Era Girl Quotes

It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.

It is a do-it-yourself era: health care, real estate, police investigation. Go online and f*ing figure it out for yourself because everyone’s overworked and understaffed.

For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again.

...I have so many dreams of my own, and I remember things from my childhood, from when I was a girl and a young woman, and I haven't forgotten a thing. So why did we think of Mom as a mom from the very beginning? She didn't have the opportunity to pursue her dreams, and all by herself, faced everything the era dealt her, poverty and sadness, and she couldn't do anything about her very bad lot in life other than suffer through it and get beyond it and live her life to the very best of her ability, giving her body and her heart to it completely. Why did I never give a thought to Mom's dreams?

It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.

In an era where women undress their outfits & give their bodies so carelessly, become the rare wild woman that undresses her mind and soul & knows the worth of what she has to offer.

Eventually, I’ll grow sick and perish. Die on the floor, a young girl—who even when in the presence of company, still feels the loneliness that looms over her heart.

But I have to say this in defense of humankind: In no matter what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got here. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these games going on that could make you act crazy, even if you weren't crazy to begin with. Some of the crazymaking games going on today are love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf, and girls' basketball.

One hot afternoon during the era in which you’ve gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin, you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She’ll offer you one of the balloons, but you won’t take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You’re wrong. You do.

Then, on the twenty-first day of December in the 109th year of the third era, Queen Channary gave birth to a baby girl. She was officially named Princess Selene Channary Jannali Blackburn of Luna,

Has anyone been corrupted or defiled?" "Since the age of twelve," West said. "I wasn't asking you, I was asking the girls." "Not yet," Cassandra replied cheerfully.

All the girls, the most beautiful, the most heterosexual, the ones waiting for Prince Charming full of natural testosterone, are actually destined without knowing it to become bitches that my dildos penetrate.

I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again.

in these shitty plastic days ...

Lisbeth Salander era la mujer que odiaba a los hombres que odiaban a las mujeres.

Desde que la conocía se había dado cuenta de que ella jamás mentía directamente, pero también de que no siempre era del todo sincera. Su manera de mentir consistía en desviar el tema.

And I suppose all the wishes come true,” Minya said, sarcastic. “Of course not, silly girl,” Suheyla retorted. She had not grown up in an era of optimism, but that didn’t mean they’d lived without dreams. “Wishes don’t just come true. They’re only the target you paint around what you want. You still have to hit the bull’s-eye yourself.

We want you to tell us about vampires." Simon grinned. "What do you want to know? Scariest is Eli in Let the Right One In, cheesiest is late-era Lestat, most underrated is David Bowie in The Hunger. Sexiest is definitely Drusilla, though if you ask a girl, she'll probably say Damon Salvatore or Edward Cullen. But..." he shrugged, "You know girls." Julie's and Beatriz's eyes were wide. "I didn't think you'd know so many!" Beatriz exclaimed. "Are they... are they your friends?" "Oh, sure, Count Dracula and I are like this," Simon said, crossing his fingers to demonstrate. "Also Count Chocula. Oh, and my BFF Count Blintzula. He's a real charmer...." He trailed off as he realized no one else was laughing. In fact, no one seemed to realize he was joking. "They're from TV," he prompted them. "Or, uh, cereal." "What's he talking about?" Julie asked Jon, perfect nose wrinkling up in confusion. "Who cares?" Jon said.

The term “tomboy,” one nineteenth-century author recalled, looking back at the pre–Civil War era, “was applied to all little girls who showed the least tendency toward thinking and acting for themselves.

It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.

Era um dia de primavera desses que trazem esperança: cheio de brisas suaves e delicados aromas de terra aquecida.

We were women in transition, raised in one era and coming of age in another, very different time...here we were, entering the workplace in the 1960s questioning--and often rejecting--many of the values we had been taught. We were the polite, perfectionist "good girls," who never showed our drive or our desires around men. Now we were becoming mad women, discovering and confronting our own ambitions, a quality praised in men but stigmatized--still--in women.

believe in egalitarianism über alles, not to be confused with being a communist, of course, I know enough about Stalin and Mao to be disabused of any fantasies in that direction at the same time, the truth is that hierarchies of power and privilege won’t disappear, every historian knows this, it’s innate to human nature and inherent in all societies in all eras and equally manifests in the animal kingdom, so I can’t pretend otherwise my job as a teacher is to help those who are disadvantaged

Stavolta lessi il titolo del quadro: Ragazza interrotta mentre suona. Interrotta mentre suona: com’era stata la mia vita, interrotta nella musica dei miei diciassette anni, com’era stata la sua vita, strappata e fissata su tela: un momento reso immobile, per tutti gli altri momenti, qualsiasi cosa fossero o avrebbero potuto essere. Quale vita può guarirne?

No era la mejor decisión y sin duda tampoco una decisión lógica, pero era la decisión correcta.

Eu nunca quis ser qualquer coisa, exceto quem eu era.

Los momentos importantes de tu vida habían quedado tan incorporados a ti que ya ni siquiera eras capaz de verlos.

We entered an era of false alarms.

It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And

En aquel mundo opresivo en el que nadie era libre, Sierva María lo era: sólo ella y sólo allí.

Era la encarnación del peor temor de cualquier escritor: un cliché

Take a little thought experiment. Imagine all the rampage school shooters in Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas; now imagine they were black girls from poor families who lived instead in Chicago, New Haven, Newark, Philadelphia, or Providence. Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand-wringing? There is no doubt we’d be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would doubtless invent a new term for their behavior, as with wilding two decades ago. We’d hear about the culture of poverty, about how living in the city breeds crime and violence. We’d hear some pundits proclaim some putative natural tendency among blacks toward violence. Someone would likely even blame feminism for causing girls to become violent in a vain imitation of boys. Yet the obvious fact that virtually all the rampage school shooters were middle-class white boys barely broke a ripple in the torrent of public discussion. This uniformity cut across all other differences among the shooters: some came from intact families, others from single-parent homes; some boys had acted violently in the past, and others were quiet and unassuming; some boys also expressed rage at their parents (two killed their parents the same morning), and others seemed to live in happy families.

It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls.

life was different before 9/11, Waris said, as they left the town behind and walked along a busy main road passing big old houses made of thick slabs of grey stone; she was too young to remember the 'before era', when her mother said people looked at hijabbed women with surprise, curiosity or pity

Like any girl, she still felt the echoes from earlier eras of repression. She'd been raised by a mother who'd fought hard to get a wage she deserved, to have access to education when she lacked every advantage, to travel on her own terms. The idea she was being asked-that she was expected to simply play along-made the blood throb in her veins. She was already in the damn stays. Wasn't the enough?

The elders say Shim Cheong was fashioned by the Goddess of Creation to be the Sea God’s final bride, the one to ease all his sorrows and usher in a new era of peace in the kingdom. She has skin forged from the purest of pearls. She has hair stitched from the deepest night. She has lips colored by the blood of men.

Once again, my new novel The Girl Who Stayed is something different for me, although with the same voice my readers have come to anticipate. I believe that people are pretty much the same, regardless of era, physical

Tutto il tempo che avevi trascorso a sistemarti, a leggere articoli che ti preparassero alla vita, era una sala d’aspetto in attesa di qualcuno che si accorgesse di te. Quel tempo i ragazzi lo avevano trascorso a diventare loro stessi.

And now, while he didn't particularly think any of these stories was a bit truer, he did realize that he didn't really know his wife at all; and that in fact the entire conception of knowing another person--of trust, of closeness, of marriage itself--while not exactly a lie since it existed someplace if only as an idea (in his parents' life, at least marginally) was still completely out-of-date, defunct, was something typifying another era, now unfortunately gone. Meeting a girl, falling in love, marrying her, moving to Connecticut, buying a fucking house, starting a life with her and thinking you really knew anything about her--the last part was a complete fiction, which made all the rest a joke.

the truth is that hierarchies of power and privilege won’t disappear, every historian knows this, it’s innate to human nature and inherent in all societies in all eras and equally manifests in the animal kingdom, so I can’t pretend otherwise

Children weren’t color-coded at all until the early twentieth century: in the era before Maytag, all babies wore white as a practical matter, since the only way of getting clothes clean was to boil them. What’s more, both boys and girls wore what were thought of as gender-neutral dresses. When nursery colors were introduced, pink was actually considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red, which was associated with strength. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy, and faithfulness, symbolized femininity.

Now we will live!” This is what the hungry little boy liked to say, as he toddled along the quiet roadside, or through the empty fields. But the food that he saw was only in his imagination. The wheat had all been taken away, in a heartless campaign of requisitions that began Europe’s era of mass killing. It was 1933, and Joseph Stalin was deliberately starving Soviet Ukraine. The little boy died, as did more than three million other people. “I will meet her,” said a young Soviet man of his wife, “under the ground.” He was right; he was shot after she was, and they were buried among the seven hundred thousand victims of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. “They asked for my wedding ring, which I….” The Polish officer broke off his diary just before he was executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. He was one of about two hundred thousand Polish citizens shot by the Soviets or the Germans at the beginning of the Second World War, while Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly occupied his country. Late in 1941, an eleven-year-old Russian girl in Leningrad finished her own humble diary: “Only Tania is left.” Adolf Hitler had betrayed Stalin, her city was under siege by the Germans, and her family were among the four million Soviet citizens the Germans starved to death. The following summer, a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: “I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves alive.” She was among the more than five million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans.

Amanda olhou para ele - Tens de compreender que já não sou a rapariga que era dantes. Sou casada e sou mãe e, tal como toda a gente, não sou perfeita. Debato-me com as escolhas que fiz e cometo erros e passo grande parte do tempo a interrogar-me sobre quem sou realmente ou se a minha vida tem algum significado sequer. Não sou de modo nenhum uma pessoa especial, Dawson, e tens de perceber isso. Tens de compreender que sou apenas... uma pessoa vulgar.

It is a do-it-yourself era: health care, real estate, police investigation. Go online and fucking figure it out for yourself because everyone’s overworked and understaffed.

... era un mentiroso redomado, y esa clase de mentirosos se esconden a plena luz del día.

Era tan sorprendente como humillante darse cuenta de la cantidad de tiempo que puedes pasarte con alguien al que no le importas tan poco, y viceversa.

Fingir que uno sentía cosas que en realidad no sentía no era una buena forma de ganarse la vida.

Nunca comprendió que era posible echar de menos y llorar lo que nunca se ha tenido.

You can learn a lot about the longings and generalized gender anxieties of an era by the kinds of fake women it dreams up.

Nació en un páramo. Era un niñita nacida envuelta en un cuerpo de niño en un páramo

Y cuando ese amor no era correspondido, podía convertirse de inmediato en un implacable odio.

... el amor era como las drogas o el alcohol o el porno: no había techo. Cada dosis debía ser más intensa que la anterior para obtener el mismo resultado.

[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation. Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up. Survival . . . could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident, wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943. Finally the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot.

Por aquel entonces, yo estaba siempre pendiente de la atención de los demás. Me vestía para generar amor, me bajaba un poco el escote, adoptaba una mirada melancólica cuando me mostraba en público, una mirada que insinuaba muchos pensamientos profundos y prometedores, por si acaso a alguien le daba por echar un vistazo. […] Todo el tiempo que había dedicado a prepararme, esos artículos que enseñaban que la vida no era más que una sala de espera, hasta que alguien se fijara en ti… Los chicos habían dedicado ese tiempo a convertirse en ellos mismos.

Gran parte del deseo, a esa edad, era un acto deliberado. Nos empeñábamos en difuminar los bordes toscos y decepcionantes de los chicos para darles la forma de alguien a quien pudiéramos amar.

Mitch me estudió con una sonrisa engreída e interrogante. Les era tan fácil, a los hombres, esa asignación inmediata de valor. Y daba la impresión de que querían que tú convinieras en el juicio.

Like Semmering Academy, the Grove School was a Gothic pile of bricks run by 1950s-era chalk drones, which maintained its cultural viability by perpetuating a weirdly seductive anxiety throughout its community. Mary herself was a victim of the seduction; despite the trying and repetitive emotional requirements of her job, she remained eternally fascinated by the wicker-thin girls and their wicker-thin mothers, all of them favoring dark wool skirts and macintoshes and unreadably far-away expressions; if she squinted, they could have emerged intact from any of the last seven decades.

The women's liberation movement of today in America, in its most oceanic sense, is a wish by women to be liked for something other than their reproductive abilities, especially since the planet is harrowingly overpopulated. And the rejection of the Equal Rights Amendment by male state legislators is this clear statement by men, in my opinion: "We're sorry, girls, but your reproductive abilities are about all we can really like you for." The truth.

It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I’m not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again.

En todo caso, ella no iba a ir más allá mientras él estuviera con [alguien más], así que, ¿Qué más daba? Estar encaprichada de alguien que le daba brillo a su día; era una alegría gratuita y libre de calorías y elementos cancerígenos.

It was an aspiring neighbourhood that retained a faint edge of slum, typical of Shanghai. Pensioners in Mao-era padded jackets would sit on doorsteps playing mah-jong, oblivious to the Prada-clad girls sweeping past on their way to work.

Racconterò di tempi difficili, tempi in cui la vita delle persone valeva assai poco e la lotta per la sopravvivenza era tutto. Mi piacerebbe poter dire che l’umanità ha imparato la lezione. Ma gli esseri umani di rado guardano al passato, finché non commettono di nuovo gli stessi errori. E quando si diventa abbastanza saggi per dispensare consigli, si è anche troppo vecchi per essere ascoltati. Motivo per cui la razza umana resterà per sempre imperfetta e allo stesso tempo meravigliosa.

Si algo había logrado inculcarle [él] era que siempre debía mantener la capacidad de salir, sin sentimentalismos, de una situación que se hubiera vuelto ingobernable. Ésa era la regla fundamental de la supervivencia. "No muevas un dedo por una causa perdida.

No estaba enamorado de ella —eran más o menos tan incompatibles como podrían serlo dos personas cualesquiera—, pero la quería mucho y echaba de menos a esa maldita y complicada mujer. Había creído que la amistad era mutua. En resumen, se sentía como un idiota.

Al mismo tiempo la atormentaban sus propios pensamientos, que se transforman constantemente en desagradables fantasías sobre lo que iba a ser de ella. Odiaba esa forzada indefensión. Por mucho que intentara concentrarse en otra cosa para pasar el tiempo y olvidarse de su situación, la angustia siempre acababa por aflorar. Flotaba en el aire como una nube de gas que amenazaba con penetrar en sus poros y envenenar su existencia. Había descubierto que la mejor manera de mantener alejada esa angustia era imaginándose algo que le transmitiera una sensación de fuerza.

It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls.

It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.

It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.

It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls. It

(Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the first government in the world to decree universal, compulsory and free primary education for both boys and girls.) The British charges against the rulers they

The feminine mystique, elevated by Freudian theory into a scientific religion, sounded a single, overprotective, life-restricting, future-denying note for women. Girls who grew up playing baseball, baby-sitting, mastering geometry -- almost independent enough, almost resourceful enough, to meet the problems of the fission-fusion era -- were told by the most advanced thinkers of our time to go back and live their lives as if they were Noras, restricted to the doll's house by Victorian prejudice. And their own respect and awe for the authority of science -- anthropology, sociology, psychology share that authority now -- kept them from questioning the feminine mystique.

He never approves of anything I do,” Kusha says from the garage, hiding her frown. She gets all her old cars and tools from places you don’t want your daughters to visit. And Rashad Gaumont certainly doesn’t want her to visit Magic Mama, the not-enough-evolved, middle-aged man from the Old City. “He’s not a citizen! He lives in a bus! So what if he made it himself? So what if he teaches you about machines? Don’t meet him.” “Why?” Kusha used to ask Rashad, and she’d always get the same answer: “The unevolved kind brings chaos and wars.” Kusha didn’t listen. She went again and bought this car, too, from an antique dealer. He almost gave it away, saying it will never run again. It has the old days’ engine, the kind you don’t find in this era. A change of engines and batteries, a new set of all-terrain-tires, some safety trackers, sensors, and, well, a whole list of other things with 300% luck to make it run again through the Junk Land—the land outside the cities where it’s only ruins and rubble. Needs hard work, yes. But Kusha instantly liked the color of its body, the moment she saw it—a sort of green with greyish tint, and a good load of rust.

the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.

Su Internet avevo visto vecchi rossetti Yardley – lo stick ormai ridotto a un impasto ceroso sbriciolato – in vendita per quasi cento dollari. In modo che le donne di una certa età potessero sentirlo di nuovo, quell’odore chimico di fiori. Ecco quanto ci tenevano le persone, a sapere che la loro vita era accaduta davvero, che ciò che erano state un tempo esisteva ancora da qualche parte dentro di loro.

Can I be a modern girl, if I acknowledge such thoughts? I must be modern; I live now. But like everybody else, as Hollier says, I live in a muddle of eras, and some of my ideas belong to today, and some to an ancient past, and some to periods of time that seem more relevant to my parents than to me. If I could sort them and control them I might know better where I stand, but when I most want to be contemporary the Past keeps pushing in, and when I long for the Past (like when I wish Tadeusz had not died, and were with me now to guide and explain and help me to find where I belong in life) the Present cannot be pushed away. When I hear girls I know longing to be what they call liberated, and when I hear others rejoicing in what they think of as liberation, I feel a fool, because I simply do not know where I stand.

If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls.

One hot afternoon during the era in which you've gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin, you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She'll offer you one of the balloons, but you won't take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You're wrong. You do.

Y, para sus adentros, advirtió que le complacía formar parte de un lugar menos frenético, impersonal y descontrolado. Si eso significaba que se hacía vieja, pues bienvenido fuera. Cuando era pequeña, Meg le había preguntado cómo era morirse. Ella le había contado, con mucha delicadeza, que era como un sueño profundo cuando se está muy cansado. Tal vez envejecer era como el placer de sentarse tras haber estado de pie todo el día.

It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters. And if all of us are playing-acting there can be no such thing as a soulmate, because we don't have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because i'm not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again

Take a little thought experiment. Imagine all the rampage school shooters in Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas; now imagine they were black girls from poor families who lived instead in Chicago, New Haven, Newark, Philadelphia, or Providence. Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand-wringing? There is no doubt we’d be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would doubtless invent a new term for their behavior, as with wilding two decades ago. We’d hear about the culture of poverty, about how living in the city breeds crime and violence. We’d hear some pundits proclaim some putative natural tendency among blacks toward violence. Someone would likely even blame feminism for causing girls to become violent in a vain imitation of boys.

—Con tus deseos, [lo]convertiste en algo que no era. Creo que las mujeres tendemos a hacerlo. No importa lo adultas e independientes que nos creamos; juro que tenemos una enfermedad mental desde la infancia, siempre pensando que va a aparece un príncipe en un caballo blanco y va a resolverlo todo. Y cuando no aparece, o incluso cuando sí aparece alguien pero no puede resolverlo todo, creemos que hemos hecho algo mal. Pero es que es príncipe nunca existió.

In the modern era, teachers and scholarship have traditionally laid strenuous emphasis on the fact that Briseis, the woman taken from Achilles in Book One, was his géras, his war prize, the implication being that her loss for Achilles meant only loss of honor, an emphasis that may be a legacy of the homoerotic culture in which the classics and the Iliad were so strenuously taught—namely, the British public-school system: handsome and glamorous Achilles didn’t really like women, he was only upset because he’d lost his prize! Homer’s Achilles, however, above all else, is spectacularly adept at articulating his own feelings, and in the Embassy he says, “‘Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones / who love their wives? Since any who is a good man, and careful, / loves her who is his own and cares for her, even as I now / loved this one from my heart, though it was my spear that won her’ ” (9.340ff.). The Iliad ’s depiction of both Achilles and Patroklos is nonchalantly heterosexual. At the conclusion of the Embassy, when Agamemnon’s ambassadors have departed, “Achilles slept in the inward corner of the strong-built shelter, / and a woman lay beside him, one he had taken from Lesbos, / Phorbas’ daughter, Diomede of the fair colouring. / In the other corner Patroklos went to bed; with him also / was a girl, Iphis the fair-girdled, whom brilliant Achilles / gave him, when he took sheer Skyros” (9.663ff.). The nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos played an unlikely role in a lawsuit of the mid-fourth century B.C., brought by the orator Aeschines against one Timarchus, a prominent politician in Athens who had charged him with treason. Hoping to discredit Timarchus prior to the treason trial, Aeschines attacked Timarchus’ morality, charging him with pederasty. Since the same charge could have been brought against Aeschines, the orator takes pains to differentiate between his impulses and those of the plaintiff: “The distinction which I draw is this—to be in love with those who are beautiful and chaste is the experience of a kind-hearted and generous soul”; Aeschines, Contra Timarchus 137, in C. D. Adams, trans., The Speeches of Aeschines (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 111. For proof of such love, Aeschines cited the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos; his citation is of great interest for representing the longest extant quotation of Homer by an ancient author. 32

I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or a TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters.

Es una era muy difícil en la que ser persona. Simplemente una persona real, auténtica, en vez de una colección de rasgos seleccionados a partir de una interminable galería de personajes. Y si todos interpretamos un papel, es imposible que exista nada semejante a un compañero del alma, porque lo que tenemos no son almas de verdad. Había llegado hasta tal extremo que ya nada parecía tener importancia, porque yo no era una persona real y tampoco nadie más lo era. Habría hecho cualquier cosa por volver a sentirme real.

Hypothetically, then, you may be picking up in someone a certain very strange type of sadness that appears as a kind of disassociation from itself, maybe, Love-o.’ ‘I don’t know disassociation.’ ‘Well, love, but you know the idiom “not yourself” — “He’s not himself today,” for example,’ crooking and uncrooking fingers to form quotes on either side of what she says, which Mario adores. ‘There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.’ ‘Engulf means obliterate.’ ‘I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is “existential,” Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky. But I think it may hold true in certain cases. My own father told stories of his own father, whose potato farm had been in St. Pamphile and very much larger than my father’s. My grandfather had had a marvelous harvest one season, and he wanted to invest money. This was in the early 1920s, when there was a great deal of money to be made on upstart companies and new American products. He apparently narrowed the field to two choices — Delaware-brand Punch, or an obscure sweet fizzy coffee substitute that sold out of pharmacy soda fountains and was rumored to contain smidgeons of cocaine, which was the subject of much controversy in those days. My father’s father chose Delaware Punch, which apparently tasted like rancid cranberry juice, and the manufacturer of which folded. And then his next two potato harvests were decimated by blight, resulting in the forced sale of his farm. Coca-Cola is now Coca-Cola. My father said his father showed very little emotion or anger or sadness about this, though. That he somehow couldn’t. My father said his father was frozen, and could feel emotion only when he was drunk. He would apparently get drunk four times a year, weep about his life, throw my father through the living room window, and disappear for several days, roaming the countryside of L’Islet Province, drunk and enraged.’ She’s not been looking at Mario this whole time, though Mario’s been looking at her. She smiled. ‘My father, of course, could himself tell this story only when he was drunk. He never threw anyone through any windows. He simply sat in his chair, drinking ale and reading the newspaper, for hours, until he fell out of the chair. And then one day he fell out of the chair and didn’t get up again, and that was how your maternal grandfather passed away. I’d never have gotten to go to University had he not died when I was a girl. He believed education was a waste for girls. It was a function of his era; it wasn’t his fault. His inheritance to Charles and me paid for university.’ She’s been smiling pleasantly this whole time, emptying the butt from the ashtray into the wastebasket, wiping the bowl’s inside with a Kleenex, straightening straight piles of folders on her desk.

Gervex's painting had a lurid and well-known literary source: it was based on Alfred de Musset's poem "Rolla," published in 1833 and 1840. The poem, a paradigm of July Monarchy romanticism, chronicles the disgrace that befalls Jacques Rolla, a son of the bourgeoisie, in the big city. The narrative of his decline — he squandered his fortune and committed suicide — is interleaved with lamentations over the moral and spiritual decadence of contemporary life. Thenineteen-year-old Rolla becomes the "most debauched man" in Paris, "where vice is the cheapest, the oldest and the most fertile in the world." The poem tells a second story as well, that of Marie (or Maria or Marion), a pure young girl who becomes a degraded urban prostitute. Her story amplifies the poet's theme — a world in moral disarray - and provides the instrument of, and a sympathetic companion for, Rolla's climactic self-destruction. Musset is clear about his young prostitute's status: she was forced into a prostitution de la misère by economic circumstances ("what had debased her was, alas, poverty /And not love of gold"), and he frequently distinguishes her situation from that of the venal women of the courtesan rank ("Your loves are golden, lively and poetic; . . . you are not for sale at all"). He is also insistent about the tawdry circumstances in which the young woman had to practice her miserable profession ("the shameful curtains of that foul retreat," "in a hovel," "the walls of this gloomy and ramshackle room"). The segments of the poem from which Gervex drew his story — and which were published in press reviews of the painting — are these: With a melancholy eye Rolla gazed on The beautiful Marion asleep in her wide bed; In spite of himself, an unnameable and diabolical horror Made him tremble to the bone. Marion had cost dearly. — To pay for his night He had spent his last coins. His friends knew it. And he, on arriving, Had taken their hand and given his word that In the morning no one would see him alive. When Rolla saw the sun appear on the roofs, He went and leaned out the window. Rolla turned to look at Marie. She felt exhausted, and had fallen asleep. And thus both fled the cruelties of fate, The child in sleep, and the man in death! It was a moment of inaction, then, that Gervex chose to paint - that of weary repose for her and melancholic contemplation for Rolla, following the night of paid sex and just prior to his suicide.

I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with movies and TV and now the internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because i'm not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again.

I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just like a real actual person, instead of a collective personality trait selected from an endless automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again.

The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls.

and were willing to suffer pain if necessary.” A young woman in the spring and summer of 1967 was walking toward a door just as that door was springing open. A stage was set for her adulthood that was so accommodatingly extreme—so whimsical, sensual, and urgent—that behavior that in any other era would carry a penalty for the daring was shielded and encouraged. There was safety in numbers for every gorgeous madness; good girls wanting to be bad hadn’t had so much cover since the Jazz Age. San Francisco—glowing with psychedelic mystique, the whole city plastered with Fillmore and Avalon posters of tangle-haired goddess girls—was preparing for a convocation (of hapless runaways from provincial suburbs, it would turn out), the Summer of Love, through which the term “flower children” would be coined, while in harsh, emotion-sparking contrast, helicopters were dropping thousands of U.S. boys into the swamps of Vietnam.

Éramos la primera generación de seres humanos que jamás podría ver nada por primera vez. Contemplamos las maravillas del mundo con ojos mortecinos, de vuelta de todo. Mona Lisa, las pirámides, el Empire State Building. El ataque de un animal selvático, el colapso de antiquísimos glaciares, las erupciones volcánicas. No consigo recordar ni una sola cosa asombrosa que haya visto en persona que no me recordase de inmediato a una película o a un programa de televisión. A un puto anuncio. ¿Conocen el espantoso sonsonete del indiferente?: Ya lo he viiistooo. Bien, pues yo lo he visto literalmente todo. Y lo peor, lo que de verdad provoca que me entren ganas de saltarme la tapa de los sesos, es que la experiencia de segunda mano siempre es mejor. La imagen es más nítida, la visión más intensa, el ángulo de la cámara y la banda sonora manipulan mis emociones de un modo que ha dejado de estar al alcance de la realidad. No estoy seguro de que, llegados a este punto, sigamos siendo realmente humanos, al menos aquellos de nosotros que somos como la mayoría de nosotros: los que crecimos con la televisión y el cine y ahora internet. Si alguien nos traiciona, sabemos qué palabras decir; cuando muere un ser amado, sabemos qué palabras decir; si queremos hacernos el machote o el listillo o el loco, sabemos qué palabras decir. Todos seguimos el mismo guión manoseado. Es una era muy difícil en la que ser persona. Simplemente una persona real, auténtica, en vez de una colección de rasgos seleccionados a partir de una interminable galería de personajes. Y si todos interpretamos un papel, es imposible que exista nada semejante a un compañero del alma, porque lo que tenemos no son almas de verdad. Había llegado hasta tal extremo que ya nada parecía tener importancia, porque yo no era una persona real y tampoco nadie más lo era. Habría hecho cualquier cosa por volver a sentirme real.

Las últimas palabras me gustan tanto como las primeras, aunque no exactamente en el mismo sentido que a Miles Halter. Me encantan las últimas palabras que pronuncian los criminales antes de ser ejecutados, cuando intentan ser ingeniosos recordándole al pelotón de ejecución que no tienen todo el día; o cuando insisten en su inocencia, lo cual lleva a uno a comprender lo irreversible que es la pena de muerte. ¿Cuántas veces se ha demostrado que el asesino era otro después de la muerte de un inocente atrapado en una situación terrible? Me encantan las últimas palabras de los poetas, escritores y dramaturgos que dejan bellas notas de suicidio o cantan al amor en su lecho de muerte. Y también las de las personas que son fieles a la profesión hasta el último aliento, como los gramáticos o esos bichos raros obsesionados con los tecnicismos de las palabras, que antes de dejar esta vida exclaman algo similar a: «"Me estoy muriendo" o "Estoy a punto de morirme", ambas son correctas.

Back in the twentieth century, American girls had used baseball terminology. “First base” referred to embracing and kissing; “second base” referred to groping and fondling and deep, or “French,” kissing, commonly known as “heavy petting”; “third base” referred to fellatio, usually known in polite conversation by the ambiguous term “oral sex”; and “home plate” meant conception-mode intercourse, known familiarly as “going all the way.” In the year 2000, in the era of hooking up, “first base” meant deep kissing (“tonsil hockey”), groping, and fondling; “second base” meant oral sex; “third base” meant going all the way; and “home plate” meant learning each other’s names. Getting to home plate was relatively rare, however. The typical Filofax entry in the year 2000 by a girl who had hooked up the night before would be: “Boy with black Wu-Tang T-shirt and cargo pants: O, A, 6.” Or “Stupid cock diesel”—slang for a boy who was muscular from lifting weights—“who kept saying, ‘This is a cool deal’: TTC, 3.” The letters referred to the sexual acts performed (e.g., TTC for “that thing with the cup”), and the Arabic number indicated the degree of satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10. In the year 2000, girls used “score” as an active verb indicating sexual conquest, as in: “The whole thing was like very sketchy, but I scored that diesel who said he was gonna go home and caff up [drink coffee in order to stay awake and study] for the psych test.” In the twentieth century, only boys had used “score” in that fashion, as in: “I finally scored with Susan last night.” That girls were using such a locution points up one of the ironies of the relations between the sexes in the year 2000. The continuing vogue of feminism had made sexual life easier, even insouciant, for men. Women had been persuaded that they should be just as active as men when it came to sexual advances. Men were only too happy to accede to the new order, since it absolved them of all sense of responsibility

The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I’m not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again.

I ask him about his novel. I fancy that Leo writes historical fiction, and for some reason I'm convinced his era is the Roman Empire. I have no reason to suppose this...it's just a fancy. "Romance," he says. "I write romance." My surprise clearly needs no words because he continues to explain. "My agent will tell you it's a story about passionate friendships and reluctant relationships in modern America, but really it's a romance." "Oh...set today?" I'm still thinking gladiators. "Modern America, remember." "Have you...have you always written romance?" "Yes, and what's more, so have you. The mystery writers, the historical novelists, the political thriller writers, the science fiction writers...everybody but the people who write instruction manuals is writing romance. We dress our stories up with murders, and discussions about morality and society, but really we just care about relationships." "You can't be serious. You're saying Stephen King writes romances?" "Yes, ma'am!" Leo sits back in the sofa. "The killer clown is entertaining and all that, but what we're really interested in is whether the fat kid gets the pretty girl.

If any actress best represents the snappy 1930s dame, it’s Joan Blondell. During that era she played a lively assortment of chorus girls, waitresses, golddiggers, reporters and secretaries in a total of 53 movies, 44 of them for Warner Bros. “Yet, for all that overwork,” Mick LaSalle writes in Complicated Women, “Blondell hardly ever had a false moment. Self-possessed, unimpressed, completely natural, always sane, without attitude or pretense … the greatest of the screen’s great broads. No one was better at playing someone both fun-loving yet grounded, ready for a great time, yet substantial, too.” She was fun-loving, but sometimes there were limits. As a flip waitress in Other Men’s Women (1931), Joan puts the breaks on a fresh customer: BLONDELL: Anything else you guys want? CUSTOMER (checking her out as she bends over): Yeah, give me a big slice of you—and some french fried potatoes on the side. BLONDELL: Listen, baby, I’m A.P.O. CUSTOMER (turning to friend): What does she mean, A.P.O.? BLONDELL: Ain’t Putting Out. “I was the fizz on the soda,” she once said. “I just showed my big boobs and tiny waist and acted glib and flirty.” While that’s a fair assessment of most of her early roles, it wasn’t the whole story.

Mr. President, Dr. Biden, Madam Vice President, Mr. Emhoff, Americans and the world, when day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry asea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace. In the norms and notions of what just is isn’t always justice. And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished. We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one. And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect. We are striving to forge our union with purpose. To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man. And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another. We seek harm to none and harmony for all. Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true. That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped. That even as we tired, we tried that will forever be tied together victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division. Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid. If we’re to live up to her own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made. That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare. It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit. It’s the past we step into and how we repair it. We’ve seen a forest that would shatter our nation rather than share it. Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. This effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated. In this truth, in this faith we trust for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us. This is the era of just redemption. We feared it at its inception. We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour, but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves so while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe? Now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us? We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be a country that is bruised, but whole, benevolent, but bold, fierce, and free. We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation. Our blunders become their burdens. But one thing is certain, if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright. So let us leave behind a country better than one we were left with. Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one. We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the West. We will rise from the wind-swept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution. We will rise from the Lake Rim cities of the Midwestern states. We will rise from the sun-baked South. We will rebuild, reconcile and recover in every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful. When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light. If only we’re brave enough.

Chubby: A regular-size person who could lose a few, for whom you feel affection. Chubster: An overweight, adorable child. That kid from Two and a Half Men for the first couple of years. Fatso: An antiquated term, really. In the 1970s, mean sorority girls would call a pledge this. Probably most often used on people who aren’t even really fat, but who fear being fat. Fatass: Not usually used to describe weight, actually. This deceptive term is more a reflection of one’s laziness. In the writers’ room of The Office, an upper-level writer might get impatient and yell, “Eric, take your fat ass and those six fatasses and go write this B-story! I don’t want to hear any more excuses why the plot doesn’t make sense!” Jabba the Hutt: Star Wars villain. Also, something you can call yourself after a particularly filling Thanksgiving dinner that your aunts and uncles will all laugh really hard at. Obese: A serious, nonpejorative way to describe someone who is unhealthily overweight. Obeseotron: A nickname you give to someone you adore who has just stepped on your foot accidentally, and it hurts. Alternatively, a fat robot. Overweight: When someone is roughly thirty pounds too heavy for his or her frame. Pudgy: See “Chubby.” Pudgo: See “Chubster.” Tub o’ Lard: A huge compliment given by Depression-era people to other, less skinny people. Whale: A really, really mean way that teen boys target teen girls. See the following anecdote.

We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing is, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.

Cribbage!” I declared, pulling out the board, a deck of cards, and pen and paper, “Ben and I are going to teach you. Then we can all play.” “What makes you think I don’t know how to play cribbage?” Sage asked. “You do?” Ben sounded surprised. “I happen to be an excellent cribbage player,” Sage said. “Really…because I’m what one might call a cribbage master,” Ben said. “I bet I’ve been playing longer than you,” Sage said, and I cast my eyes his way. Was he trying to tell u something? “I highly doubt that,” Ben said, “but I believe we’ll see the proof when I double-skunk you.” “Clearly you’re both forgetting it’s a three-person game, and I’m ready to destroy you both,” I said. “Deal ‘em,” Ben said. Being a horse person, my mother was absolutely convinced she could achieve world peace if she just got the right parties together on a long enough ride. I didn’t know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. I didn’t know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. The three of us were pretty evenly matched, and Ben was impressed enough to ask sage how he learned to play. Turned out Sage’s parents were historians, he said, so they first taught him the precursor to cribbage, a game called noddy. “Really?” Ben asked, his professional curiosity piqued. “Your parents were historians? Did they teach?” “European history. In Europe,” Sage said. “Small college. They taught me a lot.” Yep, there was the metaphorical gauntlet. I saw the gleam in Ben’s eye as he picked it up. “Interesting,” he said. “So you’d say you know a lot about European history?” “I would say that. In fact, I believe I just did.” Ben grinned, and immediately set out to expose Sage as an intellectual fraud. He’d ask questions to trip Sage up and test his story, things I had no idea were tests until I heard Sage’s reactions. “So which of Shakespeare’s plays do you think was better served by the Globe Theatre: Henry VIII or Troilus and Cressida?” Ben asked, cracking his knuckles. “Troilus and Cressida was never performed at the Globe,” Sage replied. “As for Henry VIII, the original Globe caught fire during the show and burned to the ground, so I’d say that’s the show that really brought down the house…wouldn’t you?” “Nice…very nice.” Ben nodded. “Well done.” It was the cerebral version of bamboo under the fingernails, and while they both tried to seem casual about their conversation, they were soon leaning forward with sweat beading on their brows. It was fascinating…and weird. After several hours of this, Ben had to admit that he’d found a historical peer, and he gleefully involved Sage in all kinds of debates about the minutiae of eras I knew nothing about…except that I had the nagging sense I might have been there for some of them. For his part, Sage seemed to relish talking about the past with someone who could truly appreciate the detailed anecdotes and stories he’d discovered in his “research.” By the time we started our descent to Miami, the two were leaning over my seat to chat and laugh together. On the very full flight from Miami to New York, Ben and Sage took the two seats next to each other and gabbed and giggled like middle-school girls. I sat across from them stuck next to an older woman wearing far too much perfume.