Compares Birthday Quotes

I have graded my separate works from A to D. The grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself. Thus can I give myself an A-plus for Cat’s Cradle, while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare. The report card is chronological, so you can plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like: Player Piano B The Sirens of Titan A Mother Night A Cat’s Cradle A-plus God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A Slaughterhouse-Five A-plus Welcome to the Monkey House B-minus Happy Birthday, Wanda June D Breakfast of Champions C Wampeters, Foma & Grandfalloons C Slapstick D Jailbird A Palm Sunday C

IT WAS HER FORTIETH birthday. Madame Wu sat before the tilted mirror of her toilet case and looked at her own calm face. In her mind she was comparing it with the face she had seen in this same mirror when she was sixteen.

A spark of electricity passes from me and into him, flooding out of my crowded heart and into his. I wonder what Morgan’s heart is like compared to mine. Empty isn’t the right word, though it’s the first that comes to mind. Minimalist. Maybe it’s more like yin and yang, like his heart is a dark, cool room after a hot, exhausting day.

They say that February is the shortest month, but you know they could be wrong. Compared, calendar page against calendar page, it looks to be the shortest, all right. Spread between January and March like lard on bread, it fails to reach the crust on either slice. In its galoshes it's a full head shorter than December, although in leap years, when it has growth spurts, it comes up to April's nose. However more abbreviated than it's cousins it may look, February feels longer than any of them. It is the meanest moon of winter, all the more cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a time, only to rip off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into every gullible face, behavior that grows quickly old. February is pitiless, and it's boring. That parade of red numerals on its page adds up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holiday reserved for rodents, what kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine's Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed. Except to the extent that it "tints the buds and swells the leaves within" February is as useless as the extra r in its name. It behaves like an obstacle, a wedge of slush and mud and ennui holding both progress and contentment at bay. If February is the color of lard on rye, its aroma is that of wet wool trousers. As for sound, it is an abstract melody played on a squeaky violin, the petty whine of a shrew with cabin fever. O February, you may be little but you're small! Where you twice your tiresome length, few of us would survive to greet the merry month of May.

So I’ve gotten used to not complaining, and I’ve gotten used to not bothering Mom and Dad with little stuff. I’ve gotten used to figuring things out on my own: how to put toys together, how to organize my life so I don’t miss friends’ birthday parties, how to stay on top of my schoolwork so I never fall behind in class. I’ve never asked for help with my homework. Never needed reminding to finish a project or study for a test. If I was having trouble with a subject in school, I’d go home and study it until I figured it out on my own. I taught myself how to convert fractions into decimal points by going online. I’ve done every school project pretty much by myself. When Mom or Dad ask me how things are going in school, I’ve always said “good”—even when it hasn’t always been so good. My worst day, worst fall, worst headache, worst bruise, worst cramp, worst mean thing anyone could say has always been nothing compared to what August has gone through. This isn’t me being noble, by the way: it’s just the way I know it is.

Every year my wife would get me a card for my birthday, then as I got more involved with her family I found most of her family would send me a card, hell people I didn't even know would send me a card. Considering I'd had years and years without any of this card, gift business, years of just seeing it as another day and cracking on then this was weird beyond compare and I liked it. It made me feel good, but it also made me notice the things that hadn't happened

It is already the fashion to diminish Eliot by calling him derivative, the mouthpiece of Pound, and so forth; and yet if one wanted to understand the apocalypse of early modernism in its true complexity it would be Eliot, I fancy, who would demand one's closest attention. He was ready to rewrite the history of all that interested him in order to have past and present conform; he was a poet of apocalypse, of the last days and the renovation, the destruction of the earthly city as a chastisement of human presumption, but also of empire. Tradition, a word we especially associate with this modernist, is for him the continuity of imperial deposits; hence the importance in his thought of Virgil and Dante. He saw his age as a long transition through which the elect must live, redeeming the time. He had his demonic host, too; the word 'Jew' remained in lower case through all the editions of the poems until the last of his lifetime, the seventy-fifth birthday edition of 1963. He had a persistent nostalgia for closed, immobile hierarchical societies. If tradition is, as he said in After Strange Gods--though the work was suppressed--'the habitual actions, habits and customs' which represent the kinship 'of the same people living in the same place' it is clear that Jews do not have it, but also that practically nobody now does. It is a fiction, a fiction cousin to a myth which had its effect in more practical politics. In extenuation it might be said that these writers felt, as Sartre felt later, that in a choice between Terror and Slavery one chooses Terror, 'not for its own sake, but because, in this era of flux, it upholds the exigencies proper to the aesthetics of Art.' The fictions of modernist literature were revolutionary, new, though affirming a relation of complementarity with the past. These fictions were, I think it is clear, related to others, which helped to shape the disastrous history of our time. Fictions, notably the fiction of apocalypse, turn easily into myths; people will live by that which was designed only to know by. Lawrence would be the writer to discuss here, if there were time; apocalypse works in Woman in Love, and perhaps even in Lady Chatterley's Lover, but not n Apocalypse, which is failed myth. It is hard to restore the fictive status of what has become mythical; that, I take it, is what Mr. Saul Bellow is talking about in his assaults on wastelandism, the cant of alienation. In speaking of the great men of early modernism we have to make very subtle distinctions between the work itself, in which the fictions are properly employed, and obiter dicta in which they are not, being either myths or dangerous pragmatic assertions. When the fictions are thus transformed there is not only danger but a leak, as it were, of reality; and what we feel about. all these men at times is perhaps that they retreated inso some paradigm, into a timeless and unreal vacuum from which all reality had been pumped. Joyce, who was a realist, was admired by Eliot because he modernized myth, and attacked by Lewis because he concerned himself with mess, the disorders of common perception. But Ulysses ,alone of these great works studies and develops the tension between paradigm and reality, asserts the resistance of fact to fiction, human freedom and unpredictability against plot. Joyce chooses a Day; it is a crisis ironically treated. The day is full of randomness. There are coincidences, meetings that have point, and coincidences which do not. We might ask whether one of the merits of the book is not its lack of mythologizing; compare Joyce on coincidence with the Jungians and their solemn concordmyth, the Principle of Synchronicity. From Joyce you cannot even extract a myth of Negative Concord; he shows us fiction fitting where it touches. And Joyce, who probably knew more about it than any of the others, was not at tracted by the intellectual opportunities or the formal elegance of fascism.

...the task was not to choose but to accept, there being no obligation to choose between what was appropriate and what was inappropriate, only to accept that we are not obliged to do anything except to comprehend that the appropriateness of the one great universal process of thinking is not predicated on it being correct, for there was nothing to compare it with, nothing but its own beauty, and it was its beauty that gave us confidence in its truth—and this, said Korin, was what struck him as he walked those hundred furiously-thinking paces on the evening of his birthday: that is to say he understood the infinite significance of faith and was given a new insight into what the ancients had long known, that it was faith in its existence that had both created and maintained the world; the corollary of which was that it was the loss of his own faith that was now erasing it, the result of which realization being, he said, that he experienced a sudden, utterly numbing, quite awful feeling of abundance...

I've gotten used to not complaining, and I've gotten used to not bothering Mom and Dad with little stuff. I've gotten used to figuring things out on my own: how to put toys together, how to organise my life so I don't miss friends' birthday parties, how to stay on top of my schoolwork so I never fall behind in class. I've never asked for help with my homework. Never needed reminding to finish a project or study for a test. If I was having trouble with a subject in school, I'd go home and study it until I figured it out on my own. I taught myself how to convert fractions into decimal points by going online. I've done every school project pretty much by myself. When Mom or Dad ask me how things are going in school, I've always said 'good' - even when it hasn't always been so good. My worst day, worst fall, worst headache, worst bruise, worst cramp, worst mean thing anyone could say has always been nothing compared to what August has gone through. This isn't me being noble, by the way: it's just the way I know it is.

When you buy from an independent, locally owned business, as opposed to nationally owned businesses, you strengthen the economic base of our city. And of course there’s no doubt that you’ll receive a better quality product or service. I share John Roeser’s amazement that people today tend to prefer saving a dollar or too two on a birthday cake, for example, by purchasing a sub-par cake made with artificial, cheap ingredients from a mass retailer, when Roeser’s Bakery offers some of the most delectable, housemade cakes in the world. How could anyone step into a fast food joint when we live in a city that has Lem’s barbecque rib tips, Kurowski’s kielbasa, Manny’s matzo ball soup, and Lindy’s chili within reach? You can’t even compare the products and services of the businesses featured in this book with those of mass retailers, either: Jjust try putting an Optimo hat on your head—you’ll ooze with elegance. Burn a beeswax lambathe from Athenian Candle and watch it glow longer than any candle you’ve ever lit. Bite into an Andersonville coffeecake from the Swedish Bakery—and you’ll have a hard time returning to the artificial ingredient– laden cakes found at most grocers. Equally important, local, family- owned businesses keep our city unique. In our increasingly homogenized and globalized world, cities that hold on tightly to their family-owned, distinctive businesses are more likely to attract visitors, entrepreneurs, and new investment. Chicago just wouldn’t be Chicago without these historic, one-of-a-kind places, and the people that run them from behind the scenes with nothing but love, hard work, and pride.

proper legal structure. The best structure is that of the Mondragon companies, which do not allow workers to own a tradable share of equity. Instead, in addition to their wages they each have an internal capital account the value of which depends on the business’s performance and on the number of hours the member works. A new member has to pay a large entrance fee, most of which is credited to his internal account. He receives interest at the end of every fiscal year, but he cannot withdraw the annually accumulating principal from his account until retirement. Almost all profits are divided between these individual accounts and a collective account that helps ensure the company’s survival. No buying or selling of shares takes place in this scheme, so it’s difficult for the firm to lose its worker-controlled status. Not until 1982, however, did the internal-capital-accounts legal structure exist in the United States (and then only in Massachusetts); prior to that, worker cooperatives had to make convoluted use of other categories, which sometimes made them vulnerable to degeneration.113 In any case, the survival rates of contemporary cooperatives put the lie to traditional theories of cooperatives’ unsustainability, for they appear to have higher rates of survival than conventional firms. During the 1970s and early 1980s, the death rate for co-ops in France (due either to dissolution or to conversion into a capitalist firm) was 6.9 percent; the comparable rate for capitalist competitors was 10 percent. A study in 1989 found much higher failure rates for capitalist companies than cooperatives in North America.114 A study conducted by Quebec’s Ministry of Industry and Commerce in 1999 concluded that “Co-op startups are twice as likely to celebrate their 10th birthday as conventionally owned private businesses.”115 A later study by the same organization found that “More than 6 out of 10 cooperatives survive more than five years, as compared to almost 4 businesses out of 10 for the private sector in Québec and in Canada in general. More than 4 out of 10 cooperatives survive more than 10 years, compared to 2 businesses out of 10 for the private sector.”116

Between 2003 and 2008, Iceland’s three main banks, Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki, borrowed over $140 billion, a figure equal to ten times the country’s GDP, dwarfing its central bank’s $2.5 billion reserves. A handful of entrepreneurs, egged on by their then government, embarked on an unprecedented international spending binge, buying everything from Danish department stores to West Ham Football Club, while a sizeable proportion of the rest of the adult population enthusiastically embraced the kind of cockamamie financial strategies usually only mooted in Nigerian spam emails – taking out loans in Japanese Yen, for example, or mortgaging their houses in Swiss francs. One minute the Icelanders were up to their waists in fish guts, the next they they were weighing up the options lists on their new Porsche Cayennes. The tales of un-Nordic excess are legion: Elton John was flown in to sing one song at a birthday party; private jets were booked like they were taxis; people thought nothing of spending £5,000 on bottles of single malt whisky, or £100,000 on hunting weekends in the English countryside. The chief executive of the London arm of Kaupthing hired the Natural History Museum for a party, with Tom Jones providing the entertainment, and, by all accounts, Reykjavik’s actual snow was augmented by a blizzard of the Colombian variety. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in late 2008 exposed Iceland’s debts which, at one point, were said to be around 850 per cent of GDP (compared with the US’s 350 per cent), and set off a chain reaction which resulted in the krona plummeting to almost half its value. By this stage Iceland’s banks were lending money to their own shareholders so that they could buy shares in . . . those very same Icelandic banks. I am no Paul Krugman, but even I can see that this was hardly a sustainable business model. The government didn’t have the money to cover its banks’ debts. It was forced to withdraw the krona from currency markets and accept loans totalling £4 billion from the IMF, and from other countries. Even the little Faroe Islands forked out £33 million, which must have been especially humiliating for the Icelanders. Interest rates peaked at 18 per cent. The stock market dropped 77 per cent; inflation hit 20 per cent; and the krona dropped 80 per cent. Depending who you listen to, the country’s total debt ended up somewhere between £13 billion and £63 billion, or, to put it another way, anything from £38,000 to £210,000 for each and every Icelander.

We sat down and Cage introduced me to a few of his teammates and their spouses, ones I of course didn’t get around to meeting at Everson’s party. “So how did you two meet?” Brea, one of the wives, asked me as Cage and her husband chatted. She must have thought we were there together. The way she stared at me with her bottom lip protruding out in a you-poor-thing expression told me she also thought I looked less than presentable compared to all the other women there. With my hair back and hat pulled down low on my head to shadow my face, I did look like my next stop might be robbing a convenience store. “It’s a long and really weird story, but it happened by chance several years ago and we hadn’t seen each other since, until we ran into each other at Everson’s birthday party.” She leaned in close to me, looking past the shadows of my hat. “Oh my God, you’re that cat lady!” There it was, that label that would stick forever. “You had that cat that looked like … like … uh …” I let her fumble her words. If she thought I would jump in and admit to being the cat lady, she was so very wrong.

We are all driven to select a mate. Those of us who don’t do not pass our genes on to the future. A human female is apparently driven to select a mate that will provide for her and her offspring. If nothing else, such behavior or motivation would be consistent with the tenets of sexual selection. A human male selects a mate that is, by his reckoning, well suited to carrying his genes forward. The female has to make her genes appear valuable by “playing hard to get,” as the old saying was and is so often said. But really … all things in moderation. Look around. So much of what goes on in our society is motivated by the process of sexual selection, and there are many subtle and not-so-subtle things that affect that process: There’s mascara. Expensive watches. Amazing shoes. Sports cars, perfume, skirts, ties, jeans, boots, and on and on. Now, compare us to everybody else. By everybody else I mean dogs and cats and lions and tigers and bears … and squids and whales. All the other animals around, and all the plants, have seasons to their mating. We humans don’t seem to. When it comes to our babies, birthdays are pretty well distributed around the calendar.

One thing led to another, and, notwithstanding some moments in history that dogs and cats would probably not want to bring up (like the time Pope Gregory IX declared cats to be the Devil incarnate), pets have gradually become cherished members of our families. According to “Citizen Canine,” a book by David Grimm, sixty-seven per cent of households in America have a cat or a dog (compared with forty-three per cent who have children), and eighty-three per cent of pet owners refer to themselves as their animal’s “mom” or “dad.” Seventy per cent celebrate the pet’s birthday. Animals are our best friends, our children, and our therapists.

Sonnet. What the hell kinda name is Sonnet?” “My mom was into Shakespeare when she had me—a May birthday. I’m named after Sonnet number 18. Do you know it?” “‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,’” Jezebel quoted, her voice taking on the cadence and tone of the syncopated sound that had made her famous. “‘Thou are more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath too short a date. Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines...

Hoping is a vague, unsophisticated, and largely uninteresting state of mind. One associates it with children and their feelings about birthday presents and snow days. Compared to the surgical precision of sentence adverbs like presumably, ostensibly, and understandably, hopefully is a bowl of mush.

We had finished the set when a lovely young woman wandered into our dressing room. She had bleached-blond hair and fire-engine-red lips and giant eyelashes that made her look like a reincarnated southern version of Marilyn Monroe. As I was prone to do at that time, I made my move before anyone else could even talk to her. I grabbed her hand and pulled her into the bathroom and asked her if she could keep me company while I took a shower. Once I got into the shower, she went into an impeccable rendition of Marilyn singing "Happy Birthday" to JFK. I got out of that shower ready to go. She immediately threw off her clothes and we made love on the floor. I had known the girl for five minutes, but I was certain of my affection for her. We spent the night together, and I found out more about her, including the fact that she went to Catholic school. (She would be the inspiration for a later song, "Catholic School Girls Rule.") The next day we drove to Baton Rouge, and of course, she came with us. After we got offstage, she came up to me and said, "I have something to tell you. My father's the chief of police and the entire state of Louisiana is looking for me because I've gone missing. Oh, and besides that, I'm only fourteen." I wasn't incredibly scared, because in my somewhat deluded mind, I knew that if she told the chief of police she was in love with me, he wasn't going to have me taken out to a field and shot, but I did want to get her the hell back home right away. So we had sex one more time, and she gave me an interesting compliment that I never forgot. She said, "When you make love to me, it's like you're a professional." I told her that she should give herself a little time and she'd realize that it was because she didn't have much to compare it to. And I put her on a bus and sent her back to New Orleans.

Sometimes people’s diets take on a religiosity of their own. I remember a man once telling me that he could never “go plant based” because he could never give up his grandma’s chicken soup. Huh? Then don’t! After I asked him to say hello to his bubby for me, I told him that enjoying her soup shouldn’t keep him from making healthier choices the rest of the time. The problem with all-or-nothing thinking is that it keeps people from even taking the first steps. The thought of never having pepperoni pizza again somehow turns into an excuse to keep ordering it every week. Why not scale down to once a month or reserve it for special occasions? We cannot let the “perfect” be the enemy of the good. It’s really the day-to-day stuff that matters most. What you eat on special occasions is insignificant compared to what you eat day in and day out. So don’t beat yourself up if you really want to put edible bacon-flavored candles on your birthday cake. (I’m not making those up!40) Your body has a remarkable ability to recover from sporadic insults as long as you’re not habitually poking it with a fork.

ROZ: My sister and I became guarded with each other in the weeks and months after our mother died. I don’t think either of us had a handle on what it was about, but I, in my characteristic way, was eager to roll up my sleeves and iron out some issues with her. She, less given to argument, preferred to keep her distance. Many is the time I drove through the streets of Boston presenting my case in the most cogent terms to a full courtroom just beyond the dashboard, while she was safely closeted a state away. My birthday came and went and still we had not managed to get together; of course I felt all the more put upon. Finally I had the grace to ask myself, “What’s happening here?” and I caught a glimpse of the in-between. All the energy I had been expending to shape a persuasive argument was actually propelling us apart. And I missed her—acutely. I thought that if I could just see her we surely could find some solutions. So I called her, and invited myself to her house for breakfast, and got up in the dark and was down in Connecticut by seven. There in the kitchen in her nightgown I found her, looking like my favorite sister in all the world. We talked gaily while we drank black Italian coffee, and then we took a long morning walk down the leafy dirt roads of Ashford, Connecticut, while her chocolate Lab, Chloe, ran ahead and came back, ran ahead and came back, in long arcs of perpetual motion. What did we talk about? The architecture, and the countryside, and the cats that Chloe was eager to visit at the farm ahead. We revisited scenes featuring our hilarious mother. We talked about my work, and about a paper she was about to present. My “case” never came up; it must have gotten lost somewhere along that wooded road because by the time I got in the car—my courtroom, my favorable jury—it was no longer on the docket. Did we resolve the issues? Obviously not, but the issues themselves are rarely what they seem, no matter what pains are taken to verify the scoreboard. We walked together, moved our arms, became joyous in the sunlight, and breathed in the morning. At that moment there were no barriers between us. And from that place, I felt our differences could easily be spoken. My disagreements with my sister were but blips on our screen compared to the hostilities individuals and nations are capable of when anger, fear, and the sense of injustice are allowed to develop unchecked. “Putting things aside” then becomes quite a different matter. At the apex of desperation and rage, we need a new invention to see us through.

For Husbands: 1. Do you still "court" your wife with an occasional gift of flowers, with remembrances of her birthday and wedding anniversary, or with some unexpected attention, some unlooked-for tenderness? 2. Are you careful never to criticize her before others? 3. Do you give her money to spend entirely as she chooses, above the household expenses? 4. Do you make an effort to understand her varying feminine moods and help her through periods of fatigue, nerves, and irritability? 5. Do you share at least half of your recreation hours with your wife? 6. Do you tactfully refrain from comparing your wife's cooking or housekeeping with that of your mother or of Bill Jones' wife, except to her advantage? 7. Do you take a definite interest in her intellectual life, her clubs and societies, the books she reads, her views on civic problems? 8. Can you let her dance with and receive friendly attentions from other men without making jealous remarks? 9. Do you keep alert for opportunities to praise her and express your admiration for her? 10. Do you thank her for the little jobs she does for you, such as sewing on a button, darning your socks, and sending your clothes to the cleaners?

Pardon me,” I say with a stomp of my foot. “But do you not recall how I’ve raised Alexander? He’s flourishing. And because Harriot, my neighbor is taking care of him while I’m here, he will continue to flourish.” “Comparing our aunt Cindy to a ficus is not even close to the same thing, Storee.” I cross my arms over my chest in defiance. “Says the person who bought Alexander a birthday present this year.” “You asked me to grab you fertilizer when I came out to visit you. I highly disagree with calling that a birthday gift.” “It was his birthday and you brought it to him. I see it differently.” With another roll of her eyes, she pushes her suitcase toward the red room.