Wedding Organizer Quotes

I waited patiently - years - for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy.

I have always, essentially, been waiting. Waiting to become something else, waiting to be that person I always thought I was on the verge of becoming, waiting for that life I thought I would have. In my head, I was always one step away. In high school, I was biding my time until I could become the college version of myself, the one my mind could see so clearly. In college, the post-college “adult” person was always looming in front of me, smarter, stronger, more organized. Then the married person, then the person I’d become when we have kids. For twenty years, literally, I have waited to become the thin version of myself, because that’s when life will really begin. And through all that waiting, here I am. My life is passing, day by day, and I am waiting for it to start. I am waiting for that time, that person, that event when my life will finally begin. I love movies about “The Big Moment” – the game or the performance or the wedding day or the record deal, the stories that split time with that key event, and everything is reframed, before it and after it, because it has changed everything. I have always wanted this movie-worthy event, something that will change everything and grab me out of this waiting game into the whirlwind in front of me. I cry and cry at these movies, because I am still waiting for my own big moment. I had visions of life as an adventure, a thing to be celebrated and experienced, but all I was doing was going to work and coming home, and that wasn’t what it looked like in the movies. John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” For me, life is what was happening while I was busy waiting for my big moment. I was ready for it and believed that the rest of my life would fade into the background, and that my big moment would carry me through life like a lifeboat. The Big Moment, unfortunately, is an urban myth. Some people have them, in a sense, when they win the Heisman or become the next American Idol. But even that football player or that singer is living a life made up of more than that one moment. Life is a collection of a million, billion moments, tiny little moments and choices, like a handful of luminous, glowing pearl. It takes so much time, and so much work, and those beads and moments are so small, and so much less fabulous and dramatic than the movies. But this is what I’m finding, in glimpses and flashes: this is it. This is it, in the best possible way. That thing I’m waiting for, that adventure, that move-score-worthy experience unfolding gracefully. This is it. Normal, daily life ticking by on our streets and sidewalks, in our houses and apartments, in our beds and at our dinner tables, in our dreams and prayers and fights and secrets – this pedestrian life is the most precious thing any of use will ever experience.

They'll be fine," Wickersham said. "Practice makes perfect." I had to ask. "You practice running away?" "We knew we'd make enemies. Other organizations have fire drills; we have oh-shit-someone-found-our-ass drills.

When did they stop putting toys in cereal boxes? When I was little, I remember wandering the cereal aisle (which surely is as American a phenomenon as fireworks on the Fourth of July) and picking my breakfast food based on what the reward was: a Frisbee with the Trix rabbit's face emblazoned on the front. Holographic stickers with the Lucky Charms leprechaun. A mystery decoder wheel. I could suffer through raisin bran for a month if it meant I got a magic ring at the end. I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up feeling fresh every morning, never raise their voices, only cook with organic food, and are equally at ease with the CEO and the PTA. Here's a secret: those mothers don't exist. Most of us-even if we'd never confess-are suffering through the raisin bran in the hopes of a glimpse of that magic ring. I look very good on paper. I have a family, and I write a newspaper column. In real life, I have to pick superglue out of the carpet, rarely remember to defrost for dinner, and plan to have BECAUSE I SAID SO engraved on my tombstone. Real mothers wonder why experts who write for Parents and Good Housekeeping-and, dare I say it, the Burlington Free Press-seem to have their acts together all the time when they themselves can barely keep their heads above the stormy seas of parenthood. Real mothers don't just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady's car, and say, "Great. Maybe YOU can do a better job." Real mothers know that it's okay to eat cold pizza for breakfast. Real mothers admit it is easier to fail at this job than to succeed. If parenting is the box of raisin bran, then real mothers know the ratio of flakes to fun is severely imbalanced. For every moment that your child confides in you, or tells you he loves you, or does something unprompted to protect his brother that you happen to witness, there are many more moments of chaos, error, and self-doubt. Real mothers may not speak the heresy, but they sometimes secretly wish they'd chosen something for breakfast other than this endless cereal. Real mothers worry that other mothers will find that magic ring, whereas they'll be looking and looking for ages. Rest easy, real mothers. The very fact that you worry about being a good mom means that you already are one.

Who's this?" he said, coming across a name he didn't recognize. "Lady Georgina of Sandalhurst? Why are we inviting her? I don't know her. Why are we asking people we don't know?" I know her," Pauline replied. There was a certain steeliness in her voice that Halt would have done well to recognize. "She's my aunt, Bit of an old stick, really, but I have to invite her." You've never mentioned her before," Halt challenged. True. I don't like her very much. As I said, she's a bit of an old stick." Then why are we inviting her?" We're inviting her," Lady Pauline explained, "because Aunt Georgina has spent the last twenty years bemoaning the fact that I was unmarried. 'Poor Pauline!' she'd cry to anyone who'd listen. 'She'll be a lonley old maid! Married to her job! She'll never find a husband to look after her!' It's just too good an opportunity to miss." Halt's eyebrows came together in a frown. There might be a few things that would annoy him more than someone criticizing the woman he loved, but for a moment, he couldn't think of one. Agreed," he said. "And let's sit her with the most boring people possible at the wedding feast." Good thinking," Lady Pauline said. She made a note on another sheet of paper. "I'll make her the first person on the Bores' table." The Bores' table?" Halt said. "I'm not sure I've heard that term." Every wedding has to have a Bores' table," his fiance explained patiently. "We take all the boring, annoying, bombastic people and sit them together. That way they all bore each other and they don't bother the normal people we've asked." Wouldn't it be simpler to just ask the people you like?" Halt askede. "Except Aunt Georgina, of course--there's a good reason to ask her. But why ask others?" It's a family thing," Lady Pauline said, adding a second and third name to the Bores' table as she thought of them. "You have to ask family and every family has its share of annoying bores. It's just organizing a wedding.

Undoubtedly, Baron Arald thought with a deep sense of pride and satisfaction, this would go down as the weddiong of the year. Perhaps of the decade. Already, it had the hallmarks of a roaring success . The Bores' Table was well attended with a group of eight people, currently vying to see who could be the most uninteresting, overbearing, and repetitive. Other guests glanced in their direction, giving silent thanks to the organizers who had seperated them from such dread-ful people. There had been inevitable tearful flouncing and shrill recriminations when a girlfriend of one of the younger warriors from Sir Rodney's Battleschool had caught her boyfriend kissing another girl in a darkened corridor. It wouldn't be a wedding reception without that, Arald thought.

When we were little, Scarlett and I were utterly convinced that we'd originally been one person in our mother's belly. We believed that somehow, half of us wanted to be born and half wanted to stay. So our heart had to be broken in two so that Scarlett could be born first, and then I finally braved the outside world a few years later. It made sense, in our little pigtailed heads--it explained why, when we ran through grass or danced or spun in circles long enough, we would lose track of who was who and it started to feel as if there were some organic, elegant link between us, our single heart holding the same tempo and pumping the same blood. That was before the attack, though. Now our hearts link only when we're hunting, when Scarlett looks at me with a sort of beautiful excitement that's more powerful than her scars and then tears after a Fenris as though her life depends on its death. I follow, always, because it's the only time when our hearts beat in perfect harmony, the only time when I'm certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we are one person broken in two.

They were staggered to learn that a real tangible person, living in Minnesota, and married to their own flesh-and-blood relation, could apparently believe that divorce may not always be immoral; that illegitimate children do not bear any special and guaranteed form of curse; that there are ethical authorities outside of the Hebrew Bible; that men have drunk wine yet not died in the gutter; that the capitalistic system of distribution and the Baptist wedding-ceremony were not known in the Garden of Eden; that mushrooms are as edible as corn-beef hash; that the word "dude" is no longer frequently used; that there are Ministers of the Gospel who accept evolution; that some persons of apparent intelligence and business ability do not always vote the Republican ticket straight; that it is not a universal custom to wear scratchy flannels next the skin in winter; that a violin is not inherently more immoral than a chapel organ; that some poets do not have long hair; and that Jews are not always peddlers or pants-makers. "Where does she get all them theories?" marveled Uncle Whittier Smail; while Aunt Bessie inquired, "Do you suppose there's many folks got notions like hers? My! If there are," and her tone settled the fact that there were not, "I just don't know what the world's coming to!

Organic church life, however, is a wedding of glory and gore.

Xav sprinkled olive oil on his lettuce. 'Lola was very particular that it all had to fit properly.' 'Lola?' squeaked Diamond. I wanted to warn her not to rise to the bait Xav was dangling in front of her but it was too late. Xav added some Parmesan and pepper. 'Suspicious, Diamond? You should be. This is a bachelor party I'm organizing, not a school outing, and it is going to tick all of Trace's boxes. Lola is either a very efficient water sports instructor or an exotic dancing girl; I'll leave it your imagination.' I rolled my eyes at Diamond. 'Myabe she's both. I mean the guys will really go for that, I guess. Don't worry,Di, Luigi and his crew will not disappoint us girls.' Luigi was in fact Contessa Nicoletta's little bespectacled chef with whom I had been consulting about the menu for Friday, but the Benedicts weren't to know that. 'He has promised to provide something suitably spicy for our tastes.

eveything that comes together, falls apart," the Old Man said. "Everything. the chair I'm sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I'm gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you're gonna fall apart. the cells and organs and systems that make you you - they came together, grew together and so must fall apart. the buddha knew one thing that science didn't prove for millenia after his dead: entropy increases. Things fall apart." We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The buddah said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. when you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did. Some day no one will remember that she ever existed, i wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost, but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying away. (...) I'd tasted her boozy breath. and then something invisible snapped inside her and that which had come together commenced to fall apart. And maybe that was the only asnwer we'd ever have. She fell apart because that's what happens.

Tatiana fretted over him before he left as if he were a five-year-old on his first day of school. Shura, don't forget to wear your helmet wherever you go, even if it's just down the trail to the river. Don't forget to bring extra magazines. Look at this combat vest. You can fit more than five hundred rounds. It's unbelievable. Load yourself up with ammo. Bring a few extra cartridges. You don't want to run out. Don't forget to clean your M-16 every day. You don't want your rifle to jam." Tatia, this is the third generation of the M-16. It doesn't jam anymore. The gunpowder doesn't burn as much. The rifle is self-cleaning." When you attach the rocket bandolier, don't tighten it too close to your belt, the friction from bending will chafe you, and then irritation follows, and then infection... ...Bring at least two warning flares for the helicopters. Maybe a smoke bomb, too?" Gee, I hadn't thought of that." Bring your Colt - that's your lucky weapon - bring it, as well as the standard -issue Ruger. Oh, and I have personally organized your medical supplies: lots of bandages, four complete emergency kits, two QuickClots - no I decided three. They're light. I got Helena at PMH to write a prescription for morphine, for penicillin, for -" Alexander put his hand over her mouth. "Tania," he said, "do you want to just go yourself?" When he took the hand away, she said, "Yes." He kissed her. She said, "Spam. Three cans. And keep your canteen always filled with water, in case you can't get to the plasma. It'll help." Yes, Tania" And this cross, right around your neck. Do you remember the prayer of the heart?" Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." Good. And the wedding band. Right around your finger. Do you remember the wedding prayer?" Gloria in Excelsis, please just a little more." Very good. Never take off the steel helmet, ever. Promise?" You said that already. But yes, Tania." Do you remember what the most important thing is?" To always wear a condom." She smacked his chest. To stop the bleeding," he said, hugging her. Yes. To stop the bleeding. Everything else they can fix." Yes, Tania.

None of us would ever fully grasp the extent of our magnificent unoriginality -- it would be too painful to process...There was the evidence, in all these profiles, where who we really are and who we'd like everyone to think we are were in such unsubtle tension. How clear it suddenly was that we are all the same organs, tissue and liquids packaged up in one version of a million cliches, who all have insecurities and desires; the need to feel nutured, important, understood and useful in one way or another. Non of us are special. I don't know why we fight it so much.

Whether we do it consciously or subconsciously, we tend to organize our lives to display our identity as accurately as possible. Our lifestyle choices often reveal our values, or at least what we’d like people to perceive as our values…as we make our everyday choices, we continuously calculate not just which choices best match who we are and what we want but also how those choices will be interpreted by others. We look for cues in our social environment to figure out what others think of this or that, which can require being sensitive to the most localized and up-to-date details of what a particular choice means.

When we were little, Scarlett and I were utterly convinced that we'd originally been one person in our mother's belly. We believed that somehow, half of us wanted to be born and half wanted to stay. So our heart had to be broken in two so that Scarlett could be born first, and then I finally braved the outside world a few years later. It made sense, in our pig-tailed heads--it explained why, when we ran through grass or danced or spun in circle long enough, we would lose track of who was who and it started to feel as if there were some organic, elegant link between us, our single heart holding the same tempo and pumping the same blood. That was before the attack, though. Now our hearts link only when we're hunting, when Scarlett looks at me with a sort of beautiful excitement that's more powerful than her scars and then tears after a Fenris as though her life depends on its death. I follow, always, because it's the only time when our hearts beat in perfect harmony, the only time when I'm certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we are one person broken in two.

At that, Marty howled great big, messy sobs, and Elanor, the little lady in the yellow suit, who organized the weddings at the church, came running with a box of tissue. Oz appeared in the vestibule, looking alarmed. “Is everything all right? I thought someone was strangling a duck.” “Do you mind?” Marty snapped. “Me and the bride, here, we’re having a moment.

Where's my Italian lace? Where's my bouffant sleeves? Where's my goddamn hoop skirt?" The same place as your goddamned morals, you worthless tramp. "It's been modernized, Brenda," Agnes said. "When you pass something on to someone else, you have to expect changes. You don't get it back.

Whereas my tribe is motley and chaotic. My tribe is dense and tumultuous. We argue and tease and wrangle and goof and fly upside down. We are brilliant and stupid. We are lonely and livid. We lie, we laugh. We are greedy and foolish. Sometimes we all sing together. We tease dogs. We can be cruel, but never for very long. We just can't sustain it. If we could sustain and organize our cruelty we'd rule the world. But what kind of life is that? We all fly home together at the end of the day. We have no kings. We have no outlaws. We have no ranking. We have no priests. We have no status. Age confers nothing in our clan. Size confers nothing. We have no warriors. We have no beauties. That's just how it is. We all look the same. Our stories go all day long. We remember everything. Our life can be maddening. It gets loud. We never agree on anything. We bicker. We play jokes. We take chances. I have often taken refuge with your tribe just to escape the hubbub of my tribe. Your tribe is better able to be alone.

I waited patiently—years—for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we’d say, Yeah, he’s a Cool Guy. But it never happened. Instead, women across the nation colluded in our degradation!

Organizing a wedding is not all that different from planning a hit, I’ve come to realize.

I’d long believed that the more perspectives around a table, the better an organization performed, and I took pride in the fact that we’d recruited the most diverse cabinet in history.

Imagine if we had locally supported, collectively organized agriculture, where our apples were grown in--I dunno--Kent, and if you lived in Kent you could buy and eat those apples in Kent. And then someone turned up and said "I've got a better idea! Let me take over yourr orchard and all orchards like it, fly their produce around the globe to be spruced up and then we'll give em back to ya! Sound like a plan?" We'd tell em to fuck off, wouldn't we? Well it has happened, and we didn't because nobody explained it to us. The reason they don't explain this to us is that they know if we find out the extraordinary lengths that they're going to to fuck us over we will overthrow the current system and replace it with something fair. That is why all this important stuff is made to seem inaccessible, boring, and abstract. That is why our participation in politics has been sanded down into an impotent nub: Stick your X into this box and congratulate yourself on being free.

Progress. — Let us not be deceived! Time marches forward; we'd like to believe that everything that is in it also marches forward— that the development is one that moves forward. The most level-headed are led astray by this illusion. But the nineteenth century does not represent progress over the sixteenth; and the German spirit of 1888 represents a regress from the German spirit of 1788. "Mankind" does not advance, it does not even exist. The overall aspect is that of a tremendous experimental laboratory in which a few successes are scored, scattered throughout all ages, while there are untold failures, and all order, logic, union, and obligingness are lacking. How can we fail to recognize that the ascent of Christianity is a movement of decadence? -That the German Reformation is a recrudescence of Christian barbarism? -That the Revolution destroyed the instinct for a grand organization of society? Man represents no progress over the animal: the civilized tenderfoot is an abortion compared to the Arab and Corsican; the Chinese is a more successful type, namely more durable, than the European.

Sue had been told that tumors had developed in her liver and lungs. She had been in a deep depression for a while, but she finally followed Barb's advice to call me after various people at her church kept saying that she could be happy - she was going home to be with Jesus. This is the type of thing that gives Christians a bad name. This, and the Inquisition. Sue wanted to open fire on them all. I think I encouraged this. Some of her evangelical friends had insisted sorrowfully that her nieces wouldn't get into heaven, since they were Jews, as was one of her sisters. I told her what I believe to be true - that there was not one chance in a million that the nieces wouldn't go to heaven, and if I was wrong, who would even want to go? I promised that if there was any problem, she and I would refuse to go. We'd organize. "What kind of shitty heaven would that be, anyway?" she asked.

When we meet someone new, we quickly answer two questions: “Can I trust this person?” and “Can I respect this person?” In our research, my colleagues and I have referred to these dimensions as warmth and competence respectively. Usually we think that a person we’ve just met is either more warm than competent or more competent than warm, but not both in equal measure. We like our distinctions to be clear—it’s a human bias. So we classify new acquaintances into types. Tiziana Casciaro, in her research into organizations, refers to these types as lovable fools or competent jerks.2 Occasionally we see people as incompetent and cold—foolish jerks—or as warm and competent—lovable stars. The latter is the golden quadrant, because receiving trust and respect from other people allows you to interact well and get things done. But we don’t value the two traits equally. First we judge warmth or trustworthiness, which we consider to be the more important of the two dimensions. Oscar Ybarra and his colleagues found, for instance, that people process words related to warmth and morality (friendly, honest, and others) faster than words related to competence (creative, skillful, and others).3 Why do we prioritize warmth over competence? Because from an evolutionary perspective, it is more crucial to our survival to know whether a person deserves our trust. If he doesn’t, we’d better keep our distance, because he’s potentially dangerous, especially if he’s competent. We do value people who are capable, especially in circumstances where that trait is necessary, but we only notice that after we’ve judged their trustworthiness. Recalling

Try to remember that even if they deliver the wrong cake, the limo driver is a no-show, there's a monsoon, and the band plays music you hate, you will still have just married the person of your dreams!!! Isn't that what the whole thing is really about?

Hockey is like the universe, Saul,” he said one day. “When you stand in the dark and look up at it, you see the placid fire of stars. But if we were right in the heart of it, we’d see chaos. Comets churning by. Meteorites. Star explosions. Things being born, things dying. Chaos, Saul. But that chaos is organized. It’s harnessed. It’s controlled. What you can’t see under all the action, the speed, the mayhem, is the great spirit of this game. That’s what makes you so extraordinary. You have that spirit within you.

I waited patiently—years—for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we’d say, Yeah, he’s a Cool Guy.

waited patiently – years – for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we’d say, Yeah, he’s a Cool Guy.

I waited patiently – years – for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we’d say, Yeah, he’s a Cool Guy.

We see the world and our words in one impression, as if we're looking at a forest through a green filter. We can't see what's really green and what's not. If we were to walk around with the filter in our eye long enough, we'd forget it was there, and life would just be green.

It's so bizarre how our brains work, how our priorities are organized by emotions instead of actual significance. This cabin could be flooded soon, and still we'd be standing around gossiping, too fixated on our petty grievances and grudges and crushes to notice the sky falling.

Per ounce, organic grass-finished beef is cheaper than many common foods like potato chips, red wine, name-brand cookies, popular coffee drinks, fancy donuts, and even fresh strawberries. And if we were to compare price per gram of protein, or per micronutrient, we’d see an even better value.

And with that, the training was over. One week. A fifty-page orientation manual, half of which concerned cleaning the rooms and the toilet, and keeping the supply closet organized. We had spent three days just going over that part. Long enough to question if we’d been hired as maids or nurses.

We’d die quite quickly without amino acids, the organic compounds that serve as the building blocks for every protein in the human body. Without them—and in particular the nine essential amino acids that our bodies cannot make on their own—our cells can’t assemble the life-giving enzymes needed for life.

She's startin' to show her age, bless her heart," Brenda said with satisfaction. "She was up all night working on your dress for your granddaughter," Lisa Livia snapped. "She was up all night ruining my wedding dress," Brenda shot back. "Bless her heart," Agnes said. Brenda jerked back to glare at Agnes.

That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men—friends, coworkers, strangers—giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much—no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version—maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”) I waited patiently—years—for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we’d say, Yeah, he’s a Cool Guy. But it never happened. Instead, women across the nation colluded in our degradation! Pretty soon Cool Girl became the standard girl. Men believed she existed—she wasn’t just a dreamgirl one in a million. Every girl was supposed to be this girl, and if you weren’t, then there was something wrong with you. But it’s tempting to be Cool Girl. For someone like me, who likes to win, it’s tempting to want to be the girl every guy wants. When I met Nick, I knew immediately that was what he wanted, and for him, I guess I was willing to try. I will accept my portion of blame. The thing is, I was crazy about him at first. I found him perversely exotic, a good ole Missouri boy. He was so damn nice to be around. He teased things out in me that I didn’t know existed: a lightness, a humor, an ease. It was as if he hollowed me out and filled me with feathers. He helped me be Cool

That's something for me to consider. So what else can you tempt me with?" Breckenridge hid a wry smile; he'd guessed that, in common with her female Cynster mentors, she'd be drawn to the prospect of managing a large household and the estate's people. Organizing ran in the blood. "I believe I mentioned that I'm under sisterly edict to marry. Unsurprisingly, a large and pertinent motive behind my sisters' prodding is the desirability of me begetting an heir, or more, thus securing the succession. Perish the thought the estate might ever revert to the Crown, so you could view your pole as my future countess as in part holding the ton line against King George and his cronies." She narrowed her eyes on his. That's the most inventive way I've ever heard of saying you want children." His lips curved, then he let the expression fade. "I do-but do you?" She looked forward. "Yes, of course." After a moment she added, "I can't imagine not wanting children, truth be told." "Well, then we're in agreement on that." "Don't get carried away-you haven't yet convinced me we should wed.

Why on earth would we spend our entire effort - sacrificing lives and time and immense amounts of money - to run an organization that wants the world to end? What would be the point? If we want to rule humanity, don't you think we'd want there to be a place for them to live? It's insane to think we want the Cataclysm to happen. It's outrageous and most definitely not intelligent. - Tilda

Wow," Agnes said, looking at her bridge. "Was it good for you?" Lisa Livia said. "It was good for me." "That bridge was built for tanks," Shane told Agnes proudly. "It'll take your wedding traffic and then some. It's even better than what you had." "Thank you," Agnes said to him, trying not to sound hero-worship-y. "But it's temporary," Lisa Livia said, leaning on Carpenter a little. Carpenter put his arm around her. "And I'm thinking the price is right," Agnes said, and sipped her coffee as Shane settled his arm around her. "And my mother is going to have a stroke," Lisa Livia said. "It's a beautiful bridge," Agnes said, and tried to forget all the hell swirling around her and the need to be practical and not get hurt. She could be smart tomorrow. Tonight she had a bridge and she was holding on to him.

I used to think that we can have almost anything we want from life, that it's just a question of organization. But now I'm beginning to think that we have to make a choice more often than we'd like. The important thing is to make sure that it's our choice, no one else's, and that we make it honestly. But one thing I'm sure of is that it's never a good thing to make a decision when you're not absolutely well.

Here in Texas, that’s not how it works. When we threw ourselves on Slip’N Slides, we were met with a bone-crushingly hard ground that was sparsely covered by grass that had the consistency of old hay. As we slid down the yellow tarp for our three seconds of fun, we’d experience the familiar explosions of pain when previously undiscovered rocks or sticks jabbed into our internal organs. Then we’d slide off the end into fire ants.

Even in rainier areas, where dust is less inexorable and submits to brooms and rags, it is generally detested, because dust is not organized and is therefore considered aesthetically bankrupt. Our light is not kind to faint diffuse spreading things. Our soft comfortable light flatters carefully organized, formally structured things like wedding cakes with their scrolls and overlapping flounces. It takes the mortal storms of a star to transform dust into something incandescent. Our dust, shambling and subtractive as it is, would be radiant, if we were close enough to such a star, to that deep and dangerous light, and we would be ravished by the vision—emerald shreds veined in gold, diamond bursts fraught with deep-red flashes, aqua and violet and icy-green astral manifestations, splintery blinking harbor of light, dust as it can be, the quintessence of dust.

commodification of information is the only thing that’s made space travel economically feasible. It’s the only commodity whose value exceeds its transportation cost. We’d be exporting biologicals or photonics if it paid. But our trading partners can build the machines and grow the organics much cheaper than we can send them, if they just have the codes and specs. If information were free, the way the radicals want, then there would be nothing to trade, and there goes the only incentive for interstellar ties.

At about this time people began to suspect that the ancient and almost reputable Thieves’ Guild of Lankhmar had invented a new stratagem, and there was talk of torturing a few suspected leaders or waiting for a west wind and burning the Street of the Silk Merchants. But since the Thieves’ Guild was a conservative and hide-bound organization wedded to traditional methods of thievery, suspicion shifted somewhat when it became increasingly evident that a mentality of incredible daring and ingenuity was at work.

...[M]ost of us have figured out that we have to do what's in front of us and keep doing it. We clean up beaches after oil spills. We rebuild whole towns after hurricanes and tornadoes. We return calls and library books. We get people water. Some of us even pray. Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice. The equation is: life, death, resurrection, hope. The horror is real, and so you make casseroles for your neighbor, organize an overseas clothing drive, and do your laundry. You can also offer to do other people's laundry if they have recently had any random babies or surgeries. We live stitch by stitch, when we're lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. And maybe the stitching is crude, or it is unraveling, but if it were precise, we'd pretend that life was just fine and running like a Swiss watch. That's not helpful if on the inside our understanding is that life is more often a cuckoo clock with rusty gears.

As for what became of the sisters after the narrative in the novel ends, they retired from the rigors of public life following Angelina’s wedding, in part due to Angelina’s fragile health. Together, they raised Angelina and Theodore’s three children and remained active in anti-slavery and suffrage organizations, tirelessly collecting petitions, and giving aid to a number of Grimké family slaves, whom they helped to set free. Their powerful document, American Slavery As It Is, sold more copies than any anti-slavery pamphlet ever written up until Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The general idea was for the boy to satisfy his sexual needs with the maid, so he wouldn’t “go too far” with a girl of his own social class; and after all, a maid was safer than a prostitute. In rural areas there was a local version of the Spanish derecho a pernada, which in feudal times allowed the lord to bed any bride on the night of her wedding. In Chile, the tradition was never that organized: the patron just went to bed with anyone and at any time he pleased. So the landowners sowed their lands with bastards, and even today there are regions where nearly everyone has the same last name.

What? No heartbeat? Huh. Funny. Moving on, the bigger problem is why do I have circles under my eyes?’ “And he’d say, ‘Wait a second. Did you hear me? No heart!’ And we’d be all ‘Yes, yes, we heard you. But other than missing a major organ, what’s wrong with me?’ And then he’d go on and on about the whole no-heart thing, and then I would try to distract him by doing that dance I do—you know, the one that looks like the running man. . . . But before I finish my entire routine, the doctor would be texting the CIA to tell them about my lack of heart, and the rounds of involuntary government testing would begin.

At a high level, we look for people who think independently, argue open-mindedly and assertively, and above all else value the intense pursuit of truth and excellence, and through it, the rapid improvement of themselves and the organization. Because we treat work as more than just what we do to make a living, we look at every potential hire not just as an employee but as someone we’d want share our lives with. We insist that the people we work with are considerate and have a high sense of personal accountability to do the difficult, right things. We look for people with generous natures and high standards of fairness.

Well, that was certainly a disgusting display worthy of your father's family." "Shut up, Ma," Lisa Livia said, her hands on her hips. "Like you weren't born in the Bronx, and the Fortunatos weren't a big step up for you. Now you listen to me. You try to move this wedding away from Two Rivers again, I'm gonna clean every skeleton out of every closet you got and make them dance, you hear me? I'll dig up everything you ever buried, including my daddy, and then I'll sink that beat-up rowboat you're living on so you'll be out in the street with nothing. Do not fuck with my kid and do not fuck with my friend, they are all the family I got, and they are off-limits to you. Understand?

As a trumpet joined the organ in Jeremiah Clark's triumphant march, John was glad Pamela had chosen the piece over the more traditional "Bridal Chorus" from Lohengrin. Even though he had familiarity with the music because Mrs. Norton had played the piece by Wagner at every wedding he'd attended. The music sent goosebumps down John's arms, bringing him into stark awareness of the sanctity of this ceremony, the weight of the commitment he was about to make, the new life journey he and Pamela were about to embark upon... together. Goosebumps shivered over his skin, and his legs trembled. He didn't chide himself for the unmanly reactions, just took some deep breaths to steady himself.

The continuing struggle to align word and action, our heartfelt desires with a workable plan—didn’t self-esteem finally depend on just this? It was that belief which had led me into organizing, and it was that belief which would lead me to conclude, perhaps for the final time, that notions of purity—of race or of culture—could no more serve as the basis for the typical black American’s self-esteem than it could for mine. Our sense of wholeness would have to arise from something more fine than the bloodlines we’d inherited. It would have to find root in Mrs. Crenshaw’s story and Mr. Marshall’s story, in Ruby’s story and Rafiq’s; in all the messy, contradictory details of our experience.

Organic farming is environmentally friendlier to every acre of land. But it requires _more_ acres. The trade-off is a harsh one. Would we rather have pesticides on farmland and nitrogen runoffs from them? Or would we rather chop down more forest? How much more forest would we have to chop down? If we wanted to reduce pesticide use and nitrogen runoff by turning all of the world’s farmland to organic farming, we’d need about 50 percent more farmland than we have today. Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug, whose work helped triple crop yields over the last fifty years and arguably saved billions from starvation, estimates that the world would need an _additional_ 5 to 6 billion head of cattle to produce enough manure to fertilize that farmland. There are only an estimated 1.3 billion cattle on the planet today. Combined, we’d need to chop down roughly half of the world’s remaining forest to grow crops and to graze cattle that produce enough manure to fertilize those crops. Clearing that much land would produce around 500 billion tons of CO2, or almost as much as the total cumulative CO2 emissions of the world thus far. And the cattle needed to fertilize that land would produce far _more_ greenhouse gases, in the form of methane, than all of agriculture does today, possibly enough to equal all human greenhouse gases emitted from all sources today. That’s not a viable path.

About a block away from them there lived another Lithuanian family, consisting of an elderly widow and one grown son; their name was Majauszkis, and our friends struck up an acquaintance with them before long. One evening they came over for a visit, and naturally the first subject upon which the conversation turned was the neighborhood and its history; and then Grandmother Majauszkiene, as the old lady was called, proceeded to recite to them a string of horrors that fairly froze their blood. She was a wrinkled-up and wizened personage--she must have been eighty--and as she mumbled the grim story through her toothless gums, she seemed a very old witch to them. Grandmother Majauszkiene had lived in the midst of misfortune so long that it had come to be her element, and she talked about starvation, sickness, and death as other people might about weddings and holidays. The thing came gradually. In the first place as to the house they had bought, it was not new at all, as they had supposed; it was about fifteen years old, and there was nothing new upon it but the paint, which was so bad that it needed to be put on new every year or two. The house was one of a whole row that was built by a company which existed to make money by swindling poor people. The family had paid fifteen hundred dollars for it, and it had not cost the builders five hundred, when it was new. Grandmother Majauszkiene knew that because her son belonged to a political organization with a contractor who put up exactly such houses. They used the very flimsiest and cheapest material; they built the houses a dozen at a time, and they cared about nothing at all except the outside shine. The family could take her word as to the trouble they would have, for she had been through it all--she and her son had bought their house in exactly the same way. They had fooled the company, however, for her son was a skilled man, who made as high as a hundred dollars a month, and as he had had sense enough not to marry, they had been able to pay for the house. Grandmother Majauszkiene saw that her friends were puzzled at this remark; they did not quite see how paying for the house was "fooling the company." Evidently they were very inexperienced. Cheap as the houses were, they were sold with the idea that the people who bought them would not be able to pay for them. When they failed--if it were only by a single month--they would lose the house and all that they had paid on it, and then the company would sell it over again. And did they often get a chance to do that? Dieve! (Grandmother Majauszkiene raised her hands.) They did it--how often no one could say, but certainly more than half of the time. They might ask any one who knew anything at all about Packingtown as to that; she had been living here ever since this house was built, and she could tell them all about it. And had it ever been sold before? Susimilkie! Why, since it had been built, no less than four families that their informant could name had tried to buy it and failed.

All this to say, ADHD isn’t your fault. You aren’t selfish, reckless, or irresponsible by nature. Most people seem to have a double standard for chemical imbalances in the brain, as opposed to elsewhere in the body. One would not — we hope! — tell a person with Type I Diabetes to try harder because everyone’s blood sugar gets out of whack sometimes. We’d expect this person to maintain their condition with insulin and a healthy diet so they could live a normal life. Why would we expect someone with a chemical imbalance in the brain to correct it by sheer force of will when we don’t expect them to do it with their pancreas? The sooner you accept your ADHD as a part of your unique biology, not as a personal failing, the sooner you can begin to build a better life for yourself

It would be hard. After all, I'm working. I'm a mother. Number one, I'm a mother & housewife, so there's the house kind of chores. In the evenings, I might attend some meeting, & then late at night, I would be either writing to the brothers & sisters in prison or working on the leaflets of their cases. Then on the weekend, at least every other weekend, we'd visit the political prisoners...I mean everybody has their whole life & things they have to do at home. But I'll tell you, we were busy during this time. Every week, more brothers & sisters would be arrested. We were working on scores of cases at the same time--trying to keep up with visiting, writing, attending court hearings. If I could show you all the leaflets we made, you'd get an idea of how expansive the work was.

Cavity embalming has the same general purpose as arterial embalming: you take the old fluids out and put new fluids in, to kill bacteria and halt decomposition long enough for a viewing and a funeral. But whereas arterial embalming used the body’s natural circulatory system to make the job easy, cavity embalming involved a lot of individual organs and unconnected spaces that had to be dealt with one by one. We accomplished this with a tool called a trocar - basically a long, bladed nozzle attached to a vacuum. We used the trocar to puncture a body and suck out the gunk, a process called ‘aspiration’, and then once we’d sucked everything out we cleaned the trocar and attached it to a different tube, so it could drizzle in another chemical cocktail similar to the one we put in the arteries.

Silicon Psychos (The Sonnet) If we cared more about the hard problem of real inhumanity, And less about the fictitious hard problem of consciousness, We'd have filled the world with human consciousness already, Instead of still fighting for basic rights against base biases. What kind of a moron goes walkabout when their home is on fire, What kind of a moron abandons the living chasing life on silicon! We really gotta take a hard look at our habits and priorities, Dreaming is good, but dream devoid of life is but degeneration. Chimps driving teslas are still chimps no matter the demagoguery, All intelligence is disgrace if it's unaware of human condition. A heartless organism living on silicon is no different, From a heartless organism living in a carbon based human. Be it crucifix or code, in savage hands every tool is weapon. The wise use AI to design prosthetics, savages for transhumanism.

This place...is it a different planet? Where are we, compared to my home?" Not that an explanation of astral geography would help much. She should have paid more attention in astronomy class. "Yes, this is a separate world -- Alaia. Alaia and your world are... very close, in one sense." "Meaning..." He looked away as if organizing his thoughts. "One could say we share the same sun." "That's impossible. We know all the planets around our sun. There's no other one that has life, or temperatures like Earth's. Besides, if our years match in length like Varene said, we'd be on the same orbit." "In a sense, we are Earth." "What?" She shook her head. "Start over, please." "Perhaps you'd call it a different dimension, or an alternate plane. Our worlds share the sun but we don't exist at the same time. We are each other's shadow. While on your world, you can't see ours. And on ours, we can't see yours. Our Old Letters hint of your world, though cryptically.

The Bernie Bros looked up from the vegetarian snack bar we’d put in across from the copier. “Yeah, bro,” one of them said. “Righteous.” “You’re out of organic cashew butter,” the other one said. “Got it,” I said. “See? We’re already building a solid base of support.” “Excuse me for being a progressive,” the first Bernie Bro said, “but I threw out the cashew butter. It’s not a native plant to the Northern Hemisphere.” “So what?” the second one said. “Some of us have peanut allergies. Cashew farming is totally sustainable and supporting organic cashew cultivation supports anti-deforestation efforts in Brazil. Unless there’s something anti-progressive about the rainforest.” “Microaggression. You’re forgetting the carbon footprint of shipping cashews to North America. And the cultural appropriation issues. You could just as easily eat almond butter.” “Oh, really? Have you looked at what almond growers are doing to the ecology of central California?” “Microaggression.” “Yeah,” Polly said, “that’s a solid base of support you got there. You can really build a political movement on that.

Ultimately, the United States is prepared to intervene with its own forces to defend the regime against internal attack. This was made abundantly clear in 1981, when President Reagan declared that the United States would not allow an insurgent movement to overthrow the Saudi monarch, as had occurred in Iran two years earlier. “I will not permit [Saudi Arabia] to be an Iran,” he told reporters at the White House.67 Direct American involvement in a civil war is, no doubt, the last thing that Washington would like to see happen. To prevent this, great emphasis is being placed on intelligence activities and the disruption of antigovernment organizations. But President Reagan’s 1981 statement provides an unambiguous indication of America’s determination to protect the Saudi monarchy at all costs. Nor is there any evidence to suggest that this commitment has in any way been diluted since Reagan’s time; if anything, the United States is even more closely wedded to the Saudi regime now than it was in 1981. And while it is impossible to predict the exact nature of the U.S. response to any particular threat to the regime, it is likely to be swift, muscular, and lethal.

When she was turning the bacon, he came up behind her, his hands settling on her waist as he peered over her shoulder. “That looks awfully edible,” he teased. “I was rather counting on our ‘traditional’ breakfast.” She smiled and let him turn her around. “When do we have to return?” she asked, thinking whimsically of how cozy it was up here with him. “How does two months sound?” “It sounds wonderful, but are you certain you won’t be bored-or worried about neglecting your business affairs?” “If they were going to suffer overmuch from my neglect, my love, we’d have pockets to let after the last three months. Evidently,” he continued with a grin, “I’m much better organized than I thought. Besides, Jordan will let me know if there’s a particular problem that needs my attention.” “Duncan has provided me with nearly a hundred books,” she said, trying to think of ways he could occupy his time if they stayed, “but you’ve probably read them already, and, even if you haven’t,” she said with laughing exaggeration, “you’d be done with the lot of them by Wednesday. I’m afraid you’ll be bored.” “It will be difficult for me,” he agreed dryly. “Snowbound up here with you. Without books or business to occupy my time, I wonder what I’ll do,” he added with a leer.

What are you going to say to the Maternal Organism?” Dinah asked, as Ivy rummaged in the back of a storage bin for her bottle of tequila. Ivy stiffened for a moment, then pulled out the bottle and swung it toward Dinah’s head like a club. Dinah didn’t flinch, just watched it glide to a halt above her head. “What?” “I can’t believe that the Morg has so taken over my wedding that the first thing that comes into your mind is how she’s going to react.” Dinah looked mildly sick. “Don’t worry about it,” Ivy said, “you forgot.” To put on your makeup. “Sorry, baby. I was just thinking . . . you and Cal are still going to get married, and have a great life, no matter what.” “But the Morg is going to take the hit,” Ivy said, nodding, as she poured tequila into a pair of small plastic cups. “Having to reschedule everything.” “Sounds like she’s kind of in her element doing that, though,” Dinah said. “Not to minimize it or anything.” “Totally.” “To the Morg.” “The Morg.” Dinah and Ivy tapped their plastic cups together and sipped at the tequila. One of the fringe benefits that came of being in the torus was that you could drink normally instead of sucking everything through tubes. The lower gravity took some getting used to, but they were old hands at it by now. “What’s

Your grandfather should not be allowed on social media,” Caroline went on. “He just did a quick and dirty post asking if anyone wanted to go owling with him, and never noticed that autocorrect changed ‘owling’ to ‘bowling.’ And before I noticed it and posted a correction, several dozen people signed up.” “Good grief,” I muttered. “And once I corrected it, we started hearing from any number of people saying how deeply disappointed they were about our canceling the bowling—as if you could cancel something that wasn’t even scheduled in the first place. So he told me to go ahead and organize some kind of bowling event. Open to anyone in the Brigade, no cost, but donation to one of the Blake Foundation’s environmental projects suggested. Brigade members love events like that. We’re sure to get way more donations than it costs to rent a few bowling lanes. Now I just need to figure out how to deal with his other typo, which won’t be quite as easy.” “Why?” I asked. “What was the other typo?” “He intended to say that we’d wrap up the event by singing around a campfire,” Caroline said. “I have no idea why autocorrect changed ‘campfire’ to ‘vampire.’ Or why anyone would suppose he’d be planning to serenade one. Am I really expected to provide a vampire on top of the bowling?

This was a talk to an anarchist conference, and in my view the libertarian movements have been very shortsighted in pursuing doctrine in a rigid fashion without being concerned about the human consequences. So it's perfectly proper… I mean, in my view, and that of a few others, the state is an illegitimate institution. But it does not follow from that that you should not support the state. Sometimes there is a more illegitimate institution which will take over if you do not support this illegitimate institution. So, if you're concerned with the people, let's be concrete, let's take the United States. There is a state sector that does awful things, but it also happens to do some good things. As a result of centuries of extensive popular struggle there is a minimal welfare system that provides support for poor mothers and children. That's under attack in an effort to minimize the state. Well, anarchists can't seem to understand that they are to support that. So they join with the ultra-right in saying "Yes, we've got to minimize the state," meaning put more power into the hands of private tyrannies which are completely unaccountable to the public and purely totalitarian. It's kind of reminiscent of an old Communist Party slogan back in the early thirties "The worse, the better." So there was a period when the Communist Party was refusing to combat fascism on the theory that if you combat fascism, you join the social democrats and they are not good guys, so "the worse, the better." That was the slogan I remember from childhood. Well, they got the worse: Hitler. If you care about the question of whether seven-year-old children have food to eat, you'll support the state sector at this point, recognizing that in the long term it's illegitimate. I know that a lot of people find that hard to deal with and personally I'm under constant critique from the left for not being principled. Principle to them means opposing the state sector, even though opposing the state sector at this conjuncture means placing power into the hands of private totalitarian organizations who would be delighted to see children starve. I think we have to be able to keep those ideas in our heads if we want to think constructively about the problems of the future. In fact, protecting the state sector today is a step towards abolishing the state because it maintains a public arena in which people can participate, and organize, and affect policy, and so on, though in limited ways. If that's removed, we'd go back to a [...] dictatorship or say a private dictatorship, but that's hardly a step towards liberation.

Simi Chopra, will you marry me?" He opened the blue velvet box in his hand and showed me a beautiful sapphire ring surrounded by diamonds. My mouth opened, but all that spilled out was, "My brain..." A frown creased Jack's brow. "Not really the answer I was expecting." "I can't..." I shook my head. "You organized all this? Chloe? The dress? The car? Trey and all the renovations were real? When did you buy this house? It had to be after I told you I wanted to take a break." "Yes, it was." "But how did you know we'd get back together?" "Because if we weren't meant to be together, I would never have been in the bushes the night you tried to save Chloe in the museum. I wouldn't have held you in my arms and known deep in my bones that I'd met the woman I'd been waiting for all my life... a woman who is intelligent and beautiful and brave and loyal, who has a secret love of adventure and a wicked sense of humor, a woman who lights up every room she walks into and can take a group of misfits and turn them into a family. A woman I want to call my wife." He took the ring out of the box and slid it on my finger. "This was my mother's ring. It is the only thing I have left to remember her by, and there is no one else I have ever wanted to give it to but you." I looked at the ring and then at the man who had stolen my heart. "Yes, Jack, I'll marry you.

If this is true—if solitude is an important key to creativity—then we might all want to develop a taste for it. We’d want to teach our kids to work independently. We’d want to give employees plenty of privacy and autonomy. Yet increasingly we do just the opposite. We like to believe that we live in a grand age of creative individualism. We look back at the midcentury era in which the Berkeley researchers conducted their creativity studies, and feel superior. Unlike the starched-shirted conformists of the 1950s, we hang posters of Einstein on our walls, his tongue stuck out iconoclastically. We consume indie music and films, and generate our own online content. We “think different” (even if we got the idea from Apple Computer’s famous ad campaign). But the way we organize many of our most important institutions—our schools and our workplaces—tells a very different story. It’s the story of a contemporary phenomenon that I call the New Groupthink—a phenomenon that has the potential to stifle productivity at work and to deprive schoolchildren of the skills they’ll need to achieve excellence in an increasingly competitive world. The New Groupthink elevates teamwork above all else. It insists that creativity and intellectual achievement come from a gregarious place. It has many powerful advocates. “Innovation—the heart of the knowledge economy—is fundamentally social,” writes the prominent journalist Malcolm Gladwell. “None of us is as smart as all of us,” declares the organizational consultant Warren Bennis,

Emergency food has become very useful indeed, and to a very large assortment of people and institutions. The United States Department of Agriculture uses it to reduce the accumulation of embarrassing agricultural surpluses. Business uses it to dispose of nonstandard or unwanted product, to protect employee morale and avoid dump fees, and, of course, to accrue tax savings. Celebrities use it for exposure. Universities and hospitals, as well as caterers and restaurants, use it to absorb leftovers. Private schools use it to teach ethics, and public schools use it to instill a sense of civic responsibility. Churches use it to express their concern for the least of their brethren, and synagogues use it to be faithful to the tradition of including the poor at the table. Courts use it to avoid incarcerating people arrested for Driving While Intoxicated and a host of other offense. Environmentalists use it to reduce the solid waste stream. Penal institutions use it to create constructive outlets for the energies of their inmates, and youth-serving agencies of all sorts use it to provide service opportunities for young people. Both profit-making and nonprofit organizations use it to absorb unneeded kitchen and office equipment. A wide array of groups, organizations, and institutions benefits from the halo effect of 'feeding the hungry,' and this list does not even include the many functions for ordinary individuals--companionship, exercise, meaning, and purpose. . .If we didn't have hunger, we'd have to invent it.

Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places. Even more astounding is our statistical improbability in physical terms. The normal, predictable state of matter throughout the universe is randomness, a relaxed sort of equilibrium, with atoms and their particles scattered around in an amorphous muddle. We, in brilliant contrast, are completely organized structures, squirming with information at every covalent bond. We make our living by catching electrons at the moment of their excitement by solar photons, swiping the energy released at the instant of each jump and storing it up in intricate loops fro ourselves. We violate probability, by our nature. To be able to do this systematically, and in such wild varieties of form, from viruses to whales, is extremely unlikely; to have sustained the effort successfully for the several billion years of our existence, without drifting back into randomness, was nearly a mathematical impossibility. Add to this the biological improbability that makes each member of our own species unique. Everyone is one in 3 billion at the moment, which describes the odds. Each of us is a self-contained, free-standing individual, labeled by specific protein configurations at the surfaces of cells, identifiable by whorls of fingertip skin, maybe even by special medleys of fragrance. You'd think we'd never stop dancing.

Once, during a concert of cathedral organ music, as I sat getting gooseflesh amid that tsunami of sound, I was struck with a thought: for a medieval peasant, this must have been the loudest human-made sound they ever experienced, awe-inspiring in now-unimaginable ways. No wonder they signed up for the religion being proffered. And now we are constantly pummeled with sounds that dwarf quaint organs. Once, hunter-gatherers might chance upon honey from a beehive and thus briefly satisfy a hardwired food craving. And now we have hundreds of carefully designed commercial foods that supply a burst of sensation unmatched by some lowly natural food. Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation, also offered numerous subtle, hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine release a thousandfold higher than anything stimulated in our old drug-free world. An emptiness comes from this combination of over-the-top nonnatural sources of reward and the inevitability of habituation; this is because unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation.90 This has two consequences. First, soon we barely notice the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the lingering glance of the right person, or by the promise of reward following a difficult, worthy task. And the other consequence is that we eventually habituate to even those artificial deluges of intensity. If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we’d desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger. What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow.

The first signal of the change in her behavior was Prince Andrew’s stag night when the Princess of Wales and Sarah Ferguson dressed as policewomen in a vain attempt to gatecrash his party. Instead they drank champagne and orange juice at Annabel’s night club before returning to Buckingham Palace where they stopped Andrew’s car at the entrance as he returned home. Technically the impersonation of police officers is a criminal offence, a point not neglected by several censorious Members of Parliament. For a time this boisterous mood reigned supreme within the royal family. When the Duke and Duchess hosted a party at Windsor Castle as a thank you for everyone who had helped organize their wedding, it was Fergie who encouraged everyone to jump, fully clothed, into the swimming pool. There were numerous noisy dinner parties and a disco in the Waterloo Room at Windsor Castle at Christmas. Fergie even encouraged Diana to join her in an impromptu version of the can-can. This was but a rehearsal for their first public performance when the girls, accompanied by their husbands, flew to Klosters for a week-long skiing holiday. On the first day they lined up in front of the cameras for the traditional photo-call. For sheer absurdity this annual spectacle takes some beating as ninety assorted photographers laden with ladders and equipment scramble through the snow for positions. Diana and Sarah took this silliness at face value, staging a cabaret on ice as they indulged in a mock conflict, pushing and shoving each other until Prince Charles announced censoriously: “Come on, come on!” Until then Diana’s skittish sense of humour had only been seen in flashes, invariably clouded by a mask of blushes and wan silences. So it was a surprised group of photographers who chanced across the Princess in a Klosters café that same afternoon. She pointed to the outsize medal on her jacket, joking: “I have awarded it to myself for services to my country because no-one else will.” It was an aside which spoke volumes about her underlying self-doubt. The mood of frivolity continued with pillow fights in their chalet at Wolfgang although it would be wrong to characterize the mood on that holiday as a glorified schoolgirls’ outing. As one royal guest commented: “It was good fun within reason. You have to mind your p’s and q’s when royalty, particularly Prince Charles, is present. It is quite formal and can be rather a strain.

In the year after Chris died, a friend organized a trip for the kids and me to use the time-share at Disney World in Florida. I felt exceptionally lonely the night we arrived in our rental car, exhausted from our flight. Getting our suitcases out, I mentioned something along the lines of “I wish we had Dad here.” “Me, too,” said both of the kids. “But he’s still with us,” I told them, forcing myself to sound as optimistic as possible. “He’s always here.” It’s one thing to say that and another to feel it, and as we walked toward the building I didn’t feel that way at all. We went upstairs--our apartment was on the second floor--and went to the door. A tiny frog was sitting on the door handle. A frog, really? Talk about strange. Anyone who knows the history of the SEALs will realize they trace their history to World War II combat divers: “frogmen” specially trained to infiltrate and scout enemy beaches before invasions (among other duties). They’re very proud of that heritage, and they still occasionally refer to themselves as frogmen or frogs. SEALs often feature frogs in various tattoos and other art related to the brotherhood. As a matter of fact, Chris had a frog skeleton tattoo as a tribute to fallen SEALs. (The term frogman is thought to derive from the gear the combat divers wore, as well as their ability to work both on land and at sea.) But for some reason, I didn’t make the connection. I was just consumed by the weirdness--who finds a frog, even a tiny one, on a door handle? The kids gathered round. Call me squeamish, but I didn’t want to touch it. “Get it off, Bubba!” I said. “No way.” We hunted around and found a little tree branch on the grounds. I held it up to the doorknob, hoping it would hop on. It was reluctant at first, but finally it toddled over to the outside of the door jam. I left it to do whatever frogs do in the middle of the night. Inside the apartment, we got settled. I took out my cell phone and called my mom to say we’d arrived safely. “There was one strange thing,” I told her. “There was a frog on the door handle when we arrived.” “A…frog?” “Yes, it’s like a jungle down here, so hot and humid.” “A frog?” “Yeah.” “And you don’t think there’s anything interesting about that?” “Oh my God,” I said, suddenly realizing the connection. I know, I know: just a bizarre coincidence. Probably. I did sleep really well that night. The next morning I woke up before the kids and went into the living room. I could have sworn Chris was sitting on the couch waiting for me when I came out. I can’t keep seeing you everywhere. Maybe I’m crazy. I’m sorry. It’s too painful. I went and made myself a cup of coffee. I didn’t see him anymore that week.

In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying in any one place; for at one and the same time everything has to be done everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavors the description of the scene. We must now retrace our way a little. It was mentioned that upon first breaking ground in the whale’s back, the blubber-hook was inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades of the mates. But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that same hook get fixed in that hole? It was inserted there by my particular friend Queequeg, whose duty it was, as harpooneer, to descend upon the monster’s back for the special purpose referred to. But in very many cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on the whale till the whole flensing or stripping operation is concluded. The whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated upon. So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill beneath him. On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured in the Highland costume—a shirt and socks—in which to my eyes, at least, he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no one had a better chance to observe him, as will presently be seen. Being the savage’s bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead whale’s back. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by a long cord. Just so, from the ship’s steep side, did I hold Queequeg down there in the sea, by what is technically called in the fishery a monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip of canvas belted round his waist. It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both ends; fast to Queequeg’s broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed. So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death. Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have so gross an injustice. And yet still further pondering—while I jerked him now and then from between the whale and ship, which would threaten to jam him—still further pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg’s monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.

Every time, however, Atal rose to the defence of the RSS. For instance, on 27 May 1996, when the short-lived Atal government was sought to be replaced by Deve Gowda, Atal said on the floor of the Lok Sabha that the RSS was an organization that was wedded to the cause of the nation. He gave two examples, one of the Republic Day parade of 1963 (after the Chinese debacle) when the RSS was one of the organizations invited to send in representatives to participate in the march past to demonstrate national unity. The other one related to 1965 when, at the time of the Indo-Pak war, the government had deployed RSS men to regulate traffic on the roads of Delhi. Atal went on to quote Deve Gowda who, while speaking at a function in Bangalore in the midst of the Emergency, had said, ‘RSS is a spotless organization.’ Atal added that the RSS was an independent organization and while ‘you can differ with the RSS, the allegations against them are not required’.

As the German literary scholar Wolfgang Iser wrote, 'with reading there is no face-to face situation'; we have the luxury of getting rid of our faces too. Wed don't have to be ourselves, with all the logistical, financial and emotional complications that our lives entail. We don't really have to be anyone at all. And while we might never lose ourselves completely because we are, after all, the organism that brings the story to life at the moment, we can unclasp quite a lot of the inhibitions and worries that buckle us into who we are. Paradoxically, at the same time as being able to be more self indulgent by escaping into a world where no one can reasonably expect us to do anything, we have the luxury of putting ourselves and our needs, wants, and fears aside for a while; by being more selfish in a book we become less self-ish.

A great event manager makes even the host feel like a guest.

An event shouldn't be just an experiential thing, it should be an emotional thing.

On the day of an event, a good event manager is always the first to arrive and last to leave.

The purpose of event management is to create a client who creates other clients.

I became mad for a time, wanting to dig her up just to be certain she was dead. Once, I even had the shovel in my hand. But then I knew I could not let her suffer the indignity of a man who had lost his mind to grief and loss. Not a man at all, really, but a bio-organic whose soul might never recover from her quick and sudden departure from my life just as we’d found an avenue for happiness.

He said wouldn't it be brilliant to have a food emporium on the ground floor of Fenton's, like Harrods, but have everything organic and locally grown." Diana paused to let the idea sink in. "I said not the ground floor of course, Fenton's isn't a supermarket, but the basement has been a dead zone for years. A whole floor dedicated to stationery when no one writes letters anymore." "A food emporium," Cassie repeated. "Fresh fish caught in the bay, oysters, crab when it's in season. Counters of vegetables you only find in the farmers market, those cheeses they make in Sonoma that smell so bad they taste good. Wines from Napa Valley, Ghirardelli chocolates, sourdough bread, sauces made by Michael Mina and Thomas Keller. Everything locally produced. And maybe a long counter with stools so you could sample bread and cheese, cut fruit, sliced vegetables. Not a true cafe because we'd keep the one on the fourth floor. It would have more the feel of a food bazaar, with the salespeople wearing aprons and white caps." Cassie closed her eyes and saw large baskets of vegetables, glass cases filled with goat cheese and baguettes, stands brimming with chocolate-covered strawberries.

It was the concentration of resources and power in hierarchical political organizations, the millions of cannon-fodder citizens subject to their disposal, the galleon, compass and sextant, the ox-wagon, steam engine, railroads, and factory production, as well as smallpox, measles, and weeds, that allowed the nations of western Europe to gain ascendancy over the uncivilized world during the past half-millennium. It was not the much discussed and theatrical weaponry, discipline, and tactical techniques that gave soldiers their eventual triumphs, but their mastery of the rather pedestrian arcana of logistics. In modern guerrilla warfare, when superior primitive tactics are wedded to even very limited civilized logistics, more completely civilized adversaries are very commonly discomfited. Guerrilla warfare merely incorporates manpower and supply capacities on a civilized scale and uses more up-to-date weaponry. Primitive warfare is simply total war conducted with very limited means. The

Here was a guy who had taken much of the Silicon Valley ethic behind moving quickly and running organizations free of bureaucratic hierarchies and applied it to improving big, fantastic machines and chasing things that had the potential to be real breakthroughs we'd been missing.

What would we learn from an alien? It could be astonishing. We’d quickly find out if life necessarily needs a genetic code, a cell membrane, similar kinds of appendages, and familiar sorts of sensory organs.

We couldn’t stop following the news. Every ten seconds we refreshed our browsers and gawked at the headlines. Dully we read blogs of friends of friends of friends who had started an organic farm out on the Wichita River. They were out there pickling and canning and brewing things in the goodness of nature. And soon we’d worry it was time for us to leave the city and go. Go! To Uruguay or Morocco or Connecticut? To the Plains or the Mountains or the Bay? But we’d bide our time and after some months or years, our farmer friends would give up the farm and begin studying for the LSATs. We felt lousy about this, and wonderful. We missed getting mail. We wondered why we even kept those tiny keys on our crowded rings. Sometimes we would send ourselves things from the office. Sometimes we would handwrite long letters to old loved ones and not send them. We never knew their new address. We never knew anyone’s address, just their cross streets and what their doors looked like. Which button to buzz, and if the buzzers even worked. How many flights to climb, and which way to turn off the stairs. Sometimes we missed those who hadn’t come to the city with us— or those who had gone to other, different cities. Sometimes we journeyed to see them, and sometimes they ventured to see us. Those were the best of times, for we were all at home and not at once. Those were the worst of times, for we inevitably longed to all move here or there, yet no one ever came— somehow everyone only left. Soon we were practically all alone. Soon we began to hate the forever cramping of our lives. Sleeping on top of strangers and sipping coffee with people we knew we knew but couldn’t remember where from. Living out of boxes we had no space to unpack. Soon we named the pigeons roosting in our windowsills; we worried they looked mangier than the week before. We heard bellowing in the apartments below us and bedsprings creaking in the ones above. Everywhere we saw people with dogs and wodnered how they managed it. Did they work form home?Did they not work? Had they gone to the right schools? Did they have connections? We had no connections. Our parents were our guarantors in name only; they called us from their jobs in distant, colorless, suburban office parks and told us we could come home anytime, and this terrified us always. But then came those nights, creeping up on us while we worked busily in dark offices, like submariners lost at sea, sailing through the dark stratosphere in our cement towers. We’d call each other to report: a good thing happened, a compliment had been paid, a favor had been appreciated, an inch of ground had been gained. We wouldn’t trade those nights for anything or anywhere. Those nights, we remembered why we came to the city. Because if we were really living, then we wanted to hear the cracking in our throats and feel the trembling in our extremities. And if our apartments were coffins and our desks headstones and our dreams infections— if we were all slowly dying — then at least we were going about that great and terrible business together.

His brother Najib owned an auto-parts store at bustling Shikarpur Gate, the mouth of the narrow road linking their village to the city—an ancient byway that had once led southward through the passes all the way to India. At dusk it is clogged with a riot of vegetable sellers’ handcarts beset by shoppers, Toyota pickup trucks, horse-drawn taxis, and three-wheeled rickshaws clambering around and through the throng like gaudy dung beetles. Nurallah’s brother Najib had gone to Chaman, just across the border in Pakistan, where the streets are lined with cargo containers serving as shops, and used motor oil cements the dust to the ground in a glossy tarmac, and every variety of automotive organ or sinew is laid bare, spread out, and strung up for sale. He had made his purchases and set off back to Kandahar. “He paid his customs dues”—Nurallah emphasized the remarkable point—“because that’s the law. He paid at every checkpoint on the way back, fifty afghanis, a hundred afghanis.” A dollar or two every time an unkempt, underage police boy in green fatigues slouched out of a sandbagged lean-to into the middle of the road—eight times in the sixty-six miles when last I counted. “And then when he reached the entrance to town, the police there wanted five hundred afghanis. Five hundred!” A double arch marks the place where the road that swoops down from Kabul joins the road leading in from Pakistan. The police range from one side to the other, like spear fishermen hunting trout in a narrows. “He refused,” Nurallah continued. “He said he had paid his customs dues—he showed them the receipt. He said he had paid the bribes at every checkpoint all along the way, and he was not paying again.” I waited a beat. “So what happened?” “They reached into his window and smacked him.” “They hit him?” I was shocked. Najib might be a sunny guy, but Kandahar tempers are strung on tripwires. For a second I thought we’d have to go bail him out. “What did he do?” Nurallah’s eyes, beneath his widow’s peak, were banked and smoldering. “What could he do? He paid the money. But then he pulled over to the side of the road and called me. I told him to stay right there. And I called Police Chief Matiullah Qatih, to report the officer who was taking the bribes.” And Matiullah had scoffed at him: Did he die of it? The police buzzards had seen Najib make the call. They had descended on him, snatched the phone out of his hand, and smashed it. “You call that law?” Now Nurallah was ablaze. “They’re the police! They should be showing people what the law is; they should be enforcing the law. And they’re the ones breaking it.” Nurallah was once a police officer himself. He left the force the day his own boss, Kabul police chief Zabit Akrem, was assassinated in that blast in the mosque in 2005.1 Yet so stout was Nurallah’s pride in his former profession that he brought his dark green uniform into work and kept it there, hung neatly on a hook in his locker. “My sacred oath,” he vowed, concluding: “If I see someone planting an IED on a road, and then I see a police truck coming, I will turn away. I will not warn them.” I caught my breath. So maybe he didn’t mean it literally. Maybe Nurallah wouldn’t actually connive with the Taliban. Still, if a former police officer like him was even mouthing such thoughts, then others were acting on them. Afghan government corruption was manufacturing Taliban.

Raw persimmon is an acquired taste," he said, handing me a slice, "but I have a feeling you'll like this one." I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. 'I'm a baker, Ogden,' I wanted to say. 'Of course I know what persimmon tastes like.' I bit into the fruit. It had the texture of a firm heirloom tomato and a heady, semisweet taste as though infused with a tiny drop of honey. I nodded and made a sound of approval. "You didn't order any, but I brought you a few to try anyway. I wondered if maybe they might inspire a new cupcake flavor for the holidays," Ogden said. He kept his serious brown eyes trained on the persimmon in his hand while he spoke, a gesture that seemed oddly bashful and entirely unlike him. "You'll have to excuse me if that sounds presumptuous. I'll be the first to admit I know nothing about the recipe creation process." I took another bite of persimmon, considering. Ogden held himself very still as he watched me chew, and I appreciated the restraint he showed in not jumping in to fill the silence. I knew it couldn't have been easy for him. "You have good instincts," I said finally. "A persimmon cupcake could be a great addition to the menu. Add some chocolate, a little cinnamon and cardamom, some sweet vanilla icing, and I think we'd have a new Christmas favorite." "You don't think persimmon is too adventurous for your patrons?" "Nah," I said. It was actually nice to talk to someone who took food as seriously as I did- I only wished he could do so without sounding so pompous. "But we might have to lead with the chocolate. Chocolate Persimmon Spice. That wouldn't offend you, would it? If I promised to use organic chocolate?" "I think my ego can handle a little organic chocolate," Ogden said.

Comparing African and Egyptian circumstances also points to other reasons why churches survived in some regions and failed in others. From earliest times, Christianity had developed in the particular social and economic world of the Mediterranean and the Near East, and networks of church organization and mission followed the familiar routes of trade and travel. Also, this social world was founded upon cities, which were the undisputed centers of the institutionalized church. Mediterranean Christianity was founded upon a hierarchical system of metropolitans and bishops based in cities: even the name metropolitan suggests a fundamentally urban system. Over time, though, trade routes changed and some cities lost power or vanished altogether. Between the fifth century and the ninth, these changes had a special effect on the Mediterranean, as sea routes declined in importance and states tended to look more inland, to transcontinental routes within Asia and Africa. This process was accelerated by the impact of plague, particularly during the 540s, and perhaps of climate change. Cities like Carthage and Antioch shrank to nothing, while Damascus and Alexandria lost influence before the new rising stars of Baghdad and Cairo.11 These changes coincided with the coming of Islam rather than being caused by that event, but they had immense religious consequences. Churches that remained wedded to the old social order found themselves in growing difficulty, while more flexible or adaptable organizations succeeded. Nestorians and Jacobites coped well for centuries with an Eastern world centered in Baghdad and looking east into Asia. Initially, too, the old urban framework adapted successfully to the Arab conquest, and Christian bishops made their peace quite easily. Matters were very different, though, when the cities themselves were faced with destruction. By the seventh century, the decline of Carthage and its dependent cities undermined the whole basis of the North African church, and accelerated the collapse of the colonial social order. Once the cities were gone, no village Christians remained to take up the slack. The Coptic Church flourished because its network of monasteries and village churches allowed it to withstand changes in the urban system.

Elysian Way by Stewart Stafford An eviction deadline decree, A woodpecker broadcast, Winter, the incoming actor, About to enter a clean stage. The powder blue sky framed, Fall's aurum, russet and ochre, Dripping opalescent raindrops, A red wedding's spangled confetti. Leaves shushed and shimmered, In moving vertical waves of surf, Trees shrugged slowly to begin, The organic haircut of the ages. Leaves plunged, spun and floated, Fallen comrades littered the grass, Half-assed, surprise resurrections, As swirling spectral mini vortexes. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved

Then I saw the card taped to the mirror. Congratulations on your new chapter, Katie! Wishing you and Declan all happiness and love- and the most organized closet on the block! Blessed Be ~ Lucy, Mimsey, Bianca, Cookie, and Jaida. P.S. look in the cupboard above your scarves.

From then on, I dieted, surviving on four organic egg whites for breakfast, green salad—no dressing—for lunch. Dinnertime, I grilled a six-ounce fillet of salmon—illegally on my tiny terrace overlooking a schoolyard in Manhattan. I searched five states for six months looking for the perfect wedding gown. I was so full of pride to finally fit into a size 12, I would’ve worn the tag down the aisle instead of the actual dress.

They frowned even more upon the charivari, which had been banned throughout the Catholic world in the 16th century under penalty of excommunication. In New France charivaris became popular in the 1680s. People would make a hullabaloo to protest a wedding or widowhood that was too brief, or to oppose marriage of a bride and a groom who were too far apart in age. Very often the only way to stop a charivari was to pay off its organizers.

Meanwhile, our bodies are getting bigger because we’re putting on fat, and so our fuel requirements are increasing. When we get fatter, we also add muscle to support that fat. (Thanks again in part to insulin, which assures that whatever protein we consume is used for repairing muscle cells and organs and for adding muscle, if necessary.) So, as we fatten, our energy demand increases, and our appetite will increase for this reason as well—particularly our appetite for carbohydrates, because this is the only nutrient our cells will burn for fuel when insulin is elevated. This is a vicious cycle, and it’s precisely what we’d like to avoid. If we’re predisposed to get fat, we’ll be driven to crave precisely those carbohydrate-rich foods that make us fat.

When the waiter left, I asked Xuan, “Have you ever wondered about God? Or religions other than your own?” “Most of my family is Buddhist. Growing up, every year my grandparents on my mother’s side organized a chaoshan jinxiang—what I think you know as a pilgrimage. We’d go to the city’s most important religious site, Miaofengshan, or the Mountain of the Wondrous Peak, which is considered one of the five holy mountains that match cardinal directions in geomancy. They still go yearly to pay their respects to the mountain and to present incense. Honestly, I’ve only stepped foot into one church in my life, and that was with my nǎi nai.” I knew nǎi nai meant “grandmother” in Chinese. “You did?” I asked, a little surprised. He’d never mentioned that. “Yeah,” he nodded. “I used to spend weekends at her house. She had a lot of paintings of Jesus, and a beautiful jade rosary. When I was young, she took me to a Catholic church, and I remember watching her as she asked God for several things and lit prayer candles. Nǎi nai believed a church was a place where dreams were realized. She told me to tell God my wishes and He would grant them. I remember what I said to her when she told me to make a wish.” Xuan offered an indulgent half smile. “Where is God, huh? Look around us. Look at all the bad things that happen in this world. God isn’t a genie, and a church isn’t a place for wishes to be granted. It’s a place for the lonely, sick, weak, and broken. It’s a place people go to not feel alone. But my nǎi nai still went back, every Sunday.” I continued watching Xuan, not quite sure where this conversation was going. I patiently waited for him to make his point. “I didn’t make any wishes that day. I had never made a wish or spoken to God until the night of the mudslide. But I remember, in Colombia, looking out onto the road and seeing your vehicle trapped, and silently I prayed. I’ll believe in you. So please... . save her. If you let her live, I’ll happily give up the rest of the time I have left alive. Take me and let Cassie live.

Attending a Marriage Retreat For those who are married, it’s time now to fall in love all over again. Whether you are renewing your wedding vows or just want to attend a marriage retreat and rejuvenate your marriage, now is the time to do it. For thirty-plus years, you have dedicated your waking days to your profession, but now those waking days are filled with being at home with your spouse. Uh, yes, it’s just the two of you day in, day out, till death do you part. You might be saying, “Oh my, we haven’t had this much alone time together since we first started dating!” Now is a great time to learn how to live together every day. Make an annual pilgrimage to a marriage conference; you get to travel, you get to be with your mate, and you get to have fun. But don’t forget: pick a location that you have never been to before or somewhere the both of you will enjoy seeing together after the conference. 50 Organizing a Family Reunion So, you’re a glutton for punishment?

only sport known to have inspired an indignant left-wing poem. It was written by one Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn in 1915. The golf links lie so near the mill That almost every day The laboring children can look out And see the men at play. Just show me an indignant left-wing poem about softball or bungee jumping. And our local mill has been converted to a shopping mall, so the kids are still there. Golf is also the only sport God is known to play. God and Saint Peter are out on Sunday morning. On the first hole God drives into a water hazard. The waters part and God chips onto the green. On the second hole God takes a tremendous whack and the ball lands ten feet from the pin. There’s an earthquake, one side of the green rises up, and the ball rolls into the cup. On the third hole God lands in a sand trap. He creates life. Single-cell organisms develop into fish and then amphibians. Amphibians crawl out of the ocean and evolve into reptiles, birds, and furry little mammals. One of those furry little mammals runs into the sand trap, grabs God’s ball in its mouth, scurries over, and drops it in the hole. Saint Peter looks at God and says, “You wanna play golf or you wanna fuck around?” And golf courses are beautiful. Many people think mature men have no appreciation for beauty except in immature women. This isn’t true, and, anyway, we’d rather be playing golf. A golf course is a perfect example of Republican male aesthetics—no fussy little flowers, no stupid ornamental shrubs, no exorbitant demands for alimony, just acre upon acre of lush green grass that somebody else has to mow. Truth, beauty, and even poetry are to be found in golf. Every man, when he steps up to the tee, feels, as Keats has it … Like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien. That is, the men were silent. Cortez was saying, “I can get on in two, easy. A three-wood drive, a five-iron from the fairway, then a two-putt max. But if I hook it, shit, I’m in the drink.” EAT THE RICH

Any memories of other women were banished permanently from his mind... there was only Evie, her red hair streaming and curling over his stomach and thighs, her playful fingers and frolicsome mouth causing him an agony of pleasure like nothing he had ever felt before. When he could no longer hold back his groans, she climbed over him carefully, straddling him, crawling up his body slowly like a sun-warmed lioness. He had one glimpse of her flushed face before she sought his mouth with teasing, sucking kisses. The rosy tips of her breasts dragged through the hair on his chest... she rubbed herself against him, purring with satisfaction at the hard warmth of the male body beneath her. His breath snagged in his throat as he felt her hand slip between their hips. He was so aroused that she had to gently pull his sex away from his stomach before she could fit it between her thighs. The crisp red curls of her mound tickled his exquisitely sensitive skin as she guided him between the hot folds of her body. "No," Sebastian managed, recalling the bet. "Not now. Evie, no---" "Oh, stop protesting. I didn't make nearly this much of a fuss after our wedding, and I was a virgin." "But I don't want---oh God. Holy Mother of God---" She had pushed the head of his sex into her entrance, the sweet flesh so snug and soft that it took his breath away. Evie writhed a little, her hand still grasping the length of his organ as she tried to guide him deeper. Seeing the difficulty she was having in accommodating him caused him to swell even harder, his entire body flushed with prickling excitement. And then came the slow, miraculous slide, hardness within softness. Sebastian's head fell back to the pillow, his eyes drowsy with intense desire as he stared up into her face. Evie made a little satisfied hum in her throat, her eyes tightly closed as she concentrated on taking him deeper. She moved carefully, too inexperienced to find or sustain a rhythm. Sebastian had always been relatively quiet in his passion, but as her lush body lifted and settled, deepening his penetration, and his cock was gripped and stroked by her wet depths, he heard himself muttering endearments, pleas, sex words, love words. Somehow he coaxed her to lean farther over him, resting more of her body against his, adjusting the angle between them. Evie resisted briefly, fearing she would hurt him, but he took her head in his hands. "Yes," he whispered shakily. "Do it this way. Sweetheart. Move on me... yes..." As Evie felt the difference in their position, the increased friction against the tingling peak of her sex, her eyes widened. "Oh," she breathed, and then inhaled sharply. "Oh, that's so---" She broke off as he set a rhythm, nudging deeper, filling her with steady strokes. The entire world dwindled to the place where he invaded her, their most sensitive flesh joined. Evie's long auburn lashes lowered to her cheeks, concealing her unfocused gaze. Sebastian watched a pink flush creep over her face. He was suspended in wonder, suffused with vehement tenderness as he used his body to pleasure hers. "Kiss me," he said in a guttural whisper, and guided her swollen lips to his, slowly ravishing her mouth with his tongue. She sobbed and shuddered with release, her hips bearing greedily against his as she took his full length. The rim of her sex clamped tightly around him, and Sebastian gave himself up to the squeezing, enticing, pulsing flesh, letting her pull the ecstasy from him in great voluptuous surges. As she relaxed over him, trying to catch her breath, he drew his hands over her damp back, his fingertips gently inquiring as they traveled to the plump curve of her bottom. To his delight, she squirmed and tightened around him in helpless response. If he had his usual strength... oh, the things he would have done to her...

Many years ago, in the spring of 1974, I visited the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. There were not many people around, and it was quiet and still inside. I gazed in silent awe at the great Rose Window, glowing in the morning sun. All at once the cathedral was filled with a huge volume of sound: an organ playing magnificently for a wedding taking place in a distant corner. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. I had always loved the opening theme; but in the cathedral, filling the entire vastness, it seemed to enter and possess my whole self. It was as though the music itself was alive.

*JESUS IN LONDON 'INASMUCH AS YE DID IT NOT—' If JESUS came to London, Came to London to-day, He would not go to the West End, He would come down our way; He'd talk with the children dancing To the organ out in the street, And say He was their big Brother And give them something to eat. He wouldn't go to the mansions Where the charitable live, He'd come to the tenement houses Where we ain't got nothing to give. He'd come so kind and so homely, And feed us with love and bread, And then He'd tell us how to behave, And then we'd mind what He said. In the warm, bright, West End churches They sing and preach and pray, They call us “Beloved brethren,” But they do not act that way; And when He come to the church door He'd call out loud and free, “You stop that preaching and praying And show what you've done for Me.” Then they'd say, “Oh, Lord, we have given To the poor both blankets and tracts, And we've tried to make them sober And we've tried to teach them facts. But they will sneak round to the drink shop And pawn the blankets for beer, And we find them very ungrateful— But still we persevere.” Then He would say, “I told you The time I was here before, That you were all of you brothers, All you that I suffered for. I won't go into your churches, I'll stop in the sun outside. You bring out the men, your brothers, The men for whom I died!” Out of our lousy lodgings, From arches and doorways about, They'd have to do as He told them, They'd have to call us out. Millions and millions and millions, Thick and crawling like flies, We should creep out to the sunshine And not be afraid of His eyes. He'd see what God's image looks like When men have dealt with the same— Wrinkled with work that is never done, Swollen and dirty with shame. He'd see on the children's foreheads The branded gutter-sign That marks the girls to be harlots, That dooms the boys to be swine. Then He'd say, “What's the good of churches When these have nowhere to sleep? And how can I hear you praying When they are cursing so deep? I gave My blood and My body That they might have bread and wine, And you have taken your share and theirs Of these good gifts of Mine!” Then some of the rich would be sorry, And all would be very scared; And they'd say, “But we never knew, Lord!” And He'd say, “You never cared!” And some would be sick and shameful Because they'd know that they knew, And the best would say, “We were wrong, Lord. Now tell us what to do!” I think He'd be sitting, likely, For someone 'ud bring Him a chair, With a common kid cuddled up on His knee And the common sun on His hair. And they'd be standing before Him, And He'd say, “You know that you knew. Why haven't you worked for your brothers The same as I worked for you? “For since you're all of you brothers, It's clear as God's blessed sun That each must work for the others, Not thousands work for one. And the ones that have lived bone-idle, If they want Me to hear them pray, Let them go and work for their livings— The only honest way! “I've got nothing new to tell you; You know what I always said. But you've built their bones into churches And stolen their wine and bread. You with My name on your foreheads, Liar, and traitor, and knave, You have lived by the death of your brothers, These whom I died to save.” I wish He would come and say it; Perhaps they'd believe it then, And work like men for their livings And let us work like men. Brothers? They don't believe it, The lie on their lips is red. They'll never believe till He comes again Or till we rise from the dead