Lost Weekend Quotes

I lost a little weight over the weekend. I cut my fingernails.

That's my entire weekend. I had plans" "A Vampire Dairies marathon is not plans." She looked at me like I lost my mind. "Have you even seen the Salvatore brothers? Holy mother of gingersnaps.

How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?

Well … Zeus approves, Aeolus muttered. ―He says … he says it would be better if you could avoid saving her until after the weekend, because he has a big party planned—Ow! That‘s Aphrodite yelling at him, reminding him that the solstice starts at dawn. She says I should help you. And Hephaestus… yes. Hmm. Very rare they agree on anything. Hold on

Amanda: This weekend was wonderful, but it isn't real life. It was more like a honeymoon, and after a while the excitement will wear off. We can tell ourselves it won't happen, we can make all the promises we want, but it's inevitable, and after that you'll never look at me the way you do now. I won't be the woman you dream about, or the girl you used to love. And you won't be my long-lost love, my one true thing anymore, either. You'll be someone my kids despise because you ruined the family, and you'll see me for who I really am. In a few years, I'll simply be a woman pushing fifty with three kids who might or might not hate her, and who might end up hating herself because of all this. And in the end, you'll end up hating her, too. Dawson: That's not true. Amanda: But it is. Honeymoons always come to an end. Dawson: Being together isn't about a honeymoon. It's about the real you and me. I want to wake up with you beside me in the mornings, I want to spend my evenings looking at you across the dinner table. I want to share every mundane detail of my day with you and hear every detail of yours. I want to laugh with you and fall asleep with you in my arms. Because you aren't just someone I loved back then. You were my best friend, my best self, and I can't imagine giving that up again. You might not understand, but I gave you the best of me, and after you left, nothing was ever the same. I know you're afraid, and I'm afraid, too. But if we let this go, if we pretend none of this ever happened, then I'm not sure we'll ever get another chance. We're still young. We still have time to make this right. Amanda: We're not that young anymore- Dawson: But we are. We still have the rest of our lives. Amanda: I know. That's why I need you to do something for me. Dawson: Anything. Amanda: Please...don't ask me to go with you, because if you do, I'll go. Please don't ask me to tell Frank about us, because I'll do that, too. Please don't ask me to give up my responsibilities or break up my family. I love you, and if you love me, too, then you just can't ask me to do these things. Because I don't trust myself enough to say no.

That’s my entire weekend. I had plans.” “A Vampire Diaries marathon is not plans.” She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Have you even seen the Salvatore brothers? Holy mother of ginger snaps.

But what?” she snapped. “You lost your balls and had to go looking for them all weekend?

They say we have weak wills. Do you know about the two drunks who went to the film of The Lost Weekend. Came out staggering. "My God I'll never take another drink," said the first. "My God I'll never go to another movie." How's that for commitment?

God, who am I? I sit in the library tonight, the lights glaring overhead, the fan whirring loudly. Girls, girls everywhere, reading books. Intent faces, flesh pink, white, yellow. And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches. There is history to read... centuries to comprehend before I sleep, millions of lives to assimilate before breakfast tomorrow. Yet I know that back at the house there is my room, full of my presence. There is my date this weekend: someone believes I am a human being, not a name merely. And these are the only indications that I am a whole person, not merely a knot of nerves, without identity. I'm lost.

her laptop. That’s where the good stuff would be anyway. It always was. Even at my old school, kids had always been frantic when they’d lost their laptops, thinking about all the incriminating stuff that someone might find on them. Like e-mails about how drunk the kids had gotten with their friends the weekend their parents thought they went to band camp. Papers they’d downloaded and plagiarized for AP English. Porn.

She found the evenings long and empty, and the nights worse. She dreaded the weekends.

When you don't have any reason to think of days as weekdays or weekends, you start to realize that all days are pretty much the same. And that kind of gives you the freedom to do whatever you want. It's a lot easier to seize the day than it is to seize a Tuesday. You have errands on Tuesday. On Tuesday you eat pizza again. Your favorite show is on Tuesday, you know? But the day... The day is all just hours you're alive for. They can be filled with anything. Unexpectedness, wildness, maybe a little bit of lawlessness, even. If that makes sense.

To Poetry" Don’t desert me just because I stayed up last night watching The Lost Weekend. I know I’ve spent too much time praising your naked body to strangers and gossiping about lovers you betrayed. I’ve stalked you in foreign cities and followed your far-flung movements, pretending I could describe you. Forgive me for getting jacked on coffee and obsessing over your features year after jittery year. I’m sorry for handing you a line and typing you on a screen, but don’t let me suffer in silence. Does anyone still invoke the Muse, string a wooden lyre for Apollo, or try to saddle up Pegasus? Winged horse, heavenly god or goddess, indifferent entity, secret code, stored magic, pleasance and half wonder, hell, I have loved you my entire life without even knowing what you are or how—please help me—to find you.

No weekends for the gods now. Wars flicker, earth licks its open sores, fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance assassinations, no advance. Only man thinning out his own kind sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind swipe of the pruner and his knife busy about the tree of life... Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone; peace to our children when they fall in small war on the heels of small war - until the end of time to police th eearth, a ghost orbiting forever lost in our monotonous sublime.

There are further considerations I might raise. How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? What are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognizable in fiction?

Delirium is a disease of the night.

When the drink was set before him, he felt better. He did not drink it immediately. Now that he had it, he did not need to.

If it wasn’t one thing it was another, and it never mattered which. Always something to run away from, no matter what, no matter why, as though you’d been born with a consciousness of guilt and would find that thing to feel guilty about regardless.

He supposed he was only one of several million persons of his generation who had grown up and, somewhere around thirty, made the upsetting discovery that life wasn't going to pan out the way you'd always expected it would; and why this realization should have thrown him and not them—or not too many of them—was something he couldn't fathom. Life offered none of those prizes you'd been looking forward to since adolescence (he less than others, but looking forward to them all the same, if only out of curiosity). Adulthood came through with none of the pledges you'd been led somehow to believe in; the future still remained the future-illusion; a non-existent period of constantly-receding promise, hinting fulfillment, yet forever withholding the rewards. All the things that had never happened yet were never going to happen after all. It was a mug's game and there ought to be a law. But there wasn't any law, there was no rhyme or reason; and with the sour-grapes attitude of “Why the hell should there be”—which is as near as you ever came to sophistication—you retired within yourself and compensated for the disappointment by drink, by subsisting on daydreams, by living in a private world of your own making (hell or heaven, what did it matter?), by accomplishing or becoming in fancy what you could never bring about in fact.

The three golden balls were above his head. The entrance to the shop (not so good a one as Mr. Rabinowitz’s but a pawnshop all the same, with a cash-register in the rear) was shuttered with a grey iron gate, fixed with a padlock.

Control! Control, Mac,” he said. “There’s plenty of time.” He lifted his coat from the back of a chair. “All afternoon,” he added. “Time to go out and plenty of time to get back.

I tried not to think of Uncle Ray as being gone forever. I just liked to imagine him on one really long Lost Weekend.

The Lost Weekend was the only book, out of five books, that I wrote sober, without stimulus or sedative.

I haven’t got time to be neurotic,” he had heard Helen say once; and the words had made him go weak with anger. He had thought it was the most stupid and reactionary remark he ever heard in his life; but was it any more stupid than the sneering thrust he had made in reply: “Time! You haven’t got the imagination!

Fitzgerald's work was almost entirely out of print when 'The Lost Weekend' was published in 1944—even 'Gatsby' seemed well on its way to being forgotten—and Jackson had meant to be 'deliberately prophetic' in calling attention to a writer he considered the foremost chronicler of 'the temper and spirit of the time.' More than twenty years later he finally received credit, in writing, for having played a key role in the so-called Fitzgerald Revival.

While I was washing my face, I began to cry. The tears mingled easily with the cold water, in the luminous, dripping crimson of my cupped fingers, and at first I wasn't aware that I was crying at all. The sobs were regular and emotionless, as mechanical as the dry heaves which had stopped only a moment earlier; there was no reason for them, they had nothing to do with me. I brought my head up and looked at my weeping reflection in the mirror with a kind of detached interest. What does this mean? I thought. I looked terrible. Nobody else was falling apart; yet here I was, shaking all over and seeing bats like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. A cold draft was blowing in the window. I felt shaky but oddly refreshed. I ran myself a hot bath, throwing in a good handful of Judy's bath salts, and when I got out and put on my clothes I felt quite myself again. Nihil sub sole novum, I thought as I walked back down the hail to my room. Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness...

When you don't have any reason to think of days as weekdays or weekends, you start to realize that all days are pretty much the same. And that kind of gives you the freedom to do whatever you want. It's a lot easier to seize the day than it is to seize a Tuesday.

THE ORGANIC FOODS MYTH A few decades ago, a woman tried to sue a butter company that had printed the word 'LITE' on its product's packaging. She claimed to have gained so much weight from eating the butter, even though it was labeled as being 'LITE'. In court, the lawyer representing the butter company simply held up the container of butter and said to the judge, "My client did not lie. The container is indeed 'light in weight'. The woman lost the case. In a marketing class in college, we were assigned this case study to show us that 'puffery' is legal. This means that you can deceptively use words with double meanings to sell a product, even though they could mislead customers into thinking your words mean something different. I am using this example to touch upon the myth of organic foods. If I was a lawyer representing a company that had labeled its oranges as being organic, and a man was suing my client because he found out that the oranges were being sprayed with toxins, my defense opening statement would be very simple: "If it's not plastic or metallic, it's organic." Most products labeled as being organic are not really organic. This is the truth. You pay premium prices for products you think are grown without chemicals, but most products are. If an apple is labeled as being organic, it could mean two things. Either the apple tree itself is free from chemicals, or just the soil. One or the other, but rarely both. The truth is, the word 'organic' can mean many things, and taking a farmer to court would be difficult if you found out his fruits were indeed sprayed with pesticides. After all, all organisms on earth are scientifically labeled as being organic, unless they are made of plastic or metal. The word 'organic' comes from the word 'organism', meaning something that is, or once was, living and breathing air, water and sunlight. So, the next time you stroll through your local supermarket and see brown pears that are labeled as being organic, know that they could have been third-rate fare sourced from the last day of a weekend market, and have been re-labeled to be sold to a gullible crowd for a premium price. I have a friend who thinks that organic foods have to look beat up and deformed because the use of chemicals is what makes them look perfect and flawless. This is not true. Chemical-free foods can look perfect if grown in your backyard. If you go to jungles or forests untouched by man, you will see fruit and vegetables that look like they sprouted from trees from Heaven. So be cautious the next time you buy anything labeled as 'organic'. Unless you personally know the farmer or the company selling the products, don't trust what you read. You, me, and everything on land and sea are organic. Suzy Kassem, Truth Is Crying

Like all his attempts at fiction it would be as personal as a letter—painful to those who knew him, of no interest to those who didn’t; precious or self-pitying in spots, in others too clever for its own good; so packed with Shakespeare that it looked as if he worked with a concordance in his lap; so narcissistic that its final effect would be that of the mirrored room which gives back the same image times without count, or the old Post Toastie box of his boyhood with the fascinating picture of a woman and child holding a Post Toastie box with a picture of a woman and child holding a Post Toastie box with a picture of a woman and child holding—-

I suspected the severe boredom had unhinged my brain chemicals somehow, making me care more about things than other people would. Like waking up hungover bothered me, the self-abuse aspect of it. Some of my friends would still sleep away most of the weekend, waking up late and eating fried things, only to go out again. I have never been into fried food but even staying out late had at this point lost its appeal because sleeping in ruined the whole flow of the day, making me stress to catch up on whatever I had missed.

We ain't nervous folk, as you know well; but when it comes to makin' a weekend visit and finding you've run full butt into the Day of Judgement, it wants a bit of explainin'.

The sounds of gunfire didn't bother Winn any more. It just meant that this was the weekend, or a soccer tournament, or someone had a sale on ammunition.

Fitzgerald never swerves by a hair from the one rule that any writer worth his salt will follow: Don’t write about anything you don’t know anything about. Class dismissed.

The answer was nowhere, the drink was everything. What a blessing the money in his pocket, he must get more, much more for the feast of drink ahead.

But he knew he wouldn’t.” How much it said, that line; how much it told about himself.

During the week, she’d focused on school. On the weekends, she’d lost herself in a Netflix binge; any reality was better than hers.

Who would ever want to read a novel about a punk and a drunk! Everybody knew a couple or a dozen; they were not to be taken seriously; nuisances and trouble-makers, nothing more; like queers and fairies, people were bell-sick of them; whatever ailed them, that was their funeral; who cared? - life presented a thousand things more important to be written about than misfits and failures.

Sex," the driver said, "Has no one ever told you about it?" I took the New York Times from my carry-on bag and pretended to read, an act that apparently explained it all. "Ohhh," the driver said, "I understand. You do not like pussy. You like the dick. Is that it?" I brought the paper close to my face, and he stuck his arm through the little window and slapped the back of his seat. "David," he said, "David, listen to me when I am talking to you. I asked do you like the dick?" "I just work," I told him. "I work, and then I go home, and then I work some more." I was trying to set a good example, trying to be the person I'd imagined him to be, but it was a lost cause. "I fucky-fuck every day," he boasted. "Two women. I have a wife and another girl for the weekend. Two kind of pussy. Are you sure you no like to fucky-fuck?" If forced to, I can live with the word "pussy," but "fucky-fuck" was making me carsick. "That is not a real word," I told him. "You can say fuck, but fucky-fuck is just nonsense. Nobody talks that way. You will never get ahead with that kind of language." Traffic thickened because of an accident, and, as we slowed to a stop, the driver ran his tongue over his lips. "Fucky-fuck," he repeated. "I fucky-fucky-fucky fuck.

People are bored. They're dead! Go to a shopping mall and check out the faces. I did this for years—I'd drive out to the malls on weekends and just sit there watching people, trying to figure it out. What's missing? What do they need? What's the next step? And then I got it: imagination. We've lost the ability to make things up. We've farmed out that job to the entertainment industry, and we sit around and drool on ourselves while they do it for us.

He was reminded dully of a scene in The Big Parade years ago (was everything in fiction or in film more real to him than fact?) in which the American troops were shown advancing across a wooded slope into battle: walking slowly doggedly on, their guns in their hands, their grim faces set: plodding straight ahead in a kind of frightful and relentless monotony, undeterred by bursting shrapnel, smoke, gas, tank-fire, or their own dead.… He did not push his way through the crowds.

This is a life, he thought, smooth skipping stones bounding across the surfaces of time, with brief moments of deepened consciousness as you hit the water before going airborne again, flying across the carpool lane, over weeks at a desk, enjoying yourself when the skipping stopped, and spending the rest of your life in a kind of drifting contentment, slipped consciousness, lost weekends, the glow from the television sets warming placid faces, smile lines growing in the glare of the screen.

Not on me you don’t!” He had a horror of the spinal puncture because when it had been used in the TB sanatorium as a means of anesthesia some years ago, a friend of his had been paralyzed by it; not temporarily, which had been the idea, but permanently

What would I say? I lost the place where I didn't have to think about who I need to be, a place where rules were clear and I excelled at them. I lost nearly everything I care about by simply trying to stay afloat, and this weekend, I'll lose the rest. "Thanks.

The thing was over. He himself was back home in bed again and safe. God knows why or how but he had come through one more. No telling what might happen the next time but why worry about that? This one was over and nothing had happened at all. Why did they make such a fuss?

Who would believe that? Nobody. And wasn’t it just as well? Wasn’t it even more fun—weren’t you liked even more—if they sort of got the teasing impression that maybe the story was true and maybe it wasn’t?—if you left it up to them, like the author’s point in The Guardsman?

He turned then to go on—and stopped dead in his tracks. Suddenly he had never felt so good and so foolish in his life. You God damned fool, he said to himself; if you’ve got enough curiosity and interest to know what’s in that book, then what the hell are you running away from?

How often he had been dumbfounded—at first incredulous, then contemptuous—to hear someone say, after a night of drinking, “God, take it away, I don’t want to smell it, I don’t want to see it even, take it out of my sight!”—this at the very moment when he wanted and needed it most.

You've got to seduce the brain throughout a King Weekend, appease it, and occasionally confound it. The brain is so commanding, confident that every thought has always been right, is right, will be right, that tweaking a man's heart has no chance of success if the brain isn't distracted.

Dean Owen did what a lot of reporters seem to have forgotten how to do these days, he asked the people who were there that awful day what they saw and how they felt. This is a must-read for anyone who wants a better understanding of what happened on the weekend that America lost its innocence. A terrific read.

Suppose that lad— Suppose time could be all mixed up so that the child of twenty years ago could look into the bathroom mirror and see himself reflected at thirty-three, as he saw himself now. What would he think, that boy? Would he have accepted it—is this what he dreamed of becoming? Would he accept it for a moment?

The alcoholic, to get liquor, will do everything that the drug-addict will do to get drugs, everything but one: and that is murder. Cut off from drink, he’ll lie to get it, beg, plead, wheedle, borrow, steal, rob—all the crimes in the catalogue. But he won’t kill for it. That’s the difference between the drunk and the drug-addict. But the only one.

I made the mistake of renting a cottage in a village near Chichester. Charles had advised against it but at the time I’d thought how nice it would be to get away now and then for the weekend. He was right. I couldn’t wait to get back. I soon discovered that every time I made one friend I made three enemies and that arguments about such issues as car parking, the church bells, dog waste and hanging flower baskets dominated daily life to such an extent that everyone was permanently at each other’s throats. That’s the truth of it. Emotions which are quickly lost in the noise and chaos of the city fester around the village square, driving people to psychosis and violence. It’s a gift to the whodunnit writer.

I will say this about the upper echelon in France: they know how to spend money. From what I saw living in America, wealth is dedicated to elevating the individual experience. If you’re a well-off child, you get a car, or a horse. You go to summer camps that cost as much as college. And everything is monogrammed, personalized, and stamped, to make it that much easier for other people to recognize your net worth. …The French bourgeois don’t pine for yachts or garages with multiple cars. They don’t build homes with bowling alleys or spend their weekends trying to meet the quarterly food and beverage limit at their country clubs: they put their savings into a vacation home that all their family can enjoy, and usually it’s in France. They buy nice food, they serve nice wine, and they wear the same cashmere sweaters over and over for years. I think the wealthy French feel comfortable with their money because they do not fear it. It’s the fearful who put money into houses with even bedrooms and fifteen baths. It’s the fearful who drive around in yellow Hummers during high-gas-price months becasue if they’re going to lose their money tomorrow, at least other people will know that they are rich today. The French, as with almost all things, privilege privacy and subtlety and they don’t feel comfortable with excess. This is why one of their favorite admonishments is tu t’es laisse aller. You’ve lost control of yourself. You’ve let yourself go.

Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since. I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since. But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen. As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal. But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong. Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant. The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too. The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up. I mean, what does a child know about faith? It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known. Life is like that. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about. Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. And he was like a second father to me. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg. I was devastated. I remember sitting up a tree one night at school on my own, and praying the simplest, most heartfelt prayer of my life. ‘Please, God, comfort me.’ Blow me down … He did. My journey ever since has been trying to make sure I don’t let life or vicars or church over-complicate that simple faith I had found. And the more of the Christian faith I discover, the more I realize that, at heart, it is simple. (What a relief it has been in later life to find that there are some great church communities out there, with honest, loving friendships that help me with all of this stuff.) To me, my Christian faith is all about being held, comforted, forgiven, strengthened and loved – yet somehow that message gets lost on most of us, and we tend only to remember the religious nutters or the God of endless school assemblies. This is no one’s fault, it is just life. Our job is to stay open and gentle, so we can hear the knocking on the door of our heart when it comes. The irony is that I never meet anyone who doesn’t want to be loved or held or forgiven. Yet I meet a lot of folk who hate religion. And I so sympathize. But so did Jesus. In fact, He didn’t just sympathize, He went much further. It seems more like this Jesus came to destroy religion and to bring life. This really is the heart of what I found as a young teenager: Christ comes to make us free, to bring us life in all its fullness. He is there to forgive us where we have messed up (and who hasn’t), and to be the backbone in our being. Faith in Christ has been the great empowering presence in my life, helping me walk strong when so often I feel so weak. It is no wonder I felt I had stumbled on something remarkable that night up that tree. I had found a calling for my life.

What first comes across our minds About the stocky Mexican Pushing a mower across the lawn At 7 a.m. on a Saturday As the roar of the cutter wakes us? Let me take a guess. Why do they have to come so damn early? What do we make of his flannel Shirt missing buttons at the cuffs, Threadbare at the shoulders, The grass stains around his knees, The dirt like roadmaps to nowhere, Between the wrinkles of his neck? Let me take a shot. Dirty Mexican. Would his appearance lead us to believe He is a border jumper or wetback Who hits the bar top with an empty shot glass For the twelfth time then goes home To kick his wife around like fallen grapefruit Lying on the ground? First, the stocky Mexican isn’t mowing the lawn At 7 a.m. on a Saturday. He doesn’t work weekends anymore ever since He lost one-third of his route To laborers willing to work for next to nothing. Second, he knows better than to kneel On the wet grass because, well, the knees Of his pants will become grass-stained And pants don’t grow on trees, even here, Close to Palm Springs. Instead, after 25 years of the same blue collar work, Two sons out and one going to college, Rather than jail, and a small but modest savings In case he loses the remaining two-thirds Of his work—no matter how small and reluctantly The checks come in the mail— My father the stocky gardener believes He firmly holds his life In both his hands like pruning shears, Chopping branches and blossoms, Never looking downward as they fall to his feet In pieces like the American dream.

I need someone who knows to enjoy life. Someone who'll get high with me at the Pere - Lechaise cemetery. Someone who'll lose their breath running trough the Louvre. Someone who'll go to coffee with a good book ( Fyodor Dostoyevsky, L. Tolstoy, Voltaire, A. Camus, Oscar Wilde, Gustave Flaubert ). During the weekends to the cafe de Flore, and after that lunch at Ritz. Someone who'll get lost in Paris in the middle of the night. Someone who'll lay beside Seine, drink wine and listen to Florence and Machine, Banks, Borns, Hurts, Bjork, Tom Odelle... Someone who can sit in front of S.Dali's paintings for hours and not talk. Someone who wants to live. Someone who wants to travel and see the world. Someone who'll look at the stars for hours, talk about life, someone who is not afraid of death.

If he wanted to drink himself to death it was nobody’s affair but his own; his life was his life to throw away, if that’s what he wanted; but—was that what he wanted? If so, why did he suffer remorse? Obviously there was the will in him to destroy himself; part of him was bent on self-destruction—he’d be the last to deny it. But obviously, too, part was not; part held back and expressed its disapproval in remorse and shame.

It’s tempting to believe fairy tales and imagine recovery is this meteoric rise from darkness, but I think it must be stated for the sake of honesty, integrity and solidarity with others going through it, that recovery doesn’t feel at all like strength. It feels like giving up, like failing. It feels like lying in a useless lump all weekend, crying about the weight you gained. It feels like the deep shame you carry around all day because you actually can’t stop yourself eating anymore. It feels like the maddening conflict of being hungry and healthy. You gaze back at your skinny pictures wondering what happened – was that really you? It was seemingly moments ago, but now you are asking yourself what happened to the girl who would have given her life to be thin. It feels like you’re being weak and lazy and surrendering to your own worthlessness. It actually, on many days, feels like you’ve lost a battle.

I missed you." A humorless laugh closed his eyes. When he opened them, the redness had turned them deep mossy green. "Sorry." Trip's own eyes welled up. "Not like, gosh-I-wonder-what-Trip-is-doing missed you. I meant I actually started to feel like I'd survived some horrible amputation and part of me had been hacked off and lost in a haunted warzone being gnawed by the walking dead. I missed you because you were missing. I actually spent weeks trying to imagine what you were doing at any given Moment... obsessing, really." He didn't wipe his wet cheeks. "Trip must be seeing the new Superman this weekend. I wonder if Trip's asleep. I wish I could swallow Trip's load right this second. Trip needs to stop and eat now, something not dyed or in plastic. I even went to watch the Big Dog office doors a couple of times, like the Little Match Queer, when I knew you had pages due, just to make sure, you were okay, but then you... I dunno: vanished.

Genevieve was the girl who brought me home after my dad killed himself and let me cry in a way I never would’ve in front of my friends. She tutored me in chemistry when I was failing, even though I was always too absorbed by her to actually pay attention. When her father started bringing home younger girls for the first time since her mother died, I distracted her with weekend outings, like a trip across the Brooklyn Bridge and people watching in Fort Wille Park. And now she’s the girl who won’t let me hug her.

In knowledge work, when you agree to a new commitment, be it a minor task or a large project, it brings with it a certain amount of ongoing administrative overhead: back-and-forth email threads needed to gather information, for example, or meetings scheduled to synchronize with your collaborators. This overhead tax activates as soon as you take on a new responsibility. As your to-do list grows, so does the total amount of overhead tax you’re paying. Because the number of hours in the day is fixed, these administrative chores will take more and more time away from your core work, slowing down the rate at which these objectives are accomplished. At moderate workloads, this effect might be frustrating: a general sense that completing your work is taking longer than it should. As your workload increases, however, the overhead tax you’re paying will eventually pass a tipping point, beyond which logistical efforts will devour so much of your schedule that you cannot complete old tasks fast enough to keep up with the new. This feedback loop can quickly spiral out of control, pushing your workload higher and higher until you find yourself losing your entire day to overhead activities: meeting after meeting conducted against a background hum of unceasing email and chat. Eventually the only solution becomes to push actual work into ad hoc sessions added after hours—in the evenings and early mornings, or over the weekend—in a desperate attempt to avoid a full collapse of all useful output. You’re as busy as you’ve ever been, and yet hardly get anything done.

By mid-summer only Ma Barker remained in Chicago, lost in her jigsaw puzzles. Karpis drove over to visit her one weekend and found she was doing surprisingly well. He and Dock took her to see a movie. To their horror, the film was preceded by a newsreel warning moviegoers to be on the lookout for Dillinger, Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Karpis, and the Barkers. Karpis scrunched low in his seat as their pictures flashed on the screen. “One of these men may be sitting next to you,” the announcer said. Karpis pulled his hat low over his forehead.

I took the bucket off my head. I looked at the carriage. The baby was NOT sitting in the carriage watching me. The baby was GONE. I looked under all the bushes, and up the tree, but I couldn’t find the baby. I’d lost the baby. Losing a baby is bad. I panicked. I ran inside and took a potato from the kitchen. From under my bed I scooped up lots of fluff and dust bunnies and stuck them to the top of the potato with my glue stick. I drew a face on the potato. I ran outside and put the potato-baby in the carriage. Maybe Mrs Whitman wouldn’t notice that it wasn’t her baby.

I particularly love when Spirit sends signs that make us laugh. I know a woman who lost her husband to cancer at a young age. A year later, she was in Miami with her friends during a much-needed girls’ weekend. They were lying on the beach, when she began talking about her mother-in-law. She was saying that it had been a hard relationship to negotiate without her spouse, since each woman dealt with losing the son/husband differently. Well, right in the middle of this, a seagull pooped on the wife’s arm. I have a hunch it was her husband’s soul telling her, Stop gossiping about my mom, already!

Well, friends, he lost a full day of his life that weekend. Or maybe it was more? Maybe it was a day and a half? Two days? Our friend Seth called him twice during that time and it didn’t go straight to voicemail, but it went after-seeing-Seth-was-calling straight to voicemail. The sun went up, the sun went down, he realized he’d had to pee for an hour, and at some point he thought to order Chinese food (steamed chicken and vegetables, no water chestnuts, please), but mostly he remained aloft on the wind of the messages he was getting—women who wanted to LOL at his every joke, and send winkies, and pictures, and set his weary heart afire with double entendre

Her hand shot out, gripped his arm. "M.J. and Bailey?" "Your friends are fine." He felt her grip go limp. "They've had an eventful holiday weekend, all of which could have been avoided if they'd contacted and cooperated with the police. And it's cooperation I'll have from you now, one way or the other." She tossed her hair back. "Where are they? What did you do,toss them in a cell? My lawyer will have them out and your butt in a sling before you can finish reciting the Miranda." She started toward the phone, saw it wasn't on the Queen Anne table. "No,they're not in a cell." It goaded him, the way she snapped into gear, ready to buck the rules. "I imagine they're planning your funeral right about now.

A late arrival had the impression of lots of loud people unnecessarily grouped within a smoke-blue space between two mirrors gorged with reflections. Because, I suppose, Cynthia wished to be the youngest in the room, the women she used to invite, married or single, were, at the best, in their precarious forties; some of them would bring from their homes, in dark taxis, intact vestiges of good looks, which, however, they lost as the party progressed. It has always amazed me - the capacity sociable weekend revelers have of finding almost at once, by a purely empiric but very precise method, a common denominator of drunkenness, to which everybody loyally sticks before descending, all together, to the next level. The rich friendliness of the matrons was marked by tomboyish overtones, while the fixed inward look of amiably tight men was like a sacrilegious parody of pregnancy. Although some of the guests were connected in one way or another with the arts, there was no inspired talk, no wreathed, elbow-propped heads, and of course no flute girls. From some vantage point where she had been sitting in a stranded mermaid pose on the pale carpet with one or two younger fellows, Cynthia, her face varnished with a film of beaming sweat, would creep up on her knees, a proffered plate of nuts in one hand, and crisply tap with the other the athletic leg of Cochran or Corcoran, an art dealer, ensconced, on a pearl-grey sofa, between two flushed, happily disintegrating ladies. At a further stage there would come spurts of more riotous gaiety. Corcoran or Coransky would grab Cynthia or some other wandering woman by the shoulder and lead her into a corner to confront her with a grinning imbroglio of private jokes and rumors, whereupon, with a laugh and a toss of her head, he would break away. And still later there would be flurries of intersexual chumminess, jocular reconciliations, a bare fleshy arm flung around another woman's husband (he standing very upright in the midst of a swaying room), or a sudden rush of flirtatious anger, of clumsy pursuit-and the quiet half smile of Bob Wheeler picking up glasses that grew like mushrooms in the shade of chairs. ("The Vane Sisters")

Genevieve went over and kicked lightly at the front tire of her Dodge—to her the tire always looked low. The boys had made her remember what it was to be young. Once, before they had any kids, she and her husband Dan took off one weekend and drove to Raton, New Mexico. They stayed in a motel, lost twenty dollars at the horse races, made love six times in two days, and had dinner in the coffee shop of a fancy restaurant. She had even worn eye shadow. Romance might not last, but it was something while it did. She looked up the street and waved at Sam the Lion, but he was looking the other way and didn’t notice her and she went back into the empty café, wishing for a few minutes that she was young again and free and could go rattling off across Texas toward the Rio Grande.

Sam, I’ll have one more rye.” To celebrate, he said under his breath. To celebrate what?—and a fit of boredom, of ennui so staggering descended upon him with such suddenness that he was scarcely able to stand. He wanted to put his head down on the counter, in the wet and all, and weep: tears, idle tears, I know damned well what they mean—for he was seeing himself with unbearable clarity again and he could beat his fists together and curse this double vision of his that enabled him, forced him, to see too much—though all the while, all the long time he had been at the bar, he knew that to the casual spectator he had changed or moved by not so much as a hair or had a thought more troubling than the price of his drinks. Cloudy the place, who was drinking now with him, in him, inside him, instead of him, he loved and hated himself and that Sam, and groped to think of it again, clearly like before.

Last night it had been merely drink. It was medicine now. He lifted the empty pint to his mouth. One warm drop crawled like slow syrup through the neck of the bottle. It lay on his tongue, useless, all but impossible to swallow. He thought of all the mornings (and as he thought of them he knew he was in for another cycle of harrowing mornings) when, at such times as these, he would drag himself into the kitchen and examine the line-up of empty quarts and pints on the floor under the sink, pick them up separately and hold them upside down over a small glass, one by one for minutes at a time, extracting a last sticky drop from one bottle, two drops from another, maybe nothing from a third, and so on through a long patient nerve-wracking process till he had collected enough, perhaps, to cover the bottom of the glass. It was like a rite—the slow drinking of it still more so; and it was never enough.

Suddenly he thought of Wick. He would be at the opera now. Helen would be there too, sitting beside him in the great nearly dark house (she’s only going because of you). The two of them would be looking at the brilliantly lighted sailing-ship scene that was the first act, and now and again one of them would lean toward the other and whisper something about the performance. Not about him; they wouldn’t be talking about him now. Chiefly because he was the only thing on their minds and neither wanted the other to know it. Helen would be wondering if he really wasn’t feeling well, or was he off again; and Wick would be wondering if Helen had accepted the excuse. She didn’t give a damn for the opera under any conditions and he certainly didn’t under these. He would be staring at the stage, half-turned toward Helen to catch her next whispered comment, and thinking: “If he isn’t there when I go back; if he’s gone out—” Don felt sorry for the distraction he knew he was causing them, and yet he couldn’t help smiling, too.

While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging “center of narrative gravity” (to use Daniel Dennett’s phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time. Our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also suggest, to varying degrees and with greater or lesser precision, that we live in the grip of a cognitive illusion. But the alternative to our captivity is almost always viewed through the lens of religious dogma. A Christian will recite the Lord’s Prayer continuously over a weekend, experience a profound sense of clarity and peace, and judge this mental state to be fully corroborative of the doctrine of Christianity; A Hindu will spend an evening singing devotional songs to Krishna, feel suddenly free of his conventional sense of self, and conclude that his chosen deity has showered him with grace; a Sufi will spend hours whirling in circles, pierce the veil of thought for a time, and believe that he has established a direct connection to Allah. The universality of these phenomena refutes the sectarian claims of any one religion. And, given that contemplatives generally present their experiences of self-transcendence as inseparable from their associated theology, mythology, and metaphysics, it is no surprise that scientists and nonbelievers tend to view their reports as the product of disordered minds, or as exaggerated accounts of far more common mental states — like scientific awe, aesthetic enjoyment, artistic inspiration, etc. Our religions are clearly false, even if certain classically religious experiences are worth having. If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science. But we must first realize that we are lost in thought.

It was in her abode, in the janitorial quarters assigned her on the ground floor rear, that seemingly inoffensive Mrs. Shapiro set up a clandestine alcohol dispensary—not a speakeasy, but a bootleg joint, where the Irish and other shikkers of the vicinity could come and have their pint bottles filled up, at a price. And several times on weekends, when Ira was there, for he got along best with Jake, felt closest to him, because Jake was artistic, some beefy Irishman would come in, hand over his empty pint bottle for refilling, and after greenbacks were passed, and the transaction completed, receive as a goodwill offering a pony of spirits on the house. And once again those wry (rye? Out vile pun!), wry memories of lost opportunities: Jake’s drab kitchen where the two sat talking about art, about Jake’s favorite painters, interrupted by a knock on the door, opened by Mr. Shapiro, and the customer entered. With the fewest possible words, perhaps no more than salutations, purpose understood, negotiations carried out like a mime show, or a ballet: ecstatic pas de deux with Mr. McNally and Mr. Shapiro—until suspended by Mr. Shapiro’s disappearance with an empty bottle, leaving Mr. McNally to solo in anticipation of a “Druidy drunk,” terminated by Mr. Shapiro’s reappearance with a full pint of booze. Another pas de deux of payment? Got it whole hog—Mr. Shapiro was arrested for bootlegging several times, paid several fines, but somehow, by bribery and cunning, managed to survive in the enterprise, until he had amassed enough wealth to buy a fine place in Bensonhurst by the time “Prohibition” was repealed. A Yiddisher kupf, no doubt.

His months of teaching experience were now a lost age of youth and innocence. He could no longer sit in his office at Fort McNair, look out over the elm trees and the golf course, and encompass the world within "neat, geometric patterns" that fit within equally precise lectures. Policy planning was a very different responsibility, but explaining just how was "like trying to describe the mysteries of love to a person who has never experienced it." There was, however, an analogy that might help. "I have a largish farm in Pennsylvania."...it had 235 acres, on each of which things were happening. Weekends, in theory, were days of rest. But farms defied theory: Here a bridge is collapsing. No sooner do you start to repair it than a neighbor comes to complain about a hedge row which you haven't kept up half a mile away on the other side of the farm. At that very moment your daughter arrives to tell you that someone left the gate to the hog pasture open and the hogs are out. On the way to the hog pasture, you discover that the beagle hound is happily liquidating one of the children's pet kittens. In burying the kitten you look up and notice a whole section of the barn roof has been blown off and needs instant repair. Somebody shouts from the bathroom window that the pump has stopped working, and there's no water in the house. At that moment, a truck arrives with five tons of stone for the lane. And as you stand there hopelessly, wondering which of these crises to attend to first, you notice the farmer's little boy standing silently before you with that maddening smile, which is halfway a leer, on his face, and when you ask him what's up, he says triumphantly 'The bull's busted out and he's eating the strawberry bed'. Policy planning was like that. You might anticipate a problem three or four months into the future, but by the time you'd got your ideas down on paper, the months had shrunk to three to four weeks. Getting the paper approved took still more time, which left perhaps three or four days. And by the time others had translated those ideas into action, "the thing you were planning for took place the day before yesterday, and everyone wants to know why in the hell you didn't foresee it a long time ago." Meanwhile, 234 other problems were following similar trajectories, causing throngs of people to stand around trying to get your attention: "Say, do you know that the bull is out there in the strawberry patch again?

Then he was striding toward me. His mesmerizing gaze pinned me in place as he cupped my face. When his lips covered mine, I gasped. He took the opportunity to deepen the kiss, groaning into the contact. His hands tightened on my face. His sexy groans made my toes curl, muddling my thoughts. Block that out! I was Aric’s wife. I’d wronged him in the past, had consigned him to misery for hundreds—no, thousands—of years. I needed to make this right. Like penance. There was something vaguely threatening about his words. Misgivings about this arose. Too fast. “If you have feelings for him, fight them,” Aric commanded me. “By going to him, you’d be stoking them once more. Don’t you understand? He can find another woman—I cannot. If you choose him, you’ll be consigning me to a hellish fate. As you’ve done again and again. No, this will be even worse, because I’ve had a greater glimpse of what I’ll be missing.” “I just want to talk to him. I’m leaving this weekend,” I said in an unwavering voice. “No, you will not.” His arrogant demeanor back in place, he said, “Understand me, I’m not surrendering the one woman who was born for me alone. Not to a human, not to anyone.” “You can’t keep me here against my will any longer. What are you going to do? Put that cuff back on me?” I held up my hand to stop him. “I understand why you did it. But I won’t be a prisoner anymore.” He snatched up his shirt, threading his arms into the sleeves. “You say you keep your promises now? You made a vow before gods to be my wife. In this life, you will keep your promises to me—before you ever honor one to him!” “You can’t stop me from leaving. I have my powers back. I earned my powers back.” With a cruel curve of his lips, he said, “You promised never to harm me, Empress. Know that you’ll have to kill me before I would ever let you go.” As he strode out the door, I said, “And know that you’ll have to put that cilice on me to keep me prisoner again.” He whirled around, fury in his expression. “You refused—twice—to beg me for your own life, but you’d beg for his?” I whispered, “Yes.” With a calculating gleam in his eyes, he said, “This isn’t an impossible task you ask of me. I could call in ancient favors, contact old allies. They could be here in mere hours. We’d ride out as one.” “T-truly?” “On one condition: you’ll become my wife in truth, mine in every way. Beginning tonight. Comply, and I’ll take on an army for you.” My lips parted with shock. “How can you do this to me?” “Deveaux is lost to you in one way or another. He’ll either be slaughtered by the Lovers—or saved by my female, by her sacrifice.” He offered his hand. “Come with me, and begin this.” “Don’t, Aric! Don’t destroy what I do feel for you.” “I’ll take”—he seized my hand, yanking me close—“what I can get.” Despite myself, I shivered from the contact, from his husky voice. His hold on me was firm, proprietary. Because he believed I was about to become his. The red witch in me whispered, Death thinks he has you at his mercy. But the Empress doesn’t get collared or caged—or controlled. Take his head and pay the Tower. Shut up! “Please, Aric. I’ll grow to hate you for this. I don’t want to feel that way about you. Never again. Don’t force me to do this.” “Force?” Unmoved, he led me toward his bedroom. “I’m not forcing you to do anything. Just as you can’t force me to save your lover’s life. We each make sacrifices to get what we want.” With my heart pounding, I crossed the threshold into his dark world. Black walls, black ceiling, black night beyond his windows. Yet outside I thought I saw . . . a single fluttering snowflake. Like a sign.

Stick to a sleep schedule. Go to bed and wake up at the same time each day. As creatures of habit, people have a hard time adjusting to changes in sleep patterns. Sleeping later on weekends won’t fully make up for a lack of sleep during the week and will make it harder to wake up early on Monday morning. Set an alarm for bedtime. Often we set an alarm for when it’s time to wake up but fail to do so for when it’s time to go to sleep. If there is only one piece of advice you remember and take from these twelve tips, this should be it. Exercise is great, but not too late in the day. Try to exercise at least thirty minutes on most days but not later than two to three hours before your bedtime. Avoid caffeine and nicotine. Coffee, colas, certain teas, and chocolate contain the stimulant caffeine, and its effects can take as long as eight hours to wear off fully. Therefore, a cup of coffee in the late afternoon can make it hard for you to fall asleep at night. Nicotine is also a stimulant, often causing smokers to sleep only very lightly. In addition, smokers often wake up too early in the morning because of nicotine withdrawal. Avoid alcoholic drinks before bed. Having a nightcap or alcoholic beverage before sleep may help you relax, but heavy use robs you of REM sleep, keeping you in the lighter stages of sleep. Heavy alcohol ingestion also may contribute to impairment in breathing at night. You also tend to wake up in the middle of the night when the effects of the alcohol have worn off. Avoid large meals and beverages late at night. A light snack is okay, but a large meal can cause indigestion, which interferes with sleep. Drinking too many fluids at night can cause frequent awakenings to urinate. If possible, avoid medicines that delay or disrupt your sleep. Some commonly prescribed heart, blood pressure, or asthma medications, as well as some over-the-counter and herbal remedies for coughs, colds, or allergies, can disrupt sleep patterns. If you have trouble sleeping, talk to your health care provider or pharmacist to see whether any drugs you’re taking might be contributing to your insomnia and ask whether they can be taken at other times during the day or early in the evening. Don’t take naps after 3 p.m. Naps can help make up for lost sleep, but late afternoon naps can make it harder to fall asleep at night. Relax before bed. Don’t overschedule your day so that no time is left for unwinding. A relaxing activity, such as reading or listening to music, should be part of your bedtime ritual. Take a hot bath before bed. The drop in body temperature after getting out of the bath may help you feel sleepy, and the bath can help you relax and slow down so you’re more ready to sleep. Dark bedroom, cool bedroom, gadget-free bedroom. Get rid of anything in your bedroom that might distract you from sleep, such as noises, bright lights, an uncomfortable bed, or warm temperatures. You sleep better if the temperature in the room is kept on the cool side. A TV, cell phone, or computer in the bedroom can be a distraction and deprive you of needed sleep. Having a comfortable mattress and pillow can help promote a good night’s sleep. Individuals who have insomnia often watch the clock. Turn the clock’s face out of view so you don’t worry about the time while trying to fall asleep. Have the right sunlight exposure. Daylight is key to regulating daily sleep patterns. Try to get outside in natural sunlight for at least thirty minutes each day. If possible, wake up with the sun or use very bright lights in the morning. Sleep experts recommend that, if you have problems falling asleep, you should get an hour of exposure to morning sunlight and turn down the lights before bedtime. Don’t lie in bed awake. If you find yourself still awake after staying in bed for more than twenty minutes or if you are starting to feel anxious or worried, get up and do some relaxing activity until you feel sleepy.

The Invitational Church In the invitational church, the focus is on growth. The goal of the church is to reach out and gather people into the church. Therefore, the church is designed as a consumer-oriented place that takes special care to make sure the red carpet is rolled out for visitors and guests. A highly trained staff puts forth great effort to ensure the very best experience for everyone who comes to the church, with special attention paid to visitors. Invitational churches are often successful at growth because this is a large part of their goal and focus. There are many wonderful aspects of the invitational church. I believe God sovereignly birthed the church growth and seeker movements to help the institutional church get beyond itself and start caring about the millions of people trying to find God who were unable to fit into the institutional church. I deeply appreciate and value invitational churches, because they have come up with a way to re-create a modern day “Court Of The Gentiles” aspect of the temple, a place where God-seekers can come and find God. They have unselfishly set aside their desire for church to be about themselves, and they have designed church services for lost people and seekers. What a refreshing change when invitational churches hit the scene! They have really harvested many people for Jesus and helped thousands of churches become outward-focused. This is a good thing! The difficulty with the invitational church is that the individual is essentially irrelevant. What I mean is, when most people walk into an invitational church, it really doesn’t matter whether or not they show up. Why is this true? Because the invitational church has, by default, set the bar very low to make sure that whosoever will may come. However, the inadvertent message is that the individual is not really needed. Little is asked or required of people, and it is very clear that if they aren’t part of the overall goal to facilitate growth, their gifts may not be needed. To prove the point: where do many of the people who have left institutional churches go? They often sit in the back of invitational churches where they can go unnoticed and where they can have very little asked of them. The invitational church is a great place to recover from the institutional church. Some go on and become involved in meaningful ways. But often over time, two negative things happen to believers who have been in invitational churches. One, they become sedentary, consumer-oriented Christians. Those who joined the institutional church and who wanted to make a difference have all but lost their initial fire. Often they no longer burn with zeal for God and His purposes. Instead, they unwittingly adopt the culture of the invitational church into their Christianity, and they, too, lower the bar to the point where, for all intents and purposes, they are now just showing up at a weekend service. Or two, they begin to feel the need for a more personal, relational church, and they move on to something more personal and meaningful to them.

I feel as if I have been set adrift without a paddle. Tossed into a boat on a raging ocean without so much as a life jacket to keep me from drowning; no means to reach the nearest shore, even if I can see it. I am weary of this spiritual path. The world does not seem to understand this new perspective and frankly I don’t either. I question the choices I have made. I plead with my guides to show me that the last nine years I have been on this journey haven’t been for naught. I am no longer sure that my path is the right one; that the events and programs I create are what I am to do. Once I was so sure of my vision, now I am sure of nothing. Perhaps I am the crazy one. Am I imagining all this woo-woo spiritual stuff? Why does it not make sense? Where is it all going? Or more importantly, where am I going? Am I a fool? I am pretty sure my family thinks I am. I have just returned from spending the weekend with my family—the successful business people who seem to have it all figured out. I am sure they all think I am crazy. Maybe I am. None of this seems to make sense any more. This global shift we are supposedly in, maybe it’s just one of those cycles humanity goes through, nothing special or spiritual about it. I know nothing any more. At times I feel so alone. The large circle of friends I once had has gotten smaller and smaller, and though I am supported by a group of amazing souls who understand this spiritual arena, I feel lost at times. Alone once again—why am I surprised? Why me? Why did this have to happen to me? Why did Kristi have to die? What is the purpose? I have asked these questions a million times and though my heart knows the answer, my brain still struggles to wrap itself around it. The concept that I chose this existence is at times still difficult to accept. Why would I choose to lose my daughter? Why would I choose this life and all the challenges? I am so weary. I surrender, God. Show me the way.

SHORE-LARK During the week, the shore-lark works in the City and flies home every night with its mate in Wimbledon, where it is a model husband and father. At weekends, however, it migrates briefly on Brighton, on any of one hundred pretexts, where is meets female shore-larks under the pier and seeks to recapture its lost youth.

You know what you were and it wasn’t a job.” His words taunted me, offering a glimmer of hope. Yet, his words on the driveway less than two months ago lingered in my thoughts. “Why are you bothering me?” “You’re not to go around Mac again. Do you understand?” “I don’t have to listen to you.” Judd narrowed his eyes at me. “Fine. I’ll tell him to stay away from you. He’ll listen if he wants to keep both eyes.” “Whatever. He’s one guy and the college is full of them. Bailey and I are going to a frat party this weekend. Can’t take all of those guys’ eyes.” “Is that a challenge?” “You got me here safe,” I said, trying to look away, but unable to. “You did your job and I’m sure you got paid. What more do you want?” Judd glanced at approaching Harleys then focused on me. When he erased the space between us again, I shivered at the feel of his breath on my cheek. “You know what I want.” “To fuck me because I’m hot.” Judd stared in my eyes and I saw the walls come down. Even staring into those pained baby blues, I remembered how coldly he discarded me. Over a month passed with no word from him. Yet, one guy sniffed around me and Judd was suddenly interested. “Is your birthday present to me to make me a woman?” I whispered, holding his gaze. “You have to know I’m not a virgin and you’d do nothing someone hasn’t done before. There’s no prize between my legs. Maybe you outta stop threatening random men and go find yourself a real woman.” Judd opened his mouth to speak until he heard Cooper’s voice from inside the house. When the arriving guests called back to their boss, Judd stepped away from me. Sighing, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his brown leather jacket. “I see a prize when I look at you,” he said softly as he walked past, “but it’s not between your legs.” He pressed a little wrapped box into my hand. “Happy birthday, angel.” Appearing on the porch, Cooper lost his smile when he saw Judd and me. The men gave each other a little nod before Judd stepped off the porch and past the men who also did their male hello gestures. The men disappeared inside, but Cooper remained next to me as I watched Judd drive away on a black Harley.

Sighing, I scooted down in the booth and pulled away my hand. “You can’t control everything. It’s like you’re a finished product and I’m a brand new idea. You’re making all the decisions about who I can be and what I can do, but I can’t make any decisions about who you are.” “Well, for one thing, I’m not eighteen. For another, you have control over how I feel and that’s still power. Finally, maybe you grew up with a boot on the back of your neck so you need all of this independence to feel like you’ve accomplished shit, but you need to get over that. I take care of the people I love. My money can make your life easier and that makes my life easier. I’m not molding you and I don’t think you need molding anyway. The only difference between us is that I know I’m a finished product and you think you still need to change. You don’t and working this weekend so you can buy new clothes you don’t need won’t make you better. It won’t make you stronger or smarter. It’ll wear you down and give you a false sense of accomplishment. In the long run, your grades will suffer and you’ll hate your job and school and, God forbid, me.” “I’ve dreamed of this life for a long time and I want it to be like my dream.” “Dream bigger, baby.” “You mean dream of you.” “A dream with me in it, yes, but I know you want to be a teacher. I see on your face what that means to you. I’m not saying give up everything for me and be my bitch. I’m saying live your dream along with being my bitch.” “Fuck you,” I hissed, grinning. Cooper shared my smile. “I have to protect you. I have to feel like I’m doing right by you because my heart hurts when you aren’t happy. The last day sucked worse than any time in my life. I just couldn’t give two shits about anything because I’d lost you.” “I don’t know. I still feel like I should work this weekend.” Cooper sighed for nearly a minute then shook his head. “Healthy relationships are about compromise. Don’t work this weekend and go to the fair with me and I’ll buy you new clothes. See, compromise?” “You get everything you want. How is that compromise?” “I’m buying you new clothes that I don’t think you need,” he said, grinning. “I’m wasting money on your delusion. You’re welcome.” Laughing, I finished my soda then stood up. “I’ll think about it.” “And say yes when I take you home later.

The greatest challenge that exists in life, in anyone’s life, is that of sustaining a child’s fascination and love for life itself while being bombarded, infiltrated and violated by every possible reason and excuse not to do so. Ultimately, nothing really matters more or has more meaning than a child lost in overwhelming joy and gratitude for a single moment…the all-bodies recognition/revelation that something like Heaven does exist on Earth, right now. Nothing, that is, except for the same thing in an adult. You can reduce and compress all the greatest lives, philosophies, religions, art, science, literature, all of humanity’s best and most sophisticated knowledge into this single idea. Something like, “Can you hold this through time and space?

Carter watched Avery weave her way through the crowds like a ninja—ready to battle at a moment’s notice, but invisible to the general crowd. The reception was in full swing, and he’d never felt so damn tired in his life. He’d been running around nonstop, taking care of endless tasks that popped up. Everything ached, from his head to his feet, and through it all, the woman never lost her cool or her charm. The idea she did this every weekend the entire spring and summer was more than impressive. And this was just “live time,” as she’d termed it. All the months of prep work led up to this one day. All her efforts and sweat and time were for the purpose of making one couple happy as they embarked on a life together

People thought that when you got old, you wanted your lost youth, or lost love, or men, or sex. But really you wanted work and you wanted money.

Every now and then, though, it feels like we’re trying to rekindle our neglected friendships with an old ritual that’s lost its sparkle.

The term “jogging” became widely used in the United States in the late 1960s, as it was a result of a popular book with the title Jogging. Its author was University of Oregon track coach and Nike cofounder Bill Bowerman. He had been exposed to jogging while on vacation in New Zealand with his college team. He took time off and went for some easy runs with legendary running coach Arthur Lydiard, who had trained several Olympic running champions. On weekends, Lydiard would invite locals to join him for “fitness and sociability” runs, or what he called jogging. Lydiard wanted New Zealanders to stop being sedentary and get some easy, non-strenuous exercise. Bowerman enjoyed these easy runs, and lost ten pounds in the process. He was eager to spread the message about jogging to residents in Eugene, Oregon, where he lived and coached. When these jogging get-togethers became popular, Bowerman decided to broaden the message, and co-wrote the 126-page bestselling Jogging book with the help of a local cardiologist.

I remember explaining explaining what I saw to one brother who couldn't see the sea. "I see an endless body of blue," I said, "with a soul that courses through the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Suez Canal, all the way to the Red Sea and the western coast of Yemen, where in the seaside town of Hudaydah, my father is at the market buying fish for a special meal. And when the tide comes in and the air is heavy with salt, my mind takes me straight to the port city of Aden and weekends I spent there with friends after high school. We'd lie on the beach and imagine our lives and the wives and families we would one day have.

Now King had all the accoutrements of success: a Porsche, a mortgage, a divorce, a kid he saw on weekends.

All the woeful errors of childhood and adolescence came to their crashing climax at seventeen. They gathered themselves for a real workout in the passionate hero-worship of an upperclassman during his very first month at college, a worship that led, like a fatal infatuation, to scandal and public disgrace, because no one had understood or got the story straight and no one had wanted to understand, least of all the upperclassman who emerged somehow as a hero, now, to the others—why, he would never know. . . . He had survived (didn’t one always?).

Here at this desk, this night, one of life’s important moments had occurred. Humbly, almost unaware, certainly innocent, he had sat there and been the instrument by which a poem was transmitted to paper. He was awed and truly humble, for all that he must look in the mirror to see if the experience registered in his face. Often tears came genuinely to his eyes. How had it come about—why should it have been he? he asked himself in humility and gratitude. He read the poem in fear and read it again. Now it was fine; would it be so tomorrow?

LIKE a fish of the deep rising to the surface of bright air and sun, he swam up to consciousness out of a dead blank into a whiter world than he had ever seen.

THE barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.

The prize money certainly said something about FIFA’s priorities, though. The same week the 2015 Women’s World Cup kicked off, United Passions debuted in movie theaters. It was a propaganda film that FIFA produced about itself and bankrolled for around $30 million. That’s double the total amount of prize money FIFA made available to all teams participating in the 2015 Women’s World Cup. The film earned less than $1,000 in its debut weekend in North America, for the worst box-office opening in history, and it went down as the lowest-grossing film in U.S. history. Almost all the millions of dollars FIFA poured into making the movie was lost. The film has a 0% rating on the popular movie-review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, and a New York Times review called it “one of the most unwatchable films in recent memory.” And

The prize money certainly said something about FIFA’s priorities, though. The same week the 2015 Women’s World Cup kicked off, United Passions debuted in movie theaters. It was a propaganda film that FIFA produced about itself and bankrolled for around $30 million. That’s double the total amount of prize money FIFA made available to all teams participating in the 2015 Women’s World Cup. The film earned less than $1,000 in its debut weekend in North America, for the worst box-office opening in history, and it went down as the lowest-grossing film in U.S. history. Almost all the millions of dollars FIFA poured into making the movie was lost. The film has a 0% rating on the popular movie-review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, and a New York Times review called it “one of the most unwatchable films in recent memory.” And remember the uncomfortable encounter at the team hotel between the Americans and Brazilians after the 2007 Women’s World Cup semifinal? That would never happen in a men’s World Cup. That’s because FIFA assigns different hotels and training facilities to each men’s team, to serve as a base camp throughout the tournament. The women don’t get base camps—they jump from city to city and from hotel to hotel during the World Cup, and they usually end up bumping into their opponents, who are given the same accommodations. American coach Jill Ellis said she almost walked into the German meal room at the World Cup once. “Sometimes you’re in the elevator with your opponent going down to the team buses for a game,” Heather O’Reilly says. “It’s pretty awkward.

Francisco was an underdog city struggling to absorb an influx of aspiring alphas. It had long been a haven for hippies and queers, artists and activists, Burners and leather daddies, the disenfranchised and the weird. It also had a historically corrupt government, and a housing market built atop racist urban-renewal policies—real estate values had benefited as much from redlining as from discriminatory zoning practices and midcentury internment camps—but these narratives, along with the reality that an entire generation had been prematurely lost to AIDS, undercut its reputation as a mecca for the free and freakish, people on the fringe. The city, trapped in nostalgia for its own mythology, stuck in a hallucination of a halcyon past, had not quite caught up to the newfound momentum of tech’s dark triad: capital, power, and a bland, overcorrected, heterosexual masculinity. It was a strange place for young and moneyed futurists. In the absence of vibrant cultural institutions, the pleasure center of the industry might have just been exercise: people courted the sublime on trail runs and day hikes, glamped in Marin and rented chalets in Tahoe. They dressed for work as if embarking on an alpine expedition: high-performance down jackets and foul-weather shells, backpacks with decorative carabiners. They looked ready to gather kindling and build a lean-to, not make sales calls and open pull-requests from climate-controlled open-plan offices. They looked in costume to LARP their weekend selves.

There’s lost time hiding everywhere and it’s waiting for you to claim it!

The beaches in Dubai are well-known for their cleanliness and tranquility. While many individuals enjoy a relaxing weekend at the beach, thrill-seekers prefer to participate in thrilling water sports. Jet skiing is one of Dubai's most popular water activities, and adventure seekers love to try it. Do you want to know what the most extraordinary Dubai marine adventures are? What is the best method to see this magnificent city? There is plenty to do in this city-state of the UAE, and we have several fun aquatic activities for you to enjoy while on vacation or to live in the Emirates! How about a Jet Ski Ride along the Dubai waterfront? It can be done with your family, as a couple, with friends, or by yourself. We jet ski around all of Dubai's most famous attractions, skyscrapers, and landmarks. All of our Jet Ski trips include a stop at the luxury Burj Al Arab hotel, which is constructed into the sea, where you can have fun and receive a photo souvenir of Dubai. Jet skiing in Dubai is unquestionably the most acceptable way to see the city and have a good time during your vacation. Dubai Yacht Rental Experience When it comes to a luxury Boat Party in Dubai for those who can afford it, the pleasure and adventure that Yachts can provide cannot be overstated. Yachting is, without a doubt, the most beautiful sport on the planet. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to splash around in the ocean's deep blue waves and lose yourself in an environment that is both soothing and calming to the soul. The sensation you get from a yacht requires a whole new set of words to explain it. It's a fantastic experience that transports people to another zone while also altering their mental state. People who have the advantage of owning private yachts go sailing to have a relaxing excursion and clear their minds whenever they feel the need. Those who cannot afford to purchase a yacht can enjoy the thrill of cruising from one coastal region to the other by renting an economical Dubai yacht. It is not a challenging task to learn to sail. Some people believe that yachting can only be done by experts, which is a ridiculous misconception. Anyone willing to acquire a few tactics and hints can master the art of yachting. READ MORE About Dubai Jet Ski: Get lost in the tranquility of blue waters while waiting to partake in action. With the instructor sitting right behind you, you’ll learn astonishing stunts and skills for riding a Jet ski. This adventure will take your excitement to a new level of adventure in the open sea. While sailing past the picturesque shorelines of the islands, take in stunning views of prominent Dubai monuments such as the Burj Al Arab and more. About the activity: Jumeirah Beach is the meeting site for this activity. You have the option of riding for 30 minutes or 60 minutes Jet Ski around the beaches while being accompanied at all times by an instructor, as your safety is our top priority. Begin your journey from the marina and proceed to the world-famous Burj-Al-Arab, a world well known hotel, for a photo shoot. where you may take as many pictures as you want

This is a big one. One of the most prominent sources of stress in peoples lives is the worry of things which MIGHT happen. We can all recall times when we have lost sleep over seemingly menial things. Will my new work colleagues like me? Will I fail my exam next week? What if bad weather ruins my garden party this weekend? The list is endless. However, continually fretting about things does us no good. It will only result in anxiety and unnecessary internal suffering, which in turn will affect our daily lives in a negative manner. Instead, and as

I looked under all the bushes, and up the tree, but I couldn’t find the baby. I’d lost the baby. Losing a baby is bad. I panicked. I ran inside and took a potato from the kitchen. From under my bed I scooped up lots of fluff and dust bunnies and stuck them to the top of the potato with my glue stick. I drew a face on the potato. I ran outside and put the potato-baby in the carriage. Maybe Mrs Whitman wouldn’t notice that it wasn’t her baby.

two or ALL the puppies if I could’ve. But whatever, it was just cool to have puppies in the mall. My sister’s gonna FREAK when I tell her about it. Anyways, Fergus and Annie returned to our tournament table with the biggest plate of nachos I’d ever seen in my whole entire life, so me and Emma went and joined them. The four of us dug into the towering mountain of chips and cheese and chicken and onions and queso and tomatoes and salsa and sour cream and guac and jalapenos and O.M.CHEESE, it was SO good! I filled my belly with warm food and then sat back, watching all the people around the tournament having fun. What a great start to a weekend full of friends, puppies, and video games. I mean, seriously, everything was PERFECT, and there wasn’t a single thing that could change that… And immediately, Annie goes, “It was stolen,” but she didn’t know that! Isn’t it funny how some people go to the worst-case scenario first? That’s called “catastrophic thinking” and helps ABSOLUTELY NOBODY in times of stress. So, until we had more details, I thought it best to simply call the camera “missing.” I ran up to Callie, HOPING that maybe she had taken the camera to a Lost & Found box somewhere inside Hacktronics, but nope. Apparently, they didn’t have one. Not good. That meant somebody MIGHT have stolen it. I went to the other players in the tournament and asked if THEY saw anything suspicious, but nobody did! I just couldn’t believe it! How was it possible that NOBODY saw some fool GANK an $800 camera?? That doesn’t even make any sense! Fergus had completely shut down. Annie was angry at me. And Emma was just caught in the middle of it, sitting there, like, “Awkwaaaaaard.” Then, outta nowhere, Annie let me have it. She shouted a bunch of stuff at me that weren’t the kindest things ever, but I fixed all that through the MAGIC of editing…