Different Kinds Of Friends Quotes

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)

Because the difference between a friend and a real friend is that you and the real friend come from the same territory, of the same place deep inside you, and that means you see the world in the same kind of way. You know each other even before you do.

Let no one think of me that I am humble or weak or passive; let them understand I am of a different kind: dangerous to my enemies, loyal to my friends. To such a life glory belongs.

Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like "maybe we should just be friends" or "how very perceptive" turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love.

There is a difference between saying goodbye and letting go. Goodbye is not permanent. You can meet years later as old friends and share what happened in your life. You can smile and laugh about all the nonsense that you both went through. However, letting go is being okay with never seeing this person ever again…being okay with never knowing how their life turned out…being okay with fifty or more years of silence… being okay with running into that person at a grocery store and having them not acknowledge your presence. This is the part of life that doesn’t sit well with me and never will. It tears my heart in pieces, robs me of gratitude, drains me of anything positive and eats at the faith that holds on. It goes against kindness.

Bein friends is like being soldiers in the army. You live together, you fight together; you die together.

Like" as a friend. "Like" as respect. There are so many different kinds of "likes." So when does "like" turn into "love"? Where's the boundary?

At first we had so much to catch up on we were talking a hundred words a second, barely even listening to the ends of one another's sentences before moving onto the next. And there was laughing. Lots of laughing. Then the laughing stopped and there was this silence. What the hell was it? It was like the world stopped turning in that instant. Like everyone around us had disappeared. Like everything at home was forgotten about. It was as if those few minutes on this world were created just for us and all we could do was look at each other. It was like he was seeing my face for the first time. He looked confused but kind of amused. Exactly how I felt. Because I was sitting on the grass with my best friend Alex, and that was my best friend Alex's face and nose and eyes and lips, but they seemed different. So I kissed him. I seized the moment and I kissed him,

I love the idea of the big life - the life that matters, the life that makes a difference. The life where stuff happens, where people take action. The opposite of the life where the girl can't even speak to the boy she likes; the opposite of the life where the friends aren't even good friends, and lots of days are wasted away feeling bored and kind of okay, like nothing matters much.

it's weird how much people change. for example, when i was a kid i loved all of these things..and over time all of them just fell away, one after another, replaced by friends and IMing and cell phones and boys and clothes. it's kind of sad, if you think about it. like there's no continuity in people at all. like something ruptures when you hit twelve, or thirteen, or whatever the age is when you're no longer a kid but a "young adult," and after that you're a totally different person. maybe even a less happy person. maybe even a worse one.

Love does not cost anything. Kind words and deeds do not cost anything. The real beauty of the world is equal for everyone to see. It was given by God equally to all, without restrictions. Everyone, was given a beautiful vehicle in which to express love to others. Feelings are free to express and give to ourselves and each other through our willingness to give and care. What is complicated about this... Why have we made others feel they have to climb mountains and swim oceans in order to make a difference. All we need to understand my friends, is that human life was given equally to us all, not partially but in totality. The sun was given to all. It does not shine on the few. So, just has nature is indifferent to our station or situation, we need to know that we are all equal. We need to focus on the things that are constant and not place our values on things that can be blown away with the next, great, wind. Value life in what ever house it dwells. For when it comes time that we are all stripped to bare bones before the divine and facing eternity, we will understand that the only law we were meant to follow, was to love ourselves and each other. Nothing more...nothing less.

Perhaps the greatest charity comes when we are kind to each other, when we don't judge or categorize someone else, when we simply give each other the benefit of the doubt or remain quiet. Charity is accepting someone's differences, weaknesses, and shortcomings; having patience with someone who has let us down; or resisting the impulse to become offended when someone doesn't handle something the way we might have hoped. Charity is refusing to take advantage of another's weakness and being willing to forgive someone who has hurt us. Charity is expecting the best of each other. None of us need one more person bashing or pointing out where we have failed or fallen short. Most of us are already well aware of the areas in which we are weak. What each of us does need is family, friends, employers, and brothers and sisters who support us, who have the patience to teach us, who believe in us, and who believe we're trying to do the best we can, in spite of our weaknesses. What ever happened to giving each other the benefit of the doubt? What ever happened to hoping that another person would succeed or achieve? What ever happened to rooting for each other?

Be the girl you want your daughter to be. Be the girl you want your son to date. Be classy, be smart, be real, but most importantly be nice.

My request today is simple. Today. Tomorrow. Next week. Find somebody, anybody, that’s different than you. Somebody that has made you feel ill-will or even hateful. Somebody whose life decisions have made you uncomfortable. Somebody who practices a different religion than you do. Somebody who has been lost to addiction. Somebody with a criminal past. Somebody who dresses “below” you. Somebody with disabilities. Somebody who lives an alternative lifestyle. Somebody without a home. Somebody that you, until now, would always avoid, always look down on, and always be disgusted by. Reach your arm out and put it around them. And then, tell them they’re all right. Tell them they have a friend. Tell them you love them. If you or I wanna make a change in this world, that’s where we’re gonna be able to do it. That’s where we’ll start. Every. Single. Time.

It was the exact opposite for me. At first all I wanted was sex with her, but soon I wanted more. More sex, yes, in unusual places, and all different kinds. But that wasn’t all. I wanted her to fill the empty spaces left by a father who never once praised me, ‘friends’ who used me, an ice princess mom who raised me with glass kisses.

Peeta and I sit on the damp sand, facing away from each other, my right shoulder and hip pressed against his. ... After a while I rest my head against his shoulder. Feel his hand caress my hair. "Katniss... If you die, and I live, there's no life for me at all back in District Twelve. You're my whole life", he says. "I would never be happy again." I start to object but he puts a finger to my lips. "It's different for you. I'm not sayin it wouldn't be hard. But there are other people who'd make your life worth living." ... "Your family needs you, Katniss", Peeta says. My family. My mother. My sister. And my pretend cousin Gale. But Peeta's intension is clear. That Gale really is my family, or will be one day, if I live. That I'll marry him. So Peeta's giving me his life and Gale at the same time. To let me know I shouldn't ever have doubts about it. Everithing. That's what Peeta wants me to take from him. ... "No one really needs me", he says, and there's no self-pity in his voice. It's true his family doesen't need him. They will mourn him, as will a handful of friends. But they will get on. Even Haymitch, with the help of a lot of white liquor, will get on. I realize only one person will be damaged beyond repair if Peeta dies. Me. "I do", I say. "I need you." He looks upset, takes a deep breath as if to begin a long argument, and that's no good, no good at all, because he'll start going on about Prim and my mother and everything and I'll just get confused. So before he can talk, I stop his lips with a kiss. I feel that thing again. The thing I only felt once before. In the cave last year, when I was trying to get Haymitch to send us food. I kissed Peeta about a thousand times during those Games and after. But there was only one kiss that made me feel something stir deep inside. Only one that made me want more. But my head wound started bleeding and he made me lie down. This time, there is nothing but us to interrupt us. And after a few attempts, Peeta gives up on talking. The sensation inside me grows warmer and spreads out from my chest, down through my body, out along my arms and legs, to the tips of my being. Instead of satisfying me, the kisses have the opposite effect, of making my need greater. I thought I was something of an expert on hunger, but this is an entirely new kind.

Don't be afraid to be different. Different is better. Different is much more interesting.

She craves men but women are her most abiding lovers. Her friends are her soul mates, all the love without the consumption of sex and romance, a different kind of intimacy. Women make love by admiring each other, studying and envying each other and mixing it all up in a pot of devotion.

Don’t we get it? To put our arm around someone who is gay, someone who has an addiction, somebody who lives a different lifestyle, someone who is not what we think they should be… doing that has nothing to do with enabling them or accepting what they do as okay by us. It has nothing to do with encouraging them in their practice of what you or I might feel or believe is wrong vs right. It has everything to do with being a good human being. A good person. A good friend.

I didn't drink in the essence of the classroom. I didn't take legible notes or dance all night. I thought I would marry my boyfriend and grow old and sick of him. I thought I would keep my friends, and we'd make different, new memories. None of that happened. Better things happened.

A book is like the best friend you can imagine. Once you read a book, it stays with you forever.

I don’t know if I’ve learned anything yet! I did learn how to have a happy home, but I consider myself fortunate in that regard because I could’ve rolled right by it. Everybody has a superficial side and a deep side, but this culture doesn’t place much value on depth — we don’t have shamans or soothsayers, and depth isn’t encouraged or understood. Surrounded by this shallow, glossy society we develop a shallow side, too, and we become attracted to fluff. That’s reflected in the fact that this culture sets up an addiction to romance based on insecurity — the uncertainty of whether or not you’re truly united with the object of your obsession is the rush people get hooked on. I’ve seen this pattern so much in myself and my friends and some people never get off that line. But along with developing my superficial side, I always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was falling into the trap of that other kind of love, I was hip to what I was doing. I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called ‘The End of Sex,’ that said something that struck me as very true. It said: “If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.” What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories — and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over. You can’t do that with a longtime mate because he knows all that old material. With a long relationship, things die then are rekindled, and that shared process of rebirth deepens the love. It’s hard work, though, and a lot of people run at the first sign of trouble. You’re with this person, and suddenly you look like an asshole to them or they look like an asshole to you — it’s unpleasant, but if you can get through it you get closer and you learn a way of loving that’s different from the neurotic love enshrined in movies. It’s warmer and has more padding to it.

There are all kinds of friends you make in life... But there's something different about someone who spreads their wings with you.

In different degrees, in every part of the town, men and women had been yearning for a reunion, not of the same kind for all, but for all alike ruled out. Most of them had longed intensely for an absent one, for the warmth of a body, for love, or merely a life that habit had endeared. Some, often without knowing it, suffered from being deprived of the company of friends and from their inability to get in touch with them through the usual channels of friendship—letters, trains, and boats. Others, fewer these... had desired a reunion with something they couldn’t have defined, but which seemed to them the only desirable thing on earth. For want of a better name, they sometimes called it peace.

If you chase anything in life chase the things that get you excited about living. Chase the things that give you hope, happiness and a glimpse of a better life. Chase the things that make you want to be a better person. Chase the things that inspire you to think, create and live joyfully. Chase the things that reinforce in your soul that you can make a difference. Chase the things that make you want to transform your heart from selfish to selfless. When you chase that kind of storm you are chasing rainbows.

I believe it, she's a very good person, kind. There's weariness there, but no bitterness or spite. When you're with a girl like that you feel like a different person. You try to be better, and that's a strain. Men prefer to be friends with her kind, flirt a bit, share confidences. They don't often fall in love with girls like that, but everybody loves them.

Facing an enemy on the battlefield took courage, but you had your friends beside you. Standing alone against your friends, that was a different kind of courage.

If you fishin' for a friend you just gon' catch and release, then I ain't got no desire to be your friend... "But if you is lookin' for a real friend, then I'll be one. Forever.

These are your friends now, Grace Mae. A madman who eats cancer in the dark and another who searches for a different kind of killer, the kind who smiles at you in the light of day.

She discovers that it is possible to cry all day and all night. That there are many different ways to cry: the sudden outpouring of tears, the deep, racking sobs, the soundless and endless leaking of water from the eyes. That sore skin around the eyes may be treated with oil infused with a tincture of eyebright and chamomile. That it is possible to comfort your daughters with assurances about places in Heaven and eternal joy and how they may all be reunited after death and how he will be waiting for them, while not believing any of it. That people don’t always know what to say to a woman whose child has died. That some will cross the street to avoid her merely because of this. That people not considered to be good friends will come, without warning, to the fore, will leave bread and cakes on your sill, will say a kind and apt word to you after church, will ruffle Judith’s hair and pinch her wan cheek.

To a Depressed Friend Sometimes, to make sure You're still here, Look up for cloud sustenance. Be sure they are Different from yesterday, From an hour ago, From when you were 15 And sky didn't matter Because only pretty girls did. Note how cumulus Will be looking down And naming what Kind of human you're Shaped like: mailman, Archaeologist, student of rain. On clear nights, rely on starlight. Pentacles. Pulses. Further proof of existence.

CUSTOMER: These books are really stupid, aren’t they? BOOKSELLER: Which ones? CUSTOMER: You know, the ones where animals like cats and mice are best friends. BOOKSELLER: I suppose they’re not very realistic, but then that’s fiction. CUSTOMER: They’re more than unrealistic; they’re really stupid. BOOKSELLER: Well, writers use that kind of thing to teach kids about accepting people different to themselves, you know? CUSTOMER: Yeah, well, books shouldn’t pretend that different people get on like that and that everything is ‘la de da’ and wonderful, should they? Kids should learn that life’s a bitch, and the sooner the better.

Mary Welland was certainly lovely. She was gentle and kind. She remained my friend all the time I was in hospital. But there is a world of difference falling in love with a voice and remaining in love with a person you can see. From the moment I opened my eyes, Mary became a human instead of a dream and my passion evaporated.

It’s taboo to admit that you’re lonely. You can make jokes about it, of course. You can tell people that you spend most of your time with Netflix or that you haven’t left the house today and you might not even go outside tomorrow. Ha ha, funny. But rarely do you ever tell people about the true depths of your loneliness, about how you feel more and more alienated from your friends each passing day and you’re not sure how to fix it. It seems like everyone is just better at living than you are. A part of you knew this was going to happen. Growing up, you just had this feeling that you wouldn’t transition well to adult life, that you’d fall right through the cracks. And look at you now. La di da, it’s happening. Your mother, your father, your grandparents: they all look at you like you’re some prized jewel and they tell you over and over again just how lucky you are to be young and have your whole life ahead of you. “Getting old ain’t for sissies,” your father tells you wearily. You wish they’d stop saying these things to you because all it does is fill you with guilt and panic. All it does is remind you of how much you’re not taking advantage of your youth. You want to kiss all kinds of different people, you want to wake up in a stranger’s bed maybe once or twice just to see if it feels good to feel nothing, you want to have a group of friends that feels like a tribe, a bonafide family. You want to go from one place to the next constantly and have your weekends feel like one long epic day. You want to dance to stupid music in your stupid room and have a nice job that doesn’t get in the way of living your life too much. You want to be less scared, less anxious, and more willing. Because if you’re closed off now, you can only imagine what you’ll be like later. Every day you vow to change some aspect of your life and every day you fail. At this point, you’re starting to question your own power as a human being. As of right now, your fears have you beat. They’re the ones that are holding your twenties hostage. Stop thinking that everyone is having more sex than you, that everyone has more friends than you, that everyone out is having more fun than you. Not because it’s not true (it might be!) but because that kind of thinking leaves you frozen. You’ve already spent enough time feeling like you’re stuck, like you’re watching your life fall through you like a fast dissolve and you’re unable to hold on to anything. I don’t know if you ever get better. I don’t know if a person can just wake up one day and decide to be an active participant in their life. I’d like to think so. I’d like to think that people get better each and every day but that’s not really true. People get worse and it’s their stories that end up getting forgotten because we can’t stand an unhappy ending. The sick have to get better. Our normalcy depends upon it. You have to value yourself. You have to want great things for your life. This sort of shit doesn’t happen overnight but it can and will happen if you want it. Do you want it bad enough? Does the fear of being filled with regret in your thirties trump your fear of living today? We shall see.

To have someone understand your mind is a different kind of intimacy altogether.

I know the M-word makes you nervous, but yeah. I'm talking about the big, permanent friendship. A little different from what Joe and Charles had, though. See, I want to be the kind of best friends who make love every night, who share all their darkest secrets and favorite jokes, and maybe even someday make babies together. I know that kind of friendship requires hard work, but you know, I'm pretty good at hard work. ~ Tom Paoletti, "The Unsung Hero

Keep it always with you that laughter who knock at your door and say, 'May I come in?' is not the true laughter. No! he is a king, and he come when and how he like. He ask no person; he choose no time of suitability. He say, 'I am here.' ... Oh, friend John, it is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles; and yet when King Laugh come he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall - all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. And believe me, friend John, that he is good to come, and kind. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come; and, like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again; and we bear to go on with our labour, what it may be.

I heard that when white folks go fishin they do somethin called 'catch and release.' Catch and release? I nodded solemnly, suddenly nervous and curious at the same time. 'That really bothers me', Denver went on. 'I just can't figure it out. 'Cause when colored folks go fishin, we really proud of what we catch, and we take it and show it off to everybody that'll look. Then we eat what we catch...in other words, we use it to SUSTAIN us. So it really bothers me that white folks would go to all the trouble to catch a fish, when when they done caught it, just throw it back in the water.' He paused again, and the silence between us stretched a full minute. Then: 'Did you hear what I said?' I nodded, afraid to speak, afraid to offend. Denver looked away, searching the blue autumn sky, then locked onto me again with that drill-bit start. 'So, Mr. Ron, it occurred to me: If you is fishin for a friend you just gon' catch and release, then I ain't got no desire to be your friend.' I returned Denver's gaze with what I hoped was a receptive expression and hung on. Suddenly his eyes gentled and he spoke more softly than before: 'But if you is lookin for a REAL friend, then I'll be one. Forever.

I won't take advantage of you. Today, I'll be your friend." "Fen has been my friend for decades," she said, sliding her arm into his when he offered it to her. "And he never presumed to put his mouth on mine." "Obviously I'll be a different kind of friend.

Mourning a living person is different from mourning the dead. A woman whose husband dies is a widow. But there is no word for a person who grieves a living person—a child, a partner, an estranged family member or dear friend. There is no name for what you are when a part of your life and identity dies, but you go on living. There is no name for what you are when you outlive the life you expected to have and find yourself in a kind of afterlife.

David Foster Wallace: I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it’s really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid. And that the reasons… That the fear is the basic condition, and there are all kinds of reasons for why we’re so afraid. But the fact of the matter is, is that, is that the job that we’re here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we’re not terrified all the time. And not in a position of using all kinds of different things, and using people to keep that kind of terror at bay. That is my personal opinion. Well for me, as an American male, the face I’d put on the terror is the dawning realization that nothing’s enough, you know? That no pleasure is enough, that no achievement is enough. That there’s a kind of queer dissatisfaction or emptiness at the core of the self that is unassuageable by outside stuff. And my guess is that that’s been what’s going on, ever since people were hitting each other over the head with clubs. Though describable in a number of different words and cultural argots. And that our particular challenge is that there’s never been more and better stuff comin’ from the outside, that seems temporarily to sort of fill the hole or drown out the hole. Personally, I believe that if it’s assuageable in any way it’s by internal means. And I don’t know what that means. I think it’s fine in some way. I think it’s probably assuageable by internal means. I think those internal means have to be earned and developed, and it has something to do with, um, um, the pop-psych phrase is lovin’ yourself. It’s more like, if you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do this.

It's kind of embarrassing to put this into words," she said, "but I want to stay friends with you, Junpei. Not just for now, but even after we get older. A lot older. I love Takatsuki, but I need you, too, in a different way. Does that make me selfish?

Some people may think that it is a dangerous attitude to take toward the Bible, to pick and choose what you want to accept and throw everything else out. My view is that everyone already picks and chooses what they want to accept in the Bible...I have a young friend who whose evangelical parents were upset because she wanted to get a tattoo, since the Bible, after all, condemns tattoos. In the same book, Leviticus, the Bible also condemns wearing clothing made of two different kinds of fabric and eating pork...Why insist on the biblical teaching about tattoos but not about dress shirts, pork chops, and stoning?

Nature needs your care. Animals need your attention. People need your light. The world needs your love. There are five kinds of love: veritable love for God, your parents, your life partner, your friends, and the most difficult of all, your neighbor. How can you make a difference in the world? Help one person at a time.

How dare you tell me 'I am not like most girls,' when those 'girls' you refer to are my sisters and mothers, my friends, the very solace and the kindness I have sought when the worst things in my life have happened? How dare you assume I should take that as a compliment, and beam at you like it is praise when you are alienating me from the very core of my proudly female being? There are a thousand ways to tell me you love me, and making my sisters small to make me big isn't one of them. Tell me you love me, but not because I am different. Tell me you love me, just because you do.

And my mom told me that part of growing up is just … learning that people come in and out of your life, and that there are all kinds of levels of friendship, all different types. And maybe you’ll make a friend, and you won’t see them again, but it doesn’t devalue what you had with them or the time you spent together. That’s still valid, even if it wasn’t built to last. It’s not any less … significant, you know?

I was Mrs. Taylor yesterday.” I grin at Taylor, who flushes. “That has a nice ring to it, Miss Steele,” Taylor says matter-of-factly. “I thought so, too.” Christian tightens his hold on my hand, scowling. “If you two have quite finished, I’d like a debrief.” He glares at Taylor, who now looks uncomfortable, and I cringe inwardly. I have overstepped the mark. “Sorry,” I mouth at Taylor, who shrugs and smiles kindly before I turn to follow Christian. “I’ll be with you shortly. I just want a word with Miss Steele,” Christian says to Taylor, and I know I’m in trouble. Christian leads me into his bedroom and closes the door. “Don’t flirt with the staff, Anastasia,” he scolds. I open my mouth to defend myself—then close it again, then open it. “I wasn’t flirting. I was being friendly—there is a difference.” “Don’t be friendly with the staff or flirt with them. I don’t like it.” Oh. Good-bye, carefree Christian. “I’m sorry,” I mutter and stare down at my fingers. He hasn’t made me feel like a child all day. Reaching down he cups my chin, pulling my head up to meet his eyes. “You know how jealous I am,” he whispers. “You have no reason to be jealous, Christian. You own me body and soul.

Friends come in all different shapes and sizes... The important thing is not what we look like but the role we play in our best friend's life. Friends choose certain friends because that's the kind of company they are looking for at that specific time, not because they're the correct height, age or have the right hair colour. It's not always the case but often there's a reason why...

I think I want a house of my own," I start, the words a discovery as they leave my mouth. "Something small, so I don't have much housework, but enough room for a proper library. I want a lot of books. And I wouldn't mind a good old dog to walk with me. And a bakery I go to every morning where they know my name." "And you don't want anyone with you?" Sim asks, raising her head. "No family?" "I want friends," I say. "Good friends, that make up a different kind of family.

What difference does it make whether they are slaves of free men, freeborn or freedmen, owing their freedom to the laws or to a gift made in the presence of friends? Wherever there is a human being, there exists the opportunity for an act of kindness.

During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost never get this feeling any other way. I once spent sixteen hours making 150 wedding invitations by hand and was not for one instance of that time tempted to eat or look at my watch. By contrast, if seated at the computer, I check my email conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can't be the whole story. I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth. From my dick.

And that's how it was with Garrett. Because he understood me, the me I wanted so desperately to be. Think about your best friend - how you tell them everything, how they're the person who knows you best, all your deepest fears and insecurities. They're the one you call when something amazing happens or when everything falls apart and you need someone to come over and watch movies and tell you that everything's going to be OK. It's not like family, who are obligated to love you and even then sometimes fail to be everything they're supposed to be. Your true friend has chosen you, and you them, and that's a different kind of bond. That's Garrett to me. I'm used to talking to him all the time, about the most meaningless stuff. To have him gone feels like a loss, an absence haunting me every day. Without him, there's just the empty space that used to be filled with laughter and friendship and comfort. Can you really blame me for finding it so hard to let go?

So you're, like crazy, in love. You open your eyes in the morning and your first thought is her. You wonder how she is. What she's doing. When you can see her again. Those thoughts stay with you all day. You share them with whoever will listen — including your best friends, who of course respect you but, after a while, out of the kind of concern only real friends have, seriously question your sanity. And you make all sorts of plans — big plans, like, post-high school — when the rest of us can barely wrap our heads around the fact that we only two years left to get a clue. You live and breath this girl. You talk about her all the time, you hang out with your friends less and less, you're blind to other girls, no matter how hot or into you they are — and some of them are extremely hot and into you — and eventually, you break and actually say you love her. Not only that, you tell your friends you love her. Which, as you know, is about as major as you can get. Your friends may think you're a little out there, but they know you wouldn't be for any other girl. It's just because it's her. She's different. This girl is it for you. Food, water, oxygen, sleep — all details.

This LIFE is NOT about a BIG house, VALUABLE things, a FULL bank account or a POWERFUL status. It’s about having a BIG open mind and heart that respects and accepts differences. It’s about VALUING your family, friends & being grateful for the little things. It’s about FILLING your heart and soul full of love and laughter, making the best of each day while you can. It’s about having the POWER to have a positive attitude and show kindness even when you’re dealing with your own adversity. THAT’S what this LIFE is all about!

But in the early 1970s, we were not birdwatching. We were birding, and that made all the difference. We were out to seek, to discover, to chase, to learn, to find as many different kinds of birds as possible — and, in friendly competition, to try to find more of them than the next birder. We became a community of birders, with the complications that human societies always have; and although it was the birds that had brought us together, our story became a human story after all.

Bein' a friend is a heavy commitment. In a way, even more than a husband or wife.... Friendship to me means more than just somebody to talk to, or run with, or hang with. Bein' friends is like being soldiers in the army. You live together; you fight together; you die together.

most cherished desires of present-day Westerners are shaped by romantic, nationalist, capitalist and humanist myths that have been around for centuries. Friends giving advice often tell each other, ‘Follow your heart.’ But the heart is a double agent that usually takes its instructions from the dominant myths of the day, and the very recommendation to ‘follow your heart’ was implanted in our minds by a combination of nineteenth-century Romantic myths and twentieth-century consumerist myths. The Coca-Cola Company, for example, has marketed Diet Coke around the world under the slogan ‘Diet Coke. Do what feels good.’ Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order. Let’s consider, for example, the popular desire to take a holiday abroad. There is nothing natural or obvious about this. A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band. The elite of ancient Egypt spent their fortunes building pyramids and having their corpses mummified, but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon or taking a skiing holiday in Phoenicia. People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism. Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; we must learn to appreciate different styles of music. One of the best ways to do all that is to break free from our daily routine, leave behind our familiar setting, and go travelling in distant lands, where we can ‘experience’ the culture, the smells, the tastes and the norms of other people. We hear again and again the romantic myths about ‘how a new experience opened my eyes and changed my life’. Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better. 18. The Great Pyramid of Giza. The kind of thing rich people in ancient Egypt did with their money. Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded. The tourism industry does not sell flight tickets and hotel bedrooms. It sells experiences. Paris is not a city, nor India a country – they are both experiences, the consumption of which is supposed to widen our horizons, fulfil our human potential, and make us happier. Consequently, when the relationship between a millionaire and his wife is going through a rocky patch, he takes her on an expensive trip to Paris. The trip is not a reflection of some independent desire, but rather of an ardent belief in the myths of romantic consumerism. A wealthy man in ancient Egypt would never have dreamed of solving a relationship crisis by taking his wife on holiday to Babylon. Instead, he might have built for her the sumptuous tomb she had always wanted. Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. They may take the form, for example, of a suburban cottage with a swimming pool and an evergreen lawn, or a gleaming penthouse with an enviable view. Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.

it’s a terrible feeling when you first fall in love. your mind gets completely taken over, you can’t function properly anymore. the world turns into a dream place, nothing seems real. you forget your keys, no one seems to be talking English and even if they are you don’t care as you can’t hear what they’re saying anyway, and it doesn’t matter since your not really there. things you cared about before don’t seem to matter anymore and things you didn’t think you cared about suddenly do. I must become a brilliant cook, I don’t want to waste time seeing my friends when I could be with him, I feel no sympathy for all those people in India killed by an earthquake last night; what is the matter with me? It’s a kind of hell, but you feel like your in heaven. even your body goes out of control, you can’t eat, you don’t sleep properly, your legs turn to jelly as your not sure where the floor is anymore. you have butterflies permanently, not only in your tummy but all over your body - your hands, your shoulders, your chest, your eyes everything’s just a jangling mess of nerve endings tingling with fire. it makes you feel so alive. and yet its like being suffocated, you don’t seem to be able to see or hear anything real anymore, its like people are speaking to you through treacle, and so you stay in your cosy place with him, the place that only you two understand. occasionally your forced to come up for air by your biggest enemy, Real Life, so you do the minimum then head back down under your love blanket for more, knowing it’s uncomfortable but compulsory. and then, once you think you’ve got him, the panic sets in. what if he goes off me? what if I blow it, say the wrong thing? what if he meets someone better than me? Prettier, thinner, funnier, more like him? who doesn’t bite there nails? perhaps he doesn’t feel the same, maybe this is all in my head and this is just a quick fling for him. why did I tell him that stupid story about not owning up that I knew who spilt the ink on the teachers bag and so everyone was punished for it? does he think I'm a liar? what if I'm not very good at that blow job thing and he’s just being patient with me? he says he loves me; yes, well, we can all say words, can’t we? perhaps he’s just being polite. of course you do your best to keep all this to yourself, you don’t want him to think you're a neurotic nutcase, but now when he’s away doing Real Life it’s agony, your mind won’t leave you alone, it tortures you and examines your every moment spent together, pointing out how stupid you’ve been to allow yourself to get this carried away, how insane you are to imagine someone would feel like that about you. dad did his best to reassure me, but nothing he said made a difference - it was like I wanted to see Simon, but didn’t want him to see me.

The betrayal of a friend differs from the treachery of a lover only in the degree of pain, not the kind.

But how could I have been a good best friend - or girlfriend, or daughter - when I was so busy balancing the different parts of myself that I never got to actually be myself?

Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of those things. Three - that's it. Maybe four, if you're very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things. But this isn't the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That's real life. Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing.' ...At the time, he hadn't believed these words, because at the time, everything really did seem possible: he was twenty-three, and everyone was young and attractive and smart and glamorous. Everyone thought they would be friends for decades, forever. But for most people, of course, that hadn't happened. As you got older, you realized that the qualities you valued in the people you slept with or dated weren't necessarily the ones you wanted to live with, or be with, or plod through your days with. If you were smart, and if you were lucky, you learned this and accepted this. You figured out what was most important to you and you looked for it, and you learned to be realistic. They all chose differently: Roman had chosen beauty, sweetness, pliability; Malcolm, he thought, had chosen reliability, and competence...and aesthetic compatibility. And he? He had chosen friendship. Conversation. Kindness, Intelligence. When he was in his thirties, he had looked at certain people's relationships and asked the question that had (and continued to) fuel countless dinner-party conversations: What's going on there? Now, though, as an almost-forty-eight-year-old, he saw people's relationships as reflections of their keenest yet most inarticulable desires, their hopes and insecurities taking shape physically, in the form of another person. Now he looked at couples - in restaurants, on the street, at parties - and wondered: Why are you together? What did you identify as essential to you? What's missing in you that you want someone else to provide? He now viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had of offer and had chosen to value it as well.

Before she leaves, my new friend tells me to look out of the big picture window at the parking lot. "See that purple Harley out there—that big gorgeous one? That's mine. I used to ride behind my husband, and never took the road on my own. Then after the kids were grown, I put my foot down. It was hard, but we finally got to be partners. Now he says he likes it better this way. He doesn't have to worry about his bike breaking down or getting a heart attach and totaling us both. I even put 'Ms.' on my license plate—and you should see my grandkids' faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!" On my own again, I look out at the barren sand and tortured rocks of the Badlands, stretching for miles. I've walked there, and I know that, close up, the barren sand reveals layers of pale rose and beige and cream, and the rocks turn out to have intricate womblike openings. Even in the distant cliffs, caves of rescue appear. What seems to be one thing from a distance is very different close up. I tell you this story because it's the kind of lesson that can be learned only on the road. And also because I've come to believe that, inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle. We have only to discover it—and ride.

She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. 'The last time you were here, you were so lost. So . . . well, if you don't mind me saying —' 'Pathetic,' I blurted out. 'Whiny, entitled, selfish. I felt terribly sorry for myself.' Meg nodded along with my words as if listening to her favourite song. 'You still feel sorry for yourself.' 'But now,' Sally said, sitting back again, 'you're more . . . human, I suppose.' There was that word again: human, which not long ago I would have considered a terrible insult. Now, every time I heard it, I thought of Jason Grace's admonition: Remember what it's like to be human. He hadn't meant all the terrible things about being human, of which there were plenty. He'd meant the best things: standing up for a just cause, putting others first, having stubborn faith that you could make a difference, even if it meant you had to die to protect your friends and what you believed in. These were not the kind of feelings that gods had . . . well, ever.

Would You Think It Odd? Would you think it odd if Hafiz said, “I am in love with every church And mosque And temple And any kind of shrine Because I know it is there That people say the different names Of the One God.” Would you tell your friends I was a bit strange if I admitted I am indeed in love with every mind And heart and body. O I am sincerely Plumb crazy About your every thought and yearning And limb Because, my dear, I know That it is through these That you search for Him.

There are two kinds of people we meet in our lives who make a difference: those who remain in our lives and those we only meet once. Each kind has a different type of impact, but both are important.

FOR THE DYING May death come gently toward you, Leaving you time to make your way Through the cold embrace of fear To the place of inner tranquillity. May death arrive only after a long life To find you at home among your own With every comfort and care you require. May your leave-taking be gracious, Enabling you to hold dignity Through awkwardness and illness. May you see the reflection Of your life’s kindness and beauty In all the tears that fall for you. As your eyes focus on each face, May your soul take its imprint, Drawing each image within As companions for the journey. May you find for each one you love A different locket of jeweled words To be worn around the heart To warm your absence. May someone who knows and loves The complex village of your heart Be there to echo you back to yourself And create a sure word-raft To carry you to the further shore. May your spirit feel The surge of true delight When the veil of the visible Is raised, and you glimpse again The living faces Of departed family and friends. May there be some beautiful surprise Waiting for you inside death, Something you never knew or felt, Which with one simple touch, Absolves you of all loneliness and loss, As you quicken within the embrace For which your soul was eternally made. May your heart be speechless At the sight of the truth Of all belief had hoped, Your heart breathless In the light and lightness Where each and everything Is at last its true self Within that serene belonging That dwells beside us On the other side Of what we see.

River was a beautiful man, inside and out—too beautiful for this world, it turned out. It always seems to be the really talented guys who go down. Why is it that the original thinkers like River Phoenix and Heath Ledger die, but Keanu Reeves still walks among us? River was a better actor than me; I was funnier. But I certainly held my own in our scenes—no small feat, when I look back decades later. But more important, River just looked at the world in a different way than we all did, and that made him fascinating, and charismatic, and, yes, beautiful, but not in a Gap ad kinda way (though he was that, too)—in a there-is-no-one-else-in-the-world-like-him kind of way. Not to mention he was rocketing to stardom, yet you would never know it.

Exasperation over our struggle in Vietnam should not close our eyes to the fact that we could have other missile crises in the future—different kinds, no doubt, and under different circumstances. But if we are to be successful then, if we are going to preserve our own national security, we will need friends, we will need supporters, we will need countries that believe and respect us and will follow our leadership.

I believe we don’t have enough quiet conversational moments listening to a friend with no other distractions. That kind of interaction leads to a completely different quality of human connection. A different depth.

Do you miss her? I blinked. Did I what? This was my best friend since preschool we were talking about, the girl whose snack and math homework I’d shared since before I had memorized my own phone number, who’d buried her cold, annoying little feet underneath me during a thousand different movie nights and showed me how to use a tampon. She’d grown up in my kitchen, she was my shadow- self—or I was hers— and Sawyer wanted to know if I missed her? What the hell kind of question was that?

For the first time, it struck me that when Denver said he'd be my friend for life, he meant it-for better or for worse. The hell of it was, Mr. Ballantine never wanted a friend, especially a black one. But once Denver committed, he stuck. It reminded me of what Jesus told His disciples 'Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

Friendship is a difficult thing to define. Oscar here is my oldest friend. How would you define friendship, Oscar?" Oscar grunts slightly, as though the answer is obvious. "Friendship is about choice and chemistry. It cannot be defined." "But surely there's something more to it than that." "It is a willingness to overlook faults and to accept them. I would let a friend hurt me without striking back," he says, smiling. "But only once." De Souza laughs. "Bravo, Oscar, I can always rely on you to distill an argument down to its purest form. What do you think, Dayel?" The Indian rocks his head from side to side, proud that he has been asked to speak next. "Friendship is different for each person and it changes throughout our lives. At age six it is about holding hands with your best friend. At sixteen it is about the adventure ahead. At sixty it is about reminiscing." He holds up a finger. "You cannot define it with any one word, although honesty is perhaps the closest word-" "No, not honesty," Farhad interrupts. "On the contrary, we often have to protect our friends from what we truly think. It is like an unspoken agreement. We ignore each other's faults and keep our confidences. Friendship isn't about being honest. The truth is too sharp a weapon to wield around someone we trust and respect. Friendship is about self-awareness. We see ourselves through the eyes of our friends. They are like a mirror that allows us to judge how we are traveling." De Souza clears his throat now. I wonder if he is aware of the awe that he inspires in others. I suspect he is too intelligent and too human to do otherwise. "Friendship cannot be defined," he says sternly. "The moment we begin to give reasons for being friends with someone we begin to undermine the magic of the relationship. Nobody wants to know that they are loved for their money or their generosity or their beauty or their wit. Choose one motive and it allows a person to say, 'is that the only reason?'" The others laugh. De Souza joins in with them. This is a performance. He continues: "Trying to explain why we form particular friendships is like trying to tell someone why we like a certain kind of music or a particular food. We just do.

It is not the case that one can create new people on the assumption that if they are not pleased to have come into existence they can simply kill themselves. Once somebody has come into existence and attachments with that person have been formed, suicide can cause the kind of pain that makes the pain of childlessness mild by comparison. Somebody contemplating suicide knows (or should know) this. This places an important obstacle in the way of suicide. One’s life may be bad, but one must consider what affect ending it would have on one’s family and friends. There will be times when life has become so bad that it is unreasonable for the interests of the loved ones in having the person alive to outweigh that person’s interests in ceasing to exist. When this is true will depend in part on particular features of the person for whom continued life is a burden. Different people are able to bear different magnitudes of burden. It may even be indecent for family members to expect that person to continue living. On other occasions one’s life may be bad but not so bad as to warrant killing oneself and thereby making the lives of one’s family and friends still much worse than they already are.

We seem normal only to those who don't know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on an early dinner date would be; "And how are you crazy?" The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don't care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with. We make mistakes, too, because are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal state of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for. The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn't exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently - the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the "not overly wrong" person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition. Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not "normal." We should learn to accommodate ourselves to "wrongness", striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and our partners.

Self-parenting exercises taught me to slowly rebuild healthy self-talk. But it must be said: Even though I know reparenting had helped dozens of my friends and acquaintances, almost everyone has told me it’s exhausting. Reparenting takes time, and concentration, and calmness. It takes an intellectual and physical effort to shove aside the comfortably worn neural pathways and go in a different direction. And even though that effort comes with joyous rewards, sometimes it also comes with sadness. Because expressing the kindness to yourself that you deserve often reminds you of the kindness you didn’t get.

I want friends, good friends that make up a different kind of family...It wouldn't be lonely. I'd like to be on my own, but not alone.

I feel like there are two different sides of me, like I could be anyone and touch anyone and love like that kind of Holy Ghost love - everywhere and everyone. Most of my friends act like they know exactly who and what they are, like there's only one answer, but to me, that feels like putting a beginning and end on something that's not supposed to have either.

I love to watch to him while he sleeps. Besides everything else he is really my best friend now. It's a different kind of friendship...It makes me wish I could share every day with him.

Your motivations--get that promotion, throw the best parties, run for public office--aren't impersonal abstractions but powerfully reflect who you are and what you focus on. An individual's goals figure prominently in the theories of personality first developed by the Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. According to his successor David McClelland, what Friedrich Nietzsche called "the will to power," which he considered the major driving force behind human behavior, is one of the three basic motivations, along with achievement and affiliation, that differentiate us as individuals. A simple experiment show show these broad emotional motivations can affect what you pay attention to or ignore on very basic levels. When they examine images of faces that express different kinds of emotion, power-oriented subjects are drawn to nonconfrontational visages, such as "surprise faces," rather than to those that suggest dominance, as "anger faces" do. In contrast, people spurred by affiliation gravitate toward friendly or joyful faces.

Grandma Fifi had two friends named Martin and Merlin who were afraid in a way Dirk didn't want to be. They were both very handsome and kind and always brought candies and toys when they came over for tea and Fifi's famous pastries. But as much as Dirk liked Martin and Merlin he knew he was different from them. They talked in voices as pale and soft as the shirts they wore and they moved as gracefully as Fifi did. Their eyes were startled and sad. They had been hurt because of who they were. Dirk didn't want to be hurt that way. He wanted to be strong and to love someone who was strong; he wanted to meet any gaze, to laugh under the brightest sunlight and never hide.

A Thing I Have Learned (Written By a Nobody Who Has Been Everybody) It is easy to morn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscope versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy. ...We don't have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility. So let's be kind to the people in our own existence. Let's occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on forever. Yesterday I knew I had no future, and that it was impossible for me to accept my life as it is now. And yet today, that same messy life seems full of hope. Potential.

Many years later, my friend Cecilie Surasky, then one of the leaders of Jewish Voice for Peace, observed of these kinds of educational methods: “It’s re-traumatization, not remembering. There is a difference.” When she said it, I knew it was true. Remembering puts the shattered pieces of our selves back together again (re-member-ing); it is a quest for wholeness. At its best, it allows us to be changed and transmuted by grief and loss. But re-traumatization is about freezing us in a shattered state; it’s a regime of ritualistic reenactments designed to keep the losses as fresh and painful as possible. Our education did not ask us to probe the parts of ourselves that might be capable of inflicting great harm on others, and to figure out how to resist them. It asked us to be as outraged and indignant at what happened to our ancestors as if it had happened to us—and to stay in that state.

What fascinates me—and what serves as a central theme of this book—is why we make the choices we do. What separates us from the world we have and the kind of ethical universe envisioned by someone like Havel? What prompts one person to act boldly in a moment of crisis and a second to seek shelter in the crowd? Why do some people become stronger in the face of adversity while others quickly lose heart? What separates the bully from the protector? Is it education, spiritual belief, our parents, our friends, the circumstances of our birth, traumatic events, or more likely some combination that spells the difference? More succinctly, do our hopes for the future hinge on a desirable unfolding of external events or some mysterious process within?

They’re convinced that if they ever did do something hurtful, they’d either have to kill the other guy or die themselves it's why they avoid conflict as a rule. These friends know all kinds of expressions that could smooth things over at least ten different gradations for conveying what essentially means no. Long before any type of conflict can emerge they are exchanging gestures of diplomacy. And while they dance across the surface with their smiles and their handshakes in; their minds they are both saying the same thing: what an idiot!

I've always fixated on the things I want in my life--paint palettes and sumptuous fabrics and star-flecked skies and dancing on my tiptoes and the smell of jasmine. But I usually imagine myself alone or falling in love with all kinds of different people. These days, I've started to daydream of the permanent relationships I want to have. Friends who stay in my life forever. People who I trust to love me even if I'm wobbling--the way I trust Jonah. And if that's what I want, then I have scorched Earth to till and replant. I have a Japanese maple seedling, and I have seen how beautiful a rooted life can be. But I have miles to go before I decide where to plant us.

To a Child Dancing in the Wind Dance there upon the shore; What need have you to care For wind or water’s roar? And tumble out your hair That the salt drops have wet; Being young you have not known The fool’s triumph, nor yet Love lost as soon as won, Nor the best labourer dead And all the sheaves to bind. What need have you to dread The monstrous crying of wind? Has no one said those daring Kind eyes should be more learn’d? Or warned you how despairing The moths are when they are burned, I could have warned you, but you are young, So we speak a different tongue. O you will take whatever’s offered And dream that all the world’s a friend, Suffer as your mother suffered, Be as broken in the end. But I am old and you are young, And I speak a barbarous tongue.

Bennie's corner of Brooklyn looked different every time Sierra passed through it. She stopped at the corner of Washington Avenue and St. John's Place to take in the changing scenery. A half block from where she stood, she'd skinned her knee playing hopscotch while juiced up on iceys and sugar drinks. Bennie's brother, Vincent, had been killed by the cops on the adjacent corner, just a few steps from his own front door. Now her best friend's neighborhood felt like another planet. The place Sierra and Bennie used to get their hair done had turned into a fancy bakery of some kind, and yes, the coffee was good, but you couldn't get a cup for less than three dollars. Plus, every time Sierra went in, the hip, young white kid behind the counter gave her either the don't-cause-no-trouble look or the I-want-to-adopt-you look. The Takeover (as Bennie had dubbed it once) had been going on for a few years now, but tonight its pace seemed to have accelerated tenfold. Sierra couldn't find a single brown face on the block. It looked like a late-night frat party had just let out; she was getting funny stares from all sides--as if she was the out-of-place one, she thought. And then, sadly, she realized she was the out-of-place one.

When I got to school the next morning I had stepped only one foot in the quad when he spotted me and nearly tackled me to the ground. “Jamie!” he hollered, rushing across the lawn without caring the least bit about the scene he was creating. The next thing I knew, my feet were off the ground and I was squished so tightly in Ryan’s arms that I could barely breathe. “Okay, Ryan?” I coughed in a hushed tone. “This is exactly the kind of thing that can get you killed.” “I don’t care, I’m not letting go. Don’t ever disappear like that again!” he scolded, but his voice was more relieved than angry. “It’s been days! You had your mother worried sick!” “My mother?” I questioned sarcastically. Ryan laughed as he finally set me back on my feet. “Okay, fine, me too.” He still wouldn’t let go of me, though. He was gripping my arms while he looked at me with those eyes, and that smile… You know, being all Ryan-ish. And then, when I got lost in the moment, he totally took advantage of how whipped I was and he kissed me. The jerk. He just pulled my face to his right then and there, in the middle of a crowded quad full of students, where I could have accidentally unleashed an electrical storm at any moment. And okay, maybe I liked it, and maybe I even needed it, but still! You can’t just go kissing Jamie Baker whenever you want, even if you are Ryan Miller! “Ryan!” I yelled as soon as I was able to pull away from him—which admittedly took a minute. “I’m sorry.” Ryan laughed with this big dopey grin on his face and then kissed me some more. I had to push him away from me. “Don’t be sorry, just stop!” I realized I was screaming at him when I felt a hundred different pairs of eyes on me. I tried to ignore the audience that Ryan seemed oblivious to and dropped the audio a few decibels. “I wasn’t kidding when I said this has to stop. Look, I will be your friend. I want to be your friend. But that’s it. We can’t be anything more. It’ll never work.” Ryan watched me for a minute and then whispered, “Don’t do that.” I was shocked to hear the sudden emotion in his voice. “Don’t give up.” It was hopeless. “Fine!” I snapped. “I’ll be your stupid girlfriend!” Big shocker, me giving Ryan his way, I know. But let’s face it—it’s just what I do best. I had to at least act a little tough, though. “But!” I said in the harshest voice I was capable of. “You can’t ever touch me unless I say. No more tackling me, and especially no more surprise kissing.” He actually laughed at my request. “No promises.” Stupid, cocky boyfriend. “You’re crazy. You know that, right?” Ryan got this big cheesy smile on his face and said, “Crazy about you.” “Ugh,” I groaned. “Would you be serious for a minute? Why do you insist on putting your life in danger?” “Because I like you.” His stupid grin was infectious. I wanted to be angry, but how could I with him looking at me like that? “I’m not worth it, you know,” I said stubbornly. “I have issues. I’m unstable.” “You’re cute when you’re unstable,” Ryan said, “and I like your issues.” The stupid boy was straight-up giddy now. But he was so cute that I cracked a smile despite myself. “You really are crazy,” I muttered.

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on. Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum. We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility. So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever. Yesterday I knew I had no future, and that it was impossible for me to accept my life as it is now. And yet today, that same messy life seems full of hope. Potential. The impossible, I suppose, happens via living. Will my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depression? No. But do I want to live? Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes.

Just imagine the existence of a man - let us call him A - who has left youth far behind, and of a woman whom we may call B, who is young and happy and has seen nothing as yet of life or of the world. Family circumstances of various kinds brought them together, and he grew to love her as a daughter, and had no fear that his love would change its nature. But he forgot that B was so young, that life was still a May-game to her and that it was easy to fall in love with her in a different way, and that this would amuse her. He made a mistake and was suddenly aware of another feeling, as heavy as remorse, making its way into his heart, and he was afraid. He was afraid that their old friendly relations would be destroyed, and he made up his mind to go away before that happened.

The machine itself receives some of the same feelings. With over 27,000 on it it's getting to be something of a high-miler, and old-timer, although there are plenty of older ones running. But over the miles, and I think most cyclists will agree with this, you pick up certain feelings about an individual machine that are unique for that one individual machine and no other. A friend who owns a cycle of the same make, model and even same year brought it over for a repair, and when I test rode it afterward it was hard to believe it had come from the same factory years ago. You could see that long ago it had settled into its own kind of feel and ride and sound, completely different from mine. No worse, but different. I suppose you could call that a personality. Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better, and it is the personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance. The new ones start out as good-looking strangers, and depending on how they are treated, degenerate rapidly into bad-acting grouches or even cripples, or else turn into healthy, good-natured, long-lasting friends.

We are the gods of poverty, but why should we be ashamed in front of those gods of good fortune? We and they, all of us, have our own fates. Not only that, but while they are on friendly terms with emperors, aristocrats, feudal lords, the privileged class and, yes, wealthy townspeople, and provide them with different kinds of luxury and splendor, they’re not intimate with men of virtue at all.

No one, not even a ‘friend,’ can make us better. But it is a great happiness in life to meet a person of quite different construction, different bent, completely dissimilar views who, while always remaining himself and in no wise echoing us nor currying favor with us (as sometimes happens) and not trying to insinuate his soul (and an insincere soul at that!) into our psyche, into our muddle, into our tangle, would stand as a firm wall, as a check to our follies and our irrationalities, which every human being has. Friendship lies in contradiction and not in agreement! Verily, God granted me Strakhov as a teacher and my friendship with him, my feelings for him were ever a kind of firm wall on which I felt I could always lean, or rather rest. And it won’t let you fall, and it gives warmth

There were shelves upon shelves of the most succulent-looking sweets imaginable. Creamy chunks of nougat, shimmering pink squares of coconut ice, fat, honey-colored toffees; hundreds of different kinds of chocolate in neat rows; there was a large barrel of Every Flavor Beans, and another of Fizzing Whizbees, the levitating sherbert balls that Ron had mentioned; along yet another wall were "Special Effects" sweets: Droobles Best Blowing Gum (which filled a room with bluebell-colored bubbles that refused to pop for days), the strange, splinter Toothflossing Stringmints, tiny black Pepper Imps ("breathe fire for your friends!"), Ice Mice ("hear your teeth chatter and squeak!"), peppermint creams shaped like toads ("hop realistically in the stomach!"), fragile sugar-spun quills, and exploding bonbons.

We change our attitudes, our careers, our relationships. Even our age changes minute by minute. We change our politics, our moods, and our sexual preferences. We change our outlook, we change our minds, we change our sympathies. Yet when someone changes hir gender, we put hir on some television talk show. Well, here’s what I think: I think we all of us do change our genders. All the time. Maybe it’s not as dramatic as some tabloid headline screaming “She Was A He!” But we do, each of us, change our genders. In response to each interaction we have with a new or different person, we subtly shift the kind of man or woman, boy or girl, or whatever gender we’re being at the moment. We’re usually not the same kind of man or woman with our lover as we are with our boss or a parent. When we’re introduced for the first time to someone we find attractive, we shift into being a different kind of man or woman than we are with our childhood friends. We all change our genders.

What’s the kindest thing you almost did? Is your fear of insomnia stronger than your fear of what awoke you? Are bonsai cruel? Do you love what you love, or just the feeling? Your earliest memories: do you look through your young eyes, or look at your young self? Which feels worse: to know that there are people who do more with less talent, or that there are people with more talent? Do you walk on moving walkways? Should it make any difference that you knew it was wrong �as you were doing it? Would you trade actual intelligence for the perception of being smarter? Why does it bother you when someone at the next table is having a conversation on a cell phone? How many years of your life would you trade for the greatest month of your life? What would you tell your father, if it were possible? Which is changing faster, your body, or your mind? Is it cruel to tell an old person his prognosis? Are you in any way angry at your phone? When you pass �a storefront, do you look at what’s inside, look at your reflection, or neither? Is there anything you would die for if no one could ever know you died for it? If you could be assured that money wouldn’t make �you any small bit happier, would you still want more money? What has �been irrevocably spoiled for you? If your deepest secret became public, �would you be forgiven? Is your best friend your kindest friend? Is it in any way cruel to give a dog a name? Is there anything you feel a need to confess? You know it’s a “murder of crows” and a “wake of buzzards” but it’s a what of ravens, again? What is it about death that you’re �afraid of? How does it make you feel to know that it’s an “unkindness �of ravens”?

To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving. I know nothing more simultaneously false and telling than the statement by Leonardo da Vinci that we cannot love or hate something until we’ve understood it. Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other’s presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define. Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness. The presence of another person – of any person whatsoever – instantly slows down my thinking, and while for a normal man contact with others is a stimulus to spoken expression and wit, for me it is a counterstimulus, if this compound word be linguistically permissible. When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror. The mere thought of having to enter into contact with someone else makes me nervous. A simple invitation to have dinner with a friend produces an anguish in me that’s hard to define. The idea of any social obligation whatsoever – attending a funeral, dealing with someone about an office matter, going to the station to wait for someone I know or don’t know – the very idea disturbs my thoughts for an entire day, and sometimes I even start worrying the night before, so that I sleep badly. When it takes place, the dreaded encounter is utterly insignificant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different: I never learn to learn. ‘My habits are of solitude, not of men.’ I don’t know if it was Rousseau or Senancour who said this. But it was some mind of my species, it being perhaps too much to say of my race.

I think I want a house of my own,” I start, the words a discovery as they leave my mouth. “Something small, so I don’t have much housework, but enough room for a proper library. I want a lot of books. And I wouldn’t mind a good old dog to walk with me. And a bakery I go to every morning where they know my name.” “And you don’t want anyone with you?” Sim asks, raising her head. “No family?” “I want friends,” I say. “Good friends, that make up a different kind of family.” “That sounds lonely.” “It wouldn’t be lonely,” I reply. “I’d like to be on my own, but not alone.

From this time I was most narrowly watched. If I was in a separate room any considerable length of time, I was sure to be suspected of having a book, and was at once called to give an account of myself. All this, however, was too late. The first step had been taken. Mistress, in teaching me the alphabet, had given me the inch, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell. The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in the street. As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers. With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different places, I finally succeeded in learning to read. When I was sent of errands, I always took my book with me, and by going one part of my errand quickly, I found time to get a lesson before my return.

The left and right sides of the brain also process the imprints of the past in dramatically different ways.2 The left brain remembers facts, statistics, and the vocabulary of events. We call on it to explain our experiences and put them in order. The right brain stores memories of sound, touch, smell, and the emotions they evoke. It reacts automatically to voices, facial features, and gestures and places experienced in the past. What it recalls feels like intuitive truth—the way things are. Even as we enumerate a loved one’s virtues to a friend, our feelings may be more deeply stirred by how her face recalls the aunt we loved at age four.3 Under ordinary circumstances the two sides of the brain work together more or less smoothly, even in people who might be said to favor one side over the other. However, having one side or the other shut down, even temporarily, or having one side cut off entirely (as sometimes happened in early brain surgery) is disabling. Deactivation of the left hemisphere has a direct impact on the capacity to organize experience into logical sequences and to translate our shifting feelings and perceptions into words. (Broca’s area, which blacks out during flashbacks, is on the left side.) Without sequencing we can’t identify cause and effect, grasp the long-term effects of our actions, or create coherent plans for the future. People who are very upset sometimes say they are “losing their minds.” In technical terms they are experiencing the loss of executive functioning. When something reminds traumatized people of the past, their right brain reacts as if the traumatic event were happening in the present. But because their left brain is not working very well, they may not be aware that they are reexperiencing and reenacting the past—they are just furious, terrified, enraged, ashamed, or frozen. After the emotional storm passes, they may look for something or somebody to blame for it. They behaved the way they did way because you were ten minutes late, or because you burned the potatoes, or because you “never listen to me.” Of course, most of us have done this from time to time, but when we cool down, we hopefully can admit our mistake. Trauma interferes with this kind of awareness, and, over time, our research demonstrated why.

[I]t's difficult to make people see that what you have been taught counts for nothing, and that the only things worth having are the things you find out for yourself. Also, that when so many brands of what Chesterton calls 'fancy souls' and theories of life are offered you, there is no sense in not looking pretty carefully to see what you are going in for. [...] It isn't a case of 'Here is the Christian religion, the one authoritative and respectable rule of life. Take it or leave it'. It's 'Here's a muddling kind of affair called Life, and here are nineteen or twenty different explanations of it, all supported by people whose opinions are not to be sneezed at. Among them is the Christian religion in which you happpen to have been brought up. Your friend so-and-so has been brought up in quite a different way of thinking; is a perfectly splendid person and thoroughly happy. What are you going to do about it?' -- I'm worrying it out quietly, and whatever I get hold of will be valuable, because I've got it for myself; but really, you know, the whole question is not as simple as it looks.

I watched my best friend fall in love with the same girl a million times in the same minute.  She had vivid eyes, a warm smile, and a streak of purple in her hair.  They were too drunk to notice I was watching; I was too sober to not realize what was happening.  Someone kept cutting off the oxygen in the room every time their faces got close.  But I knew if it were for just a few more inches, they would have kissed.  I also knew that it was because of the fact that she had a boyfriend that they didn't.  Even I could feel his heart racing as she licked off the birthday cake icing off his right cheek.  I saw his eyes light up; it was much more than the effects of inebriation.  There was suddenly a different kind of gravity present in the room.  And I then I realized: The same forces that bring two people together are the same ones that pull them apart.  But I knew from the way he looked at her.  I knew what he felt.  I knew how much she meant to him.  And in that moment, I finally understood.  Because that's the exact same way I look at you.  (I have learned to see gravity; it is the colour of your skin.)

There was that word again: human, which not long ago I would have considered a terrible insult. Now, every time I heard it, I thought of Jason Grace’s admonition: Remember what it’s like to be human. He hadn’t meant all the terrible things about being human, of which there were plenty. He’d meant the best things: standing up for a just cause, putting others first, having stubborn faith that you could make a difference, even if it meant you had to die to protect your friends and what you believed in. These were not the kind of feelings that gods had…well, ever. Sally Jackson meant the term in the same way Jason had—as something worth aspiring to.

Unsent letters carry a kind of cruelty. A letter is written as a space shared by two people; by not sending it, its writer claims the power to include and exclude the recipient simultaneously. Out of cowardice or control an act is performed in the name of caring or discretion. Unsent letters should never be written. But what difference is there between an unsent and an unwritten letter? The truth is already there. Self-imposed silence speaks, too, though not to communicate but to punish.

Dear Friend, I hope it is alright that I address you in such a manner. I figured if you are a friend of Ashlyn, then you are a friend of mine. I wish we had a chance to meet under better circumstances, but the whole dying thing really puts a damper on my ability to make a great first impression. So what I want to say is thank you. Thank you for befriending a girl who is probably very broken but at the same time so amazingly perfect. Thank you for befriending a girl who is probably a little different and quotes too many books. Thank you for befriending a girl who doesn’t talk about her feelings a lot, but trust me, she feels everything. Thank you for being there for her. So now, I promise you that I’ll be there for you, too. I don’t know how. And I probably shouldn’t make those kinds of promises…yet just know that when you see the winds whistling through the flowers, that’s me thanking you and hugging you during your darkest days. Thank you, friend. You’re doing great. ~ Gabrielle

A month or so ago, he and his friends had gone to Pizza House for slices after a game and he’d seen her in the kitchen. Her cap pushed back, she was carrying cold trays of glistening dough rounds, and her face had a kind of pink to it, her hips turning to knock the freezer door shut. I didn't spit on it, Deenie had promised, winking at him from behind the scarlet heat lamps. He’d stood there, arrested. The pizza box hot in his hands. She looked different than at school and especially at home, and she was acting differently. Moving differently. He couldn’t stop watching her, his friends all around him, loud and triumphant, their faces streaked with sweat.

If ever I create a website, I'll call it Two-Face Book, and I'll invite everyone to it, it will be a game board, of a whitewash chalkboard. A social network, with reserved intentions, where we can fall into our cliques and circle of friends. We can dis who we want and accept who appeals to our discretion. Where the users will keep abusing, and abusers keep using, where the computer bullies will keep swinging and the J-birds that fly by will die; where the lonely will keep seeking and the needy still go desperate, where the envious will keep hating, and the lustful will keep flashing. Where those that think ignoring, will keep one down and the wannabes will foolishly think themselves greater by the number of "likes" that pours caffeine into their coffee. We can jump on the bandwagon of likes, or reserve not to show we care. Where the scorners, scammers and stalkers lay wait to take hold of the innocent and fragile, and my pockets will get fatter as more and more will join up, where being fake is accepted. As a mirror that stares at a different face. It will be my two-face epilogue, in a 3-world dimension, of a twofold war. I will build an empire of contagious hooks, and still we will live, happily-ever disastrous.

People will always respond differently to the story of a sexually abused third grader than they will that of a young woman who is violated by a friend at a booze-soaked house party. There is a kind of fairness in that, since they are very different stories. Yet, in many ways, they are so intimately intertwined: they both rely on the belief in ownership of the vulnerable body, whether female or child or both. The idea that one violation is vastly worse than the other is probably not so different a rationalization than what goes through a date rapist’s mind. Those who are disgusted at the idea of touching a child may be the exact same that would grope an adult woman in an alleyway or on a crowded subway train—or worse.

There can be different types of bonds in life, with different people. But, no bond is less important than the other. And no matter you may not have a certain kind of bond other people have, you can have other types of bonds those people cannot have. And there's more to it – when you don't have a certain type of needful bond, the other bonds you have formed with different people, all of them double (it is like, when one is born blind, their other four senses are doubled). So, I know it is hard, but you must not grieve over what you do not have. Instead, try to embrace what you already have. Do not feel alone or lost. What you are lacking, is added to other types of relationships, and of course, it may not feel the same way as it would if you had a certain bond, but it is not gone, it is still there, only, in another form... Preserve your bonds and fight to protect them – that is the path of a Blade Warrior...

Oh, friend John, it is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles. And yet when King Laugh come, he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall, all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. And believe me, friend John, that he is good to come, and kind. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come, and like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again, and we bear to go on with our labor, what it may be.

At times I think of human relationships as something soft like sand or water, and by pouring them into particular vessels we give them shape. So a mother’s relationship with her daughter is poured into a vessel marked ‘mother and child’, and the relationship takes the contours of its container and is held inside there, for better or worse. Maybe some unhappy friends would have been perfectly contented as sisters, or married couples as parents and children, who knows. But what would it be like to form a relationship with no preordained shape of any kind? Just to pour the water out and let it fall. I suppose it would take no shape, and run off in all directions. That’s a little like myself and Felix, I think. There is no obvious path forward by which any relation between us can proceed. I don’t believe he would describe me as a friend, because he has friends, and the way he relates to them is different from the way he relates to me.

I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumors and scraps of information we dug from official publications. I was struck less by the West's technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual, and the incredible amount of liberty. To me, the ultimate proof of freedom in the West was that there seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and praising China. Almost every other day the front page of Reference, the newspaper which carded foreign press items, would feature some eulogy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. At first I was angered by these, but they soon made me see how tolerant another society could be. I realized that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where people were allowed to hold different, even outrageous views. I began to see that it was the very tolerance of oppositions, of protesters, that kept the West progressing. Still, I could not help being irritated by some observations. Once I read an article by a Westerner who came to China to see some old friends, university professors, who told him cheerfully how they had enjoyed being denounced and sent to the back end of beyond, and how much they had relished being reformed. The author concluded that Mao had indeed made the Chinese into 'new people' who would regard what was misery to a Westerner as pleasure. I was aghast. Did he not know that repression was at its worst when there was no complaint? A hundred times more so when the victim actually presented a smiling face? Could he not see to what a pathetic condition these professors had been reduced, and what horror must have been involved to degrade them so? I did not realize that the acting that the Chinese were putting on was something to which Westerners were unaccustomed, and which they could not always decode. I did not appreciate either that information about China was not easily available, or was largely misunderstood, in the West, and that people with no experience of a regime like China's could take its propaganda and rhetoric at face value. As a result, I assumed that these eulogies were dishonest. My friends and I would joke that they had been bought by our government's 'hospitality." When foreigners were allowed into certain restricted places in China following Nixon's visit, wherever they went the authorities immediately cordoned off enclaves even within these enclaves. The best transport facilities, shops, restaurants, guest houses and scenic spots were reserved for them, with signs reading "For Foreign Guests Only." Mao-tai, the most sought-after liquor, was totally unavailable to ordinary Chinese, but freely available to foreigners. The best food was saved for foreigners. The newspapers proudly reported that Henry Kissinger had said his waistline had expanded as a result of the many twelve-course banquets he enjoyed during his visits to China. This was at a time when in Sichuan, "Heaven's Granary," our meat ration was half a pound per month, and the streets of Chengdu were full of homeless peasants who had fled there from famine in the north, and were living as beggars. There was great resentment among the population about how the foreigners were treated like lords. My friends and I began saying among ourselves: "Why do we attack the Kuomintang for allowing signs saying "No Chinese or Dogs" aren't we doing the same? Getting hold of information became an obsession. I benefited enormously from my ability to read English, as although the university library had been looted during the Cultural Revolution, most of the books it had lost had been in Chinese. Its extensive English-language collection had been turned upside down, but was still largely intact.

The wide receiver had a real taste for crime, and he indulged it with an erratic kind of vigor that made him an albatross for Madden and a natural soulmate for my old friend, Al Davis, who remains the ultimate Raider. They were serious people, and John Madden was definitely one of them, for good or ill. Living with the Oakland Raiders in those days was not much different than living with the Hell’s Angels. I

She’s my best friend,” I reminded him. “If she is, she’ll come to see what’s good for you and she’ll sort her shit out. If she’s a different kind of woman, she won’t. Instead, she’ll see green and won’t clue in that men do not want high maintenance drama queens so much they steer well clear and until she shifts that shit outta her life, it’s gonna be a lonely one. Unlike her friend who sees a man drinking outta her milk jug, processes that it’s highly unlikely she’s gonna break him of that habit seein’ as he’s forty-five and still does it and has since he was a kid, lets it go and moves on all in the expanse of about a second instead of throwing a shit fit about it which gets her nowhere, is a waste of energy and leaves both involved feeling like garbage.” Well, I had to admit, all that was interesting and insightful and weirdly mature.

Levin was almost of the same age as Oblonsky; their intimacy did not rest merely on champagne. Levin had been the friend and companion of his early youth. They were fond of one another in spite of the difference of their characters and tastes, as friends are fond of one another who have been together in early youth. But in spite of this, each of them—as is often the way with men who have selected careers of different kinds—though in discussion he would even justify the other's career, in his heart despised it. It seemed to each of them that the life he led himself was the only real life, and the life led by his friend was a mere phantasm. Oblonsky could not restrain a slight mocking smile at the sight of Levin. How often he had seen him come up to Moscow from the country where he was doing something, but what precisely Stepan Arkadyevitch could never quite make out, and indeed he took no interest in the matter. Levin arrived in Moscow always excited and in a hurry, rather ill at ease and irritated by his own want of ease, and for the most part with a perfectly new, unexpected view of things. Stepan Arkadyevitch laughed at this, and liked it. In the same way Levin in his heart despised the town mode of life of his friend, and his official duties, which he laughed at, and regarded as trifling. But the difference was that Oblonsky, as he was doing the same as every one did, laughed complacently and good-humoredly, while Levin laughed without complacency and sometimes angrily.

There is a power in accepting people the way they are—our friends, partners, workmates, children, siblings, and especially ourselves. People really are born different from each other and those differences persist. We’re shy, smart, wild, kind, anxious, impulsive, hardworking, absent-minded, quick-tempered. We literally see the world differently, think differently, and feel things differently. Some of us make our way through the world with ease, and some of us struggle to fit in or get along or keep it together. Denying those differences or constantly telling people they should change is not helpful to anyone. We should recognize the diversity of our human natures, accept it, embrace it, even celebrate it.

It was becoming more and more evident that Salem was a town that celebrated individuality, a real live-and-let-live kind of place. Melody felt a gut punch of regret. Her old nose would have fit in here. "Look!" She pointed at the multicolored car whizzing by. Its black door were from a Mercedes coupe, the white hood from a BMW; the silver trunk was Jaguar, the red convertible top was Lexus, the whitewall tires were Bentley, the sound system was Bose, and the music was classical. A hood ornament from each model dangled from the rear view mirror. Its license plate appropriately read MUTT. "That car looks like a moving Benton ad." "Or a pileup on Rodeo drive." Candace snapped a picture with her iPhone and e-mailed to her friends back home. They responded instantly with a shot of what they were doing. It must have involved the mall because Candace picked up her pace and began asking anyone under the age of fifty where the cool people hung out.

I vowed to myself to read one hundred books a year, and I did. I read to fill my mind and to block out the bad memories. But I found that as I read more, my thoughts were getting deeper, my vision wider, and my emotions less shallow. The vocabulary in South Korea was so much richer than the one I had known, and when you have more words to describe the world, you increase your ability to think complex thoughts. In North Korea, the regime doesn’t want you to think, and they hate subtlety. Everything is either black or white, with no shades of gray. For instance, in North Korea, the only kind of “love” you can describe is for the Leader. We had heard the “love” word used in different ways in smuggled TV shows and movies, but there was no way to apply it in daily life in North Korea—not with your family, friends, husband, or wife. But in South Korea there were so many different ways of expressing love—for your parents, friends, nature, God, animals, and, of course, your lover.

Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of his world. Today he is the thing he understands least. Physics and biology have come a long way, but there has been no comparable development of anything like a science of human behavior. Greek physics and biology are now of historical interest only (no modern physicist or biologist would turn to Aristotle for help), but the dialogues of Plato are still assigned to students and cited as if they threw light on human behavior. Aristotle could not have understood a page of modern physics or biology, but Socrates and his friends would have little trouble in following most current discussions of human affairs. And as to technology, we have made immense strides in controlling the physical and biological worlds, but our practices in government, education, and much of economics, though adapted to very different conditions, have not greatly improved. We can scarcely explain this by saying that the Greeks knew all there was to know about human behavior. Certainly they knew more than they knew about the physical world, but it was still not much. Moreover, their way of thinking about human behavior must have had some fatal flaw. Whereas Greek physics and biology, no matter how crude, led eventually to modern science, Greek theories of human behavior led nowhere. If they are with us today, it is not because they possessed some kind of eternal verity, but because they did not contain the seeds of anything better.

That’s your project,” he said. “You can do something no one has done: you can examine Mormonism not just as a religious movement, but as an intellectual one.” I began to reread the letters of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. As a child I’d read those letters as an act of worship; now I read them with different eyes, not the eyes of a critic, but also not the eyes of a disciple. I examined polygamy, not as a doctrine but as a social policy. I measured it against its own aims, as well as against other movements and theories from the same period. It felt like a radical act. My friends in Cambridge had become a kind of family, and I felt a sense of belonging with them that, for many years, had been absent on Buck’s Peak. Sometimes I felt damned for those feelings.

Every person you meet has been assigned to play a role in your story as you are assigned to play one in someone else’s. I often say that the people we come across can be one of the four kinds. They can be like pebbles, fountains, quagmire or bridges. Pebbles are those who you meet commonly and in abundance. They do not facilitate anything great but they help you continue walking on this journey of life. Everyone you cross in life without really connecting with them are pebbles. Then there are fountains – who spring water of happiness on you. They bring positivity and joy; they nourish your soul and irrigate the seeds of good thoughts. Your friends, well-wishers are all fountains. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, you have quagmires. These are the people who cause you pain. Now, even some pebbles may have caused you pain as it happens if you tread on a barbed pebble but the difference is that quagmires do that on purpose. They pull you down, induce fear and negativity by discouraging you and worrying you. They will not let you move on – that’s why they keep you bogged down in your failures. Finally, the rarest ones are the bridges – they connect you to unchartered ground that you wouldn’t have reached on your own. They unite you to your destiny. With them, your plane of consciousness expands, you see things you have not seen before; your life becomes more aware, more enlightened. Your parents, your teachers and anyone who touches your life and transcends it into something more beautiful – they are all bridges.

When I heard about the ease with which the Four had been removed, I felt a wave of sadness. How could such a small group of second-rate tyrants ravage 900 million people for so long? But my main feeling was joy. The last tyrants of the Cultural Revolution were finally gone. My rapture was widely shared. Like many of my countrymen, I went out to buy the best liquors for a celebration with my family and friends, only to find the shops out of stock there was so much spontaneous rejoicing. There were official celebrations as well exactly the same kinds of rallies as during the Cultural Revolution, which infuriated me. I was particularly angered by the fact that in my department, the political supervisors and the student officials were now arranging the whole show, with unperturbed self-righteousness. The new leadership was headed by Mao's chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, whose only qualification, I believed, was his mediocrity. One of his first acts was to announce the construction of a huge mausoleum for Mao on Tiananmen Square. I was outraged: hundreds of thousands of people were still homeless after the earthquake in Tangshan, living in temporary shacks on the pavements. With her experience, my mother had immediately seen that a new era was beginning. On the day after Mao's death she had reported for work at her depas'uuent. She had been at home for five years, and now she wanted to put her energy to use again. She was given a job as the number seven deputy director in her department, of which she had been the director before the Cultural Revolution. But she did not mind. To me in my impatient mood, things seemed to go on as before. In January 1977, my university course came to an end. We were given neither examinations nor degrees. Although Mao and the Gang of Four were gone, Mao's rule that we had to return to where we had come from still applied. For me, this meant the machinery factory. The idea that a university education should make a difference to one's job had been condemned by Mao as 'training spiritual aristocrats.

The life and friends are two connected things. As life is one we get friends for once too. There could be so many things between friends sometime we get angry on. But If you don't solve and remain angry then that will be your big mistake and it could be just because of your ego. One side can take step to solve it but your ego (that is not fully ego but a kind of ego for that you think you were right at that moment and another one should take step first to feel apologize) never let you to do so. You should be apologize to be a good friend. Now you may think why to apologize if another one doesn't care at all. Then whats the difference between you and that one. You may leave it by thinking you dont need or you may proceed to solve it. It shouldn't be difficult to apologize with friends.

Pardons for his friends on the Dossier. FRIENDS. A few days ago, he would've scoffed at the idea, because Robb Valerio didn't have FRIENDS. Or if he did, he had a use for them. But Ana was unlike anyone he'd ever met. She was kind, but kind in a way most people called BRASH. She was reckless, she followed her heart like it was a guiding star. She was insufferable, and yet she had suffered so much and it had never defined her. Ana was different from anyone else in the entire cosmos, and a part of him wanted to be different, too.

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

They’re convinced that if they ever did do something hurtful, they’d either have to kill the other guy or die themselves it's why they avoid conflict as a rule. These friends know all kinds of expressions that could smooth things over at least ten different gradations for conveying what essentially means no. Long before any type of conflict can emerge they are exchanging gestures of diplomacy. And while they dance across the surface with their smiles and their handshakes in their minds they are both saying the same thing: what an idiot!

When I get my kingdom back . . . ,” Nightshade began. “Stop there,” said Tiffany. “Why do you want your kingdom back? What good has it done you? Think about it, for I am the human who has looked after you, the only person you might call a friend.” She looked seriously at the elf. “I have told you that I—we—would be happy if you were to be Queen of the Elves again, but only if you can truly learn from your time here. Be prepared to live in peace, teach your elves that the world has changed and that there is no space for them here.” There was hope in her voice now, a hope that human and elf might be able to change the stories of humans and elves. A princess doesn’t have to be blond and blue-eyed and have a shoe size smaller than her age, she thought. People can trust witches, and not fear the old woman in the woods, the poor old woman whose only crime was to have no teeth and to talk to herself. And perhaps an elf could learn to know mercy, to discover humanity. . . . “If you learn things,” she finished softly, “you might find yourself building a different kind of kingdom.

And how easy it was to leave this life, after all - this life that could feel so present and permanent that departing from it must seem to require a tear into a different dimension. There the bunch of them were, young hopefuls, decorating their annually purged dorm rooms with postcards and prints and favorite photographs of friends, filling them with hot pots and dried flowers, throw rugs and stereos. Houseplants, a lamp, maybe some furniture brought up by encouraging parents. They nested there like miniature grownups. As if this provisional student life - with its brushfire friendships and drink-addled intimacies, its gorging on knowledge and blind sexual indulgences - could possibly last. As if it were a home, of any kind at all: someplace to gather one's sense of self. Flannery had never felt for a minute that these months of shared living took place on anything other than quicksand, and it had given this whole year (these scant seven or eight months, into which an aging decade or so had been condensed) a sliding, wavery feel. She came from earthquake country and knew the dangers of building on landfill. That was, it seemed to Flannery, the best description of this willed group project of freshman year: construction on landfill. A collective confusion of impressions and tendencies, mostly castoffs with a few keepers. What was there to count on in any of it? What structure would remain, founded on that?

An e-reader is super helpful. And no more toe paper cuts. 10. Some kind of sport or recreational activity—soccer, dance, swimming, professional hopscotch. You can do it! I’m trying out my motivational speaking skills here. 11. Pants that button easily. Trust me, when nature calls at school, you’ll be grateful you listened. 12. Your handy-dandy hook. From buttoning pants to lifting a dollar out of your pocket, a good hook is essential. 13. A wide variety of nail polishes. Boys probably don’t care much about this, but when people are staring at our feet as much as they do, we want to look our best. Am I right, ladies, or am I right? 14. Nunchuks. At least until bully spray becomes available. 15. An open heart and eyes. You think you’re the only one out there who feels different? What about that kid sitting alone in the library or out on the sidewalk? 16. Awesome parents. This is a must. 17. Friends who listen.

The difference between being your kid's best friend and being their ally is the difference between being nice and being kind; the first is about a desire to be liked and the second is about a deeper desire to make a positive, lasting difference in someone's life. My job is not to be liked by my kids. And I don't take it personally when my kids don't like me, because their well-being is more important to me than their opinion of me. My hope is that if I raise them well, with enough love and structure, then one day they'll grow up to be the kind of good and decent people I have the privilege of calling friends.

Glennon Doyle Melton, author of Carry On, Warrior, once said: Every time we open our mouths and speak, we are either saying “Let there be light” or “Let there be darkness.” When we gossip, when we criticize, when we lie or tell hurtful jokes or use labels that categorize and demean people, we are saying “let there be darkness.” We create a world around us that is not so beautiful. And then we have to live in it. When we offer a compliment, when we defend a friend or a stranger, when we stick to the truth, when we speak a kind word to anyone, we are saying “Let there be light.” We are creating a more beautiful world, and then we get to live in it.9

Get two non-Jews confiding in each other, after cautiously finding that they have enough common ground not to mistake each other for the kind of mental defective called an anti-Semite, and they are likely to agree that notwithstanding all this liberal talk Jews tend to be brash, pushing, sharp in business, vulgar in manners, loud in public, and so clannish that they band in a knot against the Christian world. They will also agree that they know Jews who are different, and that they number such Jews among their valued friends. There are, of course, many Christians who will take no part in such an exchange. But the reader will recognize the commonplaces.

Mattilon’s law firm in the Paris directory. He wrote it out, brought it to an operator and said he would pay in cash. He was told to go to booth number seven and wait for the ring. He entered it quickly, the soft cloth brim of his hat falling over his forehead above the tortoiseshell glasses. Any enclosure, whether a toilet stall or a glass booth, was preferable to being out in the open. He felt his pulse accelerating; it seemed to explode when the bell rang. “Saint-Pierre, Nelli, et Mattilon,” said the female voice in Paris. “Monsieur Mattilon, please—s’il vous plaît.” “Votre …?” The woman stopped, undoubtedly recognizing an American’s abysmal attempt at French. “Who may I say is calling, please?” “His friend from New York. He’ll know. I’m a client.” René did know. After several clicks his strained voice came on the line. “Joel?” he whispered. “I don’t believe it!” “Don’t,” said Converse. “It’s not true—not what they say about Geneva or Bonn, not even what you said. I had nothing to do with those killings, and Paris was an accident. I had every reason to think—I did think—that man was reaching for a gun.” “Why didn’t you stay where you were, then, my friend?” “Because they wanted to stop me from going on. It’s what I honestly believed, and I couldn’t let them do that. Let me talk.… At the George Cinq you asked me questions and I gave you evasive answers and I think you saw through me. But you were kind and went along. You have nothing to be sorry about, take my word for it—my very sane word. Bertholdier came to me that evening in my room; we talked and he panicked. Six days ago I saw him again here in Bonn—only, this time it was different.

Design your day thinking that you have limited mental resources, knowing that taking time to replenish them will not only help you be less stressed and better able to resist distractions, but also more creative. We know how different activities affect our physical energy in the world, such as being with family or friends, coordinating a complex event, or taking a walk in nature. In the digital world, what taxes your mental energy? What things do you do that replenish your resources? What kind of rote activity relaxes you? At the end of the day, you want to feel energetic and positive. Don’t end up with your tank of resources on reserve when it’s only early afternoon.

One interesting thing is the idea that people have of a kind of science of Aesthetics. I would almost like to talk of what could be meant by Aesthetics. You might think Aesthetics is a science telling us what's beautiful - almost too ridiculous for words. I suppose it ought to include also what sort of coffee tastes well. I see roughly this - there is a realm of utterance of delight, when you taste pleasant food or smell a pleasant smell, etc., then there is a realm of Art which is quite different, though often you may make the same face when you hear a piece of music as when you taste good food. (Though you may cry at something you like very much.) Supposing you meet someone in the street and he tells you he has lost his greatest friend, in a voice extremely expressive of his emotion. You might say: 'It was extraordinarily beautiful, the way he expressed himself.' Supposing you then asked: 'What similarity has my admiring this person with my eating vanilla ice and like it?' To compare them seems almost disgusting. (But you can connect them by intermediate cases.) Suppose someone says 'But this is a quite different kind of delight.' But did you learn two meanings of 'delight'? You use the same word on both occasions. There is some connection between these delights. Although in the first case the emotion of delight would in our judgement hardly count.

Cole envisioned the next few weeks passing as a sort of painless montage: there'd be music, and different moments of the townspeople hard at work building a defensive wall around the perimeter of the town, and digging holes to serve as traps, and training with the few weapons they had. There'd be a wiping of perspiration and drinks raised to one another and the exchange of friendly smiles between comrades, and perhaps deeper, more meaningful glances between him and MaryAnn. But by midmorning of the first day, Cole had come to the unavoidable conclusion that the remainder of the experience would in fact drag on in exceedingly real time, with lots of heaving and hoing and digging and hauling under the hot sun, full of the kind of intense straining that raised the danger of a really spectacular hernia. And, judging from the few tense conversations he'd had so far, he foresaw a series of increasingly strident arguments with Nora regarding matters strategic. Plus, of course, at the end of all this effort they'd all probably be dead.

A Christian minister is a person who in a peculiar sense is not his own; he is the servant of God, and therefore ought to be wholly devoted to him. By entering on that sacred office he solemnly undertakes to be always engaged, as much as possible, in the Lord's work, and not to chuse his own pleasure, or employment, or pursue the ministry as a something that is to subserve his own ends, or interests, or as a kind of bye-work. He engages to go where God pleases, and to do, or endure what he sees fit to command, or call him to, in the exercise of his function. He virtually bids farewell to friends, pleasures, and comforts, and stands in readiness to endure the greatest sufferings in the work of his Lord, and Master.

Retreat is a form of pause—it is a time apart in solitude, a precious space in which we can see our world in a different light—acknowledge the grief, celebrate the gifts, and honor our own unique spirit without worrying about how others see us or what jobs still have to be done. For me, retreat is a time to endure suspense; find, not seek; relish what comes by chance; repair body and soul; wait patiently; and live into the questions. It is a time to get acquainted with silence—that friend we’ve kept at a distance; a time to be open to the spaciousness of a day; a time to live on the other side, in another world, where spirit, deep thought, and a new kind of wonder can flourish. Above all, retreat is a time to honor all that we have experienced and the way it affects our hearts. Webster’s dictionary defines “retreat” as the “act or process of withdrawal . . . a receding from a position” to a place that affords peace, privacy, and security. But I prefer Jennifer Louden’s assertion that retreat is “an act of self-nurturing, a radical leap into the hallowed halls of selfhood.

It’s no one’s fault really,” he continued. “A big city cannot afford to have its attention distracted from the important job of being a big city by such a tiny, unimportant item as your happiness or mine.” This came out of him easily, assuredly, and I was suddenly interested. On closer inspection there was something aesthetic and scholarly about him, something faintly professorial. He knew I was with him, listening, and his grey eyes were kind with offered friendliness. He continued: “Those tall buildings there are more than monuments to the industry, thought and effort which have made this a great city; they also occasionally serve as springboards to eternity for misfits who cannot cope with the city and their own loneliness in it.” He paused and said something about one of the ducks which was quite unintelligible to me. “A great city is a battlefield,” he continued. “You need to be a fighter to live in it, not exist, mark you, live. Anybody can exist, dragging his soul around behind him like a worn-out coat; but living is different. It can be hard, but it can also be fun; there’s so much going on all the time that’s new and exciting.” I could not, nor wished to, ignore his pleasant voice, but I was in no mood for his philosophising. “If you were a negro you’d find that even existing would provide more excitement than you’d care for.” He looked at me and suddenly laughed; a laugh abandoned and gay, a laugh rich and young and indescribably infectious. I laughed with him, although I failed to see anything funny in my remark. “I wondered how long it would be before you broke down and talked to me,” he said, when his amusement had quietened down. “Talking helps, you know; if you can talk with someone you’re not lonely any more, don’t you think?” As simple as that. Soon we were chatting away unreservedly, like old friends, and I had told him everything. “Teaching,” he said presently. “That’s the thing. Why not get a job as a teacher?” “That’s rather unlikely,” I replied. “I have had no training as a teacher.” “Oh, that’s not absolutely necessary. Your degrees would be considered in lieu of training, and I feel sure that with your experience and obvious ability you could do well.” “Look here, Sir, if these people would not let me near ordinary inanimate equipment about which I understand quite a bit, is it reasonable to expect them to entrust the education of their children to me?” “Why not? They need teachers desperately.” “It is said that they also need technicians desperately.” “Ah, but that’s different. I don’t suppose educational authorities can be bothered about the colour of people’s skins, and I do believe that in that respect the London County Council is rather outstanding. Anyway, there would be no need to mention it; let it wait until they see you at the interview.” “I’ve tried that method before. It didn’t work.” “Try it again, you’ve nothing to lose. I know for a fact that there are many vacancies for teachers in the East End of London.” “Why especially the East End of London?” “From all accounts it is rather a tough area, and most teachers prefer to seek jobs elsewhere.” “And you think it would be just right for a negro, I suppose.” The vicious bitterness was creeping back; the suspicion was not so easily forgotten. “Now, just a moment, young man.” He was wonderfully patient with me, much more so than I deserved. “Don’t ever underrate the people of the East End; from those very slums and alleyways are emerging many of the new breed of professional and scientific men and quite a few of our politicians. Be careful lest you be a worse snob than the rest of us. Was this the kind of spirit in which you sought the other jobs?

Self-sufficient though he is, the sapiens can now have friends and can grieve, within limits, at the loss of one. It has become his duty to be kind and forgiving towards others, indeed to ‘live for the other person’.33 In his way of living he should avoid being ostentatiously different from those he tries to win from moral ignorance. He has to battle like the rest against his failings, in a long and painful progress towards perfection in which all can do with help from above or the inspiration of others’ example. Seneca himself, we observe, occasionally makes immodest statements concerning his own progress, but is capable of humility, as in one description of himself as ‘a long way from being a tolerable, let alone a perfect human being’.

That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men—friends, coworkers, strangers—giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much—no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version—maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”) I waited patiently—years—for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we’d say, Yeah, he’s a Cool Guy. But it never happened. Instead, women across the nation colluded in our degradation! Pretty soon Cool Girl became the standard girl. Men believed she existed—she wasn’t just a dreamgirl one in a million. Every girl was supposed to be this girl, and if you weren’t, then there was something wrong with you. But it’s tempting to be Cool Girl. For someone like me, who likes to win, it’s tempting to want to be the girl every guy wants. When I met Nick, I knew immediately that was what he wanted, and for him, I guess I was willing to try. I will accept my portion of blame. The thing is, I was crazy about him at first. I found him perversely exotic, a good ole Missouri boy. He was so damn nice to be around. He teased things out in me that I didn’t know existed: a lightness, a humor, an ease. It was as if he hollowed me out and filled me with feathers. He helped me be Cool

And even in the open air the stench of whiskey was appalling. To this fiendish poison, I am certain, the greater part of the squalor I saw is due. Many of these vermin were obviously not foreigners—I counted at least five American countenances in which a certain vanished decency half showed through the red whiskey bloating. Then I reflected upon the power of wine, and marveled how self-respecting persons can imbibe such stuff, or permit it to be served upon their tables. It is the deadliest enemy with which humanity is faced. Not all the European wars could produce a tenth of the havock occasioned among men by the wretched fluid which responsible governments allow to be sold openly. Looking upon that mob of sodden brutes, my mind’s eye pictured a scene of different kind; a table bedecked with spotless linen and glistening silver, surrounded by gentlemen immaculate in evening attire—and in the reddening faces of those gentlemen I could trace the same lines which appeared in full development of the beasts of the crowd. Truly, the effects of liquor are universal, and the shamelessness of man unbounded. How can reform be wrought in the crowd, when supposedly respectable boards groan beneath the goblets of rare old vintages? Is mankind asleep, that its enemy is thus entertained as a bosom friend? But a week or two ago, at a parade held in honour of the returning Rhode Island National Guard, the Chief Executive of this State, Mr. Robert Livingston Beeckman, prominent in New York, Newport, and Providence society, appeared in such an intoxicated condition that he could scarce guide his mount, or retain his seat in the saddle, and he the guardian of the liberties and interests of that Colony carved by the faith, hope, and labour of Roger Williams from the wilderness of savage New-England! I am perhaps an extremist on the subject of prohibition, but I can see no justification whatsoever for the tolerance of such a degrading demon as drink.

Followers Everywhere To start with; Facebook : 10K followers !! Instagram : 710 followers !! Twitter : 20K followers !! Followers!! Followers!! And Followers!! Well, who are these followers? Just more than being a crowd of audience, who are they? Ever thought of? And for what purpose are they following you or someone else? Is it because you are a famous personality, a best friend, or you're someone who holds a high status in the society or just because you're simply rich enough to be followed ? Everyone live their life the way they want to. No one is bound to live under certain limitations or boundaries. Every individual have their own freedom in life. Each one of them is unique too. But what holds us different from others is the work we do for ourselves and for our society. Our behaviour, personality, nature, our attitude towards life and our talents hold us apart from others. Some people are really good and some are really worse than you ever thought of. What I'm trying to say is that some are 'legally' good and they may or may not hold a high position in the society and some are 'illegally' good and they may or may not hold a high position in the society. I just want to say that follow people for who they actually are, for the good work they do for themselves and for everyone. And respect them by being their true follower in a true sense. The person whom you follow doesn't need to be a rich or poor. A person should be rich by heart and poor by wealth! Even I'm not someone to be followed, yet I do have a few followers. It's not because I'm some great personality or a renowned writer, but might be because they like my work. And I feel happy for that. And I thank God for blessing me with this wonderful skill of writing. Even I follow many people including some really great personalities for their good work and for their kind way of serving the society and the poor. And I believe that, this is the true way to show respect for them.

A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend? Yet this status is used again and again to connote the highest intimacy. My mother is my best friend. My husband is my best friend. No. True sisterhood, the kind where you grew fingernails in the same womb, were pushed screaming through identical birth canals, is not the same as friendship. You don’t choose each other, and there’s no furtive period of getting to know the other. You’re part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord—tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential—and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.

Some very elegant dishes were served up to himself and a few more of us, whilst those placed before the rest of the company consisted simply of cheap dishes and scraps. There were, in small bottles, three different kinds of wine; not that the guest might take their choice, but that they might not have any option in their power; one kind being for himself, and for us; another sort for his lesser friends (for it seems he has degrees of friends), and the third for his own freedmen and ours. My neighbour . . . asked me if I approved the arrangement. Not at all, I told him. "Pray, then," he asked, "what is your method upon such occasions?" "Mine," I returned, "is to give all my visitors the same reception; for when I give an invitation, it is to entertain, not distinguish, my company: I place every man upon my own level whom I admit to my table." . . . He replied, "This must cost you a great deal." "Not in the least." "How can that be?" "Simply because, although my freedmen don't drink the same wine as myself, yet I drink the same as they do." And, no doubt about it, if a man is wise enough to moderate his appetite, he will not find it such a very expensive thing to share with all his visitors what he takes himself. Restrain it, keep it in, if you wish to be true economist. You will find temperance a far better way of saving than treating other people rudely can be. . . . Remember, then, nothing is more to be avoided than this modern alliance of luxury with meanness; odious enough when existing separate and distinct, but still more hateful where you meet with them together.

Read. You should read Bukowski and Ferlinghetti, read Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and listen to Coltrane, Nina Simone, Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Son House, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Miles Davis, Lou Reed, Nick Drake, Bobbie Gentry, George Jones, Jimmy Reed, Odetta, Funkadelic, and Woody Guthrie. Drive across America. Ride trains. Fly to countries beyond your comfort zone. Try different things. Join hands across the water. Different foods. New tasks. Different menus and tastes. Talk with the guy who’s working in construction on your block, who’s working on the highway you’re traveling on. Speak with your neighbors. Get to know them. Practice civil disobedience. Try new resistance. Be part of the solution, not the problem. Don’t litter the earth, it’s the only one you have, learn to love her. Care for her. Learn another language. Trust your friends with kindness. You will need them one day. You will need earth one day. Do not fear death. There are worse things than death. Do not fear the reaper. Lie in the sunshine but from time to time let the neon light your way. ZZ Top, Jefferson Airplane, Spirit. Get a haircut. Dye your hair pink or blue. Do it for you. Wear eyeliner. Your eyes are the windows to your soul. Show them off. Wear a feather in your cap. Run around like the Mad Hatter. Perhaps he had the answer. Visit the desert. Go to the zoo. Go to a county fair. Ride the Ferris wheel. Ride a horse. Pet a pig. Ride a donkey. Protest against war. Put a peace symbol on your automobile. Drive a Volkswagen. Slow down for skateboarders. They might have the answers. Eat gingerbread men. Pray to the moon and the stars. God is out there somewhere. Don’t worry. You’ll find out where soon enough. Dance. Even if you don’t know how to dance. Read The Four Agreements. Read the Bible. Read the Bhagavad Gita. Join nothing. It won’t help. No games, no church, no religion, no yellow-brick road, no way to Oz. Wear beads. Watch a caterpillar in the sun.

Jeremiah came over after a while. He sat on the edge of my chair and drank from my thermos of Kool-Aid. “She’s pretty,” I said. “Who? Yolie?” He shrugged. “She’s nice. One of my many admirers.” “Ha!” “So what about you? Cam Cameron, huh? Cam the vegetarian. Cam the straight edge.” I tried not to smile. “So what? I like him.” “He’s kind of a dork.” “That’s what I like about him. He’s…different.” He frowned slightly. “Different from who?” “I don’t know.” But I did know. I knew exactly who he was different from. “You mean he’s not a dick like Conrad?” I laughed, and so did he. “Yeah, exactly. He’s nice.” “Just nice, huh?” “More than nice.” “So you’re over him, then? For real?” We both knew the “him” he was talking about. “Yes,” I told him. “I don’t believe you,” Jeremiah said, watching me closely-just like when he was trying to figure out what kind of hand I had in Uno. I took off my sunglasses and looked him in the eye. “It’s true. I’m over him.” “We’ll see,” Jeremiah said, standing up. “My break’s over. Are you okay over here? Wait around and I’ll drive us home. I can put your bike in the back.” I nodded, and watched him walk back to the lifeguard chair. Jeremiah was a good friend. He’d always been good to me, watched out for me.

I had it in middle school, with this girl Raya,” Vera replied. “It was kind of fucked up.” My shoulders tensed. I pushed a fry around in the dregs of my ketchup. “Why do you think that?” I asked. “Um, it was really intense, I think. Too intense. And the whole thing kind of blew up. It actually really hurt. I still think about her sometimes.” “I’m sorry,” I said. “Yeah.” Vera nodded. “Thanks. It’s a lot to promise, you know? That you’re gonna be in the same friendship for your whole life.” “We do that romantically, though,” Candace said. “I mean, that’s the basic idea, if you believe in marriage and stuff.” “Yeah, but that feels different,” Vera argued. “You go into a romantic relationship knowing it can completely combust and leave you wrecked. You basically sign up for that. I feel like friends don’t talk about that happening.

In mid-January 2024, with Gaza’s health system essentially collapsed and no one left to count the dead, The New York Times publishes an article detailing a drop in the number of Palestinian casualties—marking a change in Israel’s approach, it is said. This will happen again and again in the coming months: very serious reporting about perceived slowdowns in the rate of killing, the “war” entering a different “phase.” Every such story seems to prompt another round of argument about the folly of abandoning the Democratic Party now, when so much is at stake. A writer friend of mine describes it as cutting off your nose to spite your face. It’s a hackneyed phrase for a writer to rely on, but I can’t stop thinking about it, the privilege implicit in its assumptions: ownership of body, agency over mutilation. It is a source of great confusion first, then growing rage, among establishment Democrats that there might exist a sizable group of people in this country who quite simply cannot condone a real, ongoing genocide, no matter how much worse an alternative ruling party may be or do. This stance boggles a particular kind of liberal mind because such a conception of political affairs, applied with any regularity, forces the establishment to stand for something.

I was stuck in another small town, trapped in another universe populated by the kind of people who’d only ever seen faces like mine on their evening news, and I hated it. I hated the exhausting, lonely months it took to settle into a new school; I hated how long it took for the kids around me to realize I was neither terrifying nor dangerous; I hated the pathetic, soul-sucking effort it took to finally make a single friend brave enough to sit next to me in public. I’d had to relive this awful cycle so many times, at so many different schools, that sometimes I really wanted to put my head through a wall. All I wanted from the world anymore was to be perfectly unremarkable. I wanted to know what it was like to walk through a room and be stared at by no one. But a single glance around campus deflated any hopes I might’ve had for blending in.

A person is never the same person for very long. You can carry memories in your soul, for example, of childhood friendships, but agonize over the fact that they are only memories because those friends are not the same people right now. This kind of experiential interaction with memories and the people attached to our memories, is a source of anguish in all of our lives. There is a type of acceptance and understanding that needs to be applied here: accepting that the scenes of life change as time goes by, and understanding that the people occupying the scenes of your life were in fact authentic. But right now, they are authentically who they are NOW, which is a different person. They're not the same person today. But who they used to be was also who they truly were at that time. We need to release people from the chains of our memories and not demand explanations of them. We must allow them the freedom to morph, to grow, into all the persons they were meant to become. But then we also have to afford ourselves this, in that very same breath. And this is why, sometimes marriages need to be over, sometimes friendships need to be over, sometimes relationships need to come to an end. Because you need to set yourself, and other people, free from the skins they used to wear.

In any sizable park or green space, you’ll likely find two kinds of paths: the formal kind, paved with brick or concrete, and the informal kind, the paths made by people walking over and over a stretch of grass, wearing away the green and carving a scruffy emergent line in its place. These are paths made by sheer repetitive use; they’re not anyone’s executive decision but arise one choice at a time, collected in aggregate. Most of us know them as friendly disobedience: they’re shortcuts, maybe, or just the most commonsense pathway from one frequented site to another. Urban planners call these paths “desire lines,” or sometimes “cow paths,” “pirate paths,” or the slightly stuffier “counter-grid trajectories.” They indicate yearning, some planners say—either to have formal paved lines where there are none or to actively carve out a different path where one had been prescribed.

We live in a culture that teaches us that "men" are the sexual aggressors and pursuers. We also live in a world where most women, trans, and non-binary folks have had negative experiences with men who are hitting on them. These factors tend to lead to some big gender differences for those exploring non-monogamy. Cisgender men often struggle when they first enter the world of non-monogamy. Within consensual non-monogamy (CNM) communities, most folks who sleep with cis men choose their partners based on referrals and endorsements. As in the world of business, it truly is who you know. Cis men who have been in the communities longer have dated and interacted with more people, and, therefore, have more word of mouth. It is an unfortunate reality that many, especially cisgender women, will not date men they don't already know about through their friends and communities. So, if you're a cis man exploring CNM, expect that it may take a while before you start seeing the kind of attention that others get. Focus on being kind, respectful, and honest. Respect the needs and boundaries of everyone with whom you interact. Spend lots of time getting to know other people simply as people - especially of your preferred gender to date - and form genuine friendships and connections with them free from any pressure to become sexual.

I BELIEVE THAT we know much more about God than we admit that we know, than perhaps we altogether know that we know. God speaks to us, I would say, much more often than we realize or than we choose to realize. Before the sun sets every evening, he speaks to each of us in an intensely personal and unmistakable way. His message is not written out in starlight, which in the long run would make no difference; rather it is written out for each of us in the humdrum, helter-skelter events of each day; it is a message that in the long run might just make all the difference. Who knows what he will say to me today or to you today or into the midst of what kind of unlikely moment he will choose to say it. Not knowing is what makes today a holy mystery as every day is a holy mystery. But I believe that there are some things that by and large God is always saying to each of us. Each of us, for instance, carries around inside himself, I believe, a certain emptiness—a sense that something is missing, a restlessness, the deep feeling that somehow all is not right inside his skin. Psychologists sometimes call it anxiety, theologians sometimes call it estrangement, but whatever you call it, I doubt that there are many who do not recognize the experience itself, especially no one of our age, which has been variously termed the age of anxiety, the lost generation, the beat generation, the lonely crowd. Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him. But he also speaks to us about ourselves, about what he wants us to do and what he wants us to become; and this is the area where I believe that we know so much more about him than we admit even to ourselves, where people hear God speak even if they do not believe in him. A face comes toward us down the street. Do we raise our eyes or do we keep them lowered, passing by in silence? Somebody says something about somebody else, and what he says happens to be not only cruel but also funny, and everybody laughs. Do we laugh too, or do we speak the truth? When a friend has hurt us, do we take pleasure in hating him, because hate has its pleasures as well as love, or do we try to build back some flimsy little bridge? Sometimes when we are alone, thoughts come swarming into our heads like bees—some of them destructive, ugly, self-defeating thoughts, some of them creative and glad. Which thoughts do we choose to think then, as much as we have the choice? Will we be brave today or a coward today? Not in some big way probably but in some little foolish way, yet brave still. Will we be honest today or a liar? Just some little pint-sized honesty, but honest still. Will we be a friend or cold as ice today? All the absurd little meetings, decisions, inner skirmishes that go to make up our days. It all adds up to very little, and yet it all adds up to very much. Our days are full of nonsense, and yet not, because it is precisely into the nonsense of our days that God speaks to us words of great significance—not words that are written in the stars but words that are written into the raw stuff and nonsense of our days, which are not nonsense just because God speaks into the midst of them. And the words that he says, to each of us differently, are be brave…be merciful…feed my lambs…press on toward the goal.

I read to fill my mind and to block out the bad memories. But I found that as I read more, my thoughts were getting deeper, my vision wider, and my emotions less shallow. The vocabulary in South Korea was so much richer than the one I had known, and when you have more words to describe the world, you increase your ability to think complex thoughts. In North Korea, the regime doesn’t want you to think, and they hate subtlety. Everything is either black or white, with no shades of gray. For instance, in North Korea, the only kind of “love” you can describe is for the Leader. We had heard the “love” word used in different ways in smuggled TV shows and movies, but there was no way to apply it in daily life in North Korea—not with your family, friends, husband, or wife. But in South Korea there were so many different ways of expressing love—for your parents, friends, nature, God, animals, and, of course, your lover.

Did your master have any wisdom to share about traitors?” Nikli asked. “About how to deal with someone you trust who turns against you?” “Vstim said to always read contracts with friends an extra time,” Rysn said softly. “That’s it?” “I asked him, on another occasion, to explain. He said, ‘Rysn, being cheated is a terrible feeling. Being cheated by someone you love is worse. Discovering such a deception is like finding yourself in a deep dark ocean with nothing around you but formless shadows of things you once thought you understood and enjoyed. It is painful beyond explanation. But that is never a reason to pretend it can’t happen. So read those contracts again. Just in case.’ ” Nikli grunted. “That’s . . . a different kind of wisdom than I’d anticipated. I thought maybe this man lived purely a life of charity.” “Vstim is good and honest,” Rysn said. “But you don’t get a reputation for either without some people seeing your nature as an opportunity.

I don’t like stories. I like moments. I like night better than day, moon better than sun, and here-and-now better than any sometime-later. I also like birds, mushrooms, the blues, peacock feathers, black cats, blue-eyed people, heraldry, astrology, criminal stories with lots of blood, and ancient epic poems where human heads can hold conversations with former friends and generally have a great time for years after they’ve been cut off. I like good food and good drink, sitting in a hot bath and lounging in a snowbank, wearing everything I own at once, and having everything I need close at hand. I like speed and that special ache in the pit of the stomach when you accelerate to the point of no return. I like to frighten and to be frightened, to amuse and to confound. I like writing on the walls so that no one can guess who did it, and drawing so that no one can guess what it is. I like doing my writing using a ladder or not using it, with a spray can or squeezing the paint from a tube. I like painting with a brush, with a sponge, and with my fingers. I like drawing the outline first and then filling it in completely, so that there’s no empty space left. I like letters as big as myself, but I like very small ones as well. I like directing those who read them here and there by means of arrows, to other places where I also wrote something, but I also like to leave false trails and false signs. I like to tell fortunes with runes, bones, beans, lentils, and I Ching. Hot climates I like in the books and movies; in real life, rain and wind. Generally rain is what I like most of all. Spring rain, summer rain, autumn rain. Any rain, anytime. I like rereading things I’ve read a hundred times over. I like the sound of the harmonica, provided I’m the one playing it. I like lots of pockets, and clothes so worn that they become a kind of second skin instead of something that can be taken off. I like guardian amulets, but specific ones, so that each is responsible for something separate, not the all-inclusive kind. I like drying nettles and garlic and then adding them to anything and everything. I like covering my fingers with rubber cement and then peeling it off in front of everybody. I like sunglasses. Masks, umbrellas, old carved furniture, copper basins, checkered tablecloths, walnut shells, walnuts themselves, wicker chairs, yellowed postcards, gramophones, beads, the faces on triceratopses, yellow dandelions that are orange in the middle, melting snowmen whose carrot noses have fallen off, secret passages, fire-evacuation-route placards; I like fretting when in line at the doctor’s office, and screaming all of a sudden so that everyone around feels bad, and putting my arm or leg on someone when asleep, and scratching mosquito bites, and predicting the weather, keeping small objects behind my ears, receiving letters, playing solitaire, smoking someone else’s cigarettes, and rummaging in old papers and photographs. I like finding something lost so long ago that I’ve forgotten why I needed it in the first place. I like being really loved and being everyone’s last hope, I like my own hands—they are beautiful, I like driving somewhere in the dark using a flashlight, and turning something into something completely different, gluing and attaching things to each other and then being amazed that it actually worked. I like preparing things both edible and not, mixing drinks, tastes, and scents, curing friends of the hiccups by scaring them. There’s an awful lot of stuff I like.

All right, now that the weirdness between us has caused actual physical damage, I think it’s time we talked it out, don’t you?” He gave a half smile and then turned back to the path. “We don’t need to be weird,” he said. “These past few days, since the thing with Elodie, I’ve been thinking.” He took a deep breath, and I knew that this was one of those rare occasions when Cal was about to say a lot of words at once. “I like you, Sophie. A lot. For a while, I thought it might be more than that. But you love Cross.” He said it matter-of-factly, but I still caught the way his ears reddened. “I know I’ve said some pretty awful stuff about him, but…I was wrong. He’s a good guy. So, I guess what I’m saying is that as the guy who’s betrothed to you, I wish we could be more than friends.” He stopped, turning around to face me. “But as your friend, I want you to be happy. And if Cross is who you want, then I’m not gonna stand in the way of that.” “I’m the worst fiancé ever, aren’t I?” Cal lifted one shoulder. “Nah. This one warlock I knew, his betrothed set him on fire.” Laughing so I wouldn’t cry, I tentatively lifted my arms to hug him. He folded me against his chest, and there was no awkwardness between us, and I knew the warmth in the pit of my stomach was love. Just a different kind. Sniffling, I pulled back and rubbed at my nose. “Okay, now that the hard part’s over, let’s go tackle the Underworld.” “Got room for two more?” Startled, I turned to see Jenna and Archer standing on the path, Jenna’s hand clutching Archer’s sleeve as she tried to stay on her feet. “What?” was all I could say. Archer took a few careful steps forward. “Hey, this has been a group effort so far. No reason to stop now.” “You guys can’t go into the Underworld with me,” I told them. “You heard Dad, I’m the only one with-“ “With powers strong enough. Yeah, we got that,” Jenna said. “But how are you supposed to carry a whole bunch of demonglass out of that place? It’ll burn you. And hey, maybe your powers will be strong enough to get all of us in, too.” She gestured to herself and the boys. “Plus it’s not like we don’t have powers of our own.” I knew I should tell them to go back. But having the three of them there made me feel a whole lot better and whole lot less terrified. So in the end, I gave an exaggerated sign and said, “Okay, fine. But just so you know, following me into hell means you’re all definitely the sidekicks.” “Darn, I was hoping to be the rakishly charming love interest,” Archer said, taking my hand. “Cal, any role you want?” I asked him, and he looked ruefully at the craggy rock looming over us. As he did, there was the grinding sound of stone against stone. We all stared at the opening that appeared. “I’m just hoping to be the Not Dead Guy,” Cal muttered. We faced the entrance. “Between the four of us, we fought ghouls, survived attacks by demons and L’Occhio di Dio, and practically raised the dead,” I said. “We can do this.” “See, inspiring speeches like that are why you get to be the leader,” Archer said, and he squeezed my hand. And then, moving almost as one, we stepped into the rock.

Just then, I notice Mrs. Mulgrave giving the younger woman beside her a slight push in my direction. "This is my daughter, Maisie. She will be your maid." "Maisie?" I can't help blurting out in astonishment. I hardly recognize her. The past seven years have transformed Maisie from a plain preteen into a beautiful young adult. I didn't expect her to be so... pretty. She wears a black tee with black pants, but the simple clothing and lack of makeup only enhances her looks. She has heavy-lidded deep brown eyes, clear skin with the hint of a tan, the kind of plush pink lips that housewives in my New York hometown would pay good money for, and long brown hair highlighted with strands of gold. Her only adornments are a thick wristwatch and a rectangular pendant hanging on a chain around her neck. I feel a pang of sympathy as I look from mother to daughter. If Maisie's luck had been different---if she'd been born to parents like the Marinos---she could have had the world at her feet, instead of being shut up in a house working as a maid.

They had shared each other the way good friends can't even after forty years of it. He knew the boy and the boy knew him, because they each had a kind of searchlight in their heads, something they hadn't asked for, something that had just been given. (Naw, you got a flashlight, he the one with the searchlight.) And sometimes that light, that shine, seemed like a pretty nice thing. You could pick the horses, or like the boy had said, you could tell your daddy where his trunk was when it turned up missing. But that was only dressing, the sauce on the salad, and down below there was as much bitter vetch in that salad as there was cool cucumber. You could taste pain and death and tears. And now the boy was stuck in that place, and he would go. For the boy. Because, speaking to the boy, they had only been different colors when they used their mouths. So he would go. He would do what he could, because if he didn't, the boy was going to die right inside his head. But because he was human he could not help a bitter wish that the cup had never been passed his way.

If you like cool, funny entertainment, you might like this one. It's a first novel by a local author." She handed him a copy of Practical Demonkeeping. "A very different kind of buddy novel. I thought it was hilarious." "You're reading me like a book." The guy shook his head as if embarrassed by his own lame joke. Then he looked over at Blythe. Natalie saw his gaze move swiftly over her mother's red V-neck sweater and short skirt. "How can you tell that's exactly what would make me happy?" he asked. Oh boy. He was flirting. Guys did that a lot with her mom. She was super pretty, and Natalie knew it wasn't only because Mom was her mom and all kids thought their moms were pretty. Even her snottiest friends like Kayla said Blythe looked like a model. Like Julia Roberts. Plus, her mom had a knack for dressing cool and being social---she could talk to anyone and make them like her. Also, she had a superpower, which was on full display right now. She had the ability to see a person for the first time and almost instantly know what book to recommend. She was really smart and had also read every book ever written, or so it seemed to Natalie. She could talk to high school kids about Ivanhoe and Silas Marner. She ran a mystery discussion group. She could tell people the exact day the new Mary Higgins Clark novel would come out. She knew which kids would only ever read Goosebumps books, no matter what, and she knew which kids would try something else, like Edward Eager or Philip Pullman. Sometimes people didn't know anything about the book they were searching for except "It's blue with gold page edges" and her mom would somehow figure it out.

A reflection on Robert Lowell Robert Lowell knew I was not one of his devotees. I attended his famous “office hours” salon only a few times. Life Studies was not a book of central importance for me, though I respected it. I admired his writing, but not the way many of my Boston friends did. Among poets in his generation, poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Alan Dugan, and Allen Ginsberg meant more to me than Lowell’s. I think he probably sensed some of that. To his credit, Lowell nevertheless was generous to me (as he was to many other young poets) just the same. In that generosity, and a kind of open, omnivorous curiosity, he was different from my dear teacher at Stanford, Yvor Winters. Like Lowell, Winters attracted followers—but Lowell seemed almost dismayed or a little bewildered by imitators; Winters seemed to want disciples: “Wintersians,” they were called. A few years before I met Lowell, when I was still in California, I read his review of Winters’s Selected Poems. Lowell wrote that, for him, Winters’s poetry passed A. E. Housman’s test: he felt that if he recited it while he was shaving, he would cut himself. One thing Lowell and Winters shared, that I still revere in both of them, was a fiery devotion to the vocal essence of poetry: the work and interplay of sentences and lines, rhythm and pitch. The poetry in the sounds of the poetry, in a reader’s voice: neither page nor stage. Winters criticizing the violence of Lowell’s enjambments, or Lowell admiring a poem in pentameter for its “drill-sergeant quality”: they shared that way of thinking, not matters of opinion but the matter itself, passionately engaged in the art and its vocal—call it “technical”—materials. Lowell loved to talk about poetry and poems. His appetite for that kind of conversation seemed inexhaustible. It tended to be about historical poetry, mixed in with his contemporaries. When he asked you, what was Pope’s best work, it was as though he was talking about a living colleague . . . which in a way he was. He could be amusing about that same sort of thing. He described Julius Caesar’s entourage waiting in the street outside Cicero’s house while Caesar chatted up Cicero about writers. “They talked about poetry,” said Lowell in his peculiar drawl. “Caesar asked Cicero what he thought of Jim Dickey.” His considerable comic gift had to do with a humor of self and incongruity, rather than wit. More surreal than donnish. He had a memorable conversation with my daughter Caroline when she was six years old. A tall, bespectacled man with a fringe of long gray hair came into her living room, with a certain air. “You look like somebody famous,” she said to him, “but I can’t remember who.” “Do I?” “Yes . . . now I remember!— Benjamin Franklin.” “He was a terrible man, just awful.” “Or no, I don’t mean Benjamin Franklin. I mean you look like a Christmas ornament my friend Heather made out of Play-Doh, that looked like Benjamin Franklin.” That left Robert Lowell with nothing to do but repeat himself: “Well, he was a terrible man.” That silly conversation suggests the kind of social static or weirdness the man generated. It also happens to exemplify his peculiar largeness of mind . . . even, in a way, his engagement with the past. When he died, I realized that a large vacuum had appeared at the center of the world I knew.

Right around that time, I started dating a guy named Jeff. He was a classically handsome, popular guy. But there was something different about him too. He was angrier than most teenage boys, and a little misunderstood. I ignored the signs that he was probably a bit unstable. Signs like when they gave him a fish fillet at McDonald’s instead of a Big Mac, he became so furious that he cried. Truly lost it. Real tears of rage. Like the kind of tears guys are only supposed to get when they watch a movie that touches on their dad issues. (So, most movies.) Isn’t it funny that they say most girls have daddy issues, when really, every dude does? But this dude had daddy, mommy, doggy, and fish fillet issues. I just thought, Well, he can’t help it. But I understand him. I’m here for him. Even though we were both generally well liked, when we were together it was us vs. the world. I’ve only recently broken my pattern of being drawn to the “you’re the only one who gets me” guy. Which is a bad guy to be drawn to, and it’s not a coincidence if everyone—including all your friends and family and your dog—dislikes him. But

Pam was sixty-four years old by then and was not yet a grandmother, which worried her, and her two sons were no longer living in New York, which made her sad. And also her favorite son, the younger one, who lived in San Francisco, was causing her distress of a different kind. Her husband, Ted, had been (honestly) tiresome to her for many years. She still thought of herself as young but understood that she was not. She had a number of friends, many in East Hampton as well, and yet—this had felt rather sudden to her—she could barely stand them. They had become unbelievably insipid. Lydia Robbins was the one Pam considered to be her best friend. Lydia was ten years younger than Pam and had an energy that Pam enjoyed. As they took their walks, Lydia’s full glossy dark hair would fall across her face frequently as she turned to look at Pam, nodding at something Pam had said. But after they shared their confidences, Pam felt she couldn’t bear Lydia. Didn’t anyone ever have anything interesting to say? They talked of movies they were all watching, of series on Netflix, they spoke about their children, but always carefully

There was one panicked moment. He picked a book from the wall, and the shapes inside, all the letters, were friends to him; but as he settled before them and began to mouth and mutter them, waiting for them to sound as words in his head, they were all gibberish. He grew frantic very quickly, fearing that he had lost what it was he had gained.t pieced it together into a different language. Shekel was dumbstruck at the realization that these glyphs he had conquered could do the same job for so many peoples who could not understand each other at all. He grinned as he thought about it. He was glad to share. He opened more foreign volumes, making or trying to make the noises that the letters spelled and laughing at how strange they sounded. He looked carefully at the pictures and cross-referenced them again, tentatively he concluded that in this lanugage, this particular clutch of letters meant 'boat' and this other set 'moon'. ....he reached new shelving and opened a book whose script was like nothing he knew. He laughed, delighted at its strange curves. He moved off further and found yet another alphabet. And a little way off there was another. For hours he found intrigue and astonishment by exploring the non-Ragamoll shelves. He found in those meaningless words and illegible alphabets not only an awe at the world, but the remnants of the fetishism to which he had been subjected before, when all books had existed for him as those did now, only as mute objects with mass and dimension and color, but without content. .... He gazedc at the books in Base and High Kettai and Sunglari and Lubbock and Khadohi with a kind of fascinated nostalgia for his own illiteracy, without for a fraction of a moment missing it.

It is as if there are two big wolves living inside me; one is white and one is black. The white wolf is good, kind, and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all that is around him and does not take offense when no offense was intended. The good wolf, grounded and strong in the understanding of who he is and what he is capable of, fights only when it is right to do so and when he must in order to protect himself or his family, and even then he does it in the right way. He looks out for all the other wolves in his pack and never deviates from his nature. “But there is a black wolf also that lives inside me, and this wolf is very different. He is loud, angry, discontent, jealous, and afraid. The littlest thing will set him off into a fit of rage. He fights with everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think clearly because his greed for more and his anger and hate are so great. But it is helpless anger, son, for his anger will change nothing. He looks for trouble wherever he goes, so he easily finds it. He trusts no one, so he has no real friends.” The old chief sits in silence for a few minutes, letting the story of the two wolves penetrate his young grandson’s mind. Then he slowly bends down, looks deeply into his grandson’s eyes, and confesses, “Sometimes it’s hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them fight hard to dominate my spirit.” Riveted by his elder’s account of this great internal battle, the boy tugs on his grandfather’s breechcloth and anxiously asks, “Which one of the wolves wins, Grandfather?” And with a knowing smile and a strong, firm voice, the chief says, “They both do, son. You see, if I choose to feed only the white wolf, the black wolf will be waiting around every corner looking to see when I am off balance or too busy to pay attention to one of my responsibilities, and he will attack the white wolf and cause many problems for me and our tribe. He will always be angry and fighting to get the attention he craves. But if I pay a little attention to the black wolf because I understand his nature, if I acknowledge him for the strong force that he is and let him know that I respect him for his character and will use him to help me if we as a tribe are ever in big trouble, he will be happy, the white wolf will be happy, and they both win. We all win.

I like you pretty okay as you are,” Rusty conceded. “I remember when you were just Angie’s friend who I vaguely thought might be high on cough syrup all the time. But then I saw how you were with Angela, and what you meant to her. I saw your home, the warmth of it, how different it was from mine, how much I wanted a home like that for Angela. I loved you, and the thought of all that came with you. I wanted to make that love mean something. For the first time in my life, I wanted to do something, and I wanted what I did to matter. I wanted to take what I felt for you and build something beautiful.” Kami glanced nervously up at his face. “That’s, um, that means a lot to me, but you have to know I’m not looking to settle down and build a home with anyone until my mid-thirties, if ever, because I am going to be pursuing my career as a hard-hitting reporter.” Rusty smacked her lightly on the top of her head. “You were a beautiful dream to me, you brat; please cease inserting your unpleasant and hurtful reality into my dream. It was the kind of dream that’s not supposed to come true. It was the kind of dream that does something else. It taught me who I wanted to be.

She saw the different times at sea—calm blue days, raw pea-green ones, others when the skies turned black and thunderbolts blasted the masts, and the galloping waves. The ship then leaned this way, another way, seeming to want to throw herself right over and upside down. Had Art ever been frightened? Maybe only once. One of the earliest memories, this. Molly standing braced, holding Art, two or three years old, in her arms. ‘What a spectacle!’ cried Molly. ‘Look—how beautiful it is!’ And then, ‘Don’t ever be afraid of the sea. She’s the best friend out kind have got. Better than any land, however fair. Respect the sea, yes, but don’t ever think what the sea does is cruel or unjust. People are that. The sea is only herself. And this ship—she’s lucky. She’s friends with this sea. They know how to behave with each other.’ Exactly then, a great green salt wave swamped the decks. Canvas was being hauled in, Molly’s crew clutching and swinging like monkeys along the masts. Art and Molly, soaked, and Molly saying, ‘And even if we went down, don’t fear that either. Those that the sea keeps sleep among mermaids and pearls and sunken kingdoms. You wouldn’t mind that, would you, love?

And the principal tenet of Pasternak’s thought—that Nature and History do not belong to two different orders but form a continuum in which human lives find themselves immersed and by which they are determined—can be articulated better through narration than through theoretical propositions. In this way these reflections become one with the broad canvas of all the humanity and nature in the novel, they do not dominate or suffocate it. The result is that, as happens with all genuine storytellers, the book’s meaning is not to be sought in the sum of the ideas enunciated but in the totality of its images and sensations, in the flavour of life, in its silences. And all the ideological proliferations, these discussions which constantly flare up and die down, about nature and history, the individual and politics, religion and poetry, as though resuming old conversations with friends long gone, create a deep echo chamber for the strictly humble events the characters undergo, and come forth (to adopt a beautiful image used by Pasternak for the revolution) ‘like a sigh which has been held back too long’. Pasternak has breathed into his whole novel a desire for the kind of novel which no longer exists.

Pay attention to everything the dying person says. You might want to keep pens and a spiral notebook beside the bed so that anyone can jot down notes about gestures, conversations, or anything out of the ordinary said by the dying person. Talk with one another about these comments and gestures. • Remember that there may be important messages in any communication, however vague or garbled. Not every statement made by a dying person has significance, but heed them all so as not to miss the ones that do. • Watch for key signs: a glassy-eyed look; the appearance of staring through you; distractedness or secretiveness; seemingly inappropriate smiles or gestures, such as pointing, reaching toward someone or something unseen, or waving when no one is there; efforts to pick at the covers or get out of bed for no apparent reason; agitation or distress at your inability to comprehend something the dying person has tried to say. • Respond to anything you don’t understand with gentle inquiries. “Can you tell me what’s happening?” is sometimes a helpful way to initiate this kind of conversation. You might also try saying, “You seem different today. Can you tell me why?” • Pose questions in open-ended, encouraging terms. For example, if a dying person whose mother is long dead says, “My mother’s waiting for me,” turn that comment into a question: “Mother’s waiting for you?” or “I’m so glad she’s close to you. Can you tell me about it?” • Accept and validate what the dying person tells you. If he says, “I see a beautiful place!” say, “That’s wonderful! Can you tell me more about it?” or “I’m so pleased. I can see that it makes you happy,” or “I’m so glad you’re telling me this. I really want to understand what’s happening to you. Can you tell me more?” • Don’t argue or challenge. By saying something like “You couldn’t possibly have seen Mother, she’s been dead for ten years,” you could increase the dying person’s frustration and isolation, and run the risk of putting an end to further attempts at communicating. • Remember that a dying person may employ images from life experiences like work or hobbies. A pilot may talk about getting ready to go for a flight; carry the metaphor forward: “Do you know when it leaves?” or “Is there anyone on the plane you know?” or “Is there anything I can do to help you get ready for takeoff?” • Be honest about having trouble understanding. One way is to say, “I think you’re trying to tell me something important and I’m trying very hard, but I’m just not getting it. I’ll keep on trying. Please don’t give up on me.” • Don’t push. Let the dying control the breadth and depth of the conversation—they may not be able to put their experiences into words; insisting on more talk may frustrate or overwhelm them. • Avoid instilling a sense of failure in the dying person. If the information is garbled or the delivery impossibly vague, show that you appreciate the effort by saying, “I can see that this is hard for you; I appreciate your trying to share it with me,” or “I can see you’re getting tired/angry/frustrated. Would it be easier if we talked about this later?” or “Don’t worry. We’ll keep trying and maybe it will come.” • If you don’t know what to say, don’t say anything. Sometimes the best response is simply to touch the dying person’s hand, or smile and stroke his or her forehead. Touching gives the very important message “I’m with you.” Or you could say, “That’s interesting, let me think about it.” • Remember that sometimes the one dying picks an unlikely confidant. Dying people often try to communicate important information to someone who makes them feel safe—who won’t get upset or be taken aback by such confidences. If you’re an outsider chosen for this role, share the information as gently and completely as possible with the appropriate family members or friends. They may be more familiar with innuendos in a message because they know the person well.

I sat there on that Wednesday evening in my pokey fucking living room, looked at myself on the TV screen being a massive, odious cunt, and realised that nothing has really changed. Deep down, like most of us, still now at the age of thirty-eight, I have this empty, black hole inside of me that nothing and no one seems capable of filling. I say like most of us because, well, look around you. Our society, our businesses, our social constructs, habits, pastimes, addictions and distractions are predicated on vast, endemic levels of emptiness and dissatisfaction. I call it self-hatred. I hate who I was, am and have become and, as we are taught to, I constantly chastise myself for the things I do and say. And such are the global levels of intolerance, greed, entitlement and dysfunction it is evidently not just confined to a small, wounded section of society. We are all in a world of pain. If it was ever any different way back in the past, it has, by now, most certainly become normalised. And I am as angry about that as I am about my own past. There is an anger that runs underneath everything, that fuels my life and feeds the animal inside me. And it is an anger that always, always prevents me, despite my best efforts, from becoming a better version of myself. My goddamn head seems to have a life of its own, quite beyond my control, incapable of reason, compassion or bargaining. It shouts at me from deep inside. As a kid the words didn’t make sense. As an adult it’s waiting at the end of my bed and starts talking an hour or two before I wake up so that when my eyes open it is in full-on rage mode, blaring this shit at me about how glad it is I’m finally awake, how fucked I am today, how there won’t be enough time, I’ll fuck everything up, my friends are plotting against me, trust no one, I must try as hard as I can to salvage everything in my life while knowing it’s already a lost cause. I’m exhausted all the time. It’s a kind of toxic ME – corrosive, pervasive, penetrative, negative, all the bad -ives.

What kind of regrets? For me, very few books cause tears, much less require a handkerchief, but Bronnie Ware’s 2012 book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying did both. Ware spent many years caring for those facing their own mortality. When she questioned the dying about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, Bronnie found that common themes surfaced again and again. The five most common were these: I wish that I’d let myself be happier—too late they realized happiness is a choice; I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends—too often they failed to give them the time and effort they deserved; I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings—too frequently shut mouths and shuttered feelings weighed too heavy to handle; I wish I hadn’t worked so hard—too much time spent making a living over building a life caused too much remorse. As tough as these were, one stood out above them all. The most common regret was this: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself not the life others expected of me. Half-filled dreams and unfulfilled hopes: this was the number-one regret expressed by the dying. As Ware put it, “Most people had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.” Bronnie Ware’s observations aren’t hers alone. At the conclusion of their exhaustive research, Gilovich and Medvec in 1994 wrote, “When people look back on their lives, it is the things they have not done that generate the greatest regret.... People’s actions may be troublesome initially; it is their inactions that plague them most with long-term feelings of regret.” Honoring our hopes and pursuing productive lives through faith in our purpose and priorities is the message from our elders. From the wisest position they’ll ever have comes their clearest message. No regrets. So make sure every day you do what matters most. When you know what matters most, everything makes sense. When you don’t know what matters most, anything makes sense. The best lives aren’t led this way.

In the Middle Ages, marriage was considered a sacrament ordained by God, and God also authorised the father to marry his children according to his wishes and interests. An extramarital affair was accordingly a brazen rebellion against both divine and parental authority. It was a mortal sin, no matter what the lovers felt and thought about it. Today people marry for love, and it is their inner feelings that give value to this bond. Hence, if the very same feelings that once drove you into the arms of one man now drive you into the arms of another, what’s wrong with that? If an extramarital affair provides an outlet for emotional and sexual desires that are not satisfied by your spouse of twenty years, and if your new lover is kind, passionate and sensitive to your needs – why not enjoy it? But wait a minute, you might say. We cannot ignore the feelings of the other concerned parties. The woman and her lover might feel wonderful in each other’s arms, but if their respective spouses find out, everybody will probably feel awful for quite some time. And if it leads to divorce, their children might carry the emotional scars for decades. Even if the affair is never discovered, hiding it involves a lot of tension, and may lead to growing feelings of alienation and resentment. The most interesting discussions in humanist ethics concern situations like extramarital affairs, when human feelings collide. What happens when the same action causes one person to feel good, and another to feel bad? How do we weigh the feelings against each other? Do the good feelings of the two lovers outweigh the bad feelings of their spouses and children? It doesn’t matter what you think about this particular question. It is far more important to understand the kind of arguments both sides deploy. Modern people have differing ideas about extramarital affairs, but no matter what their position is, they tend to justify it in the name of human feelings rather than in the name of holy scriptures and divine commandments. Humanism has taught us that something can be bad only if it causes somebody to feel bad. Murder is wrong not because some god once said, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Rather, murder is wrong because it causes terrible suffering to the victim, to his family members, and to his friends and acquaintances. Theft is wrong not because some ancient text says, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ Rather, theft is wrong because when you lose your property, you feel bad about it. And if an action does not cause anyone to feel bad, there can be nothing wrong about it. If the same ancient text says that God commanded us not to make any images of either humans or animals (Exodus 20:4), but I enjoy sculpting such figures, and I don’t harm anyone in the process – then what could possibly be wrong with it? The same logic dominates current debates on homosexuality. If two adult men enjoy having sex with one another, and they don’t harm anyone while doing so, why should it be wrong, and why should we outlaw it? It is a private matter between these two men, and they are free to decide about it according to their inner feelings. In the Middle Ages, if two men confessed to a priest that they were in love with one another, and that they never felt so happy, their good feelings would not have changed the priest’s damning judgement – indeed, their happiness would only have worsened the situation. Today, in contrast, if two men love one another, they are told: ‘If it feels good – do it! Don’t let any priest mess with your mind. Just follow your heart. You know best what’s good for you.

the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: ‘I like strong women.’ If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because ‘I like strong women’ is code for ‘I hate strong women.’)

If she was gone when I got back, I’d lose my fucking mind. She’d said she’d stay, and she usually did what she said she would. But this thing had her shaken, and I couldn’t wait forty-eight hours to run after her if she took off on me again. I’d go insane. My mind was exhausted. I hadn’t slept last night. I didn’t fully absorb everything she’d said in the kitchen and some of it began to catch up to me now. I didn’t come here to tell you so you could decide whether you want to date me. That’s not even on the table. If Kristen thought I was going to let her go, she was fucking nuts. Not now that I knew she loved me. Not ever. I finally understood the kind of love that made men give up everything. The kind that made someone change religions or go vegan or move to the other side of the world to be with the woman they loved. If someone had told me six months ago that I’d choose a woman who couldn’t have kids, I’d have called him crazy. But being with her wasn’t even something I had to think about. I did want kids. But I wanted her first. Everything else was just everything else. Sure, a part of me grieved a life I knew I wouldn’t have now. Kids that I’d never meet, a future different from the one I’d spent the last few years wanting. But I processed it like I’d been the one who just got a diagnosis. Because in a way, I had. This thing didn’t feel like her problem. It felt like our problem, to figure out together. It was as much mine as it was hers.

As she grew up, as her character was built, as she became headstrong rather than pert, and clever enough to know when to hide her cleverness, as she discovered friends and social life and a new kind of loneliness, as she came from country to town and began amassing her future memories, she admitted her mothers's rule: they made their mistakes, now you make your mistakes. And there was a logical consequence of this, which became part of Martha's creed: after the age of twenty-five, you were not allowed to blame anything on your parents. Of course, it didn't apply if your parents had done something terrible - had raped and murdered you and stolen all your money and sold you into prostitution - but in the average course of an average life, if you were averagely competent and averagely intelligent, and more so if you were more so, then you were not allowed to blame your parents. Of course you did, there were times when it was just too tempting. If only they'd bought me roller-skates like they promised, if only they'd let me go out with David, if only they'd been different, more loving, richer, cleverer, simpler. If only they'd been more indulgent; if only they'd been more strict. If only they'd encouraged me more; if only they'd praised me for the right things...None of that. Of course Martha felt it, some of the time, wanted to cuddle such resentments, but then she would stop and give herself a talking-to. You're on your own, kid. Damage is a normal part of childhood. Not allowed to blame anything on them anymore. Not allowed.

I want a love like me thinking of you thinking of me thinking of you type love or me telling my friends more than I've ever admitted to myself about how I feel about you type love or hating how jealous you are but loving how much you want me all to yourself type love or seeing how your first name just sounds so good next to my last name. and shit- I wanted to see how far I could get without calling you and I barely made it out of my garage. See, I want a love that makes me wait until she falls asleep then wonder if she's dreaming about us being in love type love or who loves the other more or what she's doing at this exact moment or slow dancing in the middle of our apartment to the music of our hearts. Closing my eyes and imagining how a love so good could just hurt so much when she's not there and shit I love not knowing where this love is headed type love. And check this- I wanna place those little post-it notes all around the house so she never forgets how much I love her type love then not have enough ink in my pen to write all the love type love and hope I make her feel as good as she makes me feel and I wanna deal with my friends making fun of me the way I made fun of them when they went through the same kind of love type love. The only difference is this is one of those real type loves and just like in high school I wanna spend hours on the phone not saying shit and then fall asleep and then wake up with her right next to me and smell her all up in my covers type love and I wanna try counting the ways I love her then lose count in the middle just so I could start all over again and I wanna celebrate one of those one-month anniversaries even though they ain't really anniversaries but doing it just 'cause it makes her happy type love and check this- I wanna fall in love with the melody the phone plays when our numbers dial in type love and talk to you until I lose my breath, she leaves me breathless, but with the expanding of my lungs I inhale all of her back into me. I want a love that makes me need to change my cell phone calling plan to something that allows me to talk to her longer 'cause in all honesty, I want to avoid one of them high cell phone bill type loves and I don't want a love that makes me regret how small my hands are I mean the lines on my palms don't give me enough time to love you as long as I'd like to type love and I want a love that makes me st-st-st-stutter just thinking about how strong this love is type love and I want a love that makes me want to cut off all my hair. Well maybe not all of the hair, maybe like I'd cut the split ends and trim the mustache but it would still be a symbol of how strong my love is for her. I kind of feel comfortable now so I even be fantasize about walking out on a green light just dying to get hit by a car just so I could lose my memory, get transported to some third world country just to get treated and somehow meet up again with you so I could fall in love with you in a different language and see if it still feels the same type love. I want a love that's as unexplainable as she is, but I'm married so she is gonna be the one I share this love with.

I realized that it was not Ko-san, now safely ditched for ever, but Ko-san's mother who stood in need of pity and consideration. She must still live on in this hard unpitying world, but he, once he had jumped [in battle], had jumped beyond such things. The case could well have been different, had he never jumped; but he did jump; and that, as they say, is that. Whether this world's weather turns out fine or cloudy no more worries him; but it matters to his mother. It rains, so she sits alone indoors thinking about Ko-san. And now it's fine, so she potters out and meets a friend of Ko-san's. She hangs out the national flag to welcome the returned soliders, but her joy is made querulous with wishing that Ko-san were alive. At the public bath-house, some young girl of marriageable age helps her to carry a bucket of hot water: but her pleasure from that kindness is soured as she thinks if only I had a daughter-in-law like this girl. To live under such conditions is to live in agonies. Had she lost one out of many children, there would be consolation and comfort in the mere fact of the survivors. But when loss halves a family of just one parent and one child, the damage is as irreparable as when a gourd is broken clean across its middle. There's nothing left to hang on to. Like the sergeant's mother, she too had waited for her son's return, counting on shriveled fingers the passing of the days and nights before that special day when she would be able once more to hang on him. But Ko-san with the flag jumped resolutely down into the ditch and still has not climbed back.

I turned to Kitty Sue and surprised myself by answering honestly, "I'm fine. Lee's fine. Lee's more fine than me. I'm having troubles adjusting. Lee seems pretty sure of himself. Lee seems pretty sure of everything." This, I realized, was true about Lee always. I'd never met someone as confident in my life. Well, maybe Hank, but Hank's confidence was quiet and assured. And there was Lee's best friend, Eddie, of course. But Eddie was like Lee's twin, separated at birth, cut from the same cloth. Lee's confidence, and Eddie's, wasn't like Hank's. It was cocky and assertive. "And you aren't sure?" Kitty Sue asked. I looked at her and thought maybe I should have lied. It was too late now. "Nope. He scares me," I admitted. She nodded. "Yep, he's pretty dang scary." I stared. My God, the woman was talking about her son. "You agree?" She looked at Lee then back at me. "Honey, that boy drives me to distraction. It's like he's not of my loins. I don't even know where he came from. If Ally hadn't been the exact replica of Lee, personality-wise, except female I would have wondered if there was a mix up at the hospital." I kept staring. Kitty Sue kept talking. "Hank's just like his Dad. Smart, cautious, controlled, taking only calculated risks. I'm sure Lee calculates his risks, but I think he allows for a much larger margin for error and counts on ... I don't know what he counts on to get him out of whatever scrapes he gets into." I couldn't stop staring. She kept talking, and everything that came out of her mouth was like a verbal car accident. If she was trying to convince me to stick with her son, she should have tried a different tact. "He does ... you know?" Kitty Sue said. I realized she was asking me a question, so I shook my head that no, I didn't know. She explained, "He gets out of every scrape. Always did and always did it on his own. Though it'll take some kind of woman to live a life like that, knowing what he's like, knowing the risks he takes." Her hand went to my knee and she squeezed it before she went on. "Not anyone here would think less of you if you aren't that woman. I'm telling you because it's true. We all love you both and we'll always love you both, no matter what happens between you." She stopped, sighed and continued, "Anyway, I don't even know if that kind of woman exists. I'm his mother. I've lived with him surviving scrapes that would make your hair stand on end and I worry about him every day. He scares the hell out of me.

Before I knew anything about church, I'd assumed that most Christians spoke the same language, shared a sense of fellowship, and beyond minor differences had a faith in common that could transcend political boundaries. But if I had imagined that, initiated as a Christian, I was going to achieve some kind of easy bond with other believers, that fantasy was soon shot. Just a few months after I began going to St. Gregory's, I found myself at a restaurant counter in the Denver airport, waiting for a flight home from a reporting trip. A woman—perhaps noticing the silver crucifix I had recently and self-consciously started to wear around my neck—caught my eye and smiled as she took the stool next to me. She had short blond hair and a cross of her own, and was wearing some kind of sexless denim jumper that reeked of piety. I smiled back, and we exchanged small talk about the weather and flight delays, and then she asked me what I was reading. I showed her the little volume of psalms that I'd borrowed from Rick Fabian. “From my church,” I said proudly. “What church is that?” the woman asked. She leaned forward, in a friendly way. “Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, in San Francisco,” I said, as her face rearranged itself, froze, and closed. It may have been the “San Francisco,” I realized later, but the city's name was a reasonable stand-in, by that point, for everything conservative Christians had come to hate about the Episcopal Church as a whole: homosexuality; wealth; feminism; and morally relativist, decadent, rudderless liberalism. The church I'd unknowingly landed in turned out to be a scandal, a dirty joke at airport restaurants, a sign—in fact, thank God, a sure bet—that I was going to eat with sinners.

I have both some good news and some bad news for you: there is little that is unique or special about your problems. That’s why letting go is so liberating. There’s a kind of self-absorption that comes with fear based on an irrational certainty. When you assume that your plane is the one that’s going to crash, or that your project idea is the stupid one everyone is going to laugh at, or that you’re the one everyone is going to choose to mock or ignore, you’re implicitly telling yourself, “I’m the exception; I’m unlike everybody else; I’m different and special.” This is narcissism, pure and simple. You feel as though your problems deserve to be treated differently, that your problems have some unique math to them that doesn’t obey the laws of the physical universe. My recommendation: don’t be special; don’t be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or dismal failure. Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator. The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible. This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that you’re uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented, or intimidatingly attractive, or especially victimized in ways other people could never imagine. This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you’re somehow owed something by this world. This means giving up the supply of emotional highs that you’ve been sustaining yourself on for years. Like a junkie giving up the needle, you’re going to go through withdrawal when you start giving these things up. But you’ll come out the other side so much better.

Once he traveled to a village to purchase a large rice harvest, but when he arrived the rice had already been sold to another tradesman. Nevertheless, Siddhartha remained in this village for several days; he arranged a feast for the peasants, distributed copper coins among their children, helped celebrate a marriage, and returned from his trip in the best of spirits. Kamaswami reproached him for not having returned home at once, saying he had wasted money and time. Siddhartha answered, "Do not scold me, dear friend! Never has anything been achieved by scolding. If there are losses, let me bear them. I am very pleased with this journey I made the acquaintance of many different people, a Brahmin befriended me, children rode on my knees, peasants showed me their fields, and no one took me for a tradesman." "How very lovely!" Kamaswami cried out indignantly. "But in fact a tradesman is just what you are! Or did you undertake this journey solely for your own pleasure?" "Certainly." Siddhartha laughed. "Certainly I undertook the journey for my pleasure. Why else? I got to know new people and regions, enjoyed kindness and trust, found friendship. You see, dear friend, had I been Kamaswami, I'd have hurried home in bad spirits the moment I saw my purchase foiled, and indeed money and time would have been lost. But by staying on as I did, I had some agreeable days, learned things, and enjoyed pleasures, harming neither myself nor others with haste and bad spirits. And if ever I should return to this place, perhaps to buy some future harvest or for whatever other purpose, I shall be greeted happily and in friendship by friendly people and I shall praise myself for not having displayed haste and displeasure on my first visit. So be content, friend, and do not harm yourself by scolding! When the day arrives when you see that this Siddhartha is bringing you harm, just say the word and Siddhartha will be on his way. But until that day, let us be satisfied with each other.

But without Emily, Greg would feel—paradoxically for such a social creature—alone. Before they met, most of Greg’s girlfriends were extroverts. He says he enjoyed those relationships, but never got to know his girlfriends well, because they were always “plotting how to be with groups of people.” He speaks of Emily with a kind of awe, as if she has access to a deeper state of being. He also describes her as “the anchor” around which his world revolves. Emily, for her part, treasures Greg’s ebullient nature; he makes her feel happy and alive. She has always been attracted to extroverts, who she says “do all the work of making conversation. For them, it’s not work at all.” The trouble is that for most of the five years they’ve been together, Greg and Emily have been having one version or another of the same fight. Greg, a music promoter with a large circle of friends, wants to host dinner parties every Friday—casual, animated get-togethers with heaping bowls of pasta and flowing bottles of wine. He’s been giving Friday-night dinners since he was a senior in college, and they’ve become a highlight of his week and a treasured piece of his identity. Emily has come to dread these weekly events. A hardworking staff attorney for an art museum and a very private person, the last thing she wants to do when she gets home from work is entertain. Her idea of a perfect start to the weekend is a quiet evening at the movies, just her and Greg. It seems an irreconcilable difference: Greg wants fifty-two dinner parties a year, Emily wants zero. Greg says that Emily should make more of an effort. He accuses her of being antisocial. “I am social,” she says. “I love you, I love my family, I love my close friends. I just don’t love dinner parties. People don’t really relate at those parties—they just socialize. You’re lucky because I devote all my energy to you. You spread yours around to everyone.” But Emily soon backs off, partly because she hates fighting, but also because she doubts herself. Maybe I am antisocial, she

What are you doing?” “Coming to pick you up in a little bit,” he said. I loved it when he took charge. It made my heart skip a beat, made me feel flushed and excited and thrilled. After four years with J, I was sick and tired of the surfer mentality. Laid-back, I’d discovered, was no longer something I wanted in a man. And when it came to his affection for me, Marlboro Man was anything but that. “I’ll be there at five.” Yes, sir. Anything you say, sir. I’ll be ready. With bells on. I started getting ready at three. I showered, shaved, powdered, perfumed, brushed, curled, and primped for two whole hours--throwing on a light pink shirt and my favorite jeans--all in an effort to appear as if I’d simply thrown myself together at the last minute. It worked. “Man,” Marlboro Man said when I opened the door. “You look great.” I couldn’t focus very long on his compliment, though--I was way too distracted by the way he looked. God, he was gorgeous. At a time of year when most people are still milky white, his long days of working cattle had afforded him a beautiful, golden, late-spring tan. And his typical denim button-down shirts had been replaced by a more fitted dark gray polo, the kind of shirt that perfectly emphasizes biceps born not from working out in a gym, but from tough, gritty, hands-on labor. And his prematurely gray hair, very short, was just the icing on the cake. I could eat this man with a spoon. “You do, too,” I replied, trying to will away my spiking hormones. He opened the door to his white diesel pickup, and I climbed right in. I didn’t even ask him where we were going; I didn’t even care. But when we turned west on the highway and headed out of town, I knew exactly where he was taking me: to his ranch…to his turf…to his home on the range. Though I didn’t expect or require a ride from him, I secretly loved that he drove over an hour to fetch me. It was a throwback to a different time, a burst of chivalry and courtship in this very modern world. As we drove we talked and talked--about our friends, about our families, about movies and books and horses and cattle.

Melanie had the face of a sheltered child who had never known anything but simplicity and kindness, truth and love, a child who had never looked upon harshness or evil and would not recognize them if she saw them. Because she had always been happy, she wanted everyone about her to be happy or, at least, pleased with themselves. To this end, she always saw the best in everyone and remarked kindly upon it. There was no servant so stupid that she did not find some redeeming trait of loyalty and kind heartedness, no girl so ugly and disagreeable that she could not discover grace of form or nobility of character in her, and no man so worthless or so boring that she did not view him in the light of his possibilities rather than his actualities. Because of these qualities that came sincerely and spontaneously from a generous heart, everyone flocked about her, for who can resist the charm of one who discovers in others admirable qualities undreamed of even by himself? She had more girl friends than anyone in town and more men friends too, though she had few beaux for she lacked the willfulness and selfishness that go far toward trapping men's hearts. What Melanie did was no more than all Southern girls were taught to do-to make those about them feel at ease and pleased with themselves. It was this happy feminine conspiracy which made Southern society so pleasant. Women knew that a land where men were contented, uncontradicted and safe in possession of unpunctured vanity was likely to be a very pleasant place for women to live. So, from the cradle to the grave, women strove to make men pleased with themselves, and the satisfied men repaid lavishly with gallantry and adoration. In fact, men willingly gave the ladies everything in the world except credit for having intelligence. Scarlett exercised the same charms as Melanie but with a studied artistry and consummate skill. The difference between the two girls lay in the fact that Melanie spoke kind and flattering words from a desire to make people happy, if only temporarily, and Scarlett never did it except to further her own aims.

God speaks to us, I would say, much more often than we realize or than we choose to realize. Before the sun sets every evening, he speaks to each of us in an intensely personal and unmistakable way. His message is not written out in starlight, which in the long run would make no difference; rather it is written out for each of us in the humdrum, helter-skelter events of each day; it is a message that in the long run might just make all the difference. Who knows what he will say to me today or to you today or into the midst of what kind of unlikely moment he will choose to say it. Not knowing is what makes today a holy mystery as every day is a holy mystery. But I believe that there are some things that by and large God is always saying to each of us. Each of us, for instance, carries around inside himself, I believe, a certain emptiness—a sense that something is missing, a restlessness, the deep feeling that somehow all is not right inside his skin. Psychologists sometimes call it anxiety, theologians sometimes call it estrangement, but whatever you call it, I doubt that there are many who do not recognize the experience itself, especially no one of our age, which has been variously termed the age of anxiety, the lost generation, the beat generation, the lonely crowd. Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him. But he also speaks to us about ourselves, about what he wants us to do and what he wants us to become; and this is the area where I believe that we know so much more about him than we admit even to ourselves, where people hear God speak even if they do not believe in him. A face comes toward us down the street. Do we raise our eyes or do we keep them lowered, passing by in silence? Somebody says something about somebody else, and what he says happens to be not only cruel but also funny, and everybody laughs. Do we laugh too, or do we speak the truth? When a friend has hurt us, do we take pleasure in hating him, because hate has its pleasures as well as love, or do we try to build back some flimsy little bridge? Sometimes when we are alone, thoughts come swarming into our heads like bees—some of them destructive, ugly, self-defeating thoughts, some of them creative and glad. Which thoughts do we choose to think then, as much as we have the choice? Will we be brave today or a coward today? Not in some big way probably but in some little foolish way, yet brave still. Will we be honest today or a liar? Just some little pint-sized honesty, but honest still. Will we be a friend or cold as ice today? All the absurd little meetings, decisions, inner skirmishes that go to make up our days. It all adds up to very little, and yet it all adds up to very much. Our days are full of nonsense, and yet not, because it is precisely into the nonsense of our days that God speaks to us words of great significance—not words that are written in the stars but words that are written into the raw stuff and nonsense of our days, which are not nonsense just because God speaks into the midst of them. And the words that he says, to each of us differently, are be brave…be merciful…feed my lambs…press on toward the goal.

Just as there are batterers who will victimize partner after partner, so are there serial victims, women who will select more than one violent man. Given that violence is often the result of an inability to influence events in any other way, and that this is often the result of an inability or unwillingness to effectively communicate, it is interesting to consider the wide appeal of the so-called strong and silent type. The reason often cited by women for the attraction is that the silent man is mysterious, and it may be that physical strength, which in evolutionary terms brought security, now adds an element of danger. The combination means that one cannot be completely certain what this man is feeling or thinking (because he is silent), and there might be fairly high stakes (because he is strong and potentially dangerous). I asked a friend who has often followed her attraction to the strong and silent type how long she likes men to remain silent. “About two or three weeks,” she answered, “Just long enough to get me interested. I like to be intrigued, not tricked. The tough part is finding someone who is mysterious but not secretive, strong but not scary.” One of the most common errors in selecting a boyfriend or spouse is basing the prediction on potential. This is actually predicting what certain elements might add up to in some different context: He isn’t working now, but he could be really successful. He’s going to be a great artist—of course he can’t paint under present circumstances. He’s a little edgy and aggressive these days, but that’s just until he gets settled. Listen to the words: isn’t working; can’t paint; is aggressive. What a person is doing now is the context for successful predictions, and marrying a man on the basis of potential, or for that matter hiring an employee solely on the basis of potential, is a sure way to interfere with intuition. That’s because the focus on potential carries our imagination to how things might be or could be and away from how they are now. Spousal abuse is committed by people who are with remarkable frequency described by their victims as having been “the sweetest, the gentlest, the kindest, the most attentive,” etc. Indeed, many were all of these things during the selection process and often still are—between violent incidents. But even though these men are frequently kind and gentle in the beginning, there are always warning signs. Victims, however, may not always choose to detect them.

But I don't know anyone who has an easy life forever. Everyone I know gets their heart broken sometime, by something. The question is not, will my life be easy or will my heart break? But rather, when my heart breaks, will I choose to grow? Sometimes in the moments of the most searing pain, we think we don't have a choice. But we do. It's in those moments that we make the most important choice: grow or give up. It's easy to want to give up under the weight of what we're carrying. It seems sometimes like the only possible choice. But there's always, always, always another choice, and transformation is waiting for us just beyond that choice. This is what I know: God can make something beautiful out of anything, out of darkness and trash and broken bones. He can shine light into even the blackest night, and he leaves glimpses of hope all around us. An oyster, a sliver of moon, one new bud on a black branch, a perfect tender shoot of asparagus, fighting up through the dirt for the spring sun. New life and new beauty are all around us, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be seen. I'm coming to think there are at least two kinds of pain. There's the anxiety and fear I felt when we couldn't sell our house. And then there's the sadness I felt when I lost the baby or when my grandma passed away. Very different kinds of pain. The first kind, I think, is the king that invites us to grow. The second kind is the kind that invites us to mourn. God's not trying to teach me a lesson through my grandma's death. I wasn't supposed to love her less so the loss hurt less acutely, I'm not supposed to feel less strongly about the horror of death and dying. When we lose someone we love, when a dear friend moves away, when illness invades, it's right to mourn. It's right to feel deep, wrenching sadness. But then there's the other kind of pain, that first kind. My friend Brian says that the heart of all human conflict is the phrase "I'm not getting what I want." When you're totally honest about the pain, what's at the center? Could it be that you're not getting what you want? You're getting an invitation to grow, I think, as unwelcome as it may be. It's sloppy theology to think that all suffering is good for us, or that it's a result of sin. All suffering can be used for good, over time, after mourning and healing, by God's graciousness. But sometimes it's just plain loss, not because you needed to grow, not because life or God or anything is teaching you any kind of lesson. The trick is knowing the difference between the two.

Early on it is clear that Addie has a rebellious streak, joining the library group and running away to Rockport Lodge. Is Addie right to disobey her parents? Where does she get her courage? 2. Addie’s mother refuses to see Celia’s death as anything but an accident, and Addie comments that “whenever I heard my mother’s version of what happened, I felt sick to my stomach.” Did Celia commit suicide? How might the guilt that Addie feels differ from the guilt her mother feels? 3. When Addie tries on pants for the first time, she feels emotionally as well as physically liberated, and confesses that she would like to go to college (page 108). How does the social significance of clothing and hairstyle differ for Addie, Gussie, and Filomena in the book? 4. Diamant fills her narrative with a number of historical events and figures, from the psychological effects of World War I and the pandemic outbreak of influenza in 1918 to child labor laws to the cultural impact of Betty Friedan. How do real-life people and events affect how we read Addie’s fictional story? 5. Gussie is one of the most forward-thinking characters in the novel; however, despite her law degree she has trouble finding a job as an attorney because “no one would hire a lady lawyer.” What other limitations do Addie and her friends face in the workforce? What limitations do women and minorities face today? 6. After distancing herself from Ernie when he suffers a nervous episode brought on by combat stress, Addie sees a community of war veterans come forward to assist him (page 155). What does the remorse that Addie later feels suggest about the challenges American soldiers face as they reintegrate into society? Do you think soldiers today face similar challenges? 7. Addie notices that the Rockport locals seem related to one another, and the cook Mrs. Morse confides in her sister that, although she is usually suspicious of immigrant boarders, “some of them are nicer than Americans.” How does tolerance of the immigrant population vary between city and town in the novel? For whom might Mrs. Morse reserve the term Americans? 8. Addie is initially drawn to Tessa Thorndike because she is a Boston Brahmin who isn’t afraid to poke fun at her own class on the women’s page of the newspaper. What strengths and weaknesses does Tessa’s character represent for educated women of the time? How does Addie’s description of Tessa bring her reliability into question? 9. Addie’s parents frequently admonish her for being ungrateful, but Addie feels she has earned her freedom to move into a boardinghouse when her parents move to Roxbury, in part because she contributed to the family income (page 185). How does the Baum family’s move to Roxbury show the ways Betty and Addie think differently from their parents about household roles? Why does their father take such offense at Herman Levine’s offer to house the family? 10. The last meaningful conversation between Addie and her mother turns out to be an apology her mother meant for Celia, and for a moment during her mother’s funeral Addie thinks, “She won’t be able to make me feel like there’s something wrong with me anymore.” Does Addie find any closure from her mother’s death? 11. Filomena draws a distinction between love and marriage when she spends time catching up with Addie before her wedding, but Addie disagrees with the assertion that “you only get one great love in a lifetime.” In what ways do the different romantic experiences of each woman inform the ideas each has about love? 12. Filomena and Addie share a deep friendship. Addie tells Ada that “sometimes friends grow apart. . . . But sometimes, it doesn’t matter how far apart you live or how little you talk—it’s still there.” What qualities do you think friends must share in order to have that kind of connection? Discuss your relationship with a best friend. Enhance

Say what you will of religion, but draw applicable conclusions and comparisons to reach a consensus. Religion = Reli = Prefix to Relic, or an ancient item. In days of old, items were novel, and they inspired devotion to the divine, and in the divine. Now, items are hypnotizing the masses into submission. Take Christ for example. When he broke bread in the Bible, people actually ate, it was useful to their bodies. Compare that to the politics, governments and corrupt, bumbling bureacrats and lobbyists in the economic recession of today. When they "broke bread", the economy nearly collapsed, and the benefactors thereof were only a select, decadent few. There was no bread to be had, so they asked the people for more! Breaking bread went from meaning sharing food and knowledge and wealth of mind and character, to meaning break the system, being libelous, being unaccountable, and robbing the earth. So they married people's paychecks to the land for high ransoms, rents and mortgages, effectively making any renter or landowner either a slave or a slave master once more. We have higher class toys to play with, and believe we are free. The difference is, the love of profit has the potential, and has nearly already enslaved all, it isn't restriced by culture anymore. Truth is not religion. Governments are religions. Truth does not encourage you to worship things. Governments are for profit. Truth is for progress. Governments are about process. When profit goes before progress, the latter suffers. The truest measurement of the quality of progress, will be its immediate and effective results without the aid of material profit. Quality is meticulous, it leaves no stone unturned, it is thorough and detail oriented. It takes its time, but the results are always worth the investment. Profit is quick, it is ruthless, it is unforgiving, it seeks to be first, but confuses being first with being the best, it is long scale suicidal, it is illusory, it is temporary, it is vastly unfulfilling. It breaks families, and it turns friends. It is single track minded, and small minded as well. Quality, would never do that, my friends. Ironic how dealing and concerning with money, some of those who make the most money, and break other's monies are the most unaccountable. People open bank accounts, over spend, and then expect to be held "unaccountable" for their actions. They even act innocent and unaccountable. But I tell you, everything can and will be counted, and accounted for. Peace can be had, but people must first annhilate the love of items, over their own kind.

Knowledgeable observers report that dating has nearly disappeared from college campuses and among young adults generally. It has been replaced by something called “hanging out.” You young people apparently know what this is, but I will describe it for the benefit of those of us who are middle-aged or older and otherwise uninformed. Hanging out consists of numbers of young men and young women joining together in some group activity. It is very different from dating. For the benefit of some of you who are not middle-aged or older, I also may need to describe what dating is. Unlike hanging out, dating is not a team sport. Dating is pairing off to experience the kind of one-on-one association and temporary commitment that can lead to marriage in some rare and treasured cases. . . . All of this made dating more difficult. And the more elaborate and expensive the date, the fewer the dates. As dates become fewer and more elaborate, this seems to create an expectation that a date implies seriousness or continuing commitment. That expectation discourages dating even more. . . . Simple and more frequent dates allow both men and women to “shop around” in a way that allows extensive evaluation of the prospects. The old-fashioned date was a wonderful way to get acquainted with a member of the opposite sex. It encouraged conversation. It allowed you to see how you treat others and how you are treated in a one-on-one situation. It gave opportunities to learn how to initiate and sustain a mature relationship. None of that happens in hanging out. My single brothers and sisters, follow the simple dating pattern and you don’t need to do your looking through Internet chat rooms or dating services—two alternatives that can be very dangerous or at least unnecessary or ineffective. . . . Men, if you have returned from your mission and you are still following the boy-girl patterns you were counseled to follow when you were 15, it is time for you to grow up. Gather your courage and look for someone to pair off with. Start with a variety of dates with a variety of young women, and when that phase yields a good prospect, proceed to courtship. It’s marriage time. That is what the Lord intends for His young adult sons and daughters. Men have the initiative, and you men should get on with it. If you don’t know what a date is, perhaps this definition will help. I heard it from my 18-year-old granddaughter. A “date” must pass the test of three p’s: (1) planned ahead, (2) paid for, and (3) paired off. Young women, resist too much hanging out, and encourage dates that are simple, inexpensive, and frequent. Don’t make it easy for young men to hang out in a setting where you women provide the food. Don’t subsidize freeloaders. An occasional group activity is OK, but when you see men who make hanging out their primary interaction with the opposite sex, I think you should lock the pantry and bolt the front door. If you do this, you should also hang up a sign, “Will open for individual dates,” or something like that. And, young women, please make it easier for these shy males to ask for a simple, inexpensive date. Part of making it easier is to avoid implying that a date is something very serious. If we are to persuade young men to ask for dates more frequently, we must establish a mutual expectation that to go on a date is not to imply a continuing commitment. Finally, young women, if you turn down a date, be kind. Otherwise you may crush a nervous and shy questioner and destroy him as a potential dater, and that could hurt some other sister. My single young friends, we counsel you to channel your associations with the opposite sex into dating patterns that have the potential to mature into marriage, not hanging-out patterns that only have the prospect to mature into team sports like touch football. Marriage is not a group activity—at least, not until the children come along in goodly numbers.

We are all poor; but there is a difference between what Mrs. Spark intends by speaking of 'slender means', and what Stevens called our poverty or Sartre our need, besoin. The poet finds his brief, fortuitous concords, it is true: not merely 'what will suffice,' but 'the freshness of transformation,' the 'reality of decreation,' the 'gaiety of language.' The novelist accepts need, the difficulty of relating one's fictions to what one knows about the nature of reality, as his donnée. It is because no one has said more about this situation, or given such an idea of its complexity, that I want to devote most of this talk to Sartre and the most relevant of his novels, La Nausée. As things go now it isn't of course very modern; Robbe-Grillet treats it with amused reverence as a valuable antique. But it will still serve for my purposes. This book is doubtless very well known to you; I can't undertake to tell you much about it, especially as it has often been regarded as standing in an unusually close relation to a body of philosophy which I am incompetent to expound. Perhaps you will be charitable if I explain that I shall be using it and other works of Sartre merely as examples. What I have to do is simply to show that La Nausée represents, in the work of one extremely important and representative figure, a kind of crisis in the relation between fiction and reality, the tension or dissonance between paradigmatic form and contingent reality. That the mood of Sartre has sometimes been appropriate to the modern demythologized apocalypse is something I shall take for granted; his is a philosophy of crisis, but his world has no beginning and no end. The absurd dishonesty of all prefabricated patterns is cardinal to his beliefs; to cover reality over with eidetic images--illusions persisting from past acts of perception, as some abnormal children 'see' the page or object that is no longer before them --to do this is to sink into mauvaise foi. This expression covers all comfortable denials of the undeniable--freedom --by myths of necessity, nature, or things as they are. Are all the paradigms of fiction eidetic? Is the unavoidable, insidious, comfortable enemy of all novelists mauvaise foi? Sartre has recently, in his first instalment of autobiography, talked with extraordinary vivacity about the roleplaying of his youth, of the falsities imposed upon him by the fictive power of words. At the beginning of the Great War he began a novel about a French private who captured the Kaiser, defeated him in single combat, and so ended the war and recovered Alsace. But everything went wrong. The Kaiser, hissed by the poilus, no match for the superbly fit Private Perrin, spat upon and insulted, became 'somehow heroic.' Worse still, the peace, which should instantly have followed in the real world if this fiction had a genuine correspondence with reality, failed to occur. 'I very nearly renounced literature,' says Sartre. Roquentin, in a subtler but basically similar situation, has the same reaction. Later Sartre would find again that the hero, however assiduously you use the pitchfork, will recur, and that gaps, less gross perhaps, between fiction and reality will open in the most close-knit pattern of words. Again, the young Sartre would sometimes, when most identified with his friends at the lycée, feel himself to be 'freed at last from the sin of existing'--this is also an expression of Roquentin's, but Roquentin says it feels like being a character in a novel. How can novels, by telling lies, convert existence into being? We see Roquentin waver between the horror of contingency and the fiction of aventures. In Les Mots Sartre very engagingly tells us that he was Roquentin, certainly, but that he was Sartre also, 'the elect, the chronicler of hells' to whom the whole novel of which he now speaks so derisively was a sort of aventure, though what was represented within it was 'the unjustified, brackish existence of my fellow-creatures.

He swore sharply, David Jones’s still-so-familiar voice coming out of that stranger’s body. “Do you have any idea how unbelievably hard it’s been to get you alone?” Had she finally started hallucinating? But he took off his glasses, and she could see his eyes more clearly and . . . “It’s you,” she breathed, tears welling. “It’s really you.” She reached for him, but he stepped back. Sisters Helen and Grace were hurrying across the compound, coming to see what the ruckus was, shading their eyes and peering so they could see in through the screens. “You can’t let on that you know me,” Jones told Molly quickly, his voice low, rough. “You can’t tell anyone—not even your friend the priest during confession, do you understand?” “Are you in some kind of danger?” she asked him. Dear God, he was so thin. And was the cane necessary or just a prop? “Stand still, will you, so I can—” “No. Don’t. We can’t . . .” He backed away again. “If you say anything, Mol, I swear, I’ll vanish, and I will not come back. Unless . . . if you don’t want me here—and I don’t blame you if you don’t—” “No!” was all she managed to say before Sister Helen opened the door and looked from the mess on the floor to Molly’s stricken expression. “Oh, dear.” “I’m afraid it’s my fault,” Jones said in a British accent, in a voice that was completely different from his own, as Helen rushed to Molly’s side. “My fault entirely. I brought Miss Anderson some bad news. I didn’t realize just how devastating it would be.” Molly started crying. It was more than just a good way to hide her laughter at that accent—those were real tears streaming down her face and she couldn’t stop them. Helen led her to one of the tables, helped her sit down. “Oh, my dear,” the nun said, kneeling in front of her, concern on her round face, holding her hand. “What happened?” “We have a mutual friend,” Jones answered for her. “Bill Bolten. He found out I was heading to Kenya, and he thought if I happened to run into Miss Anderson that she would want to know that a friend of theirs recently . . . well, passed. Cat’s out of the bag, right? Fellow name of Grady Morant, who went by the alias of Jones.” “Oh, dear,” Helen said again, hand to her mouth in genuine sympathy. Jones leaned closer to the nun, his voice low, but not low enough for Molly to miss hearing. “His plane went down—burned—gas tank exploded . . . Ghastly mess. Not a prayer that he survived.” Molly buried her face in her hands, hardly able to think. “Bill was worried that she might’ve heard it first from someone else,” he said. “But apparently she hadn’t.” Molly shook her head, no. News did travel fast via the grapevine. Relief workers tended to know other relief workers and . . . She could well have heard about Jones’s death without him standing right in front of her. Wouldn’t that have been awful?

Well, everyone is going to confront that gorilla on the threshold. Every one has him, unseen by mortal eye, and he whispers into your ear to entertain the unlovely thoughts of the world. And your every reaction that is unlovely, it feeds upon it; and your every thought that is kind and wonderful and loving, she feeds upon it. And the day will come, you will be strong enough to confront this. And may I tell you? it will take you the twinkling of a second to dissolve it. You don’t labor upon it. All it needs is the core of integrity within you. When you pledge yourself, and no one else, – you don’t swear upon your mother, you don’t swear upon a friend, you don’t swear upon the Bible; you pledge yourself to redeem it. At the moment you pledge yourself, – and within you, you know you mean it, – the whole thing dissolves. It’s no time at all in dissolving. And then all the energy returns to you, and you are stronger than ever before to go forward now and eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And if you go forward and misuse it again, you start another form building; and one day you will dissolve it again. Eventually you will become completely awakened, and you will use your wonderful power only – not for the good, – that tree will come to an end, – for Life itself. For, eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is this world. The day will come that you will eat of the Tree of Life that bears the fruit of truth and error. Error will embody itself here, and one day you will confront error, and the error will dissolve before your mind’s eye as truth begins to glow before you, because you are eating, then, of the Tree of Life as you formerly ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And the combat of good and evil produces this monster, and the combat of truth and error produces an entirely different form of being, more glorious than that one of good and more horrible than this. The error will dissolve just as quickly when you confront error. So, if today your teaching is not true and you live by it, you are building something just as monstrous; but one day you will confront error, and you will discover that you lived by a false concept of God – something on the outside of Self; that you formerly worshipped, a little golden figure, made of gold and silver. It had eyes, but could not see. It had ears, but could not hear. It had a mouth, but could not speak. It had feet, and it could not walk. It made no sound within its throat. And those who made it are just like it. And those who trusted it are just like it, too. So, all the little icons in the world that people worship – these are the little things called “error”; and one day you will discover the true God. And when you discover the true God, you will find that He is all within your own wonderful being as your own wonderful human imagination. You’ll walk in the consciousness of being God. You don’t brag about it.

It was certainly true that I had “no sense of humour” in that I found nothing funny. I didn’t know, and perhaps would never know, the feeling of compulsion to exhale and convulse in the very specific way that humans evolved to do. Nor did I know the specific emotion of relief that is bound to it. But it would be wrong, I think, to say that I was incapable of using humour as a tool. As I understood it, humour was a social reflex. The ancestors of humans had been ape-animals living in small groups in Africa. Groups that worked together were more likely to survive and have offspring, so certain reflexes and perceptions naturally emerged to signal between members of the group. Yawning evolved to signal wake-rest cycles. Absence of facial hair and the dilation of blood vessels in the face evolved to signal embarrassment, anger, shame and fear. And laughter evolved to signal an absence of danger. If a human is out with a friend and they are approached by a dangerous-looking stranger, having that stranger revealed as benign might trigger laughter. I saw humour as the same reflex turned inward, serving to undo the effects of stress on the body by activating the parasympathetic nervous system. Interestingly, it also seemed to me that humour had extended, like many things, beyond its initial evolutionary context. It must have been very quickly adopted by human ancestor social systems. If a large human picks on a small human there’s a kind of tension that emerges where the tribe wonders if a broader violence will emerge. If a bystander watches and laughs they are non-verbally signaling to the bully that there’s no need for concern, much like what had occurred minutes before with my comments about Myrodyn, albeit in a somewhat different context. But humour didn’t stop there. Just as a human might feel amusement at things which seem bad but then actually aren’t, they might feel amusement at something which merely has the possibility of being bad, but doesn’t necessarily go through the intermediate step of being consciously evaluated as such: a sudden realization. Sudden realizations that don’t incur any regret were, in my opinion, the most alien form of humour, even if I could understand how they linked back to the evolutionary mechanism. A part of me suspected that this kind of surprise-based or absurdity-based humour had been refined by sexual selection as a signal of intelligence. If your prospective mate is able to offer you regular benign surprises it would (if you were human) not only feel good, but show that they were at least in some sense smarter or wittier than you, making them a good choice for a mate. The role of surprise and non-verbal signalling explained, by my thinking, why explaining humour was so hard for humans. If one explained a joke it usually ceased to be a surprise, and in situations where the laughter served as an all-clear-no-danger signal, explaining that verbally would crush the impulse to do it non-verbally.

Nothing is more certain than that a general profligacy and corruption of manners make a people ripe for destruction. A good form of government may hold the rotten materials together for some time, but beyond a certain pitch, even the best constitution will be ineffectual, and slavery must ensue. On the other hand, when the manners of a nation are pure, when true religion and internal principles maintain their vigour, the attempts of the most powerful enemies to oppress them are commonly baffled and disappointed. . . . [H]e is the best friend to American liberty, who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion, and who sets himself with the greatest firmness to bear down profanity and immorality of every kind. Whoever is an avowed enemy to God, I scruple not to call him an enemy to his country. Do not suppose, my brethren, that I mean to recommend a furious and angry zeal for the circumstantials of religion, or the contentions of one sect with another about their peculiar distinctions. I do not wish you to oppose any body’s religion, but every body’s wickedness. Perhaps there are few surer marks of the reality of religion, than when a man feels himself more joined in spirit to a true holy person of a different denomination, than to an irregular liver of his own. It is therefore your duty in this important and critical season to exert yourselves, every one in his proper sphere, to stem the tide of prevailing vice, to promote the knowledge of God, the reverence of his name and worship, and obedience to his laws. . . . Many from a real or pretended fear of the imputation of hypocrisy, banish from their conversation and carriage every appearance of respect and submission to the living God. What a weakness and meanness of spirit does it discover, for a man to be ashamed in the presence of his fellow sinners, to profess that reverence to almighty God which he inwardly feels: The truth is, he makes himself truly liable to the accusation which he means to avoid. It is as genuine and perhaps a more culpable hypocrisy to appear to have less religion than you really have, than to appear to have more. . . . There is a scripture precept delivered in very singular terms, to which I beg your attention; “Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart, but shalt in any wise rebuke him, and not suffer sin upon him.” How prone are many to represent reproof as flowing from ill nature and surliness of temper? The spirit of God, on the contrary, considers it as the effect of inward hatred, or want of genuine love, to forbear reproof, when it is necessary or may be useful. I am sensible there may in some cases be a restraint from prudence, agreeably to that caution of our Saviour, “Cast not your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rent you.” Of this every man must judge as well as he can for himself; but certainly, either by open reproof, or expressive silence, or speedy departure from such society, we ought to guard against being partakers of other men’s sins.

Situation awareness means possessing an explorer mentality A general never knows anything with certainty, never sees his enemy clearly, and never knows positively where he is. When armies are face to face, the least accident in the ground, the smallest wood, may conceal part of the enemy army. The most experienced eye cannot be sure whether it sees the whole of the enemy’s army or only three-fourths. It is by the mind’s eye, by the integration of all reasoning, by a kind of inspiration that the general sees, knows, and judges. ~Napoleon 5   In order to effectively gather the appropriate information as it’s unfolding we must possess the explorer mentality.  We must be able to recognize patterns of behavior. Then we must recognize that which is outside that normal pattern. Then, you take the initiative so we maintain control. Every call, every incident we respond to possesses novelty. Car stops, domestic violence calls, robberies, suspicious persons etc.  These individual types of incidents show similar patterns in many ways. For example, a car stopped normally pulls over to the side of the road when signaled to do so.  The officer when ready, approaches the operator, a conversation ensues, paperwork exchanges, and the pulled over car drives away. A domestic violence call has its own normal patterns; police arrive, separate involved parties, take statements and arrest aggressor and advise the victim of abuse prevention rights. We could go on like this for all the types of calls we handle as each type of incident on its own merits, does possess very similar patterns. Yet they always, and I mean always possess something different be it the location, the time of day, the person you are dealing with. Even if it’s the same person, location, time and day, the person you’re dealing who may now be in a different emotional state and his/her motives and intent may be very different. This breaks that normal expected pattern.  Hence, there is a need to always be open-minded, alert and aware, exploring for the signs and signals of positive or negative change in conditions. In his Small Wars journal article “Thinking and Acting like an Early Explorer” Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege (US Army Ret.) describes the explorer mentality:   While tactical and strategic thinking are fundamentally different, both kinds of thinking must take place in the explorer’s brain, but in separate compartments. To appreciate this, think of the metaphor of an early American explorer trying to cross a large expanse of unknown terrain long before the days of the modern conveniences. The explorer knows that somewhere to the west lies an ocean he wants to reach. He has only a sketch-map of a narrow corridor drawn by a previously unsuccessful explorer. He also knows that highly variable weather and frequent geologic activity can block mountain passes, flood rivers, and dry up desert water sources. He also knows that some native tribes are hostile to all strangers, some are friendly and others are fickle, but that warring and peace-making among them makes estimating their whereabouts and attitudes difficult.6

Letter to the tech giants: When fame and abundance kiss somebody’s feet before that person is wise enough, he or she is very likely to lose track of what’s necessity and what’s luxury. And modern society is filled with examples of such intelligent stupidity – stupidity that is carried out by apparently smart humans. Because being smart is not the same as being wise. The world has enough smartness, but not enough wisdom to bring that smartness into proper productive practice – and I mean productive practice not sophisticated practice – there is a difference. A person smart enough to visualize a Falcon rocket engine can easily pinpoint the locations of various organizations that spread terrorism, yet the person chooses to explore the space further instead of prioritizing the technological advantages to first fix real issues of the human society that inflict harm to the humans every walk of the way. The world is a miserable place not because we have lack of resources, but because those who have an abundance of resources do not have the slightest idea of true human need. The resources needed for colonizing Mars if put to proper practice can fix the world’s global warming issues – it can fix the world’s climate change issues – it can fix the world’s terrorism issues, yet people are more interested in the pompous idea of living in Mars for whatever reason, instead of paying attention to improving human condition on earth. I am not against technological advancement, for I am a scientist, but my soul aches when I see smart people are dumb enough to chase after illusory glory of doing something different and innovative instead of focusing the powers of their soul on cleaning up the misery business on earth. You can, yet you don’t. Why? Smartness without wisdom is stupidity. You are smart – yes indeed – but I am sorry – you are stupid at the same time. How can you dream of having a cheese burger on Mars when your own kind on Earth is suffering! How can you think of taking rich kids into the orbit just so they can admire the beauty of earth from the heavens, when that very earth is infested with the primordial evils of human character! Awaken the human within you my friend, and pay attention. Awaken the human within and let it consume all the miseries from the world that you live in. Say a member of your family falls ill, would you ignore his or her misery completely just because you want to make life more comfortable for others than it already is, or would you first try everything in your capacity in order to heal your loved one! Be wise my friend, for it is not enough to be smart. You are smart – there is no doubt about that – so utilize that smartness for humanity and heal your own kind. Heal your kind with your capacity my friend. It is wailing for healers – not some delusional faith healers, but real tangible healers. Would you not do anything! Would you not give your soul to fix the broken soul of this world! Arise my friend, Awake my friend and work for humanity, not to make it sophisticated, but to make it peaceful first. Remember, humanity first, then everything else. Peace first, sophistication later. Harmony first, luxury later.

Grabbing my hair and pulling it to the point my skull throbs, I rock back and forth while insanity threatens to destroy my mind completely. Father finally did what Lachlan started. Destroyed my spirit. The angel is gone. The monster has come and killed her. Lachlan Sipping his whiskey, Shon gazes with a bored expression at the one-way mirror as Arson lights the match, grazing the skin of his victim with it as the man convulses in fear. “Show off,” he mutters, and on instinct, I slap the back of his head. He rubs it, spilling the drink. “The fuck? We are wasting time, Lachlan. Tell him to speed up. You know if you let him, he can play for hours.” All in good time, we don’t need just a name. He is saving him for a different kind of information that we write down as Sociopath types furiously on his computer, searching for the location and everything else using FBI databases. “Bingo!” Sociopath mutters, picking up the laptop and showing the screen to me. “It’s seven hours away from New York, in a deserted location in the woods. The land belongs to some guy who is presumed dead and the man accrued the right to build shelters for abused women. They actually live there as a place of new hope or something.” Indeed, the center is advertised as such and has a bunch of stupid reviews about it. Even the approval of a social worker, but then it doesn’t surprise me. Pastor knows how to be convincing. “Kids,” I mutter, fisting my hands. “Most of them probably have kids. He continues to do his fucked-up shit.” And all these years, he has been under my radar. I throw the chair and it bounces off the wall, but no one says anything as they feel the same. “Shon, order a plane. Jaxon—” “Yeah, my brothers will be there with us. But listen, the FBI—” he starts, and I nod. He takes a beat and quickly sends a message to someone on his phone while I bark into the microphone. “Arson, enough with the bullshit. Kill him already.” He is of no use to us anyway. Arson looks at the wall and shrugs. Then pours gas on his victim and lights up the match simultaneously, stepping aside as the man screams and thrashes on the chair, and the smell of burning flesh can be sensed even here. Arson jogs to a hose, splashing water over him. The room is designed security wise for this kind of torture, since fire is one of the first things I taught. After all, I’d learned the hard way how to fight with it. “On the plane, we can adjust the plan. Let’s get moving.” They spring into action as I go to my room to get a specific folder to give to Levi before I go, when Sociopath’s hand stops me, bumping my shoulder. “Is this a suicide mission for you?” he asks, and I smile, although it lacks any humor. My friend knows everything. Instead of answering his question, I grip his shoulder tight, and confide, “Valencia is entrusted to you.” We both know that if I want to destroy Pastor, I have to die with him. This revenge has been twenty-three years in the making, and I never envisioned a different future. This path always leads to death one way or another, and the only reason I valued my life was because I had to kill him. Valencia will be forever free from the evils that destroyed her life. I’ll make sure of it. Once upon a time, there was an angel. Who made the monster’s heart bleed.