“
She conquered her demons and wore her scars like wings.
”
”
Atticus Poetry (Love Her Wild)
“
Behind him, he heard Ronan say, "I like the way you losers thought Instagram before first aid. Fuck off.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle, #3))
“
She wore the moonlight like lingerie.
”
”
Atticus Poetry (Love Her Wild)
“
If you are on social media, and you are not learning, not laughing, not being inspired or not networking, then you are using it wrong.
”
”
Germany Kent
“
A few drinks and the world was hers—
she wore her whiskey like a loaded gun.
”
”
Atticus Poetry (Love Her Wild)
“
LIFE IS
A JOURNEY
TO FIND
THE
PEOPLE
WEIRD
LIKE YOU.
—ATTICUS
”
”
Atticus Poetry (Love Her Wild)
“
Share, care, hug like a bear.
”
”
Amy Leigh Mercree
“
She wore his love like a loaded gun.
”
”
Atticus Poetry (Love Her Wild)
“
... and Lynn is dead inside, like a corpse. She Instagrams methodically, clinically, as if she's gathering evidence for defense, like her entire life is dedicated to proving that she has a life.
”
”
Caroline Kepnes (You (You, #1))
“
On Instagram, I want to change my name to "Nobody" so when someone post something really stupid I can like there post and it will say...
"Nobody likes this.
”
”
Skylar Blue
“
I do think the idea of living your life to the fullest is a little flawed. Like, why is jumping out of an airplane inherently better than reading a book?
Or why is living a life that looks good on instagram inherently more meaningful than a life lived quietly?
I just don't buy it.
”
”
John Green
“
Love drips like honey from the hive, constant, sweet, precious, into your heart each and every moment if you let it.
”
”
Amy Leigh Mercree
“
The more you give up who you are to be liked by other people, it’s a formula for chipping away at your soul. You become a product of what everyone else wants, and not who you’re supposed to be.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
what you think pushes people away is what lets them in. And, God I sound like an inspirational Instagram post, but not letting people in is what pushes them away.
”
”
Alexis Hall (Boyfriend Material (London Calling, #1))
“
In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.
”
”
Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy)
“
Dance through life flinging kindness like shimmering rainbows. Find your bliss by sharing your heart.
”
”
Amy Leigh Mercree
“
The power of love can spread magic to the world like nothing else.
”
”
Amy Leigh Mercree
“
Business is not a popularity contest. Views and likes and follows are all important. But ultimately, your business is measured by what's on the P&L and whats on the Balance Sheet. Ultimately, businesses are measured in money.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Talk to yourself like a cherished friend. Treat yourself with love and care. You are perfect, just as you are.
”
”
Amy Leigh Mercree (The Compassion Revolution: 30 Days of Living from the Heart)
“
Sharing your kindness sparks understanding all around. Then like fireflies in the night, twinkling love surrounds you.
”
”
Amy Leigh Mercree
“
Soulmates feel like a deep breath of forever
”
”
Ventum
“
Social media friends are like snowflakes:
they fall on you by the thousands,
but they melt in seconds.
”
”
Mouloud Benzadi
“
Gus hated feeling anxious. He also hated warm ketchup, loud people, sunburns, parallel parking, jams and jellies, Instagram, Sarah McLachlan’s SPCA commercials, rubber glue, Michael Bay’s DVD commentaries, Michael Bay’s films, Michael Bay, and that weird feeling that tattooed, bearded hipster caused in the pit of his stomach that felt like he had tripped down a flight of stairs into a frozen lake that got lit on fire.
”
”
T.J. Klune (How to Be a Normal Person (How to Be, #1))
“
Giving thanks fills you with light and joy so you can shine like the bright star you truly are.
”
”
Amy Leigh Mercree
“
A filter on Instagram was like if Twitter had a button to make you more clever.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
I feel like girls who drink whisky tell good stories.
”
”
Atticus Poetry
“
When that grew boring, she scrolled Twitter, which was like being bathed in the dirty water of other people's thoughts. On Instagram, she was in a deep, deep ad loop.
”
”
Rufi Thorpe (Margo's Got Money Troubles)
“
Life is like a collage. Its individual pieces are arranged to create harmony. Appreciate the artwork of your life.
”
”
Amy Leigh Mercree (Joyful Living: 101 Ways to Transform Your Spirit and Revitalize Your Life)
“
In April 2017, a confidential document is leaked that reveals Facebook is offering advertisers the opportunity to target thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds across its platforms, including Instagram, during moments of psychological vulnerability when they feel “worthless,” “insecure,” “stressed,” “defeated,” “anxious,” “stupid,” “useless,” and “like a failure.” Or to target them when they’re worried about their bodies and thinking of losing weight. Basically, when a teen is in a fragile emotional state. Facebook’s advertising team had made this presentation for an Australian client that explains that Instagram and Facebook monitor teenagers’ posts, photos, interactions, conversations with friends, visual communications, and internet activity on and off Facebook’s platforms and use this data to target young people when they’re vulnerable. In addition to the moments of vulnerability listed, Facebook finds moments when teenagers are concerned with “body confidence” and “working out & losing weight.
”
”
Sarah Wynn-Williams (Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism)
“
Pressure knocks at my door
A clock ticks and demands its due
The lava burns from the floor
But not in a game like it used to.
So little time to figure it all out
So many distractions to prevent success
I’m in a dark forest with no path or route
But this internal fire knows no rest.
”
”
Justin Wetch (Bending The Universe)
“
For many years when I have heard nice people try to be respectful about describing undocumented people, I’ve heard them call us “undocumented workers” as a euphemism, as if there was something uncouth about being just an undocumented person standing with your hands clasped together or at your sides. I almost wish they’d called us something rude like “crazy fuckin’ Mexicans” because that’s acknowledging something about us beyond our usefulness—we’re crazy, we’re Mexican, we’re clearly unwanted!—but to describe all of us, men, women, children, locally Instagram-famous teens, queer puppeteers, all of us, as workers in order to make us palatable, my god. We were brown bodies made to labor, faces pixelated.
”
”
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (The Undocumented Americans)
“
She wore compliments like diamonds.
”
”
Atticus Poetry
“
I wish that future novelists would reject the pressure to write for the betterment of society. Art is not media. A novel is not an 'afternoon special' or fodder for the Twittersphere or material for the journalists to make neat generalizations about culture. A novel is not Buzzfeed or NPR or Instagram or even Hollywood. Let's get clear about that. A novel is a literary work of art meant to expand consciousness. We need novels that live in an amoral universe, past the political agenda described on social media. We have imaginations for a reason. Novels like American Psycho and Lolita did not poison culture. Murderous corporations and exploitative industries did. We need characters in novels to be free to range into the dark and wrong. How else will we understand ourselves?
”
”
Ottessa Moshfegh
“
I keep having the same unkind thought: I am preparing for death and everyone else is on Instagram. I know it's not fair, that life is hard for everyone, but I sometimes feel like I'm the only one in the world who is dying. We're all sinking slowly but one day while everyone watches, I will run out of air, I am going to go under. Even explaining it, I feel more and more frantic. There will be a day when I can't take my next breath and I will drown.
”
”
Kate Bowler (Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved)
“
Here’s a current example of the challenge we face. At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people. Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that those middle-class jobs created? This book is built to answer questions like these, which will only become more common as digital networking hollows out every industry, from media to medicine to manufacturing.
”
”
Jaron Lanier (Who Owns the Future?)
“
Ma’s Instagram profile is classic Ma. She heavily filters photos of meals and selfies. She’s a total abuser of hashtags. #It #Is #Really #Hard #To #Read #Entire #Captions #Like #This. She noticed when I stopped following her.
”
”
Becky Albertalli (What If It's Us (What If It's Us, #1))
“
It all goes back to the red string of my imaginary kite—if you believe something, other people will believe it, too. You can’t convince someone else—whether it’s a potential employer, a loan officer at the car dealership, or someone you’ve been crushing on—that you’re amazing and terrific if you don’t actually think you are. This isn't the false confidence that comes from getting a bunch of "likes" on your Instagram selfies, but a deep-down, unshakeable self-confidence that persists even when things aren't going all that great.
”
”
Sophia Amoruso (#Girlboss)
“
So there are pics of Tucker’s mighty wang on the internet?”
“I haven’t been tagged on Instagram yet, so I’m hopeful they aren’t out there. But thanks for calling my dick mighty. We appreciate that.” Amusement colors his words.
“We? As in you and your penis?”
“Yup,” he says cheerfully.
I snuggle deeper under the covers. “You have a name for your penis?”
“Doesn’t everyone? Guys put a name on everything that’s important to them—cars, dicks. One of my teammates in junior hockey named his stick, which was dumb because sticks break all the time. He’d gone through twelve of them by the end of the season.”
“What were the names?”
“That’s the thing. He just kept adding a number to the end, like iPhone 6, iPhone 7, except in his case it was Henrietta 1, Henrietta 2, et cetera.”
I snicker. “He should’ve used the hurricane naming convention.”
“Darlin’, he wasn’t smart enough to come up with two names, let alone twelve.
”
”
Elle Kennedy (The Goal (Off-Campus, #4))
“
Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them. This is why everyone tries to look so hot and well-traveled on Instagram; this is why everyone seems so smug and triumphant on Facebook; this is why, on Twitter, making a righteous political statement has come to seem, for many people, like a political good in itself. This practice is often called “virtue signaling,
”
”
Jia Tolentino (Trick Mirror)
“
I haven’t a clue either. I’m just someone struggling to recognize their messy life in a world of perfect Instagram ones and feeling like a bit of a fuck-up. Even worse, a forty-something fuck-up. Someone who reads a life-affirming quote and feels exhausted, not inspired. Who isn’t trying to achieve new goals, or set more challenges, because life is enough of a challenge as it is. And who does not feel #blessed and #winningatlife but mostly #noideawhatthefuckIamdoing and #canIgoogleit?
”
”
Alexandra Potter (Confessions of a Forty-Something F**k Up)
“
Do not be angry with the dormant friends you have on Facebook and on social media who do not LIKE or comment on your statuses and pictures, and do not congratulate you on your birthday. See them just as the regular passengers you meet every morning on the train and bus on your way to work, and with whom you do not exchange greetings ― the only thing you share being just passengers on board the same train and bus.
”
”
Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu
“
Not everyone lives in a trash can just because they have kids. My home is orderly and neat because I care. Shame on you.” Response: “Your home is orderly and neat because the only thing you love more than your kid are Instagram likes. Go eat a bag of dicks.
”
”
Bunmi Laditan (Toddlers Are A**holes: It's Not Your Fault)
“
Did I really like cooking, or did I just like the way my Instagram photos of home-cooked meals made me look like a balanced, well-adjusted adult? How many of my beliefs and preferences were actually mine, I wondered, and how many had been put there by machines?
”
”
Kevin Roose (Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI)
“
This book is about how to hold open that place in the sun. It is a field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy, with all the stubbornness of a Chinese “nail house” blocking a major highway. I want this not only for artists and writers, but for any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized. A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them. Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive. —
”
”
Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy)
“
Instagram’s early popularity was less about the technology and more about the psychology—about how it made people feel. The filters made reality look like art. And then, in cataloging that art, people would start to think about their lives differently, and themselves differently, and their place in society differently.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
Ethanol is a volatile, flammable, colourless liquid with a slight chemical odour. It is used as an antiseptic, a solvent, in medical wipes and antibacterial formulas because it kills organisms by denaturing their proteins.
Ethanol is an important industrial ingredient. Ethanol is a good general purpose solvent and is found in paints, tinctures, markers and personal care products such as perfumes and deodorants.
The largest single use of ethanol is as an engine fuel and fuel additive. In other words, we drink, for fun, the same thing we use to make rocket fuel, house paint, anti-septics, solvents, perfumes, and deodorants and to denature, i.e. to take away the natural properties of, or kill, living organisms. Which might make sense on some level if we weren’t a generation of green minded, organic, health-conscious, truth seeking individuals. But we are.
We read labels, we shun gluten, dairy, processed foods, and refined sugars. We buy organic, we use natural sunscreen and beauty products. We worry about fluoride in our water, smog in our air, hydrogenated oils in our food, and we debate whether plastic bottles are safe to drink from.
We replace toxic cleaning products with Mrs. Myers and homemade vinegar concoctions. We do yoga, we run, we SoulCycle and Fitbit, we go paleo and keto, we juice, we cleanse. We do coffee enemas and steam our yonis, and drink clay and charcoal, and shoot up vitamins, and sit in infrared foil boxes, and hire naturopaths, and shamans, and functional doctors, and we take nootropics and we stress about our telomeres. These are all real words.
We are hyper-vigilant about everything we put into our body, everything we do to our body, and we are proud of this. We Instagram how proud we are of this, and we follow Goop and Well+Good, and we drop 40 bucks on an exercise class because there are healing crystals in the floor.
The global wellness economy is estimated to be worth $4 trillion. $4 TRILLION DOLLARS. We are on an endless and expensive quest for wellness and vitality and youth. And we drink fucking rocket fuel.
”
”
Holly Whitaker (Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol)
“
I post Instagram photos that I think of as testaments to my beauty and then obsessively check the likes to see if the internet agrees. I collect this data more than I want to admit, trying to measure my allure as objectively and brutally as possible. I want to calculate my beauty to protect myself, to understand exactly how much power and lovability I have.
”
”
Emily Ratajkowski (My Body)
“
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Facebook, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through photo slideshows at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connections of their youth through the machinery of night, who clicking and poking and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural brightness of tiny screens floating across the tops of cities contemplating likes, who bared their brains to the network and saw who got pregnant and who got fat and who’s living the life best lived by posting Instagrams of themselves staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through newly cropped profile pics with radiant cool eyes obsessing over whose ex’s new lover is the best looking ex-lover’s lover, who breaking their backs falling out of ergonomic chairs while shouting into the icy streets, Everybody look how clever I am, Look how much fun I am having, Look at this amazing party I went to, Look at how well-liked I am, Look at my effortless carefully constructed casual desperate thrown together fun, Everybody look, This is fun, Look, Look, I swear to God I am having so much fun.
”
”
Raphael Bob-Waksberg
“
Jake still won’t talk to me, and I miss him so much, it’s like I’ve been hollowed out by a nuclear blast and there’s nothing left but ashes fluttering inside brittle bones. I’ve sent him dozens of texts that aren’t only unanswered; they’re unread. He unfriended me on Facebook and unfollowed me on Instagram and Snapchat. He’s pretending I don’t exist and I’m starting to think he’s right. If I’m not Jake’s girlfriend, who am I?
”
”
Karen M. McManus (One of Us Is Lying (One of Us is Lying, #1))
“
Go on, right now, and look up the Instagram and Twitter profiles of all the men you know. How many of them list father or husband to @theirwife’sname in their bios? Not many, I’d guess, because men are raised to view themselves as multifaceted beings, with complexities and contradictions and prismatic identities. And when they only have a certain number of characters in which to describe themselves, when they reduce themselves to just one or two things, it is more likely their profession
”
”
Jessica Knoll (The Favorite Sister)
“
This woman controls my heartbeats. Every love lyric I sing each night is made for her. Every melody chases her heartbeat, and every chorus begs for her love. It has been brought to my attention that a few people on my management team have chosen to approach the love of my life and tell her that she wasn't good for my image. Due to her looks and the past she had no say in creating, they said she wasn't good enough. It's true, we grew up in the same town, but that didn't mean our home lives were built on the same steady foundation. I was blessed enough to never know struggle. This girl had to fight tooth and nail for everything she was given. She sacrificed her own youth, because she didn't want her little sister to go into the foster system. She gave up love, in order for me to go chase my dreams. She gives and gives in order to make others happy, because that's the person she is.
She's the most beautiful human being alive, and for anyone--especially people who are supposed to be in my corner--to say differently disgusts me to my core. I am not a robot. I hurt, I ache, I love, and I cry. And it breaks me to live in a world where I have to be afraid of showing who I really am in order to gain followers.
So if you don't like this fact--that I am not single and that I am hopelessly in love--then that's fine. If I lose fans over this, I'm okay with that. I will make every sacrifice in the world from this point on in order to give my love fully to the woman who has given more than she ever should've had to give. I love you, Haze. From the new moon to the fullest. From now until forever.
”
”
Brittainy C. Cherry (The Wreckage of Us)
“
The world is getting noisier. We've gone from boomboxes to Walkmen to portable CD players to iPods to any song we want, whenever we want it. We've gone from the four television channels of my childhood to the seeming infinity of cable and streaming. As technology moves us faster and faster through time and space, it seems to feel like story is getting pushed out of the way, I mean, literally pushed out of the narrative. But even as our engagement with stories change, or the trappings around it morph from book to audio to Instagram to Snapchat, we must remember our finger beneath the words. Remember that story, regardless of the format, has always taken us to places we never thought we'd go, introduced us to people we never thought we'd meet and shown us worlds that we might have missed. So as technology keeps moving faster and faster, I am good with something slower. My finger beneath the words has led me to a life of writing books for people of all ages, books meant to be read slowly, to be savored.
”
”
Jacqueline Woodson
“
A fire burns in the evening sky
Breaking like an egg in a pan
A sea of yellowish orange spreads
In accordance with divine plan.
Vibrant paint drips to the edge
Of ashen clouds drifting past
The sun is a messy painter
Every brush stroke massive and vast.
The clouds are like matches
Starting as fiery flame
Then fading to ashes
A burning passion, tamed.
The red, orange, yellow leaves
On the ground in this season
Reflect the colors of the sky, and
The sunlight that used to feed them.
A September sunset beaming
Down as a sailor's last call
A herald for the coming winter
A message, enjoy the fleeting fall.
”
”
Justin Wetch (Bending The Universe)
“
As with the transition between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, the curdling of the social internet happened slowly and then all at once. The tipping point, I'd guess, was around 2012. People were losing excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new truisms. Facebook had become tedious, trivial, exhausting. Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where everyone tweeted complaints at airlines and bitched about articles that had been commissioned to make people bitch. The dream of a better, truer self on the internet was slipping away. Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation. The freedome promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse.
”
”
Jia Tolentino (Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion)
“
Then, on impulse, I scroll back through my previous Instagram posts, looking at the photos of London cafes, sights, drinks, and smiling faces (mostly strangers). The whole thing is like a feel-good movie, and what's wrong with that? Loads of people use colored filters or whatever on Instagram. Well, my filter is the “this is how I'd like it to be” filter. It's not that I lie. I was in those places, even if I couldn't afford a hot chocolate. It's just I don't dwell on any of the not-so-great stuff in my life, like the commute or the prices or having to keep all my stuff in a hammock. Let alone vanilla-whey-coated eggs and abnoxious lechy flatmates. And the point is, it's something to aspire to, something to hope for. One day my life will match my Instagram posts. One day.
”
”
Sophie Kinsella (My Not So Perfect Life)
“
Social networking technology allows us to spend our time engaged in a hypercompetitive struggle for attention, for victories in the currency of “likes.” People are given more occasions to be self-promoters, to embrace the characteristics of celebrity, to manage their own image, to Snapchat out their selfies in ways that they hope will impress and please the world. This technology creates a culture in which people turn into little brand managers, using Facebook, Twitter, text messages, and Instagram to create a falsely upbeat, slightly overexuberant, external self that can be famous first in a small sphere and then, with luck, in a large one. The manager of this self measures success by the flow of responses it gets. The social media maven spends his or her time creating a self-caricature, a much happier and more photogenic version of real life. People subtly start comparing themselves to other people’s highlight reels, and of course they feel inferior.
”
”
David Brooks (The Road to Character)
“
There are, of course, real pleasures to be found in self-improvement. 'That the beauty idea is pleasurable AND demanding, and often concurrently, is a key feature,' Widdows writes. The beauty ideal asks you to understand your physical body as a source of potential and control. It provides a tangible way to exert power, although this power has so far come at the expense of most others: porn and modeling and Instagram influencing are the only careers in which women regularly outearn men. But the pleasures of beauty work and the advent of mainstream feminism have both, in any case, mostly exacerbated the situation. If Wolf in 1990 criticized a paradigm where a woman was expected to look like her ideal self all the time, we have something deeper burrowing now—not a beauty myth but a lifestyle myth, a paradigm where a woman can muster all the technology, money, and politics available to her to actually try to BECOME that idealized self, and where she can understand relentless self-improvement as natural, mandatory, and feminist—or just, without a question, the best way to live.
”
”
Jia Tolentino (Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion)
“
Followers Everywhere
To start with;
Facebook : 10K followers !!
Instagram : 710 followers !!
Twitter : 20K followers !!
Followers!! Followers!! And Followers!!
Well, who are these followers? Just more than being a crowd of audience, who are they? Ever thought of? And for what purpose are they following you or someone else? Is it because you are a famous personality, a best friend, or you're someone who holds a high status in the society or just because you're simply rich enough to be followed ?
Everyone live their life the way they want to. No one is bound to live under certain limitations or boundaries. Every individual have their own freedom in life. Each one of them is unique too. But what holds us different from others is the work we do for ourselves and for our society. Our behaviour, personality, nature, our attitude towards life and our talents hold us apart from others. Some people are really good and some are really worse than you ever thought of. What I'm trying to say is that some are 'legally' good and they may or may not hold a high position in the society and some are 'illegally' good and they may or may not hold a high position in the society.
I just want to say that follow people for who they actually are, for the good work they do for themselves and for everyone. And respect them by being their true follower in a true sense. The person whom you follow doesn't need to be a rich or poor. A person should be rich by heart and poor by wealth! Even I'm not someone to be followed, yet I do have a few followers. It's not because I'm some great personality or a renowned writer, but might be because they like my work. And I feel happy for that. And I thank God for blessing me with this wonderful skill of writing. Even I follow many people including some really great personalities for their good work and for their kind way of serving the society and the poor. And I believe that, this is the true way to show respect for them.
”
”
Sujish Kandampully
“
I go to one of my favorite Instagram profiles, the.korean.vegan, and I watch her last video, in which she makes peach-topped tteok. The Korean vegan, Joanne, cooks while talking about various things in her life. As she splits open a peach, she explains why she gave up meat. As she adds lemon juice, brown sugar, nutmeg, a pinch of salt, cinnamon, almond extract, maple syrup, then vegan butter and vegan milk and sifted almond and rice flour, she talks about how she worried about whitewashing her diet, about denying herself a fundamental part of her culture, and then about how others don't see her as authentically Korean since she is a vegan. I watch other videos by Joanne, soothed by her voice into feeling human myself, and into craving the experiences of love she talks of and the food she cooks as she does.
I go to another profile, and watch a person's hands delicately handle little knots of shirataki noodles and wash them in cold water, before placing them in a clear oden soup that is already filled with stock-boiled eggs, daikon, and pure white triangles of hanpen. Next, they place a cube of rice cake in a little deep-fried tofu pouch, and seal the pouch with a toothpick so it looks like a tiny drawstring bag; they place the bag in with the other ingredients. "Every winter my mum made this dish for me," a voice says over the video, "just like how every winter my grandma made it for my mum when she was a child." The person in the video is half Japanese like me, and her name is Mei; she appears on the screen, rosy cheeked, chopsticks in her hand, and sits down with her dish and eats it, facing the camera.
Food means so much in Japan. Soya beans thrown out of temples in February to tempt out demons before the coming of spring bring the eater prosperity and luck; sushi rolls eaten facing a specific direction decided each year bring luck and fortune to the eater; soba noodles consumed at New Year help time progress, connecting one year to the next; when the noodles snap, the eater can move on from bad events from the last year. In China too, long noodles consumed at New Year grant the eater a long life. In Korea, when rice-cake soup is eaten at New Year, every Korean ages a year, together, in unison. All these things feel crucial to East Asian identity, no matter which country you are from.
”
”
Claire Kohda (Woman, Eating)
“
her room now?” They were led down the hall by Beth. Before she turned away she took a last drag on her smoke and said, “However this comes out, there is no way my baby would have had anything to do with something like this, drawing of this asshole or not. No way. Do you hear me? Both of you?” “Loud and clear,” said Decker. But he thought if Debbie were involved she had already paid the ultimate price anyway. The state couldn’t exactly kill her again. Beth casually flicked the cigarette down the hall, where it sparked and then died out on the faded runner. Then she walked off. They opened the door and went into Debbie’s room. Decker stood in the middle of the tiny space and looked around. Lancaster said, “We’ll have the tech guys go through her online stuff. Photos on her phone, her laptop over there, the cloud, whatever. Instagram. Twitter. Facebook. Tumblr. Wherever else the kids do their electronic preening. Keeps changing. But our guys will know where to look.” Decker didn’t answer her. He just kept looking around, taking the room in, fitting things in little niches in his memory and then pulling them back out if something didn’t seem right as weighed against something else. “I just see a typical teenage girl’s room. But what do you see?” asked Lancaster finally. He didn’t look at her but said, “Same things you’re seeing. Give me a minute.” Decker walked around the small space, looked under piles of papers, in the young woman’s closet, knelt down to see under her bed, scrutinized the wall art that hung everywhere, including a whole section of People magazine covers. She also had chalkboard squares affixed to one wall. On them was a musical score and short snatches of poetry and personal messages to herself: Deb, Wake up each day with something to prove. “Pretty busy room,” noted Lancaster, who had perched on the edge of the girl’s desk. “We’ll have forensics come and bag it all.” She looked at Decker, obviously waiting for him to react to this, but instead he walked out of the room. “Decker!” “I’ll be back,” he called over his shoulder. She watched him go and then muttered, “Of all the partners I could have had, I got Rain Man, only giant size.” She pulled a stick of gum out of her bag, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth. Over the next several minutes she strolled the room and then came to the mirror on the back of the closet door. She appraised her appearance and ended it with the resigned sigh of a person who knows their best days physically are well in the past. She automatically reached for her smokes but then decided against it. Debbie’s room could be part of a criminal investigation. Her ash and smoke could only taint that investigation.
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David Baldacci (Memory Man (Amos Decker, #1))