Sad Tv Quotes

You can’t know, sweetie, because you’ve never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.

I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories.

Right. I look fine. Except I don't,' said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. To that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had a lipstick or a woman's magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to Kiki's knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies-- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.

The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’ The capitalist–consumerist ethic is revolutionary in another respect. Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal. They were promised paradise, but only if they cultivated compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interests. This was too tough for most. The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum. In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist–consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money and that the masses give free reign to their cravings and passions and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How though do we know that we'll really get paradise in return? We've seen it on television.

To the most inconsiderate asshole of a friend, I’m writing you this letter because I know that if I say what I have to say to your face I will probably punch you. I don’t know you anymore. I don’t see you anymore. All I get is a quick text or a rushed e-mail from you every few days. I know you are busy and I know you have Bethany, but hello? I’m supposed to be your best friend. You have no idea what this summer has been like. Ever since we were kids we pushed away every single person that could possibly have been our friend. We blocked people until there was only me and you. You probably haven’t noticed, because you have never been in the position I am in now. You have always had someone. You always had me. I always had you. Now you have Bethany and I have no one. Now I feel like those other people that used to try to become our friend, that tried to push their way into our circle but were met by turned backs. I know you’re probably not doing it deliberately just as we never did it deliberately. It’s not that we didn’t want anyone else, it’s just that we didn’t need them. Sadly now it looks like you don’t need me anymore. Anyway I’m not moaning on about how much I hate her, I’m just trying to tell you that I miss you. And that well . . . I’m lonely. Whenever you cancel nights out I end up staying home with Mum and Dad watching TV. It’s so depressing. This was supposed to be our summer of fun. What happened? Can’t you be friends with two people at once? I know you have found someone who is extra special, and I know you both have a special “bond,” or whatever, that you and I will never have. But we have another bond, we’re best friends. Or does the best friend bond disappear as soon as you meet somebody else? Maybe it does, maybe I just don’t understand that because I haven’t met that “somebody special.” I’m not in any hurry to, either. I liked things the way they were. So maybe Bethany is now your best friend and I have been relegated to just being your “friend.” At least be that to me, Alex. In a few years time if my name ever comes up you will probably say, “Rosie, now there’s a name I haven’t heard in years. We used to be best friends. I wonder what she’s doingnow; I haven’t seen or thought of her in years!” You will sound like my mum and dad when they have dinner parties with friends and talk about old times. They always mention people I’ve never even heard of when they’re talking about some of the most important days of their lives. Yet where are those people now? How could someone who was your bridesmaid 20 years ago not even be someone who you are on talking terms with now? Or in Dad’s case, how could he not know where his own best friend from college lives? He studied with the man for five years! Anyway, my point is (I know, I know, there is one), I don’t want to be one of those easily forgotten people, so important at the time, so special, so influential, and so treasured, yet years later just a vague face and a distant memory. I want us to be best friends forever, Alex. I’m happy you’re happy, really I am, but I feel like I’ve been left behind. Maybe our time has come and gone. Maybe your time is now meant to be spent with Bethany. And if that’s the case I won’t bother sending you this letter. And if I’m not sending this letter then what am I doing still writing it? OK I’m going now and I’m ripping these muddled thoughts up. Your friend, Rosie

The TV scientist who mutters sadly, "The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for," is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don't prove anything one way or another.

You are not a grenade, not to us. Thinking about you dying makes us sad, Hazel, but you are not a grenade. You are amazing. You can’t know, sweetie, because you’ve never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.

Leni had never known anyone who had died before. She had seen death on television and read about it in her beloved books, but now she saw the truth of it. In literature, death was many things - a message, catharsis, retribution. There were deaths that came from a beating heart that stopped and deaths of another kind, a choice made, like Frodo going to the Grey Havens. Death made you cry, filled you with sadness, but in the best of her books, there was peace, too, satisfaction, a sense of the story ending as it should. In real life, she saw, it wasn't like that. It was sadness opening up inside of you, changing how you saw the world.

Heterosexual relationships seem to lead only to marriage, and for most poor dumb brainwashed women marriage is the climactic experience. For men, marriage is a matter of efficient logistics: the male gets his food, bed, laundry, TV, pussy, offspring and creature comforts all under one roof, where he doesn't have to dissipate his psychic energy thinking about them too much - then he is free to go out and fight the battles of life, which is what existence is all about. But for a woman, marriage is surrender. Marriage is when a girl gives up the fight, walks off the battlefield and from then on leaves the truly interesting and significant action to her husband, who has bargained to 'take care' of her. What a sad bum deal. Women live longer than men because they really haven't been living. Better blue-in-the-face dead of a heart attack at fifty than a healthy seventy-year old widow who hasn't had a piece of life's action since girlhood.

I wish people were more like books. If you realise halfway through a novel that you aren’t enjoying it anymore, you can just stop and find something new to read. Same with films and TV dramas. There is no judgement, no guilt, nobody even needs to know unless you choose to tell them. But with people, you tend to have to see it through to the end, and sadly not everyone gets to live happily ever after.

All too often, we mask truth in artifice, concealing ourselves for fear of losing the ones we love or prolonging a deception for those we wish to expose. We hide behind that which brings us comfort from pain and sadness or use it to repel a truth too devastating to accept.

...normally I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn´t) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can´t) that leads at best to bad art, movie versions of old TV shows, and sad dads watching Fox news. At worst it leads to revisionist, extremist politics, fundamentalist terrorism, and the victory-in Appalachia in particular-of a narcissist Manhattan cartoon maybe-millionaire and cramped-up city creep who, if he ever did go up to Rocky Top in real life, would never come down again.

I live in two worlds. One is a world of books. I’ve been a resident of Faulkner’s Yoknapatowpha County, hunted the white whale aboard the Pequod, fought alongside Napoleon, sailed a raft with Huck and Jim, committed absurdities with Ignatius J. Reilly, rode a sad train with Anna Karenina, and strolled down Swann’s Way.

I want you to write like Alice Munro.  Stir the world.  Make people see the horror; show them their suffering relatives; show them that they’re not safe.  Let them know that they can’t even begin to imagine what’s happening here.  By making my reality more compelling than reality television is the only way you’ll get their attention. Psychotic and cynical. Who can tell the difference anymore between a severed head and a special effect?  Can you?  I doubt it, and I know you’ve been in the middle of it all and seen the damage first-hand.

Throughout her life, whenever Mom was sad or confuse or disoriented, she could never concentrate on television, she said, but always sought refuge in a book. Books focused her mind, calmed her, took her outside of herself; television jangled her nerves.

I'm not who you think I am, Abby," he said in English. I almost smiled. It was the kind of melodramatic line people said in bad made-for-TV movies, but then I saw his eyes, bleak and distant, and I knew he was telling the truth. "I thought you were Dante Alexander, foreign-exchange student visiting from Italy." He shook his head slowly, sadly. "Not exactly.

Plus how much time have I given over to watching TV or staring out of windows or pursuing pointless relationships or looking at my Twitter mentions? Those hours all add up and are sadly deducted from the overall life total. They are not a break from life, these ‘harmless’ distractions, they are life. They are life and they are death.

Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that's not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. Americans work harder and longer and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today. But...we seem to like it. Alarming statistics back this observation up, showing that many Americans feel more happy and fulfilled in their offices than they do in their own homes. Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure). Americans don't really know how to do NOTHING. This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype-the overstressed executive who goes on vacation but who cannot relax.

Lies I've told my 3 year old recently Trees talk to each other at night. All fish are named either Lorna or Jack. Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose. Tiny bears live in drain pipes. If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky. The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago. Everyone knows at least one secret language. When nobody is looking, I can fly. We are all held together by invisible threads. Books get lonely too. Sadness can be eaten. I will always be there.

I tried to go to sleep with my headphones still on, but then after a while my mom and dad came in, and my mom grabbed Bluie from the shelf and hugged him to her stomach, and my dad sat down in my desk chair, and without crying he said, 'You are not a grenade, not to us. Thinking about you dying makes us sad, Hazel, but you are not a grenade. You are amazing. You can't know, sweetie, because you've never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.' 'Okay,' I said. 'Really,' my dad said. 'I wouldn't bullshit you about this. If you were more trouble than you're worth, we'd just toss you out on the streets.' 'We're not sentimental people,' Mom added, deadpan. 'We'd leave you at an orphanage with a note pinned to your pajamas.

Graham Chapman, co-author of the "Parrot Sketch", is no more. He has ceased to be. Bereft of life, he rests in peace. He's kicked the bucket, hopped the twig, bit the dust, snuffed it, breathed his last, and gone to meet the great Head of Light Entertainment in the sky. And I guess that we're all thinking how sad it is that a man of such talent, of such capability for kindness, of such unusual intelligence, should now so suddenly be spirited away at the age of only forty-eight, before he'd achieved many of the things of which he was capable, and before he'd had enough fun. Well, I feel that I should say: nonsense. Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard, I hope he fries. And the reason I feel I should say this is he would never forgive me if I didn't, if I threw away this glorious opportunity to shock you all on his behalf. Anything for him but mindless good taste. (He paused, then claimed that Chapman had whipered in his ear while he was writing the speech): All right, Cleese. You say you're very proud of being the very first person ever to say 'shit' on British television. If this service is really for me, just for starters, I want you to become the first person ever at a British memorial service to say 'fuck'.

I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job... The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress.

In our lifetime, wouldn’t it be sad if we spent more time washing dishes or swatting flies or mowing the yard or watching television than praying for world missions?

You're not a grenade, not to us. Thinking about you dying makes us sad, Hazel, but you are not a grenade. You are amazing. You can't know, sweetie, because you've never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.

On the screen it rained and rained confetti, for minutes, and that glitter-rain, plus the cameras flashing and the lights from the billboards and the awesome mass of the crowds in their shiny hats and toothy smiles, made the world pop and shine and blur in a way that makes you sad to be watching it all on your TV screen, in a way that makes you feel like, instead of bringing the action into your living room, the TV cameras are just reminding you of how much you're missing, confronting you with it, you in your pajamas, on your couch, a couple of pizza crusts resting in some orange grease on a paper plate in front of you, your glass of soda mostly flat and watery, the ice all melted, and the good stuff happening miles and miles away from where you're at.

You are amazing. You can't know sweetie,because you've never had a baby becime a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows,but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.

My Teacher Sees Right Through Me I didn’t do my homework. My teacher asked me, “Why?” I answered him, “It’s much too hard.” He said, “You didn’t try.” I told him, “My dog ate it.” He said, “You have no dog.” I said, “I went out running.” He said, “You never jog.” I told him, “I had chores to do.” He said, “You watched TV.” I said, “I saw the doctor.” He said, “You were with me.” My teacher sees right through my fibs, which makes me very sad. It’s hard to fool the teacher when the teacher is your dad.

Captain Smek himself appeared on television for an official speech to humankind. [...] 'Noble Savages of Earth,' he said. 'Long time we have tried to live together in peace.' (It had been five months.) 'Long time have the Boov suffered under the hostileness and intolerableness of you people. With sad hearts I now concede that Boov and humans will never to exist as one.' I remember being really excited at this point. Could I possibly be hearing right? Were the Boov about to leave? I was so stupid. 'And so now I generously grant you Human Preserves - gifts of land that will be for humans forever, never to be taken away again, now.' [...] So that's when we Americans were given Florida. One state for three hundred million people. There were going to be some serious lines for the bathrooms.

That first Wednesday night alone the only thing of significance I discovered was just how wonderful it is to masturbate in an empty house. I was ashamed of myself, skipping church for that, but that's the sad truth. That's what happened. I also watched TV.

Membayangkan hidup tanpamu ternyata jauh lebih menakutkan ketimbang patah hati.

Although watching TV is far from being a positive experience—generally people report feeling passive, weak, rather irritable, and sad when doing it—at least the flickering screen brings a certain amount of order to consciousness. The predictable plots, familiar characters, and even the redundant commercials provide a reassuring pattern of stimulation. The screen invites attention to itself as a manageable, restricted aspect of the environment. While interacting with television, the mind is protected from personal worries. The information passing across the screen keeps unpleasant concerns out of the mind.

And when they found our shadows Grouped around the TV sets They ran down every lead They repeated every test They checked out all the data on their lists And then the alien anthropologists Admitted they were still perplexed But on eliminating every other reason For our sad demise They logged the only explanation left This species has amused itself to death

Why did popular songs always focus on romantic love? Why this preoccupation with first meetings, sad partings, honeyed kisses, heartbreak, when life was also full of children's births and trips to the shore and longtime jokes with friends? Once Maggie had seen on TV where archaeologists had just unearthed a fragment of music from who knows how many centuries B.C., and it was a boys lament for a girl who didn't love him back. Then besides the songs there were the magazine stories and the novels and the movies, even the hair-spray ads and the pantyhose ads. It struck Maggie as disproportionate. Misleading, in fact.

ALONE One of my new housemates, Stacy, wants to write a story about an astronaut. In his story the astronaut is wearing a suit that keeps him alive by recycling his fluids. In the story the astronaut is working on a space station when an accident takes place, and he is cast into space to orbit the earth, to spend the rest of his life circling the globe. Stacy says this story is how he imagines hell, a place where a person is completely alone, without others and without God. After Stacy told me about his story, I kept seeing it in my mind. I thought about it before I went to sleep at night. I imagined myself looking out my little bubble helmet at blue earth, reaching toward it, closing it between my puffy white space-suit fingers, wondering if my friends were still there. In my imagination I would call to them, yell for them, but the sound would only come back loud within my helmet. Through the years my hair would grow long in my helmet and gather around my forehead and fall across my eyes. Because of my helmet I would not be able to touch my face with my hands to move my hair out of my eyes, so my view of earth, slowly, over the first two years, would dim to only a thin light through a curtain of thatch and beard. I would lay there in bed thinking about Stacy's story, putting myself out there in the black. And there came a time, in space, when I could not tell whether I was awake or asleep. All my thoughts mingled together because I had no people to remind me what was real and what was not real. I would punch myself in the side to feel pain, and this way I could be relatively sure I was not dreaming. Within ten years I was beginning to breathe heavy through my hair and my beard as they were pressing tough against my face and had begun to curl into my mouth and up my nose. In space, I forgot that I was human. I did not know whether I was a ghost or an apparition or a demon thing. After I thought about Stacy's story, I lay there in bed and wanted to be touched, wanted to be talked to. I had the terrifying thought that something like that might happen to me. I thought it was just a terrible story, a painful and ugly story. Stacy had delivered as accurate a description of a hell as could be calculated. And what is sad, what is very sad, is that we are proud people, and because we have sensitive egos and so many of us live our lives in front of our televisions, not having to deal with real people who might hurt us or offend us, we float along on our couches like astronauts moving aimlessly through the Milky Way, hardly interacting with other human beings at all.

You reach a certain age when reality grabs you by the scruff of the neck and shouts in your face:"Hey, look, this is what life is." And you have to open your eyes and look at it, listen to it, smell it: people who don't like you, things you don't want to do, things that hurt, things that scare you, questions without answers, feelings you don't understand, feelings you don't want but have no control over. Reality. When you gradually come to realise that all that stuff in books, films, television, magazines, newspapers, comics - it's all rubbish. It's got nothing to do with anything. It's all made up. It doesn't happen like that. It's not real. It means nothing. Reality is what you see when you look out of the window of a bus: dour faces, sad and temporary lives, millions of cars, metal, bricks, glass, rain, cruel laughter, ugliness, dirt, bad teeth, crippled pigeons, little kids in pushchairs who've already forgotten how to smile ...

Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal. They were promised paradise, but only if they cultivated compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interests. This was too tough for most. The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum. In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist–consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and that the masses give free rein to their cravings and passions – and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How, though, do we know that we’ll really get paradise in return? We’ve seen it on television.

Think about it. Why does one eat a snack? Why is a snack necessary? The answer—and we’ve done a million studies on this—is because our lives are filled with tedium and drudgery and endless toil and we need a tiny blip of pleasure to repel the gathering darkness. Thus, we give ourselves a treat. “But here’s the thing,” Periwinkle continues, his eyes all aglow, “even the things we do to break the routine become routine. Even the things we do to escape the sadness of our lives have themselves become sad. What this ad acknowledges is that you’ve been eating all these snacks and yet you are not happy, and you’ve been watching all these shows and yet you still feel lonely, and you’ve been seeing all this news and yet the world makes no sense, and you’ve been playing all these games and yet the melancholy sinks deeper and deeper into you. How do you escape?” “You buy a new chip.” “You buy a missile-shaped chip! That’s the answer. What this ad does is admit something you already deeply suspect and existentially fear: that consumerism is a failure and you will never find any meaning there no matter how much money you spend. So the great challenge for people like me is to convince people like you that the problem is not systemic. It’s not that snacks leave you feeling empty, it’s that you haven’t found the right snack yet. It’s not that TV turns out to be a poor substitute for human connection, it’s that you haven’t found the right show yet. It’s not that politics are hopelessly bankrupt, it’s that you haven’t found the right politician yet. And this ad just comes right out and says it. I swear to god it’s like playing poker against someone who’s showing his cards and yet still bluffing by force of personality.

Aku menolak jadi pilihan keduamu,apalagi ketika aku tak punya pilihan selain terus mencintaimu.

At a bus stop stands a bass player with a suitcase. He calls the same number, for the last time. Then he gets on the bus and leaves town. He will never come back here, but in ten years’ time he will suddenly see Benjamin’s face on television, and will instantly remember everything again. Fingertips and glances. Glasses on a battered bar top, smoke in a silent forest. The way snow feels on your skin when it falls in March, and a boy with sad eyes and a wild heart teaches you to skate.

10 ways to raise a wild child. Not everyone wants to raise wild, free thinking children. But for those of you who do, here's my tips: 1. Create safe space for them to be outside for a least an hour a day. Preferable barefoot & muddy. 2. Provide them with toys made of natural materials. Silks, wood, wool, etc...Toys that encourage them to use their imagination. If you're looking for ideas, Google: 'Waldorf Toys'. Avoid noisy plastic toys. Yea, maybe they'll learn their alphabet from the talking toys, but at the expense of their own unique thoughts. Plastic toys that talk and iPads in cribs should be illegal. Seriously! 3. Limit screen time. If you think you can manage video game time and your kids will be the rare ones that don't get addicted, then go for it. I'm not that good so we just avoid them completely. There's no cable in our house and no video games. The result is that my kids like being outside cause it's boring inside...hah! Best plan ever! No kid is going to remember that great day of video games or TV. Send them outside! 4. Feed them foods that support life. Fluoride free water, GMO free organic foods, snacks free of harsh preservatives and refined sugars. Good oils that support healthy brain development. Eat to live! 5. Don't helicopter parent. Stay connected and tuned into their needs and safety, but don't hover. Kids like adults need space to roam and explore without the constant voice of an adult telling them what to do. Give them freedom! 6. Read to them. Kids don't do what they are told, they do what they see. If you're on your phone all the time, they will likely be doing the same thing some day. If you're reading, writing and creating your art (painting, cooking...whatever your art is) they will likely want to join you. It's like Emilie Buchwald said, "Children become readers in the laps of their parents (or guardians)." - it's so true! 7. Let them speak their truth. Don't assume that because they are young that you know more than them. They were born into a different time than you. Give them room to respectfully speak their mind and not feel like you're going to attack them. You'll be surprised what you might learn. 8. Freedom to learn. I realize that not everyone can homeschool, but damn, if you can, do it! Our current schools system is far from the best ever. Our kids deserve better. We simply can't expect our children to all learn the same things in the same way. Not every kid is the same. The current system does not support the unique gifts of our children. How can they with so many kids in one classroom. It's no fault of the teachers, they are doing the best they can. Too many kids and not enough parent involvement. If you send your kids to school and expect they are getting all they need, you are sadly mistaken. Don't let the public school system raise your kids, it's not their job, it's yours! 9. Skip the fear based parenting tactics. It may work short term. But the long term results will be devastating to the child's ability to be open and truthful with you. Children need guidance, but scaring them into listening is just lazy. Find new ways to get through to your kids. Be creative! 10. There's no perfect way to be a parent, but there's a million ways to be a good one. Just because every other parent is doing it, doesn't mean it's right for you and your child. Don't let other people's opinions and judgments influence how you're going to treat your kid. Be brave enough to question everything until you find what works for you. Don't be lazy! Fight your urge to be passive about the things that matter. Don't give up on your kid. This is the most important work you'll ever do. Give it everything you have.

The odd group of well-wishers slowly moved down the hallway as Moshe’s sobs cascaded up and down the walls, bouncing from one side to the other. The discourse on Doc Roberts was forgotten now as the group tromped forward, a ragtag assortment of travelers moving fifteen feet as if it were fifteen thousand miles, slow travelers all, arrivals from different lands, making a low trek through a country that claimed to be so high, a country that gave them so much yet demanded so much more. They moved slowly, like fusgeyers, wanderers seeking a home in Europe, or erú West African tribesmen herded off a ship on a Virginia shore to peer back across the Atlantic in the direction of their homeland one last time, moving toward a common destiny, all of them—Isaac, Nate, and the rest—into a future of American nothing. It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy. The collective history of this sad troupe moving down the hospital corridor would become tiny blots in an American future that would one day scramble their proud histories like eggs, scattering them among the population while feeding mental junk to the populace on devices that would become as common and small as the hot dog that the dying woman thought she smelled; for in death, Chona had smelled not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one’s pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought. Had the group of stragglers moping down the hallway seen that future, they would have all turned en masse and rushed from the hospital out into the open air and collapsed onto the lawn and sobbed like children. As it was, they moved like turtles toward Chona’s room as Moshe’s howl rang out. They were in no hurry. The journey ahead was long. There was no promise ahead. There was no need to rush now.

Tidak perlu pisau untuk membunuh cinta. Yang kamu butuhkan hanya ucapan perpisahan.

Germany’s emergence as a self-confident, non-aggressive, democratic power – not to speak of the humanitarian example it has set – is a pill too bitter for many of us Brits to swallow. That is a sadness that I have regretted for far too long.

their stories, tell their tales, pose for pictures, and shake their heads for the TV cameras. As one high school student told the reporter from the Today show, “Nothing much ever happens around here, so this is kind of fun. Sad, but fun at the same time.

So maybe I willed it to me, the sadness. And since then I've been storing it all up when I should have been throwing it out. Hoarding sadness like I think there'll be a TV show about it one day and someone is about to come and help me sort my life out. No one is coming.

Believe it or not, I'm good on my own." "I believe it." "If I come home to dishes in the sink, they're my dishes. I watch TV, it's whatever I want. I go wherever I want, do whatever I want. I've got a lot going on. I'm not some sad lonely sad sack out there. I've got a good life.

On Egyptian television during a 2010 talk show, a Muslim cleric, Sa’d Arafat, reviewed the rules for beating one’s wife. He began by saying, “Allah honored wives by installing the punishment of beating.”21 Beating, he explained, was a legitimate punishment if a husband did not receive sexual satisfaction from his wife. But he added: “There is a beating etiquette.” Beatings must avoid the face because they should not make a wife ugly. They must be done at chest level. He recommended using a short rod.

Having DID is, for many people, a very lonely thing. If this book reaches some people whose experiences resonate with mine and gives them a sense that they aren't alone, that there is hope, then I will have achieved one of my goals. A sad fact is that people with DID spend an average of almost seven years in the mental health system before being properly diagnosed and receiving the specific help they need. During that repeatedly misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated, simply because clinicians fail to recognize the symptoms. If this book provides practicing and future clinicians certain insight into DID, then I will have accomplished another goal. Clinicians, and all others whose lives are touched by DID, need to grasp the fundamentally illusive nature of memory, because memory, or the lack of it, is an integral component of this condition. Our minds are stock pots which are continuously fed ingredients from many cooks: parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors, teachers, schoolmates, strangers, acquaintances, radio, television, movies, and books. These are the fixings of learning and memory, which are stirred with a spoon that changes form over time as it is shaped by our experiences. In this incredibly amorphous neurological stew, it is impossible for all memories to be exact. But even as we accept the complex of impressionistic nature of memory, it is equally essential to recognize that people who experience persistent and intrusive memories that disrupt their sense of well-being and ability to function, have some real basis distress, regardless of the degree of clarity or feasibility of their recollections. We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not meliorated merely by unearthing memories or focusing on the content of traumatic material. It is not enough to just remember. Nor is achieving a sense of wholeness and peace necessarily accomplished by either placing blame on others or by forgiving those we perceive as having wronged us. It is achieved through understanding, acceptance, and reinvention of the self.

Now normally I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn’t) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can’t) that leads at best to bad art, movie versions of old TV shows, and sad dads watching Fox News. At worst it leads to revisionist, extremist politics, fundamentalist terrorism, and the victory—in Appalachia in particular—of a narcissist Manhattan cartoon maybe-millionaire

One of the main things that tip people toward garden-variety depression, she says, is a “low tolerance for sadness.” It is the inability to bear dark emotions that causes many of our most significant problems, in other words, and not the emotions themselves. When we cannot tolerate the dark, we try all kinds of artificial lights, including but not limited to drugs, alcohol, shopping, shallow sex, and hours in front of the television set or computer. There are no dark emotions, Greenspan says—just unskillful ways of coping with emotions we cannot bear. The emotions themselves are conduits of pure energy that want something from us: to wake us up, to tell us something we need to know, to break the ice around our hearts, to move us to act.

Years ago, I was yapping to my mother about Buffy and Xena and talking about how great it is that we now have these TV shows about such strong female characters. My mother, who admittedly has never watched either show, asked me if these really WERE strong female characters, or if they were merely male characters with boobs. Having a blonde cheerleader save the world with her martial arts skills doesn't equal feminism, she said. That's a male tactic. How about her saving the day using tactics that aren't all about punching and kicking and killing? I didn't have an answer for her then. I still don't, even now. There's a whole debate to be had that I'm just not ready for, that I may never be ready for. My mother is a pacifist. I am not. We see the world differently, we operate differently, even though we want the same things. We both want equality and peace. My mother is the sort to talk her way to equality and peace. I'm the sort to talk to the point where I reckon more talk won't do any good, and then smash my way through to an understanding. It is not an enlightened viewpoint I hold. It is a crass, brutish viewpoint — but in a crass, brutish world, I believe my way is the way to go. Mum believes otherwise. And that's the difference, I think, between us. We live in a world carved by men, where fear and oppression and violence are a part of our lives. I can't even IMAGINE a world sculpted by women, where other values have taken hold. I'm limited in that way. I could try not to be, but I honestly wouldn't know where to start. That's kind of sad, when you think about it. For all my imagination, I can't even imagine that... ... (turns to stare hauntingly out the window).

Yes, I know that now that there is truth in beauty and beauty in truth. My nature is to be depressive and come out of it and write, and enjoy writing and feeling as if I have a passion and excitement and love and euphoria for it and then I go 'back to sleep again' where I can eat and watch television and not work, not be productive and then just as if a magic switch is turned on I can do it all over again. I don't mind the being depressed part. Sometimes it seems to fuel me. The anger though is gone now that was there in my twenties and even earlier in my youth. Your voice is Tolstoy’s, Hemingway’s, Updike’s, Styron’s, Mcewan’s, Greene’s, Fugard’s, Kundera’s, Rilke’s while I am the incarnate of Radcliffe Hall crossing both genders effortlessly. You betray nothing. There is son in the picture. A small boy but you don’t introduce him to me. Obsessions are unhealthy creatures. They make you mentally ill, emotionally unstable; leave you with a chemistry of deep sadness in your life. I have my writing. It keeps me from disintegrating into fractions. I should stop now before I begin to make myself cry.

Now normally I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn’t) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can’t) that leads at best to bad art, movie versions of old TV shows, and sad dads watching Fox News. At worst it leads to revisionist, extremist politics, fundamentalist terrorism,

i see tear drops flow from youre eyes and relise life is sometimes hard but crying is not something to be ashamed about

I don’t know, I guess sometimes I feel happy or sad or worried…or maybe I get really into something on TV, or really like the flavor of some giant shrimp, whatever. But sometimes I have to wonder if those thoughts or feelings might be coming from the things I read for work. When I start to feel emotional about something, I can’t tell if I’m actually feeling that way. What if it’s just something somebody else wrote in a book? Or maybe a line or a performance from some movie…Either way, I get this feeling like I’m quoting somebody else’s work […] like the feelings aren’t mine.

I am a lawyer, and for me it is very sad to say that there is now law here. There are weapons rather than law. What did Mao say? Power comes out of the barrel of a gun. It's very true. The situation is decadent. A lot of Serbs think this is leading us nowhere but they feel powerless. How many disagree? I don't know. Perhaps thirty percent disagree, but most of them are frightened and quiet. Perhaps sixty percent agree or are confused enough to go along. They are led by the ten percent who have the guns and who have control of the television towers. That's all they need.' p. 107

You will forget him.” He tried to find the words to say, “This boy is only the first of many that you will meet over your life. They will stack upon one another, week by week. You’ll try to keep them in your head but, eventually, you’ll become too full and they’ll spill out and be left behind. And then, one day, you’ll grow older and you’ll realize that you’ve forgotten his name—the name of the first dead Black boy that you promised yourself you wouldn’t forget—and you’ll hate yourself. You’ll hate your memory. You’ll hate the world. You’ll hate the way you’ve failed to stop the flow of dead bodies that have piled up in your mind. You’ll try to fix it, and fail, and you’ll drown in rage. You’ll turn on yourself for not fixing everything and you’ll drown in sadness. And you’ll do it over, and over, and over again for years and, one day, you’ll have a son and you’ll see him staring down the same road that you’ve been on and you’ll want to say something that fixes him, something that saves him from it all . . . and you won’t know what to say.” William wanted to say all of the correct words to Soot, but they were not in his mind. All that was in William’s mind was the image of his son lying on the concrete, dead, just like all the boys that came and went on television.

It's not about you it's about human behavior. You know how there will be a report on TV of some woman who kills herself and her kids, and everyone acts like that's so shocking" I nod "I guess so" "What's shocking," Cheryl says, "is that it doesn't happen more often. What's shocking is that everyone says they fell in love with their child the minute it was born, what's shocking is that no one is honest about how hard it all is. So-am I surprised that some lady drowns her children and shoots herself? No. I think it's sad; I wish people had noticed that she was struggling, I wish she could have asked for help. What shocks me is how alone we all are

Dr. King spoke of how his daughter longed to visit the amusement park on Stewart Avenue in Atlanta. Yolanda begged her parents whenever she spotted the big sign from the expressway or the commercials came on TV. Dr. King had to tell her in his low, sad rumble about the segregation system that kept colored boys and girls on the other side of the fence. Explain the misguided thinking of some whites—not all whites, but enough whites—that gave it force and meaning. He counseled his daughter to resist the lure of hatred and bitterness and assured her that “Even though you can’t go to Fun Town, I want you to know that you are as good as anybody who goes into Fun Town.

They've started to say "life-limiting" instead now. "Children and young people with life-limiting conditions..." The nurse says it gently as she explains that the hospital has started to offer a counseling service for young patients whose conditions are "terminal." She falters, flushing red. "Sorry, I meant life-limiting." Would I like to sign up? I could have the counselor come to my bed, or I could go to the special counseling room for teenagers. They have a TV in there now. The options seem endless, but the term is not new to me. I have spent many days at the airport. Years. And still, I have not flown away.

They say addiction might be linked to bipolar disorder. It’s the chemicals in our brains, they say. I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don’t get enough of one or the other. They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, “It’s been an honor to serve my country.” The thing is, I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, dammit. What if the elation I feel is not another “bipolar episode” but something I fought hard for? Maybe I jump up and down and kiss you too hard on the neck when I learn, upon coming home, that it’s pizza night because sometimes pizza night is more than enough, is my most faithful and feeble beacon. What if I’m running outside because the moon tonight is children’s-book huge and ridiculous over the line of pines, the sight of it a strange sphere of medicine? It’s like when all you’ve been seeing before you is a cliff and then this bright bridge appears out of nowhere, and you run fast across it knowing, sooner or later, there’ll be yet another cliff on the other side. What if my sadness is actually my most brutal teacher? And the lesson is always this: You don’t have to be like the buffaloes. You can stop. There was a war, the man on TV said, but it’s “lowered” now. Yay, I think, swallowing my pills.

Part Three, that part of formal scientific method called experimentation, is sometimes thought of by romantics as all of science itself because that’s the only part with much visual surface. They see lots of test tubes and bizarre equipment and people running around making discoveries. They do not see the experiment as part of a larger intellectual process and so they often confuse experiments with demonstrations, which look the same. A man conducting a gee-whiz science show with fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Frankenstein equipment is not doing anything scientific if he knows beforehand what the results of his efforts are going to be. A motorcycle mechanic, on the other hand, who honks the horn to see if the battery works is informally conducting a true scientific experiment. He is testing a hypothesis by putting the question to nature. The TV scientist who mutters sadly, “The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for,” is suffering mainly from a bad scriptwriter. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don’t prove anything one way or another.

I believe the reason why people are so sad, is because we live in a world constantly telling us that we have a million options: a millions options of shoes, soda, burgers, television shows, friends, lovers... we are all filled with empty air! Why? Because options are things that float around in the air but we don't really have them. They're not ours, and we don't really want them, anyway! A million options of lovers and most people don't even have one person to hold at night! That is how empty we all are.

If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me ... I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn't work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job ... The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress ...

I get it. Having had Satoru take me in as his cat, I think I felt as lucky as he did. Strays, by definition, have been abandoned or left behind, but Satoru rescued me when I broke my leg. He made me the happiest cat on earth. I'll always remember those five years we had together. And I'll forever go by the name Nana, the name that - let's face it - is pretty unusual for a male cat. The town where Satoru grew up, too, I would remember that. And the green seedlings swaying in the fields. The sea, with its frighteningly loud roar. Mount Fuji, looming over us. How cosy it felt on top of that boxy TV. That wonderful lady cat, Momo. That nervy but earnest hound, Toramaru. That huge white ferry, which swallowed up cars into its stomach. The dogs in the pet holding area, wagging their tails at Satoru. That foul-mouthed chinchilla telling me Guddo rakku! The land in Hokkaido stretching out forever. Those vibrant purple and yellow flowers by the side of the road. The field of pampas grass like an ocean. The horses chomping on grass. The bright-red berries on the mountain-ash trees. The shades of red on the mountain ash that Satoru taught me. The stands of slender white birch. The graveyard, with its wide-open vista. The bouquet of flowers in rainbow colours. The white heart-shaped bottom of the deer. That huge, huge, huge double rainbow growing out of the ground. I would remember these for the rest of my life. And Kosuke, and Yoshimine, and Sugi and Chikako. And above all, the one who brought up Satoru and made it possible for us to meet - Noriko. Could anyone be happier than this?

Here’s how you use the Let Them Theory to process your own emotions in a healthy way: When you feel your emotions rising up, Let Them. Allow the anger, the frustration, the hurt, the disappointment, the sadness, the grief, the tears, and the feelings of failure to come up. Let Them. And then, Let Me not react. Don’t reach for your phone. Don’t turn on the TV. Don’t make a drink. Don’t open the fridge. And for crying out loud, don’t text anyone. Just notice the feelings and Let Them rise up. The reason why you must learn how to Let Them rise is that once they do, they also fall.

She arrived home to Grandma Noreen talking from the television room. As she passed the room she saw that Sandy was still sitting in there with her. She went into the kitchen, filled a vase with water, placed the flowers in them and wrote out a note: I love you too. Please don't be sad, it will happen soon.

Late in life, after his mother had died, his father cried at baptisms and funerals and sappy movies on TV, age stripping away a final protective layer. Now Henry could feel the same softening taking place inside him, a helpless grief for the past and boundless pity for the world, and that was right too. No fool like an old fool.

The odd group of well-wishers slowly moved down the hallway as Moshe’s sobs cascaded up and down the walls, bouncing from one side to the other. The discourse on Doc Roberts was forgotten now as the group tromped forward, a ragtag assortment of travelers moving fifteen feet as if it were fifteen thousand miles, slow travelers all, arrivals from different lands, making a low trek through a country that claimed to be so high, a country that gave them so much yet demanded so much more. They moved slowly, like fusgeyers, wanderers seeking a home in Europe, or erú West African tribesmen herded off a ship on a Virginia shore to peer back across the Atlantic in the direction of their homeland one last time, moving toward a common destiny, all of them—Isaac, Nate, and the rest—into a future of American nothing. It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy. The collective history of this sad troupe moving down the hospital corridor would become tiny blots in an American future that would one day scramble their proud histories like eggs, scattering them among the population while feeding mental junk to the populace on devices that would become as common and small as the hot dog that the dying woman thought she smelled; for in death, Chona had smelled not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one’s pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought.

Fairy tales are much more than silly bedtime stories. The solution to almost any problem imaginable can be found in the outcome of a fairy tale. Sadly, these timeless tales are no longer relevant in our society. We have traded their brilliant teachings for small-minded entertainment like television and video games. The only exposure to the tales some children acquire are versions bastardised by film companies. These ‘adaptations’ are usually stripped of every moral and lesson these stories were intended to teach. I(Mrs.Peters) recently read that films were being created depicting Cinderella as a struggling hip hop singer and Sleeping Beauty as a warrior princess battling zombies!

The good reporters of that era, those who were well educated and who were enlightened themselves and worked for enlightened organizations, liked the Kennedys and were for the same things the Kennedys were for. In addition, the particular nature of the President’s personal style, his ease and confidence with reporters, his considerable skill in utilizing television, and the terrible manner in which he was killed had created a remarkable myth about him. The fact that a number of men in his Cabinet were skillful writers themselves and that in the profound sadness after his murder they wrote their own eloquent (and on occasion self-serving) versions of his presidency had strengthened that myth.

On the TV screen in Harry's is The Patty Winters Show, which is now on in the afternoon and is up against Geraldo Rivera, Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey. Today's topic is Does Economic Success Equal Happiness? The answer, in Harry's this afternoon, is a roar of resounding "Definitely," followed by much hooting, the guys all cheering together in a friendly way. On the screen now are scenes from President Bush's inauguration early this year, then a speech from former President Reagan, while Patty delivers a hard-to-hear commentary. Soon a tiresome debate forms over whether he's lying or not, even though we don't, can't, hear the words. The first and really only one to complain is Price, who, though I think he's bothered by something else, uses this opportunity to vent his frustration, looks inappropriately stunned, asks, "How can he lie like that? How can he pull that shit?" "Oh Christ," I moan. "What shit? Now where do we have reservations at? I mean I'm not really hungry but I would like to have reservations somewhere. How about 220?" An afterthought: "McDermott, how did that rate in the new Zagat's?" "No way," Farrell complains before Craig can answer. "The coke I scored there last time was cut with so much laxative I actually had to take a shit in M.K." "Yeah, yeah, life sucks and then you die." "Low point of the night," Farrell mutters. "Weren't you with Kyria the last time you were there?" Goodrich asks. "Wasn't that the low point?" "She caught me on call waiting. What could I do?" Farrell shrugs. "I apologize." "Caught him on call waiting." McDermott nudges me, dubious. "Shut up, McDermott," Farrell says, snapping Craig's suspenders. "Date a beggar." "You forgot something, Farrell," Preston mentions. "McDermott is a beggar." "How's Courtney?" Farrell asks Craig, leering. "Just say no." Someone laughs. Price looks away from the television screen, then at Craig, and he tries to hide his displeasure by asking me, waving at the TV, "I don't believe it. He looks so... normal. He seems so... out of it. So... un dangerous." "Bimbo, bimbo," someone says. "Bypass, bypass." "He is totally harmless, you geek. Was totally harmless. Just like you are totally harmless. But he did do all that shit and you have failed to get us into 150, so, you know, what can I say?" McDermott shrugs. "I just don't get how someone, anyone, can appear that way yet be involved in such total shit," Price says, ignoring Craig, averting his eyes from Farrell. He takes out a cigar and studies it sadly. To me it still looks like there's a smudge on Price's forehead. "Because Nancy was right behind him?" Farrell guesses, looking up from the Quotrek. "Because Nancy did it?" "How can you be so fucking, I don't know, cool about it?" Price, to whom something really eerie has obviously happened, sounds genuinely perplexed. Rumor has it that he was in rehab.

If all goes well we should be in Lusaka by tonight, then Victoria Falls, and from what I hear our troubles are over after that. Zimbabwe and South Africa are comfortable, efficient, Westernized. Akuna Matata. No Problem. Wild, uncomfortable, incomprehensible Africa will give way to tamed and tidied Africa – hot baths and iced beers, air-conditioning and daily newspapers, French wines and credit cards. Lying here, listening to the aching wind in a hut by a lake in a forest, I feel a pain of sadness at the prospect of leaving behind all I have been through these past months and returning to a world where experience is sanitized – rationed out second-hand by television and newspapers and magazines and marketing companies.

Any animal can fuck. But only humans can experience sexual passion, something wholly different from the biological urge to mate. And sexual passion’s endured for millennia as a vital psychic force in human life — not despite impediments but because of them. Plain old coitus becomes erotically charged and spiritually potent at just those points where impediments, conflicts, taboos, and consequences lend it a double-edged character — meaningful sex is both an overcoming and a succumbing, a transcendence and a transgression, triumphant and terrible and ecstatic and sad. Turtles and gnats can mate, but only the human will can defy, transgress, overcome, love: choose. History-wise, both nature and culture have been ingenious at erecting impediments that give the choice of passion its price and value: religious proscriptions; penalties for adultery and divorce; chivalric chastity and courtly decorum; the stigma of illegitimate birth; chaperonage; madonna/whore complexes; syphilis; back-alley abortions; a set of “moral” codes that put sensuality on a taboo-level with defecation and apostasy… from the Victorians’ dread of the body to early TV’s one-foot-on-the-floor-at-all-times rule; from the automatic ruin of “fallen” women to back-seat tussles in which girlfriends struggled to deny boyfriends what they begged for in order to preserve their respect. Granted, from 1996’s perspective, most of the old sexual dragons look stupid and cruel. But we need to realize that they had something big in their favor: as long as the dragons reigned, sex wasn’t casual, not ever. Historically, human sexuality has been a deadly serious business — and the fiercer its dragons, the seriouser sex got; and the higher the price of choice, the higher the erotic voltage surrounding what people chose." -from "Back in New Fire

Undoubtedly someone is going to toss the words heteronormative and individualizing the structural at me, and that person should stop reading immediately, not just this book but all books, your mind is broken and it is better suited for TV.  I don't mean you are stupid, only that you are even more a product of the system you hate than the porn you think you reject.

Bethsmane was ugly. There were “For Sale” signs on every other truck and mobile home. It seemed preposterous that someone would choose to live in such a place, inhabit one of the cheap aluminum-sided factory houses, send their children to school in the mornings, drive to work—Where? To do what?—then come home at night to sit on their couches and watch television. That was a sad thought.

continued. “The solution to almost every problem imaginable can be found in the outcome of a fairy tale. Fairy tales are life lessons disguised with colorful characters and situations. “‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf ’ teaches us the value of a good reputation and the power of honesty. ‘Cinderella’ shows us the rewards of having a good heart. ‘The Ugly Duckling’ teaches us the meaning of inner beauty.” Alex’s eyes were wide, and she nodded in agreement. She was a pretty girl with bright blue eyes and short strawberry-blonde hair that was always kept neatly out of her face with a headband. The way the other students stared at their teacher, as if the lesson being taught were in another language, was something Mrs. Peters had never grown accustomed to. So, Mrs. Peters would often direct entire lessons to the front row, where Alex sat. Mrs. Peters was a tall, thin woman who always wore dresses that resembled old, patterned sofas. Her hair was dark and curly and sat perfectly on the top of her head like a hat (and her students often thought it was). Through a pair of thick glasses, her eyes were permanently squinted from all the judgmental looks she had given her classes over the years. “Sadly, these timeless tales are no longer relevant in our society,” Mrs. Peters said. “We have traded their brilliant teachings for small-minded entertainment like television and video games. Parents now let obnoxious cartoons and violent movies influence their children. “The only exposure to the tales some children acquire are versions bastardized by film companies. Fairy

Since I am a loyal American, I am not supposed to tell you why this has taken place, but then it is not usual for us to examine why anything happens; we simply accuse others of motiveless malignity. “We are good,” G.W. proclaims, “They are evil,” which wraps that one up in a neat package. Later, Bush himself put, as it were, the bow on the package in an address to a joint session of Congress where he shared with them—as well as with the rest of us somewhere over the Beltway—his profound knowledge of Islam’s wiles and ways: “They hate what they see right here in this Chamber.” I suspect a million Americans nodded sadly in front of their TV sets. “Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” At this plangent moment what American’s gorge did not rise like a Florida chad to the bait?

It's a sad fact that most people can't even spot a story when they see one. Most people don't know that stories aren't confined by the covers of books or by half-hour slots on TV. The world is made of stories. The world is driven by stories. When a sunburned-friend tells you about their holiday, it's not a straight list of everything that happened to them - it's a story, an anecdote with a plot, a beginning, a middle and an end. Each one of their holiday snaps is a story too. When you're making a decision, and you imagine the possible outcomes - what are you doing if not telling yourself a story? History is a story. Society is a story. Countries are stories. Your plans are stories. Your desires are stories. Your own memories are stories - narratives selected, trimmed and packaged by the hidden machinery in your mind. Human beings are story engines. We have to be - to understand stories is to understand the world.

At a bus stop stands a bass player with a suitcase. He calls the same number, for the last time. Ten he gets on the bus and leaves town. He will never come back here, but in ten years’ time he will suddenly see Benjamin’s face on television, and will instantly remember everything again. Fingertips and glances. Glasses on a battered bar top, smoke in a silent forest. The way snow feels on your skin when it falls in March, and a boy with sad eyes and a wild heart teaches you to skate.

Bethsmane was ugly. There were “For Sale” signs on every other truck and mobile home. It seemed preposterous that someone would choose to live in such a place, inhabit one of the cheap aluminum-sided factory houses, send their children to school in the mornings, drive to work—Where? To do what?—then come home at night to sit on their couches and watch television. That was a sad thought. I pictured family dinners: green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, glasses of orange soda and cheap beer, chocolate ice cream. That was not how I wanted to live.

A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere. This was the sort of resident who was content to do nothing but sit in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and wait for his neighbours to make a mistake. Perhaps the recent incidents represented a last attempt by Wilder and the airline pilots to rebel against this unfolding logic? Sadly, they had little chance of success, precisely because their opponents were people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed. Alternatively,

I bring this up because in writing some thoughts about a father, or not having a father, I feel as though I'm writing a book about a troll under a bridge or a dragon. For me, a father was nothing more than a character in a fairy tale. I know fathers are not like dragons because fathers actually exist. I have seen them on television and sliding their arms around their wives in grocery stores, and I have seen them in the malls and in the coffee shops, but these were characters in other people's stories. The sad thing is, as a kid, I wondered why I couldn't have a dragon, but I never wondered why I didn't have a father. (page 20)

{...], reality is painful, so people invent justifications and use them to supplant measurement of reality. We could use the old cliché of an ostrich hiding its head in the sand, but only if there's a television down there, dramatizing the sadness. It is an inversion of art: instead of singing the beautiful, we find praises for the ugly and disguise it as beauty, because we have lost belief in beauty. As good nihilists, we note that this loss of beauty is vested more in belief than in beauty. We have made beauty contingent upon so many moral justifications that it is socially taboo to note beauty without somehow tying it to the plight of the disadvantaged.

I couldn’t think of any book, play, TV show, or movie that basically tells the story of how boy-children become men. What “being a man” is, in its ostensibly mundane but actually momentous detail: how to shed your child-body and become an adult; how to negotiate the white-water rapids of sexual desire; how to self-soothe your sadness and anger; how to cope with defeat and loss; how to be a father; how to love; how to age. How to understand how and why the world responds to you, simply because you are a boy, or a man. How to gain the kind of confidence and happiness that not only make you confident and happy, but everyone that you love, too. In short, how to be a well-adjusted, average,

Things you shouldn’t do when someone is dying: Don’t talk about when your aunt or your grandmother or your dog died. This isn’t about you, and the sick person shouldn’t have to comfort you; it should be the other way around. There are concentric circles of grief: the patient is at the center, the next layer is the caregiver, then their kids, then close friends, and so on. Figure out what circle you’re in. If you are looking into the concentric circles, you give comfort. If you’re looking out, you receive it. Don’t say things that aren’t true: You’re going to beat this cancer! It’s all about a positive outlook! You look stronger! You aren’t fooling anyone. Don’t overact your happiness. It’s okay to be sad with someone who is dying. They’ve invited you close at a very tender time, and that’s a moment of grace you can share. Don’t think you have to discuss the illness. Sometimes, a sick person needs a break. And if you ask up front if he wants to talk about how he feels—or doesn’t—you’re giving him control at a time when he doesn’t have a lot of choices. Don’t be afraid of the silence. It’s okay to say nothing. Don’t forget: No one knows what to say to someone who’s dying. Everyone is afraid of saying the wrong thing. It’s more important to be there than to be right. Win and I have reached the stage where we can sit in quiet, without a background noise of NPR on the radio or the television murmuring.

The Robertsons’ goal was never to be known as TV stars (except maybe Uncle Si, but, hey, he’s nuts—in a good way). In fact, I wasn’t even convinced the show would actually happen until I looked out my window one morning and saw cameramen running through my brother Willie’s front yard like bees swarming to a hive. I’ll never forget overhearing what one of the cameramen whispered to a technician on the first day of filming. He was sad that the show would probably tear our family apart. I remember thinking to myself, He hasn’t met my family. He didn’t know that the only kind of stardom my family and I are interested in is the lifestyle in Christ as described in Philippians 2:15—16: “Children of God . . . [that] shine like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life.

In the ad, this better version of me is sitting in her apartment watching TV, just like I am now, only her apartment is obviously much nicer than mine. For authenticity they even have a pizza box open on the table, even though this girl only eats seven almonds a week. Her world is black and white, which seems intended as a signal for depression but actually makes her look like she's in a cool French movie...

If you ask a thousand people who don’t want anything to do with religion why that is, they’ll tell you all the reasons they don’t like it, but I doubt they’d be describing the real stuff. They’ll describe a guy or a gal on a television show who told them if they gave money, they’d get rich. They’ll talk about the big hairdo or outrageous makeup of some televangelist and the absurd things they said and did. They’ll talk about someone who was religious but broke their hearts or their promise, or lied and got caught or went to jail, or who cried a lot on camera but it looked like they were faking it. Or they’ll talk about someone who told them that God hated who they were or how they acted or who they married or couldn’t forgive what they’d done. It’s a sad situation, honestly. The only way they can keep from being head-faked anymore is for somebody to give them a taste of the real thing.

Fine people on both sides? I was disgusted. Here was the same man I’d gone on television to defend when I believed it was appropriate. While I hadn’t been a supporter at the start of his campaign, he’d eventually convinced me he could be an effective president. Trump had proved to be a disrupter of the status quo during the primary and general election. Especially when he began to talk about issues of concern to black Americans. Dems have taken your votes for granted! Black unemployment is the highest it’s ever been! Neighborhoods in Chicago are unsafe! All things I completely agreed with. But now he was saying, 'I’m going to change all that!' He mentioned it at every rally, even though he was getting shut down by the leaders of the African American community. And what amazed me most was that he was saying these things to white people and definitely not winning any points there either. I’d defended Trump on more than one occasion and truly believed he could make a tangible difference in the black community. (And still do.) I’d lost relationships with family members, friends, and women I had romantic interest in, all because I thought advocating for some of his positions had a higher purpose. But now the president of the United States had just given a group whose sole purpose and history have been based on hate and the elimination of blacks and Jews moral equivalence with the genuine counterprotesters. My grandfather was born and raised in Helena, Arkansas, where the KKK sought to kill him and other family members. You can imagine this issue was very personal to me. In Chicago, the day before Trump’s press conference, my grandfather and I had had a long conversation about Charlottesville, and his words to me were fresh in my mind. So, yeah, I was hurt. Angry. Frustrated. Sad.

My Mother They are killing her again. She said she did it One year in every ten, But they do it annually, or weekly, Some even do it daily, Carrying her death around in their heads And practicing it. She saves them The trouble of their own; They can die through her Without ever making The decision. My buried mother Is up-dug for repeat performances. Now they want to make a film For anyone lacking the ability To imagine the body, head in oven, Orphaning children. Then It can be rewound So they can watch her die Right from the beginning again. The peanut eaters, entertained At my mother’s death, will go home, Each carrying their memory of her, Lifeless – a souvenir. Maybe they’ll buy the video. Watching someone on TV Means all they have to do Is press ‘pause’ If they want to boil a kettle, While my mother holds her breath on screen To finish dying after tea. The filmmakers have collected The body parts, They want me to see. They require dressings to cover the joins And disguise the prosthetics In their remake of my mother; They want to use her poetry As stitching and sutures To give it credibility. They think I should love it – Having her back again, they think I should give them my mother’s words To fill the mouth of their monster, Their Sylvia Suicide Doll, Who will walk and talk And die at will, And die, and die And forever be dying.

A serious reader of fiction is an adult who reads, let's say, two or more hours a night, three or four nights a week, and by the end of two or three weeks he has read the book. A serious reader is not someone who reads for half an hour at a time and then picks the book up again on the beach a week later. While reading, serious readers aren't distracted by anything else. They put the kids to bed, and then they read. They don't watch TV intermittently or stop off and on to shop on-line or to talk on the phone. There is, indisputably, a rapidly diminishing number of serious readers, certainly in America. Of course, the cause is something more than just the multitudinous distractions of contemporary life. One must acknowledge the triumph the screen. Reading, whether serious or frivolous, doesn't stand a chance against the screen: first, the movie screen, then the television screen, now the proliferating computer screen, one in your pocket, one on your desk, one in your hand, and soon one imbedded between your eyes. Why can't serious reading compete? Because the gratifications of the screen are far more immediate, graspable, gigantically gripping. Alas, the screen is not only fantastically useful, it's fun, and what beats fun? There was never a Golden Age of Serious Reading in America but I don't remember ever in my lifetime the situation being as sad for books – with all the steady focus and uninterrupted concentration they require – as it is today. And it will be worse tomorrow and even worse the day after. My prediction is that in thirty years, if not sooner, there will be just as many people reading serious fiction in America as now read Latin poetry. A percentage do. But the number of people who find in literature a highly desirable source of sustaining pleasure and mental stimulation is sadly diminished.

BRUNO WAS WAKING up. The room seemed to be dark. He held his breath, testing the quality of the darkness, wondering if it was night or day, morning or afternoon. If it was night that was bad and might be terrible. Afternoon could be terrible too if he woke up too early. The drama of sleeping and waking had become preoccupying and fearful now that consciousness itself could be so heavy a burden. One had to be cunning. He never let himself doze in the mornings for fear of not being able to fall asleep after lunch. The television had been banished with its false sadnesses and its images of war. Perhaps he had nodded off over his book. He had had that dream again, about Janie and Maureen and the hatpin. He felt about him and began to push himself up a little on his pillows, his stockinged feet scrabbling inside the metal cage which lifted the weight of the blankets off them. Tight bed clothes are a major cause of bad feet. Not that Bruno’s feet minded much at this stage.

Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that’s not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. Americans work harder and longer and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today. But as Luca Spaghetti pointed out, we seem to like it. Alarming statistics back this observation up, showing that many Americans feel more happy and fulfilled in their offices than they do in their own homes. Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure). Americans don’t really know how to do nothing. This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype—the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.

I'm sorry I looked. Or saw, I guess. I didn't go digging through your book. The pages fell out." "Yeah. I kinda figured that might have been what happened." He scuffed one heel against the cement. "The book fell out of my bag again...and,well..." And,well, there he was,forgiven. "Zippers," I said. "One of mankind's better inventions. Your bag has one; I've seen it." "You see much, Grasshopper." I blinked at him. "C'mon. Kung Fu?" He let go of his knees and sliced both hands through the air in a choppy spiral. "Shaolin monk fighting against injustice while searching for his long-lost brother in the Old West?" I shook my head. "Nope.Sorry."" "Sad. I bet you wouldn't recognize 'Live long and prosper,' either." "Nope." "How did I know? My dad got me into seventies TV.It's awfully brilliant. Or brilliantly awful, maybe." He had relaxed and was looking monumentally pleased with seventies television or himself or something. You're awfully beautiful, Alex Bainbridge. I managed to keep that one to myself,but... "You're really good." That one got away from me. "Your drawing, I mean.

[Jack:] 'I was twenty-four when I met Walker. Do you know I've never lived alone? I'm forty-four years old and I've never lived alone. The first few weeks Walker was gone, I didn't know what to do with myself. I'd stay in the store until late, pick up some takeout, and just watch television until I fell asleep.' [... Melody:] 'Sounds kind of great right now.' Jack looked at her and nodded. 'It is kind of great. That's my point. I miss Walker. I miss him terribly and I don't know what's going to happen. But for the first time ever, I'm only accountable to myself and I like it. I'm not proud of why I'm at this point, but I'm doing my best to figure it out, and I'm kind of enjoying it, parts of it anyway.

More than anything, we have lost the cultural customs and traditions that bring extended families together, linking adults and children in caring relationships, that give the adult friends of parents a place in their children's lives. It is the role of culture to cultivate connections between the dependent and the dependable and to prevent attachment voids from occurring. Among the many reasons that culture is failing us, two bear mentioning. The first is the jarringly rapid rate of change in twentieth-century industrial societies. It requires time to develop customs and traditions that serve attachment needs, hundreds of years to create a working culture that serves a particular social and geographical environment. Our society has been changing much too rapidly for culture to evolve accordingly. There is now more change in a decade than previously in a century. When circumstances change more quickly than our culture can adapt to, customs and traditions disintegrate. It is not surprising that today's culture is failing its traditional function of supporting adult-child attachments. Part of the rapid change has been the electronic transmission of culture, allowing commercially blended and packaged culture to be broadcast into our homes and into the very minds of our children. Instant culture has replaced what used to be passed down through custom and tradition and from one generation to another. “Almost every day I find myself fighting the bubble-gum culture my children are exposed to,” said a frustrated father interviewed for this book. Not only is the content often alien to the culture of the parents but the process of transmission has taken grandparents out of the loop and made them seem sadly out of touch. Games, too, have become electronic. They have always been an instrument of culture to connect people to people, especially children to adults. Now games have become a solitary activity, watched in parallel on television sports-casts or engaged in in isolation on the computer. The most significant change in recent times has been the technology of communication — first the phone and then the Internet through e-mail and instant messaging. We are enamored of communication technology without being aware that one of its primary functions is to facilitate attachments. We have unwittingly put it into the hands of children who, of course, are using it to connect with their peers. Because of their strong attachment needs, the contact is highly addictive, often becoming a major preoccupation. Our culture has not been able to evolve the customs and traditions to contain this development, and so again we are all left to our own devices. This wonderful new technology would be a powerfully positive instrument if used to facilitate child-adult connections — as it does, for example, when it enables easy communication between students living away from home, and their parents. Left unchecked, it promotes peer orientation.

Another can do the activity for you; even enjoyment itself can be outsourced. The common example given by Žižek is the laugh track that occurs in most comedic sit-coms (now, sadly a dying form of entertainment with streaming services superseding network television), but the idea is that the television show is fully equipped with a canned laughter which then laughs at the point in the show when the actors make a funny remark. The point is not that the audience laughs along with the canned laughter, but that after a long day at work when you are tired, the canned laughter does the laughing for you. You are relieved of the need to act, and you imagine that there is a real person somewhere laughing at the joke in your place. Ideology functions in this gap, because the reality is that canned laughter is just a machine recording of laughter and there are no real people who are actually laughing. Žižek’s thesis is that this creates a “subject supposed to believe'' that there is someone out there doing the work that we are not doing. In instances when we give to charities we want to believe that the money is going to a good cause and that the problem of say, hunger in Africa, is being resolved by our donation. Not by the person donating the money, but by someone else who will allegedly act on our behalf and put in the work necessary for consumerism to continue unabated. Consumers can remain docile, or even active in their own hedonistic desires. Interpassivity implies that a decentered subject has emerged, where even the innermost desires of the subject can be externalized.

Never to Heaven May my eyes always stay level to the horizon may they never gaze as high as heaven to ask why May I never go where angels fear to tread so as to have to ask for answers in the sky The whys in this lifetime i've found are inconsequential compared to the magic of the nowness- the solution to most questions there are no reasons. and if there are- i'm wrong but at least i won't have spent my life waiting looking for God in the clouds of the dawn or listening out for otherworldly contact 30 billion light years on No. i'll let the others do the pondering while i'll be sitting on the lawn reading something unsubstantial with the television on I'll be up early to rise though of course- but only to make you a pot of coffee That's what i was thinking this morning Joe that it's times like this as the marine layer lifts off the sea from the view of our favourite restaurant that i pray that i may always keep my eyes level to your eyeline never downcast at the tablecloth Yes Joe it's times like this as the marine layer lifts off the sea on the dock with the candle lit that i think to myself there are things you still don't know about me like sometimes i'm afraid my sadness is too big and that one day you might have to help me handle it but until then may i always keep my eyes level to this skyline assessing the glittering new development off of the coast of Long Beach never to heaven or revenant Because i have faith in man as strange as that seems in times like these and it's not just because of the warmth i've found in your brown eyes but because i believe in the goodness in me that it's firm enough to plant a flag in or a rosebud or to build a new life.

Human beings are capable of extraordinary things. We can create and we can destroy, we can love or we can hate. Some people believe they have souls. While others think that there is only this. Just this. Reality. The news. Killings, wars, bombings, hate, prejudice. Death. And death? No one ever dies on television. Only the bad guys do. Not you. Just them. So death is without meaning. Happens without meaning due to media. We see but don't feel, we watch but haven't experienced. We can only sympathize. A gun doesn't fire on it's own and a fanatic doesn't just wake up one day and become a murderer. Hate doesn't have a face. Death doesn't have a face. Human beings become that face. All of us everyday. Whether you like it or not. Why? Because this is a mindset a culture a history. From the time we are children we are taught that this is right and this is wrong. This is what a man does. This is what a woman does. Children emulate the behaviors of adults. Parents, movie characters and just about everyone else. We live in a society based on ideals. We celebrate the intelligence of the human race and then we take on the guises of everything the opposite of that belief we've ever known and support violence, support war. Behaviors that any intelligent race should have abandoned many years ago. We are surrounded by violence, surrounded by what we still are and what we are not becoming. Frankly we are all still just primitives and not capable in any way shape or form of creating a complete and everlasting peace and that's the sad reality of it all and always has been. We're just human. Only human. The good, the bad and the ugly. The evil, the damaged and the sick. The rich, the poor and all the rest of us. So look at it this way. You can't change the world or make the world stop killing. You can't stop violence or hatred but you can walk away from it all. Violence is a part of being human. But so is love. So? Only fight if you have to. Live peacefully and as a peace keeper and do what you can to make the small part of your own world a better place. Whether that's thru creation, protest, teaching or just being who you are and doing what you do. You can't stop humanity from being humanity and you certainly can't stop all the horrible things that happen around the world everyday. So accept it. Light a candle, say a prayer, donate or meditate, listen to some music, write. But even if the human race isn't everything you wish it could be? Hold on to love. Hold onto friends. Hold onto hope or whatever religion or belief that guides you through the dark. Because in the end? You're just human and that's all that you can do. The best that you can do.