D Mart Quotes

He slung off his backpack. He'd managed to grab a lot of supplies at the Napa Bargain Mart: a portable GPS, duct tape, lighter, superglue, water bottle, camping roll, a Comfy Panda Pillow Pet (as seen on TV), and a Swiss army knife—pretty much every tool a modern demigod could want.

My name is Olivia King I am five years old. My mother bought me a balloon. I remember the day she walked through the front door with it. The curly hot pink ribbon trickling down her arm, wrapped around her wrist. She was smiling at me as she untied the ribbon and wrapped it around my hand. “Here Livie, I bought this for you.” She called me Livie. I was so happy. I’d never had a balloon before. I mean, I always saw balloons wrapped around other kids wrists in the parking lot of Wal-Mart, but I never dreamed I would have my very own. My very own pink balloon.

That night, lying beside her, I remembered how when I was a child I would slip my cold feet between my mother’s thighs to warm them. How she’d shiver and whisper that she would always suffer to bring me comfort, that that was how you knew someone really loved you.

I wondered if the 10 percent she kept from the three of us who knew her best—my father, Nami, and me—had all been different, a pattern of deception that together we could reconstruct. I wondered if I could ever know all of her, what other threads she'd left behind to pull.

When I asked her what she’d want to come back as, she always told me she’d like to return as a tree. It was a strange and comforting answer, that rather than something grand and heroic, my mother preferred to return to life as something humble and still.

I remember these things clearly because that was how my mother loved you, not through white lies and constant verbal affirmation, but in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realizing it. She remembered if you liked your stews with extra broth, if you were sensitive to spice, if you hated tomatoes, if you didn't eat seafood, if you had a large appetite. She remembered which banchan side dish you emptied first so the next time you were over it'd be set with a heaping double portion, served alongside the various other preferences that made you, you.

My mother had either finally given up, conceding in her efforts to try to shape me into something I didn't want to be, or she had moved on to subtler tactics, realizing it was unlikely that I'd last another year in this mess before I discovered she'd been right all along. Or maybe the three thousand miles between us had made it so she was just happy to be with me. Or maybe she'd finally accepted that I'd forged my own path and found someone who loved me wholly, and believed at last that I would end up all right.

...love was an action, an instinct. A response wrapped by unplanned moments and small gestures. An inconvenience in someone else's favor. How I felt it most when he drove up to New York after work at 3 in the morning just to hold me in a warehouse in Brooklyn after I had discovered my mother was sick. The many times these months he had flown 3000 miles whenever I needed him while he listened patiently through the 5 calls a day I'd been making since June, and though I wished our marriage could begin under more ideal circumstances, it had been these very trials that had assured me he was everything I needed to brave the future that lay ahead.

Pink Balloons My name is Olivia King I am five years old My mother bought me a balloon. I remember the day she walked through the front door with it. The curly hot pink ribbon trickling down her arm, wrapped around her wrist . She was smiling at me as she untied the ribbon and wrapped it around my hand. "Here Livie, I bought this for you." She called me Livie. I was so happy . I'd never had a balloon before. I mean, I always saw balloon wrapped around other kids wrist in the parking lot of Wal-Mart , but I never dreamed I would have my very own. My very own pink balloon. I was excited! So ecstatic! So thrilled! i couldn't believe my mother bought me something! She'd never bought me anything before! I played with it for hours . It was full of helium and it danced and swayed and floated as I drug it around from room to room with me, thinking of places to take it. Thinking of places the balloon had never been before. I took it in the bathroom , the closet , the laundry room , the kitchen , the living room . I wanted my new best friend to see everything I saw! I took it to my mother's bedroom! My mothers Bedroom? Where I wasn't supposed to be? With my pink balloon... I covered my ears as she screamed at me, wiping the evidence off her nose! She slapped me across the face as she told me how bad I was! How much I misbehaved! How I never listened! She shoved me into the hallways and slammed the door, locking my pink balloon inside with her. I wanted him back! He was my best friend! Not her! The pink ribbon was still tied around my wrist so I pulled and pulled , trying to get my new best friend away from her. And it popped. My name is Eddie. I'm seventeen years old. My birthday is next week. I'll be big One-Eight. My foster dad is buying me these boots I've been wanting. I'm sure my friends will take me out to eat. My boyfriend will buy me a gift, maybe even take me to a movie. I'll even get a nice little card from my foster care worker, wishing me a happy eighteenth birthday, informing me I've aged out of the system. I'll have a good time. I know I will. But there's one thing I know for sure I better not get any shitty ass pink balloons!

Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti'd celebration of athletic victory on bridge overpass, crust of blood on the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on the highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that.

Isn't he utterly divine? Beautiful?" "Somehow,I think he'd disagree with that last one." And not enough with the first. "All right," she waved her dismissively. "Handsome then. Do you think he noticed me?" "We were sprawled in a heap of twitching limbs and lace at his feet. He would have had to have been unconscious not to notice us." She wrinkled her nose. "I meant,do you think he noticed I'm nearly on the Marriage Mart now?" I didn't know how to reply. I didn't want to hurt her feelings,but I wasn't sure Frederic noticed anything other than cards and port.He was twenty years old,after all,and quite wealthy. He was acting exactly as he was expected to. Her cheeks were red. "We should return before Mother wonders where we've gone off to.Heaven forbid we might be somewhere enjoying ourselves!

What I have to face is that 'Barb,' the name on my ID tag, is not exactly the same person as Barbara. 'Barb' is what I was called as a child, and still am by my siblings, and I sense that at some level I'm regressing. Take away the career and the higher education, and maybe what you're left with is this original Barb, the one who might have ended up working at Wal-Mart for real if her father hadn't managed to climb out of the mines. So it's interesting, and more than a little disturbing, to see how Barb turned out — that she's meaner and slyer than I am, more cherishing of grudges, and not quite as smart as I'd hoped.

I don’t think any other retail company in the world could do what I’m going to propose to you. It’s simple. It won’t cost us anything. And I believe it would just work magic, absolute magic on our customers, and our sales would escalate, and I think we’d just shoot past our Kmart friends in a year or two and probably Sears as well. I want you to take a pledge with me. I want you to promise that whenever you come within ten feet of a customer, you will look him in the eye, greet him, and ask him if you can help him. Now I know some of you are just naturally shy, and maybe don’t want to bother folks. But if you’ll go along with me on this, it would, I’m sure, help you become a leader. It would help your personality develop, you would become more outgoing, and in time you might become manager of that store, you might become a department manager, you might become a district manager, or whatever you choose to be in the company. It will do wonders for you. I guarantee it. Now, I want you to raise your right hand—and remember what we say at Wal-Mart, that a promise we make is a promise we keep—and I want you to repeat after me: From this day forward, I solemnly promise and declare that every time a customer comes within ten feet of me, I will smile, look him in the eye, and greet him. So help me Sam.

That night, lying beside her, I remembered how when I was a child I would slip my cold feet between my mother’s thighs to warm them. How she’d shiver and whisper that she would always suffer to bring me comfort, that that was how you knew someone really loved you. I remembered the boots she’d broken in so that by the time I got them I could go on unbothered, without harm. Now, more than ever, I wished desperately for a way to transfer pain, wished I could prove to my mother just how much I loved her, that I could just crawl into her hospital cot and press my body close enough to absorb her burden. It seemed only fair that life should present such an opportunity to prove one’s filial piety. That the months my mother had been a vessel for me, her organs shifting and cramping together to make room for my existence, and the agony she’d endured upon my exit could be repaid by carrying this pain in her place. The rite of an only daughter. But I could do no more than lie nearby, ready to be her advocate, listening to the slow and steady beeping of machinery, the soft sounds of her breathing in and out.

I'd just never really taken the time to picture it. It was like when you're a little kid and you run into your teacher or librarian at the grocery store or Wal-Mart and it's just so startling, because it never occurred to you they existed outside of school.

Mom's afraid you two will fight if you come," my father admitted later. "She knows she has to put all her focus into getting better." I assumed the seven years I'd lived away from home had healed the wounds between us, that the strain built up in my teenage years had been forgotten. My mother had found ample space in the three thousand miles between Eugene and Philadelphia to relax her authority, and for my part, free to explore my creative impulses without constant critique, I came to appreciate all the labors she performed, their ends made apparent only in her absence. Now we were closer than ever, but my father's admission revealed there were memories of which my mother could not let go.

After the shows, I’d sell shirts and copies of the record, oftentimes to other mixed kids and Asian Americans who, like me, struggled to find artists who looked like them,

Instead, I began to cook. Mostly the kind of food you could crawl into and that required sleeping off. The kind you’d order on death row.

This is it. I'm dead. Dear Baby Jesus, heat up the oven. I'm having pizza rolls in heaven tonight.

Another veteran Wal-Mart booster told me he would wear very baggy clothing, with long-john underwear underneath, taped at the ankles. He’d walk through the store stuffing merchandise in his long johns, which would balloon out, though nothing would show under his baggy pants and shirt. “I walked out of there, it looked like I was four hundred pounds,” he said.

Gabriel didn't have to look at his parents to know they were thoroughly charmed by Pandora. As for him... He hardly recognized himself in his reaction to her. She was full of life, burning like sunflowers in the rime of autumn frost. Compared to the languid and diffident girls of London's annual marriage mart, Pandora might have been another species altogether. She was just as beautiful as he'd remembered, and as unpredictable. Laughing after the dog had jumped on her in the front drive, when any other young woman in her place would have been angry or humiliated. As she'd stood there wanting to argue with him about carrots, all Gabriel had been able to think of was how much he wanted to carry her somewhere cool and dark and quiet, and have her all to himself.

Every day, we make choices. Your choices either hurt people or help people. If you hurt people, and you don't care. If you only care about yourself, at the expense of others, you're gonna burn.

middle school, where kids endure the three most confusing and sensitive years of their lives, where girls who’ve already sprouted D cups and know about blow jobs sit beside girls in trainers from the Gap

Some nights I would drive up Route 29 to the all-night Wal-Mart. I'd push a cart around with some paper towels inside to look like a real shopper, just to spy on married people. I just wanted to be near them, to listen to them argue...Married people fight over some dumb shit when they think there aren't any widowers eavesdropping. And they never think there are widowers eavesdropping.”--Rob Sheffield (Love is a Mix Tape)

The world is a shit show, Lloyd. We're neck deep,” she said. “Every one of us is born with a shovel. At the end of your life, you'll be judged by one thing: Did you use your shovel to clean up your little corner of the world? Did you, by existing, make the world less shitty? Me? I'm using my shovel. I've chosen to start digging. I'm going to leave my corner nicer than it was when I found it. Part of that is my job. So, Lloyd. Tell me. Are you going to dig, too?

Gwaenchanh-a, gwaenchanh-a,” she said. It’s okay, it’s okay. Korean words so familiar, the gentle coo I’d heard my whole life that assured me whatever ache was at hand would pass. Even as she was dying, my mother offered me solace, her instinct to nurture overwhelming any personal fear she might have felt but kept expertly hidden.

A cosmically cruel fate for a woman who’d never known romantic love. Her last words were “Where are we going?

But, most days, I knew it was the ultimate display of a Korean woman’s tenderness, and I cherished that love. A love I’d do anything to have back.

Sweet braised black soybeans, crisp yellow sprouts with scallion and sesame oil, and tart, juicy cucumber kimchi were shoveled into our mouths behind spoonfuls of warm, lavender kong bap straight from the open rice cooker. We'd giggle and shush each other as we ate ganjang gejang with our fingers, sucking salty, rich, custardy raw crab from its shell, prodding the meat from its crevices with our tongues, licking our soy sauce-stained fingers. Between chews of a wilted perilla leaf, my mother would say, "This is how I know you're a true Korean.

She remembered which banchan side dish you emptied first so the next time you were over it’d be set with a heaping double portion, served alongside the various other preferences that made you, you.

remember these things clearly because that was how my mother loved you, not through white lies and constant verbal affirmation, but in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realizing it. She remembered if you liked your stews with extra broth, if you were sensitive to spice, if you hated tomatoes, if you didn’t eat seafood, if you had a large appetite. She remembered which banchan side dish you emptied first so the next time you were over it’d be set with a heaping double portion, served alongside the various other preferences that made you, you.

Left with her in the woods, I was overwhelmed by her time and attention, a devotion that I learned could both be an auspicious privilege and have smothering consequences. My mother was a homemaker. Making a home had been her livelihood since I was born, and while she was vigilant and protective, she wasn’t what you would call coddling. She was not what I’d refer to as a “Mommy-Mom,” which was what I envied most of my friends for having. A Mommy-Mom is someone who takes an interest in everything her child has to say even when there is no actual way she gives a shit, who whisks you away to the doctor when you complain of the slightest ailment, who tells you “they’re just jealous” if someone makes fun of you, or “you always look beautiful to me” even if you don’t, or “I love this!” when you give them a piece of crap for Christmas.

My mother would have known what to do, and when it was all over, we'd reemerge entwined with each other, closer than ever. But my father was unabashedly panicked, openly scared in a way I wished he would keep from me

She was not what I’d refer to as a “Mommy-Mom,” which was what I envied most of my friends for having. A Mommy-Mom is someone who takes an interest in everything her child has to say even when there is no actual way she gives a shit, who whisks you away to the doctor when you complain of the slightest ailment, who tells you “they’re just jealous” if someone makes fun of you, or “you always look beautiful to me” even if you don’t, or “I love this!” when you give them a piece of crap for Christmas.

GIVEN A CHOICE between death and the Buford Zippy Mart, Nico would’ve had a tough time deciding. At least he knew his way around the Land of the Dead. Plus the food was fresher. ‘I still don’t get it,’ Coach Hedge muttered as they roamed the centre aisle. ‘They named a whole town after Leo’s table?’ ‘I think the town was here first, Coach,’ Nico said. ‘Huh.’ The coach picked up a box of powdered doughnuts. ‘Maybe you’re right. These look at least a hundred years old. I miss those Portuguese farturas.’ Nico couldn’t think about Portugal without his arms hurting. Across his biceps, the werewolf claw marks were still swollen and red. The store clerk had asked Nico if he’d picked a fight with a bobcat. They bought a first-aid kit, a pad of paper (so Coach Hedge could write more paper aeroplane messages to his wife), some junk food and soda (since the banquet table in Reyna’s new magic tent only provided healthy food and fresh water) and some miscellaneous camping supplies for Coach Hedge’s useless but impressively complicated monster traps.

Nami Emo was also the greatest storybook reader in the world. Like my grandfather before her, she worked as a voice actress, doing voice-overs for documentaries and dubbing anime episodes, which Seong Young and I would watch over and over on VHS. At night, she'd read Korean Sailor Moon books to me and do all the voices. It didn't matter that she couldn't translate the chapters into English---her voice was elastic and could swing seamlessly from the cackle of an evil queen to the catchphrase of the resolute heroine, then quiver words of caution from a useless sidekick and resolve with a dashing prince's gallant coo.

I remember these things clearly because that was how my mother loved you, not through white lies and constant verbal affirmation, but in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realizing it. She remembered if you liked your stews with extra broth, if you were sensitive to spice, if you hated tomatoes, if you didn’t eat seafood, if you had a large appetite. She remembered which banchan side dish you emptied first so the next time you were over it’d be set with a heaping double portion, served alongside the various other preferences that made you, you.

Such was puberty, one big masochistic joke set in the halfway house of middle school, where kids endure the three most confusing and sensitive years of their lives, where girls who’ve already sprouted D cups and know about blow jobs sit beside girls in trainers from the Gap who still have crushes on anime characters.

Such was puberty, one big masochistic joke set in the halfway house of middle school, where kids endure the three most confusing and sensitive years of their lives, where girls who've already sprouted D cups and know about blow jobs sit besides girls in trainers from the Gap who still have crushes on anime characters.

At the Chinese restaurant, Nami Emo would reserve a room with a big table and a gigantic glass lazy Susan on which turned small porcelain pitchers of vinegar and soy sauce with a marble button to ring for service. We'd order decadent jjajangmyeon noodles, dumpling after dumpling served in rich broth, tangsuyuk pork with mushrooms and peppers, and yusanseul, gelatinous sea cucumber with squid, shrimp, and zucchini.

Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti'd celebration of athletic victory on bridge overpass, crust of blood of the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on a highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that.

For the rest of my life there would be a splinter in my being, stinging from the moment my mother died until it was buried with me. Tears streamed down my face and when I looked over, my mother was crying too. We held each other, letting ourselves sob deeply onto each other’s T-shirts. Neither of us had ever watched Law and Order or even knew who this actress was, but it was as if we were watching my future play out, the pain I’d keep with me for a lifetime.

According to Wal-Mart expert Bob Ortega, Sam Walton got the idea for the cheer on a 1975 trip to Japan, “where he was deeply impressed by factory workers doing group calisthenics and company cheers.” Ortega describes Walton conducting a cheer: “‘Gimme a W!’ he’d shout. ‘W!’ the workers would shout back, and on through the Wal-Mart name. At the hyphen, Walton would shout ‘Gimme a squiggly!’ and squat and twist his hips at the same time; the workers would squiggle right back

Who cheats? Well, just about anyone, if the stakes are right. You might say to yourself, I don’t cheat, regardless of the stakes. And then you might remember the time you cheated on, say, a board game. Last week. Or the golf ball you nudged out of its bad lie. Or the time you really wanted a bagel in the office break room but couldn’t come up with the dollar you were supposed to drop in the coffee can. And then took the bagel anyway. And told yourself you’d pay double the next time. And didn’t. For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it. Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor. Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less. So it isn’t just the boldface names — inside-trading CEOs and pill-popping ballplayers and perkabusing politicians — who cheat. It is the waitress who pockets her tips instead of pooling them. It is the Wal-Mart payroll manager who goes into the computer and shaves his employees’ hours to make his own performance look better. It is the third grader who, worried about not making it to the fourth grade, copies test answers from the kid sitting next to him. Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases, the evidence is massive. Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing the name of each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number. Suddenly, seven million children — children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms — vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States.

That night, lying beside her, I remembered how when I was a child I would slip my cold feet between my mother’s thighs to warm them. How she’d shiver and whisper that she would always suffer to bring me comfort, that that was how you knew someone really loved you. I remembered the boots she’d broken in so that by the time I got them I could go on unbothered, without harm. Now, more than ever, I wished desperately for a way to transfer pain, wished I could prove to my mother just how much I loved her, that I could just crawl into her hospital cot and press my body close enough to absorb her burden.

Almost unconsciously, his gaze shifted across the immense ballroom to fasten on the girl, inexorably pulled to her like metal filings to a magnet. He could barely make her out since she was surrounded by her usual jostling court of ardent admirers, most of them titled, wealthy, and considerably handsomer than Nigel. If he was honest with himself, he’d have to admit that obsession would be the most accurate description of his feelings, and he hadn’t the slightest notion as to when or how that obsession had developed. However it had happened, over the last several months a ridiculous amount of space in his skull had been taken up by thoughts of lovely Amelia Easton. Fortunately, until now, none of his acquaintances had suspected that he—the most sensible man in the ton—had succumbed to such a maudlin, hopeless passion. A hopeless passion, since Amelia Easton would no sooner marry a man like Nigel than she would a butcher from Smithfield. After all, she was widely acknowledged as one of the great prizes on the matrimonial mart—beautiful, kind, good-natured, and disgustingly rich, or at least her father was. It was a most potent combination, and meant that the girl couldn’t step foot outside her family’s Mayfair townhouse without a pack of slavering bachelors in pursuit. “How

Then I got to the point: “I don’t think any other retail company in the world could do what I’m going to propose to you. It’s simple. It won’t cost us anything. And I believe it would just work magic, absolute magic on our customers, and our sales would escalate, and I think we’d just shoot past our Kmart friends in a year or two and probably Sears as well. I want you to take a pledge with me. I want you to promise that whenever you come within ten feet of a customer, you will look him in the eye, greet him, and ask him if you can help him. Now I know some of you are just naturally shy, and maybe don’t want to bother folks. But if you’ll go along with me on this, it would, I’m sure, help you become a leader. It would help your personality develop, you would become more outgoing, and in time you might become manager of that store, you might become a department manager, you might become a district manager, or whatever you choose to be in the company. It will do wonders for you. I guarantee it. Now, I want you to raise your right hand—and remember what we say at Wal-Mart, that a promise we make is a promise we keep—and I want you to repeat after me: From this day forward, I solemnly promise and declare that every time a customer comes within ten feet of me, I will smile, look him in the eye, and greet him. So help me Sam.

Then, just when he thought he’d made it through without delay, he heard an aged, female, and very imperious voice call out his name. “Bridgerton! I say, Bridgerton! Stop at once. I’m speaking to you!” He groaned as he turned about. Lady Danbury, the dragon of the ton. There was simply no way he could ignore her. He had no idea how old she was. Sixty? Seventy? Whatever her age, she was a force of nature, and no one ignored her. “Lady Danbury,” he said, trying not to sound resigned as he reined in his mount. “How nice to see you.” “Good gad, boy,” she barked, “you sound as if you’ve just taken an antidote. Perk up!” Anthony smiled weakly. “Where’s your wife?” “I’m looking for her right now,” he replied, “or at least I was.” Lady Danbury was far too sharp to miss his pointed hint, so he could only deduce that she ignored him apurpose when she said, “I like your wife.” “I like her, too.” “Never could understand why you were so set on courting her sister. Nice gel, but clearly not for you.” She rolled her eyes and let out an indignant huff. “The world would be a much happier place if people would just listen to me before they up and got married,” she added. “I could have the entire Marriage Mart matched up in a week.” “I’m sure you could.” Her eyes narrowed. “Are you patronizing me?” “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Anthony said with complete honesty. “Good. You always seemed like the sensible sort.

Trust me, Jennifer. Just...trust me." I drove another block or two. "Why should I?" "Why shouldn't you?" Because you left me, Cameron. After everything we went through. But I knew it wasn't his fault, any more than it was mine. It wasn't like either of us had control over our lives. We were at the mercy of our parents, both of us. Anyway, I'd already turned the car toward the freeway entrance. I turned on the car radio and we drove twenty minutes without talking. When the exit finally came into view, ugly warehouses and the new Wal-Mart looming before us, I said, "Let's go to my old apartment first. I haven't been there since we moved." "I've gone by it a couple of times." "Really?" "Yeah. Living there with you was kind of my best memory." I imagined that, him going to the apartment and looking up at the window and thinking about me.

Another night I bought lobsters, taking time to observe them in the supermarket tank, sussing out the liveliest of the bunch. I instructed the fishmonger to lift them with his plastic rake and tickle their tails like my father taught me, picking the ones that flipped violently and with gusto. I boiled them in a large pot and set out the same small bowls my mother would for the melted butter. When they were cooked through, my father made two hacks in the center of their claws and large incisions down their backs. When we ate lobster, my mother used to boil one for each of us and content herself with a side of corn or a baked potato or a small bowl of rice with banchan and a can of saury, an oily fish she braised in soy sauce. But if we were lucky enough to find some, she'd eat the roe, giddily scooping the plump orange eggs onto her plate.

My mother never seemed to listen to much music, but she loved Barbara Streisand, counting The Way We Were and Yentl as two of her favorite films. I remembered how we used to sing the song "Tell Him" together, and skipped through the album until I found it on track four. "Remember this?" I laughed, turning up the volume. It's a duet between Babe and Celine Dion, two powerhouse divas joining together for one epic track. Celine plays the role of a young woman afraid to confess her feelings to the man she loves, and Barbara is her confidant, encouraging her to take the plunge. "I'm scared, so afraid to show I care... Will he think me weak, if I tremble when I speak?" Celine begins. When I was a kid my mother used to quiver her lower lip for dramatic effect when she sang the word "tremble." We would trade verses in the living room. I was Barbara and she was Celine, the two of us adding interpretive dance and yearning facial expressions to really sell it. "I've been there, with my heart out in my hand..." I'd join in, a trail of chimes punctuating my entrance. "But what you must understand, you can't let the chance to love him pass you by!" I'd exclaim, prancing from side to side, raising my hand to urge my voice upward, showcasing my exaggerated vocal range. Then, together, we'd join in triumphantly. "Tell him! Tell him that the sun and moon rise in his eyes! Reach out to him!" And we'd ballroom dance in a circle along the carpet, staring into each other's eyes as we crooned along to the chorus. My mom let out a soft giggle from the passenger seat and we sang quietly the rest of the way home. Driving out past the clearing just as the sun went down, the scalloped clouds flushed with a deep orange that made it look like magma.

Though my mother and I hadn't parted on good terms, once a month, huge boxes would arrive, reminders I was never far from her mind. Sweet honey-puffed rice, twenty-four packs of individually wrapped seasoned seaweed, microwavable rice, shrimp crackers, boxes of Pepero, and cups of Shin ramen I would subsist on for weeks on end in an effort to avoid the dining hall. She sent clothing steamers, lint rollers, BB creams, packages of socks. A new "this is nice brand" skirt she'd found on sale at T.J. Maxx. The cowboy boots arrived in one of these packages after my parents had vacationed in Mexico. When I slipped them on I discovered they'd already been broken in. My mother had worn them around the house for a week, smoothing the hard edges in two pairs of socks for an hour every day, molding the flat sole with the bottom of her feet, wearing in the stiffness, breaking the tough leather to spare me all discomfort.

he is a sence of unrest the new birth maybe is not that good....bitterness...except for his grandson ========== Road Tripping (Noelle Adams) - Tu subrayado en la página 8 | posición 123-125 | Añadido el miércoles, 6 de mayo de 2015 23:07:16 Ethan was still as good-looking as he’d been before, a fact that annoyed her as much as anything else. It seemed like a life of crime should cast its mark on your appearance. But he still had the same strong features, vivid green eyes, and lean, fit body. His hair had been blazing red when he was a kid, but it had darkened now to an auburn. ========== Road Tripping (Noelle Adams) - Tu subrayado en la página 9 | posición 127-128 | Añadido el miércoles, 6 de mayo de 2015 23:07:49 Ethan’s plans, the way he always had. He’d always trusted Ethan. So had she. The thought upset ========== Road Tripping (Noelle Adams) - Tu subrayado en la página 9 | posición 132-134 | Añadido el miércoles, 6 de mayo de 2015 23:09:09 He’d seemed to transform while he was away from the skinny boy she’d known before. He’d broadened across the shoulders and chest, and he’d suddenly become really good-looking. Very good-looking. ========== Road Tripping (Noelle Adams) - Tu subrayado en la página 9 | posición 134-135 | Añadido el miércoles, 6 de mayo de 2015 23:09:22 The lingering crush on him Ashley had had all her life had morphed into full-blown love. ========== Road Tripping (Noelle Adams) - Tu subrayado en la página 28 | posición 427-427 | Añadido el jueves, 7 de mayo de 2015 7:39:32 hot-wire a car. Why ========== Road Tripping (Noelle Adams) - Tu subrayado en la página 38 | posición 574-574 | Añadido el jueves, 7 de mayo de 2015 18:22:07 He screeched to a halt. As soon as he slammed it into ========== Road Tripping (Noelle Adams) - Tu subrayado en la página 42 | posición 641-642 | Añadido el jueves, 7 de mayo de 2015 19:30:10 He was the antithesis of the nice, clean, stable life she wanted to build for herself. He was bossy, and arrogant, and infuriating, and condescending, and presumptuous, and smug, and without compassion, and bossy… ========== Road Tripping (Noelle Adams) - Tu subrayado en la página 42 | posición 643-644 | Añadido el jueves, 7 de mayo de 2015 19:30:23 And he had looked so funny in that cowboy hat. And he had the most delicious laugh she had ever heard. And sometimes, like when he’d fake-kissed her earlier, there was a warmth in his eyes that was so unexpected, so breathtaking… ========== Road Tripping (Noelle Adams) - Tu subrayado en la página 62 | posición 945-945 | Añadido el jueves, 7 de mayo de 2015 20:55:59 As long as you don’t hog the covers.” ========== Road Tripping (Noelle Adams) - Tu subrayado en la página 82 | posición 1253-1254 | Añadido el jueves, 7 de mayo de 2015 23:37:15 he wasn’t a bad guy at heart. He’d never been truly a bad guy. For the first time in the last eighteen months, she knew it for sure. ========== Road Tripping (Noelle Adams) - Tu subrayado en la página 94 | posición 1438-1439 | Añadido el viernes, 8 de mayo de 2015 7:45:17 she felt like it was only humane to let him know she was okay. ========== Road Tripping (Noelle Adams) - Tu subrayado en la página 179 | posición 2744-2745 | Añadido el viernes, 8 de mayo de 2015 21:04:11 was uncomfortably hot and smushed. Attempting to rouse herself ========== Mis recortes - Tu subrayado en la posición 1-6 | Añadido el sábado, 9 de mayo de 2015 13:59:08 When I Break (Ryan, Kendall) - Tu subrayado en la posición 518-519 | Añadido el viernes, 13 de marzo de 2015 20:31:52 Her voice was light, clear, and appealing. ========== When We Fall (Kendall Ryan) - Tu subrayado en la página 105 | posición 1601-1601 | Añadido el lunes, 16 de marzo de 2015 11:42:37 Two long and hard days had passed since Knox told me. ========== Unravel Me (Ryan, Kendall) - Tu nota en la página 20 | posición 304 | Añadido el martes, 17 de marzo de 2015 1:24:23 interesante ====

The state of you,’ Senan says in disgust. ‘I’m grand,’ Bobby says, miffed. ‘Mr Dwyer,’ Mart tells Cal, ‘is the finest distiller in three counties. A master craftsman, so he is.’ Malachy smiles modestly. ‘Every now and then, when Malachy has a particularly fine product on his hands, he’s gracious enough to bring some of it in here to share with us. As a service to the community, you might say. I thought you deserved an opportunity to sample his wares.’ ‘I’m honoured,’ Cal says. ‘Although I feel like if I had any sense I’d be scared, too.’ ‘Ah, no,’ Malachy says soothingly. ‘It’s a lovely batch.’ He produces, from under the table, a shot glass and a two-litre Lucozade bottle half-full of clear liquid. He pours Cal a shot, careful not to spill a drop, and hands it over. ‘Now,’ he says. The rest of the men watch, grinning in a way that Cal doesn’t find reassuring. The liquor smells suspiciously innocuous. ‘For Jaysus’ sake, don’t be savouring the bloody bouquet,’ Mart orders him. ‘Knock that back.’ Cal knocks it back. He’s expecting it to go down like kerosene, but it tastes of almost nothing, and the burn doesn’t have enough harshness even to make him grimace. ‘That’s good stuff,’ he says. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ Mart says. ‘Smooth as cream. This fella’s an artist.’ Right then the poteen hits Cal; the banquette turns insubstantial beneath him and the room circles in slow jerks. ‘Whoo!’ he says, shaking his head. The alcove roars with laughter, which comes to Cal as a pulsing jumble of sound some distance away. ‘That’s some serious firepower you got there,’ he says. ‘Sure, that was only to give you the flavour of it,’ Malachy explains. ‘Wait till you get started.’ ‘Last year,’ Senan tells Cal, jerking a thumb at Bobby, ‘this fella here, after a few goes of that stuff—’ ‘Ah, now,’ Bobby protests. People are grinning. ‘—he got up out of that seat and started shouting at the lot of us to bring him to a priest. Wanted to make his confession. At two o’clock in the morning.’ ‘What’d you done?’ Cal asks Bobby. He’s not sure whether Bobby will hear

Somehow over the years people have gotten the impression that Wal-Mart was... just this great idea that turned into an overnight success. But...it was an outgrowth of everything we’d been doing since [1945].... And like most overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making.

In the Ackerman household, it soon unfolded, you had two alternatives for how you spent your summer break: a job, or remedial tutoring. Only Doc, my youngest stepbrother - known as David to everyone but me - was exempt from either of these, as he was too young to work, and he had made good enough grades that he'd been accepted into a month-long computer camp, at which he was presumably learning skills that would make him the next Bill Gates - only hopefully without the bad haircut and the Wal-Mart-y sweaters.

Curst be the Gold and Silver which persuade Weak Men to follow far-fatiguing Trade! The Lilly-Peace outshines the silver Store, And Life is dearer than the golden Ore. Yet Money tempts us o'er the Desert brown, To ev'ry distant Mart and wealthy Town: Full oft we tempt the Land and Sea; And are we only yet repay'd by Thee? Ah! why was Ruin so attractive made, Or why fond Man so easily betrayed? -Eclogue the Second. Hassan; or the Camel-driver

Støtte oprettede Slesvigholstenerne d. 28. Marts en provisorisk Regjering i Kiel, og Dagen efter overrumpledes Fæstningen Rendsborg af Prinsen af Noer paa den troløseste Maade. Friskarer strømmede til fra hele Tyskland

wished that my mother could see me, could be proud of the woman I’d become and the career I’d built, the realization of something she worried for so long would never happen.

Observing Colette made me question my mother’s dreams. Her lack of purpose seemed more and more an oddity, suspect, even anti-feminist. That my care played such a principal role in her life was a vocation I naively condemned, rebuffing the intensive, invisible labor as the errand work of a housewife who’d neglected to develop a passion or a practical skill set. It wasn’t until years later, after I left for college, that I began to understand what it meant to make a home and just how much I had taken mine for granted.

They were attempts to unpack the past six months, when everything I’d once thought I knew for certain about my life had been undone.

You. Basement-dwelling fat man. You are one of us. Join me. Bow to your master. Open the gate. The Angels of Divine Eventuality must be freed.

I tried to see myself through my mother’s shrewd eye, pinpoint the parts of me she’d pick apart. I wanted to impress her, to demonstrate how much I’d grown and how I could thrive without her.

Holy shit. How did going to the pet store to buy a hamster cage turn into being chased by vampires who wanted to suck the juice out of me like a human Capri Sun?

Now, more than ever, I wished desperately for a way to transfer pain, wished I could prove to my mother just how much I loved her, that I could just crawl into her hospital cot and press my body close enough to absorb her burden. It seemed only fair that life should present such an opportunity to prove one’s filial piety. That the months my mother had been a vessel for me, her organs shifting and cramping together to make room for my existence, and the agony she’d endured upon my exit could be repaid by carrying this pain in her place

she’d have wound up with the same perm that every Korean grandma gets, as though it were a part of our race’s evolution.

That was the start of a lot of the practices and philosophies that still prevail at Wal-Mart today. I was always looking for offbeat suppliers or sources. I started driving over to Tennessee to some fellows I found who would give me special buys at prices way below what Ben Franklin was charging me. One I remember was Wright Merchandising Co. in Union City, which would sell to small businesses like mine at good wholesale prices. I’d work in the store all day, then take off around closing and drive that windy road over to the Mississippi River ferry at Cottonwood Point, Missouri, and then into Tennessee with an old homemade trailer hitched to my car. I’d stuff that car and trailer with whatever I could get good deals on—usually on softlines: ladies’ panties and nylons, men’s shirts—and I’d bring them back, price them low, and just blow that stuff out the store.

Well, capitalism is a pretty brutal place. But I personally think that the world is better for having Wal- Mart. I mean, you can idealize small town life. But I've spent a fair amount of time in small towns. And let me tell you-you shouldn't get too idealistic about all those businesses he destroyed.Plus, a lot of people who work at Walmart are very high-grade, bouncy people who are raising nice children. I have no feeling that an inferior culture destroyed a superior culture.

I remembered how when I was a child I would slip my cold feet between my mother’s thighs to warm them. How she’d shiver and whisper that she would always suffer to bring me comfort, that that was how you knew someone really loved you. I remembered the boots she’d broken in so that by the time I got them I could go on unbothered, without harm. Now, more than ever, I wished desperately for a way to transfer pain, wished I could prove to my mother just how much I loved her, that I could just crawl into her hospital cot and press my body close enough to absorb her burden.

Her lack of purpose seemed more and more an oddity, suspect, even anti-feminist. That my care played such a principal role in her life was a vocation I naively condemned, rebuffing the intensive, invisible labor as the errand work of a housewife who'd neglected to develop a passion or a practical skill set. It wasn't until years later, after I left for college, that I began to understand what it meant to make a home and just how much I had taken mine for granted.

It was how I’d felt about music once, back before everything happened. A pure, childlike belief that songs could heal. I had believed that with such conviction before I’d confronted a loss so consuming it had rattled my clearest passions, made my ambitions appear frivolous and egomaniacal.

I thought of all the years my mother had taken me to Korean school, how I begged her every week to let me skip it and enjoy my Friday night with my friends. All the money and time I wasted. All the times she told me I’d regret treating the lessons as a drag one day. She was right about everything. Sitting across from Nami, I felt so fucking stupid I wanted to throw my head through a wall.

If dreams were hidden wishes, why couldn’t I dream of my mother the way I wanted? Why was it that whenever she appeared she was still sick, as if I could not remember her the way she’d been before? I wondered if my memory was stunted, if my dreams were consigned to the epoch of trauma, the image of my mother stuck where we had left off. Had I forgotten her when she was beautiful?

Such was puberty, one big masochistic joke set in the halfway house of middle school, where kids endure the three most confusing and sensitive years of their lives, where girls who’ve already sprouted D cups and know about blow jobs sit beside girls in trainers from the Gap who still have crushes on anime characters. A time when anything that is unique about ourselves, anything that makes us depart ever so slightly from the collective, prototypical vision of popular beauty becomes an agonizing pockmark and self-denial the only remedy at hand.

No other way off the hill. He’d managed to get himself cornered. He stared at the stream of cars flowing west toward San Francisco and wished he were in one of them. Then he realized the highway must cut through the hill. There must be a tunnel…right under his feet. His internal radar went nuts. He was in the right place, just too high up. He had to check out that tunnel. He needed a way down to the highway—fast. He slung off his backpack. He’d managed to grab a lot of supplies at the Napa Bargain Mart: a portable GPS, duct tape, lighter, superglue, water bottle, camping roll, a Comfy Panda Pillow Pet (as seen on TV), and a Swiss army knife—pretty much every tool a modern demigod could want. But he had nothing that would serve as a

How did Wal-Mart do it?” I’ve usually been flip about answering them. “Friend, we just got after it and stayed after it,” I’d say.

Actually, during this whole early period, Wal-Mart was too small and insignificant for any of the big boys to notice, and most of the promoters weren’t out in our area so we weren’t competitive. That helped me get access to a lot of information about how they were doing things. I probably visited more headquarters offices of more discounters than anybody else—ever. I would just show up and say, “Hi, I’m Sam Walton from Bentonville, Arkansas. We’ve got a few stores out there, and I’d like to visit with Mr. So-and-So”—whoever the head of the company was—“about his business.” And as often as not, they’d let me in, maybe out of curiosity, and I’d ask lots of questions about pricing and distribution, whatever. I learned a lot that way. KURT

As we moved along in the seventies, we had very definitely become an effective retail entity, and we had set the stage for the even more phenomenal growth that was going to follow. It’s amazing that our competitors didn’t catch on to us quicker and try harder to stop us. Whenever we put a Wal-Mart store into a town, customers would just flock to us from the variety stores. It didn’t take those stores long to figure out that if they were going to stay in business against this thing Wal-Mart had created, they were going to have to go into it themselves. And most of them did eventually convert to discounting. Kuhn’s Big K became a discount chain. Sterling launched its Magic Mart discount chain. And Duckwall went into discounting. Now, most of these guys already had distribution centers and systems in place, while we had to build one from scratch. So on paper we really didn’t stand a chance. What happened was that they didn’t really commit to discounting. They held on to their old variety store concepts too long. They were so accustomed to getting their 45 percent markup, they never let go. It was hard for them to take a blouse they’d been selling for $8.00, and sell it for $5.00, and only make 30 percent. With our low costs, our low expense structures, and our low prices, we were ending an era in the heartland. We shut the door on variety store thinking.

He wrapped his arms around her. “Have I told you today how happy I am that you gave up the good fight and moved back in with me?” “Not today,” she said, sucking in his sex-and-sin scent. “But last night you mentioned it quite a few times.” She’d tried for six weeks to live by herself in the apartment over Gracie’s garage, thinking she needed to experience life on her own before living with Mitch. She’d hated every minute of it. When she’d taken to sneaking into the farmhouse and crawling into bed with him in the middle of the night, he’d finally put his foot down. She sighed. Contentment had her curling deeper into his embrace. She didn’t care if it was wrong: Mitch and this farmhouse made her happy. “Maddie,” he said, his voice catching in a way that had her lifting her chin. “You know I love you.” “I know. I love you too.” His fingers brushed a lock of hair behind her chin. “Come with me.” He clasped her hand and led her into the bedroom before motioning her to the bed. She sat, and he walked over to the antique dresser and took a box out of the dresser. He walked back to the bed and sat down next to her. “I wanted to give this to you tonight, but then I saw you standing in the doorway and I knew I couldn’t wait.” Maddie looked at the box, it was wooden, etched with an intricate fleur-de-lis design on it and words in another language. “What is it?” “It was my grandmother’s. They bought it on their honeymoon. It’s French. It says, ‘There is only one happiness in life: to love and be loved.’” “It’s beautiful.” That he would give her something so treasured brought the threat of tears to her eyes. He handed it to her. “Open it.” She took the box and suddenly her heart started to pound. She lifted the lid and gasped, blinking as her vision blurred. Mitch grasped her left hand. “I know it’s only been three months, but in my family, meeting the night your car breaks down is a sign of a long, happy marriage.” Maddie couldn’t take her eyes off the ring. It was a gorgeous, simple platinum band with two small emerald stones flanking what had to be a three-carat rectangular diamond. She looked at Mitch. “Maddie Donovan, will you please marry me?” “Yes.” She kissed him, a soft, slow, drugging kiss filled with hope and promises. There was no hesitation. Not a seed of worry or shred of doubt. Her heart belonged to only one man, and he was right in front of her. “It would be my honor.” He slipped the ring on her finger. “My grandma would be thrilled that you have her ring.” “It’s hers?” It sparkled in the sunlight. It looked important on her hand. “It’s been in the family vault since she died. My mom sent it a couple of weeks ago. She’s been a little pushy about the whole thing. I think she’s worried I’ll do something to screw it up and she’ll lose the best daughter-in-law ever.” Maddie laughed. “I love her, too.” He ran his finger over the platinum band. “I changed the side stones to emeralds because they match your eyes. Do you think I made the right choice?” She put her hands on the sides of his face. “It is the most gorgeous ring I have ever laid eyes on. I love it. I love you. You know I’d take you with a plastic ring from Wal-Mart.” “I know.” She kissed him. “But I’m not going to lie: this is a kick-ass ring.” He grinned. “You know, I think that’s what my grandma used to say.” “She was obviously a smart woman.” “For the record, don’t even think about running.” Mitch pushed her back on the bed and captured her beneath him. “I will hunt you down to the ends of the earth and bring you back where you belong.” She reached for him, this man who’d been her salvation. “I will run down the aisle to meet you.

A little later on, Phil ran what became one of the most famous item promotions in our history. We sent him down to open store number 52 in Hot Springs, Arkansas—the first store we ever opened in a town that already had a Kmart. Phil got there and decided Kmart had been getting away with some pretty high prices in the absence of any discounting competition. So he worked up a detergent promotion that turned into the world’s largest display ever of Tide, or maybe Cheer—some detergent. He worked out a deal to get about $1.00 off a case if he would buy some absolutely ridiculous amount of detergent, something like 3,500 cases of the giant-sized box. Then he ran it as an ad promotion for, say, $1.99 a box, off from the usual $3.97. Well, when all of us in the Bentonville office saw how much he’d bought, we really thought old Phil had completely gone over the dam. This was an unbelievable amount of soap. It made up a pyramid of detergent boxes that ran twelve to eighteen cases high—all the way to the ceiling, and it was 75 or 100 feet long, which took up the whole aisle across the back of the store, and then it was about 12 feet wide so you could hardly get past it. I think a lot of companies would have fired Phil for that one, but we always felt we had to try some of this crazy stuff. PHIL GREEN: “Mr. Sam usually let me do whatever I wanted on these promotions because he figured I wasn’t going to screw it up, but on this one he came down and said, ‘Why did you buy so much? You can’t sell all of this!’ But the thing was so big it made the news, and everybody came to look at it, and it was all gone in a week. I had another one that scared them up in Bentonville too. This guy from Murray of Ohio called one day and said he had 200 Murray 8 horsepower riding mowers available at the end of the season, and he could let us have them for $175. Did we want any? And I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll take 200.’ And he said, ‘Two hundred!’ We’d been selling them for $447, I think. So when they came in we unpacked every one of them and lined them all up out in front of the store, twenty-five in a row, eight rows deep. Ran a chain through them and put a big sign up that said: ‘8 h.p. Murray Tractors, $199.’ Sold every one of them. I guess I was just always a promoter, and being an early Wal-Mart manager was as good a place to promote as there ever was.

WAL-MART: “In those days, we would go on these buying trips with Sam, and we’d all stay, as much as we could, in one room or two. I remember one time in Chicago when we stayed eight of us to a room. And the room wasn’t very big to begin with. You might say we were on a pretty restricted budget.” But sometimes I’m asked why today, when Wal-Mart has been so successful, when we’re a $50 billion-plus company, should we stay so cheap? That’s simple: because we believe in the value of the dollar. We exist to provide value to our customers, which means that in addition to quality and service, we have to save them money. Every time Wal-Mart spends one dollar foolishly, it comes right out of our customers’ pockets. Every time we save them a dollar, that puts us one more step ahead of the competition—which is where we always plan to be.

E di più ormai siamo in troppi in questo mondo e se non troviamo il mezzo d’invadere qualche pianeta, non so come se la caveranno i nostri pronipoti fra altri cent’anni, a menoché non tornino, come i nostri antenati, all’antropofagia. La produzione della terra e dei mari non basterebbero a nutrire tutti, e questo è il grave problema che turba e preoccupa gli scienziati. Ah! Se si potesse dar la scalata a Marte che ha invece una popolazione così scarsa e tante terre ancora incolte!

If I won the lottery I’d still shop at Wal-Mart, because I’m Uncle Scrooge, and three dollars is three dollars. God bless America.

But I beg you remember,’ said her ladyship, turning back to Artemisia, ‘not to walk down St James’s Street.’ ‘Yes, I know: it would be a moral hazard to my reputation,’ said Artemisia, reciting what she had been taught. ‘Though why people should make such a fuss over a lady being ogled by the gentlemen in St James’s Street is beyond me. Debutantes are paraded in front of those very same gentlemen to be ogled at in every other setting and no one has any objections to that practice! Rather than having to go through a whole Season to catch a husband, it would be far quicker if each girl was walked up and down St James’s, whirled around so she could be seen from all angles and auctioned off to the highest bidder. Why, St James’s could become the Tattersall’s of the marriage mart!’ Lady Lubriot choked on what sounded suspiciously like a laugh, and then tried to recover the situation by looking stern. ‘Chérie!’ she exclaimed. ‘You must never – never! – voice that particular notion of yours in public.’ ‘Tattersall’s?’ repeated Aunt Ophelia with incredulity. ‘Did the child just compare the Season to a horse auction?

think. ‘About what?’ I say. She gets all mad and stomps off to the bedroom. Now how in tarnation am I supposed to know she had her hair fixed a different way? I ain’t some faggot hairdresser. If she’d had it shaved off or dyed green, I most likely would have noticed.” Kevin thought this over. “Dahlia’s temperamental, but her hair’s the same.” “She buy a new dress? That can be dangerous.” “Not in a long while. She just kicked me out. Whenever I try to talk to her, her lips get all puckered and there I am on the porch.” “There’s your problem,” Earl said. “No man should be trying to talk to a woman. They’re a whole different breed, all the time wantin’ to know how you feel about things. Buy her a big bottle of cologne at Wal-Mart and tell her you like her hair. Just don’t sound like a faggot, okay? Keep in mind God ain’t married. Now go get that beer.” “You know anything about men?” Dahlia asked her mother-in-law while they took turns dipping into the bowl of popcorn. “I’ve been married to one for over thirty years,” said Eileen. “Far as I can tell, they’re all the same. The only reason they have faces is so we can tell ’em apart. Hardly

Free will is the idea that you, through your choices, thoughts, and actions, control the outcome of your life and the fate of your eternal soul.

I wasn’t sure if it was the boat ride we’d just taken or my father’s usage of the word foodies and the care he took in pronouncing it FOO-DEES that was making me feel queasy, but suddenly the seafood mango salad I had ordered was not so appealing. There are few things I detest more in this world than an adult man proclaiming himself to be a foodie, much less my own father dragging me in to share the title when only moments before he had asked me if I’d ever heard of a ceviche.

That night, lying beside her, I remembered how when I was a child I would slip my cold feet between my mother's thighs to warm them. How she'd shiver and whisper that she would always suffer to bring me comfort, that that was how you knew someone really loved you [...] Now, more than ever, I wished desperately for a way to transfer pain, wished I could prove to my mother just how much I loved her, that I could just crawl into her hospital cot and press my body close enough to absorb her burden

Let me feel this, I wanted to scream. Hold me, and let me wallow in it. I thought to myself that if I ever had children, I’d never tell them to save their tears.

I was haunted by nightmares and an intense paranoia of my parents dying. I imagined robbers breaking into our house and envisioned their murders in horrible detail. If they returned home late from a night out, I was convinced they'd gotten into a car accident.

How she’d shiver and whisper that she would always suffer to bring me comfort, that that was how you knew someone really loved you.

Personally, I’d be willing to sacrifice some of the benefits I get as a consumer and investor in order to achieve these social ends—as long as I knew everyone else was, too. Yet how to create new rules of the game? The market is adept at catering to us as consumers and investors, but democracy has become less responsive to us in our roles as citizens seeking to make the rules of the game fairer. That’s mainly because, as I will show in these pages, supercapitalism has spilled over into politics. The money Wal-Mart and other companies are pouring into Washington and every other major capital gets in the way.

When he got out of the hospital, Peter went back to his parents’ house in Bucks County for a few weeks to recover. When he finally came back to work, I figured things would be different, that he might be rattled and skittish, afraid to walk alone at night. I couldn’t imagine he’d want to come out to the bars with us after work. But it seemed that the only thing that had really changed about him were his feelings for me. From then on, the running joke was that I’d paid the two guys to knock some sense into him. —

It was July, and we'd ordered patbingsu to share to stave off the humidity. This rendition was far more elaborate than the homespun efforts of my childhood, its base a perfect soft powder of snow slathered in sweet red beans and garnished with pristinely cut strawberries, perfect squares of ripe mango, and little cushions of multicolored rice cakes. A fine web of condensed milk drizzled over the sides, and vanilla soft serve towered high on top.

Such was puberty, one big masochistic joke set in the halfway house of middle school, where kids endure the three most confusing and sensitive years of their lives, where girls who've already sprouted D cups and know about blow jobs sit beside girls in trainers from the Gap who still have crushes on anime characters. A time when anything that is unique about ourselves, anything that makes us depart ever so slightly from the collective, prototypical vision of popular beauty becomes an agonizing pockmark and self denial the only remedy at hand.

I'm pretty sure dad-khakis and pastel polo shirts aren't it,” she said. The eight ball shook violently in my hand. I looked at it. “She's right. Lose the outfit. You're dressed like a pedophile.

In my elementary years, she feared I was too short, so every morning before school she’d instruct me to hold the bars of my headboard and pull my legs in an effort to stretch them out. If I furrowed my brow or smiled too widely, she’d smooth my forehead with her fingers and instruct me to “stop making wrinkles.” If I walked with a slouch, she’d push a palm between my shoulder blades and command, “Ukgae peegoo!” “Shoulders straight!

but the full-length mirror where she’d spent so many hours modeling, where she witnessed her bald head for the first time, was gone.

Into the vacuum of my disinterest, music rushed to fill the void. It cracked a fissure, splintered a vein through the already precarious and widening rift between my mother and me; it would become a chasm that threatened to swallow us whole. Nothing was as vital as music, the only comfort for my existential dread. I spent my days downloading songs one at a time off LimeWire and getting into heated discussions on AIM about whether the Foo Fighters’ acoustic version of “Everlong” was better than the original. I pocketed my allowance and lunch money to spend exclusively on CDs from House of Records, analyzing lyrics in the liner notes, obsessing over interviews with the champions of Pacific Northwest indie rock, memorizing the rosters of labels like K Records and Kill Rock Stars, and plotting which concerts I’d attend.

This kind of blight can’t be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state wasn’t the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the conservatives’ beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at its most unrestrained, has little use for smalltown merchants or the agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place. Deregulated capitalism is what has allowed Wal-Mart to crush local businesses across Kansas and, even more important, what has driven agriculture, the state’s raison d’être, to a state of near collapse. “The