Super Short Quotes

You look ridiculous,” Wren said. “What?” “That shirt.” It was a Hello Kitty shirt from eighth or ninth grade. Hello Kitty dressed as a superhero. It said SUPER CAT on the back, and Wren had added an H with fabric paint. The shirt was cropped too short to begin with, and it didn’t really fit anymore. Cath pulled it down self-consciously. “Cath!” her dad shouted from downstairs. “Phone.” Cath picked up her cell phone and looked at it “He must mean the house phone,” Wren said. “Who calls the house phone?” “Probably 2005. I think it wants its shirt back.

Super-secret Ninja Club sounds way cooler than the whole BFF thing.

I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond! I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial! I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers. I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail. But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!

We should leave people alone about their weight. Being skinny for a while (provided you actually eat food and don't take pills or smoke to get there) is a perfectly fine pastime. Everyone should try it once, like a super-short haircut or dating a white guy.

If you’re super tall, don’t be a dick and stand in front of a short person.

Connor; "Push me and you might just find yourself locked in the trunk of a car and on a ferry headed off to Nova Scotia. . .Again" he said Softly loving the way she practically shook with rage against him. "I knew that was you, you bastard" She snarled, looking torn between going for his nipples again or just out right killing him. "You deserved it", he felt obligated to remind her. She scoffed. "I was twelve!" "you super glued my shorts to my ass!" the smile that teased her lips transformed her face from beautiful to breathtakingly beautiful in a matter of seconds. . . She chuckled softly as she moved to put a little space between them. "I actually forgot about that".

How You Doing, Little Lucy?” His bright tone and mild expression indicates we’re playing a game we almost never play. It’s a game called How You Doing? and it basically starts off like we don’t hate each other. We act like normal colleagues who don’t want to swirl their hands in each other’s blood. It’s disturbing. “Great, thanks, Big Josh. How You Doing?” “Super. Gonna go get coffee. Can I get you some tea?” He has his heavy black mug in his hand. I hate his mug. I look down; my hand is already holding my red polka-dot mug. He’d spit in anything he made me. Does he think I’m crazy? “I think I’ll join you.” We march purposefully toward the kitchen with identical footfalls, left, right, left, right, like prosecutors walking toward the camera in the opening credits of Law & Order. It requires me to almost double my stride. Colleagues break off conversations and look at us with speculative expressions. Joshua and I look at each other and bare our teeth. Time to act civil. Like executives. “Ah-ha-ha,” we say to each other genially at some pretend joke. “Ah-ha-ha.” We sweep around a corner. Annabelle turns from the photocopier and almost drops her papers. “What’s happening?” Joshua and I nod at her and continue striding, unified in our endless game of one-upmanship. My short striped dress flaps from the g-force. “Mommy and Daddy love you very much, kids,” Joshua says quietly so only I can hear him. To the casual onlooker he is politely chatting. A few meerkat heads have popped up over cubicle walls. It seems we’re the stuff of legend. “Sometimes we get excited and argue. But don’t be scared. Even when we’re arguing, it’s not your fault.” “It’s just grown-up stuff,” I softly explain to the apprehensive faces we pass. “Sometimes Daddy sleeps on the couch, but it’s okay. We still love you.

I think it was Donald Mainstock, the great amateur squash player who pointed out how lovely I was. Until that time I think it was safe to say that I had never really been aware of my own timeless brand of loveliness. But his words smote me, because of course you see, I am lovely in a fluffy moist kind of way and who would have it otherwise? I walk, and let’s be splendid about this, in a highly accented cloud of gorgeousness that isn't far short of being, quite simply terrific. The secret of smooth almost shiny loveliness, of the order of which we are discussing, in this simple, frank, creamy sort of way, doesn't reside in oils, unguents, balms, ointments, creams, astringents, milks, moisturizers, liniments, lubricants, embrocations or balsams, to be rather divine for just one noble moment, it resides, and I mean this in a pink slightly special way, in ones attitude of mind. To be gorgeous, and high and true and fine and fluffy and moist and sticky and lovely, all you have to do is believe that one is gorgeous and high and true and fine and fluffy and moist and sticky and lovely. And I believe it of myself, tremulously at first and then with rousing heat and passion, because, stopping off for a second to be super again, I’m so often told it. That’s the secret really.

Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if "a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics". To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos. Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics. Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger, and so on. It happens that you need to set thirtysomething knobs to fully describe the world about us. The crucial point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned very precisely, or the universe would be sterile. Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn't exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleuses and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life.

Psychologist: "This, ah, is a new sort of, ah, psychopathology that we're only now beginning to, ah, understand. These, ah, super-serial killers have no, ah, 'type' but, ah, rather consider everyone to be their 'type.'" Gramma: "Did you hear that? Your daddy's a superhero!

—I’m like super short. 5′3″

If you plan to live longer than you’re supposed to, CoQ10 must be on your short list of supplements at 100 to 200 mg per day.

Don't stop at the Ford's because they're at Gerald Flatt's," a short kid says in passing. "Super dooper!" Granny's dentures clickity-clack. "Don't stomp on the Lord just because it's raining cats." She nods and adjusts her hearing aid. "Those are words to live by, little man!

In short, the advent of super-intelligent AI would be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. The real risk with AI isn’t malice but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours we’re in trouble.

perhaps that’s what it’s for – self-confidence and courage and energy and peace – perhaps it’s to be used in the world. Perhaps there’s only one thing to do with it: spend it. I’m always super-conscious of how whenever I go out into the world, whenever I get involved in a relationship, my idea of who I think I am utterly collides with the reality of who I actually am. And I continue to go out even though who I am always comes up short. I always prove myself to be less generous, less charming, less considerate, not as bold or energetic or intelligent or courageous as I imagined in my solitude. And I’m always being insulted, or snubbed, or disappointed. And I’m never in my pyjamas. And yet, in some way, maybe this is better. Each of us in this room could suffer the pangs of withdrawal and gain the serenity of the non-smoker. We could be demi-gods in our little castles, all alone, but perhaps, at heart, none of us here wants that. Maybe the only cure for self-confidence and courage is humility. Maybe we go out in order to fall short... because we want to learn how to be good at being people... and moreover, because we want to be people.

Effective parenting requires being the grown up version of what you want your children to be. Why? Because example is the most compelling superpower.

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Don’t faint, bitch. You’re wearing a super-short dress.

There's no marker on the entrance to this entire complex, or on many of the buildings, but if there was I would call this one "Super Secret Spy Swimming Complex", or SSSSC, for short.

help you brainstorm incremental goals that will keep your Monitor satisfied, but the super-short guidelines are: soon, certain, positive, concrete, specific, and personal.11 Soon: Your goal should be achievable without requiring patience. Certain: Your goal should be within your control. Positive: It should be something that feels good, not just something that avoids suffering. Concrete: Measurable. You can ask Andrew, “Are you filled with joy?” and he can say yes or no. Specific: Not general, like “fill people with joy,” but specific: Fill Andrew with joy. Personal: Tailor your goal. If you don’t care about Andrew’s state of mind, forget Andrew. Who is your Andrew? Maybe you’re your own Andrew. Redefining winning in terms of incremental goals is not the same as giving yourself rewards for making progress

My faux school uniform is like a power suit, my armor, a super hero’s costume that makes me feel on top of the world. Short skirt, white blouse, knee-highs and Mary Janes. When I wear this, I make the rules.

I sat on a bench and my mother stood in front of me, looking down the track. Her hair was cut short, and because it had all turned gray when she was twenty-three, she always had it dyed a deep chestnut brown. It was that color all over except for a super thin stripe at the top of her head, where the gray showed through. Sometimes I wanted to touch that place on my mother's head, that thin crack where her real self had forced its way through.

Well, to make a long story short, I had this long talk with my baseball coach. And I started reading about depression. I learned that it can be serious. You shouldn’t ignore it. Talking about it can help. So can a long trip.

Investing styles may differ among successful market players, but without exception, winning stock traders share certain key traits required for success. Fall short in those qualities and you will surely part ways with your money.

Of course, activity by itself doesn’t equal accomplishment, and certainly not success -- being busy just means being busy. I know many people who work super hard to fill up the spaces in their lives, so they won’t have to think. A wise colleague calls this “numbing out”. They may accomplish their goals, but they’re unlikely to be fulfilled or do truly creative work. I know other people who fill their free time with meaningless activities. They’re also busy, but they neither achieve much, nor are they satisfied.

Three wars back we called sauerkraut "liberty cabbage" and we called liberty cabbage "super slaw" and back then a suitcase was known as a "Swedish lunchbox." Of course, nobody knew that but me. Anyway, long story short... is a phrase whose origins are complicated and rambling.

Then, she’d take her shorts and roll them up so high that you could practically see her underwear. Really, it looked like she was wearing a giant diaper and had just taken a shit in her pants. However, everyone was super into it, so I was, like, well, obviously I gotta do that. But

And what nags me about this is that the source of my anxiety was exactly what Kierkegaard says the source of anxiety is, and what he praised in direct proportion to the volume any person possesses: possibility. The awareness that life is a series of choices any one of which could be either aggrandizing or disastrous. That this happens to be true I have no trouble signing on to. Any who has lived past the age of ten knows that even piddling actions can wind up having big consequences, and that even when you are super-conscious of your behaviors you can't know how things are going to turn out in the short- or the long-run. That's the drama of it all. On the one hand, your very existence means you can and will change things in your life and others. On the other hand, you aren't God, so everything is always going to be drenched in uncertainty and doubt.

They were black, white, and gray, with black around their eyes and white around their muzzles,” Leafstar replied. “They walk on four legs like we do, but they can stand on their hind paws like a Twoleg. And they can grip things like a Twoleg, with their front and back paws. Their ears are like ours, but they have short, pointed muzzles like a fox.

One went to two, two became four and the series continued. The more I tried to pull out the more I got pulled in. Constant fighting at home and bad academic grades made my new found world even more attractive. There there were no compulsions, no obligations; where you were the super-hero slaying beasts, demons and villains alike; where everything was perfect and reality was left far behind. Page 13, Addiction.

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations. The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out my garbage gcan, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the junior droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrapper. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?) While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of the morning: Mr Halpert unlocking the laundry's handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia's son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement's super intendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning English his mother cannot speak. Now the primary childrren, heading for St. Luke's, dribble through the south; the children from St. Veronica\s cross, heading to the west, and the children from P.S 41, heading toward the east. Two new entrances are made from the wings: well-dressed and even elegant women and men with brief cases emerge from doorways and side streets. Most of these are heading for the bus and subways, but some hover on the curbs, stopping taxis which have miraculously appeared at the right moment, for the taxis are part of a wider morning ritual: having dropped passengers from midtown in the downtown financial district, they are now bringing downtowners up tow midtown. Simultaneously, numbers of women in housedresses have emerged and as they crisscross with one another they pause for quick conversations that sound with laughter or joint indignation, never, it seems, anything in between. It is time for me to hurry to work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro, the short, thick bodied, white-aproned fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street, his arms folded, his feet planted, looking solid as the earth itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back at eachother and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know what it means: all is well. The heart of the day ballet I seldom see, because part off the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks. But from days off, I know enough to know that it becomes more and more intricate. Longshoremen who are not working that day gather at the White Horse or the Ideal or the International for beer and conversation. The executives and business lunchers from the industries just to the west throng the Dorgene restaurant and the Lion's Head coffee house; meat market workers and communication scientists fill the bakery lunchroom.

Smile bigger.” Now I know how to get through photo shoots, because I know every angle they need. I do this super weird thing for my friends where I just slightly move my face to do a speed round of each red carpet pose and photo shoot I’ve done. The big smile, eyes up and then down, the Mona Lisa, the chin-down-lips-parted, the “Oh hi!” . . . My friends scream because I look like a robot model shorting out. But let me tell you, it makes it easy on the photographers.

My client described her dreams in the same way I’d heard countless visitations depicted: super-vivid. Many report that the dreams felt almost like real-life memories. Whereas normal dreams are often nonsensical, inconsistent in chronology, and varyingly vague, spiritual dreams have an unmistakable sharpness. They also tend to be remembered as short interactions, regardless of time elapsed. To an intuitive person, dream visitations are conspicuous and very difficult to ignore.

He had one room above a thrift store. He had a trunk of books by Ayn Rand. He was short-sighted and reclusive, resisting pleas to take his photograph. He drew a super-hero comic. He saw the world in terms of black and white. He said 'A day's work for a day's pay. That is our one and only right.' He takes a card and shades one half of it in dark So he can demonstrate to you just what he means. He says, 'There’s black and there is white, And there is wrong, and there is right, And there is nothing, nothing in between.' That’s what Mr. A says.

If you like cool, funny entertainment, you might like this one. It's a first novel by a local author." She handed him a copy of Practical Demonkeeping. "A very different kind of buddy novel. I thought it was hilarious." "You're reading me like a book." The guy shook his head as if embarrassed by his own lame joke. Then he looked over at Blythe. Natalie saw his gaze move swiftly over her mother's red V-neck sweater and short skirt. "How can you tell that's exactly what would make me happy?" he asked. Oh boy. He was flirting. Guys did that a lot with her mom. She was super pretty, and Natalie knew it wasn't only because Mom was her mom and all kids thought their moms were pretty. Even her snottiest friends like Kayla said Blythe looked like a model. Like Julia Roberts. Plus, her mom had a knack for dressing cool and being social---she could talk to anyone and make them like her. Also, she had a superpower, which was on full display right now. She had the ability to see a person for the first time and almost instantly know what book to recommend. She was really smart and had also read every book ever written, or so it seemed to Natalie. She could talk to high school kids about Ivanhoe and Silas Marner. She ran a mystery discussion group. She could tell people the exact day the new Mary Higgins Clark novel would come out. She knew which kids would only ever read Goosebumps books, no matter what, and she knew which kids would try something else, like Edward Eager or Philip Pullman. Sometimes people didn't know anything about the book they were searching for except "It's blue with gold page edges" and her mom would somehow figure it out.

Death duties in Harcourt’s time were a comparatively modest 8 percent on estates valued at £1 million or more, but they proved to be such a reliable source of revenue, and so popular with the millions who didn’t have to pay them, that they were raised again and again until by the eve of the Second World War they stood at 60 percent—a level that would make even the richest eyes water. At the same time, income taxes were raised repeatedly and other new taxes invented—the Undeveloped Land Duty, the Incremental Value Duty, the Super Tax—all of which fell disproportionately on those with a lot of land and plummy accents.

The billionaire investor and former senior executive at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, argues that we must rewire our brain to focus on the long term, which starts by removing social media apps from our phones. In his words, such apps, “wire your brain for super-fast feedback.” By receiving constant feedback, whether through likes, comments, or immediate replies to our messages, we condition ourselves to expect fast results with everything we do. And this feeling is certainly reinforced through ads for schemes to help us “get rich quick”, and through cognitive biases (i.e., we only hear about the richest and most successful YouTubers, not about the ones who fail).

Try a cognitive enhancer from the list in this chapter to promote healthy brain function and avoid cognitive degeneration as you age. Here is the short list: •​Piracetam: Reduces cognitive decline with age •​Modafinil: Performance enhancing, not anti-aging •​Nicotine: Low doses (not from cigarettes) can be helpful for aging and cognitive performance •​Deprenyl: Works on dopamine receptors for cognitive enhancement •​CoQ10: Helps your mitochondria produce energy •​PQQ: A powerful antioxidant for anti-aging •​L-theanine: An amino acid that helps with memory and mental endurance •​Curcumin: Improves memory and attention while acting as an antioxidant •​He Shou Wu: Longevity-enhancing antioxidant herb that can also help you regrow and regain color in your hair!

McCullough points out that early treatment does not just prevent hospitalization; it quickly starves pandemics to death by stopping their spread. “Early treatment reduces the infectivity period from 14 days to about four days,” he explains. “It also allows someone to stay in the home so they don’t contaminate people outside the home. And then it has this remarkable effect in reducing the intensity and duration of symptoms so patients don’t get so short of breath, they don’t get into this panic where they feel they have to break containment and go to the hospital.” McCullough says that those hospital trips are tinder for pandemics, especially since, at that point, the patient is at the height of infectivity, with teeming viral loads. “Every hospitalization in America—and there’s been millions of them—has been a super-spreader event. Sick patients contaminate their loved ones, paramedics, Uber drivers, people in the clinic and offices. It becomes a total mess.” McCullough says that by treating COVID-19 at home, doctors actually can extinguish the pandemic.

This is simply the long history of the origin of responsibility. That task of breeding an animal which can make promises, includes, as we have already grasped, as its condition and preliminary, the more immediate task of first making man to a certain extent, necessitated, uniform, like among his like, regular, and consequently calculable. The immense work of what I have called, "morality of custom", the actual work of man on himself during the longest period of the human race, his whole prehistoric work, finds its meaning, its great justification (in spite of all its innate hardness, despotism, stupidity, and idiocy) in this fact: man, with the help of the morality of customs and of social strait-waistcoats, was made genuinely calculable. If, however, we place ourselves at the end of this colossal process, at the point where the tree finally matures its fruits, when society and its morality of custom finally bring to light that to which it was only the means, then do we find as the ripest fruit on its tree the sovereign individual, that resembles only himself, that has got loose from the morality of custom, the autonomous "super-moral" individual (for "autonomous" and "moral" are mutually-exclusive terms),—in short, the man of the personal, long, and independent will, competent to promise, and we find in him a proud consciousness (vibrating in every fibre), of what has been at last achieved and become vivified in him, a genuine consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of human perfection in general. And this man who has grown to freedom, who is really competent to promise, this lord of the free will, this sovereign—how is it possible for him not to know how great is his superiority over everything incapable of binding itself by promises, or of being its own security, how great is the trust, the awe, the reverence that he awakes—he "deserves" all three—not to know that with this mastery over himself he is necessarily also given the mastery over circumstances, over nature, over all creatures with shorter wills, less reliable characters? The "free" man, the owner of a long unbreakable will, finds in this possession his standard of value: looking out from himself upon the others, he honours or he despises, and just as necessarily as he honours his peers, the strong and the reliable (those who can bind themselves by promises),—that is, every one who promises like a sovereign, with difficulty, rarely and slowly, who is sparing with his trusts but confers honour by the very fact of trusting, who gives his word as something that can be relied on, because he knows himself strong enough to keep it even in the teeth of disasters, even in the "teeth of fate,"—so with equal necessity will he have the heel of his foot ready for the lean and empty jackasses, who promise when they have no business to do so, and his rod of chastisement ready for the liar, who already breaks his word at the very minute when it is on his lips. The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over himself and over fate, has sunk right down to his innermost depths, and has become an instinct, a dominating instinct—what name will he give to it, to this dominating instinct, if he needs to have a word for it? But there is no doubt about it—the sovereign man calls it his conscience.

I believe that social media, and the internet as a whole, have negatively impacted our ability to both think long-term and to focus deeply on the task in front of us. It is no surprise, therefore, that Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, prohibited his children from using phones or tablets—even though his business was to sell millions of them to his customers! The billionaire investor and former senior executive at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, argues that we must rewire our brain to focus on the long term, which starts by removing social media apps from our phones. In his words, such apps, “wire your brain for super-fast feedback.” By receiving constant feedback, whether through likes, comments, or immediate replies to our messages, we condition ourselves to expect fast results with everything we do. And this feeling is certainly reinforced through ads for schemes to help us “get rich quick”, and through cognitive biases (i.e., we only hear about the richest and most successful YouTubers, not about the ones who fail). As we demand more and more stimulation, our focus is increasingly geared toward the short term and our vision of reality becomes distorted. This leads us to adopt inaccurate mental models such as: Success should come quickly and easily, or I don’t need to work hard to lose weight or make money. Ultimately, this erroneous concept distorts our vision of reality and our perception of time. We can feel jealous of people who seem to have achieved overnight success. We can even resent popular YouTubers. Even worse, we feel inadequate. It can lead us to think we are just not good enough, smart enough, or disciplined enough. Therefore, we feel the need to compensate by hustling harder. We have to hurry before we miss the opportunity. We have to find the secret that will help us become successful. And, in this frenetic race, we forget one of the most important values of all: patience. No, watching motivational videos all day long won’t help you reach your goals. But, performing daily consistent actions, sustained over a long period of time will. Staying calm and focusing on the one task in front of you every day will. The point is, to achieve long-term goals in your personal or professional life, you must regain control of your attention and rewire your brain to focus on the long term. To do so, you should start by staying away from highly stimulating activities.

Looking back on all my interviews for this book, how many times in how many different contexts did I hear about the vital importance of having a caring adult or mentor in every young person’s life? How many times did I hear about the value of having a coach—whether you are applying for a job for the first time at Walmart or running Walmart? How many times did I hear people stressing the importance of self-motivation and practice and taking ownership of your own career or education as the real differentiators for success? How interesting was it to learn that the highest-paying jobs in the future will be stempathy jobs—jobs that combine strong science and technology skills with the ability to empathize with another human being? How ironic was it to learn that something as simple as a chicken coop or the basic planting of trees and gardens could be the most important thing we do to stabilize parts of the World of Disorder? Who ever would have thought it would become a national security and personal security imperative for all of us to scale the Golden Rule further and wider than ever? And who can deny that when individuals get so super-empowered and interdependent at the same time, it becomes more vital than ever to be able to look into the face of your neighbor or the stranger or the refugee or the migrant and see in that person a brother or sister? Who can ignore the fact that the key to Tunisia’s success in the Arab Spring was that it had a little bit more “civil society” than any other Arab country—not cell phones or Facebook friends? How many times and in how many different contexts did people mention to me the word “trust” between two human beings as the true enabler of all good things? And whoever thought that the key to building a healthy community would be a dining room table? That’s why I wasn’t surprised that when I asked Surgeon General Murthy what was the biggest disease in America today, without hesitation he answered: “It’s not cancer. It’s not heart disease. It’s isolation. It is the pronounced isolation that so many people are experiencing that is the great pathology of our lives today.” How ironic. We are the most technologically connected generation in human history—and yet more people feel more isolated than ever. This only reinforces Murthy’s earlier point—that the connections that matter most, and are in most short supply today, are the human-to-human ones.

There appeared among our letters in 1988 a remarkably vivid account from a woman in Australia, who had been doing housework in the middle of the day when some very strange creatures had abruptly appeared in her sitting room. She observed a willowy being with dark, slanted eyes and a group of short, stocky ones in “brown shrouds,” who seemed to her to be workers, while the tall one was more of a supervisor. It proceeded to overpower her with its mind while the workers moved about in the background, doing what she could not imagine. After a ferocious mental struggle, during which she literally tried to crawl out of the house as she could no longer walk, all went dark. When she woke up, it was hours later. She never found out what had happened to her during that missing time. Presumably, though, the creatures who put her through this ordeal know—and perhaps, also, that is something close to the secret of the ages. In any case, one wonders, looking at Lorie Barnes’s story and the story of the Australian woman, if we are not seeing the outline of a very remarkable and unsuspected structure: we are the kobolds. They are us working, somehow, in the fields of the soul. And one day, many of the living will join them down this very strange path, as we enter this other level of humanity, where what is hidden to us in this state, is the grammar of their ordinary truth.

The Transition to Fewer Animal Products Many people claim to need animal products to feel good and perform well. In my experience, this assertion generally comes from individuals who felt worse during the first couple of weeks after a change to a lower-animal-source diet. Instead of being patient, they simply returned to their old way of eating—genuinely feeling better for it—and now insist that they need meat to thrive. A diet heavily burdened with animal products places a huge stress on the detoxification systems of the body. As with stopping caffeine and cigarettes, many people observe withdrawal symptoms for a short period, usually including fatigue, weakness, headaches, or loose stools. In 95 percent of such cases, these symptoms resolve within two weeks. It is more common that the temporary adjustment period, during which you might feel mild symptoms as your body withdraws from your prior toxic habits, lasts less than a week. Unfortunately, many people mistakenly assume these symptoms to be due to some lack in the new diet and go back to eating a poor diet again. Sometimes they have been convinced that they feel bad because they aren’t eating enough protein, especially since when they return to their old diet they feel better again. People often confuse feeling well with getting well, not realizing that sometimes you have to temporarily feel a little worse to really get well.

In her eyes, he could see the fear, but also the love. The need. Time to show her, that to him, she meant everything. “Before you shower me with kisses for saving you –” “I think it could be argued that I played a part.” “Not when I retell the story you won’t. But we can argue about that later, naked. As I was saying, I have something for you.” Remy pulled the sheet of paper out of his back pocket and unfolded it. Initially he’d worried about it being too short. But as Lucifer assured him when he made the contract and binding, the less clauses he put in, the more his promise would stick out. Handing it to her, he waited. Fidgeted when she didn’t say a word. Almost tore it from her grasp. Then stumbled back as she threw herself at him. I, Remy, the most awesome demon in Hell, do declare to love the witch Ysabel, fiery temper and all, for an eternity. I will never stray. Never betray her trust. Never do anything to cause her pain upon penalty of permanent death. This I do swear in blood, Remy A simple contract, which in its very lack of clauses and sub items, awed her. “You love me that much?” He peered at her with incredulity on his face. “Of course I love you that much. Would I have done all the things I did if I didn’t?” “Well, you are related to a mad woman.” “Yes, and maybe it’s madness for me to love you, but I do. Do you think just any woman would inspire me enough to take on a bloody painful curse. Or put up with the fact you have a giant, demon eating cat. I know you have trust issues, and that I might not have led the kind of life that inspires confidence, but I will show you that you can believe in me. I want you to love me.” “I know you do. And I do love you. Only for you would I come to the rescue wearing nothing to cover my bottom.” His eyebrows shot up. “You came to battle in a skirt without any underwear?” A slow nod was her answer. He grinned, then scowled. “You will not do that again. Do you know how many demons live in the sewer and could have looked up your skirt? I won’t have them looking at what’s mine. On second thought. Throw out all your underwear. I’ll lead the purge on the sewers myself so you can stroll around with your girl parts unencumbered for my enjoyment.” “You’re insane,” she laughed. “Crazy in love with you,” he agreed. “But I do warn you, we’ll have to have dinner with my crazy mother at least once a month.” “Or more often. I quite like your mom. She’s got a refreshing way of viewing the world.” “Oh fuck. Don’t tell me she’s already rubbing off,” he groaned, as he pulled her into his arms. She snuggled against him. This was where she belonged. But she did have a question. “As my new… what should I call you anyway? Boyfriend? Demon I sleep with?” “The following terms are acceptable to me. Yours. Mate. Husband. Divine taster of your –” She slapped a hand over his mouth. “I’ll stick to mate.” “And I’m going with my super, sexy, touch her and die, fabulous cougar, ass kicking witch.” “I dare you shout that five times in a row without stumbling.” He did to her eye popping disbelief. “I told you, I have a very agile tongue.” “I remember.

The piece would be a searing indictment of the super-rich. He would expose, remorselessly, those hypocrites and cynics who publicly denied the catastrophe of climate change while secretly short-selling that very same position and hedging all their bets; the millionaires and billionaires who preached self-reliance while accepting vast handouts in the form of subsidies and easy credit, and who bemoaned red tape while building contractual fortresses to shield their capital from their ex-wives; the tax-dodging economic parasites who treated state treasuries like casinos and dismantled welfare programmes out of spite, who secured immensely lucrative state contracts through illegitimate back channels and grubby, endlessly revolving doors, who eroded civil standards, who demolished social norms, and whose obscene fortunes had been made, in every case, on the back of institutions built with public funding, enriched by public patronage, and rightfully belonging to the public, most notably, the fucking Internet; the confirmed sociopaths who were literally vampiric with their regular transfusions of younger, healthier blood; the cancerous polluters who consumed more, and burned more, and wasted more than half the world’s population put together; the crypto-fascist dirty tricksters who pretended to be populists while defrauding and despising the people, who lied with impunity, who stole with impunity, who murdered with impunity, who invented scapegoats, who incited suicides, who encouraged violence and provoked unrest, and who then retreated into a private sphere of luxury so well insulated from the lives of ordinary people, and so well defended against them, that it basically amounted to a form of secession.

The wonder of evolution is that it works at all. I mean that literally: If you want to marvel at evolution, that’s what’s marvel-worthy. How does optimization first arise in the universe? If an intelligent agent designed Nature, who designed the intelligent agent? Where is the first design that has no designer? The puzzle is not how the first stage of the bootstrap can be super-clever and super-efficient; the puzzle is how it can happen at all. Evolution resolves the infinite regression, not by being super-clever and super-efficient, but by being stupid and inefficient and working anyway. This is the marvel. For professional reasons, I often have to discuss the slowness, randomness, and blindness of evolution. Afterward someone says: “You just said that evolution can’t plan simultaneous changes, and that evolution is very inefficient because mutations are random. Isn’t that what the creationists say? That you couldn’t assemble a watch by randomly shaking the parts in a box?” But the reply to creationists is not that you can assemble a watch by shaking the parts in a box. The reply is that this is not how evolution works. If you think that evolution does work by whirlwinds assembling 747s, then the creationists have successfully misrepresented biology to you; they’ve sold the strawman. The real answer is that complex machinery evolves either incrementally, or by adapting previous complex machinery used for a new purpose. Squirrels jump from treetop to treetop using just their muscles, but the length they can jump depends to some extent on the aerodynamics of their bodies. So now there are flying squirrels, so aerodynamic they can glide short distances. If birds were wiped out, the descendants of flying squirrels might reoccupy that ecological niche in ten million years, gliding membranes transformed into wings. And the creationists would say, “What good is half a wing? You’d just fall down and splat. How could squirrelbirds possibly have evolved incrementally?

GUAC AD HOC   Hannah’s 1st Note: This is Howie Levine’s guacamole recipe. He’s Lake Eden’s most popular lawyer. 2 ounces cream cheese 4 ripe avocados (I used Haas avocados) 2 Tablespoons lemon juice (freshly squeezed is best) 1 clove garlic, finely minced (you can squeeze it in a garlic press if you have one) cup finely chopped fresh oregano leaves 1 Italian (or plum) tomato, peeled, seeded, and chopped 4 green onions, peeled and thinly sliced (you can use up to 2 inches of the green stem) ½ teaspoon salt 10 grinds of freshly ground pepper (or tea spoon) ½ cup sour cream to spread on top Bacon bits to sprinkle on top of the sour cream Tortilla chips as dippers Howie’s Note: I use chopped oregano because Florence doesn’t always carry cilantro at the Lake Eden Red Owl. This guacamole is equally good with either one. Heat the cream cheese in a medium-sized microwave-safe bowl for 15 seconds on HIGH, or until it’s spreadable. Peel and seed the avocados. Put them in the bowl with the cream cheese and mix everything up with a fork. Mix just slightly short of smooth. You want the mixture to have a few lumps of avocado. Add the lemon juice and mix it in. It’ll keep your Guac Ad Hoc from browning. Add the minced garlic, chopped oregano leaves, tomato, sliced green onion, salt, and pepper. Mix everything together. Put your Guac Ad Hoc in a pretty bowl, and cover it with the sour cream. Sprinkle on the bacon bits. If you’re NOT going to serve it immediately, spread on the sour cream, but don’t use the bacon bits. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate it until time to serve. Then sprinkle on the bacon bits. (My bacon bits got a little tough when I added them to the bowl and refrigerated it. They were best when I sprinkled them on at the last moment.) Hannah’s 2nd Note: Mike and Norman like this best if I serve it with sliced, pickled Jalapenos on top. Mother won’t touch it that way. Yield: This amount of Guac Ad Hoc serves 4 unless you’re making it for a Super Bowl game. Then you’d better double the recipe.

The little sneak caught me one day, coming around the car when I was outside puffing away. “I was wondering what you were doing,” he said, spying me squatting behind the truck. He’d nailed me, but the look on his face made it seem as if our roles were reversed--he looked as if he were in shock, as if I’d just slapped him. When I went back inside, I found he’d taped signs to the walls: DON’T SMOKE! I laugh about it now, but not then. “Why are you so devastated that I’m smoking?” I asked when I found him. “Because. I already lost one parent. I don’t want to lose you, too.” “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I told him. “I’m going to stop.” But of course it wasn’t nearly that easy. As horrible as I felt, I was deep into the habit. I would quit for a while--a day, an hour--then somehow a cigarette would find its way to my mouth. I continued to rationalize, continued to struggle--and Bubba continued to call me out. “I’m trying,” I told him. “I’m trying.” He’d come up and give me a hug--and smell the cigarette still on me. “Did you have one?” “Yes.” “Hmmmm…” Instant tears. “I’m trying, I’m trying.” One day I went out to the patio to take what turned out to be a super stressful call--and I started to smoke, almost unconsciously. In the middle of the conversation, Bubba came out and threw a paper airplane at me. What!!! My son scrambled back inside. I was furious, but the call was too important to cut short. Wait until I get you, mister! Just as I hung up, Bubba appeared at the window and pointed at the airplane at my feet. I opened it up and read his message. YOU SUCK AT TRYING. That hurt, not least of all because it was true. I tried harder. I switched to organic cigarettes--those can’t be that bad for you, right? They’re organic! Turns out organic tars and nicotine are still tars and nicotine. I quit for day, then started again. I resolved not to go to the store so I couldn’t be tempted…then found myself hunting through my jacket for an old packet, rifling around in my hiding places for a cigarette I’d forgotten. Was that a half-smoked butt I saw on the ground? Finally, I remembered one of the sayings SEALs live by: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Not exactly the conventional advice one uses to stop smoking, but the conventional advice had failed me. For some reason I took the words and tried applying them to my heartbeat, slowing my pulse as it ramped up. It was a kind of mini-meditation, meant to take the place of a cigarette. The mantra helped me take control. I focused on the thoughts that were making me panic, or at least getting my heart racing. Slow is smooth. Slow down, heart. Slow down--and don’t smoke. I worked on my breathing. Slow is smooth. Slow is smooth. And don’t smoke.

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If you plan to live longer than you’re supposed to, CoQ10 must be on your short list of supplements at 100 to 200 mg per day. Advanced anti-aging experts often recommend idebenone, a synthetic pharmaceutical that is similar to coenzyme Q10 and is shown to improve skin and help brain cells stay healthy35 and improve learning and memory in mice.

Hmm,” said Tammy, “and once more your naive optimism regarding the human species reveals its hopeless disconnect with reality. While it was well-established that prior to the Great EM Pulse following the Benefactors’ arrival in Earth orbit, virtually every human being on the planet had already become a drooling automaton with bloodshot eyes glued to a pixelated screen, even as the world melted around them in a toxic stew of air pollution, water pollution, vehicles pouring out carcinogenic waste gases, and leaking gas pipelines springing up everywhere along with earthquake-inducing fracking and oil spills in the oceans and landslides due to deforestation and heat waves due to global warming and ice caps melting and islands and coastlines drowning and forests dying and idiots building giant walls and—” “All right, whatever!” Hadrian snapped. “But don’t you see? This is the future!” “Yeah, that statement makes sense.” “The future from then, I mean. Now is their future, even if it’s our now, or will be, I mean—oh fuck it. The point is, Tammy, we’re supposed to have matured as a species, as a civilization. We’re supposed to have united globally in a warm gush of integrity, ethical comportment, and peace and love as our next stage of universal consciousness bursts forth like a blinding light to engulf us all in a golden age of enlightenment and postscarcity well-being.” “Hahahaha,” Tammy laughed and then coughed and choked. “Stop! You’re killing me!” Beta spoke. “I am attempting to compute said golden age, Captain. Alas, my Eternally Needful Consumer Index is redlining and descending into a cursive loop of existential panic. All efforts to reset parameters yield the Bluescreen of Incomprehension. Life without mindless purchase? Without pointless want? Without ephemeral endorphin spurts? Without gaming-induced frontal lobe permanent degradation resulting in short-tempered antisocial short-attention-span psychological generational profiles? Impossible.” “The EMP should have given us the breathing space to pause and reevaluate our value system,” said Hadrian. “Instead, it was universal panic. Riots in Discount Super Stores, millions trampled—they barely noticed the lights going out, for crying out loud.

We need to change the ways in which we talk about humanity and the environment and in order to do so, we need to change the way in which we think about them, not an easy task given that we use language to think and our languages make us conceive the environment as detached. A possible way out to help us approach problems, without being drawn back by the mental models that fail us, is Systems Dynamics (Meadows 2008; Sterman 2012). Unfortunately, Sterman explains, most efforts made by individuals and institutions to enhance sustainability are directed at the symptoms and not at the causes and systems (any system) will respond to any change introduced with what is known as ‘policy resistance’, that is the existing system will tend to react to change in ways that we had not intended when we first designed the intervention (a few examples are road-building programs designed to reduce congestion that ends up increasing traffic or antibiotics that stimulate the evolution of drug-resistant pathogens—for a longer list and further explanation see Sterman 2012, 24). Systems Dynamics allows us to calculate scientifically the way in which a complex system will react to change and to account beforehand for what we usually describe as ‘side-effects’. Side effects, Sterman argues, ‘are not a feature of reality but a sign that the boundaries of our mental models are too narrow, our time horizons too short’ (24). As Gonella et al. (2019) explain: ”As long as we consider the geobiosphere as a sub-system (a resources provider) of the human-made economic system, any attempt to fix environmental and social problems by keeping the business as usual, i.e., the mantra of economic growth, will fail. The reality tells us the reverse: geobiosphere is not a sub-system of the economy, economy is a sub-system of geobiosphere. As systems thinkers know, trying to keep alive at any cost the operation of a sub-system will give rise to a re-arrangement of the super-system – the geobiosphere – that will self-reorganize to absorb and make ineffective our attempt, then continuing its own way.” (Gonella et al. 2019)

Amid the round of congratulations after the battle, Constantine’s officers expressed their amazement. How had he managed to pull off this victory? He told them about the dream and the sign but confessed that its meaning was still a mystery to him. Then, it seems, one of Constantine’s Christian officers spoke up. That wasn’t a cross you saw, he said. It must have been a Greek letter khi (X) super-imposed not on a loop, but on another Greek letter, rho (P). As every Greek-speaking Christian knew, these were the first letters of Khristós, or Christ. The voice you heard, Constantine was told, must have been that of God Himself.3 Later, someone also pointed out that the X looked exactly like the cross that Plato described in Timaeus as the basic shape into which God fashioned the World Soul. In short, Constantine’s new labarum had the authority not only of Christ behind it, but of Plato as well.

I felt super-frustrated. We’d hired all these talented people and were spending tons of money, but we weren’t going any faster. Things came to a head over a top-priority marketing OKR for personalized emails with targeted content. The objective was well constructed: We wanted to drive a certain minimum number of monthly active users to our blog. One important key result was to increase our click-through rate from emails. The catch was that no one in marketing had thought to inform engineering, which had already set its own priorities that quarter. Without buy-in from the engineers, the OKR was doomed before it started. Even worse, Albert and I didn’t find out it was doomed until our quarterly postmortem. (The project got done a quarter late.) That was our wake-up call, when we saw the need for more alignment between teams. Our OKRs were well crafted, but implementation fell short. When departments counted on one another for crucial support, we failed to make the dependency explicit. Coordination was hit-and-miss, with deadlines blown on a regular basis. We had no shortage of objectives, but our teams kept wandering away from one another. The following year, we tried to fix the problem with periodic integration meetings for the executive team. Each quarter our department heads presented their goals and identified dependencies. No one left the room until we’d answered some basic questions: Are we meeting everyone’s needs for buy-in? Is a team overstretched? If so, how can we make their objectives more realistic?

Sometimes the lethal power is in the form of the simplest elements of all, air and water

They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through the mountains, cut down a thousand years of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn’t touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn’t be tainted. There was nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn’t cure.

A word of warning: The absolute worst thing you can do is ask yourself, What products are super popular right now? For example, I can’t tell you how many people I know chased fidget spinners or tried to sell diet supplements. Both trends exploded brightly, and, sure, some people made some money—but they couldn’t build a business, because fidget spinners are a one-off product that don’t serve a direct person, and diet fads change every year. Those people thought they had a business, but what they actually had was a short-term cash flow machine, and most of those sellers are out of business now that their flash-in-the-pan fad has fizzled out.

That’s what some grown-ups called Riley and his friends Ben, Briana, Jamal, and Mongo (whose real name was Hubert Montgomery but, because he was so huge, everybody called him “Humongo,” which quickly morphed into “Mongo”).

Briana came up the hall, hugging her books to her chest, trying to blend into the background of lockers. Riley touched his ear. She nodded and moved to the nearby water fountain where she could eavesdrop.

Mr. Ball was Fairview Middle School’s vice principal. Its disciplinarian. The guy who liked nothing better than running detention hall. He’d strut up and down the rows of chairs, tapping a ruler behind his back, his eyes darting from one inmate to the next, just itching to whip out his pink pad and give one of the troublemakers another hour in the after-school punishment zone.

Mr. Ball came through the front doors wrapped in a dull gray parka that made him look like a quilted pork sausage. He stomped snow off his rubber boots; shook it off his pant cuffs. Then he wiggle-waggled the large pair of tan hiking boots he held in his hand.

Riley had a strict ethical code for his team’s operations, too. They would never execute a caper that was just plain wrong. For instance, on Monday, an eighth grader named Steve Duffy had come to Riley’s office in the media center, begging for help.

In truth, Riley’s crew didn’t make trouble. They were fixers. The school’s go-to team of Robin Hoods. They only tried to right wrongs, protect innocent kids from bullies, look out for abused animals, and, basically, use their talents to do all the good they could.

Why, hello, Mr. Mack,” said Briana in a snooty, lockjaw voice, like she went to college in Connecticut. “I’m ever so delighted to see you again.

Briana would hit the locker room, change into her New Goth Girl disguise/costume, and then try to find a seat at Elyssa Shapiro’s table. It shouldn’t be hard. Nobody much wanted to sit with Elyssa except her nose- and eyebrow-studded friend with the purple hair, Charlotte Edelman.

Jamal Wilson came strutting into the library. He was the youngest and newest member of Riley’s “gnat pack.” That’s what Fairview’s sheriff, Big John Brown, called Riley Mack and the “other known troublemakers” he associated with. The sheriff thought they were a bunch of annoying little pests. Probably because the bully they busted most often was his son, Gavin Brown.

Riley and his crew usually met up in the library every morning before the first bell. After school, they’d meet up again at the Pizza Palace on Main Street. They were a little like firefighters or the Avengers. They were always ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice.

Riley put on his snow boots and coat and trudged across the ballfields to the scene of the “crime.” The edges of the FART letters were crusting over with ice. Riley wondered why Mr. Ball hadn’t sent out the custodians to plow away or cover up the word. Probably because it was on Old Man Jenkins’s property, not the school’s.

Riley scooched through a hole he knew about in the fence and carefully headed toward Mr. Jenkins’s elevated back porch. It was made of concrete and free of snow, shielded by an angled aluminum awning overhead. As he moved closer, Riley could see the tops of a pair of tan boots peeking out of a wooden crate pushed into a corner where the porch’s railings met the house’s brick wall.

Frowning in concentration, the three of them looked closer. Suddenly, the image came into much sharper focus. Brian stood in an old-fashioned basement, one with a high-bricked ceiling and an earthen floor. In an instant Min knew exactly where he was filming, because everybody knew about the most haunted house in Indiana, especially Min, who lived two short blocks away. She’d grown up hearing the stories: ghost children who ran through hallways, throwing pebbles—three at a time—at anyone who dared to come inside. Whispers of a man who haunted its empty windows, his withered skin as white as bone. Tattered curtains moved by the curl of a skeletal finger. Everyone called that house the Scary Place.

The three “Geekers” met almost every other day to figure out science riddles, just to keep their thinking sharp during the hot summer months. Today they had landed at Min’s, a white-and-gray modern home with lots of large, shiny windows and square furniture that looked like boxes. Since it was a hundred degrees with 87 percent humidity outside (Min knew it precisely, because at the moment she was studying meteorology), the Geekers were sprawled out in the family room, which was air-conditioned to a crisp seventy-two degrees.

Lame.” Jayid Kafir yawned, not even looking up from a map of glowing stars. He was stocky, with ears that stood out from his head like large seashells. Jayid was the one who geeked out over everything in the night sky. He always wore tee shirts with a different planet on the front. Today it was Mars.

Why are we here again?” Derrick asked, his green eyes narrowing into slits. Beads of sweat gathered along the edge of his hair and his hands were trembling. For someone who studied monstrous creatures from the ocean, Derrick seemed surprisingly nervous about the supernatural. Of course, thought Min, if Derrick didn’t want to see a vampire squid all he had to do was stay out of the ocean. A ghost could find you anywhere.

unfortunately, stupid was never in short enough supply.

FOCUS is one of the most valuable skills in business, and is becoming increasingly rare. If you can master this skill, you’ll achieve extraordinary results and make more money than most people. In his book, "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success In a Distracted World", Cal Newport says: “Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep – spending their days instead in a frantic blur of email and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way.” When I started writing a book a month, I have to admit, it was challenging. I quickly realized I had a focus problem. Coincidentally, I attended a book festival and picked up a book by Catherine Price, "How to Break Up With Your Phone", and discovered my life was being sucked away one text message, one social media post, and one email at a time. If I wanted to write a book a month, I needed to get my life and my time back. I read Catherine’s book, and the following especially resonated with me: “Today, just over a decade since smartphones entered our lives, we’re beginning to suspect that their impact on our lives might not be entirely good. We feel busy but ineffective… The same technology that gives us freedom can also act like a leash—and the more tethered we become, the more it raises the question of who’s actually in control.” I had lost control of my time and my ability to focus. It wasn’t an overnight event, it was a slow, insidious change that happened over a long period of time. Below are some other interesting statistics from Price’s book: Americans check their phones 47 times per day.

and then I spot him, crazy hot, I mean the most ridiculously handsomest sexiest man I’ve ever seen off screen, super cool, tall, broad shoulders, short dark hair and an aura of alpha sophistication.

Money changes everything. In Billionaires, a book by political scientist Darrell West, one member of the three-comma club brought up his “get-a-senator” strategy—a handy tactic, given that a lone senator can block objectionable legislation or pull strings on a favored donor’s behalf. West recalls how Senator Rand Paul held up Senate action for years on a treaty that would have forced Swiss banks to reveal the names of twenty-two thousand wealthy Americans who had assets stashed in overseas accounts, presumably to evade taxes. (An invasion of privacy, Paul insisted.) In another case, a billionaire hedge fund manager persuaded Democratic senator Edward Markey to write a letter to the SEC calling for an investigation of Herbalife, a multilevel marketing company the financier suspected of fraud, and whose stock he also happened to be short-selling. The effort paid off. After Markey’s letter was made public, Herbalife’s share price plummeted 14 percent.

I rang out a couple more customers as I thought about it, and...he slowly walked up to the counter and set down two spools of line. I should really figure out what the point of one being thicker than the other was. “Hi, Mr. Rhodes,” I greeted him with a smile. He’d taken his sunglasses off and slid them through one of the gaps between the buttons of his work shirt. His gray eyes were steady on me as he said in that same uninterested, stern tone from before, “Hi.” I took the first package of fishing line and scanned it. “How is your day going?” “Fine.” I scanned the next package and figured I might as well go in for the kill since no one was around. “You remember that time you said you owed me?” A day ago. He didn’t say anything, and I peeked up at him. Since his eyebrows couldn’t talk, they formed a shape that told me exactly how distrustful he was feeling right then. “You do, okay. Well,” and I lowered my voice, “I was going to ask if I could redeem that favor.” Those gray eyes stayed narrowed. This was going well. I glanced around to make sure no one was listening and quickly said, “When you aren’t busy… could you teach me about all this stuff? Even if it’s just a little bit?” That got him to blink in what I was pretty sure was surprise. And to give him credit, he too lowered his voice as he asked slowly and possibly in confusion, “What stuff?” I tipped my head to the side. “All this stuff in here. Fishing, camping, you know, general knowledge I might need to work here so I have an idea of what I’m doing.” There was another blink. I might as well go for it. “Only when you aren’t super busy. Please. If you can, but if you can’t, that’s okay.” I’d just cry myself to sleep at night. No biggie. Worst case, I could hit up the library on my days off. Hang out in the grocery store parking lot and google information. I could make it work. I would, regardless. Dark, thick, black eyelashes dipped over his nice eyes, and his voice came out low and even. “You’re serious?” He thought I was shitting him. “Dead.” His head turned to the side, giving me a good view of his short but really pretty eyelashes. “You want me to teach you to fish?” he asked like he couldn’t believe it, like I’d asked him to… I don’t know, show me his wiener. “You don’t have to teach me to fish, but I wouldn’t be opposed to it. I haven’t been in forever. But more about everything else. Like, what is the point of these two different kinds of line? What are all the lures good for? Or are they called flies? Do you really need those gadgets to start a fire?” I knew I was whispering as I said, “I have so many random questions, and not having internet makes it hard to look things up. Your total is $40.69, by the way.” My landlord blinked for about the hundredth time at that point, and I was pretty sure he was either confused or stunned as he pulled his wallet out and slipped his card through the reader, his gaze staying on me for the majority of the time in that long, watchful way that was completely different from the way the older men had been eyeballing me earlier. Not sexually or with interest, but more like I was a raccoon and he wasn’t sure if I had rabies or not. In a weird way, I preferred it by a lot. I smiled. “It’s okay if not,” I told him, handing over a small paper bag with his purchases inside. The tall man took it from me and let his eyes wander to a spot to my left. His Adam’s apple bobbed; then he took a step back and sighed. “Fine. Tonight, 7:30. I’ve got thirty minutes and not one longer.” What! “You’re my hero,” I whispered. He looked at me, then blinked. “I’ll be there, thank you,” I told him. He grunted, and before I could thank him again, he was out of there so fast I had no chance to check out his butt in those work pants of his.

One thing I don’t see here today is customers. Luxury-car sales are “more lifestyle than automotive,” Christiansen explains. The vehicles follow the money. His team will cosponsor events with private jet manufacturers and fractional ownership services such as NetJets and XOJET, or with San Francisco’s St. Francis Yacht Club, to expose affluent people to vehicles “they don’t even know they want yet.” Customers wander in from time to time, of course. Rocker Sammy Hagar, a Ferrari collector who sold his Cabo Wabo tequila brand to Campari for $91 million, has been known to stop by the sister dealership in San Francisco “in flip-flops, torn shorts, ratted hair, and a T-shirt. You wouldn’t think the guy has two dimes to rub together if you didn’t know who he was,” Christiansen says. Another guy showed up at the Walnut Creek lot dressed like a plumber and configured a $260,000 Bentley. He was, in fact, a plumber—one who owned a thriving plumbing business. He’d arrived in another Bentley, now on consignment.

But as he approached fifty, Kenny yearned to do something different. Someone told him that More Than Money—the same inheritors group Jeff Weissglass got involved with—was hiring an executive director. He landed the position and, in short order, discovered that his pregnant teens had at least one thing in common with these young heirs and heiresses: Society defined and stereotyped both groups by how much money they did or didn’t have. The foundations that funded adolescent pregnancy care assumed the girls were getting knocked up because they were poor, “which was not necessarily true,” Kenny says, whereas the inheritors were pegged as “entitled and spoiled and lazy—and there’s no basis for that.” The anti-inheritor bias proved so toxic that some of Kenny’s former colleagues shunned him after he took the new job. “They’re like, ‘What a sellout! What a cop-out! Why would you do that?’ ” he recalls. “What does it say about our culture that everyone wants to win the lottery in some way, shape, or form, and there’s a whole segment of our culture that hates people who win the big payout.” This is indeed a paradox. Oscar Mayer heir Chuck Collins gave away his $500,000 inheritance in 1986, when he was a young man. (Invested in the S&P 500, it would be worth about $14 million today.) He has since dedicated himself, through the Institute for Policy Studies, to educating the American public about inequality. His memoir, Born on Third Base, includes the following scene: Speaking to a crowd of about 350 people, he asks who among them feels rage toward the wealthiest 1 percent. Almost everyone raises a hand. He then asks, “How many of you wish you were in the wealthiest 1 percent?” They laugh, but again, almost everyone. “People are envious,” Kenny says. “And what you end up doing with envy is demeaning whoever it is that you envy, because they have what we think we deserve.” During his time at More Than Money, Kenny grew friendly with Paul Schervish, then the director of the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy, and when Schervish offered him the associate director job, Kenny jumped. He’d seen how inheritors grappled with their unearned fortunes. Now he wanted to better understand their parents. Havens was the numbers guy “and I was in charge of: ‘I’d like to know what these people are thinking, and nobody ever asks them.’ 

The first hints of this emerged in the early and mid-1990s, at the tail end of the crack epidemic. Suniya Luthar is now sixty-two, with an infectious smile, bright brown eyes, and short snow-white hair. Back then, she was a fledgling psychologist working as an assistant professor and researcher in the department of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. She was studying resiliency among teenagers in low-income urban communities, and one of her early findings was that the most popular kids were also among the most destructive and aggressive at school. Was this a demographic phenomenon, she wondered, or merely an adolescent one, this tendency to look up to peers who acted out? To find out, she needed a comparison group. A research assistant suggested they recruit students from his former high school in an affluent suburb. Luthar’s team ultimately enlisted 488 tenth graders—about half from her assistant’s high school and half from a scruffy urban high school. The affluent community’s median household income was 80 percent higher than the national median, and more than twice that of the low-income community. The rich community also had far fewer families on food stamps (0.3 percent vs. 19 percent) and fewer kids getting free or reduced-price school lunches (1 percent vs. 86 percent). The suburban teens were 82 percent white, while the urban teens were 87 percent nonwhite. Luthar surveyed the kids, asking a series of questions related to depression and anxiety, drug use ranging from alcohol and nicotine to LSD and cocaine, and participation in delinquent acts at home, at school, and in the community. Also examined were grades, “social competence,” and teachers’ assessments of each student. After crunching the numbers, she was floored. The affluent teens fared poorly relative to the low-income teens on “all indicators of substance use, including hard drugs.” This flipped the conventional wisdom on its head. “I was quite taken aback,” Luthar recalls.

It follows from these results that wealthy people who are exposed to the suffering of others should exhibit less compassion than their poorer counterparts do, and this has been confirmed in the lab. When we experience compassion, though nobody knows why, our hearts slow down. Piff’s colleagues Michael Kraus and Jennifer Stellar hooked volunteers up to EKG devices and showed them two short videos, a “neutral” video of a woman explaining how to construct a patio wall and a “compassion” video of cancer-stricken children undergoing chemotherapy. Relative to the wealthier subjects, the poor ones not only reported higher levels of compassion for the children, they had a significantly larger slowdown in heart rate between the neutral video and the compassion video than their wealthy peers.

Approaching Existing Investors If you ever need to raise more money, there’s no better audience than your existing investors! I find that the best way to reach out is with a super short email blast. For example: “Dear Backers, [2-3 sentences on what you just accomplished, extremely excited] We’ve also got a very exciting opportunity. Based on our milestones, we are gearing up for a serious product launch and will raise another $1M at a special-priced note to accelerate a few components. If you’ve wanted to get more deeply invested, now is the time. I imagine this being accounted for very quickly, so please ping me ASAP!” You might want to send a couple of “momentum” emails leading up to this message so that they’re already excited by the time they get the email from you.

Billy Joel was supposed to have a triumphant first on Sunday night, April 14. The Piano Man was headed to high time for his first- ever broadcast network performance special, The 100th Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden – The Greatest Arena Run of All Time, following fifty times in the music business. still, his broadcast was cut short by CBS. Why did CBS cut short Billy Joel’s broadcast? The event, which was supposed to state on CBS from 9 to 11p.m., was blazoned before this time’s Super Bowl and taped on March 28 during Joel’s 100th performance at the fabled New York City theatre. Unfortunately, the Joel musicale’s airing was delayed due to the network’s live content of the Masters golf event. As a result, numerous observers missed the show’s dramatic conclusion and were forced to switch to the original news.

I just told you about the importance of asking. Well . . . To get my book into the hands of the people who need it most, I need your help. If my book has been helpful, can you take thirty seconds right now and leave a short review? Think back to why you decided to pick up this book and give it a chance. Maybe it’s because a five-star review on Amazon or Goodreads caught your eye. Leave a review and give someone else the opportunity to start their Million Dollar Weekend. Before I started writing this book, I met Matt, who works security at the Austin airport. He has the same dream as you, to create a business so he can change his life, but he may never hear about this book. Your review means the world to me AND it could change the world of someone else, like Matt. Feel good about yourself knowing your brief review can change someone’s life forever. The review costs you no money (my favorite price) and only takes thirty seconds. You can go to the book’s page on the Amazon app or desktop site, or wherever you bought it, and leave a review there. On Kindle or an e-reader, scroll to the last page of the book. On Audible, go to your library page and click Write a Review. BTW: I read every single review. And when your review happens, an alarm goes off in my office, my mom tells me about it, and our entire team celebrates like we just won the Super Bowl. Now back to your Million Dollar Weekend. —Love you forever, Noah

Sadness would inevitably happen down the road. It wasn't being pessimistic, just realistic.

Hi, We’re VERY close to finishing our long-awaited Trading Manual. We have been working on this for more than four years, but we are finally going to wrap it up. We will be releasing it in early January. This course will be entirely focused on “Support and Resistance.” It will include two printed manuals, eight audio CDs, and one video tutorial DVD. It is going to be a complete brain dump of everything that we know about “SUPPORT and RESISTANCE.” We are going to cover all the ways that we use to generate our support and resistance zones, and we are going to show you exactly how we trade those zones. HOWEVER, we need your help. Before we finalize everything and send it off to the printer, we need to make sure we have covered everything. That is where you come in. Please take a few minutes to answer this super-short survey—there is really only one thing we want to ask you … What are your two top questions about Support and Resistance that we absolutely NEED to answer in our trading course?

Slowly, carefully, she threaded her arms around his neck and hugged him. Under her touch, his muscles were rigid, bunched, braced. But then it was like he melted, and his arms came around her in return. For a long moment, he held on tight, like she was his anchor. And then he pulled back enough to rest his forehead on her shoulder, the pain that had rolled off of him moments before replaced by a heavy weariness. She stroked the back of his head and neck, soft caresses meant to comfort. She loved holding this big man in her arms, loved knowing that maybe she wasn’t the only one in need of some comfort and protection and reassurance. “Know what’ll make you feel better?” she said after a little while. “You?” Her heart literally panged in her chest at the sweetness of that single word. She kissed the side of his head, his super short hair tickling her lips. “Besides me.” Reaching out with her hand, she grabbed the milk-shake glass and her spoon. Easy sat up, an eyebrow arched as he looked between her and the ice cream. She scooped some onto the spoon and held it out to him. “Trust me.” Skepticism plain on his face, he ate what she offered. Jenna couldn’t keep from grinning at his lack of reaction. “You clearly need more. Here.” He swallowed the second spoonful, too, but still wasn’t looking particularly better. “This is a very serious case,” she said playfully. “Better make it a double this time.” The spoon nearly overflowed. A smile played around the corners of Easy’s lips, and it filled her chest with a warm pressure. He ate it just before it dripped, humor creeping into his dark eyes. “See? It’s working. I knew it.” This time he stole the spoon right out of her fingers. “Problem is, you aren’t administering this medicine the proper way,” he said as he filled the spoon himself. Jenna grinned again, happy to see lightness returning to his expression. “I’m not?” “Nope,” he said, shaking his head. “This is what will really help.” He held the spoon up to her lips. “How will me taking it—” “No questioning. Just obeying.” There was that cocked eyebrow again. “Oh, is that how it is?” she asked, smirking. When he just stared at her, she gave in and ate the ice cream. Next thing she knew, his lips were on hers. Avoiding the cut on her lip, Easy’s cool tongue slowly snaked over her lips and stroked at her tongue. He grasped the back of her head as he kissed and nibbled at her. The rich flavor of the chocolate combined with another taste that was all Easy and made her moan in appreciation. His grip tightened, his tongue stroked deeper, and a throaty groan spilled from his lips. One more soft press of his lips against hers, and he pulled away. Jenna was nearly panting, and very definitely wanting more. “You’re right,” she said, “that is much more effective.” He gave a rare, open smile, and it made her happy to see it after how sad he’d seemed a few minutes before. “Told ya,” he said with a wink. She nodded. “But, you know, that could’ve been a fluke. Just to be sure it really worked, maybe you should, um, give me another dose?” Easy looked at her a long moment, then leaned in and scooped another spoonful from her nearly empty glass. He held it out to her, making her heart flutter in anticipation. When she tilted her head toward the spoon, he yanked it away and ate the ice cream himself. “No fair,” Jenna sputtered, reaching for the spoon. “That is not what the doctor prescribed.” Holding the spoon above his head put it out of Jenna’s reach, even with them sitting on the bed. She pushed to her knees, grabbed hold of his shoulder, and lunged for it. Laughing, he banded an arm around her lower back and held her in place, easily avoiding her grabs. Jenna couldn’t stop laughing as they wrestled for the spoon. It was stupid and silly and childish . . . and exactly what she needed. And it seemed he did, too. It was perfect.

President Vladimir Putin has evolved a “hybrid foreign policy, a strategy that mixes normal diplomacy, military force, economic corruption and a high-tech information war.” Indeed, on any given day, the United States has found itself dealing with everything from cyberattacks by Russian intelligence hackers on the computer systems of the U.S. Democratic Party, to disinformation about what Russian troops, dressed in civilian clothes, are doing in Eastern Ukraine, to Russian attempts to take down the Facebook pages of widows of its soldiers killed in Ukraine when they mourn their husbands’ deaths, to hot money flows into Western politics or media from Russian oligarchs connected to the Kremlin. In short, Russia is taking full advantage of the age of accelerating flows to confront the United States along a much wider attack surface. While it lives in the World of Order, the Russian government under Putin doesn’t mind fomenting a little disorder—indeed, when you are a petro-state, a little disorder is welcome because it keeps the world on edge and therefore oil prices high. China is a much more status quo power. It needs a healthy U.S. economy to trade with and a stable global environment to export into. That is why the Chinese are more focused on simply dominating their immediate neighborhood. But while America has to deter these two other superpowers with one hand, it also needs to enlist their support with the other hand to help contain both the spreading World of Disorder and the super-empowered breakers. This is where things start to get tricky: on any given day Russia is a direct adversary in one part of the world, a partner in another, and a mischief-maker in another.

Whether it be brand marketers trumpeting the new BMW X5, game developers getting players to spend real money on virtual goods, or someone selling an online nursing degree, the only difference is the time frame in which those different goals occur—in other words, the time between attention and action. If the time frame is very short, like browsing for and buying a shirt at nordstroms.com, it’s called “direct response,” or “DR” advertising. If the time frame is very long, such as making you believe life is unlivable outside the pricey mantle of a Burberry coat, it’s called “brand advertising.” Note that the goal is the same in both: to make you buy shit you likely don’t need with money you likely don’t have. In the former case, the trail is easily trackable, as the “conversion” usually happens online, usually after clicking on the very ad you were served.* In the latter, the media employed is a multipronged strategy of Super Bowl ads, Internet advertising, postal mail, free keychains, and God knows what else. Also, the conversion happens way after the initial exposure to the media, and often offline and in a physical space, like at a car dealership. The tracking and attribution are much harder, due to both the manifold media used and the months or years gone by between the exposure and the sale. As such, brand advertising budgets, which are far larger than direct-response ones, are spent in embarrassingly large broadsides, barely targeted or tracked in any way. Now you know all there is to know about advertising. The rest is technical detail and self-promoting bullshit spun by agencies. You’re officially as informed as the media tycoons who run the handful of agencies that manage our media world.

Sensual Nuru Massage London A session with our super hot masseuses will be a different experience that will break you out of the dulling effect routine on the body and assist you to let go and breathe deep, and explore freedom of sexuality in a secure and moderate environment. We provide Sensual Nuru Massage services on short notice at your desired location.

This is nothing special but a simple short 5 or 6 digit phone number that is allotted particularly to a business to send out text messages to their target peoples who have previously opted into to receive these text messages from their own will. The benefit of this is that it is a quit handy service where you can ask the clients to send feedback by typing back a message to the same number

Reviews help other readers find books. If you enjoyed the book and could take a moment to post a short review on the website you brought it from, tell a friend, tweet about it or mention it on your Facebook page, I'd greatly appreciate it. If you did all four I'd be super-duper-extra grateful.

In short, we have to face two fundamental facts about geopolitics today: Fact #1: The necessary is impossible. Fact #2: The impossible is necessary. That is, while we cannot repair the wide World of Disorder on our own, we also cannot just ignore it. It metastasizes in an interdependent world. If we don’t visit the World of Disorder in the age of accelerations, it will visit us. This is especially true when you know that the age of accelerations is going to continue to hammer frail states and produce migration flows, particularly from Africa and the Middle East toward Europe, as well as more super-empowered breakers. So

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours? There was a period when I was drinking at every show, and I was DJing a lot, maybe four nights a week, playing local shows in Los Angeles. I had a couple of Dim Mak parties, and we were on top of the world! We had cornered the market with our sound and culture, and I was just getting booked left and right. I was the ambassador of this new culture that was burgeoning in electronic music called “electro,” and my ego was flexing a bit. I was drinking and having fun. It was a great feeling, but then you forget about the most important things in life because you’re in that fog of self-indulgence. My mom was coming to visit me, and she never flies in. This was one of the few times she had. I was supposed to pick her up in the morning. I had a big night the night before—we had a party, I drank, and I stayed out super late. The next morning my mom landed around 7 A.M., and I slept through it. I woke up at 10 A.M., or something awful like three hours later. I saw a text message from my mom—she barely even knew how to text! I don’t know why, but she waited at the airport for three hours, sitting outside on a bench. My poor mom. Once I got to the airport an hour later—making it four hours she had been there—she was just innocently sitting on this bench, and I broke down. She was still so sweet about it. It was at that moment that I felt like this whole life of partying and drinking was all bullshit, especially if you can’t maintain your priorities of valuing and taking care of your family. That was one fail I will never forget. After that, I stopped being caught up in that Hollywood bubble where everyone parties and drinks every single night. You can live in that bubble and forget about the realities of your family and relationships outside the bubble. But those relationships are vital to who you are and are important in your life. Eventually, I quit drinking, which I am happy about, partly because of this major fail.

Snacks? What kind of snacks?” I asked. “Something called chips, which are made from potatoes, and different kinds of candies.” “Oh, you’re gonna sell candy, too?” “Yeah, but totally different from the candy shop.” “I see.” “I hope you’ll come by for the grand opening.” “When is it?” “Hopefully, next week. I’ll let you know.” I nodded. “Okay, I’ll try to make it, Tes.” “Cool. Thank you. Alright, I’m going to get some more food,” he said and left. A few minutes later, Maky got on the microphone and announced that the dancing portion of the night was going to start soon. “Woohoo! It’s dancing time,” said Arthur excitedly. “You know who I’m going to ask to dance with me?” “Who?” I asked. “Autumn,” answered Pierce. “Yup! Hopefully, she’ll agree.” “What about you, Pierce? Are you gonna ask anyone to dance?” “Um, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just dance by myself or with a group of friends,” the knight answered. “Cool…” I said sadly because I felt a little bit left out. “Or you know, maybe I’ll just hang out with you.” “Naw, I’m fine. You don’t have to keep me company.” Then suddenly, music started playing from the speakers that were set up at all the four corners of the city square. “Oh, here we go! I’ll be back later,” said Arthur as he took off to find Autumn. As the music played, I looked around for Maky’s band, but they were nowhere in sight. “Hm. This music must be coming from the jukebox,” I said. “Yeah, I don’t think Maky is playing tonight,” said Pierce. “She’s not? Why not? They’re super good.” “I don’t know, Steve.” “Hm. Oh, look. People are starting to take to the dance floor.” Slowly, a couple of villagers made their way toward the center of the city square. They were nervous about being the first ones, but soon after, many others followed their lead. Before I knew it, there were a ton of villagers in the middle, jumping up and down and dancing to the music. “That looks like fun…” I said. “Yeah…” said Pierce. “You should go join them.” “N-nah. I like sitting here.” Right when Pierce said that, someone came by and grabbed his hand and pulled him to the dance floor. “Come on, Pierce, let’s show them how it’s done,” said Leila. “B-but I’m not that good!” said Pierce. I tried my best to smile and said, “Have fun…” With my fake smile on, I watched as Pierce was dragged into the middle. Leila had stolen my only company away from me, and that made me feel super left out. I sighed and thought to myself, I wish I was out of this chair already. But I knew I didn’t have a choice, so I just sat in my chair and nodded along to the music. A few minutes later, the first song ended and the next one came on. I just continued sitting there while watching my friends have fun. In the middle, I could see Arthur dancing with Autumn, Cindy dancing with Arceus, and Leila dancing with Pierce. Shortly after, someone came by to talk to me. “Hey, Steve! How ya doing?” Maky asked while breathing hard. “Maky? Why aren’t you playing tonight?” I asked. “Oh, because I wanted to dance and have fun tonight. I mean, playing my instrument is fun, too, but dancing is a different kind of fun.” “I see.” “So, what are you doing over here? You don’t want to join the fun?” “Uh, there’s not much fun to be had when I’m stuck in a wheel chair.” “Oh, that’s nonsense!” Then she ran behind my chair, tilted it slightly backwards and pushed me off toward the middle of the dance floor. “Whoa! What are you doing?!” “We’re going to dance!” “Huh?!

That’s not true. Firestar and I never discovered what we might have meant to each other,” she mewed at last. “I was alive in the forest for such a short time after he came to ThunderClan. But I know for sure”—her voice grew more intense—“that he and I could never have been mates. I was and always will be a medicine cat. That comes first, more than any cat who walks the forest, more even than Firestar.

Moral support or backup in case she loses it and tries to make me into an appetizer?” Jamie wrinkled his nose. “Wow, super inappropriate, Gigi.” “Yes, you’re selling yourself short, Geeg, you’re at least a small entrée, like one of those microwavable pot pies,” Sam suggested. “So I’m frozen convenience food in this scenario?” I frowned. “That’s insulting.

People look at initiates or gurus as having fancy titles, deep or advanced spiritual information or super powers. Yet in truth initiation is about becoming a good human again. The same way animals know what their role is when it comes to serving nature. Initiates understand their unique roles in serving nature. Since each person is unique, either initiate understands they were born under an astrological sign, to serve a unique role to nature. Adebamgbe From the short story Dark Initiation