Halfway Through The Week Quotes

Opening Yulia Koroleva's uterus was the most heartbreaking thing I'd ever done. When I saw that perfect fetus, when I took it in my hands, my vision clouded over with tears and my professional reserve fell away...[he] had fully formed organs each in its correct location, without any abnormalities. The foot length told me he had been nineteen weeks old, exactly halfway through gestation. I returned him to his mother's body, to be buried with her.

So walk across the street, or drive across town, or fly across the country, but don’t let really intimate loving friendships become the last item on a long to-do list. Good friendships are like breakfast. You think you’re too busy to eat breakfast, but then you find yourself exhausted and cranky halfway through the day, and discover that your attempt to save time totally backfired. In the same way, you can try to go it alone because you don’t have time or because your house is too messy to have people over, or because making new friends is like the very worst parts of dating. But halfway through a hard day or a hard week, you’ll realize in a flash that you’re breathtakingly lonely, and that the Christmas cards aren’t much company.

Price Pritchett, author of The Quantum Leap Strategy, emphasizes that what often looks like failure is actually a work in progress: “Everything looks like a failure in the middle. You can’t bake a cake without getting the kitchen messy. Halfway through surgery it looks like there’s been a murder in the operating room.” If you measure your body fat after a week of work and there’s no change, you haven’t failed; you’ve simply produced a result. As long as you have a goal and you’re taking efficient daily action, then whatever result you produce is “performance feedback.” It may not be the result you want, but it’s still valuable feedback. You’ve learned one way that doesn’t work.

I got up to get another glass of water when Zac asked from his spot still at the stove, breaking up the two pounds of ground beef he’d added to the vegetables. “Vanny, were you gonna want me to help you with your draft list again this year?” I groaned. “I forgot. My brother just messaged me about it. I can’t let him win again this year, Zac. I can’t put up with his crap.” He raised his hand in a dismissive gesture. “I got you. Don’t worry about it.” “Thank—what?” Aiden had his glass halfway to his mouth and was frowning. “You play fantasy football?” he asked, referring to the online role-playing game that millions of people participated in. Participants got to build imaginary teams during a mock draft, made up of players throughout the league. I’d been wrangled into playing against my brother and some of our mutual friends about three years ago and had joined in ever since. Back then, I had no idea what the hell a cornerback was, much less a bye week, but I’d learned a lot since then. I nodded slowly at him, feeling like I’d done something wrong. The big guy’s brow furrowed. “Who was on your team last year?” I named the players I could remember, wondering where this was going and not having a good feeling about it. “What was your defensive team?” There it went. I slipped my hands under the counter and averted my eyes to the man at the stove, cursing him silently. “So you see…” The noise Zac tried to muffle was the most obvious snicker in the world. Asshole. “Was I not on your team?” I gulped. “So you see—” “Dallas wasn’t your team?” he accused me, sounding… well, I didn’t know if it was hurt or outraged, but it was definitely something. “Ahh…” I slid a look at the traitor who was by that point trying to muffle his laugh. “Zac helped me with it.” It was the thump that said Zac’s knees hit the floor. “Look, it isn’t that I didn’t choose you specifically. I would choose you if I could, but Zac said Minnesota—” “Minne-sota.” Jesus, he’d broken the state in two. The big guy, honest to God, shook his head. His eyes went from me to Zac in… yep, that was outrage. Aiden held out his hand, wiggling those incredibly long fingers. “Let me see it.” “See what?” “Your roster from last year.” I sighed and pulled my phone out of the fanny pack I still had around my waist, unlocking the screen and opening the app. Handing it over, I watched his face as he looked through my roster and felt guilty as hell. I’d been planning on choosing Dallas just because Aiden was on the team, but I really had let Zac steer me elsewhere. Apparently, just because you had the best defensive end in the country on your team, didn’t mean everyone else held up their end of the bargain. Plus, he’d missed almost the entire season. He didn’t have to take it so personally.

About a month later, we left for our final training exercise, maneuvers on the planet Charon. Though nearing perihelion, it was still more than twice as far from the sun as Pluto. The troopship was a converted “cattlewagon” made to carry two hundred colonists and assorted bushes and beasts. Don’t think it was roomy, though, just because there were half that many of us. Most of the excess space was taken up with extra reaction mass and ordnance. The whole trip took three weeks, accelerating at two gees halfway, decelerating the other half. Our top speed, as we roared by the orbit of Pluto, was around one-twentieth of the speed of light—not quite enough for relativity to rear its complicated head. Three weeks of carrying around twice as much weight as normal…it’s no picnic. We did some cautious exercises three times a day and remained horizontal as much as possible. Still, we got several broken bones and serious dislocations. The men had to wear special supporters to keep from littering the floor with loose organs. It was almost impossible to sleep; nightmares of choking and being crushed, rolling over periodically to prevent blood pooling and bedsores. One girl got so fatigued that she almost slept through the experience of having a rib push out into the open air. I’d been in space several times before, so when we finally stopped decelerating and went into free fall, it was nothing but relief. But some people had never been out, except for our training on the moon, and succumbed to the sudden vertigo and disorientation. The rest of us cleaned up after them, floating through the quarters with

Every night, I sit in the rocking chair in the nursery when I give Willow her bedtime bottle. Tonight, I burped her halfway through her feeding like always. Then I sat her on my knees facing me and made funny faces. She looked right into my eyes. And she smiled. She’s ten weeks old and she just gave me her very first smile. I wish I’d taken a picture. I’m probably supposed to be documenting everything better for her baby book or whatever. She’s going to have a terrible baby book. But at least she’ll have a father who loves her. Because when she smiled at me tonight, I finally felt it. Love. A rush of love. I was so blown away by it I laughed, which made her smile at me even more. Then I hugged her small body and breathed in the smell of her Johnson’s baby shampoo. I could feel her heartbeat. Up until tonight, I was pretty sure Willow didn’t like me, and I understood why she didn’t. I didn’t blame her for resenting the idiot, bumbling guy who started doing for her all the things her gorgeous, familiar mother had done before. But tonight . . . tonight my little girl smiled at me. She gave her very first smile to me because I’m her person now. I’m her daddy and, in her way, I think she might love me, too. When I laid her against the inside of my elbow to feed her the rest of her bottle, her hand made a fist in the fabric of my shirt. She watched me as she drank down her formula. I’m tired and lonely. Parenting is far more difficult than I understood when I was a son and not yet a father. I miss my freedom and my friends and the life I had before Sylvie told me she was pregnant. I miss who I used to be. But tonight my daughter, a tiny girl in pink pajamas, smiled at me. Because I’m her person. Letter

I've been thinking about God quite a bit lately, though I've never told anyone before. When I was a little girl, my parents taught me to say a prayer every night before I went to bed. It became a habit, like brushing my teeth. I took God for granted. I mean, I never thought about Him, because all my wants and needs were taken care of. Now that I've had this accident and I'm often alone, I've had more than enough time to ponder all kinds of things. One of the first nights I was here, I got halfway through my prayers and realized that my mind was on very different matters. So I did something I'd never done before. I started thinking about the underlying meaning of the words and discovered that there's much more to this supposedly simple child's prayer than I ever suspected. Since that night, I've been saying other prayers, things that I myself thought were beautiful, not just a standard prayer. But a few weeks ago, I was halfway through my prayers again when a thought struck me like a bolt of lightning: ‘Why should God help me now, in my hour of need, when I all but ignored Him in better days?’ This question kept haunting me, because I knew that it would only be fair if God were to ignore my prayers in return.

THE NIGHTGOWN was only the first of the garments in the box. There were seven nightgowns, in fact—one for each day of the week—of delicate silk, lovely georgette, and beautiful tiffany. As Alexandra pulled them out, she draped them on the bed. She’d never seen a nightgown that wasn’t white, but these were almond and pale blush pink, powder blue and soft peach, with delicate edgings of lace and intricate, exquisite embroidery. “They’re stunning,” she said. “Madame Rodale has nothing like them in her book of fashion plates.” Tris just grinned. He seemed different tonight. More relaxed, less worried. She didn’t know what had prompted his sudden good humor, but she didn’t want to question it. She’d rather enjoy it instead. After the afternoon she’d had—starting with Elizabeth’s letter and ending with three fruitless interviews—she wasn’t about to risk the one thing that seemed to be going right. “Are you going to try one on for me?” he asked. Her face heated. He chose a nightgown off the bed, palest lavender with black lace and violet embroidery. “This one,” he said, handing it to her. “Do you require assistance with your dress?” “Just the buttons,” she said, and turned to let him unfasten them. She shifted the nightgown in her hands. It felt so light. “There,” he said when the back of her green dress gaped open. He kissed her softly on the nape of her neck, then settled on one of the striped chairs, sipping from the glass of port he’d brought upstairs with him. “Use the dressing room. I’ll be waiting.” In the dressing room, she shakily stripped out of her frock, chemise, shoes, and stockings, then dropped the nightgown over her head and smoothed it down over her hips. The fabric whispered against her legs. She turned to see herself in the looking glass. Sweet heaven. She’d never imagined nightgowns like this existed. Her nightgowns all had high collars that tied at the throat. This one had a wide, low neckline. Her nightgowns all had long, full sleeves. This one had tiny puffed sleeves that began halfway off her shoulders. Her nightgowns were made of yards and yards of thick, billowing fabric. This one was a slender column that left no curve to the imagination. It was wicked. “Are you ready yet?” Tris called. Alexandra swallowed hard, reminding herself that he’d seen her in less clothing. And he was her husband. Still, wearing the nightgown for him somehow felt more intimate than wearing nothing at all. She was as ready as she’d ever be. Drawing a deep breath, she exited the dressing room, walked quickly through the sitting room, and paused in the bedroom’s doorway. She dropped her gaze, then raised her lashes, giving him the look—the one Juliana had said would make men fall at her feet. Judging from the expression on Tris’s face, it was a good thing he was sitting. The way he looked at her made her heartbeat accelerate. He rose and moved toward her. She met him halfway, licking suddenly dry lips. “Will you kiss me?” she asked softly, reaching up to sweep that always unruly lock off his forehead. It worked this time. He kissed her but good.

joke around—nothing serious—as I work to get my leg back to where it was. Two weeks later, I’m in an ankle-to-hip leg brace and hobbling around on crutches. The brace can’t come off for another six weeks, so my parents lend me their townhouse in New York City and Lucien hires me an assistant to help me out around the house. Some guy named Trevor. He’s okay, but I don’t give him much to do. I want to regain my independence as fast as I can and get back out there for Planet X. Yuri, my editor, is griping that he needs me back and I’m more than happy to oblige. But I still need to recuperate, and I’m bored as hell cooped up in the townhouse. Some buddies of mine from PX stop by and we head out to a brunch place on Amsterdam Street my assistant sometimes orders from. Deacon, Logan, Polly, Jonesy and I take a table in Annabelle’s Bistro, and settle in for a good two hours, running our waitress ragged. She’s a cute little brunette doing her best to stay cheerful for us while we give her a hard time with endless coffee refills, loud laughter, swearing, and general obnoxiousness. Her nametag says Charlotte, and Deacon calls her “Sweet Charlotte” and ogles and teases her, sometimes inappropriately. She has pretty eyes, I muse, but otherwise pay her no mind. I have my leg up on a chair in the corner, leaning back, as if I haven’t a care in the world. And I don’t. I’m going to make a full recovery and pick up my life right where I left off. Finally, a manager with a severe hairdo and too much makeup, politely, yet pointedly, inquires if there’s anything else we need, and we take the hint. We gather our shit and Deacon picks up the tab. We file out, through the maze of tables, and I’m last, hobbling slowly on crutches. I’m halfway out when I realize I left my Yankees baseball cap on the table. I return to get it and find the waitress staring at the check with tears in her eyes. She snaps the black leather book shut when she sees me and hurriedly turns away. “Forget something?” she asks with false cheer and a shaky smile. “My hat,” I say. She’s short and I’m tall. I tower over her. “Did Deacon leave a shitty tip? He does that.” “Oh no, no, I mean…it’s fine,” she says, turning away to wipe her eyes. “I’m so sorry. I just…um, kind of a rough month. You know how it is.” She glances me up and down in my expensive jeans and designer shirt. “Or maybe you don’t.” The waitress realizes what she said, and another round of apologies bursts out of her as she begins stacking our dirty dishes. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. Really. I have this bad habit…blurting. I don’t know why I said that. Anyway, um…” I laugh, and fish into my back pocket for my wallet. “Don’t worry about it. And take this. For your trouble.” I offer her forty dollars and her eyes widen. Up close, her eyes are even prettier—large and luminous, but sad too. A blush turns her skin scarlet “Oh, no, I couldn’t. No, please. It’s fine, really.” She bustles even faster now, not looking at me. I shrug and drop the twenties on the table. “I hope your month improves.” She stops and stares at the money, at war with herself. “Okay. Thank you,” she says finally, her voice cracking. She takes the money and stuffs it into her apron. I feel sorta bad, poor girl. “Have a nice day, Charlotte,” I say, and start to hobble away. She calls after me, “I hope your leg gets better soon.” That was big of her, considering what ginormous bastards we’d been to her all morning. Or maybe she’s just doing her job. I wave a hand to her without looking back, and leave Annabelle’s. Time heals me. I go back to work. To Planet X. To the world and all its thrills and beauty. I don’t go back to my parents’ townhouse; hell I’m hardly in NYC anymore. I don’t go back to Annabelle’s and I never see—or think about—that cute waitress with the sad eyes ever again. “Fucking hell,” I whisper as the machine reads the last line of

A true nothing is not competitive. But I don't think I'm being competitive when I say it. I am feeling truly humble, at that moment. Or I think I am—in fact, can anyone be truly humble at the moment they say they want to learn to be nothing? But there is another problem, which I have been wanting to describe to Bob for weeks now: at last, halfway through your life, you are smart enough to see that it all amounts to nothing, even success amounts to nothing. But how does a person learn to see herself as nothing when she has already had so much trouble learning to see herself as something in the first place? It's so confusing. You spend the first half of your life learning that you are something after all, now you have to spend the second half learning to see yourself as nothing. You have been a negative nothing, now you want to be a positive nothing.

49. Go To Fiji…Every Day! He needed to do ten days’ worth of work in one. Early the next morning, before the sun came up, Mark was awake and downstairs, getting ready for his monster mission to get through his to-do list. He made a quick cup of tea, did a couple of stretches, then hit his desk with huge energy and total focus. He had to get through this and get to Fiji, and he had to do it today. That morning he worked like he had never worked before: he didn’t dodge the hard tasks or just pick the fun ones. No, not that day. Mark started at the top and refused to move on to the next item until each task was done, completed, filed and closed. He was like a rhino, attacking that list head-on with purpose. He had a holiday to go on. Any obstacle he came across on his list, he put his rhino horn down and charged through it, never taking no for an answer until he got the result he needed. By lunchtime he was halfway through his monster work pile. He was so focused he forgot about lunch, and by 4 p.m. he had completed everything. Done. He leant back and let out a big sigh of satisfaction, amazed at how he had managed to do two weeks’ worth of work in less than a day. One thought crossed his mind as he sat there enjoying the fruits of his hard work, and it changed everything for Mark from that day on… ‘Imagine if I had to go to Fiji every day!’ Imagine how much we could all do, how many goals we could charge down, people we could help, adventures we could have and promotions would be ours…if we could just set about them all with that Fiji attitude. That’s why I often say to myself when I have a lot on: It’s time to go to Fiji!

You separate the Sunday sections and there are endless identical lines of print with people living somewhere in the words and the strange contained reality of paper and ink seeps through the house for a week and when you look at the page and distinguish from line from another it begins to gather you into it and there are people being tortured halfway around the world, who speak another language, and you have conversations with them more or less uncontrollably until you become aware you are doing it and then you stop, seeing whatever is in front of you at the time, like half a glass of juice in your husband's hand.

I’m a member of the latter group and have been ever since my wife came across ajar of my hellgrammites while she was sorting through the refrigerator in search of some mayonnaise. The incident would probably have passed without any lingering ill effects had she not at the time been entertaining her church bridge club. It is difficult to describe the resulting commotion with any accuracy, but I learned later that cards from our bridge deck were found as far away as three blocks and one of the olive-and-avocado sandwiches served at the party turned up in a ladies’ restroom halfway across town. Our dog was asleep on the front sidewalk when the ladies left, and it was weeks before we could get all the dents out of him left by their heels.

We were all hyperaware of the volcano because of a crazy experience that we had just a couple weeks earlier in Portland, Oregon. We did a show there on June 12 and, about halfway through “Fire on the Mountain,” Mount St. Helens started erupting. The synchronicity was classic Grateful Dead.

During the first week of filming, it began raining in Tunisia’s Nefta Valley for the first time in seven years and didn’t stop for four days. Equipment and vehicles bogged down in the mud, requiring assistance from the Tunisian army to pull everything out of the muck. It was often cold in the morning and blazing hot by afternoon, and Lucas would begin most days in his brown coat, hands shoved deep in the pockets as he peered through the eyepiece of the camera; as the sun rose higher in the sky, he would shrug off his coat, put on his sunglasses, and direct his actors in a checked work shirt, with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. When it wasn’t raining, high winds tore up the sets, ripping apart the sandcrawler and blowing one set, as a crew member put it, “halfway to Algeria.”7

The Patriots’ quarterback, Tom Brady, had scored touchdowns in far less time. Sure enough, within seconds of the start of play, Brady moved his team halfway down the field. With seventeen seconds remaining, the Patriots were within striking distance, poised for a final big play that would hand Dungy another defeat and crush, yet again, his team’s Super Bowl dreams. As the Patriots approached the line of scrimmage, the Colts’ defense went into their stances. Marlin Jackson, a Colts cornerback, stood ten yards back from the line. He looked at his cues: the width of the gaps between the Patriot linemen and the depth of the running back’s stance. Both told him this was going to be a passing play. Tom Brady, the Patriots’ quarterback, took the snap and dropped back to pass. Jackson was already moving. Brady cocked his arm and heaved the ball. His intended target was a Patriot receiver twenty-two yards away, wide open, near the middle of the field. If the receiver caught the ball, it was likely he could make it close to the end zone or score a touchdown. The football flew through the air. Jackson, the Colts cornerback, was already running at an angle, following his habits. He rushed past the receiver’s right shoulder, cutting in front of him just as the ball arrived. Jackson plucked the ball out of the air for an interception, ran a few more steps and then slid to the ground, hugging the ball to his chest. The whole play had taken less than five seconds. The game was over. Dungy and the Colts had won. Two weeks later, they won the Super Bowl. There are dozens of reasons that might explain why the Colts finally became champions that year. Maybe they got lucky. Maybe it was just their time. But Dungy’s players say it’s because they believed, and because that belief made everything they had learned—all the routines they had practiced until they became automatic—stick, even at the most stressful moments. “We’re proud to have won this championship for our leader, Coach Dungy,” Peyton Manning told the crowd afterward, cradling the Lombardi Trophy. Dungy turned to his wife. “We did it,” he said.

Eventually, at 7:22 A.M. on the morning of May 26, 1998, with tears still pouring down my frozen cheeks, the summit of Mount Everest opened her arms and welcomed me in. As if she now considered me somehow worthy of this place. My pulse raced, and in a haze I found myself suddenly standing on top of the world. Alan embraced me, mumbling excitedly into his mask. Neil was still staggering toward us. As he approached, the wind began to die away. The sun was now rising over the hidden land of Tibet, and the mountains beneath us were bathed in a crimson red. Neil knelt and crossed himself on the summit. Then, together, with our masks of, we hugged as brothers. I got to my feet and began to look around. I swore that I could see halfway around the world. The horizon seemed to bend at the edges. It was the curvature of our earth. Technology can put a man on the moon but not up here. There truly was some magic to this place. The radio suddenly crackled to my left. Neil spoke into it excitedly. “Base camp. We’ve run out of earth.” The voice on the other end exploded with jubilation. Neil passed the radio to me. For weeks I had planned what I would say if I reached the top, but all that just fell apart. I strained into the radio and spoke without thinking. “I just want to get home.” The memory of what went on then begins to fade. We took several photos with both the SAS and the DLE flags flying on the summit, as promised, and I scooped some snow into an empty Juice Plus vitamin bottle I had with me.* It was all I would take with me from the summit. I remember having some vague conversation on the radio--patched through from base camp via a satellite phone--with my family some three thousand miles away: the people who had given me the inspiration to climb. But up there, the time flew by, and like all moments of magic, nothing can last forever. We had to get down. It was already 7:48 A.M. Neil checked my oxygen. “Bear, you’re right down. You better get going, buddy, and fast.” I had just under a fifth of a tank to get me back to the Balcony. I heaved the pack and tank onto my shoulders, fitted my mask, and turned around. The summit was gone. I knew that I would never see it again. *Years later, Shara and I christened our three boys with this snow water from Everest’s summit. Life moments.

Halfway through practice I stand on my own with my helmet in my hand, trying to catch my breath after a series of scout team plays. A voice startles me. —You’ll get used to it. It’ll take a few weeks but you’ll get used to it. No one realizes how bad the altitude change is until they get here.

new blog posts for the coming week. Halfway through the final polish on the

So Jim found a cooperative theater 30 miles from our house and sent a limo to carry me, Barbara, and not-quite-three-week-old Emily to an 8 a.m. showing of Titanic. Barbara was so exhausted from lack of sleep that she had the limo stop at a Dunkin’ Donuts to buy some coffee. Then we settled down in the center seats of this giant theater, just the three of us. It’s a long movie. Halfway through, Barbara had to go to the bathroom. I stood up and said, “Stop the movie!” Can’t do that every day.

Watching the old lady’s fingers, and hoping it wasn’t going to taste vile, May nodded. ‘Thank you.’ Having removed the stopper from the first jar, Primrose picked up a set of measuring spoons threaded onto a leather thong and searched for the one she wanted. Into a stone bowl, she then measured four quantities of what looked like dried leaves. From the second jar, she added a similar amount. To May’s eyes, the contents of both looked identical. Once stirred together, Granny Beer tipped them out on to a square of paper, folded the corners together and then twisted the top tightly closed. ‘Equal parts nettle and dandelion. Enough for a week. Nettles are rich in iron. Better than that, they contain all the vitamins needed to get it into your blood.’ May conveyed her understanding with a nod. ‘All right.’ ‘Nettle by itself is prone to being somewhat potent, which is why I’ve made it up with dandelion leaf, which will also help with getting it into your body.’ ‘I see.’ ‘Two teaspoons into a pot. You got a little teapot over yonder?’ ‘Um, actually…’ May pictured the contents of the dresser. There was really only the Brown Betty. ‘Here,’ Primrose went on, opening the door to another of her cupboards and bending to look inside. ‘Take this ’n.’ Into May’s hand, she pressed a small pot painted blue and white. ‘Two teaspoons in there, boiling water to fill it up, steep for five minutes with a stir halfway through. Strain it into a cup, let it cool a moment. No sense scalding your tongue. And then

So walk across the street, or drive across town, or fly across the country, but don’t let really intimate loving friendships become the last item on a long to-do list. Good friendships are like breakfast. You think you’re too busy to eat breakfast, but then you find yourself exhausted and cranky halfway through the day, and discover that your attempt to save time totally backfired. In the same way, you can try to go it alone because you don’t have time or because your house is too messy to have people over, or because making new friends is like the very worst parts of dating. But halfway through a hard day or a hard week, you’ll realize in a flash that you’re breathtakingly lonely, and that the Christmas cards aren’t much company. Get up, make a phone call, buy a cheap ticket, open your front door. Because there really is nothing like good friends, like the sounds of their laughter and the tones of their voices and the things they teach us in the quietest, smallest moments.

His burrito is halfway to his mouth as he says, “Takes me a week and a half to get through a self-help book when a new season of The Challenge comes out.” Then he takes a bite of his burrito, and honestly, from the lack of facial expressions, I can’t tell if he’s being serious or not. Might as well test his knowledge. “You watch The Challenge?” He nods slowly. “CT for life.” Okay, okay, don’t freak out. Gah . . . but CT! “He’s my dream man,” I say before I can stop myself. “Heavy Boston accent, troubled past, buff—even in his dad-bod era—and just a fine piece of ass.

This God always keeps his promises; he is always true to his word, and he does it in the most extraordinary and wonderful ways, even bringing a miraculous conception to an ageing couple, and even filling an unborn child with the Holy Spirit and making him dance in response to the Saviour. And, by the way, we should not miss some of the implications of this extraordinary encounter between Jesus and John when they are both still in the womb. John was perhaps twenty-two weeks old, little more than halfway through to full term of forty weeks gestation, and Jesus couldn’t have been more than a tiny embryo, no more than a few weeks at the very most, something that many scientists today would simply call ‘a ball of cells’. Yet his presence is already the human presence of God incarnate; already he is causing miraculous things to happen.

You are playing Hamlet in William Shakespeare’s play at school and halfway through the ‘To be or not to be …’ speech your Auntie rushes up from the audience, spits on a tissue and wipes your face with it? You take off your trainers after games and the smell of mouldy cheese is so bad the entire school has to be closed down for a week to be de-fumigated? At lunchtime in the dining hall you overdose on baked beans and you do a blow-off that lasts all afternoon?

It was two weeks before Racin’ Jason knew for sure he was being eaten alive. It was more like a gentle nibbling really. It wasn’t so much painful at first, it tickled unendurably though. Later it became agony. And it took over a year for the entire body to be consumed, although Racin’ Jason was dead halfway through that. He had wondered at times whether this was some sort of punishment for his crimes, for he knew that he deserved something bad. He wept a great deal in the last months, through sockets where his eyes had once been, and he apologized to all the gods he could think of, but it made not the slightest difference.

don’t think this is realistic,” he said. “The CEO would be an older white man.” My colleague and I agreed that might often be the case, but explained that we wanted to focus more on Linda’s needs and motivations than on how she looked. “Sorry, it’s just not believable,” he insisted. “We need to change it.” I squirmed in my Aeron chair. My colleague looked out the window. We’d lost that one, and we knew it. Back at the office, “Linda” became “Michael”—a suit-clad, salt-and-pepper-haired guy. But we kept Linda’s photo in the mix, swapping it to another profile so that our personas wouldn’t end up lily-white. A couple weeks later, we were back in that same conference room, where our client had asked us to share the revised personas with another member of his executive team. We were halfway through our spiel when executive number two cut us off. “So, you have a divorced black woman in a low-level job,” he said. “I have a problem with that.” Reader, I died. Looking back, both of these clients were right: most of the CEOs who were members of their organization were white men, and representing their members this way wasn’t a good plan for their future. But what they missed—because, I recognize now, our personas encouraged them to miss it—was that demographics weren’t the point. Differing motivations and challenges were the real drivers behind what these people wanted and how they interacted with the organization. We thought adding photos, genders, ages, and hometowns would give our personas a more realistic feel. And they did—just not the way we intended. Rather than helping folks connect with these people, the personas encouraged the team to assume that demographic information drove motivations—that

Chicken Tenders (Traditional Flavor) 1 cup almond flour 1 teaspoon garlic powder ½ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon black pepper ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper (optional) 2 egg whites 2 pounds chicken tenders Preheat the oven to 450 ° F. Mix the almond flour, garlic powder, salt, black pepper, and cayenne pepper (if using) in a small bowl and pour the mixture onto a plate. Put the egg whites in a nearby bowl. Dip the chicken tenders in the egg whites, then evenly coat them in the flour mixture and lay out on a cookie sheet sprayed with cooking spray. Bake for about 16 minutes, flipping them halfway through, until both sides are crisp.

Chicken Tenders (Italian Blend) 1 cup almond flour ½ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon pepper 1 tablespoon Italian-blend seasoning 1 teaspoon garlic powder 3 egg whites 2 pounds chicken tenders Italian-blend cheese Low-sodium spaghetti sauce Preheat the oven to 450 ° F. Mix the almond flour, salt, pepper, Italian seasoning, and garlic powder in a small bowl and pour the mixture onto a plate. Put the egg whites in a nearby bowl. Dip the chicken tenders in the egg whites, then evenly coat them in the flour mixture and lay out on a cookie sheet sprayed with cooking spray. Bake for about 16 minutes, flipping them halfway through, until both sides are crisp. Lightly coat the top of the tenders with the cheese and, if needed, place back in the oven to melt it. Serve with spaghetti sauce for dipping.

I told Benny that I had plans to go to Belarus and Lithuania t see the places where our European relatives had lived and died. Halfway through the week, Benny decided to join me on what he called the 'roots trip,' and by the end of the week Shimon and his oldest son, Amir, and Benny's son Rotem had signed on too. I enlisted my daughter Emily, who speaks Russian. In the middle of May 2011, the six of us met at a small wooden inn deep in the lush green Belarusian countryside. Together we visited Rakov and Volozhin; we walked through the crumbling hall of the Volozhin yeshiva, which has survived two world wars and the death of its students and teachers; we scouted out the street near Rakov's brick Catholic church where Sonia, Doba, and Etl grew up. We traveled to Vilna - now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania - and searched out the two apartment buildings where Doba and Shepseleh lived and raised their sons. We drove out to Ponar to say kaddish at the cratered pit where Shepseleh and tens of thousands of Lithuanian Jews lay buried. We walked to a hillside at the edge of Volozhin and said kaddish over the pit where Chaim's brother Yishayahu may have been shot. We said kaddish in the small grassy clearing where the Rakov synagogue burned with Etl and her children inside.