Sock Drive Quotes

My Top Ten Reasons To Live 10. Stars in a really dark sky 9. Driving across the country 8. Nirvana 7. My mom 6. Our dog pack 5. Gay bingo 4. Mud fights 3. Kissing 2. Magic marker tattoos 1. Pink socks

Hate Poem I hate you truly. Truly I do. Everything about me hates everything about you. The flick of my wrist hates you. The way I hold my pencil hates you. The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped in the jaws of a moray eel hates you. Each corpuscle singing in its capillary hates you. Look out! Fore! I hate you. The blue-green jewel of sock lint I’m digging from under by third toenail, left foot, hates you. The history of this keychain hates you. My sigh in the background as you explain relational databases hates you. The goldfish of my genius hates you. My aorta hates you. Also my ancestors. A closed window is both a closed window and an obvious symbol of how I hate you. My voice curt as a hairshirt: hate. My hesitation when you invite me for a drive: hate. My pleasant “good morning”: hate. You know how when I’m sleepy I nuzzle my head under your arm? Hate. The whites of my target-eyes articulate hate. My wit practices it. My breasts relaxing in their holster from morning to night hate you. Layers of hate, a parfait. Hours after our latest row, brandishing the sharp glee of hate, I dissect you cell by cell, so that I might hate each one individually and at leisure. My lungs, duplicitous twins, expand with the utter validity of my hate, which can never have enough of you, Breathlessly, like two idealists in a broken submarine.

He could be wearing a red letterman’s jacket, driving around in a Corvette with the top down, one arm on the steering wheel, on his way to pick up his girl for the sock hop.

As Julie Sondra Decker, author of The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality, tells me, “We’re whole people who just lack that ‘driving force’ and it’s understandable in the same way that it’s understandable that someone doesn’t have ‘crafts’ as their driving force.” (Or in the way that people don’t have “not wearing sock-monkey hats” as their driving force.) “I’m not a ‘non-crafter’; I’m only asexual because there’s a word for it and because people have an objection to me not wanting to have sex. If they didn’t, my life would not have involved very much of talking about it,” she says.

Plus, every time I tried to say anything about my specific predicament, the curse would activate, driving me back and prompting me to do something monstrous, like wear socks with sandals.

I think about her as she is in front of me, in her weird overalls and woolen socks and fancy leather slippers. I wonder if she still wears that Indian shawl around the house, if she still drinks hot water with a spoonful of some honey that she claims has miraculous, antiviral, immortality-giving properties, whether she still plays the piano late at night and insists on cooking pasta in not-quite-boiling water because she’s too impatient to wait. I wonder whether she still crashes the gears on the car as she’s driving but denies all knowledge of this. I wonder if there is anything of mine that she’s kept, any shirts, any books, any letters. I wonder if she still walks in her sleep and whether there is anybody there to get up, follow her, and lead her back to bed.

If you look at forces that improved products like socks, sweaters, and Twinkies,the engine that drives that system is economics. It’s economics that breaks down for software so that it remains indefinitely in its present primitive stage of evolution.

The wild notes of tuba and trumpet and trombone rattled and hummed through the trees. In the first group of musicians, there were kids as young as fourteen playing the tuba and one kid who probably couldn’t drive banging a bass drum. They stomped together in rhythm to the music. Two ladies had dressed up in what looked like princess outfits. They wore white gloves and socks with tassels.

You know how old you have to be before you stop wanting to fuck strangers?’ said Arthur. ‘Dead, that’s how old. It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t go away. You put all this energy into suppressing it and telling yourself it’s worth it because of what you get in exchange, and then one day someone brushes up against you and you’re fourteen years old again and all you want to do is go to a drive-in movie and fuck her brains out in the back seat. But you don’t do it because you’re not going to be that kind of person, so you go home, and there’s your wife, and she wears socks to bed.

Research and clinical observation (not to mention people’s personal experiences) show that people with ADHD tend to have hypersensitivities in each of the five senses: touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight (Bailey and Haupt 2010, 182). I have no doubt that the tale of the princess and the pea is the portrait of a young woman with ADHD! I’m constantly yanking my shirt tail and skirts down and my socks and leotards up because any bunched fabric drives me nuts. Many women with ADHD (including me) would like to burn their bras, and it’s not (necessarily) because we’re feminists: it’s because of tactile hypersensitivity

The most common answer began with a question. Had Dr. Jim ever tried to sleep in a shelter, with a hundred other people in the same room? Well, they just couldn’t do it. Almost always, they would add that he shouldn’t think they chose to live outside. Offer them someplace else besides a shelter and they’d gladly move in. The most striking explanation came from a man who slept under one of the Storrow Drive bridges—a sweet, soft-spoken fellow who suffered from schizophrenia. Jim had met him half a dozen times and given him coffee and blankets and socks and treated him for a few minor ailments. In the middle of a very cold night, afraid the man might die of hypothermia, Jim begged him to come back in the van to the Pine Street shelter. But the man demurred. “Look, Doc, if I’m at Pine Street, I can’t tell which voices are mine and which are somebody else’s,” he said. “When I stay out here, I know the voices are mine, and I can control them a little.

I don’t know. I think maybe I’m just partly yellow and partly the type that doesn’t give much of a damn if they lose their gloves. One of my troubles is, I never care too much when I lose something—it used to drive my mother crazy when I was a kid. Some guys spend days looking for something they lost. I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I’d care too much. Maybe that’s why I’m partly yellow. It’s no excuse, though. It really isn’t. What you should be is not yellow at all. If you’re supposed to sock somebody in the jaw, and you sort of feel like doing it, you should do it. I’m just no good at it, though. I’d rather push a guy out the window or chop his head off with an ax than sock him in the jaw. I hate fist fights. I don’t mind getting hit so much—although I’m not crazy about it, naturally—but what scares me most in a fist fight is the guy’s face. I can’t stand looking at the other guy’s face, is my trouble. It wouldn’t be so bad if you could both be blindfolded or something. It’s a funny kind of yellowness, when you come to think of it, but it’s yellowness, all right. I’m not kidding myself.

So many socks. After the pair the undertaker asks for (I picture them black beneath the fold in your open casket, your toes still cold) what else to do,. Body bags of old suits, shirts still pressed, long johns, the unworn, unwashed wreckage of your closet, too many coats to keep, though I will save so many. How can I give away the last of your scent? And still, father, you have errands, errant dry cleaning to pick up-- yellow tags whose ghostly carbon tells a story where to look. One place closed for good, the tag old. One place with none of your clothes, just stares as if no one ever dies, as if you are naked somewhere, & I suppose you are. Nothing here. The last place knows exactly what I mean, brings me shirts hanging like a head. Starched collars your beard had worn. One man saying sorry, older lady in the back saying how funny you were, how you joked with her weekly. Sorry— & a fellow black man hands your clothes back for free, don’t worry. I’ve learned death has few kindnesses left. Such is charity—so rare & so rarely free— that on the way back to your emptying house I weep. Then drive everything, swaying, straight to Goodwill— open late—to live on another body & day.

She was a new world - a place of endless mysteries and unexpected delights, an enchanting mixture of woman and child. She supervised the domestic routine with deceptive lack of fuss. With her there, suddenly his clothes were clean and had their full complement of buttons; the stew of boots and books and unwashed socks in his wagon vanished. There were fresh bread and fruit preserves on the table; Kandhla's eternal grilled steaks gave way to a variety of dishes. Each day she showed a new accomplishment. She could ride astride, though Sean had to turn his back when she mounted and dismounted. She cut Sean's hair and made as good a job of it as his barber in Johannesburg. She had a medicine chest in her wagon from which she produced remedies for every ailing man or beast in the company. She handled a rifle like a man and could strip and clean Sean's Mannlicher. She helped him load cartridges, measuring the charges with a practised eye. She could discuss birth and procreation with a clinical objectivity and a minute later blush when she looked at him that way. She was as stubborn as a mule, haughty when it suited her, serene and inscrutable at times and at others a little girl. She would push a handful of grass down the back of his shirt and run for him to chase her, giggle for minutes at a secret thought, play long imaginative games in which the dogs were her children and she talked to them and answered for them. Sometimes she was so naive that Sean thought she was joking until he remembered how young she was. She could drive him from happiness to spitting anger and back again within the space of an hour. But, once he had won her confidence and she knew that he would play to the rules, she responded to his caresses with a violence that startled them both. Sean was completely absorbed in her. She was the most wonderful thing he had ever found and, best of all, he could talk to her.

I always had trouble with the feet of Jón the First, or Pre-Jón, as I called him later. He would frequently put them in front of me in the evening and tell me to take off his socks and rub his toes, soles, heels and calves. It was quite impossible for me to love these Icelandic men's feet that were shaped like birch stumps, hard and chunky, and screaming white as the wood when the bark is stripped from it. Yes, and as cold and damp, too. The toes had horny nails that resembled dead buds in a frosty spring. Nor can I forget the smell, for malodorous feet were very common in the post-war years when men wore nylon socks and practically slept in their shoes. How was it possible to love these Icelandic men? Who belched at the meal table and farted constantly. After four Icelandic husbands and a whole load of casual lovers I had become a vrai connaisseur of flatulence, could describe its species and varieties in the way that a wine-taster knows his wines. The howling backfire, the load, the gas bomb and the Luftwaffe were names I used most. The coffee belch and the silencer were also well-known quantities, but the worst were the date farts, a speciality of Bæring of Westfjord. Icelandic men don’t know how to behave: they never have and never will, but they are generally good fun. At least, Icelandic women think so. They seem to come with this inner emergency box, filled with humour and irony, which they always carry around with them and can open for useful items if things get too rough, and it must be a hereditary gift of the generations. Anyone who loses their way in the mountains and gets snowed in or spends the whole weekend stuck in a lift can always open this special Icelandic emergency box and get out of the situation with a good story. After wandering the world and living on the Continent I had long tired of well-behaved, fart-free gentlemen who opened the door and paid the bills but never had a story to tell and were either completely asexual or demanded skin-burning action until the morning light. Swiss watch salesmen who only knew of “sechs” as their wake-up hour, or hairy French apes who always required their twelve rounds of screwing after the six-course meal. I suppose I liked German men the best. They were a suitable mixture of belching northerner and cultivated southerner, of orderly westerner and crazy easterner, but in the post-war years they were of course broken men. There was little you could do with them except try to put them right first. And who had the time for that? Londoners are positive and jolly, but their famous irony struck me as mechanical and wearisome in the long run. As if that irony machine had eaten away their real essence. The French machine, on the other hand, is fuelled by seriousness alone, and the Frogs can drive you beyond the limit when they get going with their philosophical noun-dropping. The Italian worships every woman like a queen until he gets her home, when she suddenly turns into a slut. The Yank is one hell of a guy who thinks big: he always wants to take you the moon. At the same time, however, he is as smug and petty as the meanest seamstress, and has a fit if someone eats his peanut butter sandwich aboard the space shuttle. I found Russians interesting. In fact they were the most Icelandic of all: drank every glass to the bottom and threw themselves into any jollity, knew countless stories and never talked seriously unless at the bottom of the bottle, when they began to wail for their mother who lived a thousand miles away but came on foot to bring them their clean laundry once a month. They were completely crazy and were better athletes in bed than my dear countrymen, but in the end I had enough of all their pommel-horse routines. Nordic men are all as tactless as Icelanders. They get drunk over dinner, laugh loudly and fart, eventually start “singing” even in public restaurants where people have paid to escape the tumult of

I always ask the lead agent to avoid using lights and sirens whenever possible. I’m also embarrassed to admit that I do a fair amount of backseat driving. That’s pretty rich coming from someone who hasn’t driven a car regularly in twenty-five years. Luckily, the agents are too polite to tell me to put a sock in it.

59. Creature Comforts Are Only Temporary It was one of the most painful lessons of my life. It was during the first time I attempted SAS selection. I was totally lost in a vast boggy wetland, torrential rain was driving down, and I was utterly spent. I was also way behind time, and I knew it. When I finally made it to the penultimate checkpoint, the corporals kept me there doing endless press-ups in the wet marsh with my heavy pack still on my back. I knew this was costing me even more valuable time and energy. I was feeling fainter and fainter; I knew things were bad. I was soon off again, wading across a fast-flowing, waist-deep stream, before climbing up through knee-deep mud towards the next 2,000-foot (600-metre) mountain ridge-line. I just had to keep going. Ten miles. Twenty miles. ‘Nothing good comes from quitting,’ I told myself, over and over again. ‘If I keep going, I will pass.’ But I was getting more and more delirious with fatigue. I didn’t know why this was happening, and I couldn’t control it. Maybe I hadn’t eaten or drunk enough, or perhaps it was just that the months of this relentless pace were finally taking their toll and I was at my limit. Every couple of paces, my knees would buckle. If I stumbled, I couldn’t stop myself from falling. Eventually I saw the trucks in the distance below me, symbolizing the end point. Wisps of smoke from army Hexi stoves curled upwards from the woods. Soon I would be warm, soon I would have a cup of hot tea. It was all I wanted. But when I reached the end checkpoint I was told I had been failed - I had been too slow. My world fell inwards. I was sent off to make camp in the woods and rest for the night. The remaining recruits would be heading out for the night march in a few hours. The next morning I would be returned to camp with the others who hadn’t made the grade. I was totally dejected. That night in those woods, warm and dry under my shelter, blisters attended to, dry socks on, and out of the wind and rain, I learnt an enduring lesson: warm and dry doesn’t mean fulfilled and happy.

In the wilderness you learn what’s authentic and what is not. To “boot up” means to put on your boots not turn on your computer. A mouse is still a mouse. Software is warm socks. The hard drive is your kayak. You sleep on the ground until you’re uncomfortable in a bed. You breath fresh air until you suffocate indoors. You laugh from your toes and fly in your dreams. You find that you can sing the high notes; that true wealth isn’t a matter of adding to your possessions but of subtracting from the sum of your desires.

5. Processes must be regularly updated to ensure they reflect customers’ ever-changing expectations for service. The top ten most important processes—those deemed to have the biggest impact on driving and sustaining customer loyalty—must be singled out annually for an “alignment check” and tune up. Today, customer expectations change at supersonic speed as customers are influenced by their service experiences with organizations of every type and effectiveness. Staying in touch with these ever-changing customer service expectations is crucial to an organization’s success. Just as you would expect a complete checkup from your doctor during an annual physical, so too should your most important processes undergo the rigors of an annual evaluation of their effectiveness at delivering or enabling service to customers in an appropriate fashion.

Back when I used to fly every week, I tried a clever trick that Michael Rintala showed me: put two tennis balls in an athletic sock about four to six inches apart, and position them just about at the level of my kidneys, or where my thoracic spine meets my lumbar spine. Then, with every breath I try to make sure I expand fully enough to feel the tennis balls on both sides. The idea is that it cues your breathing. When I did this, I could get off a five-hour flight and feel as if I had not been sitting for longer than about five minutes. (It also kept my seatmates from talking to me when I was trying to work.) It’s worth trying on a long flight or drive. *

with Cooper and his old EMT buddies—after way too much drinking and Cooper asking him to slow down, only to end up driving him home—Aaron found an invoice tacked to the microwave with a corner of Scotch tape. It was for a storage unit a few blocks from home, taken out under his name with his credit card. She had left a stack of flattened boxes sitting against the wall next to the front door and a sticky note with Doctor Jandreau’s number tucked into his sock drawer. She

Sex and the Single Girl Grab my ass Pull me closer Kiss my neck Bite my lip Pull my hair Be gentle Throw me against the wall Pin me down Undress me with your teeth Use your tongue Make me moan Talk dirty to me Don't speak Pressyour weight on me Go deeper Thrust harder Lick my nipples Stick it in my ass Drive me wild Don't stop Stop Don't stop Speed up Slow down Do it sideways Choke me Go down on me Take me in the shower Take me from behind I'm not done with you yet Fuck me again Navigating Sex with your wife Make sure the kids are asleep and tucked in Turn off the lights Take off your socks I think the ceiling needs to be painted I wonder who's on Jimmy Kimmel tonight

When he entered the anteroom, two women looked up at him. One was Miss Robertson, the governor's secretary; the other he did not recognize till she smiled and said his name in a gentle voice. She was Mrs. Freeman, the wife of the bishop; he saluted her and went to Miss Robertson. 'Will you tell them I'm here?' he said. 'I'm sorry, Mr. Haffner, they don't even want me to take minutes right now.' 'Well, just go tell them I'm out of the running.' There was not so much as a flicker in her eyes. 'They locked the door,' she said, 'and besides, I don't think they'll accept your withdrawal.' 'Won't they though. Just give them my message, Miss Robertson. I'm leaving.' 'Oh, Mr. Haffner, I know they'll want to see you. It's very important.' 'They will, huh. I'll give them half an hour.' He sat down beside her to talk. It was not that he liked Miss Robertson particularly. Her soul had been for a long time smoothed out and hobbled by girdles and high heels as her body; her personality was as blank and brown as her gabardine suit; her mind was exactly good enough to take down 140 any sort of words a minute without error, without boredom, without wincing. But she could talk idly in a bare room like this well enough; he remembered that she liked science-fiction; he drew her out. Besides, she was not Mrs. Freeman. Mrs. Freeman was a good woman; that is, she did good, and did not resent those who did bad but pitied them. For example, now: she was knitting alone while the other two talked, neither trying to join them nor, as John actively knew, making them uncomfortable for not having included her; and she was waiting for the bishop, who for reasons no one understood, hated to drive at night without her. John liked good people—no, he respected them above everyone else, above the powerful or beautiful or rich, whom he knew well, the gifted or learned or even the wise; indeed, he was rather in awe of the good, but their actual sweet presence made him uncomfortable. Mrs. Freeman there: with her hair drawn back straight to a bun, she sat in a steel-tube, leatherette chair, against a beige, fire-resistant, sound-absorbent wall, knitting in that ambient, indirect light socks for the mad; he knew quite well that if he should go over beside her she would talk with him in her gentle voice about whatever he wished to talk about, that she would have firm views which, however, she would never declare harshly against his should they differ, that she would tell him, if he asked about her work with the insane, what she had accomplished and what failed to accomplish, that she would make him acutely uncomfortable. He felt himself deficient not to be living, as people like Mrs. Freeman seemed to live, in an altogether moral world, but more especially he was reluctant to come near such people because he did not want to know more than he could help knowing of their motives; he did not trust motives; he was a lawyer. Therefore, though it was all but rude of him, he sat with Miss Robertson till the door opened.

Harley Diekerhoff looked up from peeling potatoes to glance out the kitchen window. It was still snowing... even harder than it had been this morning. So much white, it dazzled. Hands still, breath catching, she watched the thick, white flakes blow past the ranch house at a dizzying pace, enthralled by the flurry of the lacy snowflakes. So beautiful. Magical A mysterious silent ballet in all white, the snow swirling, twirling just like it did in her favorite scene from the Nutcracker—the one with the Snow Queen and her breathtaking corps in their white tutus with their precision and speed—and then that dazzling snow at the end, the delicate flakes powdering the stage. Harley’s chest ached. She gripped the peeler more tightly, and focused on her breathing. She didn’t want to remember. She wasn’t going to remember. Wasn’t going to go there, not now, not today. Not when she had six hungry men to feed in a little over two hours. She picked up a potato, started peeling. She’d come to Montana to work. She’d taken the temporary job at Copper Mountain Ranch to get some distance from her family this Christmas, and working on the Paradise Valley cattle ranch would give her new memories. Like the snow piling up outside the window. She’d never lived in a place that snowed like this. Where she came from in Central California, they didn’t have snow, they had fog. Thick soupy Tule fog that blanketed the entire valley, socking in airports, making driving nearly impossible. And on the nights when the fog lifted and temperatures dropped beneath the cold clear sky, the citrus growers rushed to light smudge pots to protect their valuable, vulnerable orange crops. Her family didn’t grow oranges. Her family were Dutch dairy people. Harley had been raised on a big dairy farm in Visalia, and she’d marry a dairyman in college, and they’d had their own dairy, too. But that’s the part she needed to forget. That’s why she’d come to Montana, with its jagged mountains and rugged river valleys and long cold winters. She’d arrived here the Sunday following Thanksgiving and would work through mid-January, when Brock Sheenan’s housekeeper returned from a personal leave of absence. In January, Harley would either return to California or look for another job in Crawford County. Harley was tempted to stay, as the Bozeman employment agency assured her they’d have no problem finding her a permanent position if she wanted one.

Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about that. Is that you? Can you control it?” “Are you kidding? I’m a sock puppet. Protomolecule’s got its arm so far up my ass, I can taste its fingernails.” Miller laughed. “I can’t even control myself.” “It’s just that some of it seems dangerous. That robot, for instance. And you were able to turn off the station in the slow zone.” “Because it wanted me to. You can order the sun to come up if you time it right. I’m not driving this bus. Making it do what I want would be like talking someone out of a seizure.

Another knock sounded at the door, this one louder. He strode across the room, and instinctively his hand slid to the knife sheathed at his rib cage. He cracked the door and peered into the hollow blackness of the hallway. Instantly the cold tip of a rifle rammed into his temple. “Where’s Lily, you worthless piece of pond scum?” Oren growled at him. “I haven’t seen her.” Connell shoved the rifle away and refrained from pulling out his knife. He wouldn’t. Not on Oren. “I thought she was going with you.” Oren lowered his gun and muttered several oaths under his mustache. “Isn’t she in her room?” Connell had been listening for the squeak of the floorboards, for the click of her door down the hall from his room. How had he missed the sounds? Oren muttered again. Cold fear jabbed into him like the sharp end of a pike pole. “She didn’t start off to Merryville on her own, did she?” “That’s what I’m afraid of.” Oren’s voice wavered, all bluster suddenly gone. Connell’s fear exploded into near panic. Without stopping to think, he grabbed the blankets from his bed and rolled them into a tight bundle. “What time do you think she left?” he asked, stuffing the bundle into one of his bags and then cramming in a pair of socks, his ax, and anything else he could find in his hurry. “I’m guessing she had no intention of letting me drive her,” Oren said. “She’s too impatient.” “So she got a sizable head start?” Oren didn’t say anything. But his silence spoke volumes.

How do you think people are going to feel when they find out you’ve deceived them?” he asked. “When they find out you’ve been playing them all for fools for weeks on end?” I didn’t answer until we were safely out in the parking lot. Then I turned to face him. “Gee, I don’t know, Mark. I imagine they’ll be furious and hate me for it. Is that the point you’re trying to make? I get it. Though, for the record, I never wanted to deceive anyone.” “Then why pretend to be dead in the first place?” “I already told you I can’t tell you.” “Then let me tell you something, Calloway--O’Connor--whatever your name is,” Mark said in a furious voice. “I am going to write the tell-all article of your nightmares.” “Gee,” I said. “Now there’s a surprise.” I began to walk quickly through the parking lot in the direction of the street. If I didn’t get away from him soon, I was going to do something completely disgusting, like disgrace myself and cry. “Don’t walk away from me. Where are you going?” Mark said. “To the bus stop.” “What do you mean to the bus stop? Nobody leaves the prom on the bus.” “Now the heck do you think I got here?” I all but shouted, rounding on him as a flood of frustration overcame my desire to cry. “In a carriage that will turn into a pumpkin at midnight?” “Why didn’t Crawford pick you up?” “Because I wasn’t his date,” I said succinctly. “Elaine was. Is.” Mark dragged a hand through his hair. “My car’s right over there,” he said. “I’ll drive you home.” “No way,” I said. “And listen to you tell me what a lying jerk I am all the way across town? I think I’d rather walk.” Before I could take so much as a step back, Mark crossed the distance between us and yanked me into his arms. In the next moment, his mouth crashed down onto mine. Twice before I’d thought he was going to kiss me, but he hadn’t. I guess he must have figured he had nothing to lose now. The kiss was full of frustration, almost as full of frustration as of desire. It was a kiss that begged for mercy, took no prisoners, searched for answers, and made promises it could never keep, all at the same time. In other words, it would have knocked my socks off if I’d been wearing any at the time. It certainly made my knees weak, a thing that probably would have annoyed the hell out of me if it hadn’t been quite so exhilarating. “That’s the last thing I’m ever going to say to you,” Mark said when the kiss was over. In a silence that felt like a blackout at the end of the world, I let him drive me home.

Right after church, my great Aunt Theresa comes to visit. She drives one of those long white Cadillacs which is so old that I can hear the muffler long before I spot the car. Whenever it sounds like a log truck is tearing down our drive, nine times out of ten it’s my great Aunt Theresa. Out of all of Grandpa’s sisters, she is the only one I can remember. Not because she always stores a pinch of snuff between her cheek and gum and not because a puff of brown dust escapes her mouth every time she speaks. It’s because my great Aunt Theresa is a twiddler. She’s constantly twiddling with something—a strand of hair, her nails, an earlobe, a sock, the bottom of her shoe. But in the past five years, she’s developed a new twiddling habit—trailing her fingers up and down pillowcase fabric. In fact, she stores pillowcases everywhere, like in the trunk of her car or in the oversized purse always swinging from her hip. Where most people can’t go five minutes without their phone, Aunt Theresa can’t go five minutes without her pillowcase.

Who were these people who were Nico's friends at that club? It seemed like an Italian-Spanish coffeeshop. I'm not sure, it was quite far from downtown in a pretty hidden location. I don't remember the name of the club or the street, but if I drive from Urgell I can find it. I took a few pictures outside the reception area while we were waiting outside with Adam to be allowed to enter after being registered as club members. They took our entry into the almost empty private club very seriously, unlike my girlfriend selling weed in their dispensary at age 20, when I just gave her a job elsewhere. The pictures I took were of two skateboards hanging on the wall next to each other. They were spray-painted with smiling devilish faces, the comedy and tragedy masks. („Sock and buskin: The sock and buskin are two ancient symbols of comedy and tragedy. In ancient Greek theatre, actors in tragic roles wore a boot called a buskin (Latin cothurnus). The actors with comedic roles wore only a thin-soled shoe called a sock (Latin soccus).” – Source: Wikipedia) There was another skateboard hanging on the wall, showing the devil smiling with his eyes and teeth and horns only visible in the darkness of the artwork. I doubt they were Italians – they were rather Spaniards – but I never really met anyone else from there besides Nico and Carulo. But I trusted Carulo; he was different. Carulo was a known person in Catalonia. He was known to be the person who was sitting in the Catalan Parliament and rolled a joint and lit it up, smoking during a session as a protest against the law prohibiting marijuana growing and smoking in Spain. Nico told me when he introduced me to Carulo in the summer of 2013, almost a year earlier: “This is the guy you can thank for being able to smoke freely in Catalonia without the police bothering you. Tomas, meet Carulo.” He never really ordered from me if I had met him before. He had no traffic; his growshop was always closed. He was only smoking inside with his younger brother, who was always walking his bull terrier. Their white Bull Terrier was female, half the size of Chico, but she was kind of crazy; you could see in her eyes that she was not normal; she had mental issues. At least, looking into Carulo's eyes and his brother's eyes, I recognized the similar illness in their dog's eyes. In 2014, it had been over four years since I had been working with dogs in my secondary job interpreting Italian and travelling every fifth weekend. Additionally, Huns came to Europe with their animals, including their dogs. There are at least nine unique Hungarian dog breeds.

He has the look of a Handsome Boy from a different time. He could be a dashing World War I soldier, handsome enough for a girl to wait years for him to come back from war, so handsome she could wait forever. He could be wearing a red letterman’s jacket, driving around in a Corvette with the top down, one arm on the steering wheel, on his way to pick up his girl for the sock hop. Peter’s kind of wholesome good looks feel more like yesterday than today. There’s just something about him girls like.

Sophie Mol eventually found what she had been looking for. Presents for her cousins. Triangular towers of Toblerone chocolate (soft and slanting in the heat). Socks with separate multicolored toes. And two ballpoint pens—the top halves filled with water in which a cut-out collage of a London streetscape was suspended. Buckingham Palace and Big Ben. Shops and people. A red doubledecker bus propelled by an air bubble floated up and down the silent street. There was something sinister about the absence of noise on the busy ballpoint street. Sophie Mol put the presents into her go-go bag and went forth into the world. To drive a hard bargain. To negotiate a friendship. A friendship that, unfortunately, would be left dangling. Incomplete. Flailing in the air with no foothold. A friendship that never circled around into a story which is why, far more quickly than ever should have happened, Sophie Mol became a Memory, while The Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. Like a fruit in season. Every season.

As citizens we recognize this "collateral damage," deplore it, and frequently decry it. But as consumers we habitually downplay and ignore it. We rail against exploitation of low-paid workers in Asia as we drive twenty minutes to the Big Box to save three bucks on tube socks and a dollar on underpants. We fume over the mistreatment of animals by agribusiness but freak out at an uptick in food prices. We lecture our kids on social responsibility and then buy them toys assembled by destitute child workers on some far-flung foreign shore. Maintaining cognitive dissonance is one way to navigate a world of contradictions, and on an individual basis there's much to be said for this. But somehow the Age of Cheap has raised cognitive dissonance to a societal norm.

Practice being kind to yourself in small, concrete ways. Look at your refrigerator. Are you feeding yourself nicely? Do you have socks? An extra set of sheets? What about a new house plant? A thermos for the long drive to work? Allow yourself to pitch out some of your old ragged clothes. You don’t have to keep everything.

It’s strange, the things you miss. Me, I miss the way she used to wear her socks to bed and then pull them off with her toes. I would find them hidden in the sheets when I made the bed in the morning, crumpled into little black balls, covered in dog hair. It used to drive me nuts, but not anymore, in retrospect. Now it seems kind of adorable.

Let’s suppose an algorithm is showing you an opportunity to buy socks or stocks about five seconds after you see a cat video that makes you happy. An adaptive algorithm will occasionally perform an automatic test to find out what happens if the interval is changed to, say, four and a half seconds. Did that make you more likely to buy? If so, that timing adjustment might be applied not only to your future feed, but to the feeds of thousands of other people who seem correlated with you because of anything from color preferences to driving patterns.

You thought your best bet was to find a fan and date her? What if I’d been psychotic?” “Then I wouldn’t still be here.” “Oh, you would be. Tied up in my basement.” He laughed and pressed a kiss against my eyelid that made my stomach go all fluttery. “But my therapist warned me to go slowly and to date like it was 1955.” I opened my eyes to give him a pointed, teasing look. “You’ve totally failed. We haven’t been to a single sock hop or drive-in, and we haven’t shared even one milk shake.

Life at the Burrow was as different as possible from life on Privet Drive. The Dursleys liked everything neat and ordered; the Weasleys’ house burst with the strange and unexpected. Harry got a shock the first time he looked in the mirror over the kitchen mantelpiece and it shouted,“ Tuck your shirt in, scruffy!” The ghoul in the attic howled and dropped pipes whenever he felt things were getting too quiet, and small explosions from Fred and George’s bedroom were considered perfectly normal. What Harry found most unusual about life at Ron’s, however, wasn’t the talking mirror or the clanking ghoul: It was the fact that everybody there seemed to like him. Mrs. Weasley fussed over the state of his socks and tried to force him to eat fourth helpings at every meal. Mr. Weasley liked Harry to sit next to him at the dinner table so that he could bombard him with questions about life with Muggles, asking him to explain how things like plugs and the postal service worked. “Fascinating!” he would say as Harry talked him through using a telephone. “Ingenious, really, how many ways Muggles have found of getting along without magic.” Harry heard from Hogwarts one sunny morning about a week after he had arrived at the Burrow. He and Ron went down to breakfast to find Mr. and Mrs. Weasley and Ginny already sitting at the kitchen table. The moment she saw Harry, Ginny accidentally knocked her porridge bowl to the floor with a loud clatter. Ginny seemed very prone to knocking things over whenever Harry entered a room. She dived under the table to retrieve the bowl and emerged with her face glowing like the setting sun. Pretending he hadn’t noticed this, Harry sat down and took the toast Mrs. Weasley offered him. “Letters from school,” said Mr. Weasley, passing Harry and Ron identical envelopes of yellowish parchment, addressed in green ink. “Dumbledore already knows you’re here, Harry—doesn’t miss a trick, that man. You two’ve got them, too,” he added, as Fred and George ambled in, still in their pajamas. For a few minutes there was silence as they all read their letters.