Vague Status Quotes

In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down. We are the carpenter ants of the service industry, the apparatchiks of the corporate world, we are math-crunching middle managers who keep the corporate wheels greased but who never get promoted since we don’t have the right ‘face’ for leadership. We have a content problem. They think we have no inner resources. But while I may look impassive, I'm frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy. There's a ton of literature on the self-hating Jew and the self-hating African American, but not enough has been said about the self-hating Asian. Racial self hatred is seeing yourself whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy. Your only defence is to be hard on yourself, which becomes compulsive, and therefore a comfort: to peck yourself to death.

Like all self-mythologising rebels, Mira preferred enemies to rivals, and often turned her rivals into enemies, the better to disdain them as secret agents of the status quo. But because this was not a conscious habit, she experienced only a vague feeling of righteous defiance as, unable to dismiss Owen Darvish, she told herself instead that she disliked him.

Love is not a nebulous idea. It's not a vague notion of warm and fuzzy. Its the real daily interactions of sharing our lives with someone, caring for them, and having them care for us in return. Love is what we do, day in day out, not what we profess in our status updates.

Poor old Jean Valjean, of course, loved Cosette only as a father; but, as we noted earlier, into this fatherly love his lonely single status in life had introduced every other kind of love; he loved Cosette as his daughter, and he loved her as his mother, and he loved her as his sister; and, as he had never had either a lover or a wife, as nature is a creditor that does not accept nonpayment, that particular feeling, too, the most indestructible of all, had thrown itself in with the rest, vague, ignorant, heavenly, angelic, divine; less a feeling than an instinct, less an instinct than an attraction, imperceptible and invisible but real; and love, truly called, lay in his enormous tenderness for Cosette the way a vein of gold lies in the mountain, dark and virginal. We should bear in mind that state of the heart that we have already mentioned. Marriage between them was out of the question, even that of souls; and yet it is certain that their destinies had joined together as one. Except for Cosette, that is, except for a child, Jean Valjean had never, in all his long life, known anything about love. Serial passions and love affairs had not laid those successive shades of green over him, fresh green on top of dark green, that you notice on foliage that has come through winter and on men that have passed their fifties. In short, and we have insisted on this more than once, this whole inner fusion, this whole set, the result of which was lofty virtue, had wound up making Jean Valjean a father for Cosette. A strange father, forged out of the grandfather, son, brother, and husband that were all in Jean Valjean; a father in whom there was even a mother; a father who loved Cosette and worshipped her, and for whom that child was light, was home, was his homeland, was paradise.

Adulthood is hell. In the face of such a trenchant position, “moralists” today will utter vague, opprobrious grumblings while waiting for a chance to strike with their obscene intimations. Perhaps Lovecraft actually could not become an adult; what is certain is that he did not want to. And given the values that govern the adult world, how can you argue with him? The reality principle, the pleasure principle, competitiveness, permanent challenges, sex and status—hardly reasons to rejoice. Lovecraft, for his part, knew he had nothing to do with this world. And at each turn he played a losing hand. In theory and in practice. He lost his childhood; he also lost his faith. The world sickened him and he saw no reason to believe that by looking at things better they might appear differently. He saw religions as so many sugar-coated illusions made obsolete by the progress of science. At times, when in an exceptionally good mood, he would speak of the enchanted circle of religious belief, but it was a circle from which he felt banished, anyway.

An important contributory factor to the loss of mental morale in the church has been a misguided conception of Christian charity. It has been assumed that the charitable man suppresses his views in the same way that he subordinates his personal interests. A wild fantasy has taken hold of many Christians. They have come to imagine that just as an unselfish man restrains himself from snatching another piece of cake, so too, he restrains himself from putting forward his point of view. And just as it is bad form to boast about your private possessions or loudly recapitulate your personal achievements, so too it is bad form announce what your convictions are. By analogy with that charity of the spirit which never asks or claims but always gives and gives again, we have manufactured a false "charity" of the mind, which never takes a stand, but continually yields ground. It is proper to give way to other people's interests: therefore it is proper to give way to other people's ideas. The damage done by this false deduction has been enormous. It is urgently necessary to clear the air on this matter. A man's religious convictions and understanding of the truth are not private possessions, in the sense that his suit and the contents of his brief case are private possessions. Your beliefs as a Christian are not yours in the sense that you have rights over them, either to tamper with them or to throw them away. Of course, the very fact that we view convictions as personal possessions is a symptom of the disappearance of the Christian mind. One of the crucial tasks in reconstituting the Christian mind will be to reestablish the status of objective truth as distinct from personal opinions. The sphere of the intellectual, the sphere of knowledge and understanding, is not a sphere in which the Christian gives ground, or even tolerates vagueness and confusion. There is no charity without clarity and firmness.

He took a breath. He was looking at Maomao, but somehow he seemed almost embarrassed. Finally he managed, “Now listen to me, y—I mean, Maomao! Listen close! I am going to make you my wife!” He’d said it. He’d actually said it. To her, it sounded like a death sentence. All his vagueness, all his ambiguity had actually been a show of kindness to Maomao. For with her social status, the words once spoken were as good as a command. She couldn’t fight them, couldn’t contravene what he wished.

The fall of the protecting class walls transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent. It was of no great consequence for the birth of this new terrifying negative solidarity that the unemployed worker hated the status quo and the powers that be in the form of the Social Democratic Party, the expropriated small property owner in the form of a centrist or rightist party, and the former members of the middle and upper classes in the form of the traditional extreme right. The number of this mass of generally dissatisfied and desperate men increased rapidly in Germany and Austria after the first World War, when inflation and unemployment added to the disrupting consequences of military defeat; they existed in great proportion in all the succession states, and they have supported the extreme movements in France and Italy since the second World War.

In this book, we will naturally be dealing primarily with the manifestations of the third level of immunity. I gather material on the biography of Homo immunologicus, guided by the assumption that this is where to find the stuff from which the forms of anthropotechnics are made. By this I mean the methods of mental and physical practising by which humans from the most diverse cultures have attempted to optimize their cosmic and immunological status in the face of vague risks of living and acute certainties of death. Only when these procedures have been grasped in a broad tableau of human 'work on oneself' can we evaluate the newest experiments in genetic engineering, to which, in the current debate, many have reduced the term 'anthropotechnics', reintroduced in 1997.

To return to my point about the immense power that his enemies attribute to him, Orwell once wrote about the ‘large, vague renown’ that constituted the popular memory of Thomas Carlyle. His own reputation has long been of that kind, if not rather greater and more precise. But this is not the same as moving millions to despair and apathy (Deutscher), or spoiling the morale of a whole generation (Williams), or authoring a work of fiction that was in fact, in rather cunning disguise, the work of an entire ‘culture’ (Thompson). In some semi-articulated way, many major figures of the Left have thought of Orwell as an enemy, and an important and frightening one. This was true to a somewhat lesser extent in his own lifetime. And, again, the dislike or distrust can be illustrated by a simple—or at any rate a simple-minded—confusion of categories. It was widely said, and believed, of Orwell that he had written the damning sentence: ‘The working classes smell.’ This statement of combined snobbery and heresy was supposedly to be found in The Road to Wigan Pier; in other words—since the book was a main selection of Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club—it could be checked and consulted. But it obviously never was checked or consulted, because in those pages Orwell only says that middle-class people, such as his own immediate forebears, were convinced that the working classes smelled. Victor Gollancz himself, though hopelessly at odds with Orwell in matters of politics, issued a denial on his behalf that he had ever said, or written, that ‘the working classes smell.’ It made no difference. As his published correspondence shows, every time Orwell wrote anything objectionable to the Left, up would come this old charge again, having attained the mythic status that placed it beyond mere factual refutation. It feels silly even to go over this pettiness again, but the identical method—of attributing to him the outlook that he attributed to others—is employed in our own time in critical discussions of ‘Inside the Whale.

Every human being with normal mental and emotional faculties longs for more. People typically associate their longing for more with a desire to somehow improve their lot in life—to get a better job, a nicer house, a more loving spouse, become famous, and so on. If only this, that, or some other thing were different, we say to ourselves, then we’d feel complete and happy. Some chase this “if only” all their lives. For others, the “if only” turns into resentment when they lose hope of ever acquiring completeness. But even if we get lucky and acquire our “if only,” it never quite satisfies. Acquiring the better job, the bigger house, the new spouse, or world fame we longed for may provide a temporary sense of happiness and completeness, but it never lasts. Sooner or later, the hunger returns. The best word in any language that captures this vague, unquenchable yearning, according to C. S. Lewis and other writers, is the German word Sehnsucht (pronounced “zane-zookt”).[9] It’s an unusual word that is hard to translate, for it expresses a deep longing or craving for something that you can’t quite identify and that always feels just out of reach. Some have described Sehnsucht as a vague and bittersweet nostalgia and/or longing for a distant country, but one that cannot be found on earth. Others have described it as a quasi-mystical sense that we (and our present world) are incomplete, combined with an unattainable yearning for whatever it is that would complete it. Scientists have offered several different explanations for this puzzling phenomenon—puzzling, because it’s hard to understand how natural processes alone could have evolved beings that hunger for something nature itself doesn’t provide.[10] But this longing is not puzzling from a biblical perspective, for Scripture teaches us that humans and the entire creation are fallen and estranged from God. Lewis saw Sehnsucht as reflective of our “pilgrim status.” It indicates that we are not where we were meant to be, where we are destined to be; we are not home. Lewis once wrote to a friend that “our best havings are wantings,” for our “wantings” are reminders that humans are meant for a different and better state.[11] In another place he wrote: Our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside is . . . the truest index of our real situation.[12] With Lewis, Christians have always identified this Sehnsucht that resides in the human heart as a yearning for God. As St. Augustine famously prayed, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.”[13] In this light, we might think of Sehnsucht as a sort of homing device placed in us by our Creator to lead us into a passionate relationship with him.

And the wraith on the heart monitor looks pensively down at Gately from upside-down and asks does Gately remember the myriad thespian extras on for example his beloved ‘Cheers!,’ not the center-stage Sam and Carla and Nom, but the nameless patrons always at tables, filling out the bar’s crowd, concessions to realism, always relegated to back- and foreground; and always having utterly silent conversations: their faces would animate and mouths would move realistically, but without sound; only the name-stars at the bar itself could audibilize. The wraith says these fractional actors, human scenery, could be seen (but not heard) in most pieces of filmed entertainment. And Gately remembers them, the extras in all public scenes, especially like bar and restaurant scenes, or rather remembers how he doesn’t quite remember them, how it never struck his addled mind as in fact surreal that their mouths moved but nothing emerged, and what a miserable fucking bottom-rung job that must be for an actor, to be sort of human furniture, figurants the wraith says they’re called, these surreally mute background presences whose presence really revealed that the camera, like any eye, has a perceptual corner, a triage of who’s important enough to be seen and heard v. just seen. A term from ballet, originally, figurant, the wraith explains. The wraith pushes his glasses up in the vaguely sniveling way of a kid that’s just got slapped around on the playground and says he personally spent the vast bulk of his own former animate life as pretty much a figurant, furniture at the periphery of the very eyes closest to him, it turned out, and that it’s one heck of a crummy way to try to live. Gately, whose increasing self-pity leaves little room or patience for anybody else’s self-pity, tries to lift his left hand and wiggle his pinkie to indicate the world’s smallest viola playing the theme from The Sorrow and the Pity, but even moving his left arm makes him almost faint. And either the wraith is saying or Gately is realizing that you can’t appreciate the dramatic pathos of a figurant until you realize how completely trapped and encaged he is in his mute peripheral status, because like say for example if one of ‘Cheers!’’s bar’s figurants suddenly decided he couldn’t take it any more and stood up and started shouting and gesturing around wildly in a bid for attention and nonperipheral status on the show, Gately realizes, all that would happen is that one of the audibilizing ‘name’ stars of the show would bolt over from stage-center and apply restraints or the Heineken Maneuver or CPR, figuring the silent gesturing figurant was choking on a beer-nut or something, and that then the whole rest of that episode of ‘Cheers!’ would be about jokes about the name star’s life-saving heroics, or else his fuck-up in applying the Heineken Maneuver to somebody who wasn’t choking on a nut. No way for a figurant to win. No possible voice or focus for the encaged figurant.

washroom was the same. Not possessed of a strong stomach, he’d opted not to find out. Cockroaches had been conducting a track-and-field meet along the footrail of the bar, the pungent odor of urine had been held to a draw by the generous application of sweet-smelling disinfectant, the old status quo had prevailed, and Lockington had spotted Rufe Devereaux sitting in a rear booth, talking to a blonde woman. There’d been something vaguely familiar about her but Lockington hadn’t been able to put his finger on it. Devereaux had observed Lockington’s entrance, waving to him, motioning him to take a seat at the bar, then holding up a be-with-you-in-a-moment finger. Club Howdy attendance had been sparse—a few scruffy-looking characters had been clustered in a dark corner of the place, there’d been a pair of elderly men at the end of the bar, but the tables had been deserted, and Lockington had discounted the threat of being crushed in a rush. A four-piece string band had been mauling “Clayton’s Ridge” when Lockington had seated himself. “Clayton’s Ridge” came under the heading of bluegrass, and Lockington had never been convinced that bluegrass came under the heading of music. Bluegrass had always reminded Lockington of a midnight cat fight in a trash heap, but he’d ordered a Martell’s and waited.

Poor old Jean Valjean, of course, loved Cosette only as a father; but, as we noted earlier, into this fatherly love his lonely single status in life had introduced every other kind of love; he loved Cosette as his daughter, and he loved her as his mother, and he loved her as his sister; and, as he had never had either a lover or a wife, as nature is a creditor that does not accept nonpayment, that particular feeling, too, the most indestructible of all, had thrown itself in with the rest, vague, ignorant, heavenly, angelic, divine; less a feeling than an instinct, less an instinct than an attraction, imperceptible and invisible but real; and love, truly called, lay in his enormous tenderness for Cosette the way a vein of gold lies in the mountain, dark and virginal. We should bear in mind that state of the heart that we have already mentioned. Marriage between them was out of the question, even that of souls; and yet it is certain that their destinies had joined together as one. Except for Cosette, that is, except for a child, Jean Valjean had never, in all his long life, known anything about love. Serial passions and love affairs had not laid those successive shades of green over him, fresh green on top of dark green, that you notice on foliage that has come through winter and on men that have passed their fifties. In short, and we have insisted on this more than once, this whole inner fusion, this whole set, the result of which was lofty virtue, had wound up making Jean Valjean a father for Cosette. A strange father, forged out of the grandfather, son, brother, and husband that were all in Jean Valjean; a father in whom there was even a mother; a father who loved Cosette and worshipped her, and for whom that child was light, was home, was his homeland, was paradise.

It is to be noticed, first, that pragmatism places a peculiar strain on our use of language. On the one hand, the pragmatist uses language in a perplexingly extraordinary way, and on the other hand, in a deceptively vague manner. An understandably common reply to the proposal of pragmatism is this: even if a belief or idea does have a useful function (works well), is this not because it is true? Just here it is evident that pragmatism is at variance with the way we use language, for Dewey took 'effective working' to be, not the evidence of truth, but the very nature of truth. Yet there are many thing which are ordinarily taken as true which are so taken irrespective of any pragmatic justification (e.g., that of those who died last year, some had brown eyes), and this is because we ordinarily take truth to be related to something objective, rather than as the valuable functioning of a belief. It seems as though the pragmatist wants us to adopt a very specialized use of key epistemic words, reserving them for those ideas which have the privileged status of being relevant, important, or practical. Such pragmatic reformation of our linguistic habits, however, is of little philosophic value, since traditional epistemic questions can still be asked-although with a new vocabulary; we still wonder whether certain statements or beliefs are 'true' in the old sense, and linguistic renovation will not of itself prevent us from asking. Moreover, when it is reported that such and such a solution to a problem is more useful ('true' new sense) than another proposal, one would be especially interested in asking whether this report is true (old sense). In response, the pragmatist will either be right back into the thick of it respecting traditional epistemological issues or he will prohibit the question (or just ignore it) as being pointless and impractical. But such a reply would be clearly ridiculous, because here we are not asking whether some proposal (e.g., 'Quinine is a specific treatment for malaria') is true or useful, but rather whether a certain conclusion (e.g., 'Quinine is more useful than salt tablets for treating malaria') is veridical. Certainly it is not pointless to ask after the accuracy of the pragmatist's judgements about what works and what does not.

Love is not a nebulous idea. It’s not a vague notion of warm and fuzzies. It’s the real, daily interactions of sharing our lives with someone, caring for them, and having them care for us in return. Love is what we do, day in day out. Not what we profess in our status updates.

deliberately vague, attention-seeking Facebook statuses are for thirteen-year-old girls.

Primer of Love [Lesson 1] Love flees from Avarice like a noxious plague. ~ Anonymous, 12th Century Lesson 1) do not preoccupy yourself with the love of possessions or status, just with love itself. In matters of avarice Love's not vague And flees its grasp As it does a plague. The hunger for coin Can be quite noxious And it's glutton Thrice obnoxious. Hunger only for Each other's eyes, Thirst only for Each others lips. For true love is A bounteous reprise In the subtle Symphony of hips. -BDL

In light of the well’s legendary status,” Swift said, “I’d hate to overlook a good opportunity.” He reached into a pocket, rummaged briefly and pulled out a large silver coin. It had been forever since Daisy had seen American money. “You’re supposed to throw in a pin,” she said. “I don’t have a pin.” “That’s a five-dollar piece,” Daisy said in disbelief. “You’re not going to throw that away, are you?” “I’m not throwing it away. I’m making an investment. You’d better tell me the proper procedure for making wishes—it’s a lot of money to waste.” “You’re mocking me.” “I’m in deadly earnest. And since I’ve never done this before, some advice would be welcome.” He waited for her reply, and when it became evident that none was forthcoming, a touch of humor lurked in one corner of his mouth. “I’m going to toss the coin in regardless.” Daisy cursed herself. Even though it was obvious he was mocking her, she could not resist. A wish was not something that should be wasted, especially a five-dollar wish. Drat! She approached the well and said curtly, “First hold the coin in your palm until it’s warm from your hand.” Swift came to stand beside her. “And then?” “Close your eyes and concentrate on the thing you want most.” She let a scornful note enter her voice. “And it has to be a personal wish. It can’t be about something like mergers or banking trusts.” “I do think about things other than business affairs.” Daisy gave him a skeptical glance, and he astonished her with a brief smile. Had she ever seen him smile before? Perhaps once or twice. She had a vague past memory of such an occasion, when his face had been so gaunt that all she had received was an impression of white teeth fixed in a grimace that owed little to any feeling of good cheer. But this smile was just a bit off-center, which made it disarming and tantalizing…a flash of warmth that made her wonder exactly what kind of man lurked behind his sober exterior. Daisy was profoundly relieved when the smile disappeared and he was back to his usual stone-faced self. “Close your eyes,” she reminded him. “Put everything out of your mind except the wish.” His heavy lashes fell shut, giving her the chance to stare at him without having him stare back. It was not the sort of face a boy could wear comfortably…the features were too strong-boned, the nose too long, the jaw obstinate. But Swift had finally grown into his looks. The austere angles of his face had been softened by extravagant sweeps of black lashes and a wide mouth that hinted of sensuality. “What now?” he murmured, his eyes still closed. Staring at him, Daisy was horrified by the impulse that surged through her…to step nearer and explore the tanned skin of his cheeks with her fingertips. “When an image is fixed in your mind,” she managed to say, “open your eyes and toss the coin into the well.” His lashes lifted to reveal eyes as bright as fire trapped in blue glass. Without glancing at the well, he threw the coin right into the center of it.

In contrast, as young people move their social relationships online, those relationships become disembodied, asynchronous, and sometimes disposable. Even small mistakes can bring heavy costs in a viral world where content can live forever and everyone can see it. Mistakes can be met with intense criticism by multiple individuals with whom one has no underlying bond. Apologies are often mocked, and any signal of re-acceptance can be mixed or vague. Instead of gaining an experience of social mastery, a child is often left with a sense of social incompetence, loss of status, and anxiety about future social interactions.

In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down.

college boys working to return to school down South; older advocates of racial progress with Utopian schemes for building black business empires; preachers ordained by no authority except their own, without church or congregation, without bread or wine, body or blood; the community "leaders" without followers; old men of sixty or more still caught up in post-Civil-War dreams of freedom within segregation; the pathetic ones who possessed nothing beyond their dreams of being gentlemen, who held small jobs or drew small pensions, and all pretending to be engaged in some vast, though obscure, enterprise, who affected the pseudo-courtly manners of certain southern congressmen and bowed and nodded as they passed like senile old roosters in a barnyard; the younger crowd for whom I now felt a contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream -- the business students from southern colleges, for whom business was a vague, abstract game with rules as obsolete as Noah's Ark but who yet were drunk on finance. Yes, and that older group with similar aspirations, the "fundamentalists," the "actors" who sought to achieve the status of brokers through imagination alone, a group of janitors and messengers who spent most of their wages on clothing such as was fashionable among Wall Street brokers, with their Brooks Brothers suits and bowler hats, English umbrellas, black calfskin shoes and yellow gloves; with their orthodox and passionate argument as to what was the correct tie to wear with what shirt, what shade of gray was correct for spats and what would the Prince of Wales wear at a certain seasonal event; should field glasses be slung from the right or from the left shoulder; who never read the financial pages though they purchased the Wall Street Journal religiously and carried it beneath the left elbow, pressed firm against the body and grasped in the left hand -- always manicured and gloved, fair weather or foul -- with an easy precision (Oh, they had style) while the other hand whipped a tightly rolled umbrella back and forth at a calculated angle; with their homburgs and Chesterfields, their polo coats and Tyrolean hats worn strictly as fashion demanded. I could feel their eyes, saw them all and saw too the time when they would know that my prospects were ended and saw already the contempt they'd feel for me, a college man who had lost his prospects and pride. I could see it all and I knew that even the officials and the older men would despise me as though, somehow, in losing my place in Bledsoe's world I had betrayed them . . . I saw it as they looked at my overalls.

In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down. We are the carpenter ants of the service industry, the apparatchiks of the corporate world, we are math-crunching middle managers who keep the corporate wheels greased but who never get promoted since we don’t have the right ‘face’ for leadership. We have a content problem. They think we have no inner resources. But while I may look impassive, I'm frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy. There's a ton of literature on the self-hating Jew and the self-hating African American, but not enough has been said about the self-hating Asian. Racial self hatred is seeing yourself whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy. Your only defense is to be hard on yourself, which becomes compulsive, and therefore a comfort: to peck yourself to death. You don't like how you look, how you sound. You think your Asian features are undefined, like God started pinching out your features and then abandoned you. You hate that there are so many Asians in the room. Who let in all the Asians? you rant in your head. Instead of solidarity, you feel that you are less than> around other Asians, the boundaries of yourself no longer distinct but congealed into a horde.

God, then, is more of a moral and intellectual principle than a person, and our commitment to this principle runs the gamut from fiery passion, by which people are willing to die for a cause, to a vague nostalgia, in which God and religion are given the same kind of status as the royal family in England - namely, the symbolic anchor of a certain way of life, but hardly important to its day-to-day functioning. It is not that this is bad, it is just that there is little evidence in it that anyone is actually all that interested in God. We are interested in virtue, justice, a proper way of life, and perhaps even in building communities for worship, support, and justice. But, in the end, moral philosophies, human instinct, and a not-so-disguised self-interest are more important in motivating these activities than are love and gratitude stemming from a persona relationship with a living God. God is not only often absent in our marketplaces, he is frequently absent from our religious activities and religious fervor as well.

And I’m thinking of marrying a couple friends of mine, see.” I had to pause for a moment there. “Plural friends?” “Yeah, good business match it would be.We’ve been close since we were kids. “Perhaps my Nuryeven isn’t as good as I thought. When you say marry, you mean joining your households together and producing hiers, yes?” It wasn’t that the concept was alien to me, it’s just that I hadn’t expected such an arrangement to be commonplace in Nuryevet. Well, no, I’ll be honest, iots that I hadn’t spent even a blink of time thinking about their practices, and if you’d asked me at that time I probably would have told you that all Nuryevens lumber along like they're made of stone. Not a drop of hot blood in their bodies and no interest whatsoever in romance, and that they acquired children by filing paperwork in quintuplicate and being assigned one by an advocate. My new friend Ilias said, “Iy that’s right, though I don't think that Anya and Micket will care to manage it themselves. Heirs are cheap though. You can scrape together half a dozen of them right off the street. So longs you've got flxible standards” I shook my head, “Is this a common thing in these parts?” “Ey? Oh, iy, common enough. I’ve seen marriages with more partners than that.” He pulled his chair to face me fully. “The Oomack only ever have two partner marriages, did you know that? And it's not about business. They don't even seem to care about their assets at all!” “Well, no, the Oomack marry for love and sex.” “Is that right? That seems messy. Lots of feelings involved if you combine sex and business.” Ilias had certain opinions, shall we say which may have not been representative of the general Nuryeven philosophy. Marriage here is a great amalgamation of every kind legal partnership. They get married when they are going into business together. They get married when they want to own property jointly. They get married when they're in love. Some of these arrangements do involve a physical element or the biological production of heirs, as they do elsewhere. Some, as Ilia mentioned before, simply involve formally adopting half a dozen heirs off the street. Some are a mere legal formality. Like many things in Nuryevet , you can do as you please so long as you’ve got your paperwork in order. I didn’t quite understand all this at the time. It took me a while to glean the intricacies of it, or rather, the lack of intricacies. At the time, I only asked Ilia if he had a separate lover. “Not right now. I hire a private contractor for that.” “A prostitute you mean??” “No, a contractor. Prostitutes are, well you’re foreign, you wouldn't know. We don't have those here. Prostitutes just stand on the street and don't have a license or pay taxes, right? They juits have sex with whoever in an ally.” “Oh… some of them, in some places. In other places.” I waved vaguely, “ higher status.” “Meaning what?” “Meaning they’re more expensive. Meaning they do other things besides the act. In some places they're priests and priestesses. In some places they're popular society figures with property and businesses, patrons of the arts and so forth.” “Here you hire one of them like you’d hire a doctor or a tailor or someone to build a house for you, and you wouldn’t graba just anybody off the street for that would you. They show you their l;icence and you sign a contract together and so on. It's a good system.” “What about those who don't have a licence?” “Arrested! Just like a doctor practicing without a license would be.

In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down. We are the carpenter ants of the service industry, the apparatchiks of the corporate world. We are math-crunching middle managers who keep the corporate wheels greased but who never get promoted since we don’t have the right “face” for leadership. We have a content problem. They think we have no inner resources.

He was a man who had his own urgent problems, but he visualized the life of this rejected girl, and it hurt him. She seemed to be full of energy, and—despite her deadly existence —operating on a high level of liveliness and good spirits. He began to question her casually. What kind of jobs had she held? Where did she sleep when she didn’t have a Wade Trask to provide a temporary haven for her? What about mail? Had she ever tried living in the Pripp section of the city? What about moving to the country? . . . It was a long list of questions. Riva replied, sometimes vaguely, but she seldom hesitated. In about an hour he had her life in outline. Her early childhood was dim. She had recollections of being with parents who moved, drove, flew—always seeking remoter distances of escape. And always the reaching red tape of the Great Judge’s registrars followed them. They were among the minority who were invariably refused group status. Their past connection with the Brain dogged them, brought them to ruin and hopelessness. The finale came with crushing unexpectedness. The Control descended one day upon the hovel where they lived. The father, unbelieving and protesting, was led out and put against the wall of the shack, and shot. There was no explanation, no further direct interference—but the breadwinner was gone. For mother and daughter, the time of nightmare had come. The transition to woman of the town took place in direct proportion to the need for food.

Gender is not an easy conversation to have. It makes people uncomfortable, sometimes even irritable. Both men and women are resistant to talk about gender, or are quick to dismiss the problems of gender. Because thinking of changing the status quo is always uncomfortable. Some people ask: “Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?” Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general—but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women. That the problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human. For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem acknowledge that.

For social development they need to learn the art of friendship, which is embodied; friends do things together, and as children they touch, hug, and wrestle. Mistakes are low cost, and can be rectified in real time. Moreover, there are clear embodied signals of this rectification, such as an apology with an appropriate facial expression. A smile, a pat on the back, or a handshake shows everyone that it’s okay, both parties are ready to move on and continue playing, both are developing their skills of relationship repair. In contrast, as young people move their social relationships online, those relationships become disembodied, asynchronous, and sometimes disposable. Even small mistakes can bring heavy costs in a viral world where content can live forever and everyone can see it. Mistakes can be met with intense criticism by multiple individuals with whom one has no underlying bond. Apologies are often mocked, and any signal of re-acceptance can be mixed or vague. Instead of gaining an experience of social mastery, a child is often left with a sense of social incompetence, loss of status, and anxiety about future social interactions.