Tying Shoelaces Quotes

In my rush, I hadn’t tied my shoelaces. Noah was now tying them for me. He looked up at me through his dark fringe of lashes and smiled. The expression on his face melted me completely. I knew I had the goofiest grin plastered on my lips, and didn’t care. “There,” he said as he finished tying the laces on my left shoe. “Now you won’t fall.” Too late.

Was it a test?” she asked. “I mean, I know I'm still new to this. I'm still the rookie. Did you hang back to test me, to see if I'd be able to handle it alone?” “Well, kind of,” he said. “Actually, no, nothing like that. My shoelace was untied. That's why I was late. That's why you were alone.” “I could have been killed because you were tying your SHOELACE?” “An untied shoelace an be dangerous,” he said. “I could have tripped.” She stared at him. A moment dragged by. “I'm joking,” he said at last. She relaxed. “Really?” “Absolutely. I would never have tripped. I'm far too graceful

You know you're getting old when you stoop to tie your shoelaces and wonder what else you could do while you're down there.

What happened between us has colonized every last brain cell. I can barely tie my shoelaces. I forgot how to chew this morning.

-You are on the verge of being truly mad. -No, not at all. Look at me. I can tie my shoelaces. See?

You can tie them, Yes you can. Just take those laces in both hands. Loop and swoop and tie them off. You can show them who’s the boss.

Simple things are almost always the hardest to explain, Julie. Showing someone how to tie a shoelace is easy. Explaining it is almost impossible.

I watch her do the simplest things: brushing her hair into a ponytail, feeding the dog, tying Sophie's shoelaces, and I want to tell her what she means to me, but I never actually say the words. After all, to acknowledge Delia as a drug, I'd have to face the fact that one day I might have to go without her and this I can't do.

I could've died because you had to tie your shoelace?

I can tie a cherry stem into a knot with my tongue. Now, if only I could do the same with my shoelaces, I wouldn’t have to banana pudding my way to success.

Exercises in manual dexterity build self-esteem in children. Knowing how to tie shoe-strings, scarves and more into a bow is a useful and rewarding skill.

Teach a child a useful skill. Build confidence and self-esteem that lasts a lifetime.

The promise of a reward can help encourage children to keep at a hard task. Offer something fun each time the child takes time to practice.

Lacing and knotting is not just for shoes. Looping and tying are skills you can use.

Don’t give up. Let’s try again,” cheered on the bunny’s very best friend.

I don’t need to know knots for the things I do. Why should I learn to tie my shoes?

You didn't tie your shoelaces and you blamed the world when you tripped.

Shoelaces are the first way society ties up the individual.

Leadership is volunteering at the local school, speaking encouraging words to a friend, and holding the hand of a dying parent. It’s tying dirty shoelaces and going to therapy and saying to our families and friends: No. We don’t do unkindness here. It’s signing up to run for the school board and it’s driving that single mom’s kid home from practice and it’s creating boundaries that prove to the world that you value yourself. Leadership is taking care of yourself and empowering others to do the same.

I tie my smile like a shoelace.

It's good to be with someone who has been through hell - life is hard, and strange, and a lot of shit happens. And when someone's been through the worst of it already, pain doesn't come as much of a surprise, they just sit down tie their shoelaces wave to old demons, and get on with it.

There are several diseases of the memory. Forgetfulness of nouns, for instance, or of numbers. Or there are more complex amnesias. With one, you can lose your entire past; you start afresh, learning how to tie your shoelaces, how to eat with a fork, how to read and sing. You are introduced to your relatives, your oldest friends, as if you’ve never met them before; you get a second chance with them, better than forgiveness because you can begin innocent. With another form, you keep the distant past but lose the present. You can’t remember what happened five minutes ago. When someone you’ve known all your life goes out of the room and then comes back in, you greet them as if they’ve been gone for twenty years; you weep and weep, with joy and relief, as if at a reunion with the dead. I sometimes wonder which of these will afflict me, later; because I know one of them will. For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

Death. One who died is only a little ahead of procession all moving that way. When we round the corner we'll see him again. We have only lost him for a moment because we fell behind, stopping to tie a shoelace.

Through the radical undoing and debilitation of repeated pain we are reacquainted with the essentialities of place and time and existence itself; in deep pain we have energy only for what we can do wholeheartedly and then, only within a narrow range of motion, metaphorically or physically, from tying our shoelace to holding the essential core conversations that are reciprocal and reinforcing within the close-in circle of those we love. Pain teaches us a fine economy, in movement, in the heart’s affections, in what we ask of ourselves and eventually in what we ask in others.

Almost any abdominal operation can now be performed laparoscopically, which is Greek for “much slower”, and involves inserting tiny cameras and instruments on long sticks through little holes. It’s fiddly and takes a long time to learn. Recreate the experience for yourself by tying your shoelaces with chopsticks. With your eyes closed. In space.

Death is no longer an obscure idea. It is real and it is waiting, so you grab life by the balls. When you go through the horror of seeing someone you love die and still manage to wake up the next day to tie your shoelaces, to shove a tasteless breakfast down your throat, to breathe, you realize survival trumps tragedy. Always. It’s a primal instinct.

The power of the witch is in her hair. The ones who killed her knew this. They cut off her long tresses, tied them into devil's shoelaces, and bound her hands and feet.

Stop and unplug,” say I; “look around you, at the vastness and greatness of the natural world.” Some stop. Others need binoculars to tie their shoelaces.

My cousin should be careful of tying his shoelace is a melon field......anyone might think he was stealing

He’s kind of adorable, in an I want to tie his shoelaces and blow on his skinned knee kind of way.

Do you see this shoelace? I’d like to take it and tie your tongue to your uvula, and your uvula to your stomach, and your stomach to your uterus, so that the very first word of your answer leaves you hollow.

Kat and Will must have been quietly plotting their escape for years, and I'd been so intent on making sure that their homework was done and their desks were tidy and their shoelaces tied that I'd missed all the signs.

In a sec.......let's see if this will help. Once there was a bunny that was very sad cause his ears were long and floppy and he stepped on them all the time." "Like my shoelaces?" "Yep, just like that. One day a beautiful fairy,,,,,,,," "The shoelace fairy?" "Yep. She landed on the bunny's head and.........." "Didn't that hurt? Does she have a wand?" "Nope. She lifted up the bunny's ears and crossed them over like an x." "I can cross my eyes.........look." "Lovely. She put one ear through the bottom of the x and she pulled." "She pulled the bunny's ears..........bad fairy." "No, she was trying to tie his.........." "Dan," Jordan laughed, "Stop. That is the worst thing I've ever heard." "Well, it's better than the teepees and the arrows and crap," Danny huffed. "Can I go see Andy now?" "Yes, go see Andy and his Velcro sneakers," Jordan snickered. "We give up.

Other children might have made drawings for him to stick on his fridge, but Alicia isn’t keen on drawing, so the puck marks in the plaster of his wall have become much the same thing: small marks in time that say someone you love grew up here. It started with Sune teaching her how to play hockey but it went on with him teaching her everything else you need to know in life: tying shoelaces and chanting times tables and listening to Elvis Presley.

(…) my money guy Richard is going without a tie now, like a politician who wants to appeal to the suffering common man (or perhaps every morning his firm takes the ties and shoelaces away from the brokers and financial planners to keep them from offing themselves)

In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together. You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet. You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife. But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of confusion. One hour realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving lost. Three days calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what to wear. Nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator.

I did not go to the rabbi to learn interpretations of the Torah from him but to note his way of tying his shoelaces and taking off his shoes…. In his actions, in his speech, in his bearing, and his faithfulness to the Lord, man must make the Torah manifest. — Aryeh Leib Sarahs

it was difficult to exercise him properly, because he was so big that even if I ran—and I was for ever running, in my zeal for his welfare,—he still, to keep up with me, needed only to walk, and if I paused for any reason, such as getting my breath or having to tie my shoelace, instantly he lay down. The

The point is, we’re all changing all the time. You once found it hard to tie a shoelace and now you don’t even have to look. The change is so subtle; you think that whatever you feel like right now is how you always felt. Our brain can trick us into thinking life stands still. In the end this causes the human race the most heartache. Blinkered

I’ve only been out a few days. I’d forgotten how fucking useless meat bodies are. There’s barely enough neurones to run a walking routine, let alone something complicated like tying your shoelaces up. I’ve had to run an expanded mentality in the habitat’s RI systems just to keep thinking properly; and that hardware isn’t exactly young and frisky any more.

One morning Profane woke up early, couldn't get back to sleep and decided on a whim to spend the day like a yo-yo, shuttling on the subway back and forth underneath 42nd Street, from Times Square to Grand Central and vice versa. He made his way to the washroom of Our Home, tripping over two empty mattresses on route. Cut himself shaving, had trouble extracting the blade and gashed a finger. He took a shower to get rid of the blood. The handles wouldn't turn. When he finally found a shower that worked, the water came out hot and cold in random patterns. He danced around, yowling and shivering, slipped on a bar of soap and nearly broke his neck. Drying off, he ripped a frayed towel in half, rendering it useless. He put on his skivvy shirt backwards, took ten minutes getting his fly zipped and another fifteen repairing a shoelace which had broken as he was tying it. All the rests of his morning songs were silent cuss words. It wasn't that he was tired or even notably uncoordinated. Only something that, being a schlemihl, he'd known for years: inanimate objects and he could not live in peace.

Was it a test?” she asked. “I mean, I know I’m still new at this, I’m still the rookie. Did you hang back to test me, to see if I’d be able to handle it alone?” “Well, kind of,” he said. “Actually, no, nothing like that. My shoelace was untied. That’s why I was late. That’s why you were alone.” “I could have been killed because you were tying your shoelace?” “An untied shoelace can be dangerous,” Skulduggery said. “I could have tripped.” She stared at him. A moment dragged by. “I’m joking,” he said at last. She relaxed. “Really?” “Absolutely. I would never have tripped. I’m far too graceful.

No...I knew a Martin. And was he wiley? If there was one thing he wasn't was wiley, John. Oh? Poor Martin was an inordinately stupid man. He could barely tie his shoelaces. A ha'penny short? Ah listen. Martin kept animals had more wile in them. What kind of animals? He'd sheep. A few cattle, I suppose. Though they'd have been wind-bothered up that way. They'd have been... Bothered, John. By the wind coming in. The way it would unseat cattle. Unseat them? Cornelius lowers his sad eyes - In the mind. You mean you'd have a cow'd take a turn? Cornelius squares his jaw. Do you realise you're looking at a man who's seen a cow step in front of a moving vehicle? Purposefully. On account of? Wind coming easterly. That's the kind of thing that can leave a beast beyond despair. Because of the pure evil sound of it, John. The way it would play across the country in an ominous way. An easterly? If it was to come across you for a fortnight and it might? Sleep gone out the window and a horrible black feeling racing through your fucken blood. Day and night. All sorts of thoughts of death and hopelessness. This is what you'd get on the tail end of an easterly wind. Man nor animal wouldn't be right after it.

I had always been a very physically active person. And I loved my job. I got into the military because of September 11, but I stumbled into a career that I absolutely loved. I was meant to be an infantry soldier. I thought, I will never be physical again and my career in the military is over. One tiny trip wire had taken everything away from me in one explosive moment. I sank into a very dark place. I wallowed in both my physical pain and my mental anguish. One day my parents were sitting by my side in the hospital room--as they did every day--and I turned to my mom and blurted out, “How am I ever gonna be able to tie my shoes again?” Mom rebutted my pity party with, “Well, your father can tie his shoes with one hand. Andy! Show Noah how you can tie your shoes with one hand.” And as I started to protest, Dad cut my whining off at the pass. “Oh my gosh, Noah, I can tie my shoes with one hand.” And he did, as I had seen him do so many times growing up. “I just need a little sympathy,” I said. To which Mom replied, “Well, you’re not getting it today.” A few days after I’d had my shoelace meltdown, after many tears, I found myself drained of emotion, a hollowed-out shell. My mother saw the blank expression on my face and she saw an opportunity to drag me out of the fog. She took it. She came up to my bed, leaned in close--but not so close that the other people in the room couldn’t hear her, and said, “You just had to outdo your dad and lose your arm and your leg.” She smiled, waiting for my reply, but all I could do was laugh. It was funny but it was also at that moment that I think I felt a little spark of excitement and anticipation again. It would take a while to fully ignite the flame but what she said definitely tapped into some important part of me. I have a very competitive side and Mom knew that. She knew just what to say to shake me up, so I could realize, Okay, life will go on from here. I thought to myself, My dad could do a whole lot with just one hand. Imagine how much more impressive it’ll look with two missing limbs. And I smiled the best I could through a wired jaw.

I woke in bed, sweating and breathing heavily. It was the third time I’d had this nightmare: reliving that horrible feeling of falling, out of control, toward the ground. I was now on month two of just lying there prone, supposedly recovering. But I wasn’t getting any better. In fact, if anything, my back felt worse. I couldn’t move and was getting angrier and angrier inside. Angry at myself; angry at everything. I was angry because I was shit-scared. My plans, my dreams for the future hung in shreds. Nothing was certain any more. I didn’t know if I’d be able to stay with the SAS. I didn’t even know if I’d recover at all. Lying unable to move, sweating with frustration, my way of escaping was in my mind. I still had so much that I dreamt of doing. I looked around my bedroom, and the old picture I had of Mount Everest seemed to peer down. Dad’s and my crazy dream. It had become what so many dreams become--just that--nothing more, nothing less. Covered in dust. Never a reality. And Everest felt further beyond the realms of possibility than ever. Weeks later, and still in my brace, I struggled over to the picture and took it down. People often say to me that I must have been so positive to recover from a broken back, but that would be a lie. It was the darkest, most horrible time I can remember. I had lost my sparkle and spirit, and that is so much of who I am. And once you lost that spirit, it is hard to recover. And once you lose that spirit, it is hard to recover. I didn’t even know whether I would be strong enough to walk again--let alone climb or soldier again. And as to the big question of the rest of my life? That was looking messy from where I was. Instead, all my bottomless, young confidence was gone. I had no idea how much I was going to be able to do physically--and that was so hard. So much of my identity was in the physical. Now I just felt exposed and vulnerable. Not being able to bend down to tie your shoelaces or twist to clean your backside without acute and severe pain leaves you feeling hopeless. In the SAS I had both purpose and comrades. Alone in my room at home, I felt like I had neither. That can be the hardest battle we ever fight. It is more commonly called despair. That recovery was going to be just as big a mountain to climb as the physical one. What I didn’t realize was that it would be a mountain, the mountain, that would be at the heart of my recovery. Everest: the biggest, baddest mountain in the world.

The less we cling to one side of reality—betting on either or or, arguing for for or against—the more we can be aware of the exquisite counterpoint of things. Everything matters: how we vote, how we tie our shoelaces, how we respond to the faintest whisper of a thought. And nothing matters, because (look!) it’s already gone. When we understand this, we’re home free.

The fact that the stakes are higher is all the more reason to provide teenagers with as many opportunities as possible to make their own decisions and learn from the consequences. Just as it was critical for the toddler to fumble with her shoelaces before mastering the art of shoelace tying, so is it critical for the adolescent to fumble with difficult tasks and choices in order to master the art of making independent, healthy, moral decisions that can be called upon in the absence of parents’ directives. We all want our children to put their best foot forward. But in childhood and adolescence, sometimes the best foot is the one that is stumbled on, providing an opportunity for the child to learn how to regain balance, and right himself.

You look up and now I see a part of you that’s new to me, a part that does want to be killed and I don’t think you’ve ever been loved the right way and you don’t say anything and I don’t say anything and we both know that you’re testing me, testing the world. You didn’t get off that stage tonight until the last person stopped clapping and you didn’t tie your shoelaces and you blamed the world when you tripped.

procedural memory is a long-term memory that represents how to do things automatically, like riding a bicycle or tying shoelaces.

there was something special about having small children. All the shoelace tying, and nose wiping, and remembering to carry snacks had been exhausting, yet she missed the feeling of being the center of someone else’s world.

- they'll tie your shoelaces together and stuff - but these are going to be much worse. I thought they could, oh, spook the horses and cut ropes and put rocks in people's beds-" "-put pepper in the flour an' set fire to bedrolls-" "-steal their daggers and their socks-" "-put out their eyes while they're asleep!" "Let's not get carried away, Spindle.

Sometimes, you may feel like everyone else is sprinting past you while you’re still tying your shoelaces. But hey, slow & steady wins the race, right? Maybe you’re not cutting corners or pulling shady stunts to get ahead, and that’s something to be proud of. So, don’t beat yourself. Remember, it’s not about how fast you get there; it’s about the journey & the integrity you maintain along the way. Keep doing you, and trust that your time will come when the universe decides you’re ready to shine.

He was checking the perimeter of the south tower one dawn, marking out the schedules of delivery trucks, when he saw a woman in a green jumpsuit, bent down as if tying her shoelaces, over and over again, around the base of the towers. Little bursts of feathers came from the woman’s hands. She was putting the dead birds in little ziploc bags. White-throated sparrows mostly, some songbirds too. They migrated late at night, when the air currents were calmest. Dazzled by the building lights, they crashed into the glass, or flew endlessly around the towers until exhaustion got them, their natural navigational abilities stunned. She handed him a feather from a black-throated warbler, and when he left the city again he brought it to the meadow and tacked that too just inside the cabin wall. Another reminder. Everything had purpose, signal, meaning.

You can’t run from love if I’ve tied your shoelaces together.

Why do all the men I know put their shoes on incredibly slowly? When I tie my shoelaces I can do it standing, and I’m out the door in about ten seconds. (Or, more often, I don’t even tie my shoelaces. I slip my feet into my sneakers and tighten the laces in the car.) But with men, if they are putting on any kind of shoe (sneaker, Vans, dress shoe), it will take twenty times as long as when a woman does it. It has come to the point where if I know I’m leaving a house with a man, I can factor in a bathroom visit or a phone call or both, and when I’m done, he’ll almost be done tying his shoes. There’s a certain meticulousness that I notice with all guys when they put their shoes on. First of all, they sit down. I mean, they need to sit down to do it. Right there, it signals, “I’m going to be here for a while. Let’s get settled in.” I can put on a pair of hiking boots that have not even been laced yet while talking on my cell phone, without even leaning on a wall.

began. A chief element in positioning the new Barbie was her promotion. In 1984, after a campaign that featured "Hey There, Barbie Girl" sung to the tune of "Georgy Girl," Mattel launched a startling series of ads that toyed with female empowerment. Its slogan was "We Girls Can Do Anything," and its launch commercial, driven by an irresistibly upbeat soundtrack, was a sort of feminist Chariots of Fire. Responding to the increased number of women with jobs, the ad opens at the end of a workday with a little girl rushing to meet her business-suited mother and carrying her mother's briefcase into the house. A female voice says, "You know it, and so does your little girl." Then a chorus sings, "We girls can do anything." The ad plays with the possibility of unconventional gender roles. A rough-looking Little Leaguer of uncertain gender swaggers onscreen. She yanks off her baseball cap, her long hair tumbles down, and—sigh of relief—she grabs a particularly frilly Barbie doll. (The message: Barbie is an amulet to prevent athletic girls from growing up into hulking, masculine women.) There are images of gymnasts executing complicated stunts and a toddler learning to tie her shoelaces. (The message: Even seemingly minor achievements are still achievements.) But the shot with the most radical message takes place in a laboratory where a frizzy-haired, myopic brunette peers into a microscope. Since the seventies, Barbie commercials had featured little girls of different races and hair colors, but they were always pretty. Of her days in acting school, Tracy Ullman remarked in TV Guide that she was the "ugly kid with the brown hair and the big nose who didn't get [cast in] the Barbie commercials." With "We Girls," however, Barbie extends her tiny hand to bookish ugly ducklings; no longer a snooty sorority rush chairman, she is "big-tent" Barbie.

1. Give your toddler some large tubular pasta and a shoelace.  Show her how to thread the shoelace through the pasta. 2. Take an empty long wrapping paper tube and place one end on the edge of the sofa and the other end on the floor.  Give him a small ball such as a Ping Pong ball to roll down the tube.   3. Give her some individually wrapped toilet tissues, some boxes of facial tissue or some small tins of food such as tomato paste.  Then let her have fun stacking them.     4. Wrap a small toy and discuss what might be inside it.  Give it to him to unwrap. Then rewrap as he watches.  Have him unwrap it again.    5. Cut  such fruits as strawberries and bananas into chunks.  Show her how to slide the chunks onto a long plastic straw.  Then show her how you can take off one chunk at a time, dip it into some yogurt and eat it.   6. Place a paper towel over a water-filled glass.  Wrap a rubber band around the top of the glass to hold the towel in place.  Then place a penny on top of the paper towel in the centre of the glass.  Give your child a pencil to poke holes in the towel until the penny sinks to the bottom of the glass.   7. You will need a small sheet of coarse sandpaper and various lengths of chunky wool.  Show him how to place these lengths of wool on the sandpaper and how the strands stick to it.   8. Use a large photo or picture and laminate it or put it between the sheets of clear contact paper.  Cut it into several pieces to create a puzzle.   9. Give her two glasses, one empty and one filled with water.  Then show her how to use a large eyedropper in order to transfer some of the water into the empty glass.   10. Tie the ends/corners of several scarves together.  Stuff the scarf inside an empty baby wipes container and pull a small portion up through the lid and then close the lid.  Let your toddler enjoy pulling the scarf out of the container.   11. Give your child some magnets to put on a cookie sheet.  As your child puts the magnets on the cookie sheet and takes them off, talk about the magnets’ colours, sizes, etc.   12. Use two matching sets of stickers. Put a few in a line on a page and see if he can match the pattern.  Initially, you may need to lift an edge of the sticker off the page since that can be difficult to do.    13. You will need a piece of thin Styrofoam or craft foam and a few cookie cutters.  Cut out shapes in the Styrofoam with the cookie cutters and yet still keep the frame of the styrofoam intact.  See if your child can place the cookie cutters back into their appropriate holes.        14. Give her a collection of pompoms that vary in colour and size and see if she can sort them by colour or size into several small dishes. For younger toddlers, put a sample pompom colour in each dish.   15. Gather a selection of primary colour paint chips or cut squares of card stock or construction paper.  Make sure you have several of the same colour.  Choose primary colours.  See if he can match the colours.  Initially, he may be just content to play with the colored chips stacking them or making patterns with them.

DR. Eric Blake checked his appearance in the mirror. As always, everything was in place. When people were asked to describe him, they rarely used terms like handsome or ugly or even nondescript. They usually said neat. Tidy. Immaculate. Every hair in place, shoelaces tied, every button buttoned. Eric’s shirttail never hung out, his socks always matched, his face was always clean-shaven. Even now Eric looked cool, unemotional, detached. But inside, under the fastidious grooming—well, that was another matter. His

When Bill Maher busts Fox News in a lie, it’s a gotcha moment -- to anyone who reads books and ties their own shoelaces. But not to Fox, because they’re not in the truth game. When Fox is busted in a lie, they simply tell a new one, or tell the same one in a different way. They’re impervious to facts. Or satire. They know they’re lying. They just don’t care. A 2015 report from Punditfact – a partnership between The Tampa Bay Times and Politifact.com – stated that 60% of the facts reported by Fox were false. And I’m sure Roger Ailes isn’t losing sleep over it. (I

Interviewer: "What's the best thing you've learned on Idol?" Dalton Rapattoni: "Double-tie your shoelaces.

I did not go to the rabbi to learn interpretations of the Torah from him but to note his way of tying his shoelaces and taking off his shoes.

This is not to say that it’s OK to be so tight that you can’t bend over to tie your shoelaces. Limited mobility is a problem. But it’s only one piece of a larger puzzle.

Sometimes I think you’re an evil genius. Then you do something like tie your shoelaces before you put the shoes on your feet, and I’m not sure what you are.

Shoelaces are just like nerves because they tie themselves in knots.

Eliot uncovered his ears, finished dressing, as though nothing special had happened. He sat down to tie his shoelaces. When these were tied, he straightened up. And he froze as stiff as any corpse. The black telephone rang. He did not answer.

For good measure, he took off the guy’s steel-toed shoes since some brainiac had made a YouTube video about escaping from tie wraps using your shoelaces that had gone viral. Indy wasn’t taking any chances.

Stage 3: Consciously competent. The kid thinks, “I’ve studied really hard, I know my math, this test will be fine.” He’s right. We’re delighted when our kids get here. This is the dream, people. Stage 4: Unconsciously competent. Fast-forward twenty years, and that kid is now a parent. He’s been doing math for so long that he doesn’t even have to think about it anymore. He can’t really understand why his daughter is struggling so much with something that’s become like breathing to him. (Incidentally, this is why older kids often make better tutors than parents. They learned their times tables not so long ago themselves, so they remember all the steps it took before it really sunk in.) Kids might become unconsciously competent in some areas—like reading or tying their shoelaces—while they’re still living at home, but for the most part, you don’t need to worry about Stage 4 except to note when you yourself might be in it.

So much of my identity was in the physical. Now I just felt exposed and vulnerable. Not being able to bend down to tie your shoelaces or twist to clean your backside without acute and severe pain leaves you feeling hopeless.

David, a six-year-old autistic boy, suffered from chronic anxiety and poor visual-motor co-ordination. For nine months, efforts had been made to teach him to tie his shoe-laces without avail. However, it was discovered that his audio-motor co-ordination was excellent. He could beat quite complex rhythms on a drum, and was clearly musically gifted. When a student therapist put the process of tying his shoe-laces into a song, David succeeded at the second attempt. A song is a form in time. David had a special relationship to this element and could comprehend the shoe-tying process when it was organized in time through a song.16

Well God knew I was like that, so God gave me Kaitlyn. Hyperactive from before birth, we thought Kaitlyn was going to be a boy, because the lore is that the more active babies are inside their mother’s womb the more likely they are to be boys. Well she wasn’t. Trying to hold Kaitlyn when she was a year old was like trying to hold a live salmon. I had a spiritual crisis because of this child. Many Catholic churches have the tradition of young children sitting with their parents at mass. It was no fun with Kaitlyn, because she was the worst-behaved child at church, which was not only embarrassing, it was bad for business. I treated half the children in the congregation and if my child was the worst one, people would lose confidence in me. So after a while I stopped going to church. Have you ever seen children on little yellow leashes in the mall? After having Kaitlyn I believed in little yellow leashes because she was always trying to get away. But my problem was that I wrote a column in the Daily Republic, a local newspaper where I lived, and whenever I went to the mall people recognized me and said things like, “Hey, you’re Dr. Amen! I loved your column.” I just could not deal with, “Hey, you’re Dr. Amen! Why is your child on a leash?” So what I used to do with Kaitlyn was put her in her stroller and tie her shoelaces together so she couldn’t get out. Now, I am not proud of that but when you have a hyperactive child you do things just to survive.

At the very least, I hoped the imp had swapped his salt and sugar round and tied his shoelaces in elaborate knots.

head. He can tell you how he’s feeling by the way he unscrews a Vegemite jar lid. He can tell you how happy he is by the way he butters bread, how sad he is by the way he ties his shoelaces.

Being questioned by the defense was stifling. He didn’t want to open up the emotional territory that she (the DA) did; he wanted to smother it, to erase my specific experience, abstract me into stereotypes of partying and blackouts, to ask technical questions that tied my shoelaces together, tripping me as he forced me to run.

We’ve got Quidditch tryouts this morning!” said Ron. “And we’re supposed to be practicing that Aguamenti Charm from Flitwick! Anyway, explain what? How are we going to tell him we hated his stupid subject?” “We didn’t hate it!” said Hermione. “Speak for yourself, I haven’t forgotten the skrewts,” said Ron darkly. “And I’m telling you now, we’ve had a narrow escape. You didn’t hear him going on about his gormless brother — we’d have been teaching Grawp how to tie his shoelaces if we’d stayed.” “I hate not talking to Hagrid,” said Hermione, looking upset.

She sighed and sniffed the air. The smell of dirty water hung thickly in it. They were supposed to be running a clean-up initiative. Whether they had and failed, or they’d succeeded and it had grown filthy again she wasn’t sure. Either way, she wasn’t fancying a swim.  ‘Johansson,’ Roper called from the tent, beckoning her over, the report from the uniformed officer already in his hand. ‘Come on.’ She approached and he held the edge of the door-flap open for her so she could pass inside. It was eight feet by eight feet, and the translucent material made everything bright with daylight.  The kid in front of them could have been no more than eighteen or nineteen. He was skinny and had thick curly brown hair. His skin was blued from the cold and had the distinctly greyish look of someone who did more drugs than ate food. He was lying on his back on the bank, eyes closed, hands bound together on his stomach. His clothes were enough to tell them that he was homeless. It was charity shop mix and match. A pair of jeans that were two sizes too big, tied tight around pronounced hip bones with a shoelace. He was wearing a t-shirt with the cookie monster on it that looked as old as he was. But that was it. He had no jacket despite the time of year and no socks or shoes.  Jamie crouched down, pulling a pair of latex gloves from her jacket pocket. She had a box of them in the car. ‘We got an ID?’ she asked, not looking up. She knew Roper wouldn’t get down next to her. He didn’t have the stamina for it for one, and with his hangover the smell would make him puke.  He’d leave the close inspection to her.  ‘Uh, yeah. He matches the description of a missing person’s — Oliver Hammond. Eighteen years old. No positive ID yet though. No picture on file.’ ‘Eighteen,’ Jamie mumbled, looking over him more closely. ‘Jesus.’ ‘Yup.’ Roper sighed. ‘Probably scored, got high, took a little stroll, fell in the river… And here we are.’ ‘Did he zip-tie his hands together before or after shooting up?’ She side-eyed him as he scrolled through something on his phone. She hoped it was the missing person’s report, but thought it was more likely to be one of the daily news items his phone prepared for him. ‘I’m just testing you,’ he said absently. ‘What else d’you see?’ Jamie pursed her lips. No one seemed to care when homeless people turned up dead. There’d been eight this month alone in the city — two of which had been floaters like this. She’d checked it out waiting at some traffic lights. There were more than a hundred and forty homeless missing persons reported in the last six months in London. Most cases were never closed. She grimaced at the thought and went back to her inspection. Oliver’s wrists were rubbed raw from the zip-tie, but that looked self-inflicted. She craned her neck to see his arms. His elbows were grazed and rubbed raw, and the insides were tracked out, like Roper had said. He wasn’t new to the needle. She didn’t need to check his ankles and toes to know that they’d be the same.  She lingered on his fingers, honing in on the ones with missing nails.  ‘Ripped out,’ Roper said, watching as she lifted and straightened his fingers, careful not to disturb anything before the SOCOs showed up to take their photographs. In a perfect world the body would have stayed in situ in the water, but these things couldn’t be helped.  She inspected the middle and the index fingers on the right hand — the nails were completely gone. ‘Torture,’ Roper added to the silence. ‘Probably over the heroin. You know, where’s my money?

The problem began with his telomeres. What is a telomere? Picture the little plastic bits on the end of your shoelaces. Imagine each time you tie your shoes, you have to clip off a little bit of that plastic part to get it to go through the lace holes. After you’ve done this enough times, the plastic tip is gone and the shoelace starts to unravel. Once the laces unravel enough, it’s impossible to tie your shoes, and you walk around looking like a goober.

If you hang up right now, I’m going to put my fist so far through your face that I’ll be able to tie your fucking shoelaces.

You know you’re getting old when you stoop to tie your shoelaces and wonder what else you could do while you’re down there. George Burns