implicitly, with the kind of faith you reserve for people who have proved themselves under fire. But I've also never forgotten the shock and disappointment of discovering how quickly those other friendships turned to rivalries.

Learning to meditate helped too. When the Beatles visited India in 1968 to study Transcendental Meditation at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, I was curious to learn it, so I did. I loved it. Meditation has benefited me hugely throughout my life because it produces a calm open-mindedness that allows me to think more clearly and creatively. I majored in finance in college because of my love for the markets and because that major had no foreign language requirement—so it allowed me to learn what I was interested in, both inside and outside class. I learned a lot about commodity futures from a very interesting classmate, a Vietnam veteran quite a bit older than me. Commodities were attractive because they could be traded with very low margin requirements, meaning I could leverage the limited amount of money I had to invest. If I could make winning decisions, which I planned to do, I could borrow more to make more. Stock, bond, and currency futures didn’t exist back then. Commodity futures were strictly real commodities like corn, soybeans, cattle, and hogs. So those were the markets I started to trade and learn about. My college years coincided with the era of free love, mind-expanding drug experimentation, and rejection of traditional authority. Living through it had a lasting effect on me and many other members of my generation. For example, it deeply impacted Steve Jobs, whom I came to empathize with and admire. Like me, he took up meditation and wasn’t interested in being taught as much as he loved visualizing and building out amazing new things. The times we lived in taught us both to question established ways of doing things—an attitude he demonstrated superbly in Apple’s iconic “1984” and “Here’s to the Crazy Ones,” which were ad campaigns that spoke to me. For the country as a whole, those were difficult years. As the draft expanded and the numbers of young men coming home in body bags soared, the Vietnam War split the country. There was a lottery based on birthdates to determine the order of those who would be drafted. I remember listening to the lottery on the radio while playing pool with my friends. It was estimated that the first 160 or so birthdays called would be drafted, though they read off all 366 dates. My birthday was forty-eighth.

Kathy’s teachers view her as a good student who always does her homework but rarely participates in class. Her close friends see her as a loyal and trustworthy person who is a lot of fun once you get to know her. The other students in school think she is shy and very quiet. None of them realize how much Kathy struggles with everyday life. When teachers call on her in class, her heart races, her face gets red and hot, and she forgets what she wants to say. Kathy believes that people think she is stupid and inadequate. She imagines that classmates and teachers talk behind her back about the silly things she says. She makes excuses not to go to social events because she is terrified she will do something awkward. Staying home while her friends are out having a good time also upsets her. “Why can’t I just act like other people?” she often thinks. Although Kathy feels isolated, she has a very common problem--social anxiety. Literally millions of people are so affected by self-consciousness that they have difficulties in social situations. For some, the anxiety occurs during very specific events, such as giving a speech or eating in public. For others, like Kathy, social anxiety is part of everyday life. Unfortunately, social anxiety is not an easily diagnosed condition. Instead, it is often viewed as the far edge of a continuum of behaviors and feelings that occur during social situations. Although you may not have as much difficulty as Kathy, shyness may still be causing you distress, affecting your relationships, or making you act in ways with which you are not happy. If this is the case, you will benefit from the advice and techniques provided in this book. The good news is that it is possible to change your thinking and behavior. However, there are no easy solutions. It takes strong motivation and time to overcome social anxiety. It might even be necessary to see a professional therapist or take medication. Eventually, becoming free of your anxiety will make the hard work well worth the effort. This book will help you understand social anxiety and the impact it can have on your life, now and in the future. You will find out how the disorder is diagnosed, you will receive information on professional guidance, and you will learn ways to cope with and manage the symptoms. Becoming an extroverted person is probably unlikely, but you can become more confident in social situations and increase your self-esteem.

If Mamaw's second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a religion. The tie that bound them to the neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters--about one-third--believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure--which means that a majority of white conservatives aren't certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor--which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up; His accent--clean, perfect, neutral--is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they're frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right--adversity familiar to many of us--but that was long before any of us knew him. President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we're not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren't. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we're lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn't be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it--not because we think she's wrong, but because we know she's right.

Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent? Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? The detail, the immensity of the detail, the force of the detail, the weight of the detail—the rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your young life like the six feet of dirt that’ll be packed on your grave when you’re dead. Perhaps by definition a neighborhood is the place to which a child spontaneously gives undivided attention; that’s the unfiltered way meaning comes to children, just flowing off the surface of things. Nonetheless, fifty years later, I ask you: has the immersion ever again been so complete as it was in those streets, where every block, every backyard, every house, every floor of every house—the walls, ceilings, doors, and windows of every last friend’s family apartment—came to be so absolutely individualized? Were we ever again to be such keen recording instruments of the microscopic surface of things close at hand, of the minutest gradations of social position conveyed by linoleum and oilcloth, by yahrzeit candles and cooking smells, by Ronson table lighters and Venetian blinds? About one another, we knew who had what kind of lunch in the bag in his locker and who ordered what on his hot dog at Syd’s; we knew one another’s every physical attribute—who walked pigeon-toed and who had breasts, who smelled of hair oil and who oversalivated when he spoke; we knew who among us was belligerent and who was friendly, who was smart and who was dumb; we knew whose mother had the accent and whose father had the mustache, whose mother worked and whose father was dead; somehow we even dimly grasped how every family’s different set of circumstances set each family a distinctive difficult human problem. And, of course, there was the mandatory turbulence born of need, appetite, fantasy, longing, and the fear of disgrace. With only adolescent introspection to light the way, each of us, hopelessly pubescent, alone and in secret, attempted to regulate it—and in an era when chastity was still ascendant, a national cause to be embraced by the young like freedom and democracy. It’s astonishing that everything so immediately visible in our lives as classmates we still remember so precisely. The intensity of feeling that we have seeing one another today is also astonishing. But most astonishing is that we are nearing the age that our grandparents were when we first went off to be freshmen at the annex on February 1, 1946. What is astonishing is that we, who had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happened. That the results are in for the class of January 1950—the unanswerable questions answered, the future revealed—is that not astonishing? To have lived—and in this country, and in our time, and as who we were. Astonishing.

She found it difficult to discuss physics, much less debate it, with her predominantly male classmates. At first they paid a kind of selective inattention to her remarks. There would be a slight pause, and then they would go on as if she had not spoken. Occasionally they would acknowledge her remark, even praise it, and then again continue undeflected. She was reasonably sure her remarks were not entirely foolish, and did not wish to be ignored, much less ignored and patronized alternately. Part of it—but only a part—she knew was due to the softness of her voice. So she developed a physics voice, a professional voice: clear, competent, and many decibels above conversational. With such a voice it was important to be right. She had to pick her moments. It was hard to continue long in such a voice, because she was sometimes in danger of bursting out laughing. So she found herself leaning toward quick, sometimes cutting, interventions, usually enough to capture their attention; then she could go on for a while in a more usual tone of voice. Every time she found herself in a new group she would have to fight her way through again, just to dip her oar into the discussion. The boys were uniformly unaware even that there was a problem. Sometimes she would be engaged in a laboratory exercise or a seminar when the instructor would say, “Gentlemen, let’s proceed,” and sensing Ellie’s frown would add, “Sorry, Miss Arroway, but I think of you as one of the boys.” The highest compliment they were capable of paying was that in their minds she was not overtly female. She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. “Misanthrope” is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men. And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: “misogynist.” But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word. More than many others, she had been encumbered with parental proscriptions. Her newfound freedoms—intellectual, social, sexual—were exhilarating. At a time when many of her contemporaries were moving toward shapeless clothing that minimized the distinctions between the sexes, she aspired to an elegance and simplicity in dress and makeup that strained her limited budget. There were more effective ways to make political statements, she thought. She cultivated a few close friends and made a number of casual enemies, who disliked her for her dress, for her political and religious views, or for the vigor with which she defended her opinions. Her competence and delight in science were taken as rebukes by many otherwise capable young women. But a few looked on her as what mathematicians call an existence theorem—a demonstration that a woman could, sure enough, excel in science—or even as a role model.

I’m the kind of patriot whom people on the Acela corridor laugh at. I choke up when I hear Lee Greenwood’s cheesy anthem “Proud to Be an American.” When I was sixteen, I vowed that every time I met a veteran, I would go out of my way to shake his or her hand, even if I had to awkwardly interject to do so. To this day, I refuse to watch Saving Private Ryan around anyone but my closest friends, because I can’t stop from crying during the final scene. Mamaw and Papaw taught me that we live in the best and greatest country on earth. This fact gave meaning to my childhood. Whenever times were tough—when I felt overwhelmed by the drama and the tumult of my youth—I knew that better days were ahead because I lived in a country that allowed me to make the good choices that others hadn’t. When I think today about my life and how genuinely incredible it is—a gorgeous, kind, brilliant life partner; the financial security that I dreamed about as a child; great friends and exciting new experiences—I feel overwhelming appreciation for these United States. I know it’s corny, but it’s the way I feel. If Mamaw’s second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a religion. The tie that bound them to their neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters—about one-third—believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure—which means that a majority of white conservatives aren’t certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him. President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.

Prophetic Practicum Study Revelation 19:10, and then ask the Lord to manifest the spirit of prophecy in your everyday life. Make a list of people for whom you are praying, and ask the Lord to give you a word of wisdom concerning those individuals. Ask God to give you a prophetic word for a coworker, classmate, friend, or family member. Pray for discernment of God’s timing on when and how to release this word to them (if at all). Commit an hour a day to praying over yourself, your family, and your loved ones. Pray that God will give you a prophetic perspective concerning the circumstances of your life.

I arrived in Bucksport Maine on the day of Maine Maritime Academy’s 2018 Graduation. Little wonder that all the hotel rooms for miles around were taken but I had lucked out again when I booked a room at the Spring Fountain Motel, just east from Bucksport, on the coastal route, U.S. Hwy 1. It had been a long day meeting, greeting and talking to owners of bookstores between here and Portland but I was happy at how successful my day was. Bucksport had not changed much from 60 years prior. I remembered how my friend and classmate Robert Kane, and I hitch-hiked through here in 1953. Add it up and you’ll see that a lot of water has flowed under the Verona Island Bridge that dominates the landscape but the town of Bucksport has steadfastly refused to change. Read on from page 376 in “Seawater One – Going to Sea” or pages 121 in “Salty & Saucy Maine –Sea Stories from Castine” and now yet another class of midshipmen have graduated! Talking to the new Innkeeper of the Spring Fountain Motel, I found that he had been a professional soccer player in South Africa and had recently lived in New York City. An interesting young man, originally for Pakistan he was working hard to live the American Dream! When I told him my story he didn’t hesitate to order a dozen copies of my books. Displaying the popular “Salty & Saucy Maine” near his cash register is just the latest way my book will become available to the summer tourists. In Bucksport it is also available at Andy Larcher’s cozy bookstore “Book Stacks” and is also at the local library which has all of my books on its shelves. “Salty & Saucy Maine!” Is catching on as a bestselling book in Maine!

Perhaps when I say I was expecting his suicide, it is only memory going back to revise itself. There is no reason an artistic and sensitive boy could not grow into a happy man. Where and how things went amiss with him I do not know, though even as a teenager, I recognized his despondency when at school the production of his play earned him jeers and a special exhibition of his car designs estranged him from his classmates. He was the kind of person who needed others to feel his existence.

But how do you police friends who do not want to be policed? Already, Jake could sense the dynamics changing among his high school friends. Last week, his classmates had partied out of control.

How could I have friends without looking like I was trying too hard? How could I keep to myself without people thinking I was a snob? I looked around and thought my classmates had it together, that they had something I didn’t. I wanted to figure out how to be more like them. The answer: alcohol … and drugs.

she wondered what was wrong with her and why after all these years of dating—one man after another—she hadn’t so much as been engaged before. In fact, no one had ever even asked for her hand in marriage—that is, unless you counted that time when one of her former high school classmates had seen her dining at a restaurant…and out of nowhere…declared how much he had secretly always loved her, how he had never stopped loving her, and that if she would have him, he would marry her anytime she wanted.

Getting Off the Island of Lost Boys and Girls The first step to getting off this God-forsaken island is to understand ministry is wherever you are as a disciple of Jesus. When I first chose the public-university route, Christian friends would say, “Wow, I’m really surprised you’re not going into ministry.” But they had no idea of the ministry happening all around me, through me, and growing inside of me. They weren’t there when I carried my drunk classmate to her dorm room at 3:00 a.m. and slept on her floor to make sure she was safe. They weren’t hearing the midnight conversations between my Jewish roommate and me. They didn’t know how much ministry was happening as I lit the menorah with her at Hanukkah or how the presence of God filled our room as we read the Easter story together that same year. They didn’t know about the lunches with my atheist professors who wore me down as they challenged my charismatic upbringing and tried to tell me there was no God. They didn’t see me wrestling with my faith and that with each day God was perfecting it. Ministry is all around us, and if we let him, he’ll show us it isn’t confined to a position in a church building that we fear can be stolen. It’s in the everyday hugs and phone calls we make, in teachers grading papers and doctors charting medical information, in stay-at-home moms and dads packing lunches with little notes where Jesus shows up, and the Kingdom advances because we are right where he wants us. When we learn that ministry is right where we are, we go big, we don’t hold back, and we don’t wait for something better. We stop being afraid it can be stolen. We don’t care if we’re overlooked. It might be holding back your roommate’s hair after a long night of partying or rocking a sleeping baby or mowing your neighbor’s lawn. This isn’t selfie material. Setting sail with the Great Commission (go and make disciples) and the Great Commandment (love God and love people) as our North Star keeps us off the Island of Lost Boys and Girls.

Imagine a world full of strangers who all have a tiny little razor in their hands and they can randomly, mostly accidentally, shave a tiny piece of your soul off you while they sell you a newspaper or pass you the key to the bathroom at the gass station. Now imagine your classmates and co-workers have an even bigger blade, and can cut deeper. Imagine your friends and family members wield a really big knife. Imagine that all of these cuts can whittle away at the flesh of you, day after day after day, rendering the truth of you into a silver, almost invisible, unrecognizable. Imagine that these cuts sting for hours afterwards, sometimes days, and that they tend to fester. Imagine that you have to get through every day, bleeding from hundreds of wounds, some little and some deep, all the while pretending that nothing hurts.

Why Is a Path Important? We all know people who make a lot of money, but hate their work. We also know people who do not make a lot of money and hate their work. And we all know people who just work for money. A classmate of mine from the Merchant Marine Academy also realized he did not want to spend his life at sea. Rather than sail for the rest of his life, he went to law school after graduation, spending three more years becoming a lawyer and entering private practice in the S quadrant. He died in his early fifties. He had become a very successful, unhappy lawyer. Like me, he had two professions by the time he was 26. Although he hated being a lawyer, he continued being a lawyer because he had a family, kids, a mortgage, and bills to pay. A year before he died, I met him at a class reunion in New York. He was a bitter man. “All I do is sweep up behind rich guys like you. They pay me nothing. I hate what I do and who I work for.” “Why don’t you do something else?” I asked. “I can’t afford to stop working. My first child is entering college.” He died of a heart attack before she graduated. He made a lot of money via his professional training, but he was emotionally angry, spiritually dead, and soon his body followed. I realize this is an extreme example. Most people do not hate what they do as much as my friend did. Yet it illustrates the problem when a person is trapped in a profession and unable to find their path.

Some people haven’t had the chance to live as long as we have. I have lost so many classmates, some of them had everything and yet they died. I lost one friend who was just thirty-eight years old, another who was fifty-five years old, and another, fifty-eight years old. I’m sure you’ve seen your fair share of death in your line of work, or have you?

I panicked sometimes, convinced I was wasting my youth, aimlessly wandering on the dark side of the moon while old friends, classmates, my peers were building lives, careers, becoming adults back in America. I had wanted to be useful somehow, to work, to write, to teach, to accomplish great things.

At times … I wish I could meet in a duel the man who killed my father and razed our home, expelling me into a narrow country. And if he killed me, I’d rest at last, and if I were ready— I would take my revenge! * But if it came to light, when my rival appeared, that he had a mother waiting for him, or a father who’d put his right hand over the heart’s place in his chest whenever his son was late even by just a quarter-hour for a meeting they’d set— then I would not kill him, even if I could. * Likewise … I would not murder him if it were soon made clear that he had a brother or sisters who loved him and constantly longed to see him. Or if he had a wife to greet him and children who couldn’t bear his absence and whom his gifts would thrill. Or if he had friends or companions, neighbors he knew or allies from prison or a hospital room, or classmates from his school … asking about him and sending him regards. * But if he turned out to be on his own— cut off like a branch from a tree— without a mother or father, with neither a brother nor sister, wifeless, without a child, and without kin or neighbors or friends, colleagues or companions, then I’d add not a thing to his pain within that aloneness— not the torment of death, and not the sorrow of passing away. Instead I’d be content to ignore him when I passed him by on the street—as I convinced myself that paying him no attention in itself was a kind of revenge.

You want to know how I’m feeling? Leda thought furiously. For starters, she’d been betrayed by her best friend and the only boy she’d ever really cared about, the boy she’d lost her virginity to. Now the two of them were together even though they were adopted siblings. On top of that, she’d caught her dad cheating on her mom with one of her classmates—Leda couldn’t bring herself to call Eris a friend. Oh, and then Eris had died, because Leda had accidentally pushed her from the roof of the Tower. “I’m fine,” she said briskly.

Pink-dressed classmates streamed through the foyer in two perfect lines. As they held hands and giggled, the best of friends, Agatha felt familiar shame rise. Everything in her body told her to shut the door again and hide. But this time instead of thinking of all the friends she didn’t have, Agatha thought about the one she did.

I met Jessie when I thought I would never find my place. She was a classmate who noticed my struggles and offered me a friendly smile and a helping hand.

Looking at a photograph by Helen Levitt of four boys in a New York street, we are likely to find ourselves longing to comfort the grim-faced, stoic young man in the corner, whose mother perhaps only half an hour ago did up the many buttons of his handsome coat, and whose distressed expression evokes a pure form of agony. But how very different the same scene would have looked from just a metre away and another viewpoint. To the boy at the far right, what appears to matter most is a chance to take a closer look at his friend’s toy. He has already lost any interest in the overdressed crybaby by the wall, whom he and his classmates have just slapped hard for a bit of fun, on this day as on most others.

When I was in school, every student’s grades and position in the class were printed in the leading newspapers for all to see. Success or failure was reason for public pride or shame. One of my closest friends toyed with suicide after his high-school exams because he did not stand first in the entire city of New Delhi. Another one of my classmates in college actually burned himself to death because he did not make the grade. Such

When he was thirteen, he used an anti-Semitic epithet to describe a Jewish friend. Thinking of the moment more than seven decades later, Bush volunteered the story and cried, shaken by guilt over a remark made in the 1930s. He shook his head in wonder at his own insensitivity. “Never forgotten it. Never forgotten it.” (The classmate remained a Bush friend and supporter for many years.)

Traditionally, the needs of ethnically diverse consumers had been met by smaller companies—the equivalent, in movie terms, of independent filmmakers. In the seventies, Shindana introduced two Barbie-like fashion dolls: Malaika, taller and stouter than Barbie; and Career Girl Wanda, about three-quarters as tall as Barbie and as proportionately svelte. But in 1991, when Mattel brought out its "Shani" line—three Barbie-sized African-American dolls available with mahogany, tawny, or beige complexions— there could be no doubt that "politically correct" was profitable. "For six years, I had been preaching these demographics—showing pie charts of black kids under ten representing eighteen percent of the under-ten population and Hispanic kids representing sixteen percent—and nobody was interested," said Yla Eason, an African-American graduate of Harvard Business School who in 1985 founded Olmec Corporation, which makes dolls and action figures of color. "But when Mattel came out with those same demographics and said, 'Ethnically correct is the way,' it legitimatized our business." Some say that the toy industry's idea of "ethnically correct" doesn't go far enough, however. Ann duCille, chairman of the African-American Studies Program and an associate professor of English at Wesleyan University, is a severe critic. After studying representations of race in fashion dolls for over a year, she feels that the dolls reflect a sort of "easy pluralism." "I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say I'd rather see no black dolls than see something like Shani or Black Barbie," she told me, "but I would hope for something more—which is not about to happen." Nor is she wholly enamored of Imani and Melenik, Olmec's equivalent of Barbie and Ken. "Supposedly these are dolls for black kids to play with that look like them, when in fact they don't look like them. That's a problematic statement, of course, because there's no 'generic black kid.' But those dolls look too like Barbie for me. They have the same body type, the same long, straight hair—and I think it sends a problematic message to kids. It's about marketing, about business—so don't try to pass it off as being about the welfare of black children." Lisa Jones, an African-American writer who chronicled the introduction of Mattel's Shani dolls for the Village Voice, is less harsh. Too old to have played with Christie—Barbie's black friend, born in 1968—Jones recalls as a child having expressed annoyance with her white classmates by ripping the heads and arms off her two white Barbie dolls. Any fashion doll of color, she thinks, would have been better for her than those blondes. "Having been a little girl who grew up without the images," she told me, "I realize that however they fail to reach the Utopian mark, they're still useful.

Their top-five most frequent worries:         1. Friends         2. Classmates         3. School         4. Health         5. Performance Their top-five most intense worries:         1. War         2. Personal harm         3. Disasters         4. School         5. Family

My friend, our classmate, has been snatched by an escaped criminal who was sent to prison because he’s a kidnapper. It’s not like this happens every day around here. We should’ve been out there on the streets helping with the manhunt, but no, we were stuck in school where all we did was talk about searching for April.” “Nonsense. Leave the manhunt to the professionals, Theo. We have a fine police force in this city.” “Well, they haven’t found her yet. Maybe they need some help.” “Help from whom?” Theo cleared his throat and clenched his jaw. He stared straight at his father, and got ready to tell the truth. He’d been taught to confront the truth head-on, hold nothing back,

That was the funny thing. What happened to John would pass for his classmates, but for John it was a long challenging road ahead of him. Who knew where he would be sent, maybe a juvenile detention center? He might keep in touch with a few friends if his parents let him, but he would never return to Wakefield High. His peers had no clue the journey ahead of him, that his life was changed forever. And they had no idea what lay ahead for Lilly. No one knew she had been given a task by the Archangels to fight a war against pure evil. They had no idea that Lilly would spend most of her free time not training for a marathon, but training to kill demons. John and Lilly were not all too different.

nearly touched her face; then, as if aware of their surroundings, he quickly stood. Cindy felt herself gripped by the hands and pulled through the alley. Her eyes filled with tears. Someone, she mentally pleaded, help me. Help! She remembered her classmates, her friends, her laughter at the party. Help! At the end of the path, the small man lifted her up and hugged her tight. Her head flopped on his shoulder. He lovingly stroked her hair. He grabbed one of her hands and twirled her around like they were lovers. “It’s all right,” he said loudly, as if it were meant for others, “I’ll get the door.” Cindy

Don't follow the path that a friend, a classmate, or anyone else makes. If you're forced to, you don't have to. Just be yourself and make your own path.

She threw back her head and laughed, and Char laughed, too, as he placed his hand on her lower back. I felt the warmth and weight of his hand as strongly as if I were the one in the booth right now, not Pippa. How many times had Char touched me in exactly that same way? And it always made me relax, because it was the most certain reassurance you will be coming home with me tonight. Pippa would be going home with Char tonight. I could see it as clearly as either of them up there could. Maybe even more so, because I knew how to read a crowd. And I could read them both perfectly. I felt my stomach flip, but it wasn’t because of Char. Not really. It was because I could pinpoint exactly how I had lost him. I knew because it was the same way I lost everyone. Pete had offered me my own Friday night party, and I had accepted. I had been too precocious. Again. Again and again and again. I had always thought that if I just did something extraordinary enough, then people would like me. But that wasn’t true. You will drive away everyone by being extraordinary. You will drive away your classmates and your friends, and tonight you will drive away Char. But you, you never learn your lesson. The world embraces ordinary. The world will never embrace you. Of course Char wanted Pippa. It was so clear to me now: why he ended things with me, why he would keep Pippa around and around, no matter how much he didn’t care about her. He wanted a girl he could mold just the way he wanted. And me? No one can mold me. I know because I’ve tried. So I turned and ran. I left them all behind, and I ran the whole way home.

clambered by, still having not said a word to him, still not mustering up the courage. Our story started long before we were estranged classmates. Once upon a time, we lived on the same street, and our parents were friends. We spent afternoons as begrudging playmates in one of our messy yards while the adults stayed inside and drank wine. Despite the fun time our parents assumed we were having,

And Peter, my cop friend, isn’t any better; he’s worse. He drugged one of our classmates, assaulted her, claimed that she liked it, then became a police officer out of guilt. At one point, I put his past aside since he wanted to help put my stepdad in jail, but years passed. He probably doesn’t remember that anymore. “What if I brought a friend?” I ask. “Maybe

Tim sat at his bedroom desk, reading his favorite superhero comic. It told the exciting adventures of Lightning Leo as he protected Earth from alien invasion. “I wish I was as brave as Lightning Leo,” said Tim. The next day at school, Tim’s teacher, Mrs. Lee, shocked the class. “Okay, class, quiet down. I have an important announcement. Next Tuesday, each of you will give a speech about your own personal hero. They should be from real life.” Tim’s heart beat fast and his palms began to sweat. He imagined himself feeling scared and freezing in front of his laughing classmates. His friends, Sam and Michelle, tapped him on the shoulder. “Who’s your hero going

To listen to children dissect one another in public and respond with weak words is not helpful. Wait for an opportunity, catch the malefactors in the act, and then label their behavior for what it is: “That’s cruel.” If it continues, you may have to stop the car and declare, “I have to ask you to stop talking about Isabel that way. It is unbearably cruel and I cannot tolerate it.” Your child and your child’s classmates should know that you do not condone their horrible treatment of one another and will not collude silently with it.

Girls use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them.

adapt the concept of complex grief into its current iteration—impossible grief applies to cases where the grief-processing mechanism has been obstructed, like a clog in a drain. Family members of people who were in the towers the day they fell, who were never given remains to bury. Women who were assaulted by a classmate, a boyfriend, a friend, who are told by almost everyone that what they experienced does not qualify as assault. Impossible grief is grief that does not adhere to a social contract of justice or human rituals that have existed since the dawn of time. A death with no body, a violation by someone who is not seen as the transgressor. A woman whose relationship wasn’t recognized as legitimate at the time she lost her partner. Tina teaches people how to snare the obstruction so that grief can make its way through the proper channels unencumbered. It’s always running in your veins, but better that than a life-threatening clot.

You can’t go home again,” wrote Thomas Wolfe, and he might as well have been writing about the newly minted Imperial Japanese Navy aviator, resplendently clad in blue and brass, returning home to visit his family. Of course his parents and siblings were overjoyed to see him, and he them. He had done them a great honor, lifting the status of his entire clan in the eyes of neighbors, colleagues, and friends. He was bigger, stronger, tougher, older, wiser. But his homecoming was inevitably poignant, and more than a little strange. He might have dreamed of home every night he was away, clasping it in his imagination as a sanctuary from the brutality of his tormentors and the unremitting toil of his training. Once there, however, he was inevitably taken aback by the comfort, the ease, the disorder, the aimlessness. The reality of home had steadily diverged from the image he had carried in his mind. It contrasted too sharply with the harsh, purposeful life to which he had grown accustomed. He loved his family as much as he ever had, and they loved him as much as they ever had, but he was aghast at how much space had grown between them. They could never fully understand what he had done and endured, or what he had become. That was a secret known only to his classmates, his fellow survivors, who had shared in the long crucible of his training—the fatigue, the humiliations, the beatings, the deprivations, the chronic dread of expulsion, the ecstasy of flight, and the inconceivable joy he had felt upon receiving those blessed wings. He might never admit it, but his fellow airmen were closer to him now than his own kin. He belonged with them. He could not go home again because now the navy was his home.

But would they respect me here, if all I do is stick underneath the only Black professor in the program?” On the other end, Dr. Oludara heaved a sigh. “Ailey, why are you making things harder than they have to be?” “I’m not. It’s just—” “Ailey. Let me ask you something. Do any of your classmates invite you to their study sessions?” “No, ma’am.” “Are they even friendly to you?” “I mean . . . no. Not really.” “Then why do you give a good goddamn about what they think? You could have nothing but white folks on your dissertation committee, and your classmates still would have something to say. I’m sure they’ve passed around that you’re there on a quota. They love to accuse Black folks of taking their place. Even when it ain’t but one of us, and fifty of them, they don’t even want us to have that one spot.

I constantly overestimate the impressions that I'm making on other people. I monitor myself, wondering how my friends and classmates see me, and then try to control whatever they see.

her own heating issues, she’d known her former classmate wasn’t the owner of it.

To my classmates, teammates, teachers, coaches, and friends, and the people in the medical field who encouraged and challenged me to be my best in every aspect of life.