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THE FIRST TEN LIES THEY TELL YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL
1. We are here to help you.
2. You will have time to get to your class before the bell rings.
3. The dress code will be enforced.
4. No smoking is allowed on school grounds.
5. Our football team will win the championship this year.
6. We expect more of you here.
7. Guidance counselors are always available to listen.
8. Your schedule was created with you in mind.
9. Your locker combination is private.
10. These will be the years you look back on fondly.
TEN MORE LIES THEY TELL YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL
1. You will use algebra in your adult lives.
2. Driving to school is a privilege that can be taken away.
3. Students must stay on campus during lunch.
4. The new text books will arrive any day now.
5. Colleges care more about you than your SAT scores.
6. We are enforcing the dress code.
7. We will figure out how to turn off the heat soon.
8. Our bus drivers are highly trained professionals.
9. There is nothing wrong with summer school.
10. We want to hear what you have to say.
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Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)
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Cutting PBS support (0.012% of budget) to help balance the Federal budget is like deleting text files to make room on your 500Gig hard drive
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Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.
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Martin Luther
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Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.
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Adrienne Rich (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978)
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Honk if you love Jesus, text while driving if you want to meet up.
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Barbara Kingsolver (Flight Behavior)
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How did my parents live before texting? Before the internet? I’m used to knowing things and all of this unknowing is driving me mad.
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Stephanie Perkins (Isla and the Happily Ever After (Anna and the French Kiss, #3))
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I want it all, Emily. I want to spend my nights holding hands with you,” he breathed the words into her ear. “I want the all-day texting.” He kissed her temple and caressed her cheek. “I want the laughing and the forehead kisses.” He softly ran his lips over her forehead. “I want the date nights, the movie watching, and the breakfast making.” He dragged his hands through her hair, his teeth tugging gently at her bottom lip. “I want the late-night drives, the sunset watching, the screaming, the yelling, and the crying.” Still kissing her, he smiled against her mouth. “I know I’ll definitely want the make up sex that comes after the screaming and the crying. In want the good, the bad and e in between. All of it is what's going to make us amazing together,
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Gail McHugh (Collide (Collide, #1))
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It is incredible what kind of mess I can make
with a nine-hour drive and an unanswered text.
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Andrea Gibson (The Madness Vase)
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The other that will guide you and itself through this dissolution is a rhythm, text, music, and within language, a text. But what is the connection that holds you both together? Counter-desire, the negative of desire, inside-out desire, capable of questioning (or provoking) its own infinite quest. Romantic, filial, adolescent, exclusive, blind and Oedipal: it is all that, but for others. It returns to where you are, both of you, disappointed, irritated, ambitious, in love with history, critical, on the edge and even in the midst of its own identity crisis; a crisis of enunciation and of the interdependence of its movements, an instinctual drive that descends in waves, tearing apart the symbolic thesis.
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Julia Kristeva (Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art)
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According to the three missed calls from her mother—who thought Madison had been kidnapped in the big, bad city and was now being held for an ungodly sum of money—the four text messages from her brother wondering if she knew how to navigate the beltway—because apparently little sisters couldn’t drive—and the voice mail from her father warning there was a problem with the reservations, she was late for brunch.
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J. Lynn (Tempting the Best Man (Gamble Brothers, #1))
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If cats could drive, text and launch missiles, they would rule the world
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Quasi
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Remember never to text and drive, it's bad grammar, even if you have a deadline. You might cross the line and dead may be your destination. Think about it!!
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Neil Leckman
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More than 90 percent of these accidents are caused by very human errors: somebody drinking alcohol and driving, somebody texting a message while driving, somebody falling asleep at the wheel, somebody daydreaming instead of paying attention to the road. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated in 2012 that 31 percent of fatal crashes in the United States involved alcohol abuse, 30 percent involved speeding, and 21 percent involved distracted drivers.7 Self-driving vehicles will never do any of these things. Though they suffer from their own problems and limitations, and though some accidents are inevitable, replacing all human drivers by computers is expected to reduce deaths and injuries on the road by about 90 percent.8 In other words, switching to autonomous vehicles is likely to save the lives of one million people every year.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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I think anyone who stops at a gas station at night is up to no good. I think that if cops want to stop drunk driving, they should hide out in the bushes at the Taco Bell drive-through. I think if you're a guy and you pull down your pants and the girl you're with starts texting, you have a small penis.
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Bill Konigsberg (Openly Straight (Openly Straight, #1))
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Assuming a driver never looks up in the average time it takes to send a text (4.6 seconds), at fifty-five miles per hour, he drives blindly the length of a football field. Texting
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Tony Reinke (12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You)
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There's a difference between driving and texting. When your driving your eyes have to be open and on the road watching the cars around you, road signs, and traffic lights. Along with your mind on the road and destination. Which means you are multitasking. When your texting your eyes are on your cell phone screen and key pad. Along with your mind on what your going to say next. So how can you do both? Please stop!
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Jonathan Anthony Burkett (Neglected But Undefeated: The Life Of A Boy Who Never Knew A Mother's Love)
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Ellie, I came back early because I was driving everyone around me crazy. When I wasn't texting you or talking to you, I was talking about you, and thinking about you, and wondering about you...you get the idea.
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Autumn Doughton (On an Edge of Glass)
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The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn. —Martin Luther* The
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C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)
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honk if you love jesus / text and drive if you want to meet him!
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Kara Thomas (That Weekend)
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The 30-Day Rule states that the prospecting you do in this 30-day period will pay off for the next 90 days. It is a simple, yet powerful universal rule that governs sales and you ignore it at your peril. When you internalize this rule, it will drive you to never put prospecting aside for another day. The implication of the 30-Day Rule is simple. Miss a day of prospecting and it will tend to bite you sometime in the next 90 days. Miss a week and you will feel it in your commission check. Miss the entire month and you will tank your pipeline, fall into a slump, and wake up 90 days later desperate, feeling like a loser, with no clue how you ended up there.
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Jeb Blount (Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide to Opening Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, Email, Text, and Cold Calling (Jeb Blount))
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His [the pedestrian's] elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts his at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was 'possessed' into a text that lies before one's eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more.
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Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life)
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In a world divided between theistic enthusiasts and secularist depressives there is little patience for the atheist who nurtures a passionate hatred for God. The mixture of naturalism and blasphemy that characterizes the Sadean text occupies the space of our blindness, to which Bataille’s writings are not unreasonably assimilated. If there is contradiction here it is one that is coextensive with the unconscious; the consequence of a revolt incommensurate with the ontological weight of its object. That God has wrought such loathesomeness without even having existed only exacerbates the hatred pitched against him. An atheism that does not hunger for God’s blood is an inanity, and the anaemic feebleness of secular rationalism has so little appeal that it approximates to an argument for his existence. What is suggested by the Sadean furore is that anyone who does not exult at the thought of driving nails through the limbs of the Nazarene is something less than an atheist; merely a disappointed slave.
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Nick Land (The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (An Essay in Atheistic Religion))
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The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.
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Peter Luther
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SUPPORT LITERACY! A child who cannot read cannot text.
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Ron Brackin
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There were dead kids on the news all the time and school shootings and jealous boyfriends and abusive parents and texting and driving and a million other things,
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Aric Davis (Tunnel Vision)
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Jonathan Safran Foer’s 10 Rules for Writing:
1.Tragedies make great literature; unfathomable catastrophes (the Holocaust, 9/11) are even better – try to construct your books around them for added gravitas but, since those big issues are such bummers, make sure you do it in a way that still focuses on a quirky central character that’s somewhat like Jonathan Safran Foer.
2. You can also name your character Jonathan Safran Foer.
3. If you’re writing a non-fiction book you should still make sure that it has a strong, deep, wise, and relatable central character – someone like Jonathan Safran Foer.
4. If you reach a point in your book where you’re not sure what to do, or how to approach a certain scene, or what the hell you’re doing, just throw in a picture, or a photo, or scribbles, or blank pages, or some illegible text, or maybe even a flipbook. Don’t worry if these things don’t mean anything, that’s what postmodernism is all about. If you’re not sure what to put in, you can’t go wrong with a nice photograph of Jonathan Safran Foer.
5. If you come up with a pun, metaphor, or phrase that you think is really clever and original, don’t just use it once and throw it away, sprinkle it liberally throughout the text. One particularly good phrase that comes to mind is “Jonathan Safran Foer.”
6. Don’t worry if you seem to be saying the same thing over and over again, repetition makes the work stronger, repetition is good, it drives the point home. The more you repeat a phrase or an idea, the better it gets. You should not be afraid of repeating ideas or phrases. One particularly good phrase that comes to mind is “Jonathan Safran Foer.”
7. Other writers are not your enemies, they are your friends, so you should feel free to borrow some of their ideas, words, techniques, and symbols, and use them completely out of context. They won’t mind, they’re your friends, just like my good friend Paul Auster, with whom I am very good friends. Just make sure you don’t steal anything from Jonathan Safran Foer, it wouldn’t be nice, he is your friend.
8. Make sure you have exactly three plots in your novel, any more and it gets confusing, any less and it’s not postmodern. At least one of those plots should be in a different timeline. It often helps if you name these three plots, I often use “Jonathan,” “Safran,” and “Foer.”
9. Don’t be afraid to make bold statements in you writing, there should always be a strong lesson to be learned, such as “don’t eat animals,” or “the Holocaust was bad,” or “9/11 was really really sad,” or “the world would be a better place if everyone was just a little bit more like Jonathan Safran Foer.”
10. In the end, don’t worry if you’re unsuccessful as a writer, it probably wasn’t meant to be. Not all of us are chosen to become writers. Not all of us can be Jonathan Safran Foer.
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Jonathan Safran Foer
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Then I began to smell it again, like each time he returned, like the day back in the spring when I rode up on the drive standing in one of his stirrups - that odor in the his clothes and beard and flesh too which I believed was the smell of powder and glory, the elected victorious but know better now: know now to have been only the will to endure, a sardonic and even humorous declining of self-delusion which is not even kin to that optimism which believes that that which is about to happen to us can possibly be the worst which we can suffer.
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William Faulkner (The Unvanquished: The Corrected Text)
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Serious thinking, inspired thinking, can seldom arise from texts sent while eating lunch or driving a car. Responding to these inputs generates as much thought, and as much inspiration, as swatting so many flies. They deaden both the mind and soul.
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Raymond M. Kethledge (Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude)
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Hold still, Meg, you’re dripping blood on my car seats.”
I reached behind the passenger seat of Tennyson’s car looking for the white sheet she’d thrown in for mopping up bodily fluids. Quinn, sitting in the back seat, read my mind and handed it to me.
“Thank you.”
“No problem.” He leaned forward, pulling a corner of the sheet up to wipe off a small stream of blood on my neck. “You okay?
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Laura Anderson Kurk (Perfect Glass)
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TEN MORE LIES THEY TELL YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL
1. You will use algebra in your adult lives.
2. Driving to school is a privilege that can be taken away.
3. Students must stay on campus during lunch.
4. The new text books will arrive any day now.
5. Colleges care more about you than your SAT scores.
6. We are enforcing the dress code.
7. We will figure out how to turn off the heat soon.
8. Our bus drivers are highly trained professionals.
9. There is nothing wrong with summer school.
10. We want to hear what you have to say.
”
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Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)
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Re-vision--the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction--is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name--and therefore live--afresh. A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution. We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.
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Adrienne Rich (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978)
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Nader's data could not have been clearer, or more unsettling. He demonstrated that the very act of remembering something makes it vulnerable to change. Like a text recalled from a computer's hard drive, each memory was subject to editing. First you have to search the computer for the the text and then bring it to the screen, at which point you can alter it and save it. Whether the changes are slight or extensive, the new document is never quite the same as the original.
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Rebecca Skloot (The Best American Science Writing 2011)
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The chances of the driver’s mind being on the road are usually way too low when on a highway.
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Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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Things that rock: all the different stories people come up with - Kindle text to speech while driving - kind hearted people - oh, and the Manly Sea Eagles (Aussie rugby league)!!
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G.S. Bailey
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I got a text from my husband. “Manal, you are divorced,” it read. “Your papers are in the court of Khobar.” I was divorced in my absence, just as I had been married.
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Manal Al-Sharif (Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening)
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Mek sat in the cab, doing some self-maintenance work. Instead of a verbal reply, I got a text message: SYLVATRONICS INDUSTRIAL UNIT A023 PROCESSING AN REINTEGRATION WILL BE COMPLETE IN 57 SECONDS. VERBAL COMMUNICATIONS WILL BE POSSIBLE IN ABOUT 65 SECONDS.
Oh well, I've caught rookie driving partners in the middle of all sorts of things. At least with robots you don't have to guess.
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Paul Carlson (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Volume 132, Issue 6, June 2012)
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In the end—as in the beginning—it is the authentic performance of the Beatles’ peculiar, elaborate, unfettered art that matters. It is the performance that makes the text possible in the first place, that imbues it with the heartbreaking reality of our transitory existence. It is the impermanence of the moment—rendered seemingly permanent by magnetic tape and celluloid—that is so vexing in its realness that it somehow seems immutable. Take the rooftop concert, with London’s blustery, wintry winds swirling up from the streetscape as John, Paul, George, and Ringo make one last play for greatness after a month of soul-destroying misery. They climbed the stairs above 3 Savile Row and willed a final, breathtaking performance for the ages. It is the primal image of the Beatles having become lost in the pure joy of their sound, just as they had done so many years before in the Cavern and not so very long ago in Studio Two. Everything else—the gossip, the intrigue, the emotional collapse—suddenly becomes moot, irrelevant even, as Ringo keeps the backbeat strong and true on his Ludwigs, while George furrows his brow as he drives his Rosewood Telecaster home. And John and Paul, smiling at each other across the staves of memory, play their hearts out one more time. The rest is silence.
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Kenneth Womack (Long and Winding Roads: The Evolving Artistry of the Beatles)
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Luckily, I lived only six minutes south of the station. From my house, Stubby’s was a short ten-minute drive north via Montgomery then a quick right on West Congress. I hadn’t spoken with Liza for a few days, but I’d sent a text
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C.M. Sutter (Run For Your Life (Mitch Cannon Savannah Heat #1))
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From the outset Dickens seemed to take charge even though he was younger than Seymour and less well known. His narrative input seemed to drive the content of the comic plates, which eventually led to the story becoming the main point of interest and with the death of Seymour the plates were reduced to two an instalment whereas the text increased to 16,000 words. Dickens succeeded where his predecessors had failed, making the print more important than the illustration.
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Charles Dickens (The Complete Works of Charles Dickens)
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Oh, good. We’re all here waiting. Everything is fine. Cade: All? No. You all need to leave. Jasper: I’m on my way. Cade: Why is my child’s birth part of a group text? Summer: Because we’re excited! Violet: So excited! Send pictures! Rhett: After though. Not during. I don’t need to know Willa that well. Summer: Rhett Eaton. I know you are not texting and driving with the daddy-to-be in your car. Cade: He is. Rhett: Red light, Princess. And why are you only worried about Cade and not me?
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Elsie Silver (Heartless (Chestnut Springs, #2))
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As I make the ten-minute drive into town, I curse O’Shea for forcing this volunteer gig on me and ponder the authenticity of voodoo dolls. Eventually I decide it doesn’t matter if they’re real or not. It’d still be fun to poke needles into a teeny doll version of Frank O’Shea. Once it starts falling apart from all the holes, I can use the head as a stress ball.
At a red light, I shoot a quick text to my teammate Fitzy—Hey, do u know how 2 make a voodoo doll?
His response doesn’t come until I reach the small arena across the street from the school.
Him: I’d think u were fcking with me, but the question is stupid enuff to feel legit. No idea how to make v-doll. Can prolly use any old doll? Challenge will be finding a voodoo witch to link it to your target.
Me: That makes sense.
Him: Does it??
Me: Voodoo implies magic, hexes, etc. I don’t think any doll would work. Otherwise every doll is a v-doll, right?
Him: Right.
Me: Anyway. Thx. Thought u might know.
Him: Why the fuck would *I* know?
Me: Ur into all those fantasy role-play games. U know magic.
Him: I’m not Harry Potter, ffs.
Me: HP is a nerd. Ur a nerd. Ergo, ur a boy wizard.
He sends a middle-finger emoji, then says, Bday beers at Malone’s 2nite. U still down?
Me: Yup.
Him: C U ltr
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Elle Kennedy (The Score (Off-Campus, #3))
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And in the incendiary wake of Michael Brown’s and Eric Garner’s deaths at the hands of white police officers in the summer of 2014, a conventional production of Driving Miss Daisy that in no way subverts the text now seems nothing short of obscene. There
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Jordan Tannahill (Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama)
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I’m opinionated, obstinate, and obsessive. I am quick to anger, quick to cry, quick-witted and a slow runner. A very slow runner. I don’t know if you can really call it running, really. I don’t know what I want. Some heavy making out? Someone to text me for no reason? A person who is absolutely, positively in love with me? It varies, day by day. I know that I want you to play with my hair while we lay on the couch and listen to records. I want you to hold my hand while we’re driving and take out the trash before you’re ever asked. I want you to want me, but not need me. To be there for me without my asking, and to go away without being told. I want you to keep me company and keep your promises. PS: Please, don’t be shorter than me. Chapter Seven Finders Keepers
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Nora McInerny (No Happy Endings)
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The end of this short story could be a rather disturbing thing, if it came true. I hope you like it, and if you do, be sure to COMMENT and SHARE.
Paradoxes of Destiny?
Dani! My boy! Are you all right? Where are you? Have you hurt yourself? Are you all right? Daniiii! Why won’t you answer? It’s so cold and dark here. I can’t see a thing… It’s so silent. Dani? Can you hear me? I shouldn’t have looked at that text message while I was driving… I shouldn’t have done it! I'm so stupid sometimes! Son, are you all right?... We really wrecked the car when we rolled it! I can’t see or hear a thing… Am I in hospital? Am I dead…? Dani? Your silence is killing me… Are you all right?! I can see a glimmer of light. I feel trapped. Dani, are you there? I can’t move. It’s like I’m wrapped in this mossy green translucent plastic. I have to get out of here. The light is getting more and more intense. I think I can tear the wrapping that’s holding me in. I'm almost out. The light is blinding me. What a strange place. I've never seen anything like it. It doesn’t look like Earth. Am I dead? On another planet? Oh God, look at those hideous monsters! They’re so creepy and disgusting! They look like extraterrestrials. They’re aliens! I'm on another planet! I can’t believe it. I need to get the hell out here. Those monsters are going to devour me. I have to get away. I’m so scared. Am I floating? Am I flying? I’m going to go higher to try to escape. I can’t see the aliens anymore and the landscape looks less terrifying. I think I've made it. It’s very windy. Is that a highway? I think I can see some vehicles down there. Could they be the extraterrestrials’ transport? I’m going to go down a bit. I see people! Am I on Earth? Could this be a parallel universe? Where could Dani be? I shouldn’t have looked at that text message while I was driving. I shouldn’t…
That tower down there looks a lot like the water tank in my town… It’s identical. But the water tank in my town doesn’t have that huge tower block next to it. It all looks very similar to my neighborhood, but it isn’t exactly the same: there are a lot of tower blocks here. There’s the river… and the factory. It’s definitely my neighborhood, but it looks kind of different. I must be in a parallel universe…
It’s amazing that I can float. People don’t seem to notice my presence. Am I a ghost?
I have to get back home and see if Dani’s there. God, I hope he’s safe and sound. Gabriela must be out of her mind with the crash.
There’s my house! Home sweet home. And whose are those cars? The front of the house has been painted a different color… This is all so strange! There’s someone in the garden… Those trees I planted in the spring have really grown.
Is… is that… Dani? Yes, yes! It’s Dani. But he looks so different… He looks older, he looks… like a big boy! What’s important is that he’s OK. I need to hug him tight and tell him how much I love him. Can he see me if I’m a ghost? I'll go up to him slowly so I don’t scare him. I need to hold him tight.
He can’t see me, I won’t get any closer. He moved his head, I think he’s started to realize I’m here…
Wow I’m so hungry all of a sudden! I can’t stop! How are you doing, son?! It’s me! Your dad! My dear boy? I can’t stop! I'm too hungry! Ahhhh, so delicious! What a pleasure! Nooo Daniii! Nooooo!.... I’m your daaaad!...
Splat!...
“Mum, bring the insect repellent, the garden’s full of mosquitoes,” grunted Daniel as he wiped the blood from the palm of his hand on his trousers. Gabriela was just coming out. She did an about turn and went back into her house, and shouted “Darling, bring the insect repellent, it’s on the fireplace…”
Absolute cold and silence…
THE END
(1) This note is for those who have read EQUINOX—WHISPERS OF DESTINY. This story is a spin-off of the novel EQUINOX—WHISPERS OF DESTINY and revolves around Letus’s curious theories about the possibility of animal reincarnation.
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Gonzalo Guma (Equinoccio. Susurros del destino)
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To my amazement, he turns the camera toward his face and snaps a picture. “What are you doing?” “There,” he says, handing the phone back. “Feel free to text that sexy face to your entire contact list and inform them I’m driving you home. That way if you show up dead tomorrow, everyone will know who did it.
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Elle Kennedy (The Deal (Off-Campus, #1))
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I felt disloyal to Edith when it made me smile, then to Julian because it was the kind of text Edith sent every day and I still appreciated it more from her than from him. This contravened all economics. Assuming my demand for nice messages was elastic, when they were scarcer it should surely drive up their value. But coming from Edith, they commanded a premium.
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Naoise Dolan (Exciting Times)
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We are so busy with bullshit, we fail to stop and recognize the profound. So busy with brushing teeth and buying groceries and washing dishes and watching YouTube and checking Facebook and texting and putting on makeup and driving to here or there and looking for lost keys, it starts to feel like what we are really doing is hiding from how totally fucking scary life is.
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Jamie Kain (The Good Sister)
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You drive safe, okay? Send me a text message when you get home. I know how to use those emotions things now. I’ll send you a thumbs-up back.” “Emojis?” I ask, giggling. “That’s the one.” “Good for you, Dad. I’ll send you an emoji in the shape of a house when I get home, okay?” “It’ll be our secret language.” He winks at me, and I just about manage to keep from laughing as I step into the car.
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Catharina Maura (The Wrong Bride (The Windsors, #1))
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it's a different kind of grief
when the person you miss is still alive.
when they are just a phone call away.
when you can still text them in and the morning and before you go to sleep at night.
when you can drive 15 minutes to your favorite coffee shop and meet at the park bench for lunch.
isn't it torture?
this choice to keep missing them
and holding on to hope that made
they miss you, too.
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Nelle Starling (To Be Honest)
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Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.
”
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Adrienne Rich (Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry)
“
You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That’s being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty. That knowledge that it’s all for nothing and that you’re alone. It’s down there. And sometimes when things clear away, you’re not watching anything, you’re in your car, and you start going, ‘oh no, here it comes. That I’m alone.’ It’s starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it…
That’s why we text and drive. I look around, pretty much 100 percent of the people driving are texting. And they’re killing, everybody’s murdering each other with their cars. But people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second because it’s so hard.
”
”
Louise C.K.
“
Perhaps counterintuitively, monotasking getting there can also help improve our social relationships. We think we should respond to messages from friends and family as quickly as possible—but strong friendships are generally based on qualities deeper than response time. Overall responsiveness is important, but good friends should be patient, appreciate your full attention when you have it to give, and value your safety and that of others around you.
”
”
Thatcher Wine (The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time to Do Everything Better)
“
Suzanne understood there were three options for dealing with time pressure. Option One: Perform tasks more efficiently. Move faster, triple-task, cut corners. Buy cookies instead of making them from scratch, and ignore the raised eyebrows or direct complaints from better, more efficient mothers. Drive faster and risk a speeding ticket with scheduling repercussions rippling for days afterward. Text at stoplights but not in front of the kids. Sleep less.
”
”
Sonja Yoerg (True Places)
“
You have to practice what you preach. Declare the family dinner table to be an electronics-free zone: no texting and no cell phone use allowed at the dinner table. That means you too, Dad. Although teenage girls are more likely than teenage boys to be addicted to texting and instant messaging, there seems to be a gender reversal in the over-30 crowd, with Dad more likely than Mom to be surreptitiously checking messages on his Blackberry at the dinner table.19 All electronic devices should be prohibited at mealtime.
”
”
Leonard Sax (Girls on the Edge: The Four Factors Driving the New Crisis for Girls-Sexual Identity, the Cyberbubble, Obsessions, Envi)
“
That’s why it is important to know about the DMN, recognize it, and name it when it is savage. People may learn to keep themselves busy, text while they drive, stay numb, play video games,28 smoke cigarettes (which also turns off the DMN completely),29 or turn to other addictions or compulsions without even realizing that they have a cruel self-witness and that these activities let them silence it. On the other hand, if people have grown up with responsive, warm parents and without much trauma, their DMN may (almost unthinkably for so many) have a positive or encouraging tone.
”
”
Sarah Peyton (Your Resonant Self: Guided Meditations and Exercises to Engage Your Brain's Capacity for Healing)
“
One of the King James Bible’s most consistent driving forces is the idea of majesty. Its method and its voice are far more regal than demotic. Its archaic formulations, its consistent attention to a grand and heavily musical rhythm are the vehicles by which that majesty is infused into the body of the text. Its qualities are those of grace, stateliness, scale, power. There is no desire to please here; only a belief in the enormous and overwhelming divine authority, of which royal authority, ‘the powers that be’ as they translated the words of St Paul, was an adjunct and extension
”
”
Adam Nicolson (God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible)
“
I am very much in favor of parental rights for certain types of things. I am in favor of you and I having the freedom to drive a car. But do we have a right to drive without wearing our seatbelts? Do we have a right to text while we are driving? Studies have demonstrated that those are dangerous things to do, so it becomes a public safety issue. You have to be able to distinguish our rights versus the rights of the society in which we live, because we are all in this thing together. We have to be cognizant of the other people around us, and we must always bear in mind the safety of the population. That is key, and that is one of the responsibilities of government.
”
”
Ben Carson
“
In the Middle Ages, marriage was considered a sacrament ordained by God, and God also authorised the father to marry his children according to his wishes and interests. An extramarital affair was accordingly a brazen rebellion against both divine and parental authority. It was a mortal sin, no matter what the lovers felt and thought about it. Today people marry for love, and it is their inner feelings that give value to this bond. Hence, if the very same feelings that once drove you into the arms of one man now drive you into the arms of another, what’s wrong with that? If an extramarital affair provides an outlet for emotional and sexual desires that are not satisfied by your spouse of twenty years, and if your new lover is kind, passionate and sensitive to your needs – why not enjoy it?
But wait a minute, you might say. We cannot ignore the feelings of the other concerned parties. The woman and her lover might feel wonderful in each other’s arms, but if their respective spouses find out, everybody will probably feel awful for quite some time. And if it leads to divorce, their children might carry the emotional scars for decades. Even if the affair is never discovered, hiding it involves a lot of tension, and may lead to growing feelings of alienation and resentment.
The most interesting discussions in humanist ethics concern situations like extramarital affairs, when human feelings collide. What happens when the same action causes one person to feel good, and another to feel bad? How do we weigh the feelings against each other? Do the good feelings of the two lovers outweigh the bad feelings of their spouses and children?
It doesn’t matter what you think about this particular question. It is far more important to understand the kind of arguments both sides deploy. Modern people have differing ideas about extramarital affairs, but no matter what their position is, they tend to justify it in the name of human feelings rather than in the name of holy scriptures and divine commandments. Humanism has taught us that something can be bad only if it causes somebody to feel bad. Murder is wrong not because some god once said, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Rather, murder is wrong because it causes terrible suffering to the victim, to his family members, and to his friends and acquaintances. Theft is wrong not because some ancient text says, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ Rather, theft is wrong because when you lose your property, you feel bad about it. And if an action does not cause anyone to feel bad, there can be nothing wrong about it. If the same ancient text says that God commanded us not to make any images of either humans or animals (Exodus 20:4), but I enjoy sculpting such figures, and I don’t harm anyone in the process – then what could possibly be wrong with it?
The same logic dominates current debates on homosexuality. If two adult men enjoy having sex with one another, and they don’t harm anyone while doing so, why should it be wrong, and why should we outlaw it? It is a private matter between these two men, and they are free to decide about it according to their inner feelings. In the Middle Ages, if two men confessed to a priest that they were in love with one another, and that they never felt so happy, their good feelings would not have changed the priest’s damning judgement – indeed, their happiness would only have worsened the situation. Today, in contrast, if two men love one another, they are told: ‘If it feels good – do it! Don’t let any priest mess with your mind. Just follow your heart. You know best what’s good for you.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
Out, in Henry’s view, is a madhouse. Historians of social lunacy will confirm that this is literally the case, that the mad have been let out of the asylums and allowed to walk the streets. But Henry doesn’t mean that. By mad, nerve-strung Henry means revving when you’re stationary and driving with your hand on your horn – read that sexually if you like, but Henry has in mind incessant honking – he means text messaging the person standing next to you, or being wired up so that you can speak into thin air, conversing with God is how it looks to Henry, or wearing running shoes when you’re not running, or coming up to Henry with a bad face and a dog on a piece of string and asking him for money. Why would Henry give someone with a bad face money? Because of the dog? Because of the string?
”
”
Howard Jacobson (The Making of Henry)
“
If I could make my neighbors up, I could love them in a minute. I could make them in my own image, looking back at me with deep gratitude for how authentically human I am being to them—and they to me!—reading poetry to each other, admiring pictures of each other’s grandchildren, and taking casseroles to each other when we are sick. But nine times out of ten these are not the neighbors I get. Instead, I get neighbors who cancel my vote, burn trash in their yard, and shoot guns so close to my house that I have to wear an orange vest when I walk to the mailbox. These neighbors I did not make up knock on my front door to offer me the latest issue of The Watchtower. They put things on their church signs that make me embarrassed for all Christians everywhere. They text while they drive, flipping me off when I pass their expensive pickup trucks on the right, in spite of the fish symbols on their shiny rear bumpers.
”
”
Barbara Brown Taylor (Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others)
“
People who have problems with me . . . they’re the problems. It’s not me, it never was me. I move the most recent piece of paper that’s driving me crazy around a few more times, turning it clockwise over and over, even flipping it to the other side. It’s solid white, after all. There could be any number of places it’d go in this invoice puzzle. There! I get it slipped into place and pick up another one. I’m so close I can smell it! Victory, not trash. Still don’t smell that. Turn, turn, turn, flip, turn, turn. I pull on my magnifying glasses to look at the edge a little closer. On a few pieces, I’ve been able to tell which side is the front by the tear. Hmm, it looks like it goes this way. Here? No. Here? No. Grr. I’m making such good progress, but it’s not coming together. With the magnification glasses on, I lean down close to scan the pieces I have left to get into place and one catches my eye. I pick it up and examine it closely under the light, reading the text printed there. This
”
”
Lauren Landish (Drop Dead Gorgeous)
“
Aggie taught Jane to make Moroccan lamb meatballs and said bad things about people who used died ginger and that sangria was really a lower class sort of drink, and it was just like old times. Well, almost like old times, except that now Jane was the one that Aggie contacted, not Duncan. Jane was the one she texted when she had surplus tomatoes or homemade jam. Jane was the one Aggie asked for help when her washing machine went berserk and shimmied its way half out of her laundry room, although in that case all Jane did was dispatch Duncan. Jane was the one Aggie asked for advice on her bathroom tiles and then rejected the color Jane chose. "She does that", Duncan said. "She asks you your opinion when she already has her mind made up. Drives me crazy. Jane was the one Aggie called when Gary began having dizzy spells and blurred vision, and Aggie thought he might be having a stroke. Although it turned out that he was just wearing the wrong eyeglasses having accidentally picked up someone else's at the office.
”
”
Katherine Heiny (Early Morning Riser)
“
self-driving vehicles could provide people with much better transportation services, and in particular reduce mortality from traffic accidents. Today close to 1.25 million people are killed annually in traffic accidents (twice the number killed by war, crime, and terrorism combined).6 More than 90 percent of these accidents are caused by very human errors: somebody drinking alcohol and driving, somebody texting a message while driving, somebody falling asleep at the wheel, somebody daydreaming instead of paying attention to the road. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated in 2012 that 31 percent of fatal crashes in the United States involved alcohol abuse, 30 percent involved speeding, and 21 percent involved distracted drivers.7 Self-driving vehicles will never do any of these things. Though they suffer from their own problems and limitations, and though some accidents are inevitable, replacing all human drivers by computers is expected to reduce deaths and injuries on the road by about 90 percent.8 In other words, switching to autonomous vehicles is likely to save the lives of one million people every year.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
The first thing I want to say about Boyfriend is that he’s an extraordinarily decent human being. He’s kind and generous, funny and smart, and when he’s not making you laugh, he’ll drive to the drugstore at two a.m. to get you that antibiotic you just can’t wait until morning for. If he happens to be at Costco, he’ll text to ask if you need anything, and when you reply that you just need some laundry detergent, he’ll bring home your favorite meatballs and twenty jugs of maple syrup for the waffles he makes you from scratch. He’ll carry those twenty jugs from the garage to your kitchen, pack nineteen of them neatly into the tall cabinet you can’t reach, and place one on the counter, accessible for the morning. He’ll also leave love notes on your desk, hold your hand and open doors, and never complain about being dragged to family events because he genuinely enjoys hanging out with your relatives, even the nosy or elderly ones. For no reason at all, he’ll send you Amazon packages full of books (books being the equivalent of flowers to you), and at night you’ll both curl up and read passages from them aloud to each other, pausing only to make out. While you’re binge-watching Netflix, he’ll rub that spot on your back where you have mild scoliosis, and when he stops, and you nudge him, he’ll continue rubbing for exactly sixty more delicious seconds before he tries to weasel out without your noticing (you’ll pretend not to notice). He’ll let you finish his sandwiches and sentences and sunscreen and listen so attentively to the details of your day that, like your personal biographer, he’ll remember more about your life than you will. If this portrait sounds skewed, it is.
”
”
Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed)
“
GCHQ has traveled a long and winding road. That road stretches from the wooden huts of Bletchley Park, past the domes and dishes of the Cold War, and on towards what some suggest will be the omniscient state of the Brave New World. As we look to the future, the docile and passive state described by Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World is perhaps more appropriate analogy than the strictly totalitarian predictions offered by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Bizarrely, many British citizens are quite content in this new climate of hyper-surveillance, since its their own lifestyle choices that helped to create 'wired world' - or even wish for it, for as we have seen, the new torrents of data have been been a source of endless trouble for the overstretched secret agencies. As Ken Macdonald rightly points out, the real drives of our wired world have been private companies looking for growth, and private individuals in search of luxury and convenience at the click of a mouse. The sigint agencies have merely been handed the impossible task of making an interconnected society perfectly secure and risk-free, against the background of a globalized world that presents many unprecedented threats, and now has a few boundaries or borders to protect us. Who, then, is to blame for the rapid intensification of electronic surveillance? Instinctively, many might reply Osama bin Laden, or perhaps Pablo Escobar. Others might respond that governments have used these villains as a convenient excuse to extend state control. At first glance, the massive growth of security, which includes includes not only eavesdropping but also biometric monitoring, face recognition, universal fingerprinting and the gathering of DNA, looks like a sad response to new kinds of miscreants. However, the sad reality is that the Brave New World that looms ahead of us is ultimately a reflection of ourselves. It is driven by technologies such as text messaging and customer loyalty cards that are free to accept or reject as we choose. The public debate on surveillance is often cast in terms of a trade-off between security and privacy. The truth is that luxury and convenience have been pre-eminent themes in the last decade, and we have given them a much higher priority than either security or privacy. We have all been embraced the world of surveillance with remarkable eagerness, surfing the Internet in a global search for a better bargain, better friends, even a better partner.
GCHQ vast new circular headquarters is sometimes represented as a 'ring of power', exercising unparalleled levels of surveillance over citizens at home and abroad, collecting every email, every telephone and every instance of internet acces. It has even been asserted that GCHQ is engaged in nothing short of 'algorithmic warfare' as part of a battle for control of global communications. By contrast, the occupants of 'Celtenham's Doughnut' claim that in reality they are increasingly weak, having been left behind by the unstoppable electronic communications that they cannot hope to listen to, still less analyse or make sense of. In fact, the frightening truth is that no one is in control. No person, no intelligence agency and no government is steering the accelerating electronic processes that may eventually enslave us. Most of the devices that cause us to leave a continual digital trail of everything we think or do were not devised by the state, but are merely symptoms of modernity. GCHQ is simply a vast mirror, and it reflects the spirit of the age.
”
”
Richard J. Aldrich (GCHQ)
“
With an obscure hesitation one steps into the day and its frame and its costume. Between the puzzlement and its summary abandonment, between the folds of waking consciousness and their subsequent limitation, is a possible city. Solitude, hotels, aging, love, hormones, alcohol, illness – these drifting experiences open it a little. Sometimes prolonged reading holds it ajar. Another’s style of consciousness inflects one’s own; an odd syntactic manner, a texture of embellishment, pause. A new mode of rest. I can feel physiologically haunted by a style. It’s why I read ideally, for the structured liberation from the personal, yet the impersonal inflection can persist outside the text, beyond the passion of readerly empathy, a most satisfying transgression that arrives only inadvertently, never by force of intention. As if seized by a fateful kinship, against all the odds of sociology, the reader psychically assumes the cadence of the text. She sheds herself. This description tends towards a psychological interpretation of linguistics, but the experience is also spatial. I used to drive home from my lover’s apartment at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. This was Vancouver in 1995. A zone of light-industrial neglect separated our two neighbourhoods. Between them the stretched-out city felt abandoned. My residual excitement and relaxation would extend outwards from my body and the speeding car, towards the dilapidated warehouses, the shut storefronts, the distant container yards, the dark exercise studios, the pools of sulphur light, towards a low-key dereliction. I would feel pretty much free. I was a driver, not a pronoun, not a being with breasts and anguish. I was neither with the lover nor alone. I was suspended in a nonchalance. My cells were at ease. I doted on nothing.
”
”
Lisa Robertson (The Baudelaire Fractal)
“
Bailey,” I say, my voice carrying easily across the marble floor. “Wait.”
She turns back and rolls her eyes, clearly annoyed to see me coming her way. She quickly wipes at her cheeks then holds up her hand to wave me off. “I’m off the clock. I don’t want to talk to you right now. If you want to chew me out for what happened back there, you’ll have to do it on Monday. I’m going home.”
“How?”
Her pretty brown eyes, full of tears, narrow up at me in confusion. “How what?”
“How are you getting home? Did you park on the street or something?”
Her brows relax as she realizes I’m not about to scold her. “Oh.” She turns to the window. “I’m going to catch the bus.” The bus? “The stop is just down the street a little bit.”
“Don’t you have a car?”
She steels her spine. “No. I don’t.”
I’ll have to look into what we’re paying her—surely she should have no problem affording a car to get her to and from work.
“Okay, well then what about an Uber or something?”
Her tone doesn’t lighten as she replies, “I usually take the bus. It’s fine.”
I look for an umbrella and frown when I see her hands are empty. “You’re going to get drenched and it’s freezing out there.”
She laughs and starts to step back. “It’s not your concern. Don’t worry about me.”
Yes, well unfortunately, I do worry about her. For the last three weeks, all I’ve done is worry about her.
Cooper is to blame. He fuels my annoyance on a daily basis, updating me about their texts and bragging to me about how their relationship is developing. Relationship—I find that laughable. They haven’t gone on a date. They haven’t even spoken on the phone. If the metric for a “relationship” lies solely in the number of text messages exchanged then as of this week, I’m in a relationship with my tailor, my UberEats delivery guy, and my housekeeper. I’ve got my hands fucking full.
“Well I’m not going to let you wait out at the bus stop in this weather. C’mon, I’ll drive you.”
Her soft feminine laugh echoes around the lobby.
“Thank you, but I’d rather walk.”
What she really means is, Thank you, but I’d rather die.
“It’s really not a request. You’re no good to me if you have to call in sick on Monday because you caught pneumonia.”
Her gaze sheens with a new layer of hatred. “You of all people know you don’t catch pneumonia just from being cold and wet.”
She tries to step around me, but I catch her backpack and tug it off her shoulder. I can’t put it on because she has the shoulder straps set to fit a toddler, so I hold it in my hand and start walking. She can either follow me or not. I tell myself I don’t care either way.
“Dr. Russell—” she says behind me, her feet lightly tap-tap-tapping on the marble as she hurries to keep up.
“You’re clocked out, aren’t you? Call me Matt.”
“Doctor,” she says pointedly. “Please give me my backpack before I call security.”
I laugh because really, she’s hilarious. No one has ever threatened to call security on me before.
“It’s Matt, and if you’re going to call security, make sure you ask for Tommy. He’s younger and stands a decent chance of catching me before I hightail it out of here with your pink JanSport backpack. What do you have in here anyway?”
It weighs nothing.
“My lunchbox. A water bottle. Some empty Tupperware.”
Tupperware.
I glance behind me to check on her. She’s fast-walking as she trails behind me. Am I really that much taller than her?
“Did you bring more banana bread?”
She nods and nearly breaks out in a jog. “Patricia didn’t get any last time and I felt bad.”
“I didn’t get any last time either,” I point out.
She snorts. “Yeah well, I don’t feel bad about that.”
I face forward again so she can’t see my smile.
”
”
R.S. Grey (Hotshot Doc)
“
Like Felicity they methodically checked the house office, safe and family bank account details and financial affairs. Angelina then had Inspector Mick bug the boys’ homes, cars and offices and with the information she acquired came knowledge and contacts. She wrote a programme called listen, it saved all conversations digitally and converted it to text into a computer file in a remote location not traceable to her or anybody at 3WW but it recorded all his illicit dealings and it gave her valuable information. She hacked into their individual MIS computer systems and sent spyware via e-mail called virus protection free download and once opened it went through their c drive, all files on their computers, and copied all files to a ip address of a remote computer of Angelina’s request, in a phantom company named Borrow. All data was heavily encrypted and deleted after access and storage was onto an external hard drive storage box, deleting the electronic footpath. The spyware recorded their strokes on the keyboard and Angelina was able to secure even their banking pins and passwords and all their computer passwords. She had a brilliant computer mind, wasted in librarianship
”
”
Annette J. Dunlea
“
If Marner, through the allegedly compassionate intervention of Eliot and Eppie combined, becomes, in his meek and modest way, a pillar of the social order instead of the implicit counterinstance adduced in the text as a pillar of salt, it is only because the threat of that salt, with which Eliot has no beef, cures him.
”
”
Lee Edelman (No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive)
“
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than half of us get the annual flu vaccine, even though each year in the United States the flu kills up to twenty thousand people and lands over one hundred thousand in the hospital, and the vaccine can typically prevent or at least soften the blow of the virus if it’s contracted. In a bad year, when the flu is especially virulent, up to sixty thousand people in the United States will die if they are unvaccinated. Tens of thousands of Americans perish in car crashes each year, and more than half of those people weren’t wearing seat belts. Nearly a quarter of teenagers in fatal accidents are distracted by their cell phones; every day eleven teenagers die as a result of texting while driving (car crashes are the leading cause of death of teens in the United States). And vanity must trump sanity when it comes to tanning: more than 3.5 million individuals are diagnosed with skin cancer yearly and nearly ten thousand of them die. Today one in five deaths in the United States is now associated with obesity. Over the two-year period of the Ebola virus “outbreak,” there was one U.S. death. So, indeed, éclairs are scarier than Ebola.
”
”
Nina Shapiro (Hype: A Doctor's Guide to Medical Myths, Exaggerated Claims, and Bad Advice—How to Tell What's Real and What's Not)
“
The dog in it is a guard for our souls.
And the dog drives away the violence of the firs.
The dog protects their spirits in their bodies.
And the dog is in them, irremovable.
And the dog overcomes them dissolving their breathing,
Like something similar to magnesia from the universe.
And the dog makes appear souls from what contains it.
And the dog chases away the darkness of the fats.
And the dog purifies them and makes appear their color, similar as white talcum,
Safely.
And the dog opens every lock that is difficult to open anytime.
And the dog is called the sheikh in their examples.
And the dog is called the lion in their texts.
And the dog is called the anger in their description, so understand its description.
And the dog is like the poison in the bodies.
And the dog is the dog.
”
”
Muhammad Ibn Umail
“
Pulling the letter I wrote from my back pocket, I drop it on the hallway table and text down to have a cab brought around. As far as I'm concerned, Sin can have my Camaro, Ryan can have my Harley, and Sienna gets my Hummer. She loves driving that tank, and it's the safest vehicle out there for her, really.
”
”
Ramie Wolf (Eternity of Sin: A Legion of Sin Novel #3)
“
had forced him to buy Exeltec from me for another exorbitant sum, so I came away from this in a good enough position. The CDC failed to find evidence that Panos had released any kind of pathogen, and eventually determined that the note on Panos’s computer had been an idle threat, meant to send I3 into a panic. Earlier that morning, Dion had sent me a thank-you note from him and his mother for stopping the government from burning the body. I hadn’t yet told them I’d stolen this thumb drive. It contained the key, and a . . . second file. A small text document, also encrypted. We’d stared at it for a time before realizing that the key had been printed on the outside of the thumb drive itself. Chapter nineteen
”
”
Brandon Sanderson (Skin Deep (Legion, #2))
“
Honk if you love Jesus. Text and drive if you want to meet him.
”
”
Alethea Black (You've Been So Lucky Already: A Memoir)
“
* * * WHEN TOM CAME home, it was much later than he’d planned. But he’d taken the shuttle bus to school, because only bungholes drove after drinking whiskey, and Tom was a bunghole in some ways, but not that way. Drunk driving, driving while texting, walking while texting...it would not be the way he died. So he’d done some work on a demonstration he’d be showing the students about wind sheer and torque and made good use of his time at school. Might as well. Then, Droog had shown up, and he and Tom ended up getting a beer, and Tom told his boss the news that he was getting married. “Ah!” Droog cried. “You and Mees Holland have dee cleek! Yes!
”
”
Kristan Higgins (The Perfect Match (Blue Heron #2))
“
In 2009, New York Times reporter Matt Richtel earned a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with a series of articles (“Driven to Distraction”) on the dangers of driving while texting or using cell phones. He found that distracted driving is responsible for 16 percent of all traffic fatalities and nearly half a million injuries annually. Even an idle phone conversation when driving takes a 40 percent bite out of your focus and, surprisingly, can have the same effect as being drunk. The
”
”
Gary Keller (The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results)
“
My phone buzzed in the center console again.
"What's happening with this thing?" Dad grabbed it.
"Dad, really?" I didn't want him to see the texts between Dash and me. Awkward.
"He says he knew it."
The traffic opened up, and I went right on Sunset. "Please don't scroll."
"Knew what?"
"I have no idea, and I'm driving. So forget it for now."
"I'll ask him."
—Knew what?—
"Dad, really?" I snapped the phone away.
Ding ding.
I couldn't look. I was going thirty on Sunset and the lights were synchronized for a westward trip, so there would be no stopping at a red.
"Let me see," Dad said, hand out.
All I needed was for my father to see something about Dash's tongue on my pussy or the way I sounded when I came. So I pulled over.
”
”
C.D. Reiss (HardBall)
“
DECEMBER 3, 1992 No LOL Matter On December 3, 1992, Neil Papworth sent the world’s first text message, making it a very bad day for the English language indeed. Since that day, teenagers have stopped actually speaking to one another, proper spelling has become obsolete, and driving while texting has now far surpassed driving while drinking as the most lethal activity on the road. 4COL.
”
”
Michael Farquhar (Bad Days in History: A Gleefully Grim Chronicle of Misfortune, Mayhem, and Misery for Every Day of the Year)
“
The Ultimate Guide To SEO In The 21st Century
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One sure way to increase traffic to your website, is to check the traffic statistics for the most popular search engine keywords that are currently bringing visitors to your site. Use those search words as subjects for your next few posts, as they represent trending topics with proven interest to your visitors.
Ask for help, or better yet, search for it. There are hundreds of websites available that offer innovative expertise on optimizing your search engine hits. Take advantage of them! Research the best and most current methods to keep your site running smoothly and to learn how not to get caught up in tricks that don't really work.
For the most optimal search engine optimization, stay away from Flash websites. While Google has improved its ability to read text within Flash files, it is still an imperfect science. For instance, any text that is part of an image file in your Flash website will not be read by Google or indexed. For the best SEO results, stick with HTML or HTML5.
You have probably read a few ideas in this article that you would have never thought of, in your approach to search engine optimization. That is the nature of the business, full of tips and tricks that you either learn the hard way or from others who have been there and are willing to share! Hopefully, this article has shown you how to succeed, while making fewer of those mistakes and in turn, quickened your path to achievement in search engine optimization!
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search rankings
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Most things we learn are easier to apply in a material form, as when following a certain decision or task, when thinking rationally about ourselves and our life. Everything becomes messed up when are trying to understand what makes us who we are, and that's why love exists, to pushes us there. Emotions are very powerful, I believe up to five thousand times more than the mind - there are actual scientific studies on the topic. In other words, our brain is nothing compared to the heart. The heart has an intelligence of its own. But it is indeed connected to the rest of us, including our mind. So what this means is that our emotions are far more powerful than our reason. You know, like when a grasshopper gets his head chopped off by a female after sex - he knows he is going to die, but he sill can't help himself. A large majority of us is like that. We think we are superior to animals, but only in the amount of problems. Nonetheless, when you look at someone very smart doing something very stupid, you wonder what the hell is happening, and that's when we enter the fields of spirituality and psychology. Psychology can answer pretty much most of our behaviors - as we either move towards pleasure or pain, to avoid one and obtain more of the other. When both get mixed it all becomes complicated, but it does happen, in families, relationships, and so on. The extreme of this is altruism, when a person literally sacrifices his life to save another. You can start by Jesus, but you don't need to go so far. There are many examples everywhere, like the fireman that tries to save a guy that attempted to commit suicide by setting his house on fire. The fireman may know the other man did it on purpose, but he still risks his life to save him. The same with the exorcist, who faces the devil to save someone who actually accepted to be possessed or did some crazy ritual to get more knowledge, power, sex, and whatsoever; the exorcist knows he is risking his life and mental health to save an ignorant soul, and yet he still does it. The same with the father who runs after the son who is consuming drugs. He knows that his son or one of his companions may kill him out of anger but he still can't help himself. The same occurs with the police officer, when risking getting a bullet from the person to whom he is pointing a gun with no desire to shoot it. So what about love? It's a similar relation. Many times we are programmed to behave in a certain way and we can't help ourselves. Life, however, is more complex than that, which can be a good thing, like when we are cheated by someone who was already no good in our life. He or she did us a very good favor, even if we can't see it right then. The same when someone dies. Well, yeah, this one sounds bad, but people don't just die for no reason, even though it may seem so, not when they are texting while driving or drunk or high on weed. And what about when we lose our job and our partner starts fighting about money? That's also a blessing, as otherwise we would never know that that's all he or she cared about. There are countless ways to look at it. And yet, many times we have strong feelings for someone who is simply mentally sick. Is this love or insanity? I don't really know. I know as much as the grasshopper that gets his head chopped by a female for thousands of years and is not yet extinct by reason.
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Robin Sacredfire
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Most things we learn are easier to apply in a material form, as when following a certain decision or task, when thinking rationally about ourselves and our life. Everything becomes messed up when are trying to understand what makes us who we are, and that's why love exists, to pushes us there. Emotions are very powerful, I believe up to five thousand times more than the mind - there are actual scientific studies on the topic. In other words, our brain is nothing compared to the heart. The heart has an intelligence of its own. But it is indeed connected to the rest of us, including our mind. So what this means is that our emotions are far more powerful than our reason. You know, like when a praying mantis gets his head chopped off by a female after sex - he knows he is going to die, but he sill can't help himself. A large majority of us is like that. We think we are superior to animals, but only in the amount of problems. Nonetheless, when you look at someone very smart doing something very stupid, you wonder what the hell is happening, and that's when we enter the fields of spirituality and psychology. Psychology can answer pretty much most of our behaviors - as we either move towards pleasure or pain, to avoid one and obtain more of the other. When both get mixed it all becomes complicated, but it does happen, in families, relationships, and so on. The extreme of this is altruism, when a person literally sacrifices his life to save another. You can start by Jesus, but you don't need to go so far. There are many examples everywhere, like the fireman that tries to save a guy that attempted to commit suicide by setting his house on fire. The fireman may know the other man did it on purpose, but he still risks his life to save him. The same with the exorcist, who faces the devil to save someone who actually accepted to be possessed or did some crazy ritual to get more knowledge, power, sex, and whatsoever; the exorcist knows he is risking his life and mental health to save an ignorant soul, and yet he still does it. The same with the father who runs after the son who is consuming drugs. He knows that his son or one of his companions may kill him out of anger but he still can't help himself. The same occurs with the police officer, when risking getting a bullet from the person to whom he is pointing a gun with no desire to shoot it. So what about love? It's a similar relation. Many times we are programmed to behave in a certain way and we can't help ourselves. Life, however, is more complex than that, which can be a good thing, like when we are cheated by someone who was already no good in our life. He or she did us a very good favor, even if we can't see it right then. The same when someone dies. Well, yeah, this one sounds bad, but people don't just die for no reason, even though it may seem so, not when they are texting while driving or drunk or high on weed. And what about when we lose our job and our partner starts fighting about money? That's also a blessing, as otherwise we would never know that that's all he or she cared about. There are countless ways to look at it. And yet, many times we have strong feelings for someone who is simply mentally sick. Is this love or insanity? I don't really know. I know as much as the praying mantis that gets his head chopped by a female for thousands of years and is not yet extinct by reason.
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Robin Sacredfire
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Law is not in the law books. Books are one of the first things that come to mind when we think about law: fat texts almost too heavy to lift; dust-covered, leather-bound tomes of precedents; law libraries filled with rows and rows of statutes and judicial opinions. While books tell us a lot about the law, they are not the law. Instead, law lives in conduct, not on the printed page; it exists in the interactions of judges, lawyers, and ordinary citizens. Think, for example, about one of the laws we most commonly encounter: the speed limit. What is the legal speed limit on most interstate highways? Someone who looked only in the law books might think the answer is 65 mph, but we know better. If you drive at 65 mph on the New Jersey Turnpike, be prepared to have a truck bearing down on you, flashing its lights to get you to pull into the slow lane. The speed limit according to drivers’ conduct is considerably higher than 65. And legal officials act the same way. The police allow drivers a cushion and never give a speeding ticket to someone who is going 66. If they did, the judges would laugh them out of traffic court. As a practical matter, the court doesn’t want to waste its time with someone who violated the speed limit by 1 mph, and as a matter of law, the police radar may not be accurate enough to draw that fine a line anyway. So what is the law on how fast you can drive? Something different than the books say.
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Jay M. Feinman (Law 101: Everything You Need to Know About American Law)
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From the beginning, the UX writer needs to know the business constraints, including resources available for localization and the timelines to coordinate engineering and UX content with content for marketing, sales, and support. We also need to know what languages the people using the experience are fluent in, on which devices, and in what contexts. As the experience develops, we need to know technical, display, and design constraints (like maximum URL lengths and text box sizes), which text needs to be coded before hardware is shipped, and which text can be updated from live services.
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Torrey Podmajersky (Strategic Writing for UX: Drive Engagement, Conversion, and Retention with Every Word)
Torrey Podmajersky (Strategic Writing for UX: Drive Engagement, Conversion, and Retention with Every Word)
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We can write UX text in the first-run experience for our TAPP app so that the first time the person uses the experience, they are able to start meeting their own goals right away.
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Torrey Podmajersky (Strategic Writing for UX: Drive Engagement, Conversion, and Retention with Every Word)
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Q: Why We Drive is a unique book, combining cartoons, text-form journalism, and photographs. How did it come about?
After I did the book CARtoons in 2001, I got invitations to speak at various venues including The Village Building Convergence, bookstores and a few universities. Being a visual artist, I gradually developed a slide talk about the social, environmental, economic and political problems of transportation design in America. I used a mixture of cartoons, photographs and maps because I found it was helpful to give people real-world examples of good and bad urban design. When I got positive feedback from the talk, I became interested in turning it into a book and an interactive website. I still have to build the interactive website but Microcosm helped me create, edit and publish the book. My goal was to explain transportation design issues and politics in a simple way to college students and the general public, as well as put forward a few ideas about why I believe we’re not making more political progress at reforming our transportation system.
(2015 interview with Microcosm Publishing)2015
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Andy Singer
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Write your routine, Ronan. Now. While I watch. I want to see it."
7:45 A.M.: The most important meal of the day.
8:00 A.M.: Feed animals.
9:30 A.M.: Repair barns or house.
12:00 P.M.: Lunch @ that weird gas station.
1:30 P.M.: Ronan Lynch's marvelous dream emporium.
"What does this one mean, Ronan?"
It meant practice makes perfect. It meant ten thousand hours to mastery, if at first you don't succeed, there is no try only do. Ronan had spent hours over the last year dreaming ever more complex and precise objects into being, culminating in an intricate security system that rendered the Barns largely impossible to find unless you knew exactly where you were going. After Cambridge, though, it felt like all the fun had run out of the game.
"I don't ask what you do at work, Declan."
6:00 P.M.: Drive around.
7:15 P.M.: Nuke some dinner, yo.
7:30 P.M.: Movie time.
11:00 P.M.: Text Parrish.
Adam's most recent text had said simply: $4200.
It was the amount Ronan had to send to cover the dorm room repairs.
*11:30 P.M.: Go to bed.
*Saturday/Sunday: Church/DC
*Monday: Laundry & Grocery
*Tuesday: Text or call Gansey
These last items were in Declan's handwriting, his addendums subtly suggesting all the components of a fulfilling grown-up life Ronan had missed when crafting it. They only served to depress Ronan more. Look how you can predict the next forty-eight hours, seventy-two hours, ninety-six hours, look how you can predict the rest of your life. The entire word routine depressed Ronan. The sameness. Fuck everything.
Gansey texted: Declan told me to tell you to get out of bed.
Ronan texted back: why
He watched the morning light move over the varied black-gray shapes in his bedroom. Shelves of model cars; an open Uilleann pipes case; an old scuffed desk with a stuffed whale on it; a metal tree with wondrously intricate branches; heaps of laundry curled around beet-read wood shavings.
Gansey texted back: don't make me get on a plane I'm currently chained to one of the largest black walnut trees in Oregon
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Maggie Stiefvater (Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer Trilogy, #1))
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Human rationality drives our powerful desire to come to a clear and accurate understanding of reality and to behave in accordance with what we discover. Grasping reality matters deeply to human functioning, even to human sanity. When what we are offered in the Bible or what is reinforced by Tradition seems to contradict what we observe to be real, evangelicals have often been taught to submit to Scripture and Tradition and ignore the facts in front of us. But this kind of religiosity not only takes us into intellectual dead ends, it can also hurt people—as when our texts seem to require us to put a grossly negative moral construction on the fact of nonheterosexual sexuality.
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David P. Gushee (After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity)
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Write your routine, Ronan. Now. While I watch. I want to see it."
7:45 A.M.: The most important meal of the day.
8:00 A.M.: Feed animals.
9:30 A.M.: Repair barns or house.
12:00 P.M.: Lunch @ that weird gas station.
1:30 P.M.: Ronan Lynch's marvelous dream emporium.
"What does this one mean, Ronan?"
It meant practice makes perfect. It meant ten thousand hours to mastery, if at first you don't succeed, there is no try only do. Ronan had spent hours over the last year dreaming ever more complex and precise objects into being, culminating in an intricate security system that rendered the Barns largely impossible to find unless you knew exactly where you were going. After Cambridge, though, it felt like all the fun had run out of the game.
"I don't ask what you do at work, Declan."
6:00 P.M.: Drive around.
7:15 P.M.: Nuke some dinner, yo.
7:30 P.M.: Movie time.
11:00 P.M.: Text Parrish.
Adam's most recent text had said simply: $4200.
It was the amount Ronan had to send to cover the dorm room repairs.
*11:30 P.M.: Go to bed.
*Saturday/Sunday: Church/DC
*Monday: Laundry & Grocery
*Tuesday: Text or call Gansey
These last items were in Declan's handwriting, his addendums subtly suggesting all the components of a fulfilling grown-up life Ronan had missed when crafting it. They only served to depress Ronan more. Look how you can predict the next forty-eight hours, seventy-two hours, ninety-six hours, look how you can predict the rest of your life. The entire word routine depressed Ronan. The sameness. Fuck everything.
Gansey texted: Declan told me to tell you to get out of bed.
Ronan texted back: why
He watched the morning light move over the varied black-gray shapes in his bedroom. Shelves of model cars; an open Uilleann pipes case; an old scuffed desk with a stuffed whale on it; a metal tree with wondrously intricate branches; heaps of laundry curled around beet-red wood shavings.
Gansey texted back: don't make me get on a plane I'm currently chained to one of the largest black walnut trees in Oregon
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Maggie Stiefvater (Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer Trilogy, #1))
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Our driver bumped the cars in front and behind us to make space, then we crossed on to the other side in our big 4x4 and started driving the wrong way up the motorway, dodging cars coming at us. I thought back to it afterwards and decided it had felt worryingly normal. I realised I’d been munching on a flapjack and Craig had been texting. I wondered if we were becoming just slightly too immune to risk.
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Simon Reeve (Journeys to Impossible Places: By the presenter of BBC TV's WILDERNESS)
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Superficial statesmen and politicians — always too plentifully represented in every Reform, Radical or Revolutionary Party — constantly make the mistake of assuming that if a well-tried and old-established institution begins to reveal serious flaws, the fault must inevitably lie with the institution itself and not with the men trying to run it.
Consequently, the facile remedy such men invariably seek is that of scrapping the institution altogether and replacing it by some new-fangled untried contraption, hastily contrived, which is then with infantile naivete handed over to the very same generation of men who have made a mess of the scrapped edifice.
At bottom, this policy amounts to attempting to correct the faulty and incompetent driving of a car by tinkering with its mechanisms and structure, instead of improving the driver.
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Anthony Mario Ludovici (A Defence of Aristocracy: A Text Book for Tories)
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What is Video Marketing? Why do you need it?
Video is the future of content marketing. It engages the audience like no other medium, building trust and showcasing your brand in a way that text and still images simply can't. In today's fast-paced world, video marketing helps your business stand out and drive results. Tinger Digital is here to create compelling visuals to showcase your brand and drive results. Tinger Digital is here for all your video marketing needs.
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Tinger Digital
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restrictions designed to prevent impulsive choices are all around us: speed limits, laws against drug use, laws against texting while driving, and even standard, spaced-out homework deadlines. But normally these kinds of restrictions are imposed on us by a presumably benevolent third party, such as a government or a teacher. What makes commitment devices weird is that they’re self-imposed—we’re handcuffing ourselves!
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Katy Milkman (How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be)
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When I start reading a text I never know, from the beginning, whether I am approaching it from the point of view of a suitable intention. My initiative starts to become exciting when I discover that my intention could meet the intention of that text.
How to prove a conjecture about the 'intentio operis'? The only way is to check it against the text as a coherent whole. […] any interpretation given of a certain portion of a text can be accepted if it is confirmed and must be rejected if it is challenged by another portion of the same text. In this sense the internal textual coherence controls the otherwise uncontrollable drives of the reader.
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Umberto Eco (The Limits of Interpretation (Advances in Semiotics))
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The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.
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David Harrison (C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters in Everyday English: An easy to read version of a C.S. Lewis classic.)
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Vasana is determinism that feels like free will. I’m reminded of my friend Jean, whom I’ve known for almost twenty years. Jean considers himself very spiritual and went so far in the early nineties as to walk way from his job with a newspaper in Denver to live in an ashram in western Massachusetts. But he found the atmosphere choking. “They’re all crypto Hindus,” he complained. “They don’t do anything but pray and chant and meditate.” So Jean decided to move on with his life. He’s fallen in love with a couple of women but has never married. He doesn’t like the notion of settling down and tends to move to a new state every four years or so. (He once told me that he counted up and discovered that he’s lived in forty different houses since he was born.) One day Jean called me with a story. He was on a date with a woman who had taken a sudden interest in Sufism, and while they were driving home, she told Jean that according to her Sufi teacher, everyone has a prevailing characteristic. “You mean the thing that is most prominent about them, like being extroverted or introverted?” he asked. “No, not prominent,” she said. “Your prevailing characteristic is hidden. You act on it without seeing that you’re acting on it.” The minute he heard this, Jean became excited. “I looked out the car window, and it hit me,” he said. “I sit on the fence. I am only comfortable if I can have both sides of a situation without committing to either.” All at once a great many pieces fell into place. Jean could see why he went into an ashram but didn’t feel like he was one of the group. He saw why he fell in love with women but always saw their faults. Much more came to light. Jean complains about his family yet never misses a Christmas with them. He considers himself an expert on every subject he’s studied—there have been many—but he doesn’t earn his living pursuing any of them. He is indeed an inveterate fence-sitter. And as his date suggested, Jean had no idea that his Vasana, for that’s what we’re talking about, made him enter into one situation after another without ever falling off the fence. “Just think,” he said with obvious surprise, “the thing that’s the most me is the thing I never saw.” If unconscious tendencies kept working in the dark, they wouldn’t be a problem. The genetic software in a penguin or wildebeest guides it to act without any knowledge that it is behaving much like every other penguin or wildebeest. But human beings, unique among all living creatures, want to break down Vasana. It’s not good enough to be a pawn who thinks he’s a king. We crave the assurance of absolute freedom and its result—a totally open future. Is this reasonable? Is it even possible? In his classic text, the Yoga Sutras, the sage Patanjali informs us that there are three types of Vasana. The kind that drives pleasant behavior he calls white Vasana; the kind that drives unpleasant behavior he calls dark Vasana; the kind that mixes the two he calls mixed Vasana. I would say Jean had mixed Vasana—he liked fence-sitting but he missed the reward of lasting love for another person, a driving aspiration, or a shared vision that would bond him with a community. He displayed the positives and negatives of someone who must keep every option open. The goal of the spiritual aspirant is to wear down Vasana so that clarity can be achieved. In clarity you know that you are not a puppet—you have released yourself from the unconscious drives that once fooled you into thinking that you were acting spontaneously.
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Deepak Chopra (The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life)
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other people can train themselves to focus strategically in front of thousands, please don’t tell me you can’t… Shut off your television Shut off your phone Stop texting while driving Use a planner to organize your life…
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Rene Vidal (The Power of Focus: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Start Creating Big Results)
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Lexington High still plays Burlington High on Thanksgiving Day, and Dratch and I trash-text each other. She calls me Burlington garbage and I tell her to go drive her Mercedes into a lake.
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Amy Poehler (Yes Please)
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Happy was in every minute I spent with Charlie, no matter if we were driving to work, laughing over Chinese food, or telling scary stories by the fire pit in her back yard. Happy was in her looks, in her texts, in her voice and in her laugh. Happy, I discovered, was simply doing life with Charlie.
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Nicole Deese (All She Wanted (Letting Go, #2))
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Mind Reading: Yeah, I’m talking to you. This is one that MANY of us are guilty of. Mind reading is very much what it sounds like. You assume that you know a person’s thoughts or internal motives, even though in reality you are just taking guesses. Example: You text your significant other saying how much you love them and that you are really happy that things have been great lately. You ask them if they want to go to a movie later. I’m talking super cutesy with emojis and everything. Five minutes later, you get the response, “K.” That’s it, just… K. When you see your partner later you say, “So you don’t want to go to the movies?” You’re already pissed because you assume that they don’t care as much as you given their lackluster response. If they cared as much, they would have used an equivalent number of emojis… duh. In reality, they were just driving on the freeway and cared enough about you to not get killed by texting while driving.
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Robert Duff (Hardcore Self Help: F**k Anxiety)