Stretching Fitness Quotes

Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either. Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt. No matter where we go, our love will stretch out to hold us, and that makes me feel like … like everything will be okay.

I stretch truths where I see fit. I’m a writer.

We felt so small with the city lights stretching forever below us, and we yelled at the top of our lungs because we were just these small humans but we felt more longing than could ever fit inside us.

The less you associate with some people, the more your life will improve. Any time you tolerate mediocrity in others, it increases your mediocrity. An important attribute in successful people is their impatience with negative thinking and negative acting people. As you grow, your associates will change. Some of your friends will not want you to go on. They will want you to stay where they are. Friends that don't help you climb will want you to crawl. Your friends will stretch your vision or choke your dream. Those that don't increase you will eventually decrease you. Consider this: Never receive counsel from unproductive people. Never discuss your problems with someone incapable of contributing to the solution, because those who never succeed themselves are always first to tell you how. Not everyone has a right to speak into your life. You are certain to get the worst of the bargain when you exchange ideas with the wrong person. Don't follow anyone who's not going anywhere. With some people you spend an evening: with others you invest it. Be careful where you stop to inquire for directions along the road of life. Wise is the person who fortifies his life with the right friendships. If you run with wolves, you will learn how to howl. But, if you associate with eagles, you will learn how to soar to great heights. "A mirror reflects a man's face, but what he is really like is shown by the kind of friends he chooses." The simple but true fact of life is that you become like those with whom you closely associate - for the good and the bad. Note: Be not mistaken. This is applicable to family as well as friends. Yes...do love, appreciate and be thankful for your family, for they will always be your family no matter what. Just know that they are human first and though they are family to you, they may be a friend to someone else and will fit somewhere in the criteria above. "In Prosperity Our Friends Know Us. In Adversity We Know Our friends." "Never make someone a priority when you are only an option for them." "If you are going to achieve excellence in big things,you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.."..

Then Carol slipped her arm under her neck, and all the length of their bodies touched fitting as if something had prearranged it. Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered

Words are like stories ... They change as they are passed from mouth to mouth; their meanings stretch or truncate to fit what needs to be said.

There is certainty in a ring. The non-ending, the non-beginning. The ongoing. The way it holds on to you not because it's fastened or stretched or adhered. It holds on because it fits.

I believe it will have become evident why, for me, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even though the person in this process would experience each one of these at the appropriate times. But adjectives which seem more generally fitting are adjectives such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful. This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-fainthearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming.

There are a few people out there with whom you fit just so, and, amazingly, you keep fitting just so even after you have growth spurts or lose weight or stop wearing high heels. You keep fitting after you have children or change religions or stop dyeing your hair or quit your job at Goldman Sachs and take up farming. Somehow, God is gracious enough to give us a few of those people, people you can stretch into, people who don't go away, and whom you wouldn't want to go away, even if they offered.

Like so many plain cups on the shelves. You can reach for them, use them without thinking. Most of them don't matter. Sometimes you lose your grip on one of them and it falls and smashes to piece, and you shrug and say to yourself, what a pity. Then you reach for the cup that you use every day, one that you love and use so often that as you stretch out your hand it is already making the shape that fits its curve. You are certain that yesterday it was in its proper place, but now there is nothing. Just air. You have lost something that was so familiar, so much a part of your life that you were not even looking for it. Just expecting it to be there, as always.

The voice fell low, sank into her breast and stretched the tight bodice over her heart as she came up close. He felt the young lips, her body sighing in relief against the arm growing stronger to hold her. There were now no more plans than if Dick had arbitrarily made some indissoluble mixture, with atoms joined and inseparable; you could throw it all out but never again could they fit back into atomic scale. As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.

Superhero science has taught me this: Entire universes fit comfortably inside our skulls. Not just one or two but endless universes can be packed into that dark, wet, and bony hollow without breaking it open from the inside. The space in our heads will stretch to accommodate them all. The real doorway to the fifth dimension was always right here. Inside. That infinite interior space contains all the divine, the alien, and the unworldly we’ll ever need.

The richest relationships are often those that don’t fit neatly into the preconceived slots we have made for the archetypes we imagine would populate our lives—the friend, the lover, the parent, the sibling, the mentor, the muse. We meet people who belong to no single slot, who figure into multiple categories at different times and in different magnitudes. We then must either stretch ourselves to create new slots shaped after these singular relationships, enduring the growing pains of self-expansion, or petrify.

I used to think of two people in love like that. Like puzzle pieces, fitting together. But it's not like that at all. Love pulls a part of you out, and it pulls a part of him - like taffy, stretching but not separating. The tendrils of each one wrap around the other, until they meld together. One, but not quite. Separate, but not quite.

I found myself thinking of an ocean running beneath the whole universe, like the dark seawater that laps beneath the wooden boards of an old pier: an ocean that stretches from forever to forever and is still small enough to fit inside a bucket, if you have Old Mrs. Hempstock to help you get it in there, and you ask nicely.

I don't really care if people forget me. My legacy wasn't about me. It was about everything I could do for another. When that sinks in...well you try a little harder. You dream a little broader. Your heart stretches a little farther and you find that you can't go back to the same place and make it fit. You become a person of ideas and seek out your own kind. And then it happens: One day you discover that staying the same is scary and changing has become your new home.

The question that imposed itself: Why me? The image doesn't fit: my thick glasses, my stretched-out blue Nordic sweater, the student head slaps, the too-good grades, the feminine gestures. Why me? He says: Because you are not like all the others, because I don't see anyone but you and you don't even realize it.

Somewhere it is being prepared. Somewhere deep in the heart of Germany the shell is being made. Some German girl is polishing it right now polishing it and cleaning it and fitting the charge into it. It glistens in the factory light and it has a number and the number is mine. I have a date with the shell. We shall meet soon. . . . It will come with a rush and a roar and a shudder. It will come howling and laughing and shrieking and moaning. It will come so fast you can’t help yourself you will stretch out your arms to embrace it. You will feel it before it comes and you will tense yourself for acceptance and the earth which is your eternal bed will tremble at the moment of your union.

The choice one makes between partners, between one man and another, stretches beyond romance. It is the choice between values, possibilities, futures, hopes, arguments (shared concepts that fit the world as you experience it), languages (shared words that fit the world as you believe it to be) and lives.

Pushing through some viney branches, she comes into a clearing andfinds a sight that makes her hush--and not just her voice but every part of her, like feeling silence in her deep guts... It's something she can feel in the back of her throat, her dislike of the scene--as though what she's looking upon is unholy, the conjunction of chaos and order in a forced fit where everything is stretched and bent in the wrong way like those baby legs.

Growing up feels like your skin no longer fits. Like you just want to crawl out of that thinly stretched space and lay down in the grass and sob for hours. Instead, I am in a cafe eating lunch and trying not to scream. Looking around wondering if anyone else in this building is doing the same thing, wondering if they ever have and, if so, how they got through it. Maybe I would calm down if I just had the assurance that other people have looked in the mirror and no longer recognized themselves. Maybe if I could sit across the table from an elderly woman and have her tell me that she lived through days where the covers over her head felt even better than an embrace and weeks where she drank her tears to keep from wetting her shirt sleeves, but that those years shaped her into an iron skeleton with a tender heart. That “worth it” was an understatement. Maybe then I would feel okay.

In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

The vintage St. Patty’s Day T-shirt he’s wearing, probably out of politeness, is stretched wafer thin, trying to cope. If it were a person, it would be an exhausted wraith, gasping, Please, help me. It fits like a dream.

But then suddenly there was no place higher to go. I felt my cracked lips stretch into a painful grin. I was on top of the Devil's Thumb. Fittingly, the summit was a surreal, malevolent place, an improbably slender wedge of rock and rime no wider than a file cabinet. It did not encourage loitering. As I straddled the highest point, the south face fell away beneath my right boot for twenty-five hundred feet; beneath my left boot the north face dropped twice that distance.

Can I call myself skinny if I’m stretched too thin?

[Cornell University will be] an asylum for Science—where truth shall be sought for truth's sake, not stretched or cut exactly to fit Revealed Religion.

I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

So you like to stretch the truth?" he asked me. "Stretch, fold, spindle, staple or cut, whatever it takes to get it to fit just right".

Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

WINTER DRIZZLED OUT THE way it always did, with fits of warmth followed by long stretches of numbing and miserable cold. The weather always about to deliver a new season, then failing in its promise.

I’m so sorry,” she says, and she’s wringing her hands, looking away from me. “I’m so, so sorry.” I notice what she’s wearing. It’s a dark-green dress with fitted sleeves; a simple cut made of stretch cotton that clings to the soft curves of her figure. It complements the flecks of green in her eyes in a way I couldn’t have anticipated. It’s one of the many dresses I chose for her. I thought she might enjoy having something nice after being caged as an animal for so long. And I can’t quite explain it, but it gives me a strange sense of pride to see her wearing something I picked out myself. “I’m sorry,” she says for the third time. I’m again struck by how impossible it is that she’s here. In my bedroom. Staring at me without my shirt on. Her hair is so long it falls to the middle of her back; I have to clench my fists against this unbidden need to run my hands through it. She’s so beautiful.

We weren't made with endless time between our fingers like noodles we can stretch as much as we see fit. Even the most resilient noodles break at some point. It is the most ordinary and the most profound thing in the world.

Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the darwinian facts, and yet to interpret them as still showing divine purpose. It used to be a question of purpose AGAINST mechanism, of one OR the other. It was as if one should say "My shoes are evidently designed to fit my feet, hence it is impossible that they should have been produced by machinery.

Logan licked a glob of strawberry jelly from her lower lip and smiled up at Odin. Only one comment seemed to perfectly fit her current situation. “I see dead people.” He leaned forward, hands on his hips. “Me, too. It’s the only explanation for what’s standing in front of me. Unless some high school kids broke into the anatomy closet and stole the classroom skeleton, stretched some cadaver skin over that bitch then cast an ancient ritual to animate it.

What made Jules extraordinary though, was that her heart was made of the most curious fabric. It could bend and stretch to fit every single person she met.

In truth, Serenus, I have for a long time been silently asking myself to what I should liken such a condition of mind, and I can find nothing that so closely approaches it as the state of those who, after being released from a long and serious illness, are sometimes touched with fits of fever and slight disorders, and, freed from the last traces of them, are nevertheless disquieted with mistrust, and, though now quite well, stretch out their wrist to a physician and complain unjustly of any trace of heat in their body. It is not, Serenus, that these are not quite well in body, but that they are not quite used to being well; just as even a tranquil sea will show some ripple, particularly when it has just subsided after a storm. What you need, therefore, is not any of those harsher measures which we have already left behind, the necessity of opposing yourself at this point, of being angry with yourself at that, of sternly urging yourself on at another, but that which comes last -confidence in yourself and the belief that you are on the right path, and have not been led astray by the many cross- tracks of those who are roaming in every direction, some of whom are wandering very near the path itself. But what you desire is something great and supreme and very near to being a god - to be unshaken.

We stretch ourselves: to fit within the roles we are given. To make ourselves look better to those around us. To convince one another that we are good people in a world so vacant. Each of us a desert.

We have one collective hope: the Earth And yet, uncounted people remain hopeless, famine and calamity abound Sufferers hurl themselves into the arms of war; people kill and get killed in the name of someone else’s concept of God Do we admit that our thoughts & behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us? Each fabricated conflict, self-murdering bomb, vanished airplane, every fictionalized dictator, biased or partisan, and wayward son, are part of the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets, each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet, choreographed by the forces of gravity, I see beyond the plight of humans I see a universe ever-expanding, with its galaxies embedded within the ever-stretching four-dimensional fabric of space and time However big our world is, our hearts, our minds, our outsize atlases, the universe is even bigger There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on the world’s beaches, more stars in the universe than seconds of time that have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words & sounds ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived The day we cease the exploration of the cosmos is the day we threaten the continuing of our species In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people & nations would be prone to act on their low-contracted prejudices, and would have seen the last gasp of human enlightenment Until the rise of a visionary new culture that once again embraces the cosmic perspective; a perspective in which we are one, fitting neither above nor below, but within

She was a long time about it, and when she returned, he was stretched out with both arms under his head, sound asleep, while Aunt March had pulled down the curtains and sat doing nothing in an unusual fit of benignity.

Whoever had designed the skeletons of creatures had even less imagination than whoever had done the outsides. At least the outside-designer had tried a few novelties in the spots, wool and stripes department, but the bone-builder had generally just put a skull on a ribcage, shoved a pelvis in further along, stuck on some arms and legs and had the rest of the day off. Some ribcages were longer, some legs were shorter, some hands became wings, but they all seemed to be based on one design, one size stretched or shrunk to fit all. - Ponder Stibbons

Twenty-first-century attitudes towards time and our expectations of story are very different from the shape of Mary Anning’s life. She spent day after day, year after year, doing the same thing on the beach. I have taken the events of her life and condensed them to fit into a narrative that is not stretched beyond the reader’s patience. Hence events, while in order, do not always coincide exactly with actual dates and time spans. Plus, of course, I made up plenty. For instance, while there was gossip about Mary and Buckland and Mary and Birch, there was no proof. That is where only a novelist can step in.

Only one comment seemed to perfectly fit her current situation. “I see dead people.” He leaned forward hands on his hips. “Me too. It’s the only explanation for what’s standing in front of me. Unless some high school kids broke into the anatomy closet and stole the classroom skeleton, stretched some cadaver skin over that bitch then cast an ancient ritual to animate it.” She laughed. For as much as she now disliked the bastard she had to admit he was amusing. “Did they do the same to that shit you’re wearing? You do realize it’s 2008 right?” She raised a hand. “Wait let me see if I can reach you using your own language. You do ken ‘tis year of our Lord two thousand and eight aye?

Words are like stories, don’t you think, Mr. Sweatman? They change as they are passed from mouth to mouth; their meanings stretch or truncate to fit what needs to be said. The Dictionary can’t possibly capture every variation, especially since so many have never been written down—

Suffrage," I said. "An important word." I smiled. "They are all important, Mr. Sweatman." "Of course, but some mean more than we might imagine," he said. "I sometimes fear the dictionary will fall short." "How could it not?" I forgot I was in a hurry. "Words are like stories, don't you think Mr. Sweatman? They change are they are passed from mouth to mouth; their meanings stretch to truncate to fit what needs to be said...

—Please, V says. Scribble. James opens his notebook and writes, The island was a separate place, situated partway between America and the moon. Some clear nights out with the telescope—moon full or gibbous—I felt about equidistant between the sharp-edged craters and the sparkling lights of America across the harbor. I knew that off the island very particular rules and laws and customs about skin color and blood degree applied, that the entire stretch of country from ocean to ocean was a strange place with a very strict borderline, and that I didn’t exactly fit on either side of it. Then across the bottom of the page—in a larger, more swooping hand—he writes: The island felt like home to a degree I’ve never experienced before or since.

You said it was twenty feet!” “Yeah. You’ll have to trust me. Put your arms around my neck and hang on.” “How can you possibly—” “There!” cried a voice behind them. “Kill the ungrateful tourists!” The children of Nyx had found them. Annabeth wrapped her arms around Percy’s neck. “Go!” With her eyes closed, she could only guess how he managed it. Maybe he used the force of the river somehow. Maybe he was just scared out of his mind and charged with adrenaline. Percy leaped with more strength than she would have thought possible. They sailed through the air as the river churned and wailed below them, splashing Annabeth’s bare ankles with stinging brine. Then—CLUMP. They were on solid ground again. “You can open your eyes,” Percy said, breathing hard. “But you won’t like what you see.” Annabeth blinked. After the darkness of Nyx, even the dim red glow of Tartarus seemed blinding. Before them stretched a valley big enough to fit the San Francisco Bay. The booming noise came from the entire landscape, as if thunder were echoing from beneath the ground. Under poisonous clouds, the rolling terrain glistened purple with dark red and blue scar lines. “It looks like…” Annabeth fought down her revulsion. “Like a giant heart.” “The heart of Tartarus,” Percy murmured. The center of the valley was covered with a fine black fuzz of peppery dots. They were so far away, it took Annabeth a moment to realize she was looking at an army—thousands, maybe tens of thousands of monsters, gathered around a central pinpoint of darkness. It was too far to see any details, but Annabeth had no doubt what the pinpoint was. Even from the edge of the valley, Annabeth could feel its power tugging at her soul. “The Doors of Death.

Sebastian stretched. Clara stared. She could not help it. He was still in his breeches and shirt and she was riveted by the deliciously tight fit of the buckskins over his thighs. "You could avert your eyes," Sebastian said mildly. "I could," Clara agreed, "but I am not going to." He smiled. "Hussy." "I know. But I have waited a long time--

Learning without reflection is a waste, reflection without learning is dangerous.”—Confucius

Words are like stories, don’t you think, Mr. Sweatman? They change as they are passed from mouth to mouth; their meanings stretch or truncate to fit what needs to be said.

I'm going to wear my birthday suit, even though it barely fits in the middle when I get excited and it stretches out.

When everything looks unbearable, And nothing really seems to fit, You've got to work at full stretch, But you should never ever quit!

Truth tends to stretch and bend out of shape to best fit its owner.

Do not shrink your dreams to fit reality; stretch your faith to meet destiny.

I lower onto him, inch by inch, marveling at the stretching sensation, the easy slide, the perfect fit. It’s never this wet, this careful. Fuck, I feel so full. Hungry. Relieved. The

The little unknown thing was growing within her as suddenly and softly as the first touch of spring on the maples. It was putting out its hidden, watery roots as simply and surely as little cypresses take root in a stretch of swamp water away off yonder. It was coming upon her as quietly as the dark came up from the woods at night and hushed in the little clearing, closing every chink of every shutter tight with nothing. Impulses swelled within her, swelled her body fit to burst; yet they did not come out in words, nor song, nor in any sign.

He was talking. I tried not to think of how he looked and instead of what he was telling me. Once I accomplished that, my brain couldn’t get past the ‘running’ part. “I don’t run.” I walked the mile run at school. True story. I abhorred any kind of physical exercise. I wasn’t good at it. I was skinny, but I was soft; had absolutely no muscle mass at all. That’s the way I liked it. Who was he to try to change that, change me? I wouldn’t let him. No way, no how. One half of his mouth lifted. He seemed to be enjoying this a little too much. “You do now. You have to be fit, you have to be strong, Taryn, if you’re to stand any chance of surviving this. Come on, we’ll start with stretching.” He forced me to twist my body into unimaginable positions. I even had to touch my toes. The agony. Luke took pleasure from my pain; even laughing as I moaned and groaned through it all. Then, the worst came about. He. Made. Me. Run.

When we find ourselves living in a situation that looks good from the outside but no longer brings us inner joy, we can choose one of two paths: we can deny or repress our discontent and “shrink” ourselves so we continue to fit into a life that is too small or no longer serves us; or we can embrace the new direction our soul is urging us toward, and make the choice not to shrink, but to stretch.

Procrustes, in Greek mythology, was the cruel owner of a small estate in Corydalus in Attica, on the way between Athens and Eleusis, where the mystery rites were performed. Procrustes had a peculiar sense of hospitality: he abducted travelers, provided them with a generous dinner, then invited them to spend the night in a rather special bed. He wanted the bed to fit the traveler to perfection. Those who were too tall had their legs chopped off with a sharp hatchet; those who were too short were stretched (his name was said to be Damastes, or Polyphemon, but he was nicknamed Procrustes, which meant “the stretcher”).

The story of Janie’s progress through three marriages confronts the reader with the significant idea that the choice one makes between partners, between one man and another (or one woman and another) stretches beyond romance. It is, in the end, the choice between values, possibilities, futures, hopes, arguments (shared concepts that fit the world as you experience it), languages (shared words that fit the world as you believe it to be) and lives.

A blank isn't the same. He remembered holding the book, feeling the history of the leather cover someone had tanned and stretched and cut to fit. The paper that someone had laboriously filled by hand and sewn into the binding. Years, heavy on the pages. Morgan had been reading a copy of it. An original. It felt like the old monk's story was part of his own. But when he read it in the blank, it was just words, and it had no power to carry him away.

Gray clouds were charging across tissues of white, which stretched and shredded and tore slowly, until through their final layers there gleamed a hint of the disappearing blue. Summer was retreating. The wind roared, the trees groaned, yet the noise seemed insufficient for those vast operations in heaven. The weather was breaking up, breaking, broken, and it is a sense of the fit rather than of the supernatural that equips such crises with the salvos of angelic artillery.

AWAKENING To open both your drowsy eyes, To stretch your limbs and realise That day is here. To watch the dancing, shifting beam Of sun, awake yet half in dream, Uncertain if the fitful gleam Be far or near. To turn with soft, contented sigh, And through the window watch the sky, All opal blue. To feel the air steal in the room, Made fragrant by the soft perfume Of lime-trees, when their scented bloom Is damp with dew. To hear the rustling voice of leaves, The chirp of birds beneath the eaves, But now awake. The tiny hum of timid things That fly with gauzy, fragile wings, Where yet the dusk to daylight clings, When mornings break. To feel the soul look forth and smile, Contented with each fruitful mile That it beholds. To hear the heart beat loud and strong, In unison with Nature's song, That echoes tremulous and long While dawn unfolds. To know yourself a thing complete, With strength of mind and limb replete, With vast desire; A creature made to dominate The lesser things of earth, a fate On whom the universe must wait, With force entire. And then to cry in deep delight God made the world and made it right; Dear Heaven above! Was ere completeness so complete, Was ever sweetness half so sweet, Was ever loving half so meet; Thank God for love.

She closed her eyes as his full weight stretched over her. They fit together perfectly and as they clung together her woman's body felt that at last she had found the man's bones from which she'd been created, and she was overcome with desire to become one flesh.

See, every hotel in Las Vegas has a gimmick, and the biggest gimmick of all is the Stratosphere Tower, which claims to have 113 floors, although I think they’re measuring floors in Las-Vegas-inches, which stretch and contract to fit whatever lie you’re trying to sell.

The Place Faidherbe had the characteristic atmosphere, the overdone décor, the floral and verbal excess, of a subprefecture in southern France gone mad. The ten cars left the Place Faidherbe only to come back five minutes later, having once more completed the same circuit with their cargo of anemic Europeans, dressed in unbleached linen, fragile creatures as wobbly as melting sherbet. For weeks and years these colonials passed the same forms and faces until they were so sick of hating them that they didn’t even look at one another. The officers now and then would take their families out for a walk, paying close attention to military salutes and civilian greetings, the wives swaddled in their special sanitary napkins, the children, unbearably plump European maggots, wilted by the heat and constant diarrhea. To command, you need more than a kepi; you also need troops. In the climate of Fort-Gono the European cadres melted faster than butter. A battalion was like a lump of sugar in your coffee; the longer you looked the less you saw. Most of the white conscripts were permanently in the hospital, sleeping off their malaria, riddled with parasites made to order fo every nook and cranny of the body, whole squads stretched out flat between cigarettes and flies, masturbating under moldy sheets, spinning endless yarns between fits of painstakingly provoked and coddled fever.

As the tears streamed fast down poor Jo's cheeks, she stretched out her hand in a helpless sort of way, as if groping in the dark, and Laurie took it in his, whispering as well as he could with a lump in his throat, "I'm here. Hold on to me, Jo, dear!" She could not speak, but she did 'hold on', and the warm grasp of the friendly human hand comforted her sore heart, and seemed to lead her nearer to the Divine arm which alone could uphold her in trouble. Laurie longed to say something tender and comfortable, but no fitting words came to him, so he stood silent, gently stroking her bent head as her mother used to. It was the best thing he could have done, far more soothing than the most eloquent words, for Jo felt the unspoken sympathy, and in the silence learned the sweet solace which affection administers to sorrow. Soon she dried the tears which had relieved her, and looked up with a grateful face.

Fuck, you’re tight. My cock might not even fit inside this snug little cunt.” I pull free and slide a second finger inside, stretching her. Indy bucks against my touch. “You like that? Being filled up with my fingers? Loosening you up so my big fat cock fits inside you?” “Please,” she whispers. “Don’t stop.” “Not a fucking chance.

Although, to restless and ardent minds, morning may be the fitting season for exertion and activity, it is not always at that time that hope is strongest or the spirit most sanguine and buoyant. In trying and doubtful positions, youth, custom, a steady contemplation of the difficulties which surround us, and a familiarity with them, imperceptibly diminish our apprehensions and beget comparative indifference, if not a vague and reckless confidence in some relief, the means or nature of which we care not to foresee. But when we come, fresh, upon such things in the morning, with that dark and silent gap between us and yesterday; with every link in the brittle chain of hope, to rivet afresh; our hot enthusiasm subdued, and cool calm reason substituted in its stead; doubt and misgiving revive. As the traveller sees farthest by day, and becomes aware of rugged mountains and trackless plains which the friendly darkness had shrouded from his sight and mind together, so, the wayfarer in the toilsome path of human life sees, with each returning sun, some new obstacle to surmount, some new height to be attained. Distances stretch out before him which, last night, were scarcely taken into account, and the light which gilds all nature with its cheerful beams, seems but to shine upon the weary obstacles that yet lie strewn between him and the grave.

What do you do when you’ve spent the majority of your life moving to try to fit in, and all of a sudden Maya Angelou is singing to you and telling you not to be moved? You learn how to plant your damn feet is what you do. You bend and stretch and grow, but you commit to not moving from who you are. Or, at the very least, you start trying.

Recovery" is everything you do outside the gym to take care of yourself: eating, sleeping, stretching, managing stress. Another oversight of the "workout"-based type of exercise is that it does not teach us to care at all about this stuff. If you're like me, you might have even been conditioned to believe, for instance, that eating a nice big meal after a workout would be "wasting the workout." In reality, the *opposite* is true: if you don't eat enough, you are only setting yourself up for an unfair and unnecessary amount of soreness. And this is true of all recovery dimensions: if you don't sleep, or if you don't manage your stress, you will be miserable trying to build muscle.

Even now I’ve actually been in magazines I’ve struggled with feeling like I don’t fit the standard of beauty in our culture, one that I would only fit into if I was pulled on one of those old-fashioned torture devices, the things they used to stretch people on. Now I’m thirty-three years old and bored of recounting everything I’ve eaten over the course of every day before I go to sleep and berating myself for every single carb I’ve sunk my teeth into, I’m starting to think that maybe the ridiculously tall and narrow standard is just another construct to make us feel bad about ourselves so we put our energy into going to the gym and juice cleanses instead of raising hell and changing the world.

Miss Marshall was wearing a ghastly green gown, one that had no doubt been lent to her by a friend. It fit rather poorly, gaping at the bosom and stretching at the hips. The color dimmed the fire of her hair—which, without her normal pins, refused to stay in place. Little strands made an auburn halo around her head. He’d never seen anything quite so lovely.

Western clothes were intended for healthy, robust men: to anyone in a weakened condition they were quite insupportable. Around the waist, over the shoulders, under the arms, around the neck - every part of the body was pressed and squeezed by clasps and buttons and rubber and leather, layer over layer, as if you were strapped to a cross. And of course you had to put on stockings before the shoes, stretching them carefully up on your legs by garters. Then you put on a shirt, and then trousers, cinching them in with a buckle and the back till they cut your waist and hanging them from your shoulders with suspenders. Your neck was choked in a close-fitting collar, over which you fastened a noose-like necktie, and stuck a pin in it. If a man is well filled out, the tighter you squeeze him, the more vigorous and bursting with vitality he seems; but a man who is only skin and bones can't stand that. [...] It was only because these Western clothes held him together that he was able to keep on walking at all - but to think of stiffening a limp, helpless body, shackling it hand and foot, and driving it ahead with shouts of "Keep going! Don't you dare collapse!" It was enough to make a man want to cry...

He stuck his left arm through the loop of a bungee sling and stretched it across his back. At one end there was a magazine pouch; on the other hung a Brügger & Thomet MP9. The machine pistol weighed less than three pounds and even with the built-in suppressor was only ten inches in length. It fit perfectly beneath his arm, but Steele knew that it wouldn’t slip the notice of the security guards at the door

Something wonderful happens to you and you instantly look back over your life and see it as a series of fortunate events stretching off into the distance like mountain peaks. Something terrible happens and your life has always been a litany of woe. The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn’t a story; it’s a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

he lies we tell ourselves are always the most dangerous. I think it’s instinct; self-preservation is a fundamental part of our DNA. We are a species of liars, and sometimes we deliberately join the dots in the wrong order, and pretend to make sense of what we see. We stretch the stories of our lives to fit our own desired narratives, presenting a prettier picture for those around us. Honesty loses every time to a lie less ordinary, and truth is overrated.

I don’t. And that’s what terrifies me. In all my four thousand, three hundred and twenty-nine years on this planet—” “Four thousand,” Sophie interrupted. “You’re four thousand, three hundred and twenty-nine years old?” She knew the elves had indefinite lifespans, so it wasn’t that big of a stretch to know that gnomes did too. But the number was too huge to fit in her brain. “I believe that’s the right age,” Calla agreed. “Though there have been stretches where I lost count.

At time I feel my body has betrayed the girl I was, growing past the lithe limbs hewn in independence. We are to be fit for the purposes of adulthood, I know this. Childhood anticipations are traded with the shouldering of heavier things. But these days, these stones-tossed-in-tall-grass-days, have stretched my muscles, recalled past forms, and I am remembering how it is to feel, to follow the instincts of something young yet ancient. To step outside the province of maturity and marvel.

There are a few people out there with whom you fit just so, and, amazingly, you keep fitting just so even after you have growth spurts or lose weight or stop wearing high heels. You keep fitting after you have children or change religions or stop dyeing your hair or quit your job at Goldman Sachs and take up farming. Somehow, God is gracious enough to give us a few of these people, people you can stretch into, people who don't go away, and whom you wouldn't want to go away, even if they offered to.

…for now I float in a sea of undifferentiated information and pray no one asks me something I should know, but don’t. That’s how I feel for weeks on end, actually, only I’m not floating on the water, I’ve been shot from a cannon to the bottom of the sea and have to make my way back to the surface, mostly unassisted, and weighted down by salt and seaweed, by figuring out which starfish and shells and old cannonballs I need, and how they fit together. It’s not that I’m being hazed, my coworkers are kind and helpful, but they are above the surface, so to reach one I have to stretch my arm up blindly and hope I’m grabbing at the right person, and that they have time to come hang with me under the sea. And even when they do, I can tell from their eyes that they don’t really have time. That every minute spent orienting me is one where something else might be blowing up, just out of sight. And Arjun is right, everyone here is operating on partial information, no one really knows what the fuck is going on.

The device had a segmented central spine that appeared to stretch from a wearer’s forehead to the nape of their neck, with a row of ten C-shaped metal bands attached to it. Each band was comprised of jointed, retractable segments, and each segment had a row of circular sensor pads on its underside. This made the whole sensor array adjustable, so that it could fit around heads of all shapes and sizes. A long fiber-optic cable stretched from the base of the headset, with a standard OASIS console plug at the end of it.

The heart of the cell is the nucleus. It contains the cell’s DNA—three feet of it, as we have already noted, scrunched into a space that we may reasonably call infinitesimal. The reason so much DNA can fit into a cell nucleus is that it is exquisitely thin. You would need twenty billion strands of DNA laid side by side to make the width of the finest human hair. Every cell in your body (strictly speaking, every cell with a nucleus) holds two copies of your DNA. That’s why you have enough to stretch to Pluto and beyond.

Art is a lie that reveals deep truths. Metaphor is one way to translate experience; symbols help us stretch our minds to finger elusive and illustrative truths. Truths are not always logical and human truth finding does not fit snugly onto the silicon chip of a computer. The rational as well as the irrational unites us as specie. We share expressible knowledge and suspect within ourselves and other people the unspeakable. The unfathomable is as much a part of our celestial humanity as is the dirt clutching our shoes, which accumulated grime grounds us to physical reality.

Now there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized; that while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing, generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half-well again in a day. So in good time my Queequeg gained strength; and at length after sitting on the windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with a vigorous appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out his arms and legs, gave himself a good stretching, yawned a little bit, and then springing into the head of his hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon, pronounced himself fit for a fight.

But in that split second I somehow instinctively know that I must rise to the occasion, that he would not bear to see me stammering or in a daze, otherwise everything will crumble to the ground. I figure that a new question might save us from such a disaster. The question that imposed itself: Why me? The image doesn’t fit: my thick glasses, my stretched-out blue Nordic sweater, the student head slaps, the too-good grades, the feminine gestures. Why me? He says: Because you are not like all the others, because I don’t see anyone but you and you don’t even realize it. He adds this phrase, which for me is unforgettable: Because you will leave and we will stay.

As we gazed upon the uncanny sight presented to our vision, the thick lips opened, and several sounds issued from them, after which the thing relaxed in death. The guide clutched my coat sleeve and trembled so violently that the light shook fitfully, casting weird moving shadows on the walls. I made no motion, but stood rigidly still, my horrified eyes fixed upon the floor ahead. The fear left, and wonder, awe, compassion, and reverence succeeded in its place, for the sounds uttered by the stricken figure that lay stretched out on the limestone had told us the awesome truth. The creature I had killed, the strange beast of the unfathomed cave, was, or had at one time been a MAN!!!

For, Melanie, these things I have named are but the symbols of the thing for which I risk my life, symbols of the kind of life I love. for I am fighting for the old days, the old ways I love so much but which, I fear, are now gone forever, no matter how the die may fall. For, win or lose, we lose just the same. If we win this war and have the Cotton Kingdom of our dreams, we still have lost, for we will become a different people and the old quiet ways will go. The world will be at our doors clamoring for cotton and we can command our own price. Then, I fear, we will become like the Yankees, at whose money-making activities, acquisitiveness, and commercialism we now sneer. And if we lose, Melanie, if we lose! I am not afraid of danger or capture or wounds or even death, if death must come, but I do fear that once this war is over, we will never get back to the old times. And I belong in those old times. I do not belong in this mad present of killing and I fear I will not fit into any future, try though I may. Nor will you, my dear, for you and I are of the same blood. I do not know what the future will bring, but it cannot be as beautiful or as satisfying as the past. I lie and look at the boys sleeping near me and I wonder if the twins or Alex or cade think these same thoughts. I wonder if they know they are fighting for a Cause that was lost the minute the first shot was fired, for our Cause is really our own way of living and that is gone already. But I do not think they think these things and they are lucky. I had not thought of this for us when I asked you to marry me. I had thought of life going on at Twelve Oaks as it had always done, peacefully, easily, unchanging. we are alike, Melanie, loving the same quiet things, and I saw before us a long stretch of uneventful years in which to read, hear music and dream. But not this! Never this! That this could happen to us all, this wrecking of old ways, this bloody slaughter and hate! Melanie, nothing is worth it-States' Rights, nor slaves, nor cotton. Nothing is worth what is happening to us now and what may happen, for if the Yankees whip us the future will be one of incredible horror. And, my dear, they may yet whip us.

patch, and cobble a complicated machine, the principles of which are above thy comprehension, and its simplest operations too subtle for thy understanding, when thou canst not correct a trifling error in a common piece of mechanism, the whole mystery of which is open to thy inspection?—Hence with thee to the leather and stone, which are emblems of thy head; cobble thy shoes, and confine thyself to the vocation for which Heaven has fitted thee; but," elevating his voice until it made the welkin ring, "if ever I catch thee, or any of thy tribe, meddling again with affairs of government, by St. Nicholas, but I'll have every mother's bastard of ye flayed alive, and your hides stretched for drumheads, that ye may thenceforth make a noise to some purpose!

Bodean James Gazzer had spent thirty-one years perfecting the art of assigning blame. His personal credo - everything bad that happens is someone else's fault - could, with imagination, be stretched to fit any circumstance. Bode stretched it. The intestinal unrest that occasionally afflicted him surely was the result of drinking milk taken from secretly radiated cows. The roaches in his apartment were planted by his filthy immigrant next-door neighbors. His dire financial plight was caused by runaway bank computers and conniving Wall Street Zionists; his bad luck in the South Florida job market, prejudice against English-speaking applicants. Even the lousy weather had a culprit: air pollution from Canada, diluting the ozone and derailing the jet stream

The sound of the wind stretches its limbs. The jazz music witholds some of its ruckus. Hands move something in the dark. I say: just an old romanticism... No matter, the place will fit everything. Vision descends upon flaccid pathways and rides them on cheap metal. Dried out trees and others take their water from the drowned sand by force. I say: a passing depression. No matter, the place will fit everything. During the day the sun approaches the mountain, places its hand upon it, its cold hand of lovers, strikes stone with stone. Mountain scrub dances behind the stone. The sun does not see it. Only the moon shines upon it all the way beyond the bend and the guardian stones watch from afar. I say: a passing coincidence. No matter, the place will fit everything.

Cheat propped his elbows on his knees and gazed up at Kestrel. He scrutinized her: the long, loosely clasped hands, the folds of her dress. Kestrel’s clothes had mysteriously appeared in the suite’s wardrobe, probably while she had slept, and she was glad. The dueling ensemble had served well enough, but wearing a dress fit for society made Kestrel feel ready for different kinds of battle. “Where is Arin?” Cheat said. “In the mountains.” “Doing what?” “I don’t know. I imagine that, since the Valorian reinforcements will come through the mountain pass, he is analyzing its values and drawbacks as a battleground.” Cheat gave her a gleeful smirk. “Does it bother you, being a traitor?” “I don’t see how I am.” “You just confirmed that the reinforcements will come through the pass. Thank you.” “It’s hardly worth thanking me,” she said. “Almost every useful ship in the empire has been sent east, which means there is no other way into the city. Anyone with brains could figure that out, which is why Arin is in the mountains, and you are here.” A flush began to build under Cheat’s skin. He said, “My feet are dusty.” Kestrel had no idea how to respond to that. “Wash them,” he said. “What?” He took off his boots, stretched out his legs, and leaned back against the bench. Kestrel, who had been quite still, became stone. “It’s Herrani custom for the lady of the house to wash the feet of special guests,” said Cheat. “Even if such a custom existed, it died ten years ago. And I’m not the lady of the house.” “No, you’re a slave. You’ll do as I command.

But right now Dr. Gray was watching three middle-aged women instead, as they stepped out of the cab amidst a flurry of hats and handbags, landing right in front of the old Jane Austen cottage. Despite the war now stretching across the Atlantic, women of a certain age still saw fit to travel to Chawton to see where Austen had lived. Dr. Gray had always marvelled at their female spirit in coming to pay homage to the great writer. Something had been freed in them by the war; some essential fear that the world had tried to drum into them had collapsed in the face of an even greater enemy. He wondered if the future, just as the cinema foretold, belonged to these women. Chattering, gathering, travelling women, full of vigour and mission, going after what they wanted, big or small.

Kammy jerked upright. It was as though the trees had parted beneath the pressure of the storm and a bolt of lightning had struck her. She had never entered the mouth for it had always been much too small. Yet, she had never seen anything else enter it either. The thought alone made her feel sick with excitement and fear. A small voice told Kammy that such a reaction was ridiculous, it was just a squirrel. But warmth spread to the tips of Kammy’s fingers as they stretched forward. She could see now that it was not a burrow at all, but a tunnel large enough for her to fit through. She was quite sure that she would not even have to bend her head. The same small voice tried to speak again but Kammy could not hear it through the rush of blood in her ears. Kammy stepped inside the mouth of the forest and felt herself flipped upside down.

When I opened my eyes, we were still surrounded by darkness. A lantern, standing on the ground, showed a bubbling well. The water splashing from the well disappeared, almost at once, under the floor on which I was lying, with my head on the knee of the man in the black cloak and the black mask. He was bathing my temples and his hands smelt of death. I tried to push them away and asked, ‘Who are you? Where is the voice?’ His only answer was a sigh. Suddenly, a hot breath passed over my face and I perceived a white shape, beside the man’s black shape, in the darkness. The black shape lifted me on to the white shape, a glad neighing greeted my astounded ears and I murmured, ‘Cesar!’ The animal quivered. Raoul, I was lying half back on a saddle and I had recognized the white horse out of the PROFETA, which I had so often fed with sugar and sweets. I remembered that, one evening, there was a rumor in the theater that the horse had disappeared and that it had been stolen by the Opera ghost. I believed in the voice, but had never believed in the ghost. Now, however, I began to wonder, with a shiver, whether I was the ghost’s prisoner. I called upon the voice to help me, for I should never have imagined that the voice and the ghost were one. You have heard about the Opera ghost, have you not, Raoul?” “Yes, but tell me what happened when you were on the white horse of the Profeta?” “I made no movement and let myself go. The black shape held me up, and I made no effort to escape. A curious feeling of peacefulness came over me and I thought that I must be under the influence of some cordial. I had the full command of my senses; and my eyes became used to the darkness, which was lit, here and there, by fitful gleams. I calculated that we were in a narrow circular gallery, probably running all round the Opera, which is immense, underground. I had once been down into those cellars, but had stopped at the third floor, though there were two lower still, large enough to hold a town. But the figures of which I caught sight had made me run away. There are demons down there, quite black, standing in front of boilers, and they wield shovels and pitchforks and poke up fires and stir up flames and, if you come too near them, they frighten you by suddenly opening the red mouths of their furnaces … Well, while Cesar was quietly carrying me on his back, I saw those black demons in the distance, looking quite small, in front of the red fires of their furnaces: they came into sight, disappeared and came into sight again, as we went on our winding way. At last, they disappeared altogether. The shape was still holding me up and Cesar walked on, unled and sure-footed. I could not tell you, even approximately, how long this ride lasted; I only know that we seemed to turn and turn and often went down a spiral stair into the very heart of the earth. Even then, it may be that my head was turning, but I don’t think so: no, my mind was quite clear. At last, Cesar raised his nostrils, sniffed the air and quickened his pace a little. I felt a moistness in the air and Cesar stopped. The darkness had lifted. A sort of bluey light surrounded us. We were on the edge of a lake, whose leaden waters stretched into the distance, into the darkness; but the blue light lit up the bank and I saw a little boat fastened to an iron ring on the wharf!” - Chapter 12: Apollo’s Lyre

I believe it will have become evident why, for me, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even though the person in this process would experience each one of these feelings at appropriate times. But the adjectives which seem more generally fitting are adjectives such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful. This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one’s potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming.

In her book Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America, Jennifer Sherman posits that in places lacking resources, morality is social capital. Appearing “good” unlocks jobs and community resources. But morality is determined in a fluid way; it’s just as much about fitting in and looking the part as it is about good behavior. Being white, wearing the right clothes (not too fancy, not too dirty), being male, being married, and having children were all part of the appearance of morality. But it wasn’t just about “good” behavior. John Sadler had stretched the law in an extra-legal way to get around the tax code. But this was looked on as an example of good behavior—he was conning the government after all. This made him smart and quick-witted, a cunning businessman and someone you would respect. Hell, he was a leader in his community.

I grow tired of your mouth.” Bones shifted under Curran’s skin. The nose widened, the jaws grew, the top lip split, displaying enormous teeth. I was staring into the face of a nightmare, a horrible meld of human and lion. If a thing that weighed over six hundred pounds in beast-form could be called a lion. His eyes never changed. The rest of him—the body, the arms, the legs, even his hair and skin remained human. The shapeshifters had three forms: beast, human, and half. They could shift into any of the three, but they always changed shape completely. Most had to strain to maintain the half-form and to be able to speak in it was a great achievement. Only Curran could do this: turn part of his body into one shape while keeping the rest in another. Normally, I had no trouble with Curran’s face in half-form. It was well-proportioned, even—many shapeshifters suffered the “my jaws are way too big and don’t fit together” syndrome—but I was used to that half-form face being sheathed in gray fur. Having human skin stretched over it was nausea inducing. He noticed my heroic efforts not to barf. “What is it now?” I waved my hand around my face. “Fur.” “What do you mean?” “Your face has no fur.” Curran touched his chin. And just like that all traces of the beast vanished. He sat before me fully human. He massaged his jaw. The beast grew stronger during the flare. Curran’s irritation caused his control to slip just a hair. “Having technical difficulties?” I asked and immediately regretted it. Pointing out loss of control to a control freak wasn’t the brightest idea. “You shouldn’t provoke me.” His voice dropped low. He suddenly looked slightly hungry. “You never know what I might do if I’m not fully in control of myself.” Mayday, Mayday. “I shudder at the thought.

What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks! 'tis whole again; oars! oars! Burst in upon him! I grow blind; hands! stretch out before me that I may yet grope my way. Is't night? Oars, oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea, that ere it be for ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time upon his mark; I see: the ship! the ship! Dash on, my men! - Oh, all ye sweet powers of air, now hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, in a woman's fainting fit. Up helm, I say ye fools. Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my lifelong fidelities? Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up helm again! He turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable brow drives on towards one, whose duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me now! - Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now help Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb's own unwinking eye? And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattrass that is all too soft; would it were stuffed with brushwood! I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Look ye, sun, moon, and stars! I call ye assassins of as good a fellow as ever spouted up his ghost. For all that, I would yet ring glasses with ye, would ye but hand the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou grinning whale, but there'll be plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in his drawers! A most mouldy and over salted death, though; cherries! cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die! - Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope my poor mother's drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will now come to her, for the voyage is up.

My current best model of how a market works is fractional Brownian motion of multifractal time. It has been called the Multifractal Model of Asset Returns. The basic ideas are similar to the cartoon versions above-though far more intricate, mathematically. The cartoon of Brownian motion gets replaced by an equation that a computer can calculate. The trading-time process is expressed by another mathematical function, called f(\propto), that can be tuned to fit a wide range of market behavior. My model redistributes time. It compresses it in some places, stretches it out in others. The result appears very wild, very random. The two functions, of time and Brownian motion, work together in what mathematicians call a compound manner: Price is a function of trading time, which in turn is a function of clock time. Again, the two steps in the model combine to produce a "baby" far different from either parent.

The room was two-tiered, its marble balconies filled with rams and water nymphs in fancy dress; a kaleidoscope of colours swayed in time to the beat of hypnotic music. A concerto of absent musicians, it played only in her mind. The numerous chandeliers with sculptured metal frames hung down from chains, with endless fireflies attached. At the far end stretched a grand staircase, dressed with a plush velvet carpet in deep cerise, and ceiling paintings edged with gold embossed dado rails clung to the walls. Then Eve honed in on herself and saw that she wore a crushed white taffeta A-line gown that fit her trim figure like a glove. Her butterfly mask with floral patterns embroidered in red and gold silk sat against her pale skin, her reflection like that of a porcelain doll. A matching shawl rested softly on her shoulders. Everything was so beautiful that she almost totally lost herself in the mirror’s reflection." (little snippet from our book)

Oh no. Not this again. It’s the clothing dream. I’ve been having it for fifty years. Aisle after aisle, closetful after closetful, metal rack after metal rack of clothing, stretching into the distance under the glare of the fluorescent tubing – as gaudy and ornate and confusing, and finally as glum and oppressive, as the dreams of a long-time opium smoker. Why am I compelled to riffle through these outfits, tangling up the hangers, tripping on the ribbons, snagging myself on a hook or button while feathers and sequins and fake pearls drop to the floor like ants from a burning tree? What is the occasion? Who do I need to impress? ___________ There’s a smell of stale underarms. Everything’s been worn before. Nothing fits. Too small, too big, too magenta. These flounces, hoops, ruffles, wired collars, cut-velvet capes – none of these disguises is mine. How old am I in this dream? Do I have tits? Whose life am I living? Whose life am I failing to live?

When she finally reached it, she bent forward and looked through the peephole. Jay was grinning back at her from outside. Her heart leaped for a completely different reason. She set aside her crutches and quickly unbolted the door to open it. "What took you so long?" Her knee was bent and her ankle pulled up off the ground. She balanced against the doorjamb. "What d'you think, dumbass?" she retorted smartly, keeping her voice down so she wouldn't alert her parents. "You scared the crap out of me, by the way. My parents are already in bed, and I was all alone down here." "Good!" he exclaimed as he reached in and grabbed her around the waist, dragging her up against him and wrapping his arms around her. She giggled while he held her there, enjoying everything about the feel of him against her. "What are you doing here? I thought I wouldn't see you till tomorrow." "I wanted to show you something!" He beamed at her, and his enthusiasm reached out to capture her in its grip. She couldn't help smiling back excitedly. "What is it?" she asked breathlessly. He didn't release her; he just turned, still holding her gently in his arms, so that she could see out into the driveway. The first thing she noticed was the officer in his car, alert now as he kept a watchful eye on the two of them. Violet realized that it was late, already past eleven, and from the look on his face, she thought he must have been hoping for a quiet, uneventful evening out there. And then she saw the car. It was beautiful and sleek, painted a glossy black that, even in the dark, reflected the light like a polished mirror. Violet recognized the Acura insignia on the front of the hood, and even though she could tell it wasn't brand-new, it looked like it had been well taken care of. "Whose is it?" she asked admiringly. It was way better than her crappy little Honda. Jay grinned again, his face glowing with enthusiasm. "It's mine. I got it tonight. That's why I had to go. My mom had the night off, and I wanted to get it before..." He smiled down at her. "I didn't want to borrow your car to take you to the dance." "Really?" she breathed. "How...? I didn't even know you were..." She couldn't seem to find the right words; she was envious and excited for him all at the same time. "I know right?" he answered, as if she'd actually asked coherent questions. "I've been saving for...for forever, really. What do you think?" Violet smiled at him, thinking that he was entirely too perfect for her. "I think it's beautiful," she said with more meaning than he understood. And then she glanced back at the car. "I had no idea that you were getting a car. I love it, Jay," she insisted, wrapping her arms around his neck as he hoisted her up, cradling her like a small child." "I'd offer to take you for a test-drive, but I'm afraid that Supercop over there would probably Taser me with his stun gun. So you'll have to wait until tomorrow," he said, and without waiting for an invitation he carried her inside, dead bolting the door behind him. He settled down on the couch, where she'd been sitting by herself just moments before, without letting her go. There was a movie on the television, but neither of them paid any attention to it as Jay reclined, stretching out and drawing her down into the circle of his arms. They spent the rest of the night like that, cradled together, their bodies fitting each other perfectly, as they kissed and whispered and laughed quietly in the darkness. At some point Violet was aware that she was drifting into sleep, as her thoughts turned dreamlike, becoming disjointed and fuzzy and hard to hold on to. She didn't fight it; she enjoyed the lazy, drifting feeling, along with the warmth created by the cocoon of Jay's body wrapped protectively around her. It was the safest she'd felt in days...maybe weeks... And for the first time since she'd been chased by the man in the woods, her dreams were free from monsters.

Town, as they called it, pleased me the less, the longer I saw it. But until our language stretches itself and takes in a new word of closer fit, town will have to do for the name of such a place as was Medicine Bow. I have seen and slept in many like it since. Scattered wide, they littered the frontier from the Columbia to the Rio Grande, from the Missouri to the Sierras. They lay stark, dotted over a planet of treeless dust, like soiled packs of cards. Each was similar to the next, as one old five-spot of clubs resembles another. Houses, empty bottles, and garbage, they were forever of the same shapeless pattern. More forlorn they were than stale bones. They seemed to have been strewn there by the wind and to be waiting till the wind should come again and blow them away. Yet serene above their foulness swam a pure and quiet light, such as the East never sees; they might be bathing in the air of creation's first morning. Beneath sun and stars their days and nights were immaculate and wonderful.

His was the sort of physical beauty that attracted even as any great work of art ensnared the eye. One did not have to wish to own such a creation, often it was enough just to study and appreciate it. Only a little above average height, his form was well proportioned and well muscled, with not an extra jot of flesh. He had a fencer’s easy play of movement. But it was his face that first and last attached the eye. It was a lean countenance, the ivory white skin so taut across the fine bone structure as to appear to have been stretched to fit. Feature by feature, it was not a classic visage, but the sum more than compensated for the parts. His cheekbones were high and perhaps too pronounced. The nose was straight, a trifle too long and thin, the mouth not at all the full, plump standard of Greek statuary, for while well cut it was thin as well, and bore at times a half-quirked, sensuous smile. The eyes were long and almond-shaped and pulled down slightly at the corners, rather than tilting upward in classical fashion. But despite the astonishing thick, bright-silver-tipped gilt hair and slightly darker brows, it was the eyes that one’s gaze returned to again and again. From afar, or even in shadow, Lord North’s eyes were unexceptional save for their keen expression. But in clear light and up close it could be seen that they were extraordinary. For to speak with the nobleman from his right side, one would look for answer in his grave gray eye. Yet to approach him from the left, one would seek response from his cool blue orb. His eyes were not so dissimilar as to shock, but seeing him once, the viewer would be troubled by some nagging discrepancy and turn to search his face until his varicolored eyes were at last discovered, and the viewer amazed and enchanted. To see him once was to remember him forever, to hear his name was to recall him instantly. His reputation was as varied and colorful as his strange countenance. He was said to be a libertine, he was whispered to be beyond mere libertine.

He kissed his way across my chest and down between my breasts, over my shirt. His fingers moved to the waistband of my panties and he slowly tried to peel them down my legs. Tried being the operative word because five pairs of underwear don’t really fit the same way as one . . . “What in the actual fuck—” he started to say, tugging at the fabric. “Just . . . Oh my God, Will—” I curled on my side, laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes. He managed the first pair, holding them up victoriously before he went back for the second. “Jesus Christ,” he said, attempting to pull them down without stretching them or damaging the elastic. “Are these on with some kind of adhesive?” “No!” “Okay . . . It’s possible this wasn’t my best plan. And will you hold still! It’s like trying to peel a wiggly onion!” “I’m going to die of laughter and when the police finally get here I’ll still be wearing these hideous underwear. Why didn’t you just take them all off at once?” “You can’t expect me to think when all my blood is in my dick!

Everyone should try write two philosophical observations of about 300 words a day, to keep the brain fit. The brain is a muscle too, you know. If you don't use it it gets out of shape, and any sort of movement will be tiring for it. One should not be interested in 'whom is interested', one doesnt stretch the other muscles in the hope that someone sees it either. Thinking and writing are exersizes that serve their own sake: to keep your brain fit, and to produce raw material that later on you can maybe make a book out of. Good enough for me. If i have to worry about 'whom is interested' in what I think or do I would probably never create anything.. (if anything is typical about the modern age is that almost everyone is only interested in himself, so under such conditions the concern is even more silly, since one knows that by definition no one will be interested in anything unless they have to. There are of course some exceptions to this rule, fortunately, but most people seem pretty comfortable in their reality tunnels)

My vision and lungs were clearing, yet my head and my heart still suffered, ’cause I knew I was running out of time to reach my girl. Urgency clawed at me, till I thought I’d go mad. Did she remember that it’d always be Evie and Jack? That even death—or Death—couldn’t keep us apart? Would she remember how perfect it’d been between us? With her, I’d known true peace for the first time in my life. Hadn’t she? As coo-yôn and I covered miles, I’d craved that cellphone—with its pictures of Evie—and her taped recording. When I’d been separated from her before, I’d used her voice like a drug. Now I was a junkie needing a fix, but my pack had been stolen early on. Gone forever. Matthew had sourced another one for me—up was down—but it was empty. Fitting. ’Cause I was starting over with nothing. From behind the wheel, coo-yôn said, “You need her.” “Tell me something I doan know.” He frowned, taking me literally. “You don’t know the future. I see far. I see an unbroken line that stretches through eternity—and back on itself.” “Uh-huh.” Just hold on, peekôn, I’m coming.

And despite the punishments for boundary crossing, we continue to live, daily, with all our contradictory differences. Here I still stand, unmistakably "feminine" in style, and "womanly" in personal experience - and unacceptably "masculine" in political interests and in my dedication to writing poetry that stretches beyond the woman's domain of home. Here I am, assigned a "female" sex on my birth certificate, but not considered womanly enough - because I am a lesbian - to retain custody of the children I delivered from my woman's body. As a white girl raised in a segregated culture, I was expected to be "ladylike" - sexually repressed but acquiescent to white men of my class - while other, darker women were damned as "promiscuous" so their bodies could be seized and exploited. I've worked outside the home for at least part of my living since I was a teenager - a fact deemed masculine by some. But my occupation is now that of teacher, work suitably feminine for a woman as long as I don't tell my students I'm a lesbian - a sexuality thought too aggressive and "masculine" to fit with my "feminity.

Your mother told you," he states flatly. "Yeah," I snap. "She told me." "She doesn't know everything. She doesn't know me...or how I feel. I would never force you to do anything against your will, and I would never, ever let anyone harm you." His words enrage me. Lies, I'm convinced. My hand shoots out, ready to slap that earnest look off his face. The same earnest look he'd given me the first time he lid to my face. He catches my hand, squeezes the wrist tight. "Jacinda-" "I don't believe you. You gave me your word. Five weeks-" "Five weeks was too long. I couldn't leave you for that long without checking on you." "Because you're a liar," I assert. His expression cracks. Emotion bleeds through. He knows I'm not talking about just the five weeks. With a shake of his head, he sounds almost sorry as he admits, "Maybe I didn't tell you everything, but it doesn't change anything I said. I will never hurt you. I want to try to protect you." "Try," I repeat. His jaw clenches. "I can. I can stop them." After several moments, I twist my hand free. He lets me go. Rubbing my wrist, I glare at him. "I have a life here now." My fingers stretch, curl into talons at my sides, still hungry to fight him. "Make me go, and I'll never forgive you." He inhales deeply, his broad chest lifting high. "Well. I can't have that." "Then you'll go? Leave me alone?" Hope stirs. He shakes his head. "I didn't say that." "Of course not," I sneer. "What do you mean then?" Panic washes over me at the thought of him staying here and learning about Will and his family. "There's no reason for you to stay." His dark eyes glint. "There's you. I can give you more time. You can't seriously fit in here. You'll come around." "I won't!" His voice cracks like thunder on the air. "I won't leave you! Do you know how unbearable it's been without you? You're not like the rest of them." His hand swipes through air almost savagely. I stare at him, eyes wide and aching. "You're not some well-trained puppy content to go alone with what you're told. You have fire." He laughs brokenly. "I don't mean literally, although there is that. There's something in you, Jacinda. You're the only thing real for me there, the only thing remotely interesting." He stares at me starkly and I don't breathe. He looks ready to reach out and fold me into his arms. I jump hastily back. Unbelievably, he looks hurt. Dropping his immense hands, he speaks again, evenly, calmly. "I'll give you more space. Time for you to realize that this"-he motions to the living room-"isn't for you. You need mists and mountains and sky. Flight. How can you stay here where you have none of that? How can you hope to survive? If you haven't figured that out yet, you will." In my mind, I see Will. Think how he has become the mist, the sky, everything, to me. I do more than survive here. I love. But Cassian can never know that. “What I have here beats what waits for me back home. The wing clipping you so conveniently failed to mention-" "Is not going to happen, Jacinda." He steps closer. His head dips to look into my eyes. "You have my word. If you return with me, you won't be harmed. I'd die first." His words flow through me like a chill wind. "But your father-" "My father won't be our alpha forever. Someday, I'll lead. Everyone knows it. The pride will listen to me. I promise you'll be safe.

The Poetry of Love We see the world with the eyes of a small child. We visualize the beauty of the world with an unique magic sense,and unfold our deeper feelings and expectations diffusing the seizing negative forces that stretch out their threatening tentacles. We give blow and shape in our dreams. We seek for Love through unfamiliar new people and new experiences. Love is a vivid spirit, a big breath that touches upon each piece of our existence, our each cell… Love affiliates a lot of forms, exists and fits everywhere. Each flight of a small bird, the flutter of an incredible beauty butterfly, the stones wetted by waters of Aquamarine River, the branches of the trees that dally with the blow of wind, all these is the Spirit of Love. When you love in a genuine way, love everything. You are not bothered by the babble of Nature and the strange reactions of people. You hear the sounds of everyday routine with bigger consequence. Overtakes the meanness consequently and with courage. You seek truth in small things. You live the each moment as if it's unique. Love for nature. Love for life. Love for people.

Question 2: How Do You Want to Grow? When you watch how young children soak up information, you realize how deeply wired we are to learn and grow. Personal growth can and should happen throughout life, not just when we’re children. In this section, you’re essentially asking yourself: In order to have the experiences above, how do I have to grow? What sort of man or woman do I need to evolve into? Notice how this question ties to the previous one? Now, consider these four categories from the Twelve Areas of Balance: 5.​YOUR HEALTH AND FITNESS. Describe how you want to feel and look every day. What about five, ten, or twenty years from now? What eating and fitness systems would you like to have? What health or fitness systems would you like to explore, not because you think you ought to but because you’re curious and want to? Are there fitness goals you’d like to achieve purely for the thrill of knowing you accomplished them (whether it’s hiking a mountain, learning to tap dance, or getting in a routine of going to the gym)? 6.​YOUR INTELLECTUAL LIFE. What do you need to learn in order to have the experiences you listed above? What would you love to learn? What books and movies would stretch your mind and tastes? What kinds of art, music, or theater would you like to know more about? Are there languages you want to master? Remember to focus on end goals—choosing learning opportunities where the joy is in the learning itself, and the learning is not merely a means to an end, such as a diploma. 7.​YOUR SKILLS. What skills would help you thrive at your job and would you enjoy mastering? If you’d love to switch gears professionally, what skills would it take to do that? What are some skills you want to learn just for fun? What would make you happy and proud to know how to do? If you could go back to school to learn anything you wanted just for the joy of it, what would that be? 8.​YOUR SPIRITUAL LIFE. Where are you now spiritually, and where would you like to be? Would you like to move deeper into the spiritual practice you already have or try out others? What is your highest aspiration for your spiritual practice? Would you like to learn things like lucid dreaming, deep states of meditation, or ways to overcome fear, worry, or stress?

Why do the ambiance of self-doubt and a shroud of multiple layers of contradictions underscore my confusion? Can I attain happiness by carving out a protective niche in the world, a place where my thoughts can roam free, a safe place where I can work unencumbered by silly worries that mar an ordinary life? I am free to do as I please, so why does life seem so bewildering, difficult, frustrating, and unsatisfying? Am I any different from other people? Do all people by their very nature stretch their puniness to know? Does it place a person in jeopardy to reach out to explore the difference between the known and the unknown? Is the risk to gain self-knowledge and determine how one fits into the world that surrounds us a worthwhile proposition? Is the desire to expand a person’s understanding of humanity and enhance their comprehension of humankind’s role in an interconnected world a journey that we each must undertake in our own way in order to exact a hard won scrap of perception that every civilization builds its structural pillars upon and every person relies upon in order to survive? Will a haphazard quest to obtain personal knowledge parlay my ruin or can cerebral effort jumpstart personal salvation?

Her hands found the button of his jeans, and then glided his zipper down. She wasted no time in seizing his cock with her hand, stroking him up and down as he pulled down his pants, then his boxers. He stopped her only so he could sheathe himself. And when he looked back up, she'd removed her robe, which fell around her in waves like drizzled icing. As he did, she began to guide his cock to her entrance, stroking her clit with the tip of him. He was already so fucking hard, and he hadn't even sunk into her yet. "Ready?" she breathed into his ear. He nodded, and his hands found her hips. His fingertips dug into her as he eased himself inside her, so slowly he could barely breathe, and they both moaned as she cradled him with her pussy. She braced her hands against the table as he slid further, burying himself deep inside her. Fuck. How did Nina feel so good? They both paused, him filling her. She stretched and tightened against him. He hadn't even begun to fuck her the way he planned to, but she already felt better than anything he could've imagined. He rocked into her, hitting her core deeper, and her head rolled back as a moan escaped. She fit around him in such a silky way that he already knew he'd want every waking moment to be inside her. She moved back and forth on his dick, his hands steadying her hips. He wanted to make sure that every time he pumped into her, she felt all of him. He was going to delve into her so deeply that she'd have no other choice but to come all over him. He needed to feel her heat pulsing against him. Her breathing quickened, and she said, "I need you." All he wanted was to hear this woman moan so loudly that he'd be able to hear it whenever he closed his eyes. So when he slid his cock back inside her, he made sure to push until he was all the way in. She arched her back in response, and he slowly pulled out, then pumped back in. Their moans, their thighs meeting and the slap of his balls against her ass were the only sounds in the room. He reached toward her heavy breasts and pinched one nipple tightly as he continued to fill her. "I'm..." She couldn't get the words out, but he knew what she was trying to say. She was going to come. He moved the hand that pinched her nipple down to her clit and gently rubbed. "I'm almost there," she said. He grunted in approval and pushed into her slower, bringing his length almost fully out, then plunging back in. She tightened around him. As her groans reached a crescendo, he knew he was going to erupt as well. He thrust hard and deep until his aching cock came.

This was certainly a fitting end to Valentine’s Day.” She slanted him a glance. “Tell me, was it really just chance that you drew my name at the ball?” “What do you think?” “I don’t know. Celia told me on the way home that she thought it was Fate.” He arched one eyebrow. “Only if Fate’s helper is the Duke of Foxmoor. He rigged the drawing for me.” To his surprise, she laughed. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! I thought perhaps you’d spotted my name by chance, but deliberately cheating…You have no principles whatsoever, do you?” “Not where you’re concerned,” he said. That answer seemed to please her. Reassured of her ability to bewitch him, she stretched beside him like a cat, her full breasts moving enticingly under the sheet. It roused him instantly. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, my dear.” “Do what?” Her gaze was full of curiosity. “Display yourself so deliciously. Or I’m going to make love to you again.” A coy smile tipped up her lips. “Are you really?” She slid up next to him, her hand drawing a line down his bare chest in a motion worthy of the most experienced courtesan. He caught her hand. “I mean it, minx. Don’t tempt me. I’ll have you on your back so fast you won’t know what happened.” “And what would be wrong with that?” He entwined his fingers with hers. Why couldn’t he stop touching her? “It was your first time. Your body needs to rest.” “Oh.” She frowned. “I suppose I am a little sore.” She cast him a teasing glance. “Who could have known that making love would be so…vigorous? Or addictive?” “You have no idea.” Already his cock was rock hard beneath the sheet. “But after we’re married, I’ll be happy to add to your store of experience.

He grasped the rope and slowly began hoisting himself. Suddenly it began to stretch as if it were rubber. He was startled, and the perspiration gushed from his pores. Fortunately the stretching stopped after about a foot. He tried bringing all his weight to bear, and this time there seemed to be no further cause for worry. He spit on his hands, fitted the rope between his legs, and began to climb hand over hand. He rose like a toy monkey climbing a toy coconut tree. Perhaps it was his excitement, but the perspiration on his forehead felt strangely cold. In an effort to keep sand from falling on him, he avoided brushing against it and depended solely on the rope. But he felt uneasy as his body turned round and round in the air. The dead weight of his torso was more than he had anticipated, and his progress was slow. And whatever was this trembling? His arms had begun to jerk in spite of him, and he felt almost as if he were snapping himself like a whip. Perhaps it was a natural reaction, in view of those forty-six horrible days. When he had climbed a yard the hole seemed a hundred yards deep ... two yards, two hundred yards deep. Gradually, as the depth of the hole increased, he began to be dizzy. He was too tired. He mustn't look down! But there! There was the surface! The surface where, no matter which way he went, he would walk to freedom ... to the very ends of the earth. When he got to the surface, this endless moment would become a small flower pressed between the pages of his diary ... poisonous herb or carnivorous plant, it would be no more than a bit of half-transparent colored paper, and as he sipped his tea in the parlor he would hold it up to the light and take pleasure in telling its story.

From the cobbled Close, we all admired the Minster's great towers of fretted stone soaring to the clouds, every inch carved as fine as lacework. Once we had passed into the nave, I surrendered my scruples to that glorious hush that tells of a higher presence than ourselves. It was a bright winter's day, and the vaulted windows tinted the air with dappled rainbows. Sitting quietly in my pew, I recognized a change in myself; that every morning I woke quite glad to be alive. Instead of fitful notions of footsteps at midnight, each new day was heralded by cheery sounds outside my window: the post-horn's trumpeting and the cries and songs of busy, prosperous people. I was still young and vital, with no need for bed rest or sleeping draughts. I was ready to face whatever the future held. However troubled my marriage was, it was better by far than my former life with my father. Dropping my face into my clasped hands, I glimpsed in reverie a sort of labyrinth, a mysterious path I must traverse in the months to come. I could not say what trials lay ahead of me- but I knew that I must be strong, and win whatever happiness I might glean on this earth. It was easy to make such a resolution when, as yet, I faced no actual difficulties. Each morning, Anne and I returned from our various errands to take breakfast at our lodgings. Awaiting us stood a steaming pot of chocolate and a plate of Mrs. Palmer's toast and excellent buns. Anne and I both heartily agreed that if time might halt we should have liked every day to be that same day, the gilt clock chiming ten o'clock, warming our stockinged feet on the fire fender, splitting a plate of Fat Rascals with butter and preserves, with all the delightful day stretching before us.

It got to the point where he didn’t even look up at the sky any more as he blundered back and forth. The human mind had evolved for just one universe, he thought. How much of this crap was he supposed to take? He felt exhausted, resentful, bewildered. “Wait.” He paused. He had loped out of the portal onto another stretch of scuffed, anonymous regolith. She was lying in his arms, her weight barely registering. He looked down into her face, and pushed up her gold sun visor. “Emma?” She licked her lips. “Look. Up there.” No Galaxy visible, but a starry sky. The stars looked, well, normal. But he’d learned that meant little. “So what?” Emma was lifting her arm, pointing. He saw three stars, dull white points, in a row. And there was a rough rectangle of stars around them—one of them a distinctive red—and what looked like a Galaxy disc, or maybe just a nebula, beneath … “Holy shit,” he said. She whispered, “There must be lots of universes like ours. But, surely to God, there is only one Orion.” And then light, dazzling, unbearably brilliant, came stabbing over the close horizon. It was a sunrise. He could actually feel its heat through the layers of his suit. He looked down at the ground at his feet. The rising light cast strong shadows, sharply illuminating the miniature crevices and craters there. And here was a “crater” that was elongated, and neatly ribbed. It was a footprint. He stepped forward, lifted his foot, and set it down in the print. It fit neatly. When he lifted his foot away the cleats of his boot hadn’t so much as disturbed a regolith grain. It was his own footprint. Good grief. After hundreds of universes of silence and remoteness and darkness, universes of dim light and shadows, he was right back where he started.

OR. I will tell you, but these are the beginning for me of many [125] woes. After these evil things concerning my mother, on which I keep silence, had been wrought, I was driven an exile by the pursuits of the Erinnyes, when Loxias sent my foot [126] to Athens, that I might render satisfaction to the deities that must not be named. For there is a holy council, that Jove once on a time instituted for Mars on account of some pollution of his hands. [127] And coming thither, at first indeed no one of the strangers received me willingly, as being abhorred by the Gods, but they who had respect to me, afforded me [128] a stranger's meal at a separate table, being under the same house roof, and silently devised in respect to me, unaddressed by them, how I might be separated from their banquet [129] and cup, and, having filled up a share of wine in a separate vessel, equal for all, they enjoyed themselves. And I did not think fit to rebuke my guests, but I grieved in silence, and did not seem to perceive [their conduct,] deeply groaning, because I was my mother's slayer. [130] But I hear that my misfortunes have been made a festival at Athens, and that this custom still remains, that the people of Pallas honor the Libation Vessel. [131] But when I came to the hill of Mars, and stood in judgment, I indeed occupying one seat, but the eldest of the Erinnyes the other, having spoken and heard respecting my mother's death, Phœbus saved me by bearing witness, but Pallas counted out for me [132] the equal votes with her hand, and I came off victor in the bloody trial. [133] As many then as sat [in judgment,] persuaded by the sentence, determined to hold their dwelling near the court itself. [134] But as many of the Erinnyes as did not yield obedience to the sentence passed, continually kept driving me with unsettled wanderings, until I again returned to the holy ground of Phœbus, and lying stretched before the adyts, hungering for food, I swore that I would break from life by dying on the spot, unless Phœbus, who had undone, should preserve me. Upon this Phœbus, uttering a voice from the golden tripod, sent me hither to seize the heaven-sent image, and place it in the land of Athens. But that safety which he marked out for me do thou aid in. For if we can lay hold on the image of the Goddess, I both shall cease from my madness, and embarking thee in the bark of many oars, I shall settle thee again in Mycenæ. But, O beloved one, O sister mine, preserve my ancestral home, and preserve me, since all my state and that of the Pelopids is undone, unless we seize on the heavenly image of the Goddess.

Wrath…” “What,” he murmured against her, working her with his nose. “You don’t like?” “Shut up and get back to doing—” His tongue slipping under the panties cut her off…and made him have to slow himself down. She was so slick and wet and soft and willing, it was all he could do to keep himself from hauling her on the rug and going at her deep and hard. And then they’d both miss out on the fun of anticipation. Moving the cotton aside with his hand, he kissed her pink flesh, then delved in. She was oh, so ready for him, and he knew it because of the honey that he swallowed as he dragged upward in a long, slow lick. But it wasn’t enough, and holding the panties to the side was distracting. With his fang, he punctured them, then split them apart right up the middle, leaving the two halves to hang off her hips. His palms went up to her ass and squeezed hard as he quit fooling around and got busy working out his female with his mouth. He knew exactly what she liked best, the sucking and the licking and the going in with his tongue. Closing his eyes, he took it all in, the scent and the taste and the feel of her shuddering against him as she peaked and came apart. Behind the fly of his leathers, his cock was screaming for attention, the rasp of the buttons not nearly sufficient to satisfy what it was demanding, but tough shit. His erection was going to have to chill for a while, because this was too sweet to stop anytime soon. When Beth’s knees wobbled, he took her down to the floor and stretched one of her legs up, keeping to his pace while shoving her fleece to her neck and putting his hand under her bra. As she orgasmed again, she grabbed onto one of the desk legs, pulling hard and bracing her free foot into the rug. His pursuit pushed them both farther and farther beneath where he discharged his kingly duties until he had to crouch down to fit his shoulders. Eventually her head was out the other side and she was gripping the pansy-ass chair he sat in and dragging it with her. As she cried out his name once more, he prowled up her body and glared at the stupid, nancy chair. “I need something heavier to sit in.” Last coherent thing he said. His body found the entrance to hers with an ease that spoke of all the practice they’d had and…Oh, yeah, still as good as the first time. Wrapping his arms around her, he rode her hard, and she was right there with him as the storm rolling through his body gathered in his balls until they stung. Together, he and his shellan moved as one, giving, receiving, going faster and faster until he came and kept going and came again and kept going until something hit his face. In full animal mode, he growled and swiped at it with his fangs. It was the drapes. He’d managed to fuck them out from under the desk, past the chair, and over to the wall. Beth burst out laughing and so did he, and then they were cradling each other.

In many fields—literature, music, architecture—the label ‘Modern’ stretches back to the early 20th century. Philosophy is odd in starting its Modern period almost 400 years earlier. This oddity is explained in large measure by a radical 16th century shift in our understanding of nature, a shift that also transformed our understanding of knowledge itself. On our Modern side of this line, thinkers as far back as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) are engaged in research projects recognizably similar to our own. If we look back to the Pre-Modern era, we see something alien: this era features very different ways of thinking about how nature worked, and how it could be known. To sample the strange flavour of pre-Modern thinking, try the following passage from the Renaissance thinker Paracelsus (1493–1541): The whole world surrounds man as a circle surrounds one point. From this it follows that all things are related to this one point, no differently from an apple seed which is surrounded and preserved by the fruit … Everything that astronomical theory has profoundly fathomed by studying the planetary aspects and the stars … can also be applied to the firmament of the body. Thinkers in this tradition took the universe to revolve around humanity, and sought to gain knowledge of nature by finding parallels between us and the heavens, seeing reality as a symbolic work of art composed with us in mind (see Figure 3). By the 16th century, the idea that everything revolved around and reflected humanity was in danger, threatened by a number of unsettling discoveries, not least the proposal, advanced by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), that the earth was not actually at the centre of the universe. The old tradition struggled against the rise of the new. Faced with the news that Galileo’s telescopes had detected moons orbiting Jupiter, the traditionally minded scholar Francesco Sizzi argued that such observations were obviously mistaken. According to Sizzi, there could not possibly be more than seven ‘roving planets’ (or heavenly bodies other than the stars), given that there are seven holes in an animal’s head (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and a mouth), seven metals, and seven days in a week. Sizzi didn’t win that battle. It’s not just that we agree with Galileo that there are more than seven things moving around in the solar system. More fundamentally, we have a different way of thinking about nature and knowledge. We no longer expect there to be any special human significance to natural facts (‘Why seven planets as opposed to eight or 15?’) and we think knowledge will be gained by systematic and open-minded observations of nature rather than the sorts of analogies and patterns to which Sizzi appeals. However, the transition into the Modern era was not an easy one. The pattern-oriented ways of thinking characteristic of pre-Modern thought naturally appeal to meaning-hungry creatures like us. These ways of thinking are found in a great variety of cultures: in classical Chinese thought, for example, the five traditional elements (wood, water, fire, earth, and metal) are matched up with the five senses in a similar correspondence between the inner and the outer. As a further attraction, pre-Modern views often fit more smoothly with our everyday sense experience: naively, the earth looks to be stable and fixed while the sun moves across the sky, and it takes some serious discipline to convince oneself that the mathematically more simple models (like the sun-centred model of the solar system) are right.

My little undomesticated pornstar pushed me so hard between her legs, my oxygen levels plummeted. She clenched around my fingers through her panties as an orgasm rolled through her in waves. The gush of warmth soaked the cotton. I kissed her through the fabric, again and again, knowing tomorrow everything would return to its proper position—my boundaries, my limits, my hang-ups, my demons. “Can I return the favor?” Dallas sat half up. “But not through your briefs. Men’s briefs always smell like old cheese that’s been sitting in a crockpot for days. I know because whenever my housekeeper went on vacation, we all took turns doing the laundry. And, well, I really shouldn’t say, but Dadd—” Not wanting the moment to be ruined with a conversation about her father’s underwear, I pulled forward, shutting her smart mouth with a kiss that tasted like her sweet pussy. At first, she pinched her lips and made a face, unsure what she thought about her own taste. But when I dragged the tip of my hard cock along her slit through our clothes, she went wild and kissed me back, shoving her tongue so deep down my throat I thought she would fish out my dinner. “Yes.” She wiggled against me. “Please, sir, may I have some more?” She’d quoted Oliver Twist while getting fucked. Truly, the woman was one of a kind. Knowing it was idiotic, and dangerous, and deranged, I pushed my tip through her slit. She was tight—tighter, still, through the tattered, stretched cotton of her ruined panties—but wet and sleek, ready for what was coming. The sensation, how warm and taut she felt, completely undid me. I thrust harder and deeper, entering her through our underwear, fucking her slowly with only flimsy fabric between us. I tore my mouth from hers, eyes glued to my cock each time it sank into her. I could barely fit inside, she was so tight. This was, by far, the best fuck I’d ever had. She panted. “Is this what people call dry-humping?” No. Nothing about this was dry. I was basically fucking her through our underwear. Only, explaining to her that this was full-blown sex with a side order of my issues was not in my plans for tonight. Or ever. “Sure.” Each push brought me closer to a climax. From slow, controlled, teasing thrusts designed to drive her mad with desire, I quickly derailed to jerky, manic, need-to-be-inside-this-woman plunges. Of a man so hungry for human connection, for affection, for carnal needs to be met and satisfied. My head grew dizzy. I’d taken into consideration the possibility that Dallas couldn’t come through penetration. It merely placed her in the same majority as most females on Planet Earth. But she shook, clawed, and reached for me, looking ready to climax. Her tits bounced and jiggled each time I slammed into her. Her mouth opened in awe, probably because this orgasm felt different from the first two. Deeper and more violent. She clutched the lapels of my shirt, shoving her face in mine. “Lose the underwear.” She met my thrust, groaning when my crown peeked past the slot in my boxer briefs. “I want you to come inside me. I want to feel you.” I was about two seconds from fulfilling her demand. Luckily, my logic grabbed the steering wheel, which my cock had seized sometime this evening, and derailed the situation from full-blown calamity. I managed to wait until she came, just barely, before pulling out, flipping her onto her stomach, and jerking off. I aimed for her bare ass but somehow came on her hair. No matter. She had plenty of time to wash it. Her agenda wasn’t exactly full. Dallas fell back onto the pillows, a lopsided grin on her face. (Chapter 31)

# [Justin@TV] İstanbul Başakşehir Fenerbahçe Maçi canlı İzle 6.12.2025 by Vaqavy tv İstanbul Başakşehir vs Fenerbahçe Live Stream Free: How to Watch Turkish Super Lig Game Online From anywhere Arsenal faces a real test of its title credentials on Saturday as it travels to the West Midlands to take on the English Premier League's most in-form team, Aston Villa. The Gunners come into this match-up after a professional 2-0 dispatch of Brentford in Wednesday's London derby, thanks to an early Mikel Merino header and a second-half stoppage-time strike from Bukayo Sako. After a ponderous start to the season, Aston Villa is now flying, with a thrilling 4-3 comeback win over Brighton in midweek. That extended its winning streak to six victories across all competitions, with Unai Emery's men emerging as an outside threat to their visitors' title hopes. Arsenal has started to distance itself from the pack, and the club that has come close to finishing at the top of the mountain in recent years is doing its best to stay in first place. While it is just December, the Gunners are riding high in what has been an excellent start to their 2025-26 season. Though they managed to only grab a draw at Stamford Bridge on Sunday against Chelsea, Arsenal had a multi-game lead over Manchester City coming out of the weekend, having gone unbeaten in 11 straight EPL contests. The team has lost just once so far, that coming in late August against the defending champions, Liverpool. Arsenal is coming off a solid 2-0 win over Brentford on Wednesday. Arsenal enters Wednesday five points ahead of second-place Manchester City. Aston Villa has quietly maneuvered its way back into the top four. After a rather bumpy start to their season, the Lions have won four straight matches, including wild 4-3 win over Brighton last Wednesday, moving up to third in the table. Aston Villa performed brilliantly in midweek, fighting back from 2-0 down to eventually win 4-3 against Brighton at the Amex Stadium. Ollie Watkins was back amongst the goals with a brace, whilst Amadou Onana and Donyell Malen also grabbed a goal apiece. Arsenal saw off Brentford to remain top of the Premier League table, extending their unbeaten run to 18 games in the process. Goals from Mikel Merino and Bukayo Saka made sure of the victory, with Mikel Arteta's side going well so far. Arsenal goes into a busy Saturday in the Premier League with a five-point lead atop the league standings with a 10-3-1 record, 33 points and a league-best plus-20 goal differential. And while the club has taken a couple disappointing draws this season, Arsenal also hasn’t lost a match of any kind in over three months. That includes a perfect run in Champions League play, too, with a 5-0-0 mark in that competition to pace the field in points (15) and goal differential, netting 14 goals while allowing just one in five matches. The last time Arsenal lost was on Aug. 31 to reigning Premier League champion Liverpool, and the same can be said for Aston Villa on its current six-match win streak. Between UEFA Europa play and the Premier League, Villa is 6-0-0 over that stretch with a 15-5 scoring margin. That run of play stands in stark contrast to the club’s sluggish start, which included zero wins in six matches covering Premier League and Carabao Cup play. Speaking on Friday, the Spaniard said he was unsure whether Declan Rice, Cristhian Mosquera, William Saliba, or Leandro Trossard would be fit to feature. The door is ajar, then, for Unai Emery’s men to nick a win while the Gunners are not quite at full strength. Things are not so rosy for the hosts, though. Emi Martinez could stand to miss the match after he pulled out of the lineup to face Brighton with a back problem. Villa overcame his absence to eke out a narrow 4-3 victory at the AmEx Community Stadium, with Ollie Watkins’ brace ultimately making the difference. Last edited by vaqavy at Today 8:55 AM

Tiffany used the word people because she couldn’t think of anything else that was suitable, but it was stretching the word a bit to make it fit all the . . . people.

Suddenly Frodo noticed that a strange-looking weather-beaten man, sitting in the shadows near the wall, was also listening intently to the hobbit-talk. He had a tall tankard in front of him, and was smoking a long-stemmed pipe curiously carved. His legs were stretched out before him, showing high boots of supple leather that fitted him well, but had seen much wear and were now caked with mud. A travel-stained cloak of heavy dark-green cloth was drawn close about him, and in spite of the heat of the room he wore a hood that overshadowed his face; but the gleam of his eyes could be seen as he watched the hobbits.

Keep looking straight ahead. I’ll fuck you when I see fit.” I lasted less than two minutes before hammering into her from behind. Her elbows bucked and she let out a surprised gasp. My balls clenched. I growled and drove every inch of me into her. I came inside her. In thick, never-ending ropes, the head of my cock pressed as deep as it would go. When she realized what I’d done, her entire body tensed. Her pussy erupted around my cock, slicking it with her release. I slid out, watching as our cum cascaded past her lips and onto the marble. She collapsed on the tiles, resting on her back, a lazy grin adorning her face. I reached two fingers out, gathered my cum spilling out of her pussy, and tucked it back inside her cunt, remembering her words from earlier. “Is this what I do with my pee pee?” Arms sprawled out like a snow angel, she released a delighted giggle. In the pleasure meter, making her laugh came close second to making her come. “You came in me,” she whispered, almost bewildered. “I did.” And unfortunately, I wanted to do it again. And again. However many times she’d let me. She stretched, propping one of her feet over my thigh. “That glass heart of yours, Romeo… One day, I’m going to break it.” “If anyone can, Shortbread, it’s you.” I could give her a child without giving her my heart. And that was damn well what I planned to do.(Chapter 55)

As I trained you how to walk firm walk and loving your feet by taking good care of it now add warm up & stretching exercises for a sexy lags

The silence stretched. Was that all right, or should she be talking? Biddy had wanted to meet new people all her life. Now, though, she seemed to be outside her own body, looking at herself through a stranger’s eyes standing awkward and uncertain in ill-fitting clothes. She couldn’t find a way to get back into herself, and had no idea what she would say if she did.

the choice one makes between partners, between one man and another (or one woman and another) stretches beyond romance. It is, in the end, the choice between values, possibilities, futures, hopes, arguments (shared concepts that fit the world as you experience it), languages (shared words that fit the world as you believe it to be) and lives.

A rough sense of Baker’s real time frame can also be teased out from internal evidence. The inferential details that help us to anchor the work in some genuine calendar is the extreme weather he described in his single winter of observations. It is without doubt the extraordinary winter of 1962–1963, that Arctic season when snow – more than at any time for 150 years – lay thick on the ground for months. It was the coldest period recorded in southern England since 1740, and long stretches of the coast froze into solid sheets with incipient ice floes. Baker’s description of an Essex landscape snowbound from 27 December right through until the first week of March fits closely with the meteorological pattern of that period. While these details may suggest a rough template for the book’s time and place, Baker felt in no way bound by it.

Procrustes in modern dress, the nuclear scientist will prepare the bed on which mankind must lie; and if mankind doesn't fit - well, that will be just too bad for mankind. There will have to be some stretchings and a bit of amputation ... , only this time they will be a good deal more drastic than in the past.

I look at the augusteum and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic after all it is merely this world that is chaotic b ringing changes to us all threat nobody could have anticipated. The augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who i am what i represent whom i belong to or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday i might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough but tomorrow i could be a firework's depository, even in the eternal city says the silent augusteum . one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation. pizzaeria da michele Passato remoto In her world the roman forum is not remote nor is it past. It is exactly as present and close to her as i am. The bhagavata Gita that ancient Indian yogic test says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection. So now i have started living my own life, perfected clumsy as it may look it is resembling me now thoroughly. It was in a bathtub back in new York reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary that i first started mending my soul. My life had gone to bits, and I was so unrecognizable to myself that i probably couldn't have picked me out of a police lineup. But i felt a glimmer of happiness when i started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grip onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face first out of the dirt this is not selfishness but obligation you were given life it is your duty and also your entitlement as a human being to find somehtign beautiful within life no mattter how slight But i do know that i have collected me of late through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures into somebody much more intact . I have e put on weight I exist more now than i did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when i arrived here. And i will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person the magnification of one life is indeed an act of worth in this world, Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody s but my own . Hatha yoga one limb of the philosophy the ancients developed these physical stretches not for personal fitness but to loosen up their muscles and minds in order to prepare them for meditation, Yoga can also mean trying to find God through meditation through scholarly study. The yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition which i[m going to very simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Taoists call it imbalance Buddhism calls it ignorance Islam blames our misery on rebellion against god and the jedio Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin, Graduands say that unhappiness is that inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization needs and my friend Deborah the psychologist explains it desire is the design flaw the yogis however say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity we're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals alone with our fears and flaws an d resentment sand mortality we wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature, We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character we don't realize that somewhere within us all there does exist a supreme self is our true identity universal and divine . you bear God within your poor wretch and know it not.

Sacrifice demands purity, and isn’t worth as much without it. This is why people get so pissed off when athletes get busted for performance-enhancing drugs. If sport were merely a competitive quest for excellence, pharmaceutical augmentations would be considered an innovation, and their side effects would be considered the price of doing business. We would feel the same way about doped-up athletes that we do about doped-up musicians: it might make them better at what they do. It’s part of the world they live in, although it’s a shame when they overdose or die. But if deep down, we know that sport is the sacrifice of a hunter’s energy, then doping destroys the purity of the ritual, and that’s what leaves us feeling robbed. It also spurs people to cheer for younger elite cyclists like Taylor Phinney, who conspicuously eschew not only banned substances but milder performing-enhancing measures like “finish bottles,” the crushed-up caffeine pills and painkillers that riders gulp down in the home stretch.5 The nutritional taboos of the Paleo Diet mesh perfectly with this mythos. The living root of sport is why Jerry Hill does one-legged box jumps in the Games, coaching from the floor of the arena: no excuses. And it’s why, when we see Chris Spealler carrying a 150-pound ball across the stadium, it seems like one of the great, for-the-ages moments in sport.

way of a nasty joke. She did not take it very well.” “Indeed.” The inspector echoed Evelyn. “I should hate to think you have been attempting to question your guests, Lady Northmoor.” “I assure you, that is most definitely not the case.” Evelyn shook her head in what she hoped looked like genuine dismay. “I would never attempt to do such a thing against your strict orders.” “Lady Northmoor!” Doris exclaimed in a loud voice. “There you are! My goodness, I have been searching everywhere for you. Do excuse us, Detective Inspector, but I must get Lady Northmoor dressed for dinner otherwise she will be embarrassingly late.” He nodded and Evelyn following Doris to the stairs. As soon as they reached the sanctuary of her room, she held her head in her hands. “I have told so many half truths and complete stretches of the truth in the last few days, Doris, I don’t know whether I am coming or going.” “Oh Lady Northmoor!” Doris laughed. “You’ve been spending too much time with young Nora coming out with such things.” “I suppose I should say I’m quite befuddled or such like?” Evelyn shook her head. “I didn’t realise remembering to talk like a countess would be such hard work.” “Well, My Lady,” Doris said. “I think you’re doing a grand job. Now let us get you ready for dinner so you can carry that on.” After dinner, Tommy excused himself and met Evelyn and Aunt Em in the small room at the front of the house that he had appropriated for his own use earlier that summer. It had been the former smoking room of the grand old house and suited Tommy’s purposes perfectly. “Why must we hide in this poky old room?” Aunt Em asked as Tommy ushered them inside. Tommy waited until his aunt had a chance to look around her. “You were saying, Aunt Em?” “My apologies.” She inclined her head. “You have performed quite the transformation.” The heavy velvet curtains that had kept out the natural light, but kept in the stale smell of years of tobacco were gone. Tommy had kept the large desk in the corner and hadn’t taken down the dark panelling on the lower half of the walls. However, a fresh coat of white paint on the upper portion of the walls, proper light fittings, and a colourful rug in the middle of the room made it look entirely different. “Evelyn and I wanted to talk to you, Aunt Em,” Tommy said. “We must be quick as our guests will think we are exceedingly rude.” “I presume you have both been busy sleuthing your way around our guests?” “Of course,” Tommy said. “We couldn’t just leave things as they are.” “Absolutely not,” his aunt agreed. “As I said before that detective arrived, you are far more capable than he in apprehending the killer.

It’s better to sacrifice small stuff in the short-term than to postpone your happiness forever. You have to crouch before you can jump.

You’re exercising your horses to make them hard and fast and supple and fit. You’re exercising your gesiths. You need to be fit, too, fit in all ways. So we’re going to stretch that muscle. We’re going to stretch it every day.

of menopause—not to mention a potentially increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, as we’ll see in chapter 9. Medicine 2.0 would rather throw out this therapy entirely, on the basis of one clinical trial, than try to understand and address the nuances involved. Medicine 3.0 would take this study into account, while recognizing its inevitable limitations and built-in biases. The key question that Medicine 3.0 asks is whether this intervention, hormone replacement therapy, with its relatively small increase in average risk in a large group of women older than sixty-five, might still be net beneficial for our individual patient, with her own unique mix of symptoms and risk factors. How is she similar to or different from the population in the study? One huge difference: none of the women selected for the study were actually symptomatic, and most were many years out of menopause. So how applicable are the findings of this study to women who are in or just entering menopause (and are presumably younger)? Finally, is there some other possible explanation for the slight observed increase in risk with this specific HRT protocol?[*3] My broader point is that at the level of the individual patient, we should be willing to ask deeper questions of risk versus reward versus cost for this therapy—and for almost anything else we might do. The fourth and perhaps largest shift is that where Medicine 2.0 focuses largely on lifespan, and is almost entirely geared toward staving off death, Medicine 3.0 pays far more attention to maintaining healthspan, the quality of life. Healthspan was a concept that barely even existed when I went to medical school. My professors said little to nothing about how to help our patients maintain their physical and cognitive capacity as they aged. The word exercise was almost never uttered. Sleep was totally ignored, both in class and in residency, as we routinely worked twenty-four hours at a stretch. Our instruction in nutrition was also minimal to nonexistent. Today, Medicine 2.0 at least acknowledges the importance of healthspan, but the standard definition—the period of life free of disease or disability—is totally insufficient, in my view. We want more out of life than simply the absence of sickness or disability. We want to be thriving, in every way, throughout the latter half of our lives. Another, related issue is that longevity itself, and healthspan in particular, doesn’t really fit into the business model of our current

Hand that stretched I had never seen him there before, On the street where I tread every day to settle life’s daily score, There on the edges of pavement at its most conspicuous location, He knelt there with no sense of self promotion, With one hand held out from his thinning and tattered blanket, And he held it there in this position from the sunrise to the sunset, And everyone who passed by flung something towards him, Few tossed money, few tossed a thing or two, but most of them offered him looks grim, It was at these moments his hand retreated a bit, But then it reclaimed its stance that the man had for many years now deemed fit, And people looked at him, a few looked at the hand, Many, just like me, paused for a moment and thought of the causes for his life being so bland, Who could tell, no one, none of us, for only the hand knew of the strain, Of being stretched forever on the pillars of disdain and a lot of pain, Beside the man, next to the pavement, flowed a river, That stretched endlessly like his hand as if trying to reach out to its discreet lover, Because it flowed slowly, with no visible waves, no movement at all, But in reality it flowed deep into the veins of journey encompassing seasons all, The journey called life that just like kneeling man’s hand stretches endlessly, Through which we seek life, that evades us all tirelessly, Because finding it will be like the river meeting its lover, And then both the river and the hand would sink to a point lower, From where nothing can be retrieved once lost, Because there everything is a creation of the past, To be continued........

Out of luck Even this bold idea failed to work. At first the batteries were too heavy for the trio to carry. Then when they brought the radio from the crash site to the tail, they found that the electrical systems were incompatible: the plane used AC, the batteries supplied DC. Sewing for survival It was now apparent that the only way out was to climb over the mountains to the west. They also realized that unless they found a way to survive the freezing nights, they would die attempting the journey. So the survivors came up with an ingenious solution. They tore out large sections of fabric from clothing, gathered padding from the plane’s upholstery and got to work with a needle and thread from an emergency pack. Eventually they created a passable sleeping bag. It would fit three men inside, but would carry the lives of all sixteen of the remaining survivors. Hiking with hope On 12 December 1972, Parrado, Canessa and Vizintín set out to climb the mountain to the west. It was two months since the crash. As they climbed over the first peak their bodies struggled in the thinning oxygen. It was savagely cold at night, but the homemade sleeping bag kept them alive. After three days of trekking they met with a major disappointment. Cresting the shoulder of the mountain they expected to see the green countryside of Chile. Instead there was a sea of snow-bound peaks stretching out to the horizon. They were deeper in the mountains than they thought. They had tens of kilometres of high altitude hiking still to go. After the initial rush of despair the men again found hope, and through that, a positive plan of action. They had further to go, so they must be stricter with their

The notion of becoming more productive—to constantly increase our rate of doing—as a measure of success, is misleading. We are not machines. Productivity is a paradigm for the Industrial Era. Doing is an important aspect of our lives. But there are other things that matter much more. Like loving what we do, helping others or sharing our passion with those we love.

Shadows of elegant vases and expertly crafted sculptures stretched along the floor, and I kept to the darkness, creeping toward the two armored guards stationed on either side of the double doors up ahead, guarding the entrance to Queen Izla’s rooms. Too easy. When I was close enough, I shot out. In a whirl of movement, I slid behind the guard closest to me, barely fitting in the space between his back and the wall. “Miss me, Soren?” I whispered in the blonde guard’s ear at the exact moment my palm clamped over his hand that rested on the hilt of his sword, stopping him from drawing the blade. His smooth jaw clenched, and his muscles tensed reflexively, but a second later, he relaxed. “One of these days, I’m going to accidentally stab you, shadow girl,” he said, amusement in his voice. “I’d like to see you try,” I replied with a smirk.

Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either. Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt. No matter where we go, our love will stretch out to hold us, and that makes me feel like . . . like everything will be okay.

not only does stretching not “warm” your body and prepare it for exercise, but it can be harmful.

As a chief ingredient in the mythology of science, the accumulation of objective facts supposedly controls the history of conceptual change–as logical and self-effacing scientists bow before the dictates of nature and willingly change their views to accommodate the growth of conceptual knowledge. The paradigm for such an idealistic notion remains Huxley’s famous remark about “a beautiful theory killed by a nasty, ugly little fact.” But single facts almost never slay worldviews, at least not right away (and properly so, for the majority of deeply anomalous observations turn out to be wrong)... Anomalous facts get incorporated into existing theories, often with a bit of forced stretching to be sure, but usually with decent fit because most worldviews contain considerable flexibility. (How else could they last so long, or be so recalcitrant to overthrow?)

Sometimes I think we only recollect what we have remembered before. What we recall is having recalled something already, so our strongest and truest memories come from a chain of often recalled things, and in that chain, over the years, events get adjusted and sorted around and stretched to fit the way we see things along the way.

In other words, Berlin conceived shows as events more than as works. As a result, Berlin’s shows do not exactly represent the most enduring oeuvre in the American theater: only Annie Get Your Gun, the show that least obviously addresses its time, has enjoyed an unbroken string of productions that stretches from its premiere to the present. Yet by engaging with the here-and-now, with no apparent thought of posterity but mainly of the “mob” before him, Berlin distilled and packaged musical comedy conventions that resonated in the theater deep into the twentieth century even as they held to comedy’s ancient ideals. Above all—and this I think manifests the engine that drives all of his work—Berlin seems to have understood and embraced the idea that American musical theater is always, inescapably, about itself. He probably would have scorned the term metatheater, but the boot fits. All of his stage shows and films are in some way about theater, about putting on a show, about performing in public, and about the place that tested his mettle and nourished his craft: New York City. This is the case even in shows that are not chiefly set in New York. Annie Get Your Gun may be widely considered one of the “Western” musicals of the Oklahoma! age, but it is above all a show about “show business,” and it all takes place east of (or near to) the Mississippi River and ends up in New York, with plenty of swinging tunes that resonate more with postwar Manhattan than with Annie Oakley’s earlier America in Darke County,

squatted at the corner of the hutch one more time. They’d been trying for an hour to get it loaded, but no matter how many different angles they attempted, it was too heavy for him and Violet to move on their own, especially with Violet’s arm still in a cast. “Let me give it a try.” Barney stepped forward, and Nate scrutinized him. He didn’t appear frail by any stretch, but the man was nearly ninety years old. Nate didn’t want to be responsible for breaking him. “Barnabas Riley, step away from that hutch right this minute.” Gladys bustled into the room, pointing a spatula at her husband. Barney stepped back. “Busted.” But he nudged Nate and whispered, “I wasn’t really going to do it. Just had to show her I’m still willing.” Nate laughed with him, but Violet gave the hutch a regretful pat. “Looks like it wasn’t meant to be.” “Hold on a minute, dear. You’re the one we want to have this.” Gladys disappeared again. Nate and Violet both looked at Barney, but he threw his hands into the air. “Even after sixty-five years of marriage, I don’t understand everything about that woman.” He winked at them again. “Keeps me on my toes.” Three minutes later, Gladys reappeared. “I called Sylvia, and she said her grandson can come over to help us.” “That’s great.” Violet pulled out a chair to sit down and stifled a yawn. She looked exhausted. “In the morning,” Gladys finished. Violet dropped the hand that had been covering her yawn. “I’m sorry. I don’t think we can come back tomorrow.” “Of course not.” Gladys waved her objection away. “You can stay with us. It’s getting late anyway. You don’t want to drive back yet tonight.” Nate stole a subtle peek at the time. It was already eight o’clock. And Violet looked ready to drop. She gave him a questioning look, and he shrugged, hoping she would understand that meant it was up to her. “I guess that would work. The store is always closed on Mondays anyway.” Her eyes traveled to Nate. “Unless you need to be in the office.” He should be. He really should be. If Dad called and he didn’t answer, he would never hear the end of it. But right now, he cared more about what Violet needed. And she needed this hutch to save her store. “I don’t need to be in the office.” “Oh, but Tony―” Violet clasped his arm. She had a point there. He couldn’t leave his dog uncared for. “Unless.” Violet pulled out her phone. “Just a second.” She wandered toward the kitchen with the phone pressed to her ear. “Looks like I’m not the only one with a mysterious woman.” Barney chuckled so hard he broke into a coughing fit. “Oh, we’re―” “Neighbors.” Gladys rested a hand on her husband’s back. “We know.” Barney stopped coughing and straightened, shooting Nate a wink. Nate was about to argue more, but Violet stepped back into the room. Her smile was enough to steal his protest. “Sophie’s going to stop by to take care of Tony tonight and tomorrow morning. I hope you don’t mind, but I told her about your super-secret hiding spot for the spare key.” Nate pretended to be shocked. “How do you know about that?” “I saw you putting it under the mat the other day when you forgot your keys, remember?” He did remember. He had been especially enchanted by her laugh that day. It was amazing how many of his recent memories involved her. Including

I used to think that a story was something special. That it was the one key that could unlock the broken places in us. What you hold in your hand is the story of a broken writer who attempted to kill himself and failed who meets a broken actress who attempted to kill herself and failed and somewhere in that intersection of cracked hearts and shattered souls, they find that maybe broken is not the end of things, but the beginning. Maybe broken is what happens before you become unbroken. What's more, maybe our broken pieces don't fit us. Maybe all of us are standing around with a bag of the stuff that used to be us and were wondering what to do with it and until we meet somebody else whose bag is full and heart empty we can't figure out what to do with our pieces. And standing there, face to face, my bag of me over my shoulder, and your bag of you over your shoulder, we figure out that maybe my pieces are the very pieces needed to mend me but until we've been broken we don't have the pieces to mend each other. Maybe in the offering we discover the meaning, and value, of being broken. Maybe checking out and retreating to an island is the most selfish thing the broken can do because somewhere on the planet is another somebody standing around holding a bag of all the jagged pieces of themselves and they cant get whole without you. There was a time in my life when I unselfishly offered my gift. Risked everything. Emptied myself. And when I did, I found that more bubbled up. The well never ran empty. But then, life tore my heart in two and I swore I'd never never offer it again. That I'd never risk that. Maybe love, the real kind only wished for in whispers and the kind our hearts are hardwired to want, is opening up your bag of you and risking the most painful statement ever uttered between the stretched edges of the universe: "This was once me." Maybe that in and of itself is the story.

By the nature of their shape, kettlebells hang behind the hands and make the balancing act much easier. Now, for the first time, you can do a legit overhead squat. The KBs will stretch out your shoulders in no time flat—just keep on overhead KB squatting!

Get a light dumbbell, say ten pounds for an average lady and two to three times as much for a gentleman, and do one arm snatches two to three times a week followed by ab work and back and hamstring stretches. Do as much as you can stand; the sets, reps, and rest periods are up to you. Just make sure to have your heart checked beforehand and slowly ease into the program. And do not forget to synchronize your breathing with your movement, otherwise you will wilt in no time flat.

She reported that another hawk message had come in. Azania gave a very un-princess-like caper and a fist pump. “The reign of King Tyloric has ended!” YEEEERRRSSSS!! he thundered. Three windows up in the castle’s turrets shattered at the reverberation. Glass tinkled down. “Dragon, any chance we could think before we bellow?” Gnarr-t a chance. “I understand perfectly. Anyways, it is the best news since Ignis and Taramis decided to smile upon Solixambria.” He displayed at least fifty fangs in a grin so huge, the stretch caused his jaw joint to pop loudly. “Who’s the replacement, may I ask?” “Lord Harikic, who happens to be married to Queen Shariza’s younger sister, Immiriza.” “What is it with Humans and rhyming names?” “What is it with Dragons and silly Clan names, like Crusher, Grinder or Obliterator?” “That’s what they do.” “So practical,” she teased, inflicting a hug upon him. “Is it bad of me to feel vindicated? Before you ask, this man is a very different prospect. He –” “Knows what a bathtub is?” Consumed by a fit of helpless giggles, she gasped, “Dragon, I love you!” “Oh dear. Does Azerim know he’s lost your affections?” “Not like that, you ridiculous reptile.” Placing his right fist over his heart, he moaned in a high-pitched, knightly voice, “Oh, say it not, Azania, my verimost muse, for I have loved thee most fulsomely since the very first day I clapped paw upon thy peerless person! Woe, thou breakest at least one of mine five hearts. How shall this scorned creature ever become whole again?” This was too much for the Princess. She guffawed so hard that tears sprang into her eyes. She folded up in his paw, apparently unable to stand. He eyed the girl wriggling in his paw in a perfectly undignified state of hysterics. Ah, so this would be ‘rolling with laughter’ in Human parlance. The problem was that it was catching. What was it about yawns and laughter that was more infectious than the worst disease imaginable? Very soon, his roars of mirth shook the castle. Another two windows gave up the unequal battle and dropped their leaded glass into the courtyard with a loud crash. Inzashu, the Prince and at least twenty servants rushed out to see what the commotion was all about. “Celebrating Tyloric’s downfall,” Azania managed to explain between hiccoughs. Thundersong said, “This would be the same Tyloric who clapped Princess Azania in irons in his dungeon for a month, hoping she’d break and agree to marry Prince Floric.” “Floric the Flatulent? Gods, no!” several servants blurted out. One man ducked aside and deposited his breakfast in a nearby flowerbed. “Sorry …” “I understand perfectly,” Azania said.

blotches. “Because I adore you too much to let anything happen to you.” She frowned, a pained wince that looked as though I might as well have stabbed her in the gut. “But you could have waited it out, Asha. They might have never picked me. And, even if they had…” She jolted up and gripped her stomach, wincing as she fought for breath. Her pretty smile soured as she gritted her teeth. Agony stretched across my sister’s dainty features, contorting them and molding them until she finally managed to get the words out. “I would have rather died than… I can’t get through this, Asha. I won’t. The pain, it’s like it’s filling my lungs with water. I can’t. I can’t breathe.” I lifted myself onto my elbow and stroked her sweating

We moved to Eugene, Oregon, a small college town in the Pacific Northwest. The city sits near the source of the Willamette River, which stretches 150 miles north, from the Calapooya Mountains outside of town to its mouth on the Columbia. Carving its way between mountains, the Cascade Range to the east and the Oregon Coast Range to the west, the river defines a fertile valley where tens of thousands of years ago a series of ice age floods surged southwest from Lake Missoula, traveling over eastern Washington and bringing with their floodwaters rich soil and volcanic rock that now shore up the layers of its earth, alluvial plains fit for a vast variety of agriculture. The town itself is coated in green, hugging the banks of the river and spreading out up into the rugged hills and pine forests of central Oregon. The seasons are mild, drizzly, and gray for most of the year but give way to a lush, unspoiled summer. It rains incessantly and yet I never knew an Oregonian to carry an umbrella. Eugenians are proud of the regional bounty and were passionate about incorporating local, seasonal, and organic ingredients well before it was back in vogue. Anglers are kept busy in fresh waters, fishing for wild chinook salmon in the spring and steelhead in the summer, and sweet Dungeness crab is abundant in the estuaries year-round. Local farmers gather every Saturday downtown to sell homegrown organic produce and honey, foraged mushrooms, and wild berries. The general demographic is of hippies who protest Whole Foods in favor of local co-ops, wear Birkenstocks, weave hair wraps to sell at outdoor markets, and make their own nut butter. They are men with birth names like Herb and River and women called Forest and Aurora.

I love you. I miss you. Please get out of my house. Nothing today hasn’t happened before: I woke alone, bundled the old dog into his early winter coat, watered him, fed him, left him to his cage for the day closing just now. My eye drifts to the buff belly of a hawk wheeling, as they do, in a late fall light that melts against the turning oak and smelts its leaves bronze. Before you left, I bent to my task, fixed in my mind the slopes and planes of your face; fitted, in some essential geography, your belly’s stretch and collapse against my own, your scent familiar as a thousand evenings. Another time, I might have dismissed as hunger this cataloguing, this fitting, this fixing, but today I crest the hill, secure in the company of my longing. What binds us, stretches: a tautness I’ve missed as a sapling, supple, misses the wind.

So much has changed that I wonder if it will feel different when I read it again. If you're one person when you read a book, and then you change, does the book become different? Do the words stretch to fit the new version of who you are?

This person was in her, part of her, and now he’s not. He was once hers alone, and now, for the rest of her life, she’ll be sharing him with the world. It’s amazing to her how the human body can stretch, and she thinks that if the heart can, too, maybe it can stretch big enough to fit them all.

It seemed stupid that I had stayed in the cold stone room, knowing that as soon as the new day had crested, I was no longer in the Inquisitor’s service and no longer had to follow his orders. I finished eating and opened the package, revealing the complicated sections of leather pieces that somehow made up an outfit. Some of the sections were hardened with inlaid metal, a tarnished golden colour peeking through the stitching. I finally discerned something resembling the usual bodysuits worn beneath sectorian women’s clothing, though this one was different. It was thick brown leather, a silk underlining hidden on the inside. It moulded tightly to the body, two ovals cut into the sides, exposing the hips and the sides of the stomach and back. Some sort of covering fit over the top of the bodysuit, ending a few inches above the waist. The metal-inlaid patterns curved around the front of my chest and the top of my spine, connected with brown, buckled straps along my sides. A belted skirt slid over the hips, the belt pulling along the cut of the bodysuit, above my hips, another band looping around my hips. The skirt had two short layers. Yet another section of the outfit fit over my shoulders, metallic glimpses peering out from the leather that cupped my shoulders, attaching to the upper chest armour with straps. Another set of wraps covered my wrists and forearms, and I was glad to see the Inquisitor’s mark and the Spider’s mark disappearing from view. I was able to re-wear the same footwear, as there were also knee and thigh wraps in the same boiled brown leather that complemented the knee-high boots. The outfit was clearly some kind of warrior’s uniform. The Vold—and the Sentinels in particular—often wore revealing, scant clothing to show off their impressive physiques. With Calder’s cloak still on the ground, I could see half of his bare back above the golden armour that wrapped his torso. The muscles bunched and stretched as he pulled his forearm up for investigation. He had clearly stitched and re-dressed his wound after my dismal attempt at caring for it the night before. Despite my outfit showing so much skin, it was by far the heaviest thing I had ever worn, and I started to truly appreciate how quickly and silently Calder moved, weighed down as he must have been by so much armour. I tugged my hair over my shoulders, arranging the strands so that they might hide my face better. There was a lump in my throat when I stuffed everything back into my pack and muttered, “Done.

She used to love flying through the air with only her hands to keep her from falling. It was freeing in a way she needed. She remembered what Link had told her on their first day about sloughing off the fears and insecurities she had acquired by dealing with her aunt for years and realized that was exactly what she needed to do. Phina had always wanted to go her own way. She wasn’t one to fit in naturally or be a part of the norm. She wanted to walk to her own beat and not feel like it was necessary to apologize for it. However, her aunt had made her think she should be ashamed of herself, that she wasn’t good enough unless she conformed to what her aunt wanted. That ended up making her feel like she had to apologize for being who she was, even if she didn’t want to. She paused her handstand, lowered her legs, and stood. Phina stared in front of her though she didn’t focus on anything in particular. Was it really so simple? Accept who she was, don’t apologize for it, and don’t let anyone’s opinion make her feel like she was…less. It seemed easy in concept, but she didn’t think it would be quite as simple in practice. After years of feeling like she needed to be less, it wouldn’t just take one realization to make her feel like she could be herself, let alone become more. Still, the realization made her feel lighter and cleaner. Perhaps a few of those layers really had sloughed off. Phina closed her eyes and decided to just let go and relax. A song popped into her head and she started moving to that inner music, shaking off the nerves and turning stretches into dance moves. When her muscles had loosened up again, she opened her eyes and eyed the corridor as she stopped moving.

The knowledge comes to me slowly at first and with no initial fear, seemingly a part of this dreamlike shower. I’m in love with him. For a long second, I try out the knowledge for fit, and it does. It fits and fills all the parts of me, stretching out perfectly until I can feel it in my bones. I love this grumpy, irascible, yet sometimes tender man. How could I not? I see now that all the rage he sometimes fills me with is the flipside to this feeling, the other side of the coin.

But if you know yourself well enough, you’ll be able to adjust your life, and your interactions with others, to better fit your personality—instead of trying to stretch your personality to fit someone else’s expectations.

What I could never tailor to fit the confines of an anecdote was a description of a place without people or events: a place where the landscape was not simply a backdrop. Seven-tenths of my human body is water. I spent the first nine months of my life suspended in fluid. A journey over water is not the same as a journey on land. But in my anecdotes I never found a way to even begin to explain this. I could not describe the things at sea which had moved me.

It’s amazing to her how the human body can stretch, and she thinks that if the heart can, too, maybe it can stretch big enough to fit them all.

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Those who’d engaged in aerobic exercise saw their hippocampi grow by about 2 percent over the year they’d been exercising. Considering that the hippocampus normally shrinks by 0.5 percent per year as we age, study participants had effectively walked away as much as four years of brain aging. And those who showed greater changes in their BDNF levels saw greater increases in their hippocampal volume—a sign that it was BDNF that was spurring growth in the hippocampus. By comparison, study participants in the stretching group—who on average didn’t improve their overall fitness—experienced about a 1.4 percent shrinkage in their hippocampi over the study period, about what you’d expect for this age group. Those who started out more fit,

I'd go on to reject it all, sure, but it was still part of me. When you're young, you just absorb your surroundings. Absorb, absorb, absorb like a tiny, stupid sponge, and then your bones grow around it, skin stretches to fit it.

One person’s truth is rarely exactly the same as someone else’s. Truth tends to stretch and bend out of shape to best fit its owner. People remember things differently and our memories can make liars of us all.

wore a suit, but even in that Kelly could see his body was hard and fit under it—his tall, lean form toned and strong. His intense gaze made her breath go ragged. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be alone in the room with him if he had this kind of effect on her with his aunt and cousin with them. Jack sat on the edge of his desk, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles in front of him, arms crossed over his chest. He watched her quietly while she finished chatting with his aunt. Kelly wrapped things up and ushered Mabry out the door by four o’clock as she made excuses about her fiancé needing to get back to work. She closed the door behind his aunt and turned to Mr. Sutton. That’s when Kelly felt the ground fall out from under her and her world tilt on its axis. As she faced Jack Sutton she found herself feeling shaken and uneasy. She looked up at him and realized that, in essence, she had just waltzed into his office and proposed. “I can’t believe I did that.” She began to pace frantically. She wrapped her arms around her waist and circled the room. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” She might hyperventilate. She slid down onto the couch that sat along the longest wall in Jack’s office and tried to breathe, but ended up taking in huge gulps of air that felt as if they might choke her. For the first time since she came up with her harebrained scheme to get her hands on enough money to attend Yale Law School, the reality of what she had done hit her like a ton of bricks. She’d just proposed to one of the country’s most eligible bachelors. And he’d said yes.

might seem like meditation is a fit here, but many people find meditating energizing. So we don’t usually recommend meditating before bed. Breathwork can be nice, though, just concentrating on long, easy breaths: Inhale for a slow count of four, and let the breath fall out in a slow exhale for a count of six. Do this for five to 10 minutes, then relax and breathe normally. You’ll likely find that your breath has “stretched” and become fuller, longer, and easier.

I’ve always passionately believed in the power of the state to improve lives. Before my career in AI, I worked in government and the nonprofit sector. I helped start a charity telephone counseling service when I was nineteen, worked for the mayor of London, and co-founded a conflict resolution firm focused on multi-stakeholder negotiation. Working with public servants—people stretched thin and bone-tired, but forever in demand and doing heroic work for those who need it—was enough to show me what a disaster it would be if the state failed. However, my experience with local government, UN negotiations, and nonprofits also gave me invaluable firsthand knowledge of their limitations. They are often chronically mismanaged, bloated, and slow to act. One project I facilitated in 2009 at the Copenhagen climate negotiations involved convening hundreds of NGOs and scientific experts to align their negotiating positions. The idea was to present a coherent position to 192 squabbling countries at the main summit. Except we couldn’t get consensus on anything. For starters, no one could agree on the science, or the reality of what was happening on the ground. Priorities were scattered. There was no consensus on what would be effective, affordable, or even practical. Could you raise $10 billion to turn the Amazon into a national park to absorb CO2? How are you going to deal with the militias and bribes? Or maybe the answer was to reforest Norway, not Brazil, or was the solution to grow giant kelp farms instead? As soon as proposals were voiced, someone spoke up to poke holes in them. Every suggestion was a problem. We ended up with maximum divergence on all possible things. It was, in other words, politics as usual. And this involved people notionally on the “same team.” We hadn’t even gotten to the main event and the real horse-trading. At the Copenhagen summit a morass of states all had their own competing positions. Now pile on the raw emotion. Negotiators were trying to make decisions with hundreds of people in the room arguing and shouting and breaking off into groups, all while the clock was ticking, on both the summit and the planet. I was there trying to help facilitate the process, perhaps the most complex, high-stakes multiparty negotiation in human history, but from the start it looked almost impossible. Observing this, I realized we weren’t going to make sufficient progress fast enough. The timeline was too tight. The issues were too complex. Our institutions for addressing massive global problems were not fit for purpose.

The next criteria is fit. How does this practice fit with your real family? You might ask yourself, and talk with your partner about: • Does this idea fit who we are—our family’s personality, culture, and overall vibe? • Does it fit this season of our life together, or would it possibly be better in another season? • Does this practice stretch us, but in a good way? • Are we doing this because I think we “should”? • Do my kids seem to enjoy or resist this practice? The key is to move from the long list of options to just two or three things to start with. There is always time to add more later on, but too much at once will be overwhelming. You’re creating a sustainable rhythm, not doing Extreme Home Makeover: Faith Edition.

Just a few miles north and west of the city, only a few miles up the Mississippi River, began one of the wealthiest and most fertile stretches of agricultural land in North America: Louisiana’s famed German Coast. Germans had originally settled the area before being overwhelmed by French immigrants and, in many cases, frenchifying their names and their culture in order to fit in with the new dominant group.

Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either. Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that looses their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt. No matter where we go, our love will stretch out to hold us, and that makes me feel like…like everything will be ok.

No other personal item was more painful to see than a lost person’s shoes. Shoes were life. They represented the journey, the travels, the destinations of their owners. They stretched to fit their master. They conformed to that person’s shape. They carried the dust from where one had gone and pointed in the direction of the future. Shoes were life. And there was nothing sadder than a pair of shoes that would never be used by their owner again. Barely able to move, she stepped aside

Ruric clung to me and shouted, "Your father." Looking down below I saw my father running after us, several alarmed guards trailing him. As I watched, the High Lord's slight demon shape began to shimmer in a remarkable transformation that stretched him out and out and up into a huge and long, black serpentine dragon. It was a glorious sight, one I'd never thought to see. He launched himself gracefully into the air amidst shouted protests from his guards, a large dragon smile on his face that showed more free and delighted emotion than I'd ever seen on his face. ..."His poor guards. An eight-member team set out at a dead run after us. They must be having a hissy fit over my father taking off like that, alone, unguarded. Although I couldn't imagine what could possibly be of threat to a four-ton, fire-breathing dragon.

Just because you can make it fit doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Stretching out your brand to fit an oversized idea often does more harm than good.

She says Ariel is going to interview me after she's done and he's going to ask me how many golf balls can fit into a stretch limo, and the right answer is to make reasonable estimates on the spot, maybe say, "It's probably like 100 golf balls high by 60 golf balls wide by 1,000 golf balls long," and to look like I'm thinking really hard, and then just do the math in my head and give him the answer. I ask, "Out of curiosity, what would a wrong answer be?" She says, "Freaking out about the question.

Luke, thank you. You’ve made it all so wonderful, so good. Hold me,” she said. “Let me fall asleep against you, in your arms.” He held her there, like that, stretched over his body, her head resting against his shoulder. She might weigh a hundred and ten pounds to his one-eighty, and she fit against his chest perfectly. He ran his hand down her back and over her soft bottom, stroking her, listening as her breathing evened out, as she sighed in her sleep. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, he thought. I hope I don’t screw it up.

History in the Middle East has a marvelous elasticity. It is easily stretched, twisted, compressed in the hands of its custodians, squeezed to fit into any thesis of righteous cause or pious grief. But it also has a way of springing back into an inconvenient form, a shape made of hard reminders. Certain features of the past remain as immutable as the ancient stones in Jerusalem—the Western Wall of huge Herodian blocks, the outcropping of bedrock from which Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven, the stone core of Calvary now encased in ornate grillwork and marble in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The stones are cool to the touch, to the lips, to the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian fingers that tremble as they reach out in faith. The people are imprisoned by history. To draw the boldest outlines of the past is to make Israel’s basic case. To sketch the present is to see the Arabs’ plight.

How long’s the ride?” I asked. Berleand looked at his wristwatch. “About thirty seconds.” He may have overestimated. I had, in fact, seen the building before—the “bold and stark” sandstone fortress sitting across the river. The mansard roofs were gray slate, as were the cone-capped towers scattered through the sprawl. We could have easily walked. I squinted as we approached. “You recognize it?” Berleand said. No wonder it had grabbed my eye before. Two armed guards moved to the side as our squad car pulled through the imposing archway. The portal looked like a mouth swallowing us whole. On the other side was a large courtyard. We were surrounded now on all sides by the imposing edifice. Fortress, yeah, that did fit. You felt a bit like a prisoner of war in the eighteenth century. “Well?” I did recognize it, mostly from books by Georges Simenon and because, well, I just knew it because in law-enforcement circles it was legendary. I had entered the courtyard of 36 quai des Orfèvres—the renowned French police headquarters. Think Scotland Yard. Think Quantico. “Soooo,” I said, stretching the word out, gazing through the window, “whatever this is, it’s big.” Berleand turned both palms up. “We don’t process traffic violations here.” Count

She felt as wild and free as a little kid, running up the steps with Shane in hot pursuit, and when he grabbed her around the waist and spun her around into his room and kicked the door shut, she squealed in delight. And wiggled to fit herself against his warm, hard body as she kissed him again, breathless and flying. He kissed like their lives depended on it. Like it was an Olympic event and he intended to earn a medal. Somewhere in the back of her head she was chattering to herself, warning that this was going to go too far, that she was just making things worse for both of them, but she couldn't help it. Before long they were stretched out together on Shane's bed, and his big, warm hands were teasing under the hem of her shirt, stroking the fluttering skin of her stomach and stealing her breath. She lost it all when he spread his fingers out, pressing his palm flat against her, and she felt an almost irresistible impulse to feel those hands all over. Everywhere. Her heart was hammering hard enough to make her dizzy, and it was all just so ... Perfect.

Physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body, it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity.” John F. Kennedy

Father and the child were no longer speaking, but they sat together in silence. The child was at his feet, and he sat, up in his throne, his eyes on the sky as well. It made her smile. They existed beneath the same stretch of stars. They loved the same night blanket above them. She looked at him, taking the opportunity to relish in his distraction to study him, his midnight hair, his pale body, only barely covered by the cloak, the fur of it distractingly like his hair, his lips just parted enough that his fangs were visible, his deep violet eyes, his long, elegant fingers, stroking the… She swallowed back pain that rose up her throat as she watched Father stroking the boy’s hair. Sitting together like that, the similarities between them were bewitching. She frowned, glancing once, disdainfully at the wavy-haired child with the slanted green eyes, walking to her Father’s throne and bending her knee in a bow. There was a sound like a chuckle, and she looked up at him. He was smiling at her. It warmed the quiet cold in her chest. “Come,” he said in his sonorous voice, and the darkness whispered with it, a thousand voices in varying degrees of age, gender, depth and lifted sweetness, all speaking together. She moved closer to him, sitting where his arm wound around her shoulder, fitting them together like childish toy blocks.

shoes. Shoes were life. They represented the journey, the travels, the destinations of their owners. They stretched to fit their master. They conformed to that person’s shape. They carried the dust from where one had gone and pointed in the direction of the future. Shoes were life. And there was nothing sadder than a pair of shoes that would never be used by their owner again.

It got to the point where he didn’t even look up at the sky any more as he blundered back and forth. The human mind had evolved for just one universe, he thought. How much of this crap was he supposed to take? He felt exhausted, resentful, bewildered. “Wait.” He paused. He had loped out of the portal onto another stretch of scuffed, anonymous regolith. She was lying in his arms, her weight barely registering. He looked down into her face, and pushed up her gold sun visor. “Emma?” She licked her lips. “Look. Up there.” No Galaxy visible, but a starry sky. The stars looked, well, normal. But he’d learned that meant little. “So what?” Emma was lifting her arm, pointing. He saw three stars, dull white points, in a row. And there was a rough rectangle of stars around them—one of them a distinctive red—and what looked like a Galaxy disc, or maybe just a nebula, beneath … “Holy shit,” he said. She whispered, “There must be lots of universes like ours. But, surely to God, there is only one Orion.” And then light, dazzling, unbearably brilliant, came stabbing over the close horizon. It was a sunrise. He could actually feel its heat through the layers of his suit. He looked down at the ground at his feet. The rising light cast strong shadows, sharply illuminating the miniature crevices and craters there. And here was a “crater” that was elongated, and neatly ribbed. It was a footprint. He stepped forward, lifted his foot, and set it down in the print. It fit neatly. When he lifted his foot away the cleats of his boot hadn’t so much as disturbed a regolith grain. It was his own footprint. Good grief. After hundreds of universes of silence and remoteness and darkness, universes of dim light and shadows, he was right back where he started.

Not a word to Molly,” he whispered to Harry as he opened the trunk and showed him how it had been magically expanded so that the luggage fitted easily. When at last they were all in the car, Mrs. Weasley glanced into the back seat, where Harry, Ron, Fred, George, and Percy were all sitting comfortably side by side, and said, “Muggles do know more than we give them credit for, don’t they?” She and Ginny got into the front seat, which had been stretched so that it resembled a park bench. “I mean, you’d never know it was this roomy from the outside, would you?” Mr.

I pulled on a pair of shorts and did two hundred and fifty Hindu push-ups, five hundred Hindu squats, several minutes of neck bridges, front and back, and a variety of other bodyweight calisthenics and stretches. What you can get done with nothing more than a floor, your bodyweight, and gravity in thirty minutes of nonstop activity would put the fitness equipment industry out of business if people caught on.

Celaena cocked her head as Nehemia emerged to stand along the sidelines of the large white circle. The princess met her stare and lifted her chin in encouragement. She wore a spectacular outfit: close-fitting pants, a layered tunic studded with whorls of iron, and knee-high boots; she carried her wooden staff, which stretched as high as her head. To honor her, Celaena realized, her eyes stinging. One fellow warrior acknowledging the other.

That girl could make friends with the meanest croc alive with little more than a smile and a laugh. You, on the other hand, made her work for it.” “Did you just compare me to a mean old croc?” Kerry asked, the thread of amusement back in her tone. “If the tough hide fits,” he said, but not unkindly. Kerry nodded, gave him a considering look. “True that,” she said. She picked her way over a tricky stretch of kelp-covered rock, then added, “Maybe I was trying to save her from her own friendly nature.” She looked back as Cooper hopped his way over the last pile, his heavy-booted feet sinking into a narrow stretch of sand before starting over the next rock bed. “I knew I was going to leave. You all did. No point in breaking hearts.” She held his gaze more directly now, turning back slightly to look at him full on. “I might be a tough old croc, but I’m not heartless.” “I didn’t say--” “You didn’t have to.” She opened her mouth, closed it again, then took in a slow, steadying breath, letting the deep salt tang tickle the back of her throat and the tart brine of the sea fill her senses. Anything to keep his scent from doing that instead. “As a rule, I don’t do good-byes well. I know that about myself. I also know that I have the attention span of a sand fly. A well-intentioned sand fly,” she added, trying to inject a bit of humor, mostly failing judging by the unwavering look in his eyes. “So, given my wanderlusting, gypsy life, I learned early on to keep things friendly and light. Easy, breezy. I’ve made friends all over the world, but none so close that--” “That missing them causes a pang,” he added, “Here maybe,” he said, pointing at his own head. “But not here.” He pointed at her chest, more specifically at her heart. This was how they were, how they’d been from the start. Finishing each other’s sentences, following each other’s train of thought, even when the exchange of words was a bare minimum. She glanced up into his steady gaze and thought, or when there’d been no words at all. That was why they’d worked so well together. And also why she’d had a tough time keeping her feelings for him strictly professional…She’d forgotten how threatening it felt, to have someone read her so easily. Most folks never look past the surface. Cooper--hell, the entire Jax family--hadn’t even blinked at surface Kerry before barreling right on past all of her well-honed, automatically erected barriers. “Like I said,” she went on, “I don’t do good-byes well.” She continued walking down the beach then, knowing she was avoiding continued eye contact, but it was unnerving enough that he was here, in her personal orbit, in her world. Her home world. Wasn’t that invasive enough? “Would a postcard or two have killed you?” he finally asked her retreating back. “Not for me; I never expected one.” She didn’t glance back at that, but just as he knew her too well, she knew him the same way. She’d heard that little hint of disappointment, of long-held hope. Of course the very fact that he was there, on her beach, was proof enough that he’d had hopes where she was concerned. And in that moment, she thought, the hell with this, and stopped. Running halfway around the world apparently hadn’t been far enough to leave him and all of what had transpired between her and the entire Jax family behind. So why did she think she could escape it along the span of one low-tide beach?

Through the years I experimented with all different types of materials and frames. Finally, I settled upon one that was so simple, easy, and inexpensive to use that it was almost ridiculous. Then I began growing all different types of plants vertically. I originally thought I would need to design some special way to hold up and accommodate heavier fruits such as winter squash and pumpkins, but as it turned out, these plant vines seemed to understand the situation; the stem supporting the heavy fruit grows thicker and heavier as the fruit becomes larger. If you have a framework and support that will hold the plant, the plant will hold the fruit; it is as simple as that! Mother Nature always seems to know best. Pea and bean netting can be stretched taut across a box frame and held in place by four metal posts. Plants will then grow up through the netting and be supported. Best Material I use the strongest material I can find, which is steel. Fortunately, steel comes in tubular pipe used for electrical conduit. It is very strong and turns out to be very inexpensive. Couplings are also available so you can connect two pieces together. I designed an attractive frame that fits right onto the 4 × 4 box, and it can be attached to the wooden box with clamps that can be bought at any store. Or, steel reinforcing rods driven into the existing ground outside your box provide a very steady and strong base; then the electrical conduit slips snugly over the bars. It’s very simple and inexpensive to assemble. Anyone can do it—even you! To prevent vertically grown plants from shading other parts of the garden, I recommend that tall, vertical frames be constructed on the north side of the garden. To fit it into a 4 × 4 box, I designed a frame that measured 4 feet wide and almost 6 feet tall. Tie It Tight Vertically growing plants need to be tied to their supports. Nylon netting won’t rot in the sun and weather, and I use it exclusively now for both vertical frames and horizontal plant supports. It is very strong—almost unbreakable—and guaranteed for twenty years. It is a wonderful material available at garden stores and in catalogs. The nylon netting is also durable enough to grow the heavier vine crops on vertical frames, including watermelons, pumpkins, cantaloupes, winter and summer squashes, and tomatoes. You will see in Chapter 8 how easy it is to train plants to grow vertically. To hold the plants to the frame, I have found that nylon netting with 7-inch square openings made especially for tomato growing works well because you can reach your hand through. Make sure it is this type so it won’t cut the stem of the plant when it blows against it in the wind. This comes in 4-foot widths and can easily be tied to the metal frame. It’s sometimes hard to find, so call around.

Am I then to believe that the same God Who expends millions of years in slowly fitting this earth for man's habitation, will only allow to man himself a few fleeting years, or months, or hours, as it may be, as his sole preparation time for eternity? To settle questions so unspeakably great in their issue -questions stretching away to a horizon so far distant that no power of thought can follow them-in such hot haste, does seem quite at variance with our heavenly Father's ways. Is God's action outside man so slow, and within man so hurried? Is the husk of far more value than the seed? Are millions of years allotted to fashioning man's earthly home, while for man's spiritual training for eternity, but a few brief years are given, and these so largely broken up by sleep, by work, by disease, by ignorance? What should we say -to take a homely illustration -of an arrangement allotting 10,000 years to fashioning a man's coat, or building his house, while assigning to his whole education but a few hours?

Even though one can work from home in yoga pants every day, one simply should not. Those suckers stretch, making it difficult to recognize how lax one has been in shutting one's pie hole. Then, when it comes time to don cut-off shorts with buttons or a bathing suit (cue blood-curdling scream), one realizes the false sense of security one has been enjoying since said yoga pants still fit, while none of one's non-stretchy clothes do. Do yourself a favor, and vow to only wear stretchy athletic wear when actually doing athletic endeavors—the athleisure trend be damned!—and to change into structured clothing immediately after said athletic endeavor. Shower optional.

The Florida School for the Deaf and Blind fits right in among St. Augustine’s stately bearded oaks and rock coral walls, looking more like a college campus than anything else. It’s the largest facility of its kind in the world. Because stomping on cement hurts, deaf students cup one hand against the wall and bark a short hoh to get each other’s attention from a distance. The sound echoes up and down the halls and kids stop to see if it’s them being hailed. Deaf couples stretch the boy’s T-shirt forward, dip their faces into the neck, and sign inside for privacy. Their faces almost touch. Fabric ripples with hidden movements. Watching them, my inner adolescent feels a twinge of jealousy.

People still said that “The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire,” even though the Commonwealth was starting to come apart. In spite of the obvious, it was unthinkable that the United States had a colony in Africa; well they had one, and that was where I was headed! World War II had been over for ten years and in Europe they were getting on with things and for now all was well in Africa, and with the World! Unless especially fitted out, aircraft didn’t have the range to cross the Atlantic in one jump, so after leaving Idlewild Airport in New York City, we flew halfway across the Atlantic Ocean to the Portuguese island of Santa Maria in the Azores. After refueling and stretching our legs we continued on to Lisbon. Our layovers were only for as long as it took to take care of business. There were no days built in, for me to have a leisurely, gentlemanly, civilized journey to my destination. Instead my seat was beginning to feel as hard as a rock pile. The engines continued to drone on as the Atlantic Ocean eventually gave way to the Iberian Peninsula. My view of Portugal was only what I could see from the air and what was at the airport. Again we landed for fuel in Lisbon, and then without skipping a beat, headed south across the Mediterranean to the North African desert. The beaches under us, in Morocco and the Spanish Sahara, were endless and the sand went from the barren coastal surf inland, to as far as the eye could see. With very few exceptions there was no evidence of civilization.

Abrams voice cut in over the comm. “My God, this place is breath-taking!” “It is a palace for the gods,” added Brock. The group stood gawking at the magnificence of the hall surrounding them. Delanda went to the table, placed her helmet and pack on it, and began pulling tablets, scanners, and other accessories out. She wrestled off her gloves, but had trouble with the suit torso so Wilson had to intervene and help. Without a thought to the revealing fit of the white stretch suit liner, she escaped the spacesuit bottom and placed it on the table. Then, with still no self-consciousness at all, she stripped the suit liner off down to athletic bra and slim panties and pulled her pink, rolled up vacuum-packed flight coveralls and cloth boots from the suit pack. After excitedly dressing, she hurriedly grabbed a scanner from her pack and began investigating the hall. Show over, one by one we all removed our suits and became visitors in white suit liners. Wilson gave his fatherly warning. “Everyone be very careful removing and folding those liners. If you tear or damage the thermal control system in any way you could have an unpleasant trip back to the ship. Also, be careful to tuck in your suit communicator since we’ll all be using wrist coms from now on. That is if they actually work here.” Delanda ignored his comments and headed for the far end of the hall. Wilson pulled on black coveralls, R.J.’s were farmhouse blue, Brock and Wen light green, Abrams in hospital scrubs green, and Sharma’s and Ansara’s in tan. Mine were captain’s blue. As we studied our celestial surroundings, Delanda returned and spoke in a commanding voice. “Gentlemen, if you would grab your tablets and gather around me here at this magnificent table we should get started.” For the first time there was a unanimous look of annoyance, although everyone quickly complied. R.J. and I stood opposite her feeling like two school kids being ushered around on a field trip. Delanda checked to be sure everyone was paying attention. “Okay, I’m assuming our intranet will work in here even though we’re out of contact with the ship. Let’s try it. All of you use your tablets to access mine and copy the file titled: Translations. Let me know if anyone has trouble.” Delanda’s tablet appeared on our screens. As she had guessed, there were no problems getting in. Once copied, I opened the file and found dozens of Altair symbols, some highlighted, most grayed-out. “Okay, everyone got in? Right? Okay, the symbols you see highlighted are the ones I believe I have a rudimentary translation for. Those that are in gray, your guess is as good as mine.” “How do you propose we proceed?” asked Brock. “Speaking as an experienced field researcher, I would suggest one of us photographs and documents this first chamber thoroughly while the rest of us split up and do the same with other chambers, periodically reporting back here after each excursion. We should have one central person remain here to monitor the progress of everyone in the event they get into trouble. I would think that would be you, Commander Mirtos, since you are the best at rescue. Does anyone have any objections?” R.J. leaned over. “I believe this is a non-hostile takeover. Are you going to step in?” “Not until she says something I disagree with.” Delanda continued. “So, if no one has any objections the first order of business will be to photograph every wall symbol we find along with any artifacts possibly associated

Yukiko walked over, her mouth stretching into a feline grin at the sight of Murakami. Naomi followed a moment later. She was wearing another elegant black cocktail dress, this one silk, fitted at the waist but loose above it. The diamond bracelet glittered on her left wrist as before. She saw me, and her expression started to break into a smile that aborted itself when her eyes shifted from my face to Murakami’s. She must have known him, and, based on the story I had told her, obviously didn’t expect to see us together. She was trying to process the incongruity, certainly. But the suddenness of her change of expression told me there was more. She was scared.

As the bus headed into the night, I noticed that the bench seat in the back of the bus was vacant. So I took my blanket and pillow, made my way to the back and stretched out. Rumbling along I was vaguely aware of the stops we made, but the night passed quickly. Eventually it started getting light outside, but looking around I saw that most people were still sleeping, including a Negro woman wearing a Navy uniform. She was a WAVE and must have boarded the bus sometime during the night. I had no idea where we were, but it didn’t matter as long as we were heading west. Slowly the passengers woke up and looked around, including the young Negro lady. I never had a problem talking to people, so, striking up a conversation, I discovered that she was going home to Oklahoma City. I told her about being a cadet at Farragut and that I was now heading to California for the summer. Time always goes faster when there is someone to talk to and we had the entire back of the bus to ourselves. The first inkling that something was wrong came when we got off the bus for a rest stop in Little Rock, Arkansas. The driver told me that it wasn’t fitting to sit in the back of the bus with a Negro. I was dumbfounded, and coming from the North, I didn’t understand. I tried to explain that this woman was wearing the uniform of her country, but it didn’t make any difference. That’s just the way it was in the South! We ran into the same kind of bigotry in the diner at our next rest stop, but before I could make an issue out of it, she hushed me up and explained that she just wanted to go home and didn’t need any problems. The two of us sat in the section for “Negroes Only,” where they served her but not this white boy, which is what I was called, along with other derogatory remarks. Never mind, I shared her sandwich and I guess they were just glad to get rid of us when we boarded the bus again. Behind me, I heard someone say something about my being a “nigger lover”.... Big as life, I sat in the back again! This time no one said anything and everything seemed forgotten by the time she got off in Oklahoma City. Another driver came aboard and took over. Saying goodbye to my friend, I got up and moved back to the seat I had had originally -- the one over the big hump for the rear tires!

Max spread my legs and knelt between them. The tip of his cock pressed against my hole and a shiver ran down my spine. “Oh, fuck. I’ve been thinking about this since the last time.” I had been. The thought of his dick up my ass was firmly rooted in the back of my mind no matter my task. “You mean last night?” He snorted. I lifted my head and saw his reflection; he was smiling. “I…” Max pressed his tip inside me. Yeah, I completely forgot what I was going to say. My whole body clenched up and then relaxed as he gently coaxed his length deeper. “Fuck it all to Earth, that feels amazing.” He kept pushing forward, slowly piercing me. “Yes, yes it does.” I grunted when he went deeper, spreading, filling, overpowering. Then Max leaned over me. He practically laid on me, his front pressed along my back. His hands stretched out, falling over mine and our hands twined together. Being that I was shorter it was the perfect position to hold my hands and fuck me. He softly placed kisses along my shoulder and licked my earlobe. “Elric. I love you.” Those words made me smile as wide as I could. He loved me! Max eased his cock out and then back in. His pace was completely controlled, forcing me to experience unending pleasure as his words swirled in my head. “Max,” I muttered against the blankets. Each thrust made my dick slid against the pants under my hips. I squeezed his hands harder as he humped me. His teeth grazed the back of my neck. He was breathing heavier. His movements were a bit more rushed. My cock was swelling to the brim. Between his beautiful length stabbing me and my dick rubbing along that material, I was going to blow. I could feel the tension building. My balls were tight to my body, the pressure too much. I moaned, meeting Max thrust for thrust. He groaned in my ear. Our warm bodies squirmed against each other. “Oh, yes. Please. Yes.” It felt so good. I had to come. Please, I’m so close. Almost. Almost there. Max went deep in one long, slightly painful move. The mixture sent me right over the edge. I let out a moan too low to hear as my orgasm spilled out. Even as I rutted against the pants Max held still, holding my hands and letting me ride the wave of pleasure. I was in sensation overload as cum sprayed out of my slit. Warm and sticky, I thrusted one last time and then collapsed. Max started again, slowly working his way deeper and then pulling out. Once, twice, then three times. I counted each move as I closed my eyes and savored the feeling of his body over mine. He was like a cocoon of warmth and … cock. Yeah, that sounded accurate. “Max.” He started moving faster, his length slipping in and out of my ass. “Max.” He squeezed my hands and kissed my shoulder. “Max.” He came, his body erupting behind me as he started in a fit of groans. They echoed in the room as he emptied into me. When he slowed to a stop, we both laid there a moment.

I’m sure he’s just out roaming around. That’s what cats do. Alley cats. Although the odds of Mugsy being able to fit into most alleys is a stretch…

Shanahan and I were roommates for a while, and crosswords fit well into our relationship. When we weren’t doing that we spent a fair amount of our leisure time in some form of trivia contest, usually Jeopardy! or movie trivia. We got along great, other than the fact that Shanny always did his stretching routine in the buff.

accept, believe, and know – without doubt or hesitation – that ALL things are blessing you, teaching you, and benefiting you.   God is stretching out his hand all the day long.   It is only when we try to separate ourselves that we suffer.   But as we submit humbly, willingly, full of faith - and even cheerfully - to everything that God sees fit to place in our experience, then we find consistent joy, fulfillment, peace, and progress.

Another precaution is to avoid overflexion of the knee joint when doing quadriceps stretches (i.e., bringing the heel toward the buttocks). Practice