Plug The Hole Quotes

When we begin to set boundaries with people we love, a really hard thing happens: they hurt. They may feel a hole where you used to plug up their aloneness, their disorganization, or their financial irresponsibility. Whatever it is, they will feel a loss. If you love them, this will be difficult for you to watch. But, when you are dealing with someone who is hurting, remember that your boundaries are both necessary for you and helpful for them. If you have been enabling them to be irresponsible, your limit setting may nudge them toward responsibility.

all the education and good intentions in the world couldn’t help plug up the holes in the universe or give you the power to change its blind, mindless course.

Nothing can fill you up,” she stated. “Nope,” he agreed again. “You won’t let it.” “Barrel’s got a hole in the bottom, buddy, everything leaks out no matter how much you pour in.” She was silent a moment then she whispered, “Right.” She turned to the door and his hand gripped his bourbon so hard he had to focus everything on loosening his grip or the glass would shatter. Before she opened it, she turned back. “You don’t know, Cal, you have no idea. You’ve shut yourself up for so long in this fucking house with your tragic memories, you have no idea what’s about to walk out your door. Kate, Keira and me, we could have plugged that hole. We could have filled you so full, you’d be bursting. We would have loved that chance. We’d have given it everything we had, no matter the time that slid by, graduations, weddings, grandbabies, you’d have been a part of us and we’d have given everything we had to keep you so full, you’d be bursting.” Cal didn’t reply. “Joe,” she whispered, “you let me walk out this door, you’ll lose your chance.” Cal didn’t move. Vi waited. Cal stayed seated.

And that, I suppose, is what I'd been trying to tell my mother that day: that her faith in justice and rationality was misplaced, that we couldn't overcome after all, that all the education and good intentions in the world couldn't help you plug up the holes in the universe or give you the power to change its blind, mindless course.

I couldn't think of anything other than her and the components of her. For example, her red hair. But was I so primitive I let myself be bewitched by hair? I mean, really. Hair! It's just hair! Everyone has it! She puts it up, she lets it down. So what? And why did all the other parts of her have me wheezing with delight? I mean, who hasn't got a back, or a belly, or armpits? This whole finicky obsession serves to humiliate me even as I write it, sure, but I suppose it isn't that abnormal. That's what first love is all about. What happens is you meet a love object and immediately a hole inside you starts aching, the hole that is always there but you don't notice until someone comes along, plugs it up, and then runs away with the plug.

A girl's not a watermelon you plug a hole in to see if it's sweet.

I think you learn how to live with holes in your heart. You can’t patch them up, or plug them with other people, but you find ways to make it bearable, if that makes sense.

That’s what first love is all about. What happens is you meet a love object and immediately a hole inside you starts aching, the hole that is always there but you don’t notice until someone comes along, plugs it up, and then runs away with the plug.

Lies upon lies upon lies. Once you started lying, you had to continue, and then it was like being captain of a leaky ship, always plugging holes in the side to stop yourself sinking.

Is it true that you don’t love me anymore?” “Yes.” “Why? Because I lied to you? Because I left you? Because I humiliated you?” “No. Just when I felt deceived, abandoned, humiliated, I loved you very much, I wanted you more than in any other moment of our life together.” “And then?” “I don’t love you anymore because, to justify yourself, you said that you had fallen into a void, an absence of sense, and it wasn’t true.” “It was.” “No. Now I know what an absence of sense is and what happens if you manage to get back to the surface from it. You, you don’t know. At most you glanced down, you got frightened, and you plugged up the hole with Carla’s body.

I needed to plug that hole in my head where the marbles were pouring out.

You don't know, Cal, you have no idea. You've shut yourself up for so long in this fucking house with your tragic memories, you have no idea what's about to walk out your door. Kate, Keira and me, we could have plugged that hole. We could have filled you so full,you'd be bursting. We would have loved that chance. We'd have given it everything we had.

Hey wedding DJ, there is no way in hell I'm paying you $1,000 when all you're doing is plugging your iPod into the sound system #AHOLE

I plugged the hole up with my thumb, so at least I wouldn’t sink. But it was really uncomfortable floating on that lake with my thumb up my ass.

When someone deviates from an accepted norm, they signal a gap in the system. A hole that hasn’t been plugged. The danger with exposing a foundation’s failings is it opens the door to the possibility that it’s a faulty structure altogether and should be torn down and built anew.

Lies upon lies. Once you started lying, you had to continue, and then it was like being captain of a leaky ship, always plugging holes in the side to stop yourself sinking.

He'd seen this babe before--her many counterparts, that is. He knew her kin, distant and near. All her mamas, sisters, aunts, cousins and what have you. And he knew the name was Lowdown with a capital L. He wasn't at all surprised to find her in a setup like this. Not after encountering her as a warden's sister-in-law, the assistant treasurer of a country bank, and a supervisor of paroles. This babe got around. She was the original square-plug-in-a-round-hole kid. But she never changed any. She had that good old Lowdown blood in her, and the right guy could bring it out.

What happens is you meet a love object and immediately a hole inside you starts aching, the hole that is always there but you don’t notice until someone comes along, plugs it up, and then runs away with the plug.

Darling Daddy, Poor Saffy. She had a big fight in the boys toilets on Monday, did you know? A very big fight and Sarah helped and it was terrifying. Said a boy in my class who has a brother who was there. Saffy washed her hands and said Never Ever Never Dare You Touch My Brother. (Indigo). And the plug holes were blocked with hair. Love from Rose. -Sarah's mother has given us soup. Soup soup soup and then it was all gone. L.F.R.

The pieces of soul can't be cut out without filling them up again, that's a real law there. God's law. Can't cut out the pieces any more than you can go around with a big hole in your gut. Got to be plugged up, replaced somehow.

The instant I saw Lori’s dad and Frances across the hot asphalt road, I spun around, hoping Lori was still hidden by the trees. She stood right behind me, in full view. And if my expression matched hers, we couldn’t have looked more guilty. I turned back around. Her dad’s face was even worse. Glaring at me, he worked his jaw like he was going to say something, but he wanted to make sure he’d thought of the worst possible insult first. He turned redder and seemed to swell, like all his holes were plugged up and the pressure had nowhere to escape. He opened his mouth. “It was my fault,” I said quickly. “I know!” he roared. At the same time, Lori stepped in front of me and muttered, “Wrong thing to say, Adam.” “Right.” I put my hand on Lori’s shoulder and pushed her an arm’s length away so it wouldn’t look like I was hiding behind her. “It’s nobody’s fault, because we didn’t do anything wrong.

So tell me: were you born broken just like me, born hungry? Are we all of us born with some part of us missing? Are we each us born with a hole?....Born with a hole and no earthly way of finding just the exact right plug to fill it, not 'til you've tried 'em from A to Z and back once more: booze, fags, work, candy, men, girls, heroin, methedrine, methadone, God. Tried having a baby. Tried killing yourself. A hundred religions, from Calvin to the Dalai Lama and back again; tried every damn thing you could think of and some you had to stumble over....You stick a plug in your weakness like a finger in the proverbial dike and let pressure build up let it swell and swell 'til there's nothing left but tension, nothing left but what's left over--the absence, not the presence. The wound you shape your soul around.

Plug that hole—that one, right in the middle of your face—that can drain you of your vital life force. Watch what happens. Watch how much better you get.

plugged up a hole that had been whistling in me for years. Celeste made

If [Hurricane] Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP [Deepwater Horizon] disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP has spent weeks failing to plug the hole in the earth that it made. Our political leaders cannot order fish species to survive, or bottlenose dolphins not to die in droves. No amount of compensation money can replace a culture that has lots its roots. And while politicians and corporate leaders have yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the people whose air, water, and livelihoods have been contaminated are losing their illusions fast.

Doc recalled the simple advice that his father gave him upon becoming a lawman: “Get all the evidence you can, son. Then put yourself in the criminal’s place. Think it out. Plug up those holes, son.

It's not that I'm being shy. It's just that -- well, for one, I don't even remember the event. It's a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been -- or, more precisely, being about to be -- hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who's to say that these are genuine memories? Who's to say my traumatized mind didn't just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap -- the crater -- that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things. Real chancers.

In times of crisis, you get a public reaction that is incoherence on stilts. On the one hand, most people know that the government is not in the oil business. They don't want it in the oil business. They know there is nothing a man in Washington can do to plug a hole a mile down in the gulf. On the other hand, they demand that the president 'take control.' They demand that he hold press conferences, show leadership, announce that the buck stops here and do something. They want him to emote and perform the proper theatrical gestures so they can see their emotions enacted on the public stage. They want to hold him responsible for things they know he doesn't control. Their reaction is a mixture of disgust, anger, longing and need. It may not make sense. But it doesn't make sense that the country wants spending cuts and doesn't want cuts, wants change and doesn't want change.

Let the others slap each other on the back while you’re back in the lab or the gym or pounding the pavement. Plug that hole—that one, right in the middle of your face—that can drain you of your vital life force. Watch what happens. Watch how much better you get.

Assumptions are the things you don't know you're making, which is why it is so disorienting the first time you take the plug out of a wash basin in Australia and see the water spiralling down the hole the other way round. The very laws of physics are telling you how far you are from home.

almost all of the shtetl’s three hundred–odd citizens had gathered to debate that about which they knew nothing. The less a citizen knew, the more adamantly he or she argued. There was nothing new in this. A month before there had been the question of whether it might send a better message to the children to plug, finally, the bagel’s hole.

I suppose there are three kinds of people in this world. Some people live their lives around the holes―never finding them, never even worrying about them. Their lives are full and happy. Then there are others who keep falling through those hidden gaps, into nightmares they never knew existed. I wouldn't want to be one of them. And then there's a few...restless people who spend our lives plugging holes in the unfinished corners of creation and building walls to hold back all the things that must never be seen. Perhaps there's more holes than can be patched in a lifetime. But I've got to live on the hope that maybe, just maybe, we'll get them all...and the abyss will never look into us again.

But what about you, Miss Spider?’ asked James. ‘Aren’t you also much loved in the world?’ ‘Alas, no,’ Miss Spider answered, sighing long and loud. ‘I am not loved at all. And yet I do nothing but good. All day long I catch flies and mosquitoes in my webs. I am a decent person.’ ‘I know you are,’ said James. ‘It is very unfair the way we Spiders are treated,’ Miss Spider went on. ‘Why, only last week your own horrible Aunt Sponge flushed my poor dear father down the plug-hole in the bathtub.’ ‘Oh, how awful!’ cried James. ‘I watched the whole thing from a corner up in the ceiling,’ Miss Spider murmured. ‘It was ghastly. We never saw him again.’ A large tear rolled down her cheek and fell with a splash on the floor.

This seat taken?" My eyes grazing over the only other occupant, a guy with long glossy dark hair with his head bent over a book. "It's all yours," he says. And when he lifts his head and smiles,my heart just about leaps from my chest. It's the boy from my dreams. The boy from the Rabbit Hole,the gas station,and the cave-sitting before me with those same amazing,icy-blue eues, those same alluring lips I've kissed multiple times-but only in slumber, never in waking life. I scold my heart to settle,but it doesn't obey. I admonish myself to sit,to act normal, casual-and I just barely succeed. Stealing a series of surreptitious looks as I search through my backpack, taking in his square chin,wide generous lips,strong brow,defined cheekbones, and smooth brown skin-the exact same features as Cade. "You're the new girl,right?" He abandons his book,tilting his head in a way that causes his hair to stream over his shoulder,so glossy and inviting it takes all of my will not to lean across the table and touch it. I nod in reply,or at least I think I do.I can't be too sure.I'm too stricken by his gaze-the way it mirrors mine-trying to determine if he knows me, recognizes me,if he's surprised to find me here.Wishing Paloma had better prepared me-focused more on him and less on his brother. I force my gaze from his.Bang my knee hard against the table as I swivel in my seat.Feeling so odd and unsettled,I wish I'd picked another place to sit, though it's pretty clear no other table would have me. He buries his smile and returns to the book.Allowing a few minutes to pass,not nearly enough time for me to get a grip on myself,when he looks up and says, "Are you staring at me because you've seen my doppelganer roaming the halls,playing king of the cafeteria? Or because you need to borrow a pencil and you're too shy to ask?" I clear the lump from my throat, push the words past my lips when I say, "No one's ever accused me of being shy." A statement that,while steeped in truth, stands at direct odds with the way I feel now,sitting so close to him. "So I guess it's your twin-or doppelganer,as you say." I keep my voice light, as though I'm not at all affected by his presence,but the trill note at the end gives me away.Every part of me now vibrating with the most intense surge of energy-like I've been plugged into the wall and switched on-and it's all I can do to keep from grabbing hold of his shirt, demanding to know if he dreamed the dreams too. He nods,allowing an easy,cool smile to widen his lips. "We're identical," he says. "As I'm sure you've guessed. Though it's easy enough to tell us apart. For one thing,he keeps his hair short.For another-" "The eyes-" I blurt,regretting the words the instant they're out.From the look on his face,he has no idea what I'm talking about. "Yours are...kinder." My cheeks burn so hot I force myself to look away,as words of reproach stampede my brain. Why am I acting like such an inept loser? Why do I insist on embarrassing myself-in front of him-of all people? I have to pull it together.I have to remember who I am-what I am-and what I was born to do.Which is basically to crush him and his kind-or,at the very least,to temper the damage they do.

Why do you need to reassure yourself? That need for reassurance is precisely the point: We feel that something is leaking, but we don’t want to acknowledge it as such. There is a hole somewhere in our life that we try to plug up. All our posturing is a sign that we are just about to realize that we don’t exist in the way we thought we did. We actually know that intuitively. Yet we keep on trying to prove ourselves to ourselves, to ensure that we will survive.

This is a word we use to plug holes with. It’s the right size for those warm blanks in speech, for those red heart- shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing like real hearts. Add lace and you can sell it. We insert it also in the one empty space on the printed form that comes with no instructions. There are whole magazines with not much in them but the word love, you can rub it all over your body and you can cook with it too. How do we know it isn’t what goes on at the cool debaucheries of slugs under damp pieces of cardboard? As for the weed- seedlings nosing their tough snouts up among the lettuces, they shout it. Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising their glittering knives in salute. Then there’s the two of us. This word is far too short for us, it has only four letters, too sparse to fill those deep bare vacuums between the stars that press on us with their deafness. It’s not love we don’t wish to fall into, but that fear. this word is not enough but it will have to do. It’s a single vowel in this metallic silence, a mouth that says O again and again in wonder and pain, a breath, a finger grip on a cliffside. You can hold on or let go.

Others wonder about the possibilities. Maybe the princess cheated on her prince with a dashing knight, ran away with him to live in the wilds, cheated on him with a neighbouring farmer and ended up working the fields for the rest of her life. These are the people who lie awake at night, frightened by the stars above them, intimidated by how the world keeps turning and it doesn't matter if they live or die. These are the people who attempt to stop those thoughts by painting, or writing, or reading... anything to plug up that hole in the brain that gushes out a constant stream of consciousness.

So tell me: were you born broken just like me, born hungry? Are we all of us born with some part of us missing? Are we each us born with a hole?....Born with a hold and no earthly way of finding just the exact right plug to fill it, not 'til you've tried 'em from A to Z and back once more: booze, fags, work, candy, men, girls, heroin, methedrine, methadone, God. Tried having a baby. Tried killing yourself. A hundred religions, from Calvin to the Dalai Lama and back again; tried every damn thing you could think of and some you had to stumble over....You stick a plug in your weakness like a finger in the proverbial dike and let pressure build up let it swell and swell 'til there's nothing left but tension, nothing left but what's left over--the absence, not the presence. The wound you shape your soul around.

The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I’m struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I’m surprised because the transcript doesn’t register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn’t fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn’t have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn’t like paying higher taxes—especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn’t happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who’d done Big Oil’s bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they’d be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn’t have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn’t going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster,

When you’re married to the president, you come to understand quickly that the world brims with chaos, that disasters unfurl without notice. Forces seen and unseen stand ready to tear into whatever calm you might feel. The news could never be ignored: An earthquake devastates Haiti. A gasket blows five thousand feet underwater beneath an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana, sending millions of barrels of crude oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. Revolution stirs in Egypt. A gunman opens fire in the parking lot of an Arizona supermarket, killing six people and maiming a U.S. congresswoman. Everything was big and everything was relevant. I read a set of news clips sent by my staff each morning and knew that Barack would be obliged to absorb and respond to every new development. He’d be blamed for things he couldn’t control, pushed to solve frightening problems in faraway nations, expected to plug a hole at the bottom of the ocean. His job, it seemed, was to take the chaos and metabolize it somehow into calm leadership—every day of the week, every week of the year.

told my people that I wanted only the best, whatever it took, wherever they came from, whatever it cost. We assembled thirty people, the brightest cybersecurity minds we have. A few are on loan, pursuant to strict confidentiality agreements, from the private sector—software companies, telecommunications giants, cybersecurity firms, military contractors. Two are former hackers themselves, one of them currently serving a thirteen-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Most are from various agencies of the federal government—Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, NSA. Half our team is devoted to threat mitigation—how to limit the damage to our systems and infrastructure after the virus hits. But right now, I’m concerned with the other half, the threat-response team that Devin and Casey are running. They’re devoted to stopping the virus, something they’ve been unable to do for the last two weeks. “Good morning, Mr. President,” says Devin Wittmer. He comes from NSA. After graduating from Berkeley, he started designing cyberdefense software for clients like Apple before the NSA recruited him away. He has developed federal cybersecurity assessment tools to help industries and governments understand their preparedness against cyberattacks. When the major health-care systems in France were hit with a ransomware virus three years ago, we lent them Devin, who was able to locate and disable it. Nobody in America, I’ve been assured, is better at finding holes in cyberdefense systems or at plugging them. “Mr. President,” says Casey Alvarez. Casey is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Arizona to start a family and built up a fleet of grocery stores in the Southwest along the way. Casey showed no interest in the business, taking quickly to computers and wanting to join law enforcement. When she was a grad student at Penn, she got turned down for a position at the Department of Justice. So Casey got on her computer and managed to do what state and federal authorities had been unable to do for years—she hacked into an underground child-pornography website and disclosed the identities of all the website’s patrons, basically gift-wrapping a federal prosecution for Justice and shutting down an operation that was believed to be the largest purveyor of kiddie porn in the country. DOJ hired her on the spot, and she stayed there until she went to work for the CIA. She’s been most recently deployed in the Middle East with US Central Command, where she intercepts, decodes, and disrupts cybercommunications among terrorist groups. I’ve been assured that these two are, by far, the best we have. And they are about to meet the person who, so far, has been better. There is a hint of reverence in their expressions as I introduce them to Augie. The Sons of Jihad is the all-star team of cyberterrorists, mythical figures in that world. But I sense some competitive fire, too, which will be a good thing.

The door was still open, so I shut it and was returning to my desk when I braked. There was a backpack resting on the other side of my desk chair. It wasn’t mine. It wasn’t Missy’s. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Holly’s or the cousin’s. “Shit,” I muttered under my breath. “Huh?” she barked, her head swinging around to me. A quick glance confirmed what I already knew. She was drunk. “Nothing.” She pulled out one of her shirts, but it wasn’t her normal pajama top. She was really drunk. I picked up Shay’s bag and checked the contents to make sure it was his. It was. I saw his planner with his name scrawled at the top, so I zipped that bag and put it in the back of my closet. No one needed to go through it. I didn’t think Missy would, but I just never knew. Dropping into my chair, I picked up my phone to text Shay as Missy fell to the floor. I looked up to watch. I couldn’t not see this. I was tempted to video it, but I was being nice. For once. As Missy wrestled with her jeans and lifted them over her head to throw into her closet, I texted Shay. Me: You left your bag here. Missy let out a half-gurgled moan and a cry of frustration at the same time. She didn’t stand, instead crawling to the closet. She grabbed another pair of pants. Those weren’t her pajamas, either. As she pulled them on—or tried since her feet kept eluding the pants’ hole—my phone buzzed back. Coleman: Can I pick it up in the morning? I texted back. Me: When? Missy got one leg in. Success. I wanted to thrust my fist in the air for her. My phone buzzed again. Coleman: Early. My playbook is in there. I groaned. Me: When is early? I’m in college, Coleman. Sleeping in is mandatory. Coleman: Nine too early for you? I can come back to get it now. Nine was doable. Me: Let’s do an exchange. You bring me coffee, and I’ll meet you at the parking lot curb with your bag. Coleman: Done. Decaf okay? I glared at my phone. Me: Back to hating you. Coleman: Never stop that. The world’s equilibrium will be fucked up. I have to know what’s right and wrong. Don’t screw with my moral compass, Cute Ass. Oh, no! No way. Me: Third rule of what we don’t talk about. No nicknames unless they reconfirm our mutual dislike for each other. No Cute Ass. His response was immediate. Coleman: Cunt Ass? A second squeak from me. Me: NO! I could almost hear him laughing. Coleman: Relax. I know. Clarke’s Ass. That’s how you are in my phone. The tension left my shoulders. Me: See you in the morning. 9 sharp. Coleman: Night. I put my phone down, but then it buzzed once again. Coleman: Ass. I was struggling to wipe this stupid grin off my face. All was right again. I plugged my phone in, pulled my laptop back toward me, and sent a response to Gage’s email. I’ll sit with you, but only if we’re in the opposing team’s section. He’d be pissed, but that was the only way. I turned the computer off, and by then Missy was climbing up the ladder in a bright pink silk shirt. The buttons were left buttoned, and her pajama bottoms were a pair of corduroy khakis. I was pretty sure she didn’t brush her teeth, but before my head even hit the pillow, she was snoring

Sometimes you plug the hole any way you can, and worry about fixing the boat later. If the choices are sinking today or tomorrow, I’ll take tomorrow.

If 80 percent of children can become successful as a result of first, best instruction (Batsche et al., 2005), shouldn’t district leadership devote 80 percent of its efforts toward improving Tier 1 concentrated instruction, rather than focusing most of its time, energy, and resources on “plugging holes in the dike

I sell Jarod-shaped earplugs that just may plug up the hole in your heart. My earplugs are modeled after a nude Helen Keller.

How you doing?” I shake my head. “I think I’m having my mid-life crisis. I know what I am. I know what I do. But I don't feel like I’ll ever plug that hole in my chest where my dead heart sits. I’m unfinished and incomplete without love.

Confusion about how to communicate with this age group has haunted parents for many years. Mark Twain gave an amusing piece of advice concerning adolescence when he declared his preferred method of interacting with teenagers: “When a boy turns thirteen, put him in a barrel and feed him through the knothole. When he turns sixteen, plug up the hole.” This humorous advice reflects parental frustration about what to do with adolescents who are struggling to transition from childhood to adulthood.

Get at the Root Causes While we’re working to break the cycle of addiction and adding healthy coping mechanisms, we must go deeper, to figure out what drove us outside ourselves in the first place. In other words, we need to intentionally deal with the root causes of our addiction. For me, the answer was never to just stop drinking, or to just stop sticking my finger down my throat, or to just stop weighing myself, or to just stop buying shoes in order to temporarily plug up some bottomless hole. The answer was to heal all those things that made it so desperately uncomfortable to be in my skin, so that I wouldn’t want to do those things to myself. The answer was to learn to love and respect myself so much, I didn’t want or need to do the harmful things anymore.

A colander is an excellent example of adikara. We may seek something so earnestly and yet, if we are full of holes like the colander, what we want will always elude us. Building our adikara is plugging our holes by growing our competency in the area of our desires. Building our competency takes practice and learning.

Stick pulled out a dirt block and plugged the hole just as the arrow smashed into it.

In the end, the Tea Parties were betrayed because they placed their faith in a system that could not and would not be able to deliver the reforms they sincerely wanted to see. It was like sending divers to the bottom of the North Atlantic to plug the holes in the hull of the Titanic and then wondering why the ship was still inundated.

The bottom of the bathtub was grimy and sticky because the water took forever to drain. The hot water made me feel cold and then warm. Soaped up my chest and stomach and face. Got soap in my eye. Stung. Imagined the rabbits the Johnson & Johnson people tortured Clockwork Orange-style with soap just so they knew you couldn’t go blind that way. Soaped up my pussy, legs, and ass. Wished I had a cock. I had to rub myself on stuff. Bet it would be fun to jerk off in the shower. Took the razor and put my leg up on the side of the tub, shaved, and then shaved the other one. My sinuses started to clear. I blew snot out of my nose. Shaved the outside of my pussy, covered my clit with a finger and shaved inside at the top where there was always hair and inside the lips and then all the way through the middle and then all inside the ass. Kept feeling with my fingers for those stubborn hairs I had to keep going over. The water felt like someone spitting at me. The bikini area was a bitch. Ingrown hairs or razor burn. Those lucky bitches back in the seventies could let it all grow out into a giant bush. Sometimes the present seemed just as dumb as the past if you imagined what it would sound like in the future: In ancient times, the female would rub a bladed tool over her genitalia to slice the hair growing from the body even with the surface of the skin, from where it would grow again. I plugged in the laptop and brought it from the coffee table to the couch to watch porn. The way they characterized the women like different breeds. Black bitch. White cunt. Asian slut. The line of spit from the cock to the woman’s mouth. A woman blew two guys. When she took them both in her mouth at the same time, the cocks touched. I wondered if that made the men feel a little gay. A gangbang scene. The men looked pathetic, jerking off as they waited their turn, and then this one dude rubbed his cock in the woman’s hair and then wrapped some of her hair around his cock and jerked off with it. Men are so weird. A girl swallowed and then opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue so you could see she really did swallow it all. An asshole, a wrinkled, gaping hole spitting back the come like an awful little volcano, and you thought to yourself, Why would anyone on Earth want to see that? And yet there it was. Someone on Earth wanted to see just that. The men were bullies. Pulling, slapping, ordering the women around. I put the throw pillow underneath me and started to fuck it. I liked watching the scenes where the women really didn’t look like they wanted it. Like they were just doing it for the money or drugs or whatever. When I came, I came wanting it all. In one way or another, I wanted to be the men, and I wanted to hurt the woman. I wanted to hurt like the woman, and I wanted to hate the men for hurting me. I wanted to be the man at home jerking off wanting to be the man wanting to hurt the woman. And then I wanted to hurt more. Isn’t it a little sad we can’t do a little of everything there is to do? I’ll never know what it feels like to jam my cock into a tight little asshole.

Within thirty minutes, the refrigerator was plugged in and humming, the stove was operational and some rough cabinetry had been bolted to the warehouse wall. Because the new kitchen location was adjacent to a bathroom, Trey was going to make a hole in the wall and reconfigure the plumbing.

The madam was arrested in 2007 and revealed details about her global hooking empire during the Rolling Stone interview, but Playboy—and Hef—had known about the racket for years. In fact, Hef even launched his own private investigation into the matter in hopes of shutting down Nici’s Girls and other agencies standing on the shoulders of the Playboy name. The hypocrisy here is palpable. Considering Hef kept his own “harem” of sorts, it’s easy to see the mansion as a gateway to hooking. But Hef was determined to plug this leak—not necessarily for the benefit of the girls, I believe, but to maintain Playboy’s image. It wouldn’t look that good if a majority of Playmates graduated to sex for pay. Playboy was supposed to be “classy,” after all.

Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?

That MMS wasn’t fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn’t have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn’t like paying higher taxes—especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn’t happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who’d done Big Oil’s bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they’d be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures.

When a man purchases a necessary appliance such as a TV with a flat screen the size of a squash court, he cannot afford to fritter away valuable minutes reading the owner's manual, especially when the first seventeen pages consist of statements like: WARNING: Do not test the electrical socket by sticking your tongue into it. A man does not need instructions written by and for idiots. A man already knows, based on extensive experience in the field of being male, that the way to handle an appliance is to plug all the plugs into the holes that look to be about the right size or color, then turn everything on and see what happens. This is the system I use, and it has proved to be 100 percent effective roughly 65 percent of the time.

My Daddy and My Car By Marilyn Akers, Georgia Grits At fifteen, I came home from school one afternoon to find a faded red car with a white hardtop and a damaged front fender parked in the driveway. Since my daddy often worked on cars, both for himself and others, I noticed it only in passing. That is until my daddy explained that it was a 1971 Mercury Comet…and it was mine! Trouble was, it had a blown engine, and it was my job to overhaul it. So after school and on weekends I washed car parts, rode to the junk yard for replacement parts (and foot-long hot dogs from the Dairy Queen), handed my dad all sorts of tools, fixed coffee with cream and sugar, and occasionally got to do a “real” job under the hood. I remember being so excited when he asked me to get on the creeper and roll under the car (the children were never allowed under the car!) to tighten a fender bolt. Another day, I helped him connect the spark-plug wires to the distributor cap. I asked him why this particular job was so important for him to show me. He replied, “So if you’re ever out with a boy and the car breaks down, you’ll know what to look for.” He meant intentional removal of the wires, and it didn’t occur to me until many years later to ask if that advice was from personal experience! When the engine work was done, we took it to Earl Scheib for one of his infamous $99 paint jobs. I was so proud of that car and the work done side by side with my dad. We sold it less than a year later, after I stuck my foot through a rusted hole in the floorboard. I lost my dad in 2001 following a sixteen-year battle with Alzheimer’s Disease. But the bond formed between a teenage daughter and her father, and the lessons I learned from him, will be with me for a lifetime.

Do you ever feel like you are running on empty? What is missing from your life? What would it take to plug the holes and stop the energy drains? When you see, feel, or think about lack, scarcity, or emptiness, seek ways to fill the holes, replenish and return to a state of abundance and fulfillment.

One time a McDonald’s operator came to me with the idea he’d dreamed up to cut costs by producing a doughnut-shaped patty. His notion was to plug the hole with condiments, and cover it with a pickle so the customer wouldn’t notice the hole. I told him we wanted to feed our customers, not fleece them, but I couldn’t suppress a chuckle at the outrageous con artistry of the idea; a real Chicago fast one. We

De-industrialization also has a negative effect on a country’s balance of payments because services are inherently more difficult to export than manufactured goods. A balance of payments deficit means that the country cannot ‘pay its way’ in the world. Of course, a country can plug the hole through foreign borrowing for a while, but eventually it will have to lower the value of its currency, thereby reducing its ability to import and thus its living standard.

Simplicity is the future state of complexity, who sometimes earlier, as a result of innovations, got evolved while plugging various holes in order to become whole.

Neglect never patched a crack, nor denial plugged a hole. Do not forget your imperfections; they have not forgotten you.

Sonnet of Renewable Energy There is a plug point in the sky, Which is beaming electricity 24/7. Yet we drill holes into the earth, To suck oil and power our concrete heaven. When humankind first started drilling, They had no idea of its implication. But eventually scientists raised warnings, Yet drilling continued due to lack of efficient solution. Fossil fuel has already damaged the climate, And we no longer have time for scholarly fight. So I say to scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, Come up with affordable home solar-grid. Electric cars won't do anything for climate emergency, Unless all electricity comes from renewable energy.

Cash is filling up the holes he bored in the top of it. He is trimming out plugs for them, one at a time, the wood wet and hard to work. He could cut up a tin can and hide the holes and nobody wouldn’t know the difference. Wouldn’t mind, anyway. I have seen him spend a hour trimming out a wedge like it was glass he was working, when he could have reached around and picked up a dozen sticks and drove them into the joint and made it do.

of this—and more—immediately, if not sooner? To plug up that bloomin’ hole in the ozone, of course! Yet our actions would be so much more consistent and ongoing if our motivation were not anxiety but compassion: a desire to protect the earth.

When I asked a Portuguese mathematician of my acquaintance whether he had any insight to offer me on the subject, he replied, “The foundations of mathematics are full of holes and I never felt comfortable dealing with such things.” Full of holes. Earlier generations of mathematicians assumed that the stability of the landscape on which mathematical structures were built was guaranteed by God or nature. They strode in like pioneers or surveyors, their task to map the fundamentals and in so doing secure the territory that future generations would colonize. But then the holes—of which the liar’s paradox is merely one—started popping up, and the mathematicians started falling in. Never mind! Each hole could be plugged. But soon enough another would open, and another, and another . . . Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) spoke for any number of idealistic mathematicians when he wrote in 1907, The discovery that all mathematics follows inevitably from a small collection of fundamental laws, is one which immeasurably enhances the intellectual beauty of the whole: to those who have been oppressed by the fragmentary and incomplete nature of most existing chains of deduction, this discovery comes with all the overwhelming force of a revelation: like a palace emerging from the autumn mist as the traveller ascends an Italian hill-side, the stately storeys of the mathematical edifice appear in their due order and proportion, with a new perfection in every part. I remember that when I read George Eliot’s Middlemarch in college, I was particularly fascinated by the character of Mr. Casaubon, whose lifework was a Key to All Mythologies that he could never finish. If Mr. Casaubon’s Key was doomed to incompletion, my astute professor observed, it was at least in part because “totalizing projects,” by their very nature, ramify endlessly; they cannot hope to harness the multitude of tiny details demanded by words like “all,” just as they cannot hope to articulate every generalization to which their premises (in this case, the idea that all mythologies have a single key) give rise. Perhaps without realizing it, my professor was making a mathematical statement—she was asserting the existence of both the infinite and the infinitesimal—and her objections to Mr. Casaubon’s Key hold as well for any number of attempts on the part of mathematicians to establish a Key to All Mathematics.

Change is all around us, all the time, but our futures are in our control if we allow them to be.

If you were born with a hole, look no more - than for a good-sized plug.

Diving operations on the Nevada began in mid-December as a joint effort with units in Pearl Harbor who had divers attached. Divers from submarine rescue vessels Widgeon and Ortolan excavated mud from under the stern and dynamited and removed sections of her bilge keel in an effort to attach a large patch over the forty-eight-foot-long, twenty-five-foot-high torpedo hole. The patch was made by the shipyard, and the bottom of the Oklahoma was used as a pattern because she was a sister ship of the Nevada. The divers from the Widgeon and Ortolan tried to secure the patch for more than a month before a halt was called to the work. After the Nevada was dry-docked, it was discovered that the torpedo blister on the side had blown outboard about two feet, which explained why the patch would not fit. Eventually, the patch was aborted and diving efforts were concentrated on isolating and making watertight all interior bulkheads contiguous to the hole. This required closing watertight doors and fittings, welding or caulking split seams, and driving wooden plugs in small holes. Our crew from the Salvage Unit was assigned this work. At the same time, Pacific Bridge civilian divers fitted and secured wood patches over bomb holes in the Nevada’s outside hull.

one old man, who was called the Bacon-wallah, was always an early arrival under the large tree. He had three natives with him who carried his stuff and worked under his supervision; they seemed to be in mortal dread of him, as were all the other natives who stood at the Ration Stand. He was a shrivelled-up old chap about five feet six in height and when I first met him I could not tell whether he was a white man, a half-caste or a native. But it turned out he was white. He smoked a native pipe called a hookah or hubble-bubble: it held about an ounce of tobacco and he would sit on his haunches like a native while he was smoking it. It was common to see half-a-dozen natives in a circle, smoking and gossiping; they sat on their haunches with one hubble-bubble between them, from which each man took a few whiffs before passing it on to the next man. They smoked all kinds of stuff, including charcoal and live coke, but the old Bacon-wallah smoked our tobacco, which was very cheap. At this time there were no duties on tobacco and cigarettes, and best plug-tobacco only cost one rupee a pound. I became very friendly with the old chap, who was an old British soldier who had served under the East India Company, or John Company as he called it. He was not sure of his correct age, but thought he was knocking a hole into ninety. He once asked me when I had joined the Army. I replied, that it was the year Queen Victoria died. He smiled and said that he had enlisted in 1837, the year Queen Victoria was crowned. After twelve months’ service at home he had been sent to India and had been nineteen years in the country when the Mutiny broke out. He had taken an active part in the fighting around Meerut and I was always interested in his yarns of the Mutiny.

Here is how it feels to need a hug, and then to get one: • My self spills out of my body in every direction, like a punctured barrel. A hug plugs up the holes, keeping me intact.

Not only did Americans tend to be skeptical of oil companies, but BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward, was a walking PR disaster—stating in the media that the spill involved a “relatively tiny” amount of oil in “a very big ocean”; arguing in another interview that no one wanted to see the hole plugged more than him because “I’d like my life back”; and generally living up to every stereotype of the arrogant, out-of-touch multinational executive.

Oil Change instructions for Women: 1. Pull up to Dealership when the mileage reaches 5,000 miles since the last oil change. 2. Relax in the waiting room while enjoying a cup of coffee. 3. 15 minutes later, scan debit card and leave, driving a properly maintained vehicle. Money spent: Oil Change:$24.00 Coffee: Complementary TOTAL: $24.00 Oil Change instructions for Men: 1. Wait until Saturday, drive to auto parts store and buy a case of oil, filter, kitty litter, hand cleaner and a scented tree, and use your debit card for $50.00. 2. Stop to buy a case of beer, (debit $24), drive home. 3. Open a beer and drink it. 4. Jack truck up. Spend 30 minutes looking for jack stands. 5. Find jack stands under kid's pedal car. 6.. In frustration, open another beer and drink it. 7. Place drain pan under engine. 8. Look for 9/16 box end wrench. 9. Give up and use crescent wrench. 10. Unscrew drain plug. 11. Drop drain plug in pan of hot oil: splash hot oil on you in process. Cuss. 12. Crawl out from under truck to wipe hot oil off of face and arms. Throw kitty litter on spilled oil. 13. Have another beer while watching oil drain. 14. Spend 30 minutes looking for oil filter wrench. 15. Give up; crawl under truck and hammer a screwdriver through oil filter and twist off. 16. Crawl out from under truck with dripping oil filter splashing oil everywhere from holes. Cleverly hide old oil filter among trash in trash can to avoid environmental penalties. Drink a beer. 17. Install new oil filter making sure to apply a thin coat of oil to gasket surface. 18. Dump first quart of fresh oil into engine. 19. Remember drain plug from step 11. 20. Hurry to find drain plug in drain pan. 21. Drink beer. 22. Discover that first quart of fresh oil is now on the floor. Throw kitty litter on oil spill. 23. Get drain plug back in with only a minor spill. Drink beer. 24. Crawl under truck getting kitty litter into eyes. Wipe eyes with oily rag used to clean drain plug. Slip with stupid crescent wrench tightening drain plug and bang knuckles on frame removing any excess skin between knuckles and frame. 25. Begin cussing fit. 26. Throw stupid crescent wrench. 27. Cuss for additional 5 minutes because wrench hit truck and left dent. 28. Beer. 29. Clean up hands and bandage as required to stop blood flow. 30. Beer. 31. Dump in five fresh quarts of oil. 32. Beer. 33. Lower truck from jack stands. 34. Move truck back to apply more kitty litter to fresh oil spilled during any missed steps. 35. Beer. 36. Test drive truck. 37. Get pulled over: arrested for driving under the influence. 38. Truck gets impounded. 39. Call loving wife, make bail. 40. 12 hours later, get truck from impound yard. Money spent: Parts: $50.00 DUI: $2,500.00 Impound fee: $75.00 Bail: $1,500.00 Beer: $20.00 TOTAL: $4,145.00 But you know the job was done right!

Well, here’s the thing. When you have spent your entire life so far – childhood and adulthood – feeling as though you’re continually circling the plug hole of not coping, you end up wanting to make sense of it. It really isn’t so hard to understand. When you’ve made multiple attempts to pull yourself together, and to tamp down your own experience of the world, but it’s still painfully evident that you’re different from the people around you; when that difference, or the process of trying to ignore it, frequently makes you sick; when you realise it will probably shorten your life because you drink too much to cope, or your blood pressure runs high, or you wonder how many more times you can withstand the feeling of crashing out of the mainstream world and falling through the cracks; then you might just begin to think that it would be convenient to name the thing that’s made everything so bloody hard.

You must learn to accept that humans make mistakes, but when the same issue is repeated over and over without corrective strategies to plug the holes, then you must expect negative impact on your definition of success. It is normal to make a mistake, but learn, face the consequences, get back up and march on. If you want to be different or stand out as a brand, then your actions, habits, behaviours and decisions must reflect that 'you care about what people think or say about you.

There’s no reason we can’t turn the main system clock back twenty-four hours until we can figure out what’s going on here.” “I understand precisely to where you are traveling,” Abidi said. “CEPOCS will return all parameters to the pre-trigger state. You are a computer hero.” Fulton snorted. “I don’t know about hero, Decker,” Tarkleton said, “But if this works, you can call me Tark.” Swell. Two minutes later we watched Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee sequence back to life on the display. Tarkleton wiped his forehead with a sleeve. Abidi was jubilant. Fulton dumped a BC powder onto his tongue and swallowed it dry. Beeman was too wired to stand still; he kept walking around peering at readouts. I watched him circle the room. All states were back online and I could restore the CEPOCS code to its original state. Some P.R. damage control lay ahead, but I had friends in the media—along with a few vulnerable non-friends. I’d gotten off easy. Lurking in the rear chambers of my mind, however, was a nagging buzz: CEPOCS was Decker Digital’s flagship project, and until I could find the hole and plug it, the system was vulnerable. After three trips around the room Beeman eased into his chair and hunched over the keyboard, his shoulders drawn in tight. Why was he still so worked up? He looked back and I caught his eye. I started toward him. “Hey, Harold.

I wanted to fix her to a rack and flog her until she was sobbing, and then pillage every one of her holes until she begged me to stop. Then I wanted to lock her away where no one could touch her, where I wouldn’t even let her touch herself. I wanted to take away her safety and make her long for her mats and blankets. I wanted to clamp her and plug her and chain her and train her to grovel at my feet. When she was completely broken, when her will and soul were mine, then I’d give her mats and blankets back. That’s what I wanted.

A brick could be employed to stop global warming, by using it to clog up the world’s smallest volcano. I would use my penis to plug up the hole, but it already burns while I pee enough as it is.


In the short term, it requires the same amount of work to bail your boat as it does to plug the hole. In the long-term, there's no contest.

Think of yourself as a colander—a bowl filled with holes. When you experience a peak state, it’s like turning on the kitchen faucet and flooding that colander with water. If there’s enough volume, the colander fills up despite the leaks. As long as water keeps flooding in, you will, for a moment, experience what it’s like to be a cup. You’ll feel whole; if you’re really inspired, holy. Then the faucet turns off, the peak experience ends, and all that water leaks back out. In a matter of moments, you’ll settle back to where you started. The information recedes. The inspiration that was so easy to grasp moments ago slips away. And now you’ve got a decision to make. Do you engage the dull and repetitive work of plugging your leaks or do you go hunting for the next ecstatic faucet to tap?

Go up, said the dolphin, and pass into the central palace. There you shall find a great hall of stone, in the floor of which there is a small hole plugged with a stopper of vine leaves. Pull out this stopper and see what you shall find ... And she stayed in the water, balancing on her tail, and watched him. So many a hero has gone forth into grief.

respond immediately to people who need something—anything—impulsively. I want to plug the hole. Like, I have to stifle this impulse to help people carry their grocery bags in my apartment building, or if I’m in line at the store and someone is short some money, I’ll always think about volunteering to pay. Even on the street, I’ll hear someone complain about how they can’t get somewhere, I’ll think, I have a car you can borrow. I don’t say it, thank God, but I find myself thinking it. If I see someone shivering on the street, I have an impulse to give them the coat off my back. It’s pathological, right? I have a neurotic impulse to help people?