Moderation Elaine Castillo Quotes

It was almost summer; not that anyone had told England.

Turned out that sublimating one’s “adverse childhood experiences” into being shredded AF did not, in the end, a personality make. She was just someone who lifted; she didn’t have to make the practice an autobiography. Improve your form, eat your protein, keep it moving. That was good enough.

His English was the confident, capable, somehow simultaneously obsequious and disdainful English of the French political elite (still she’d never heard a single French person of any class say the word idea instead of idée) but with a performative Asterix and Obelix accent that he seemed to be emphasizing on principle—the Sciences Po/London School of Economics in the voice only jumped out from time to time—which then made him speak in a strangely staccato pattern, as if every clause was being frisked before it left his mouth.

If one was the type of person—the only sensible type of person, in Girlie’s view—who separated out with martial discipline the distinct, incoherent parts of one’s life, so that work colleagues never had to meet family members, and family members only rarely had to meet friends, and childhood friends rarely had to meet adulthood friends, and so on, and so forth—any unexpected collision of those parts was the stuff of unmitigated disaster, as with any clash of worlds.

You’re not getting younger,” Flo said. “Especially for kids.” Girlie didn’t know if this was the venue in which to tell her mother she had absolutely zero plans to subject a new human soul to the vinegar-dipped calamity of this family: financial illiteracy, parentification, brushing systemic abuse under the rug, short calves? She imagined telling her mother all that, throwing it all in her face; imagined walking out of the party, the house, their life; imagined something happening; imagined them losing everything again; imagined heart attacks, cancer, car accidents; imagined the deathless guilt; imagined having left; imagined having to come back.

All this time, she’d wanted to do it the hard way, the bootstrapper’s way; as always, she’d been preparing herself to blunt-force it, grind through it, straight-A it, but—the easy way was right there. The easy way was hard enough.

He was wearing what looked like one of those neovintage Seamaster 300s—she tried to clock this without being smug about being right, another register she was trying out of late—brown leather, warm gold on black ceramic.

But to simper and shrink and be coy about her birthright was contrary to Girlie’s fundamental nature (kingdom: asshole / phylum: know-it-all / genus: first-generation eldest daughter). She refused to be a tenant of her face, rather than its owner. The heirloom of this beauty had been her mother’s prize possession—sole possession, really—in her impoverished youth back in the Philippines; it was the only form of intergenerational wealth Girlie knew.

Or maybe it was just because they weren’t eldest children; learned helplessness being one of the more malignant comorbidities of being a family’s last born. It did seem like a skill, maybe even a valuable one: Knowing what you wanted. Knowing how to look for it. Knowing how to recognize it, when it appeared.

But like your average Catholic priest, instead of being fired once his behavior was reported, he was merely transferred to a different department.

From his time in the Bay Area, Aditya had picked up the habit of calling them the talent, of sidling up next to the Filipina mothers and joking about lumpia (it was the only Filipino food item he knew), shamelessly deploying the material fact of his brownness to obscure the equally material fact of his bossness.

She heard his footsteps first. Playground had captured the sound of dress shoes on stone very well. Again, like mercy, he came not from behind, but from the side.