Weekend Ended Quotes

Thank you. What is it?" "Our weekend special, " Atlas says. "It's called why are you avoiding me pasta.

What is a week-end? Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey.

I know, but it has to be our secret otherwise I might end up with a well-meaning ghost buster trying to rid the cottage of an evil presence!

Rosie, I'm returning to Boston tomorrow but before I go I wanted to write this letter to you. All the thoughts and feelings that have been bubbling up inside me are finally overflowing from this pen and I'm leaving this letter for you so that you don't feel that I'm putting you under any great pressure. I understand that you will need to take your time trying to decide on what I am about to say. I no what's going on, Rosie. You're my best friend and I can see the sadness in your eyes. I no that Greg isn't away working for the weekend. You never could lie to me; you were always terrible at it. Your eyes betray you time and time again. Don't pretend that everything is perfect because I see it isn't. I see that Greg is a selfish man who has absolutely no idea just how lucky he is and it makes me sick. He is the luckiest man in the world to have you, Rosie, but he doesn't deserve you and you deserve far better. You deserve someone who loves you with every single beat of his heart, someone who thinks about you constantly, someone who spends every minute of every day just wondering what you're doing, where you are, who you're with and if you're OK. You need someone who can help you reach your dreams and who can protect you from your fears. You need someone who will treat you with respect, love every part of you, especially your flaws. You should be with someone who can make you happy, really happy, dancing-on-air happy. Someone who should have taken the chance to be with you years ago instead of becoming scared and being too afraid to try. I am not scared any more, Rosie. I am not afraid to try. I no what the feeling was at your wedding - it was jealousy. My heart broke when I saw the woman I love turning away from me to walk down the aisle with another man, a man she planned to spend the rest of her life with. It was like a prison sentence for me - years stretching ahead without me being able to tell you how I feel or hold you how I wanted to. Twice we've stood beside each other at the altar, Rosie. Twice. And twice we got it wrong. I needed you to be there for my wedding day but I was too stupid to see that I needed you to be the reason for my wedding day. I should never have let your lips leave mine all those years ago in Boston. I should never have pulled away. I should never have panicked. I should never have wasted all those years without you. Give me a chance to make them up to you. I love you, Rosie, and I want to be with you and Katie and Josh. Always. Please think about it. Don't waste your time on Greg. This is our opportunity. Let's stop being afraid and take the chance. I promise I'll make you happy. All my love, Alex

Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself - slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery. People like Sheba think that they know what it's like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her hand-writing was the best thing about her. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.

..there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon...

But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin.

We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit - a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation.

Amanda: This weekend was wonderful, but it isn't real life. It was more like a honeymoon, and after a while the excitement will wear off. We can tell ourselves it won't happen, we can make all the promises we want, but it's inevitable, and after that you'll never look at me the way you do now. I won't be the woman you dream about, or the girl you used to love. And you won't be my long-lost love, my one true thing anymore, either. You'll be someone my kids despise because you ruined the family, and you'll see me for who I really am. In a few years, I'll simply be a woman pushing fifty with three kids who might or might not hate her, and who might end up hating herself because of all this. And in the end, you'll end up hating her, too. Dawson: That's not true. Amanda: But it is. Honeymoons always come to an end. Dawson: Being together isn't about a honeymoon. It's about the real you and me. I want to wake up with you beside me in the mornings, I want to spend my evenings looking at you across the dinner table. I want to share every mundane detail of my day with you and hear every detail of yours. I want to laugh with you and fall asleep with you in my arms. Because you aren't just someone I loved back then. You were my best friend, my best self, and I can't imagine giving that up again. You might not understand, but I gave you the best of me, and after you left, nothing was ever the same. I know you're afraid, and I'm afraid, too. But if we let this go, if we pretend none of this ever happened, then I'm not sure we'll ever get another chance. We're still young. We still have time to make this right. Amanda: We're not that young anymore- Dawson: But we are. We still have the rest of our lives. Amanda: I know. That's why I need you to do something for me. Dawson: Anything. Amanda: Please...don't ask me to go with you, because if you do, I'll go. Please don't ask me to tell Frank about us, because I'll do that, too. Please don't ask me to give up my responsibilities or break up my family. I love you, and if you love me, too, then you just can't ask me to do these things. Because I don't trust myself enough to say no.

When You Have Forgotten Sunday: The Love Story -- And when you have forgotten the bright bedclothes on a Wednesday and a Saturday, And most especially when you have forgotten Sunday -- When you have forgotten Sunday halves in bed, Or me sitting on the front-room radiator in the limping afternoon Looking off down the long street To nowhere, Hugged by my plain old wrapper of no-expectation And nothing-I-have-to-do and I’m-happy-why? And if-Monday-never-had-to-come— When you have forgotten that, I say, And how you swore, if somebody beeped the bell, And how my heart played hopscotch if the telephone rang; And how we finally went in to Sunday dinner, That is to say, went across the front room floor to the ink-spotted table in the southwest corner To Sunday dinner, which was always chicken and noodles Or chicken and rice And salad and rye bread and tea And chocolate chip cookies -- I say, when you have forgotten that, When you have forgotten my little presentiment That the war would be over before they got to you; And how we finally undressed and whipped out the light and flowed into bed, And lay loose-limbed for a moment in the week-end Bright bedclothes, Then gently folded into each other— When you have, I say, forgotten all that, Then you may tell, Then I may believe You have forgotten me well.

Stay home for long weekends and have morally bankrupt amounts of sex with someone I’m in love with. Kinky, vanilla, I want it all. I want to adopt rescue animals with her. I want to take care of her, and watch her be cold in Sweden, and marvel every day at how much smarter than me she is, and . . . Scarlett.” His thumb swipes under my eye. “Why are you crying?

want to ask you a question.” He nodded. “Take me to the dance next weekend.” He tilted his head to the side and frowned. “Lilly, that was not in the form of a question. A question is a request that ends with a question mark. What you just said was a statement.

She’d make for a jazzy week-end, but she’d be wearing for a steady diet.

If I had known I’d have a hot architect balls deep inside of me before the end of the weekend, I’d have made time for a pedicure.

Don’t waste your entire life always waiting for the end of the day, for the weekend, for summer, for things to change, for something better. Enjoy as much of the present as you can. Now is happening. Now is good. Now belongs to you.

For Entrepreneurs, weekend neither starts nor ends.

Some days felt longer than other days. Some days felt like two whole days. Unfortunately those days were never weekend days. Our Saturdays and Sundays passed in half the time of a normal workday. In other words, some weeks it felt like we worked ten straight days and had only one day off.

It’s taboo to admit that you’re lonely. You can make jokes about it, of course. You can tell people that you spend most of your time with Netflix or that you haven’t left the house today and you might not even go outside tomorrow. Ha ha, funny. But rarely do you ever tell people about the true depths of your loneliness, about how you feel more and more alienated from your friends each passing day and you’re not sure how to fix it. It seems like everyone is just better at living than you are. A part of you knew this was going to happen. Growing up, you just had this feeling that you wouldn’t transition well to adult life, that you’d fall right through the cracks. And look at you now. La di da, it’s happening. Your mother, your father, your grandparents: they all look at you like you’re some prized jewel and they tell you over and over again just how lucky you are to be young and have your whole life ahead of you. “Getting old ain’t for sissies,” your father tells you wearily. You wish they’d stop saying these things to you because all it does is fill you with guilt and panic. All it does is remind you of how much you’re not taking advantage of your youth. You want to kiss all kinds of different people, you want to wake up in a stranger’s bed maybe once or twice just to see if it feels good to feel nothing, you want to have a group of friends that feels like a tribe, a bonafide family. You want to go from one place to the next constantly and have your weekends feel like one long epic day. You want to dance to stupid music in your stupid room and have a nice job that doesn’t get in the way of living your life too much. You want to be less scared, less anxious, and more willing. Because if you’re closed off now, you can only imagine what you’ll be like later. Every day you vow to change some aspect of your life and every day you fail. At this point, you’re starting to question your own power as a human being. As of right now, your fears have you beat. They’re the ones that are holding your twenties hostage. Stop thinking that everyone is having more sex than you, that everyone has more friends than you, that everyone out is having more fun than you. Not because it’s not true (it might be!) but because that kind of thinking leaves you frozen. You’ve already spent enough time feeling like you’re stuck, like you’re watching your life fall through you like a fast dissolve and you’re unable to hold on to anything. I don’t know if you ever get better. I don’t know if a person can just wake up one day and decide to be an active participant in their life. I’d like to think so. I’d like to think that people get better each and every day but that’s not really true. People get worse and it’s their stories that end up getting forgotten because we can’t stand an unhappy ending. The sick have to get better. Our normalcy depends upon it. You have to value yourself. You have to want great things for your life. This sort of shit doesn’t happen overnight but it can and will happen if you want it. Do you want it bad enough? Does the fear of being filled with regret in your thirties trump your fear of living today? We shall see.

Remember, brunch is only served once a week — on the weekends. Buzzword here, 'Brunch Menu'. Translation? 'Old, nasty odds and ends, and 12 dollars for two eggs with a free Bloody Mary'.

The problem with “everything” is that it ends up looking an awful lot like nothing: just one long haze of frantic activity, with all the meaning sheared away. Time has passed so quickly while I have been raising a child and writing books, and working a full-time job that often sprawls into my weekends, that I can’t quite account for it. The preceding years are not a blank exactly, but they’re certainly a blur, and one that’s strangely devoid of meaning, except for a clawing sense of survival.

Nick let loose an evil laugh. "It ended early. Stone cracked the coach's wee-belows with a badly thrown ball. I'm sure we'll all be running laps for hours tomorrow. But today... Coach had to go ice himself." Bubba and Mark sucked their breaths in sharply. "That'll ruin his weekend." "Yeah, and then some," Caleb added.

You are the epitome of perfect. I just want to make sure that by the end of this weekend you feel I am worth taking a chance on.

Freedom begins where work ends- the realm of freedom is after hours, on the weekend, on vacation, and not at work.

Our weekend special,” Atlas says. “It’s called why are you avoiding me pasta.

There was so much unpleasantness in the workaday world. The last thing you ever wanted to do at night was go home and do the dishes. And just the idea that part of the weekend had to be dedicated to getting the oil changed and doing the laundry was enough to make those of us still full from lunch want to lie down in the hallway and force anyone dumb enough to remain committed to walk around us. It might not be so bad. They could drop food down to us, or if that was not possible, crumbs from their PowerBars and bags of microwave popcorn surely would end up within an arm's length sooner or later. The cleaning crews, needing to vacuum, would inevitably turn us on our sides, preventing bedsores, and we would make little toys out of runs in the carpet, which, in moments of extreme regression, we might suck on for comfort.

That is a generation’s difference these days,” Ferdinand continued. “A lifetime’s difference. A thousand years’ difference. What do you children understand of existence? You’re afraid even of your own feelings. You don’t write letters—you telephone; you don’t dream—you go for week-end excursions; you are rational in love and irrational in politics—a pitiable race.

No weekends for the gods now. Wars flicker, earth licks its open sores, fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance assassinations, no advance. Only man thinning out his own kind sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind swipe of the pruner and his knife busy about the tree of life... Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone; peace to our children when they fall in small war on the heels of small war - until the end of time to police th eearth, a ghost orbiting forever lost in our monotonous sublime.

So what are you two doing here this early anyway?" Bubba asked, changing the subject. "Don't you have football practise?" Nick let loose an evil laugh. "It ended early. Stone cracked the coach's wee-belows with a badly thrown ball. I'm sure we'll all be running laps for hours tomorrow. But today... Coach had to go ice himself." Bubba and Mark sucked their breaths in sharply. "That'll ruin his weekend." "Yeah, and then some," Caleb added.

For in those days love was ruled by a different convention to ours. In those days it was chivalrous, adult, long, religious, almost platonic. It was not a matter about which you could make accusations lightly. It was not, as we take it to be nowadays, begun and ended in a long week-end.

If all the cars in the United States were placed end to end, it would probably be Labor Day Weekend

I think that I’m running from something I heard on the radio That everybody’s working for the weekend When does the weekend start? What comes at the end of the week? The end? Picture a tired dog chasing its tail

I’ve watched it time and time again—a woman always slots into a man’s life better than he slots into hers. She will be the one who spends the most time at his flat, she will be the one who makes friends with all his friends and their girlfriends. She will be the one who sends his mother a bunch of flowers on her birthday. Women don’t like this rigmarole any more than men do, but they’re better at it—they just get on with it. This means that when a woman my age falls in love with a man, the list of priorities goes from this: Family Friends To this: Family Boyfriend Boyfriend’s family Boyfriend’s friends Girlfriends of the boyfriend’s friends Friends Which means, on average, you go from seeing your friend every weekend to once every six weekends. She becomes a baton and you’re the one at the very end of the track. You get your go for, say, your birthday or a brunch, then you have to pass her back round to the boyfriend to start the long, boring rotation again. These gaps in each other’s lives slowly but surely form a gap in the middle of your friendship. The love is still there, but the familiarity is not. Before you know it, you’re not living life together anymore. You’re living life separately with respective boyfriends then meeting up for dinner every six weekends to tell each other what living is like. I now understand why our mums cleaned the house before their best friend came round and asked them “What’s the news, then?” in a jolly, stilted way. I get how that happens. So don’t tell me when you move in with your boyfriend that nothing will change. There will be no road trip. The cycle works when it comes to holidays as well—I’ll get my buddy back for every sixth summer, unless she has a baby in which case I’ll get my road trip in eighteen years’ time. It never stops happening. Everything will change.

And I am going to have another opportunity. I am going to have a week-end with him at his home in Easton, a week-end with Wells at home, with just his family. That alone is worth the entire trip from Los Angeles to Europe.

We had one of those Friday dates that turned into an entire weekend, and by the end of it, I loved him so much my larynx ached. Vulnerable love, incorrigible love. Love in which he was both the nausea and the sodium bicarbonate.

She hugged me tight, and I hugged her back. I was going to miss her—I knew it. But somehow, I had the feeling that we were going to be okay. I didn’t know what would happen with us. Maybe we’d find a way to attend the same college and be roommates and have the most amazingly decorated dorm room ever. Maybe we’d end up being pen pals, sending lists back and forth. Or we’d just stick to talking twice a week, or we’d video chat, or else just spend all our money traveling to hang out with each other on weekends. I somehow knew that the particulars didn’t matter. She was my heart, she was half of me, and nothing, certainly not a few measly hundred miles, was ever going to change that.

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand.... nor look through the eyes of the dead.... nor feed on the spectres in books. I tramp a perpetual journey All goes onward and outward.... and nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. If no other in the world be aware I sit content, And if each and all be aware I sit content. The final three stanzas of 'Song of Myself" were also highlighted. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to your nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one places search another, I stop some where waiting for you It became a weekend of reading, of trying to see her in the fragments of the poem she'd left for me. I could never get anywhere with the lines, but I kepr thinking about them anyway, becase I didn't want to disappoint her. She wanted me to play out with the string, to find the place where she had stopped and was waiting for me, to follow the bread crumb trail until it dead-ended into her.

Weekends, End of the month, your birthday and Valentines day will remind you how single and how lonely you are.

Don't worry about letting the dogs out. It's Friday! Let them have a great weekend, too.

Also, mania usually feels better than being medicated, at least for a while. It’s a bit like surfing, knowing it has to end with the inevitable wipeout, but loving the balancing act required to keep it going.

One weekend in the vacation, I was invited to meet her family. They lived in Kent, out on the Orpington line, in one of those suburbs which had stopped concreting over nature at the very last minute, and ever since smugly claimed rural status.

At some time all cities have this feel: in London it's at five or six on a winer evening. Paris has it too, late, when the cafes are closing up. In New York it can happen anytime: early in the morning as the light climbs over the canyon streets and the avenues stretch so far into the distance that it seems the whole world is city; or now, as the chimes of midnight hang in the rain and all the city's longings acquire the clarity and certainty of sudden understanding. The day coming to an end and people unable to evade any longer the nagging sense of futility that has been growing stronger through the day, knowing that they will feel better when they wake up and it is daylight again but knowing also that each day leads to this sense of quiet isolation. Whether the plates have been stacked neatly away or the sink is cluttered with unwashed dishes makes no difference because all these details--the clothes hanging in the closet, the sheets on the bed--tell the same story--a story in which they walk to the window and look out at the rain-lit streets, wondering how many other people are looking out like this, people who look forward to Monday because the weekdays have a purpose which vanishes at the weekend when there is only the laundry and the papers. And knowing also that these thoughts do not represent any kind of revelation because by now they have themselves become part of the same routine of bearable despair, a summing up that is all the time dissolving into everyday. A time in the day when it is possible to regret everything and nothing in the same breath, when the only wish of all bachelors is that there was someone who loved them, who was thinking of them even if she was on the other side of the world. When a woman, feeling the city falling damp around her, hearing music from a radio somewhere, looks up and imagines the lives being led behind the yellow-lighted windows: a man at his sink, a family crowded together around a television, lovers drawing curtains, someone at his desk, hearing the same tune on the radio, writing these words.

Here had lived an elder race, to which we look back with disquietude. The country which we visit at week-ends was really a home to it, and the graver sides of life, the deaths, the partings, the yearnings for love, have their deepest expression in the heart of the fields.

Business is just a never-ending cycle of starting and trying new things, asking whether people will pay for those things, and then trying it again based on what you’ve learned. If you’re afraid to start or ask, you can’t experiment. And if you can’t experiment, you can’t do business.

There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before. Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York--every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb. At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another. By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names. The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light. Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun.

Now, don't sigh for envy at my week-end; I am sure it is to be dull, my dear, and you know my horrible shyness and how I loathe such things. If only I had your vivacity and beauty! Alas, what we love in others does not always suit ourselves. I shall get through the weekend by wishing you in my place.

Where do we go from here? I started off this crazy weekend by trying to make sense of these moments—these moments that you know you’re going to remember—but like anything else, nothing exists without its opposite. So maybe it makes a certain kind of sense that I ended up thinking about the moments you know you’ll forget. Or, more accurately, try to remember incorrectly. How do we all learn how to do that? Relive something again and again in our heads until it takes on a slightly different light, a less truthful tone, until the memory can’t injure us as directly, until it joins the ranks of the more manageable.

I don’t believe in endings, happy or sad, so my relationships with you continue to this day. They are the kind of relationships you have with a pair of skis you know you’ll never have to strap to yourself again. Maybe you never really liked skiing, but enjoyed being a person who could say, “Looks like I’ll be hitting the slopes this weekend!” So you kept on even though it cost too much to get down a hill. Gave you windburn. I see nothing weird about keeping those skis in the basement. They offer a little nostalgia for crappier times. More importantly, they serve as a reminder that I no longer have to ski. Wake

By [college], many skills, attitudes, and habits have already been formed. We can have a much bigger impact on people at younger ages. Efforts to achieve true equity should focus instead on high-quality kindergarten and pre-K, high-quality weekend learning programs, high-quality charter schools, and high-quality after-school tutoring.

As the black of night transformed into the distinct deep blue of morning twilight, Trevor traded the well-worn accoutrements of a humble adult life for the highly specialized gear of a weekend warrior, giddily exchanging the daily grind for the enthrallment of the almighty Saturday.  Almost enough to make a grown man weep in gratitude.

All things being equal, workflows that minimize this never-ending stream of urgent communication are superior to those that instead amplify it. When you’re at home at night, or relaxing over the weekend, or on vacation, you shouldn’t feel like each moment away from work is a moment in which you’re accumulating deeper communication debt.

We hated not knowing something. We hated not knowing who was going to walk Spanish down the hall. How would our bills get paid? And where would we find new work? We knew the power of the credit card companies and the collection agencies and the consequences of bankruptcy. Those institutions were without appeal. They put your name into a system, and from that point forward, vital parts of the American dream were foreclosed upon. A backyard swimming pool. A long weekend in Vegas. A low-end BMW. These were not Jeffersonian ideals, perhaps, on par with life and liberty, but at this advanced stage, with the West won and the Cold War over, they, too, seemed among our inalienable rights.

I think all of us felt,” I said, “at least once in our lives, when we were young, we could go over there, after reading the bull stuff in the Spanish stories, that we could go over there and fight. Or at least jog ahead of the running of the bulls, in the early morning, with a good drink waiting at the other end of the run, and your best girl with you there for the long weekend.” I stopped. I laughed quietly. For my voice had, without knowing, fallen into the rhythm of his way of saying, either out of his mouth, or from his hand.

The Difference between Writers and Editors. Writers are creative using one end of a pencil. Editors are more adept using the opposite end.

One Saturday, he had gone to take the subway to Pennsylvania Station en route for the Soviet week-end rest camp at Glen Cove, the former Morgan estate on Long Island.

The Monday vise clenched. Here was that end-of-weekend despair, the death of amusement and the winnowing of the reprieve.

Let's be young again If only for a weekend Let's be fools again Let's fall in at the deep end

/A weekend toward the end of September, the bell above the door rang and there he was in the shop. Same old feeling in my guts. I’ll go if you want me to, he said. I smiled, I was so fucking happy to see him. You’ve only just got here, you twat, I said. Now give us a hand with this, and he took the other end of the trestle table and moved it over to the wall. Pub? I said. He grinned. And before I could say anything else he put his arms around me. And everything he couldn’t say in our room in France was said in that moment. I know, I said. I know. I’d already accepted I wasn’t the key to unlock him. She’d come later. It took a while to acknowledge the repercussions of that time. How the numbness in my fingertips traveled to my heart and I never even knew it. I had crushes, I had lovers, I had orgasms. My trilogy of desire, I liked to call it, but I’d no great love after him, not really. Love and sex became separated by a wide river and one the ferryman refused to cross. The psychiatrist liked that analogy. I watched him write it down. Chuckle, chuckle, his pen across the page.

MURRAY (with a cynical laugh). Interesting? On a small town rag? A month of it, perhaps, when you're a kid and new to the game. But ten years. Think of it! With only a raise of a couple of dollars every blue moon or so, and a weekly spree on Saturday night to vary the monotony. (He laughs again.) Interesting, eh? Getting the dope on the Social of the Queen Esther Circle in the basement of the Methodist Episcopal Church, unable to sleep through a meeting of the Common Council on account of the noisy oratory caused by John Smith's application for a permit to build a house; making a note that a tugboat towed two barges loaded with coal up the river, that Mrs. Perkins spent a week-end with relatives in Hickville, that John Jones Oh help! Why go on? Ten years of it! I'm a broken man. God, how I used to pray that our Congressman would commit suicide, or the Mayor murder his wife just to be able to write a real story!

Our work and educational institutions reinforce this preference for later over now throughout our lives. In school we focus on the ends — passing the semester, making the grade, or otherwise getting it all behind us — rather than the present-moment experience of actually learning. As employees, we want the work to be over as soon as it begins. Work culture is driven by quotas, billable hours, budgets, and Gantt charts — bottom lines of any sort. The value is always somewhere ahead of you, rather than here right now, in the room with you. We’re perpetually looking ahead to a payday or a weekend or some other kind of finish line. Virtually every day of our lives, we’re trained to lean towards something we don’t have, which essentially trains us to be dissatisfied with where we already are.

He found something grisly in the inevitability of the pattern of each affair. The conventional parabola – sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness – was to him shameful and hypocritical. Even more he shunned the ‘mise-en-scène’ for each of these acts in the play – the meeting at a party, the restaurant, the taxi, his flat, her flat, then the week-end by the sea, then the flats again, then the furtive alibis and the final angry farewell on some doorstep in the rain.

- But if I am going to fail, I say. - If I am not going to end up in LA after all spending weekends with you and watching our dreams come true, I don’t want to risk falling for you again just to say goodbye, I guess.

I didn’t exactly start praying that weekend after the book launch, but I did look up online how to meditate. It mainly involved closing my eyes and breathing, while also calmly letting go of passing thoughts. I focused on my breathing, you were allowed to do that. You could even count the breaths. And then at the end you could just think about anything, anything you wanted, but after five minutes of counting my breath, I didn’t want to think. My mind felt empty, like the inside of a glass jar. I was appropriating my fear of total disappearance as a spiritual practice. I was inhabiting disappearance as something that could reveal and inform, rather than totalize and annihilate.

Someday we might look back with a curious nostalgia at the days when profligate homeowners wastefully sprayed their lawns with liquid gold to make the grass grow, just so they could then burn black gold to cut it down on the weekends.

Jason closed his eye and winced. “Why is this weekend not ending?” “Because the universe hates you, and you agreed to marry a bloodsucking wannabe Real Housewife of New York, who would have used her nails as a way to kill you so we’d all end up on Dateline—crying.

If we think of eroticism not as sex per se, but as a vibrant, creative energy, it’s easy to see that Stephanie’s erotic pulse is alive and well. But her eroticism no longer revolves around her husband. Instead, it’s been channeled to her children. There are regular playdates for Jake but only three dates a year for Stephanie and Warren: two birthdays, hers and his, and one anniversary. There is the latest in kids’ fashion for Sophia, but only college sweats for Stephanie. They rent twenty G-rated movies for every R-rated movie. There are languorous hugs for the kids while the grown-ups must survive on a diet of quick pecks. This brings me to another point. Stephanie gets tremendous physical pleasure from her children. Let me be perfectly clear here: she knows the difference between adult sexuality and the sensuousness of caring for small children. She, like most mothers, would never dream of seeking sexual gratification from her children. But, in a sense, a certain replacement has occurred. The sensuality that women experience with their children is, in some ways, much more in keeping with female sexuality in general. For women, much more than for men, sexuality exists along what the Italian historian Francesco Alberoni calls a “principle of continuity.” Female eroticism is diffuse, not localized in the genitals but distributed throughout the body, mind, and senses. It is tactile and auditory, linked to smell, skin, and contact; arousal is often more subjective than physical, and desire arises on a lattice of emotion. In the physicality between mother and child lie a multitude of sensuous experiences. We caress their silky skin, we kiss, we cradle, we rock. We nibble their toes, they touch our faces, we lick their fingers, let them bite us when they’re teething. We are captivated by them and can stare at them for hours. When they devour us with those big eyes, we are besotted, and so are they. This blissful fusion bears a striking resemblance to the physical connection between lovers. In fact, when Stephanie describes the early rapture of her relationship with Warren—lingering gazes, weekends in bed, baby talk, toe-nibbling—the echoes are unmistakable. When she says, “At the end of the day, I have nothing left to give,” I believe her. But I also have come to believe that at the end of the day, there may be nothing more she needs. All this play activity and intimate involvement with her children’s development, all this fleshy connection, has captured Stephanie’s erotic potency to the detriment of the couple’s intimacy and sexuality. This is eros redirected. Her sublimated energy is displaced onto the children, who become the centerpiece of her emotional gratification.

On est tous seuls, ici, à Paris, ou ailleurs. On peut essayer de fuir la solitude, déménagé, faire tout pour rencontrer des gens, cela ne change rien. A la fin de la journée, chacun rentre chez soi. Ceux qui vivent en couple ne se rendent pas compte de leur chance. Ils ont oublié les soirées devant un plateau-repas, l’angoisse du week-end qui arrive, le dimanche à espérer que le téléphone sonne. Nous sommes des millions comme ça dans toutes les capitales du monde. La seule bonne nouvelle c’est qu’il n’y a pas de quoi se sentir si différents des autres.

if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon;

At the end of the day or week or month what really matters is that you & your loved ones are safe & well, you have done your best & are grateful for being who you are & touching the world with your presence. I wish to repeat that your ability to think & behave in a normal manner, your sound health, your safety, your feeling great, your family & the ability to start anew matters most in life. Darling listen – at the end, also remind yourself that it doesn’t matter what you’ve done so far, what you choose to do from here will matter most to you & your world in times to come. Keep Smiling, Keep Doing Something Meaningful & Stay Blessed!

A man described by authorities as one evolutionary step above a banana slug has recently admitted to having been locked in the Sacajawea Junior High biology lab over a long weekend nearly sixteen years ago when he fell asleep and was mistaken as a cadaver. Though the man is incapable of human speech, he was able, over a period of weeks, to chisel out his story in hieroglyphics on the bathroom wall of the insane asylum where he now resides. He claims that toward the end of the second day of his accidental captivity, he got downright lonely and sought companionship at his own intellectual level. He found that companionship in a petri dish.

For a while, I thought I needed to have some over-the-top gol, something comparable to the Olympics, but ..." He stops. Runs his thumb over my lower lip. "I want to spend four years in med school, fully knowing that it'll be hell. Do a fellowship and residency. Corpse stuff, sure. I want to travel to places that don't have a fucking pool. See my family more than once a year. Sleep in. Go on hiking trips. Stay home for long weekends and have morally bankrupt amounts of sex with someone I'm in love with. Kinky, vanilla, I want it all. I want to adopt rescue animals with her. I want to take care of her, and watch her be cold in Sweden, and marvel every day at how much smarter than me she is, and ... Scarlett.

Spending time with Jennie is like a Sunday you don’t want to ever end. Every moment leading up to it is perfect, a weekend that goes by way too fast. Sunday comes sooner than you want it to, and you hold on to every fleeting moment, every single minute, not ready to put it down, to say good-bye. You think if you just don’t close your eyes, you won’t have to.

For the most part in the course of our daily lives we abide the abundant evidence that no such universal justices exists. Like a cart horse, we plod along the cobblestones dragging our master's wares with our heads down and our blinders in place, waiting patiently for the next cube of sugar. But there are certain times when chance suddenly provides the justice that Agatha Christie promises. We look around at the characters cat in our own lives - our heiresses and gardeners, our vicars and nannies, our late-arriving guests who are not exactly what they seem - and discover before the end of the weekend all assembled will get their just deserts. But when we do so, we rarely remember to count ourselves among their company.

Nothing in my life had prepared me for this.Not one single thing.I feel like a lad rat stuck in some horrible experiment meant to measure how I adapt to brutal forms of social segregation and weirdness.And the sad news is,I'm producing way below average results. I stand to the side of the lunchroom or cafeteria,or whatever they call it.The vegetarian lunch Paloma packed with great love and care tightly clutched in my fist,though I've no clue as to where I'm supposed to go eat it. Having already committed the most heinous crime of all by sitting at the wrong table, I'm not sure I'm up for trying again.I'm still shaken by the way those girls acted-so self-righteous and territorial,so burdened by my presence at the end of their bench. It's the seniors' table, I was told. I have no right to sit there. Ever. And that includes holidays and weekends. "Duly noted," I replied, grabbing my lunch and standing before them. "I'll do my best to steer clear of it on Christmas.Easter as well.Though Valentine's Day is a wild card I just can't commit to." And though it felt good at the time,I've no doubt it was a reckless act that only made things worse.

It became a weekend of reading, of trying to see her in the fragments of the poem she'd left for me. I could never get anywhere with the lines, but I kept thinking about them anyway, because I didn't want to disappoint her. She wanted me to play out the string, to find the place where she had stopped and was waiting for me, to follow the bread crumb trail until it dead-ended into her.

In a colorful part of the paper, he presented a fictional scenario in which he posed questions to the machine. He imagined the machine’s activity: “Over the week-end it retrieved over 10,000 documents, scanned them all for sections rich in relevant material, analyzed all the rich sections into statements in a high-order predicate calculus, and entered the statements into the data base.

Being blown up feels like an ending, but for everyone else things carry on happening. They'd have talked about it for weeks, for months. Remembered it for years. But sooner or later their own concerns would have taken over. There comes a point when working out whether you've enough milk to see you through the weekend matters more than that somebody you once knew lost both legs to a bomb.

The moment I met her she struck me dumb, deaf, and stupid. At only eighteen, she’d had everything— brains, beauty, class. And she’d known it too. In the eight years since, I’ve watched her toy with one man after another, sometimes for a weekend, sometimes for a couple of months. But the affairs always ended the same. With her handing him his hat and a don’t-slam-the-door-on-your-way-out.

The third Friday favourite was fried meatballs. This was a meal my parents would make together, my mother preparing the meatball mixture, rolling them, and my father frying them slowly in olive oil. […] The work and school week had ended, and a weekend spent with friends and the inevitable Friday or Saturday night sleepover lay ahead for me and my sisters, while my parents looked forward to dinner parties at home or away.

On one weekend, they marched through the factory painting marks on machinery to be jettisoned. “We put a hole in the side of the building just to remove all that equipment,” Musk says. The experience became a lesson that would become part of Musk’s production algorithm. Always wait until the end of designing a process—after you have questioned all the requirements and deleted unnecessary parts—before you introduce automation.

Margo Brinker always thought summer would never end. It always felt like an annual celebration that thankfully stayed alive long day after long day, and warm night after warm night. And DC was the best place for it. Every year, spring would vanish with an explosion of cherry blossoms that let forth the confetti of silky little pink petals, giving way to the joys of summer. Farmer's markets popped up on every roadside. Vendors sold fresh, shining fruits, vegetables and herbs, wine from family vineyards, and handed over warm loaves of bread. Anyone with enough money and enough to do on a Sunday morning would peruse the tents, trying slices of crisp peaches and bites of juicy smoked sausage, and fill their fisherman net bags with weekly wares. Of all the summer months, Margo liked June the best. The sun-drunk beginning, when the days were long, long, long with the promise that summer would last forever. Sleeping late, waking only to catch the best tanning hours. It was the time when the last school year felt like a lifetime ago, and there were ages to go until the next one. Weekend cookouts smelled like the backyard- basil, tomatoes on the vine, and freshly cut grass. That familiar backyard scent was then smoked by the rich addition of burgers, hot dogs, and buttered buns sizzling over charcoal.

The house fostered an easier and more candid exchange of ideas and opinions, encouraged by the simple fact that everyone had left their offices behind and by a wealth of novel opportunities for conversation—climbs up Beacon and Coombe Hills, walks in the rose garden, rounds of croquet, and hands of bezique, further leavened by free-flowing champagne, whiskey, and brandy. The talk typically ranged well past midnight. At Chequers, visitors knew they could speak more freely than in London, and with absolute confidentiality. After one weekend, Churchill’s new commander in chief of Home Forces, Alan Brooke, wrote to thank him for periodically inviting him to Chequers, and “giving me an opportunity of discussing the problems of the defense of this country with you, and of putting some of my difficulties before you. These informal talks are of the very greatest help to me, & I do hope you realize how grateful I am to you for your kindness.” Churchill, too, felt more at ease at Chequers, and understood that here he could behave as he wished, secure in the knowledge that whatever happened within would be kept secret (possibly a misplaced trust, given the memoirs and diaries that emerged after the war, like desert flowers after a first rain). This was, he said, a “cercle sacré.” A sacred circle. General Brooke recalled one night when Churchill, at two-fifteen A.M., suggested that everyone present retire to the great hall for sandwiches, which Brooke, exhausted, hoped was a signal that soon the night would end and he could get to bed. “But, no!” he wrote. What followed was one of those moments often to occur at Chequers that would remain lodged in visitors’ minds forever after. “He had the gramophone turned on,” wrote Brooke, “and, in the many-colored dressing-gown, with a sandwich in one hand and water-cress in the other, he trotted round and round the hall, giving occasional little skips to the tune of the gramophone.” At intervals as he rounded the room he would stop “to release some priceless quotation or thought.” During one such pause, Churchill likened a man’s life to a walk down a passage lined with closed windows. “As you reach each window, an unknown hand opens it and the light it lets in only increases by contrast the darkness of the end of the passage.” He danced on. —

We find, therefore, Lowell and Mailer ostensibly locked in converse. In fact, out of the thousand separate enclaves of their very separate personalities, they sensed quickly that they now shared one enclave to the hilt: their secret detestation of liberal academic parties to accompany worthy causes. Yes, their snobbery was on this mountainous face close to identical—each had a delight in exactly the other kind of party, a posh evil social affair, they even supported a similar vein of vanity (Lowell with considerably more justice) that if they were doomed to be revolutionaries, rebels, dissenters, anarchists, protesters, and general champions of one Left cause or another, they were also, in private, grands conservateurs, and if the truth be told, poor damn émigré princes. They were willing if necessary (probably) to die for the cause—one could hope the cause might finally at the end have an unexpected hint of wit, a touch of the Lord’s last grace—but wit or no, grace or grace failing, it was bitter rue to have to root up one’s occupations of the day, the week, and the weekend and trot down to Washington for idiot mass manifestations which could only drench one in the most ineradicable kind of mucked-up publicity and have for compensation nothing at this party which might be representative of some of the Devil’s better creations. So Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer feigned deep conversation. They turned their heads to one another at the empty table, ignoring the potentially acolytic drinkers at either elbow, they projected their elbows out in fact like flying buttresses or old Republicans, they exuded waves of Interruption Repellent from the posture of their backs, and concentrated on their conversation, for indeed they were the only two men of remotely similar status in the room. (Explanations about the position of Paul Goodman will follow later.)

his back to her. “Vic, how long’s it been?” “How’d you end up down here, Sid?” I asked. “I thought you knew better than to put yourself in the crosshairs.” “Nobody asks me to go out on the street anymore and I got me a weekend place down near Schererville.” He winked, meaning, I suppose, that he was actually living down in Indiana—a no-no for someone on Chicago’s payroll. Sid had been one of my dad’s last partners, after Tony had been redeemed from cop hell: my dad had been sent to West Englewood

Jesus, just one hour ago we were sitting over there in that stinking bagnio, stone broke and paralyzed for the weekend, when a call comes through from some total stranger in New York, telling me to go to Las Vegas and expenses be damned—and then he sends me over to some office in Beverly Hills where another total stranger gives me $300 raw cash for no reason at all … I tell you, my man, this is the American Dream in action! We’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end.

Oh . . . I'd been getting pretty sick of the office. It made me feel dead inside. Finally, the week-ends weren't long enough to get it out of my system. I couldn't read poetry or listen to music. It was like being constipated. Well, I got a holiday and went to Kent for a week's hiking. And for the first two days I felt nothing at all, just a sort of deadness inside. And one day I went into a pub in a place called Marden and had a couple of pints. And as I came out, a sort of bubble seemed to burst inside me, and I started feeling things again. And I suddenly felt an overwhelming hatred for cities and offices and people and everything that calls itself civilisation . . . . "Then I got an idea. I sat down at the side of the road and thought about it. I'd read somewhere that the Manichees thought the world was created by evil. Well, it suddenly seemed to me that the forces behind the world weren't either good or evil, but something quite incomprehensible to human beings. And the only thing they want is movement, everlasting movement. That's the way I saw it suddenly. Human beings want peace, and they build their civilisations and make their laws to get peace. But the forces behind the world don't want peace. So they send down ertain men whose business is to keep the world in a turmoil - the Napoleons, Hitlers, Genghis Khans. And I called these men the Enemies, with a capital E. And I thought I belong among the Enemies - that's why I detest this bloody civilisation. And I suddenly began to feel better . . . .

PRO TIP: Don’t base your happiness or your self-worth on being the smartest, the most successful, the richest. Being so focused on the end results sets you up for a major fall because there’s ALWAYS going to be someone who’s smarter, more successful, or richer—and every time you see that you’ve fallen short, it will eat away at your motivation. Defining yourself by the things you do each day (the process) will get you to where you want to be quicker and more joyfully than measuring yourself against others.

I really doubt my parents are going to let me stay the night in a remote cabin with a bunch of boys.” “Oh, please, Snow White, Mike’s dad’ll be there. He’s actually kinda funny…you know, in a weird dad kind of way. Don’t worry, your purity will remain intact. Scout’s honor.” She made some sort of gesture with her fingers that Violet assumed was supposed to be an oath, but since Chelsea had never actually been a Girl Scout, it ended up looking more like a peace sign. Or something. Violet maintained her dubious expression. But Chelsea wasn’t about to be discouraged, and she tried to be the voice of reason. “Come on, I think Jay’s checking to see if he can get the time off work. The least you can do is ask your parents. If they say no, then no harm, no foul, right? If they say yes, then we’ll have a kick-ass time. We’ll go hiking in the snow and hang out in front of the fireplace in the evening. We’ll sleep in sleeping bags and maybe even roast some marshmallows. It’ll be like we’re camping.” She beamed a superfake smile at Violet and clasped her hands together like she was begging. “Do it for me. Ple-eease.” Jules came back with their milk shake. It was strawberry, and Chelsea flashed Violet an I-told-you-so grin. Violet finished her tea, mulling over the idea of spending the weekend in a snowy cabin with Jay and Chelsea. Away from town. Away from whoever was leaving her dead animals and creepy notes. It did sound fun, and Violet did love the snow. And the woods. And Jay. She could at least ask. Like Chelsea said, No harm, no foul.

He used to bake on weekends and on the days when he did not have much homework. He used to bake all the time, and how could we reproduce all the time? Butter and cream and honey and cinnamon and vanilla and nutmeg and clove and all the jars and bottles on his baking shelf: No one's words, Proust's included, could bring back to life their warm fragrance mixed with the scents of the winter rain of California and the wet eucalyptus leaves. You almost an invention to immortalize scents, Mr. Edison. Without that our memory is incomplete.

The Court usually begins to issue opinions in November and proceeds to hand down opinions throughout the term. But naturally, the least controversial cases, those that produce unanimous or near-unanimous decisions, get decided first. Complicated cases or those that, for one reason or another, produce numerous concurring and dissenting opinions take longer, perhaps much longer, and only the pressure of an impending July 4 weekend may spur the justices to make the last-minute compromises necessary to bring a decision out by the end of June.

Hey, baby,” Chelsea said in a voice that bordered on baby talk as Mike bent down to give her a quick kiss. “Miss me?” Violet almost rolled her eyes. “I thought about you all period,” he answered, his voice husky. “Did you get the note I left in your backpack?” Violet couldn’t hold back any longer; she rolled her eyes. Neither of them noticed. “I did. You’re so sweet.” The cooing verged on sickening. “Did anyone say anything about your mustache?” Mike winced, as if he suddenly remembered the patchy hair on his upper lip. “A coupla’ people,” he reluctantly responded, and Violet suspected that he’d taken his hair share of ribbing over it. Chelsea ignored the obvious distress in his voice. “Vi and I gotta run or we’ll be late.” She stretched up to kiss him and then rubbed her thumb across the hairs above his lip as if she were petting them. “See you after class.” Chelsea tugged at Violet, who was still staring at his unsightly mustache. It was like seeing a car accident…hard to look away. “So do you? Like it, I mean?” Violet asked as she was being dragged down the hallway. “The mustache?” Chelsea grimaced. “God, no. It’s hideous on him.” “Then, why?” “I told you, to see if he’d actually do it. Don’t worry. I’m gonna make him shave it this weekend.” Violet wasn’t sure whether to congratulate her friend on her training abilities or reprimand her for being so cruel. In the end, she didn’t do either, mostly because she knew it wouldn’t make any difference. Chelsea was Chelsea. Trying to convince her that what she’d done was wrong would be like banging your head against a brick wall. It would be painful to you but accomplish nothing.

The problem in these instances is mediocre comfort—enough of it that it prevents you from getting up off the nail. The nice car, the regular paycheck, the fun weekend of football games—all of it keeps you at the poker table with the same strategy, the same bets, and the same cards. In the end, nothing changes but the passage of time. At some point, you have to decide: What’s more important? Your UNSCRIPTED dreams? Or watching the Yankees third game on a ten-game home stand? Your long-term happiness? Or your drunken stupors at the lake on Saturday afternoon?

The day came: a Monday at the end of September. The night before he had realized that it was almost exactly a year since the beating, although he hadn’t planned it that way. He left work early that evening. He had spent the weekend organizing his projects; he had written Lucien a memo detailing the status of everything he had been working on. At home, he lined up his letters on the dining room table, and a copy of his will. He had left a message with Richard’s studio manager that the toilet in the master bathroom kept running and asked if Richard could let in the plumber the following day at nine – both Richard and Willem had a set of keys to his apartment – because he would be away on business. He took off his suit jacket and tie and shoes and watch and went to the bathroom. He sat in the shower area with his sleeves pushed up. He had a glass of scotch, which he sipped at to steady himself, and a box cutter, which he knew would be easier to hold than a razor. He knew what he needed to do: three straight vertical lines, as deep and long as he could make them, following the veins up both arms. And then he would lie down and wait. He waited for a while, crying a bit, because he was tired and frightened and because he was ready to go, he was ready to leave. Finally he rubbed his eyes and began. He started with his left arm. He made the first cut, which was more painful than he had thought it would be, and he cried out. Then he made the second. He took another drink of the scotch. The blood was viscous, more gelatinous than liquid, and a brilliant, shimmering oil-black. Already his pants were soaked with it, already his grip was loosening. He made the third. When he was done with both arms, he slumped against the back of the shower wall. He wished, absurdly, for a pillow. He was warm from the scotch, and from his own blood, which lapped at him as it pooled against his legs – his insides meeting his outsides, the inner bathing the outer. He closed his eyes. Behind him, the hyenas howled, furious at him. Before him stood the house with its open door. He wasn’t close yet, but he was closer than he’d been: close enough to see that inside, there was a bed where he could rest, where he could lie down and sleep after his long run, where he would, for the first time in his life, be safe.

What the hell is all this I read in the papers?" "Narrow it down for me," Alan suggested. "I suppose it might have been a misprint," Daniel considered, frowning at the tip of his cigar before he tapped it in the ashtray he kept secreted in the bottom drawer of his desk. "I think I know my own flesh and blood well enough." "Narrow it just a bit further," Alan requested, though he'd already gotten the drift.It was simply too good to end it too soon. "When I read that my own son-my heir, as things are-is spending time fraternizing with a Campbell, I know it's a simple matter of misspelling. What's the girl's name?" Along with a surge of affection, Alan felt a tug of pure and simple mischief. "Which girl is that?" "Dammit,boy! The girl you're seeing who looks like a pixie.Fetching young thing from the picture I saw.Good bones; holds herself well." "Shelby," Alan said, then waited a beat. "Shelby Campbell." Dead silence.Leaning back in his chair, Alan wondered how long it would be before his father remembered to take a breath. It was a pity, he mused, a real pity that he couldn't see the old pirate's face. "Campbell!" The word erupted. "A thieving, murdering Campbell!" "Yes,she's fond of MacGregor's as well." "No son of mine gives the time of day to one of the clan Campbell!" Daniel bellowed. "I'll take a strap to you, Alan Duncan MacGregor!" The threat was as empty now as it had been when Alan had been eight, but delivered in the same full-pitched roar. "I'll wear the hide off you." "You'll have the chance to try this weekend when you meet Shelby." "A Campbell in my house! Hah!" "A Campbell in your house," Alan repeated mildly. "And a Campbell in your family before the end of the year if I have my way." "You-" Emotions warred in him. A Campbell versus his firmest aspiration: to see each of his children married and settled, and himself laden with grandchildren. "You're thinking of marriage to a Campbell?" "I've already asked her.She won't have me...yet," he added. "Won't have you!" Paternal pride dominated all else. "What kind of a nitwit is she? Typical Campbell," he muttered. "Mindless pagans." Daniel suspected they'd had some sorcerers sprinkled among them. "Probably bewitched the boy," he mumbled, scowling into space. "Always had good sense before this.Aye, you bring your Campbell to me," he ordered roundly. "I'll get to the bottom of it." Alan smothered a laugh, forgetting the poor mood that had plagued him only minutes earlier. "I'll ask her." "Ask? Hah! You bring the girl, that daughter of a Campbell, here." Picturing Shelby, Alan decided he wouldn't iss the meeting for two-thirds the popular vote. "I'll see you Friday, Dad.Give Mom my love." "Friday," Daniel muttered, puffing avidly on his cigar. "Aye,aye, Friday." As he hung up Alan could all but see his father rubbing his huge hands togther in anticipation. It should be an interesting weekened.

Similarly, some people have a four-lane highway for constant achievement, a striving talent we call achiever. They may not have to win, but they do feel a burning need to achieve something tangible every single day. And these people mean every single day. For them, every day — workday, weekend, vacation — starts at zero. They have to rack up some numbers by the end of the day to feel good about themselves. This burning flame may dwindle as evening comes, but the next morning, it rekindles itself, spurring its host to look for new items to cross off his list. These people are the fabled “self-starters.

In an industrial society that conflates work and productivity, the need to produce has always stood opposed to the desire to create. What spark of humanity, which is to say possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged from sleep at six every morning, jolted about in commuter trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by speed-up and meaningless gestures and production quotas, and tossed out at the end of the day into great railway-station halls—temples of arrival and departure for the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise of the weekend, where the masses commune in brutish weariness?

They went on in this way for nine years. And then, one autumn day, it ended. Freddy had changed, of course, from a twenty-five-year-old to a man in his midthirties: a high school teacher in blue short-sleeved button-ups and black ties, whom Less jokingly called Mr. Pelu (often raising his hand as if to be called on in class). Mr. Pelu had kept his curls, but his glasses were now red plastic. He could no longer fit his slim clothes; he had filled out from that skinny youngster into a grown man, with shoulders and a chest and a softness just beginning on in his belly. He no longer stumbled drunk up Less's stairs and recited bad poetry every weekend.

We didn’t know what he did on the weekends. What sort of person showed up on Monday and had no interest in sharing what transpired during the two days of the week when one’s real life took place? His weekends were long dark shadows of mystery. In all likelihood, he spent his days off in the office, cultivating his master plan. Mondays we’d come in refreshed and unsuspecting and he would already be there, ready to spring something on us. Maybe he never left. Certainly he never came around with a coffee mug to palaver with us on a Monday morning. We didn’t judge him for that, so long as he didn’t judge us for our custom of easing into a new workweek.

there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and that light is your child.” They’ll train with a cohort of mothers based on their child’s gender and age. It wouldn’t do to have mothers of teenagers training with mothers of infants. Class sizes will be kept small, for the time being. Each mother will be assigned to a cohort based on the age of her youngest child. Mothers of girls and mothers of boys will train in different buildings. “Girls and boys have such different needs,” Ms. Knight says. Mothers of both will report for extra training three evenings a week and every other weekend. Mothers who have multiple children, as well as addiction issues, will be extremely busy.

In this current environment of precarity, this so-called gig economy, it is difficult not to romanticize a job that ends, just like many romanticize being a writer so as to not have a job, to have one’s hours to one’s self after a certain time, to have weekends, to not have capitalism suck up all available energy and possible time, not having to work constantly, including often for free, in this nebulous and borderless realm of publicizing one’s self and one’s work, in order to continue, not even to succeed, but just to continue. Although both possibilities are most likely fictions. Maybe the only way to truly luxuriate in thinking and time was to be independently wealthy.

OLIVER DAVENANT did not merely read books. He snuffed them up, took breaths of them into his lungs, filled his eyes with the sight of the print and his head with the sound of words. Some emanation from the book itself poured into his bones, as if he were absorbing steady sunshine. The pages had personality. He was of the kind who cannot have a horrifying book in the room at night. He would, in fine weather, lay it upon an outside sill and close the window. Often Julia would see a book lying on his doormat. As well as this, his reading led him in and out of love. At first, it was the picture of Alice going up on tiptoe to shake hands with Humpty Dumpty; then the little Fatima in his Arthur Rackham book, her sweet dusky face, the coins hanging on her brow, the billowing trousers and embroidered coat. Her childish face was alive with excitement as she put the key to the lock. “Don’t!” he had once cried to her in loud agony. In London, he would go every Saturday morning to the Public Library to look at a picture of Lorna Doone. Some Saturdays it was not there, and he would go home again, wondering who had borrowed her, in what kind of house she found herself that week-end. On his last Saturday, he went to say good-bye and the book was not there, so he sat down at a table to await its return. Just before the library was to be shut for lunch-time, he went to the shelf and kissed the two books which would lie on either side of his Lorna when she was returned and, having left this message of farewell, made his way home, late for lunch and empty of heart. If this passion is to be called reading, then the matrons with their circulating libraries and the clergymen with their detective tales are merely flirting and passing time. To discover how Oliver’s life was lived, it was necessary, as in reading The Waste Land, to have an extensive knowledge of literature. With impartiality, he studied comic papers and encyclopaedia, Eleanor’s pamphlets on whatever interested her at the moment, the labels on breakfast cereals and cod liver oil, Conan Doyle and Charlotte Brontë.

For a while, I thought I needed to have some over-the-top goal, something comparable to the Olympics, but ..." He stops. Runs his thumb over my lower lip. "I want to spend four years in med school, fully knowing that it'll be hell. Do a fellowship and residency. Corpse stuff, sure. I want to travel to places that don't have a fucking pool. See my family more than once a year. Sleep in. Go on hiking trips. Stay home for long weekends and have morally bankrupt amounts of sex with someone I'm in love with. Kinky, vanilla, I want it all. I want to adopt rescue animals with her. I want to take care of her, and watch her be cold in Sweden, and marvel every day at how much smarter than me she is, and ...

Our inner lives must be lent a structure and our best thoughts reinforced to counter the continuous pull of distraction and disintegration. Religions have been wise enough to establish elaborate calendars and schedules. How free secular society leaves us by contrast. Secular life is not, of course, unacquainted with calendars and schedules. We know them well in relation to work, and accept the virtues of reminders of lunch meetings, cash-flow projections and tax deadlines. But it expects that we will spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us and gives us weekends off for consumption and recreation. It privileges discovery, presenting us with an incessant stream of new information – and therefore it prompts us to forget everything. We are enticed to go to the cinema to see a newly released film, which ends up moving us to an exquisite pitch of sensitivity, sorrow and excitement. We leave the theatre vowing to reconsider our entire existence in light of the values shown on screen, and to purge ourselves of our decadence and haste. And yet by the following evening, after a day of meetings and aggravations, our cinematic experience is well on its way towards obliteration. We honour the power of culture but rarely admit with what scandalous ease we forget its individual monuments. We somehow feel, however, that it would be a violation of our spontaneity to be presented with rotas for rereading Walt Whitman.

For the most part, in the course of our daily lives we abide the abundant evidence that no such universal justice exists. Like a cart horse, we plod along the cobblestones dragging our masters' wares with our heads down and our blinders in place, waiting patiently for the next cube of sugar. But there are certain times when chance suddenly provides the justice that Agatha Christies promise. We look around at the characters cast in our own lives - our heiresses and gardeners, our vicars and nannies, our late-arriving guests who are not exactly what they seem - and discover that before the end of the weekend all assembled will get there just desserts. But when we do so, we rarely remember to count ourselves among their company.

Liberals: Liberty-loving liberals founded our country and enshrined its freedoms. Dedicated, fair-minded liberals ended slavery and brought women the vote. Hardworking liberals fought the goon squads and won workers’ rights: the eight-hour day, the weekend, health plans, and pensions. Courageous liberals risked their lives to win civil rights. Caring liberals have made the vulnerable elderly secure with Social Security and healthy with Medicare. Forward-looking liberals have extended education to everyone. Liberals who love the land have been preserving our environment so you can enjoy it. Nobody loves liberty and life more than a liberal. When conservatives say you’re on your own, we liberals know we’re all in this together. “Liberal

I told the Icelandic prime minister that it appeared that large sums of money had been taken out of the UK from the Kaupthing branches, which was a serious breach of FSA regulations. The FSA had to find out by the end of the afternoon whether or not that breach had taken place. If it had, they would close the bank. He asked whether the money was needed today and how much it was. I said it was about £600 million, small beer for us but a huge amount for him. It was urgent, I said, that he look into it immediately. His response rang alarm bells. He asked if there was any chance that the amount could be negotiated down. I said there was no chance and that the money had to be returned before the end of the weekend. I suspected we would end up having to close the banks the following week.

We fail to realize that some things really are disappearing doors, and need our immediate attention. We may work more hours at our jobs, for instance, without realizing that the childhood of our sons and daughters is slipping away. Sometimes these doors close too slowly for us to see them vanishing. One of my friends told me, for instance, that the single best year of his marriage was when he was living in New York, his wife was living in Boston, and they met only on weekends. Before they had this arrangement - when they lived together in Boston - they would spend their weekends catching up on work rather than enjoying each other. But once the arrangement changed, and they knew that they had only the weekends together, their shared time became limited and had a clear end (the time of the return train).

Come inside." Shelby tilted her head just enough to rest it briefly on his shoulder as they walked to the door. "I'm relying on your word that I'll walk out again in one piece at the end of the weekend." He only grinned. "I told you my stand on playing the mediator." "Thanks a lot." She glanced up at the door, noting the heavy brass crest that served as a door knocker. The MacGregor lion stared coolly at her with its Gaelic motto over its crowned head. "Your father isn't one to hide his light under a bushel,is he?" "Let's just say he has a strong sense of family pride." Alan lifted the knocker, then let it fall heavily against the thick door. Shelby imagined the sound would vibrate into every nook and cranny in the house. "The Clan MacGregor," Alan began in a low rolling burr, "is one of the few permitted to use the crown in their crest.Good blood. Strong stock.

Like many others who have gone into prisons and jails with us, Chuck and Carol Middlekauff demonstrate what our ministry is all about. We train Christian ‘teammates’ to share the good news and love of Christ with ‘the least of these’ so they can continue to do it with others they encounter as they go along. In this book, Carol has written the stories of some of those encounters so you can appreciate how easy it is to tell people about Jesus. It happens when you realize God does all the work, and all you have to do is show up. I hope you will be encouraged by reading the book and then join us soon for a Weekend of Champions to find out for yourself.” Bill Glass, retired NFL all-pro defensive end, evangelist, founder of Bill Glass Champions for Life prison ministries, and author of numerous books, including The Healing Power of a Father’s Blessing and Blitzed by Blessings

Little Brother, an aspiring painter, saved up all his money and went to France, to surround himself with beauty and inspiration. He lived on the cheap, painted every day, visited museums, traveled to picturesque locations, bravely spoke to everyone he met, and showed his work to anyone who would look at it. One afternoon, Little Brother struck up a conversation in a café with a group of charming young people, who turned out to be some species of fancy aristocrats. The charming young aristocrats took a liking to Little Brother and invited him to a party that weekend in a castle in the Loire Valley. They promised Little Brother that this was going to be the most fabulous party of the year. It would be attended by the rich, by the famous, and by several crowned heads of Europe. Best of all, it was to be a masquerade ball, where nobody skimped on the costumes. It was not to be missed. Dress up, they said, and join us! Excited, Little Brother worked all week on a costume that he was certain would be a showstopper. He scoured Paris for materials and held back neither on the details nor the audacity of his creation. Then he rented a car and drove to the castle, three hours from Paris. He changed into his costume in the car and ascended the castle steps. He gave his name to the butler, who found him on the guest list and politely welcomed him in. Little Brother entered the ballroom, head held high. Upon which he immediately realized his mistake. This was indeed a costume party—his new friends had not misled him there—but he had missed one detail in translation: This was a themed costume party. The theme was “a medieval court.” And Little Brother was dressed as a lobster. All around him, the wealthiest and most beautiful people of Europe were attired in gilded finery and elaborate period gowns, draped in heirloom jewels, sparkling with elegance as they waltzed to a fine orchestra. Little Brother, on the other hand, was wearing a red leotard, red tights, red ballet slippers, and giant red foam claws. Also, his face was painted red. This is the part of the story where I must tell you that Little Brother was over six feet tall and quite skinny—but with the long waving antennae on his head, he appeared even taller. He was also, of course, the only American in the room. He stood at the top of the steps for one long, ghastly moment. He almost ran away in shame. Running away in shame seemed like the most dignified response to the situation. But he didn’t run. Somehow, he found his resolve. He’d come this far, after all. He’d worked tremendously hard to make this costume, and he was proud of it. He took a deep breath and walked onto the dance floor. He reported later that it was only his experience as an aspiring artist that gave him the courage and the license to be so vulnerable and absurd. Something in life had already taught him to just put it out there, whatever “it” is. That costume was what he had made, after all, so that’s what he was bringing to the party. It was the best he had. It was all he had. So he decided to trust in himself, to trust in his costume, to trust in the circumstances. As he moved into the crowd of aristocrats, a silence fell. The dancing stopped. The orchestra stuttered to a stop. The other guests gathered around Little Brother. Finally, someone asked him what on earth he was. Little Brother bowed deeply and announced, “I am the court lobster.” Then: laughter. Not ridicule—just joy. They loved him. They loved his sweetness, his weirdness, his giant red claws, his skinny ass in his bright spandex tights. He was the trickster among them, and so he made the party. Little Brother even ended up dancing that night with the Queen of Belgium. This is how you must do it, people.

I think she did really try her hardest to get over him. You would, wouldn't you, if someone had hurt you like that? You'd make all kinds of promises to yourself not to let them do something like that again. But wouldn't a small part of you always be wondering "what if" Wouldn't some part of you - a part that you might not want to exist - still be holding out for that happy ending? It's how we're built isn't it? No matter how many times you get slapped in the face you have to believe that the next time would be different. And then in comes the guy who hurt you all those years ago, and he wants to make things better and to prove he's not all talk- this time it will be different. How could she not fall for that? How could she not think that if she chose him it would finally lift the shadow that he'd cast over her life? All that hurt, all that suffering wouldn't have been for nothing then, would it? If he'd come back to you like that, would you have taken him back?

We need to distinguish between activities that are spiritually fulfilling versus ones that leave us feeling hollow in the end. I used to play a lot of video games. Simply put, they were fun and exciting. I was good at them, and I liked getting better. During weekends I could spend more than twelve hours playing video games. I did so for years. I noticed that, as fun as the games were, at the end of the day, I often felt a lingering sense of regret or hollowness, as if I had wasted my time. My body seemed to be telling me that there was no meaning in that activity — which is not to say that everyone will feel just like I did, but pay attention to the feeling in the body during and after activities. Make note of the activities that are fulfilling. Spend more time doing those activities. Also, note those activities that result in hollowness or regret. Spend less time doing those things. We can wean ourselves from meaningless activities and gravitate more toward meaningful ones.

Patricia kept her distance while Blue and Korey hung all over Ragtag that weekend, soothing him when he barked at things that weren't there, driving to the store and getting him wet food when he wouldn't eat dry, sitting with him in the backyard or on the sofa in the sun. And on Sunday night, when things got bad, and Dr. Grouse's office was closed, the two of them sat up with Ragtag as he walked around the den in circles, barking and snapping at things they couldn't see, and they talked to him in low voices, and told him he was a good dog, and a brave dog, and they weren't going to leave him alone. When Patricia went to bed around one, both kids were still sitting up with Ragtag, patting him when his wanderings brought him close, speaking to him, showing him patience that Patricia had never seen in them before. Around four in the morning she woke up with a start and crept downstairs. The three of them lay on the den sofa. Korey and Blue were on either end, asleep. Ragtag lay between them, dead.

People don't understand how much spiritual darkness makes depression worse. The mental illness is bad enough by itself, but when you're spiritually malnourished, the only thing you have left to rely on are your physical senses. If I can't feel anything spiritually, I'll try anything to feel with my five senses. I want to taste something that will blow my mind, touch whatever is going to make me feel good, see whatever causes my mind to fantasize the most - and the cycle continues. I just wanted to feel alive. That's the real reason so many people spend money on things they don't need, ride the roller coaster of casual sex, or party every weekend until they can't think straight. They just want to feel alive. I learned the hard way that you can't sin your way out of suffering. In the end you just create more suffering from your sin. You can't wake yourself up from a depressive funk with obsessive addiction. It won't work. Trust me, I've tried it. Winning at work won't be enough. The applause of others won't fulfill you. It will haunt you in your private moments.

All 250 + episodes to date can be found at tim.blog/ podcast and itunes.com/ timferriss Jamie Foxx on Workout Routines, Success Habits, and Untold Hollywood Stories (# 124)—tim.blog/ jamie The Scariest Navy SEAL I’ve Ever Met . . . and What He Taught Me (# 107)—tim.blog/ jocko Arnold Schwarzenegger on Psychological Warfare (and Much More) (# 60)—tim.blog/ arnold Dom D’Agostino on Fasting, Ketosis, and the End of Cancer (# 117)—tim.blog/ dom2 Tony Robbins on Morning Routines, Peak Performance, and Mastering Money (# 37)—tim.blog/ tony How to Design a Life—Debbie Millman (# 214)—tim.blog/ debbie Tony Robbins—On Achievement Versus Fulfillment (# 178)—tim.blog/ tony2 Kevin Rose (# 1)—tim.blog/ kevinrose [If you want to hear how bad a first episode can be, this delivers. Drunkenness didn’t help matters.] Charles Poliquin on Strength Training, Shredding Body Fat, and Increasing Testosterone and Sex Drive (# 91)—tim.blog/ charles Mr. Money Mustache—Living Beautifully on $ 25–27K Per Year (# 221)—tim.blog/ mustache Lessons from Warren Buffett, Bobby Fischer, and Other Outliers (# 219)—tim.blog/ buffett Exploring Smart Drugs, Fasting, and Fat Loss—Dr. Rhonda Patrick (# 237)—tim.blog/ rhonda 5 Morning Rituals That Help Me Win the Day (# 105)—tim.blog/ rituals David Heinemeier Hansson: The Power of Being Outspoken (# 195)—tim.blog/ dhh Lessons from Geniuses, Billionaires, and Tinkerers (# 173)—tim.blog/ chrisyoung The Secrets of Gymnastic Strength Training (# 158)—tim.blog/ gst Becoming the Best Version of You (# 210)—tim.blog/ best The Science of Strength and Simplicity with Pavel Tsatsouline (# 55)—tim.blog/ pavel Tony Robbins (Part 2) on Morning Routines, Peak Performance, and Mastering Money (# 38)—tim.blog/ tony How Seth Godin Manages His Life—Rules, Principles, and Obsessions (# 138)—tim.blog/ seth The Relationship Episode: Sex, Love, Polyamory, Marriage, and More (with Esther Perel) (# 241)—tim.blog/ esther The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency—Nick Szabo (# 244)—tim.blog/ crypto Joshua Waitzkin (# 2)—tim.blog/ josh The Benevolent Dictator of the Internet, Matt Mullenweg (# 61)—tim.blog/ matt Ricardo Semler—The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules (# 229)—tim.blog/ ricardo

Emily turned to me. “You’re not happy at work. You’re not following a passion.” I wondered if faking a stroke was an option, as there was nothing I wanted to do less than have this conversation again. “I like my work,” I said. “I get to help people, it’s challenging.” “But are you passionate?” I shrugged. “I was passionate about things when I was your age, and working is easier when you love what you do, but even something you love contains hours and days of repetition and grind. It’s only on the internet that everything is easy.” Emily looked at Cassidy. “See what I mean? Work is not life. Work is how you pay for food. You should ask us the kind of life we want to live instead.” She started counting on her fingers. “I want a job I can forget at the end of the day, where I don’t work weekends, where I make enough money to live on my own and have a garden. Wouldn’t it be better to start there? There must be hundreds of jobs like that. Work isn’t supposed to be your life . . . Your life is supposed to be your life.” She fell silent. Then she said, “I don’t know. Maybe I’m hungry.” She got up and went to get breakfast.

Avant le chariot du supermarché, le qu'est-ce qu'on va manger ce soir, les économies pour s'acheter un canapé, une chaîne hi-fi, un appart. Avant les couches, le petit seau et la pelle sur la plage, les hommes que je ne vois plus, les revues de consommateurs pour ne pas se faire entuber, le gigot qu'il aime par-dessus tout et le calcul réciproque des libertés perdues. Une période où l'on peut dîner d'un yaourt, faire sa valise en une demi-heure pour un week-end impromptu, parler toute une nuit. Lire un dimanche entier sous les couvertures. S'amollir dans un café, regarder les gens entrer et sortir, se sentir flotter entre ces existences anonymes. Faire la fête sans scrupule quand on a le cafard. Une période où les conversations des adultes installés paraissent venir d'un univers futile, presque ridicule, on se fiche des embouteillages, des morts de la Pentecôte, du prix du bifteck et de la météo. Personne ne vous colle aux semelles encore. Toutes les filles l'ont connue, cette période, plus ou moins longue, plus ou moins intense, mais défendu de s'en souvenir avec nostalgie. Quelle honte ! Oser regretter ce temps égoïste, où l'on n'était responsable que de soi, douteux, infantile. La vie de jeune fille, ça ne s'enterre pas, ni chanson ni folklore là-dessus, ça n'existe pas. Une période inutile.

Even after the funeral, the trips to Kensington Palace, and the consolation of friends, I still couldn’t accept Diana’s death. Then, Mr. Jeffrey Ling, the British consul general in New York, invited me to speak at the memorial service for Diana in Central Park the weekend after the funeral. I was grateful for the chance to speak about Diana in my own words and at my own pace. Pat and I rewrote my three-minute speech over and over. I practiced it several times the night before. On Sunday afternoon I visited backstage with Mr. Ling and Mayor Giuliani before the service began. The mayor was engaging and down to earth. Mr. Ling was gracious and reassuring, a true gentleman. We watched the North Meadow fill up with more than ten thousand people and were grateful to see such a big turnout on a hot, sunny day. As I sat on the stage, I grew more nervous by the minute. I delivered my heartfelt speech, trembling with emotion as I spoke about “the Diana we knew.” As I looked out at the crowded meadow, I pondered the incredible path I’d traveled, all because I’d needed a part-time nanny in London seventeen years ago. I’d enjoyed a remarkable friendship, attended the most famous ceremonies of my lifetime, dined and danced in palaces, visited with royalty--extraordinary experiences for me and my family. Now, tragically, it was all ending here, as I spoke from my heart in memory and praise of my friend Diana.

When was the last time you made something that someone wasn’t paying you for, and looking over your shoulder to make sure you got it right?” When I ask creatives this question, the answer that comes back all too often is, “I can’t remember.” It’s so easy for creativity to become a means to a very practical end—earning a paycheck and pleasing your client or manager. But that type of work only uses a small spectrum of your abilities. To truly excel, you must also continue to create for the most important audience of all: yourself. In her book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron discusses a now well-known practice that she calls “morning pages.” She suggests writing three pages of free-flowing thought first thing in the morning as a way to explore latent ideas, break through the voice of the censor in your head, and get your creative juices flowing. While there is nothing immediately practical or efficient about the exercise, Cameron argues that it’s been the key to unlocking brilliant insights for the many people who have adopted it as a ritual. I’ve seen similar benefits of this kind of “Unnecessary Creation” in the lives of creative professionals across the board. From gardening to painting with watercolors to chipping away at the next great American novel on your weekends, something about engaging in the creative act on our own terms seems to unleash latent passions and insights. I believe Unnecessary Creation is essential for anyone who works with his or her mind.

One of our best dates was actually a weekend when we went to the wedding of a friend from the Teams. The couple married in Wimberley, Texas, a small town maybe forty miles south of Austin and a few hours’ drive from where we lived. We were having such a pleasant day, we didn’t want it to end. “It doesn’t have to end,” suggested Chris as we headed for the car. “The kids are at my parents’ for the weekend. Where do you want to go?” We googled for hotels and found a place in San Antonio, a little farther south. Located around the corner from the Alamo, the hotel seemed tailor-made for Chris. There was history in every floorboard. He loved the authentic Texan and Old West touches, from the lobby to the rooms. He read every framed article on the walls and admired each artifact. We walked through halls where famous lawmen-and maybe an outlaw or two-had trod a hundred years before. In the evening, we relaxed with coffee out on the balcony of our room-something we’d never managed to do when we actually owned one. It was one of those perfect days you dream of, completely unplanned. I have a great picture of Chris sitting out there in his cowboy boots, feet propped up, a big smile on his face. It’s still one of my favorites. People ask about Chris’s love of the Old West. It was something he was born with, really. It had to be in his genes. He grew up watching old westerns with his family, and for a time became a bronco-bustin’ cowboy and ranch hand. More than that, I think the clear sense of right and wrong, of frontier justice and strong values, appealed to him.

On the phone a few nights later, Peter suddenly says, “You have me, don’t you?” “No!” I haven’t told him I took out John over the weekend. I don’t want him--or Genevieve, for that matter--to have any extra info. It’s down to the three of us now. “So you do have me!” He lets out a groan. “I don’t want to play this game anymore. It’s making me lonely and really…frustrated. I haven’t seen you outside of school for a week! When is this going to be over?” “Peter, I don’t have you. I have John.” I feel a little guilty for lying, but this is how winners play this game. You can’t second-guess yourself. There’s a silence on the other end. Then he says, “So are you going to drive over to his house to tag him out? He lives in the middle of nowhere. I could take you if you want.” “I haven’t figured out my game plan yet,” I say. “Who do you have?” I know it has to be me or Genevieve. He gets quiet. “I’m not saying.” “Well, have you told anyone else?” Like, say, Genevieve? “No.” Hmm. “Okay, well, I just told you, so you obviously owe me that same courtesy.” Peter bursts out, “I didn’t make you, you offered up that information yourself, and look, if it was a lie and you have me, please just freaking take me out already! I’m begging you. Come to my house right now, and I’ll let you sneak up to my room. I’ll be a sitting duck for you if it means I can see you again.” “No.” “No?” “No, I don’t want to win like that. When I get your name, I want to have the satisfaction of knowing I beat you fair and square. My first ever Assassins win can’t be tainted.” I pause. “And besides, your house is a safe zone.

The Magic of Goulash “The trip down the aisle [on a bus or train, during his travels] was where all the stakes were. Because as I’m going down that aisle, I’ve got to look for an empty seat next to somebody who seems interesting. Somebody I can trust, somebody who might be able to trust me. The stakes are high because I know that at the end of that ride, wherever it was going, that person had to invite me to their home. Because I had no money to spend night after night in a hotel.” The clincher question Cal used to get free room and board around Europe as a poor traveler was: “Can you tell me: How do you make the perfect goulash?” He would purposefully sit down next to grandmas, who would then pour out their souls. After a few minutes of passionate pantomiming, people would come from around the train to help translate, no matter the country. Cal never had to worry about where he was spending the night. “During [one dinner party a grandma threw in Hungary to feed me goulash,] one of the neighbors says, ‘Have you ever tasted apricot brandy? Because nobody makes apricot brandy like my father. He lives a half an hour away. You’ve got to come to taste the apricot brandy.’ That weekend, we’re tasting apricot brandy, having a great time. Another party starts, another neighbor comes over to me. ‘Have you ever been to Kiskunhalas, the paprika capital of the world? You cannot leave Hungary without visiting Kiskunhalas.’ Now we’re off to Kiskunhalas. I’m telling you, a single question about goulash could get me 6 weeks of lodging and meals, and that’s how I got passed around the world. 10 years. 10 years.

Where do you write? Arthur Miller wrote in a log cabin he built for himself… I just... I have a room in my house. I mean I like writing in hotels. Occasionally I’m... I just go somewhere. I need to smoke and I need room service essentially, and that’s all I need. As a matter of fact it’s much pleasanter to be at home with wife, family and so on. But… clearly… one ought to have a little more discipline than I have. Because I don’t actually shut myself away. When times are in crisis and I am up against it with a deadline, then I do. But I’m pretty slipshod about the way I organise my life. So you don’t write every day, it’s not… No. No, I don’t. I don’t write every day. And I had a friend staying with us for the weekend and he said, Yes, he writes every day. And I just think ‘Really? What happens to your in tray?’ I can’t cope with mine. You’ve commented on how much you cherish your solitude. Do you have solitude? I’ve had a lot of times on my own and I’ve never been… never felt lonely, ever. I like, I like solitude. As a writer I think a certain amount is necessary. I’m always been… bookish rather than active. So, you know, I make few demands upon the world as a writer. And I don’t really… even if I’m writing about something factual and I need to see places and do things and find out what I’m writing about, I’m fairly casual about that as well. Very often I end up looking at places, rooms, monuments which I’ve been writing about but didn’t really get to see until the play was finished. I think that’s the attraction, actually… there’s a sort of self-sufficiency about creating a play and, I guess, a film. A certain self-sufficiency… in other words it caters to ones own distaste for making sudden movements.

The girl circled in my arm was clean and fresh, and her sleeping breath was humid against the base of my throat. Something stirred in me in response to her helplessness, and yet at the same time I resented her. I had seen too damn many of these brisk and shining girls, so lovely, so gracious, and so inflexibly ambitious. They had counted their stock in trade and burnished it and spread it right out there on the counter. It was all yours for the asking. All you had to do was give her all the rest of your life, and come through with the backyard pool, cookouts, Eames chairs, mortgage, picture windows, two cars, and all the rest of the setting they required for themselves. These gorgeous girls, with steel behind their eyes, were the highest paid whores in the history of the world. All they offered was their poised, half-educated selves, one hundred and twenty pounds of healthy, unblemished, arrogant meat, in return for the eventual occupational ulcer, the suburban coronary. Nor did they bother to sweeten the bargain with their virginity. Before you could, in your hypnoid state, slip the ring on her imperious finger, that old-fashioned prize was long gone, and even its departure celebrated many times, on house parties and ski weekends, in becalmed sailboats and on cruise ships. This acknowledged and excused promiscuity was, in fact, to her advantage. Having learned her way through the jungly province of sex, she was less likely to be bedazzled by body hunger to the extent that she might make a bad match with an unpromising young man. Her decks were efficiently cleared, guns rolled out, fuses alight, cannonballs stacked, all sails set. She stood on the bridge, braced and ready, scanning the horizon with eyes as cold as winter pebbles. One

Everyone around you is just doing their best to make it through today. Because tomorrow will come, and you have to repeat the same day over and over again.  As a kid, you go into the grocery store, and it feels like a never-ending castle filled with different rooms. You feel like every time you enter, there’s always something new to discover. But as an adult, you’ll start to get mad when they change the aisles around because now you can't find the damn oranges!  I never imagined that I would one day be employed in the magical grocery store my family and I went to every Saturday. I never imagined that the place I swore I’d never end up, would soon become the place where I was stuck. Emotionally and physically. As I watch customers trickle in and out, I create stories for each of them. The guy holding flowers and staring at his watch is probably late for a date. The young woman reading the get well soon greeting cards might have had someone close to her get hurt—or maybe they're sick.  All the stories I create for these people make me happy. They’re out in the world. They’re living whereas I’m only existing. I have nobody to share my oranges with. I have nobody to blow out candles in front of. I’m directionless and alone. This big magical place I once thought of is now holding me hostage. I had love once. I had people around me once. I had someone to grocery shop with on the weekends and laugh with when our groceries dropped through the bag. I once had someone to argue with over who was allowed to push the cart. I once had someone who would peel my oranges for me when we got home. Now, my oranges sit and rot in the bowl on my small kitchen table. I have to throw them away most of the time. Yet, I still buy them because it reminds me of something I once had. Is that all life is?

Chelsea was something else. Like an unstoppable force of nature. Similar to a hurricane or a tornado. Or a pit bull. Violet admired that about her. And, in this instance, Chelsea had proven to be nothing less than formidable. So when Jay had mentioned earlier in the week that they might be able to go to the movies over the weekend, Chelsea held him to it. A time and a place were chosen. And word spread. And, somehow, Chelsea managed to unravel it all. She still wanted the Saturday night plans; she just didn’t want the crowd that came with them. She’d decided it should be more of a “double date.” With Mike. Except Mike would never see it coming. By the time the bell rang at the end of lunch on Friday, everyone had agreed to meet up for the seven o’clock showing the next night. But when they split up to go to their classes, Chelsea set her own plan into motion. She began to separate the others from the pack and, one by one, they all fell. She started with Andrew Lauthner. Poor Andrew didn’t know what hit him. “Hey, Andy, did you hear?” From the look on his face, he didn’t hear anything other than that Chelsea-his Chelsea-was talking to him. Out of the blue. Violet needed to get to class, but she was dying to see what Chelsea had up her sleeve, so she stuck it out instead. “What?” His huge frozen grin looked like it had been plastered there and dried overnight. Chelsea’s expression was apologetic, something that may have actually been difficult for her to pull off. “The movie’s been canceled. Plans are off.” She stuck out her lower lip in a disappointed pout. “But I thought…” He seemed confused. So was Violet. “…didn’t we just make the plans at lunch?” he asked. “I know.” Chelsea managed to sound as surprised as he did. “But you know how Jay is, always talking out of his ass. He forgot to mention that he has to work tomorrow night and can’t make it.” She looked at Violet and said, again apologetically, “Sorry you had to hear that, Vi.” Violet just stood there gaping and thinking that she should deny what Chelsea was saying, but she wasn’t even sure where to start. She knew Jules would have done it. Where was Jules when she needed her? “What about everyone else?” Andrew asked, still clinging to hope. Chelsea shrugged and placed a sympathetic hand on Andrew’s arm. “Nope. No one else can make it either. Mike’s got family plans. Jules has a date. Claire has to study. And Violet here is grounded.” She draped an arm around Violet’s shoulder. “Right, Vi?” Violet was saved from having to answer, since Andrew didn’t seem to need one. Apparently, if Chelsea said it, it was the gospel truth. But the pathetic look on his face made Violet want to hug him right then and there. "Oh," he finally said. And then, "Well, maybe next time." "Yeah. Sure. Of course," Chelsea called over her shoulder, already dragging Violet away from the painful scene. "Geez, Chels, break his heart, why don't you? Why didn't you just say you have some rare disease or something?" Violet made a face at her friend. "Not cool." Chelsea scoffed. "He'll be fine. Besides, if I said 'disease,' he would have made me some chicken soup and offered to give me a sponge bath or something." She wrinkled her nose. "Eww." The rest of the afternoon went pretty much the same way, with a few escalations: Family obligations. Big tests to study for. House arrests. Chelsea made excuses to nearly everyone who'd planned on going, including Clair. She was relentless. By Saturday night, it was just the four of them...Violet, Jay, Chelsea, and, of course, Mike. It was everything Chelsea had dreamed of, everything she'd worked for.

On Friday, August 9, for example, amid a rising tide of urgent war matters, he found time to address a minute to the members of his War Cabinet on a subject dear to him: the length and writing style of the reports that arrived in his black box each day. Headed, appropriately enough, by the succinct title “BREVITY,” the minute began: “To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points.” He set out four ways for his ministers and their staffs to improve their reports. First, he wrote, reports should “set out the main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs.” If the report involved discussion of complicated matters or statistical analysis, this should be placed in an appendix. Often, he observed, a full report could be dispensed with entirely, in favor of an aide-mémoire “consisting of headings only, which can be expanded orally if needed.” Finally, he attacked the cumbersome prose that so often marked official reports. “Let us have an end to phrases such as these,” he wrote, and quoted two offenders: “It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations…” “Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect…” He wrote: “Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational.” The resulting prose, he wrote, “may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking.” That evening, as he had done almost every weekend thus far, he set off for the country.

Yes,” Andy said. “But I’ll be hiring a lawyer, you know.” “What in God’s name for?” “I think we can put it together,” Andy said. “With Tommy Williams and with my testimony and corroborative testimony from records and employees at the country club, I think we can put it together.” “Tommy Williams is no longer an inmate of this facility.” “What?” “He’s been transferred.” “Transferred where?” “Cashman.” At that, Andy fell silent. He was an intelligent man, but it would have taken an extraordinarily stupid man not to smell deal all over that. Cashman was a minimum-security prison far up north in Aroostook County. The inmates pick a lot of potatoes, and that’s hard work, but they are paid a decent wage for their labor and they can attend classes at CVI, a pretty decent vocational-technical institute, if they so desire. More important to a fellow like Tommy, a fellow with a young wife and a child, Cashman had a furlough program . . . which meant a chance to live like a normal man, at least on the weekends. A chance to build a model plane with his kid, have sex with his wife, maybe go on a picnic. Norton had almost surely dangled all of that under Tommy’s nose with only one string attached: not one more word about Elwood Blatch, not now, not ever. Or you’ll end up doing hard time in Thomaston down there on scenic Route 1 with the real hard guys, and instead of having sex with your wife you’ll be having it with some old bull queer. “But why?” Andy said. “Why would—” “As a favor to you,” Norton said calmly, “I checked with Rhode Island. They did have an inmate named Elwood Blatch. He was given what they call a PP—provisional parole, another one of these crazy liberal programs to put criminals out on the streets. He’s since disappeared.” Andy said: “The warden down there . . . is he a friend of yours?” Sam Norton gave Andy a smile as cold as a deacon’s watchchain. “We are acquainted,” he said.

I always had trouble with the feet of Jón the First, or Pre-Jón, as I called him later. He would frequently put them in front of me in the evening and tell me to take off his socks and rub his toes, soles, heels and calves. It was quite impossible for me to love these Icelandic men's feet that were shaped like birch stumps, hard and chunky, and screaming white as the wood when the bark is stripped from it. Yes, and as cold and damp, too. The toes had horny nails that resembled dead buds in a frosty spring. Nor can I forget the smell, for malodorous feet were very common in the post-war years when men wore nylon socks and practically slept in their shoes. How was it possible to love these Icelandic men? Who belched at the meal table and farted constantly. After four Icelandic husbands and a whole load of casual lovers I had become a vrai connaisseur of flatulence, could describe its species and varieties in the way that a wine-taster knows his wines. The howling backfire, the load, the gas bomb and the Luftwaffe were names I used most. The coffee belch and the silencer were also well-known quantities, but the worst were the date farts, a speciality of Bæring of Westfjord. Icelandic men don’t know how to behave: they never have and never will, but they are generally good fun. At least, Icelandic women think so. They seem to come with this inner emergency box, filled with humour and irony, which they always carry around with them and can open for useful items if things get too rough, and it must be a hereditary gift of the generations. Anyone who loses their way in the mountains and gets snowed in or spends the whole weekend stuck in a lift can always open this special Icelandic emergency box and get out of the situation with a good story. After wandering the world and living on the Continent I had long tired of well-behaved, fart-free gentlemen who opened the door and paid the bills but never had a story to tell and were either completely asexual or demanded skin-burning action until the morning light. Swiss watch salesmen who only knew of “sechs” as their wake-up hour, or hairy French apes who always required their twelve rounds of screwing after the six-course meal. I suppose I liked German men the best. They were a suitable mixture of belching northerner and cultivated southerner, of orderly westerner and crazy easterner, but in the post-war years they were of course broken men. There was little you could do with them except try to put them right first. And who had the time for that? Londoners are positive and jolly, but their famous irony struck me as mechanical and wearisome in the long run. As if that irony machine had eaten away their real essence. The French machine, on the other hand, is fuelled by seriousness alone, and the Frogs can drive you beyond the limit when they get going with their philosophical noun-dropping. The Italian worships every woman like a queen until he gets her home, when she suddenly turns into a slut. The Yank is one hell of a guy who thinks big: he always wants to take you the moon. At the same time, however, he is as smug and petty as the meanest seamstress, and has a fit if someone eats his peanut butter sandwich aboard the space shuttle. I found Russians interesting. In fact they were the most Icelandic of all: drank every glass to the bottom and threw themselves into any jollity, knew countless stories and never talked seriously unless at the bottom of the bottle, when they began to wail for their mother who lived a thousand miles away but came on foot to bring them their clean laundry once a month. They were completely crazy and were better athletes in bed than my dear countrymen, but in the end I had enough of all their pommel-horse routines. Nordic men are all as tactless as Icelanders. They get drunk over dinner, laugh loudly and fart, eventually start “singing” even in public restaurants where people have paid to escape the tumult of

On my next weekend without the kids I went to Nashville to visit her. We had a great weekend. On Monday morning she kissed me goodbye and left for work. I would drive home while she was at work. Only I didn’t go straight home. I went and paid her recruiting officer a little visit. I walked in wearing shorts and a T-shirt so my injuries were fully visible. The two recruiters couldn’t hide the surprise on their faces. I clearly looked like an injured veteran. Not their typical visitor. “I’m here about Jamie Boyd,” I said. One of the recruiters stood up and said, “Yes, I’m working with Jamie Boyd. How can I help you?” I walked to the center of the room between him and the female recruiter who was still seated at her desk and said, “Jamie Boyd is not going to be active duty. She is not going to be a truck driver. She wants to change her MOS and you’re not going to treat her like some high school student. She has a degree. She is a young professional and you will treat her as such.” “Yes, sir, yes, sir. We hold ourselves to a higher standard. We’ll do better. I’m sorry,” he stammered. “You convinced her she can’t change anything. That’s a lie. It’s paperwork. Make it happen.” “Yes, sir, yes, sir.” That afternoon Jamie had an appointment at the recruitment center anyway for more paperwork. Afterward, she called me, and as soon as I answered, without even a hello, she said, “What have you done?” “How were they acting?” I asked, sounding really pleased with myself. “Like I can have whatever I want,” she answered. “You’re welcome. Find a better job.” She wasn’t mad about it. She just laughed and said, “You’re crazy.” “I will always protect you. You were getting screwed over. And I’m sorry you didn’t know about it, but you wouldn’t have let me go if I had told you ahead of time.” “You’re right, but I’m glad you did.” Jamie ended up choosing MP, military police, as her MOS because they offered her a huge signing bonus. We made our reunion official and she quit her job in Nashville to move back to Birmingham. She had a while before basic training, so she moved back in with me. We were both very happy, and as it turned out, some very big changes were about to happen beyond basic training.

But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think-this will maybe sound weird-it's like the corporate world's full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I've had front row seats for that horror show, I know academia's no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts." "I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite -" "I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped. Dan's like that." "You don't think he likes his job, then." "Correct," she said, "but I don't think he even realises it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.” What was it in this statement that made Clark want to weep" He was nodding, taking down as much as he could. "Do you think he'd describe himself as unhappy in his work?" "No," Dahlia said, "because I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You know what I mean? "No please elaborate." "Okay, say you go into the break room," she said, "and a couple people you like are there, say someone's telling a funny story, you laugh a little, you feel included, everyone's so funny, you go back to your desk with a sort of , I don't know, I guess afterglow would be the word? You go back to your desk with an afterglow, but then by four or five o'clock the day's just turned into yet another day, and you go on like that, looking forward to five o'clock and then the weekend and then your two or three annual weeks of paid vacation time, day in day out, and that's what happens in your life." "Right," Clark said. He was filed in the moment with an inexpressible longing. The previous day he'd gone into the break roman spent five minutes laughing at a colleague's impression of a Daily Show bit. "That's what passes for a life, I should say. That's what passes for happiness, for most people. Guys like Dan, they're like sleepwalkers," she said, "and nothing ever jolts them awake.

Why should he treat Elizabeth as if he harbored any feelings for her, including anger? Elizabeth sensed that he was wavering a little, and she pressed home her advantage, using calm reason: “Surely nothing that happened between us should make us behave badly to each other now. I mean, when you think on it, it was noting to us but a harmless weekend flirtation, wasn’t it?” “Obviously.” “Neither of us was hurt, were we?” “No.” “Well then, there’s no reason why we should not be cordial to each other now, is there?” she demanded with a bright, beguiling smile. “Good heavens, if every flirtation ended in enmity, no one in the ton would be speaking to anyone else!” She had neatly managed to put him in the position of either agreeing with her or else, by disagreeing, admitting that she had been something more to him than a flirtation, and Ian realized it. He’d guessed where her calm arguments were leading, but even so, he was reluctantly impressed with how skillfully she was maneuvering him into having to agree with her. “Flirtations,” he reminded her smoothly, “don’t normally end in duels.” “I know, and I am sorry my brother shot you.” Ian was simply not proof against the appeal in those huge green eyes of hers. “Forget it,” he said with an irritated sigh, capitulating to all she was asking. “Stay the seven days.” Suppressing the urge to twirl around with relief, she smiled into his eyes. “Then could we have a truce for the time I’m here?” “That depends.” “On what?” His brows lifted in mocking challenge. “On whether or not you can make a decent breakfast.” “Let’s go in the house and see what we have.” With Ian standing beside her Elizabeth surveyed the eggs and cheese and bread, and then the stove. “I shall fix something right up,” she promised with a smile that concealed her uncertainty. “Are you sure you’re up to the challenge?” Ian asked, but she seemed so eager, and her smile was so disarming, that he almost believed she knew how to cook. “I shall prevail, you’ll see,” she told him brightly, reaching for a wide cloth and tying it around her narrow waist. Her glance was so jaunty that Ian turned around to keep himself from grinning at her. She was obviously determined to attack the project with vigor and determination, and he was equally determined not to discourage her efforts. “You do that,” he said, and he left her alone at the stove.

He and Powell would be celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary a few days later, and he admitted that at times he had not been as appreciative of her as she deserved. “I’m very lucky, because you just don’t know what you’re getting into when you get married,” he said. “You have an intuitive feeling about things. I couldn’t have done better, because not only is Laurene smart and beautiful, she’s turned out to be a really good person.” For a moment he teared up. He talked about his other girlfriends, particularly Tina Redse, but said he ended up in the right place. He also reflected on how selfish and demanding he could be. “Laurene had to deal with that, and also with me being sick,” he said. “I know that living with me is not a bowl of cherries.” Among his selfish traits was that he tended not to remember anniversaries or birthdays. But in this case, he decided to plan a surprise. They had gotten married at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite, and he decided to take Powell back there on their anniversary. But when Jobs called, the place was fully booked. So he had the hotel approach the people who had reserved the suite where he and Powell had stayed and ask if they would relinquish it. “I offered to pay for another weekend,” Jobs recalled, “and the man was very nice and said, ‘Twenty years, please take it, it’s yours.’” He found the photographs of the wedding, taken by a friend, and had large prints made on thick paper boards and placed in an elegant box. Scrolling through his iPhone, he found the note that he had composed to be included in the box and read it aloud: "We didn’t know much about each other twenty years ago. We were guided by our intuition; you swept me off my feet. It was snowing when we got married at the Ahwahnee. Years passed, kids came, good times, hard times, but never bad times. Our love and respect has endured and grown. We’ve been through so much together and here we are right back where we started 20 years ago—older, wiser—with wrinkles on our faces and hearts. We now know many of life’s joys, sufferings, secrets and wonders and we’re still here together. My feet have never returned to the ground."  By the end of the recitation he was crying uncontrollably. When he composed himself, he noted that he had also made a set of the pictures for each of his kids. “I thought they might like to see that I was young once.

Between 2003 and 2008, Iceland’s three main banks, Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki, borrowed over $140 billion, a figure equal to ten times the country’s GDP, dwarfing its central bank’s $2.5 billion reserves. A handful of entrepreneurs, egged on by their then government, embarked on an unprecedented international spending binge, buying everything from Danish department stores to West Ham Football Club, while a sizeable proportion of the rest of the adult population enthusiastically embraced the kind of cockamamie financial strategies usually only mooted in Nigerian spam emails – taking out loans in Japanese Yen, for example, or mortgaging their houses in Swiss francs. One minute the Icelanders were up to their waists in fish guts, the next they they were weighing up the options lists on their new Porsche Cayennes. The tales of un-Nordic excess are legion: Elton John was flown in to sing one song at a birthday party; private jets were booked like they were taxis; people thought nothing of spending £5,000 on bottles of single malt whisky, or £100,000 on hunting weekends in the English countryside. The chief executive of the London arm of Kaupthing hired the Natural History Museum for a party, with Tom Jones providing the entertainment, and, by all accounts, Reykjavik’s actual snow was augmented by a blizzard of the Colombian variety. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in late 2008 exposed Iceland’s debts which, at one point, were said to be around 850 per cent of GDP (compared with the US’s 350 per cent), and set off a chain reaction which resulted in the krona plummeting to almost half its value. By this stage Iceland’s banks were lending money to their own shareholders so that they could buy shares in . . . those very same Icelandic banks. I am no Paul Krugman, but even I can see that this was hardly a sustainable business model. The government didn’t have the money to cover its banks’ debts. It was forced to withdraw the krona from currency markets and accept loans totalling £4 billion from the IMF, and from other countries. Even the little Faroe Islands forked out £33 million, which must have been especially humiliating for the Icelanders. Interest rates peaked at 18 per cent. The stock market dropped 77 per cent; inflation hit 20 per cent; and the krona dropped 80 per cent. Depending who you listen to, the country’s total debt ended up somewhere between £13 billion and £63 billion, or, to put it another way, anything from £38,000 to £210,000 for each and every Icelander.

Ti scrivo mentre tu sei da qualche parte a comprare la Coca-Cola. È la prima volta in vita mia che scrivo una lettera a qualcuno seduto accanto a me su una panchina. Ma se non facessi così dubito che riuscirei a farti arrivare quello che ti voglio dire. Perché tu non ascolti niente di quello che dico, prova a dire che non è vero. “Se può interessarti, oggi tu hai fatto una cosa molto grave nei miei confronti. Non ti sei neanche accorto che ho cambiato pettinatura. Piano piano, con sacrificio, avevo aspettato che mi crescessero i capelli e lo scorso week-end finalmente mi sono fatta fare un taglio femminile. Ma tu non ci hai fatto neanche caso. Ero così sicura di essere carina nella mia nuova pettinatura che non vedevo l'ora di farti una sorpresa, tanto più che era la prima volta che ci vedevamo da tanto tempo. E tu non te ne sei nemmeno accorto! Ti rendi conto di che vuoi dire? Figuriamoci, se è per questo probabilmente non sapresti dire neanche com'ero vestita. Ma guarda che io sono una donna. Per quanti pensieri tu possa avere, potresti almeno degnarmi di uno sguardo. Sarebbe bastato poco. Se solo mi avessi detto, non dico tanto, qualcosa tipo “Carina, questa pettinatura‟, ti avrei lasciato fare come volevi, immergerti nei tuoi pensieri quanto volevi. “Perciò sto per dirti una bugia. Ti dirò che ho un appuntamento a Ginza con mia sorella. Non è vero. Pensando di restare stanotte a dormire da te mi ero portata perfino il pigiama. Sì, se lo vuoi sapere nella mia borsa ci sono pigiama e spazzolino da denti. Mi viene da ridere, se penso a quanto sono cretina. A te l'idea di invitarmi a casa tua non ti ha sfiorato nemmeno. Ma non importa. Visto che ci tieni tanto a startene da solo fregandotene altamente di me, rimani pure da solo e pensa a tutti i tuoi problemi quanto vuoi senza nessuna interferenza da parte mia. “Il guaio è che non riesco nemmeno ad avercela con te. Mi sento soprattutto sola. In fondo sei sempre stato gentile con me mentre io per te non ho fatto niente. Tu sei sempre chiuso nel tuo mondo e ogni volta che io provo a bussare e a chiamarti tu mi lanci al massimo un'occhiata e subito ti richiudi in te stesso. “Eccoti che torni con la Coca-Cola. Vieni verso di me tutto sprofondato nei tuoi pensieri. Quanto vorrei che inciampassi! Ma non inciampi, ti siedi accanto a me come prima e bevi la tua Coca. Avevo un residuo di speranza che tornando notassi qualcosa e dicessi: “Di' un po‟, ma hai cambiato pettinatura?‟ Invece niente. Se te ne fossi accorto anche in ritardo avrei strappato questa lettera e ti avrei detto: “Dai, andiamo a casa tua. Ti cucinerò una cena favolosa e poi andremo a letto felici e contenti‟. Ma tu sei ottuso come un pezzo di legno. Sayonara. P.S. La prossima volta che ci vediamo a lezione evita di rivolgermi la parola.

The US traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong. But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. It’ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it’s in the world, it’ll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I’m not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects. But there is an information economy. You don’t even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn’t own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend’s weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend’s sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal. This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives. And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying – no matter what that does to productivity – they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by “copy protection,” they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist. The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile. What country do you want to live in?

In my youth . . . my sacred youth . . . in eaves sole sparowe sat not more alone than I . . . in my youth, my saucer-deep youth, when I possessed a mirror and both a morning and an evening comb . . . in my youth, my pimpled, shame-faced, sugared youth, when I dreamed myself a fornicator and a poet; when life seemed to be ahead somewhere like a land o’ lakes vacation cottage, and I was pure tumescence, all seed, afloat like fuzz among the butterflies and bees; when I was the bursting pod of a fall weed; when I was the hum of sperm in the autumn air, the blue of it like watered silk, vellum to which I came in a soft cloud; O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, I sang then, knowing naught, clinging to the tall slim wheatweed which lay in a purple haze along the highway like a cotton star . . . in my fumbling, lubricious, my uticated youth, when a full bosom and a fine round line of Keats, Hart Crane, or Yeats produced in me the same effect—a moan throughout my molecules—in my limeade time, my uncorked innocence, my jellybelly days, when I repeated Olio de Oliva like a tenor; then I would touch the page in wonder as though it were a woman, as though I were blind in my bed, in the black backseat, behind the dark barn, the dim weekend tent, last dance, date's door, reaching the knee by the second feature, possibly the thigh, my finger an urgent emissary from my penis, alas as far away as Peking or Bangkok, so I took my heart in my hand, O my love, O my love, I sighed, O Christina, Italian rose; my inflated flesh yearning to press against that flesh becoming Word—a word—words which were wet and warm and responsive as a roaming tongue; and her hair was red, long, in ringlets, kiss me, love me up, she said in my anxious oral ear; I read: Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour; for I had oodles of needs, if England didn't; I was nothing but skin, pulp, and pit, in my grapevine time, during the hard-on priesthood of the poet; because then—in my unclean, foreskinned, and prurient youth—I devoutly believed in Later Life, in Passion, in Poetry, the way I thought only fools felt about God, prayer, heaven, foreknowledge, sin; for what was a poem if not a divine petition, a holy plea, a prophecy: [...] a stranger among strangers, myself the strangest because I could never bring myself to enter adolescence, but kept it about like a bit of lunch you think you may eat later, and later come upon at the bottom of a bag, dry as dust, at the back of the refrigerator, bearded with mold, or caked like sperm in the sock you've fucked, so that gingerly, then, you throw the mess out, averting your eyes, just as Rainer complained he never had a childhood—what luck!—never to have suffered birthpang, nightfear, cradlecap, lake in your lung; never to have practiced scales or sat numb before the dentist's hum or picked your mother up from the floor she's bled and wept and puked on; never to have been invaded by a tick, sucked by a leech, bitten by a spider, stung by a bee, slimed on by a slug, seared by a hot pan, or by paper or acquaintance cut, by father cuffed; never to have been lost in a crowd or store or parking lot or left by a lover without a word or arrogantly lied to or outrageously betrayed—really what luck!—never to have had a nickel roll with slow deliberation down a grate, a balloon burst, toy break; never to have skinned a knee, bruised a friendship, broken trust; never to have had to conjugate, keep quiet, tidy, bathe; to have lost the chance to be hollered at, bullied, beat up (being nothing, indeed, to have no death), and not to have had an earache, life's lessons to learn, or sums to add reluctantly right up to their bitter miscalculated end—what sublime good fortune, the Greek poet suggested—because Nature is not accustomed to life yet; it is too new, too incidental, this shiver in the stone, never altogether, and would just as soon (as Culp prefers to say) cancer it; erase, strike, stamp it out— [...]

It’s very possible that you one day end up feeling like there’s no need for you to date after all. Maybe you won’t need anything other than your job and a hobby. Maybe living with a pet and going out with your girlfriends every other weekend will be more than enough companionship for you.

If mutual decimation of the McLaughlins and the McLeans marked the end of Charlestown’s “gangster era,” a host of gangs endured in the Town. These were less criminal bands than expressions of territorial allegiance. Every street and alley, every park and pier had its own ragged troop which hung on the corner, played football, baseball, and street hockey, and defended its turf against all comers. The Wildcats hung at the corner of Frothingham and Lincoln streets, the Bearcats at Walker and Russell streets, the Falcons outside the Edwards School, the Cobras on Elm Street, the Jokers in Hayes Square, the Highlanders on High Street, the Crusaders at the Training Field. Each had its distinctive football jersey (on which members wore their street addresses), its own legends and traditions. The Highlanders, for example, took their identity from the Bunker Hill Monument, which towered over their hangout at the top of Monument Avenue. On weekends and summer afternoons, they gathered there to wait for out-of-town tourists visiting the revolutionary battleground. When one approached, an eager boy would step forward and launch his spiel, learned by rote from other Highlanders: “The Monument is 221 feet high, has 294 winding stairs and no elevators. They say the quickest way up is to walk, the quickest way down is to fall. The Monument is fifteen feet square. Its cornerstone was laid in 1825 by Daniel Webster. The statue you see in the foreground is that of Colonel William Prescott standing in the same position as when he gave that brave and famous command, ‘Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes.’ The British made three attempts to gain the hill …” And so forth. An engaging raconteur could parlay this patter into a fifty-cent tip.

The future many pursue is only a step ahead: Get to work. Get to lunch. Get to the end of the day. Get to the weekend. Pay the bills. When you’re engaged in short-term goals, [you're] like a hamster on a wheel: expending lots of energy, but not making progress. To exit the rat race of [one-step-ahead] day-to-day mindset requires a shift in your focus. Begin thinking much bigger and further out. [Instead of asking yourself, "what am I doing after this task?" ask yourself:] Where could you be in five years?

Our quality of life has skyrocketed and our once staunch London loyalism has been replaced by an almost embarrassing enthusiasm for everything “Dansk.” The greatest change has been the shift in work–life balance. Whereas previously we might snatch dinner once Duncan escaped from work at around nine, he now leaves his desk at five. Work later than 5.30, and the office is a morgue. Work at the weekend, and the Danes think you are mad. The idea is that families have time to play and eat together at the end of the day, every day. And it works. Duncan bathes and puts our 14-month-old daughter Liv to bed most nights. They are best buddies, as opposed to strangers who try to reacquaint at the weekend. Cathy Strongman, The Guardian

THE BEST TIME for a controlled release of bad news to the public is Friday afternoon. Taxes are going up, the economy is going down, more troops are being deployed to some third world hot spot the announcements are made on Friday afternoon. People are busy ending their workweek, getting ready for a few days of freedom, getting out of wherever early for a weekend at a lake. There's a good chance a lot of attention will be anywhere but on the news.

Clusters of destroyers were tied up together at the far end of the East Loch beyond Ford Island, but it was the moorings along the island’s eastern side that commanded the most attention. These were home to the backbone of the Pacific battleship fleet. Numbered F-1, or Fox-1, to F-8 from southwest to northeast, the moorings, or quays, spread out almost three quarters of a mile. With good reason, everyone called it Battleship Row. By the evening of December 5, Battleship Row was home to the following ships: A small seaplane tender, the Avocet (AVP-4), tied up at F-1 for the weekend. F-2, which normally berthed an aircraft carrier was empty, Lexington and Enterprise both being at sea. Northeastward, California, the flagship of the Battle Force, moored at F-3. The oiler Neosho (AO-23), which was unloading a cargo of aviation gas and scheduled to depart for the states Sunday morning, occupied F-4. Then, things got a bit crowded. At F-5 and F-6, moored side by side in pairs, with fenders between them, sat Maryland on the inboard (Ford Island side) with Oklahoma outboard, and Tennessee inboard with West Virginia outboard. Astern of Tennessee lay the Arizona at F-7. All of these battleships were moored with their bows pointed down the channel to facilitate a rapid departure to sea.

They ease into a third week, and a fourth, and then a weekend comes when there's absolutely nothing scheduled. Cal thinks they must be about to tell him to go home for five damn minutes at least, but then Anya mentions antiquing, which is something Cal has never done. When he says so, she freaks out, and it turns out that what he must do has nothing to do with going home and everything to do with picking through other people's decrepit, smelly, abandoned old furniture.

My dear," he admonished her when she brought up the fact that she might, in the future, go back to work as a lawyer, "how do you expect to do two jobs?"... "You already have a job," he explained. "From now on, your life with your husband is your job." He corrected himself. "It's more than a job. It's a career. Your husband makes the money, and you create the life. And it's going to take effort. You'll rise each morning and exercise, not simply to look attractive but to build endurance. Most ladies prefer yoga. Then you will dress. You'll arrange your schedule and send e-mails. You'll attend a meeting for a charity in the morning, or perhaps visit an art dealer or make a studio visit. You'll have lunch, and then there are meetings with decorators, caterers, and stylists; you'll have your hair colored twice a month and blow-dried three times a week. You'll do private tours of museums and read, I hope, three newspapers a day: The New York Times, The New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal. At the end of the day, you'll prepare for an evening out, which may include two or three cocktail parties and a dinner. Some will be black-tie charity events where you'll be expected to wear a gown and never the same dress twice. You'll need to have your hair and makeup done. You'll also plan vacations and weekend outings. You may purchase a country house, which you will also have to organize, staff, and decorate. You will meet the right people and court them in a manner both subtle and shameless. And then, my dear, there will be children. So," Billy concluded, "let's get busy.

She sits on the other end of the sofa from Walter and stares numbly at the football. She hates the sound of football—the dull bass monotone of male calls, the incessant up and down intonation of the commentators, the whistles and the drums; it sounds like the backdrop to a nightmare, an oncoming army of bloodless killers. It’s been the soundtrack of her weekends for twenty-seven years, since she first moved into Walter’s flat. She’d watched with him in the early years, professed her enthusiasm for the game, shouted when their team scored, pretended to be devastated when they lost. Although, no, not pretended. It had been real, at the time. Everything she thought, did, wanted, cared about back then had been through the filter of Walter. All she had wanted, from the moment they first got together, was to please him, to be the person he thought she was, to be his dream come true.

I personally think that visual novels should have a place under 'e-books', because in a way that's what they are; A virtual or digital book with multiple routes (usually), and a compelling story accompanied by art and music. I say this as someone who spent some 18+ hours getting my heart destroyed by a queer VN that's end result had me on my office floor crying until 5 in the morning over the course of a weekend. And it is a slap to the face that I cannot add it onto my read-list as there was definitely a lot of reading involved.

Dan Dilco- Liv calls him her ‘Dildo’ because he became her new sex toy over the weekend and for now… instead of that. She gives him that pet name, there have been a lot of pet names, that is how we all keep track of them all too. She has one of those also like most of us girls, nevertheless, she’s more cover than me, in not hiding it in a Pringles can. Anyway, this one came about because it rhymes with his last name. I guess she thinks that’s cute. He’s the last one on the list to pick up today, I’m sure next week or maybe tomorrow for all I know it will be someone new, but as for now, he’s the one that is all horned-up for her as she is for him. It won’t last… I think she randomly started making out with him at the bonfire, they have hooked up at least ten times, senses Friday. I don’t think Liv knows what she wants. I think she is too Bi or Bi-curious or something to choose. It seems after they become a dating couple it ends as fast as it starts. I don’t think she’s that hard to get along with, high maintenance maybe, but she’s a sweet girl overall, with a loving and trusting person. Liv already asked me to go out with her… Um- I like her, yet not in that way. I have been there, done that kind of a thing, I have kissed her, yet I never thought about it going anywhere. I don’t want to end a good friendship. Plus, I only want the forbidden boy named Ray!

The wide-eyed professor lectured, on the verge of tears, and when class ended, the students closed their notebooks shut and asked of her plans for the weekend, which was answered politely, but with a tinge of sadness, for the professor feared her personhood, which had in her lesson plan existed truly only minutes ago, was already being reduced to the small, meaningless matters of tomorrow.

By the end of the next summer the illusion had been broken. In a free fall that began on a weekend in mid-September, Lehman Brothers would go on to lose 93 percent of its stock value. A company born out of a system that treated Black people as property died from self-inflicted wounds in the course of destroying the property of Black people.

It is a fact that consumers worldwide have benefited financially from faster fashion. In countries like the UK and US, the proportion of the household budget spent on clothing has dropped from about 15 percent at the dawn of the twentieth century to 5 percent or less today. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, we've used the savings mainly to pay for rising housing costs and for what they call 'non-necessities', everything from weekend getaways to all the just-plain-stuff that fills homes and storage units.

Eventually, he decided to stay in his house where there were fewer things to hate. This was okay for a while but then some noisy neighbours moved in. Guess what? He hated them. In fact, he hated everyone he ever met, so he packed his things and moved far way to a house on a cliff by the seaside where there were hardly any other people to hate. Every day he sat on the cliff, watching the ocean and trying not to hate it. A little girl lived nearby and saw the man sitting by himself every day. She thought he must be lonely and felt sorry for him so she decided to make him a special present. She planted a geranium seed in a pot and watered it and loved it every day for six weeks. As the geranium plant grew, she spoke to it in a kind voice. She told it all about the lonely man who sat everyday on the cliff. When the geranium plant grew a beautiful pink flower, the girl carefully wrapped the pot in soft pink tissue paper. She carried it up to the cliff-top and, smiling shyly, gave it to the man. He hated it and threw it off the cliff. The girl ran home, crying. The end (Well, what did you expect? I told you at the start that he wasn’t

In general, it could be said that we talk about many things. I’ll try to list them in no particular order. 1) The Latin American hell that, especially on weekends, is concentrated around some Kentucky Fried Chickens and McDonald’s. 2) The doings of the Buenos Aires photographer Alfredo Garófano, childhood friend of Rodrigo and now a friend of mine and of anyone with the least bit of discernment. 3) Bad translations. 4) Serial killers and mass murderers. 5) Prospective leisure as the antidote to prospective poetry. 6) The vast number of writers who should retire after writing their first book or their second or their third or their fourth or their fifth. 7) The superiority of the work of Basquiat to that of Haring, or vice versa. 8) The works of Borges and the works of Bioy. 9) The advisablity of retiring to a ranch in Mexico near a volcano to finish writing The Turkey Buzzard Trilogy. 10) Wrinkles in the space-time continuum. 11) The kind of majestic women you’ve never met who come up to you in a bar and whisper in your ear that they have AIDS (or that they don’t). 12) Gombrowicz and his conception of immaturity. 13) Philip K. Dick, whom we both unreservedly admire. 14) The likelihood of a war between Chile and Argentina and its possible and impossible consequences. 15) The life of Proust and the life of Stendhal. 16) The activities of some professors in the United States. 17) The sexual practices of titi monkeys and ants and great cetaceans. 18) Colleagues who must be avoided like limpet mines. 19) Ignacio Echevarría, whom both of us love and admire. 20) Some Mexican writers liked by me and not by him, and some Argentine writers liked by me and not by him. 21) Barcelonan manners. 22) David Lynch and the prolixity of David Foster Wallace. 23) Chabon and Palahniuk, whom he likes and I don’t. 24) Wittgenstein and his plumbing and carpentry skills. 25) Some twilit dinners, which actually, to the surprise of the diner, become theater pieces in five acts. 26) Trashy TV game shows. 27) The end of the world. 28) Kubrick’s films, which Fresán loves so much that I’m beginning to hate them. 29) The incredible war between the planet of the novel-creatures and the planet of the story-beings. 30) The possibility that when the novel awakes from its iron dreams, the story will still be there.

I felt so run-down that we ended up spending most of the weekend at our seedy, two-star hotel in the red-light district. The hotel’s sheets were pocked with burn marks, a grimy window overlooked a canal, and the clackety-bang of a misfiring radiator echoed down the dreary halls. But the thing about being in love is that you can be anywhere and it feels like an adventure. In fact, when we’d first arrived, I’d turned to him and said excitedly, “This is my favorite hotel ever!

The prize money certainly said something about FIFA’s priorities, though. The same week the 2015 Women’s World Cup kicked off, United Passions debuted in movie theaters. It was a propaganda film that FIFA produced about itself and bankrolled for around $30 million. That’s double the total amount of prize money FIFA made available to all teams participating in the 2015 Women’s World Cup. The film earned less than $1,000 in its debut weekend in North America, for the worst box-office opening in history, and it went down as the lowest-grossing film in U.S. history. Almost all the millions of dollars FIFA poured into making the movie was lost. The film has a 0% rating on the popular movie-review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, and a New York Times review called it “one of the most unwatchable films in recent memory.” And remember the uncomfortable encounter at the team hotel between the Americans and Brazilians after the 2007 Women’s World Cup semifinal? That would never happen in a men’s World Cup. That’s because FIFA assigns different hotels and training facilities to each men’s team, to serve as a base camp throughout the tournament. The women don’t get base camps—they jump from city to city and from hotel to hotel during the World Cup, and they usually end up bumping into their opponents, who are given the same accommodations. American coach Jill Ellis said she almost walked into the German meal room at the World Cup once. “Sometimes you’re in the elevator with your opponent going down to the team buses for a game,” Heather O’Reilly says. “It’s pretty awkward.

When we put our foot down, I think they got a little bit nervous,” Solo says. “They said, Okay, what will it take to get you guys at all the NWSL games this weekend?” In the end, the federation treated it as an appearance fee of sorts. The players would get $10,000 each to attend their NWSL games, and they would be flown first-class, a distinct upgrade from their usual travel. It was a relatively small victory, but it set the stage for the players to stand up for themselves more assertively. The women of the national team proved they were the best in the world, they captured the country’s attention, and now they had leverage. “It was really the first time where we were like, Okay, we are worth something to the federation and we know it, so now we have to keep this going,” Solo says. “That’s what really empowered us. All of a sudden, we got a $10,000 fee, first-class tickets to fly to our NWSL games, and it was right before we were going to negotiate our new contract.” But things didn’t get better just because the federation paid the players a $10,000 fee. In less than a month, the players had to set out on the road again for a 10-game victory tour as World Cup champions and, as it turned out, the venues weren’t exactly befitting of a World Cup–winning national team. Eight of the 10 victory-tour games in 2015 were scheduled on artificial turf. Over the course of that year, U.S. Soccer scheduled the women to play 57 percent of their home games on artificial turf but scheduled zero of the men’s games on artificial turf. In fact, the men played at five venues that had artificial-turf surfaces, and in all five cases, the federation paid to have temporary grass installed.

We need downtime to recover. When we work for hours on end, even when we’re on a roll, performance can dwindle.

A to-do list doesn’t end. The finish line always moves. Chasing its completion is a game you can win. It’s not a list. It’s a Task Circle.

being alone might feel sort of heroic, or at least dignified. Or at least grown-up. It wasn’t any of these. It was the weekend before Thanksgiving, the end of the

You don’t get to make it sound like you’re ending our relationship out of concern for me.

en su campo de Villaguay, a unos cien kilómetros de Concordia), fuera la encargada de hacer que lo pasara lo mejor posible; conferenciante que, si aceptaba quedarse unos días, sería llevado a pasar el week-end a una quinta preciosa cerca de los palmares,

That was no bonfire, it was a house fire. Our house. The one Archer and I had just spent a life-changing weekend at, fucking on every available surface. Before we'd left at the end of the weekend, he'd told me that it would forever be our sanctuary. That goddamn house meant more to me than I had even fully comprehended until that moment as I watched it burn to the ground. "Mother fucker!" I screamed, throwing my champagne flute against the window and watching it rain down glittering shards of glass.

I suppose the most important memory is of Mr. Electrico. On Labor Day weekend, 1932, when I was twelve years old, he came to my hometown with the Dill Brothers…. He was a performer sitting in an electric chair and a stagehand pulled a switch and he was charged with fifty thousand volts of pure electricity. Lightning flashed in his eyes and his hair stood on end. I sat below, in the front row, and he reached down with a flaming sword full of electricity and he tapped me on both shoulders and then the tip of my nose and he cried, 'Live, forever!' And I thought, 'God, that’s wonderful. How do you do that?'...So when I left the carnival that day I stood by the carousel and I watched the horses running around and around to the music of 'Beautiful Ohio' and I cried. Tears streamed down my cheeks because I knew something important had happened to me that day because of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed. And so I went home and within days I started to write. And I’ve never stopped.

Qué hubiese pensado de esa cara el abstemio poeta de diecisiete años que veinte años atrás leyendo The lost week-end, de Charles Jackson, y leyendo una escena idéntica a ésta, bebió un traguito de oporto y se miró en este mismo espejo para ver si él también, con el tiempo, llegaría a ser bello y atormentado y maldito.

I always thought I’d end up with some kind of businessman who works nine to five and plays golf on the weekends. Instead, my man works all kinds of hours and kills people left, right, and center.

It's been a long day, this is the end of my shift and it's Friday the 13th. I don't feel like more paperwork, so if you can give me an excuse for your driving that I haven't heard before, you can go." The guy thinks for a second and says, "Last week my wife ran off with a cop. I was afraid you were trying to give her back." "Have a nice weekend," said the officer.

Dear Boundaryless Client, We certainly love working with you. (This is the first slice of graciousness.) Squeezing this important request in over the weekend won’t work for us. (This is the no. Just get it out.) Your deliverables are very important, and we want to make sure they get the focus they deserve. (Second slice of graciousness. This sentence shows good intention and some effort at gentle repair for their disappointment.) We would be happy to give this our full attention early Monday morning and have some numbers to you by end of business. Best, Chris

It started as a mere village, so several of its early inhabitants have written, and in some respects it has remained one to this day. ‘The atmosphere of Hollywood both resembles that of a village and differs from it,’ wrote the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker after spending a year there in the late 1940s: There is the same extroverted cordiality, but more stress on status as determined by income and power… As in villages, the same people are at the same parties, the same restaurants, the same clubs and the same week-end resorts. But again there is more emphasis on financial status. With rare exceptions, the people at a party are all in the same income bracket, and there is very little association with private people. The stimulus of contact with those from other fields of endeavour,

The first time that Padma, Giten's beloved friend for many lives, attended satsang with Giten, she did not really know how deep the satsang was going. After the satsang she exclaimed astonished: "Did you feel the timelessness, the eternal?" She had gone so deep that it is possible in the inner being, which is the dimension of the timeless, of the eternal. Padma described her experience of satsang with Giten: “I love satsang with Giten. Satsang with Giten is heaven. Satsang with Giten is like coming home. I went into samadhi three times during a satsang weekend with Giten - and I also got a map and an understanding for how to go into samadhi again. I was so scared that I would lose the stillness that I found in satsang in India, but I found the stillness again in satsang with Giten. Previously, I did not think that enlightenment was possible, but now I think it is possible.” The essence of satsang is meditation. Meditation is the art of discovering the light within. Meditation is the art of discovering your own soul. It is only through meditation that we can discover the light within. Otherwise man lives in darkness. Meditation enkindles something that is already latent in all of us, but which needs to be discovered. Normally we are only looking outwards. We never look within ourselves, so our back is turned at our inner source of light. It is being ignored and neglected, and the only ignorance is to ignore our inner being, our source of light within. To know the inner being is the only knowledge. All other knowledge is worthless. It may help you in the world, but it can't help you in eternity. Life is such a small and fast disappearing phenomenon. The real life is something totally different. Seventy or eighty years are nothing compared to eternity. To pay too much attention to this life, and ignoring the inner life is just stupid. But that is what the majority of people are doing, which is why the world is full of stupidity, darkness, ignorance, violence, unconsciousness, misery and suffering. The moment we turn our attention within ourselves, it enkindles a light within. Turning our attention within enkindles a light inside, which knows no end. Once it is enkindled, it starts to spread. First it fills you, then it starts spreading outside you, and ultimately it fills the whole universe. Those who attains to that state, where the inner light becomes as vast as the universe has become an enlightened one, an awakened one, a Buddha, a Christ.

AM: My father had arrived in New York all alone, from the middle of Poland, before his seventh birthday… He arrived in New York, his parents were too busy to pick him up at Castle Garden and sent his next eldest brother Abe, going on 10, to find him, get him through immigration and bring him home to Stanton Street and the tenement where in two rooms the eight of them lived and worked, sewing the great long, many-buttoned cloaks that were the fashion then. They sent him to school for about six months, figuring he had enough. He never learned how to spell, he never learned how to figure. Then he went right back into the shop. By the time he was 12 he was employing two other boys to sew sleeves on coats alongside him in some basement workshop. KM: He went on the road when he was about 16 I think… selling clothes at a wholesale level. AM: He ended up being the support of the entire family because he started the business in 1921 or something. The Miltex Coat Company, which turned out to be one of the largest manufacturers in this country. See we lived in Manhattan then, on 110th Street facing the Park. It was beautiful apartment up on the sixth floor. KM: We had a chauffeur driven car. The family was wealthy. AM: It was the twenties and I remember our mother and father going to a show every weekend. And coming back Sunday morning and she would be playing the sheet music of the musicals. JM: It was an arranged marriage. But a woman of her ability to be married off to a man who couldn’t read or write… I think Gussie taught him how to read and to sign his name. AM: She knew she was being wasted, I think. But she respected him a lot. And that made up for a little. Until he really crashed, economically. And then she got angry with him. First the chauffeur was let go, then the summer bungalow was discarded, the last of her jewellery had to be pawned or sold. And then another step down - the move to Brooklyn. Not just in the case of my father but every boy I knew. I used to pal around with half a dozen guys and all their fathers were simply blown out of the water. I could not avoid awareness of my mother’s anger at this waning of his powers. A certain sneering contempt for him that filtered through her voice. RM: So how did the way you saw your father change when he lost his money? AM: Terrible… pity for him. Because so much of his authority sprang from the fact that he was a very successful businessman. And he always knew what he as doing. And suddenly: nothin’. He didn’t know where he was. It was absolutely not his fault, it was the Great Crash of the ‘29, ‘30, ‘31 period. So from that I always, I think, contracted the idea that we’re very deeply immersed in political and economic life of the country, of the world. And that these forces end up in the bedroom and they end up in the father and son and father and daughter arrangements. In Death of a Salesman what I was interested in there was what his world and what his life had left him with. What that had done to him? Y’know a guy can’t make a living, he loses his dignity. He loses his male force. And so you tend to make up for it by telling him he's OK anyway. Or else you turn your back on him and leave. All of which helps create integrated plays, incidentally. Where you begin to look: well, its a personality here but what part is being played by impersonal forces?

I act like I’m fine alone, but I want someone. I want that someone. The person who wants to be with me, no matter what. Who is on the same page with me, on all of the things that matter. Who’s going to be there at the end of the day even when I might be work obsessed or stubborn or – whatever. The person who doesn’t leave, who – who goes antiquing with me even if she hates it and knows just how I take my coffee and likes to spend weekends making lists of activities to make the most of our time. Who can see that I maybe don’t open up easily, but will decide I’m worth it, anyway. The person… who deals with me and all my crap and doesn’t get sick of it – of me – as soon as the shine is gone.

For a moment, I almost say yes. But the wording isn't quite right. There's a difference. I remember the feeling in my stomach whenever my family passed advertisements for performances at the West End Theater, showing women dressed as men. I remember Father's newspapers - the sensationalist ones he bought for fun on the weekends - languishing over bizarre stories of "female husbands" and cross-dressing. I remember desperately wanting to be something other than what I was. I don't want to be a boy. I already am. And the world will do anything to stop you. "I think it just takes some boys longer than others to figure it out," I say.

Weights clank in a backdrop beat to the rock music on the stereo. I should be thinking about this weekend’s game, but my thoughts keep straying to my outing last Sunday afternoon with Charlie. To the way her eyes danced when she got determined to skate. To the adorable way she clung to me when she needed help. To her cute little ass in those cutoffs. I close my eyes, hating how conflicted I feel. No one ever believes me when I say that Charlotte and I have always been just friends. Only that somehow feels wrong now. I’m not sure what’s changed on my end. Maybe it’s because we’re living together and I see her every day? Maybe it’s because dragging her out of that fire scared the fuck out of me? Or maybe it’s because she feels like my best friend again, and lately I’ve been wondering what it would be like if we were… more? And when I thought she was going to wipe out? My heart was in my throat as I sprinted to catch her. When I remember how she looked at me in the park, my whole body heats. Fuck. I shouldn’t be thinking about Charlie like this. Because going there with her right now seems like a really bad idea. I promised myself I wouldn’t get involved with anyone this year. There’s too much on the line.

For the wedding weekend, Andrew was staying at her grandmother’s house while she stayed in her childhood bedroom—it was the house rule that only married couples could co-bed. She had gone over there to visit him and say good night and they’d ended up having silent, frantic sex, during which Andrew kept saying, “Take it, you rich bitch. Take it, you fucking JAP.” Their relationship was over soon after that. Not that Jenny disagreed with his assessment, or his disgust. But she’d been exposed, and he’d spat where she was vulnerable, and then there were his statutory crimes, and then there was his interest in polyamory, decades before it became Brooklyn de rigueur, and so it had to end.

We work hard and for long hours to reap the benefits that may only be enjoyed occasionally—during strict intervals or whenever they got scheduled in the (sometimes very distant) future: We’re waiting for the weekend, next vacation, or retirement! This makes us end up with a chronic condition… We constantly postpone the zest and will to love life.

That weekend I started it, and then, at about page twenty or so, the magical thing occurred that happens only with the very best books: I became absorbed and obsessed and entered the “Can’t you see I’m reading?” mode.

tried not to think about the time before Mum died. The three of them had been so happy. Dad had settled into a good job, buildings manager for a large company headquarters after years working worldwide as a project manager on construction sites. Mum worked part time in a creche for babies and toddlers, and Matt was in his first year at senior school, making new friends, struggling a bit during French and English lessons but doing well at maths and enjoying the chance to show his skills at football. Weekends were brilliant. Picnics and trips to adventure parks, the seaside, football matches, the swimming pool – always the three of them together, having fun, laughing. Then, just a year ago, it ended. On one of her days off Mum had gone shopping in the nearest big town. A gang of older boys racing along the pavement had knocked her into the path of a bus and she had died before an ambulance could reach the scene. After that all Matt could remember was the silence. The silent house, Dad sitting huddled in front of the television screen, the volume turned to mute, Matt sitting in his bedroom not knowing what to do, feeling it was wrong to play computer games or phone his mates. His mates were silent anyway – they didn’t know what to say to someone whose Mum had been killed so suddenly and shockingly.

their troops had not yet landed. Eisenhower was appalled by both British tactics and British strategy. “If one has to fight,” he told Gruenther, “then that is that. But I don’t see the point in getting into a fight to which there can be no satisfactory end, and in which the whole world believes you are playing the part of the bully and you do not even have the firm backing of your entire people.” Eisenhower said he had talked to an old British friend who was “truly bitter” about Eden’s gunboat diplomacy, and who had declared, “This is nothing except Eden trying to be bigger than he is.” Eisenhower said he “did not dismiss it that lightly. I believe that Eden and his associates have become convinced that this is the last straw and Britain simply had to react in the manner of the Victorian period.”29 The news over the weekend was quite disheartening. On Saturday, Dulles had entered Walter Reed

Arteta was devastated when Arsenal failed to win the title. After that painful defeat at Nottingham Forest on the penultimate weekend of the season, he tried to watch Manchester City against Chelsea the following day, but he struggled. He just couldn’t sit through it all. He did tell me, however, that he made himself watch Ilkay Gündogan lift the trophy at the end of the game. Not because he wanted to see his former side celebrating yet another title success, but because he wanted to use it as added motivation to push himself even harder to bring those sorts of scenes to the Emirates.

What is wrong with modern civilization which produces at the roots these signs of sterility and racial decadence? But this is nothing new, it has happened before and history is full of examples of it. Imperial Rome in its decline was far worse. Is there a cycle governing this inner decay and can we seek out the causes and eliminate them? Modern industrialism and the capitalist structure of society cannot be the sole causes, for decadence has often occurred without them. It is probable, however, that in their present forms they do create an environment, a physical and mental climate, which is favourable for the functioning of those causes. If the basic cause is something spiritual, something affecting the mind and spirit of man, it is difficult to grasp though we may try to understand it or intuitively feel it. But one fact seems to stand out: that a divorce from the soil, from the good earth, is bad for the individual and the race. The earth and the sun are the sources of life and if we keep away from them for long life begins to ebb away. Modern industrialized communities have lost touch with the soil and do not experience that joy which nature gives and the rich glow of health which comes from contact with mother earth. They talk of nature’s beauty and go to seek it in occasional week-ends, littering the countryside with the product of their own artificial lives, but they cannot commune with nature or feel part of it. It is something to look at and admire, because they are told to do so, and then return with a sigh of relief to their normal haunts; just as they might try to admire some classic poet or writer and then, wearied by the attempt, return to their favourite novel or detective story, where no effort of mind is necessary. They are not children of nature, like the old Greeks or Indians, but strangers paying an embarrassing call on a scarce-known distant relative. And so they do not experience that joy in nature’s rich life and infinite variety and that feeling of being intensely alive which came so naturally to our forefathers. Is it surprising then that nature treats them as unwanted step-children?

Business is just a never-ending cycle of starting and trying new things, asking whether people will pay for those things, and then trying it again based on what you’ve learned. If you’re afraid to start or ask, you can’t experiment. And if you can’t experiment, you can’t do business. This isn’t about willpower or self-discipline. No one is going to nag, scold, or intimidate you into starting a business. My personal favorite way to approach starting a business is to have fun!

When you’re ready to have the conversation, pick the time and place very carefully. Most people choose to terminate people at the end of the day; the most common day is Thursday. The rationale behind these choices is that if you do it at the end of the day, the person is less likely to run into colleagues on the way out, and doing it on a Thursday (and asking that he or she not come to work on Friday) gives the person a long weekend to begin to go though his or her emotional reaction. Out of common courtesy, I suggest you not fire people within a couple of weeks of Christmas, Thanksgiving, or their birthday.

Richard Kay Richard Kay became friends with Diana, Princess of Wales, through his job as royal correspondent for London’s Daily Mail. After her separation in 1992, he used his knowledge to give a penetrating and unique insight into Diana’s troubled life, and they remained friends until the end. Richard is now diary editor or the Daily Mail and lives in London with his wife and three children. Over the years, I saw her at her happiest and in her darkest moments. There were moments of confusion and despair when I believed Diana was being driven by the incredible pressures made on her almost to the point of destruction. She talked of being strengthened by events, and anyone could see how the bride of twenty had grown into a mature woman, but I never found her strong. She was as unsure of herself at her death as when I first talked to her on that airplane, and she wanted reassurance about the role she was creating for herself. In private, she was a completely different person form the manicured clotheshorse that the public’s insatiable demand for icons had created. She was natural and witty and did a wonderful impression of the Queen. This was the person, she told me, that she would have been all the time if she hadn’t married into the world’s most famous family. What she hated most of all was being called “manipulative” and privately railed against those who used the word to describe her. “They don’t even know me,” she would say bitterly, sitting cross-legged on the floor of her apartment in Kensington Palace and pouring tea from a china pot. It was this blindness, as she saw it, to what she really was that led her seriously to consider living in another country where she hoped she would be understood. The idea first emerged in her mind about three years before her death. “I’ve got to find a place where I can have peace of mind,” she said to me. She considered France, because I was near enough to stay in close touch with William and Harry. She thought of America because she--naively, it must be said--saw it as a country so brimming over with glittery people and celebrities that she would be able to “disappear.” She also thought of South Africa, where her brother, Charles, made a home, and even Australia, because it was the farthest place she could think of from the seat of her unhappiness. But that would have separated her form her sons. Everyone said she would go anywhere, do anything, to have her picture taken, but in my view the truth was completely different. A good day for her was one where her picture was not taken and the paparazzi photographers did not pursue her and clamber over her car. “Why are they so obsessed with me?” she would ask me. I would try to explain, but I never felt she fully understood. Millions of women dreamed of changing places with her, but the Princess that I knew yearned for the ordinary humdrum routine of their lives. “They don’t know how lucky they are,” she would say. On Saturday, just before she was joined by Dodi Al Fayed for their last fateful dinner at the Ritz in Pairs, she told me how fed up she was being compared with Camilla. “It’s all so meaningless,” she said. She didn’t say--she never said--whether she thought Charles and Camilla should marry. Then, knowing that as a journalist I often work at weekends, she said to me, “Unplug your phone and get a good night’s sleep.

When he shifted a few minutes later and lifted her against his chest, she did not protest but looped her arms around his neck, and that was a kind of trust too. He carried her to her porch swing and sat at one end so her back was supported by the pillows banking the arm of the swing. He set the swing in motion and gathered her close until she drifted away into sleep. Val stayed on that swing long after the woman in his arms had fallen asleep, knowing he was stealing a pleasure from her he should not. He’d never been in her cottage, though, and was reluctant to invade her privacy. Or so he told himself. In truth, the warm, trusting weight of Ellen FitzEngle in his arms anchored him on a night when he’d been at risk of wandering off, of putting just a little more space between his body and his soul; his intellect and his emotions. Darius had delivered a telling blow when he’d characterized music, and the piano, as an imaginary friend. And it was enough, Val realized, to admit no creative art could meet the artist’s every need or fulfill every wish. Ellen FitzEngle wasn’t going to be able to do that either, of course; that wasn’t the point. The point, Val mused as he carefully lifted Ellen against his chest and made his way into her cottage, was that life yet held pleasures and mysteries and interest for him. He would get through the weekend at Belmont’s on the strength of that insight. As he tucked a sleeping Ellen into her bed and left a good-night kiss on her cheek, Val silently sent up a prayer of thanks. By trusting him with her grief, Ellen had relieved a little of his own.

I also seem to recall that whatever my job was, I wasn’t very good at it. I felt like I was staring down the barrel of a gun and I didn’t like what I saw at the end of it: a loan for a car, a mortgage for a flat, weekly shopping, trips to the cinema and living for the weekends. They were all metaphors for a set of handcuffs, chaining me to the monotony of a job I hated,

I stood and walked out onto the grass a ways to enjoy the night for a little longer and think about this revelation without his too-knowing eyes on me. Not two minutes later, his arms were wrapping around my waist and his lips were on my shoulder. “I want you to be my wife, Rachel.” My body froze but my heart began racing. What was he saying? “I thought I already was,” I said teasingly, and forced out a light laugh. “No, uh, I don’t want this to end here. I—” He sighed and turned me so I was facing him. His darkened eyes searched mine and he shook his head marginally. “I get it, this is crazy. But I want this with you, what we’ve had this weekend. I don’t want it to end, tomorrow or ever. I want you, forever.” “Logan . . . what?” “Marry me.” My mouth popped open and every rational thought that was screaming at me was quickly shut up when I saw the love he had for me pouring out of him. My head shook negatively for a split second before my mind realized that was the wrong direction and I furiously nodded. “Y-yes.” Oh my God, I can’t even figure out what word I’m supposed to say right now! “Yes?” he asked in shock, and gripped my shoulders in his hands. “Yes!” Crushing my body to his, he captured my mouth and kissed me through our smiles. “You’re going to marry me?” he asked somewhat breathlessly, and kissed me harder. “You’ll be my wife?” I couldn’t respond against his forceful kisses so I just nodded again and he smiled. “I love you, so much.” “I love you too, Logan.

During the year before Shara and I got married, I managed to persuade the owners of a small island, situated in Poole Harbor, to let me winter house-sit the place in return for free lodging. It was a brilliant deal. Chopping logs, keeping an eye on the place, doing a bit of maintenance, and living like a king on a beautiful twenty-acre island off the south coast of England. Some months earlier, I had been walking along a riverbank outside of London when I had spotted a little putt-putt fishing boat with an old 15 hp engine on the back. She was covered in mold and looked on her last legs, but I noticed her name, painted carefully on the side. She was called Shara. What were the chances of that? I bought her on the spot, with what was pretty well my last £800. Shara became my pride and joy. And I was the only person who could get the temperamental engine to start! I used the boat, though, primarily, as my way of going backward and forward to the small island. I had done some properly dicey crossings in Shara during the middle of that winter. Often done late at night, after an evening out, the three-mile crossing back to the island could be treacherous in bad weather. Freezing waves would crash over the bows, threatening to swamp the boat, and the old engine would often start cutting in and out. I had no nav-lights, no waterproofs, no life jacket, and no radio. And that meant no backup plan--which is bad. Totally irresponsible. But totally fun. I held my stag weekend over there with my best buddies--Ed, Mick, Neil, Charlie, Nige (one of Shara’s uni friends who has become such a brilliant buddy), Trucker, Watty, Stan, and Hugo--and it was a wild one. Charlie ended up naked on a post in the middle of the harbor, we got rescued twice having broken down trying to water-ski behind the underpowered Shara, and we had a huge bonfire while playing touch-rugby by firelight. Perfect.

A total of 779 prisoners have been held at Guantánamo since the facility was opened on January 11, 2002. Of those, 8 have died and 637 have been released or transferred. This left 134 inmates at Guantánamo at the end of 2014, however the number is constantly changing and as of January 2015 the official number of inmates remaining at the Guantánamo detention center was 127. Of these 127 detainees, 55 have been cleared for repatriation and are listed as being eligible to be transferred out. Some of the restrictions regarding the transferring of these prisoners have now been lifted, so they may be sent back to their home countries, provided those countries agree and are able to keep an eye on them. There are still problems regarding some of the more aggressive prisoners from countries that do not want them back. However, recently five of them were sent to the countries of Georgia and Slovakia. Another six detainees were flown to Uruguay over the weekend of December 6, 2014. There still remains a hard core of prisoners left incarcerated at the prison, for whom no release date or destination is scheduled. It is speculated that eventually some of them will come to the United States to face a federal court. Clifford Sloan, the U.S. State Department’s special envoy was tasked with closing the prison, said, “We are very grateful to Uruguay for this important humanitarian action, and to President José “Pepe” Mujica, for his strong leadership in providing a home for individuals who cannot return to their own countries.” Sloan added, “This transfer is a major milestone in our efforts to close the facility.” The question now is what will happen next under the Trump Administration? Presently there are still 41 men left, 15 of which are considered high value detainees. Five were to be moved out to cooperating countries during the Obama Administration but things happened too slowly and unfortunately they remained at Guantánamo. As of now the Trump plans are unclear, other than him saying that he wants to keep the detention center open and “load it up with some bad dudes.” Assuming that this happens, it is certain to bring on international protests!

I wanted to tell him that wasn’t normal for ninety-eight percent of the American population. Most of us would have been happy with a four-day weekend at Six Flags, a Wednesday night run to Wendy’s, and hopefully making enough money so that we wouldn’t have to hand out stickers at Walmart when we retired. No offense, Tommy. If nothing else, the zombies had leveled the playing field. We all were equally mired in the shit of existence now. I just nodded. I saw no sense or purpose in kicking the man while he was down. “It

The essayist and lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson famously once said, ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’ Well, Samuel, when a woman is tired of London, she usually tries to get away for the weekend – you know, get some perspective. She doesn’t tend to think of it as a precursor for ending her existence. My advice would be: stop being so absolutist in your thinking. Think about changing it up. Failing that, some of the modern SSRIs are really very good.

I hope this means you’re getting a new lab?” “I don’t know, T. I gotta run, we’ve got Aiden’s autopsy done and I need to write up some notes. By the way, tell Baldwin the crime scene techs found Aiden’s clothes in a bin behind the McDonald’s on West End. We’ll get that sent to his lab, if he’d like.” Baldwin said, “Yes, please, Sam. Did you find an ID?” “There was a wallet and a passport, both with ID in the name of Jasper Lohan. High-end stuff, they look legitimate.” “Jasper Lohan. I don’t recognize that name for him. No wonder we lost him in St. Louis. Cunning bastard.” He wrote a quick note, then said, “Okay. Thanks.” They hung up with promises to have dinner over the weekend. The banality of the arrangements made Taylor long for some peace and quiet, reminded her that she wasn’t like everyone else. Making plans was a luxury, a formality. In most cases, either she or Sam, or Baldwin, or Sam’s husband Simon, would be called to work a case. They lived in twenty-four-hour-a-day jobs, their lives cordoned off at the whim of a criminal.

Helen, a junior high math teacher in Minnesota, spent most of the school week teaching a difficult “new math” lesson. She could tell her students were frustrated and restless by week’s end. They were becoming rowdy so she told them to put their books away. She then instructed the class to take out clean sheets of paper. She gave each of them this assignment: Write down every one of your classmates’ names on the left, and then, on the right, put down one thing you like about that student. The tense and rowdy mood subsided and the room quieted when the students went to work. Their moods lifted as they dug into the assignment. There was frequent laughter and giggling. They looked around the room, sharing quips about one another. Helen’s class was a much happier group when the bell signaled the end of the school day. She took their lists home over the weekend and spent both days off recording what was said about each student on separate sheets of paper so she could pass on all the nice things said about each person without giving away who said what. The next Monday she handed out the lists she’d made for each student. The room buzzed with excitement and laughter. “Wow. Thanks! This is the coolest!” “I didn’t think anyone even noticed me!” “Someone thinks I’m beautiful?” Helen had come up with the exercise just to settle down her class, but it ended up giving them a big boost. They grew closer as classmates and more confident as individuals. She could tell they all seemed more relaxed and joyful. About ten years later, Helen learned that one of her favorite students in that class, a charming boy named Mark, had been killed while serving in Vietnam. She received an invitation to the funeral from Mark’s parents, who included a note saying they wanted to be sure she came to their farmhouse after the services to speak with them. Helen arrived and the grieving parents took her aside. The father showed her Mark’s billfold and then from it he removed two worn pieces of lined paper that had been taped, folded, and refolded many times over the years. Helen recognized her handwriting on the paper and tears came to her eyes. Mark’s parents said he’d always carried the list of nice things written by his classmates. “Thank you so much for doing that,” his mother said. “He treasured it, as you can see.” Still teary-eyed, Helen walked into the kitchen where many of Mark’s former junior high classmates were assembled. They saw that Mark’s parents had his list from that class. One by one, they either produced their own copies from wallets and purses or they confessed to keeping theirs in an album, drawer, diary, or file at home.

Helen, a junior high math teacher in Minnesota, spent most of the school week teaching a difficult “new math” lesson. She could tell her students were frustrated and restless by week’s end. They were becoming rowdy so she told them to put their books away. She then instructed the class to take out clean sheets of paper. She gave each of them this assignment: Write down every one of your classmates’ names on the left, and then, on the right, put down one thing you like about that student. The tense and rowdy mood subsided and the room quieted when the students went to work. Their moods lifted as they dug into the assignment. There was frequent laughter and giggling. They looked around the room, sharing quips about one another. Helen’s class was a much happier group when the bell signaled the end of the school day. She took their lists home over the weekend and spent both days off recording what was said about each student on separate sheets of paper so she could pass on all the nice things said about each person without giving away who said what. The next Monday she handed out the lists she’d made for each student. The room buzzed with excitement and laughter. “Wow. Thanks! This is the coolest!” “I didn’t think anyone even noticed me!” “Someone thinks I’m beautiful?” Helen had come up with the exercise just to settle down her class, but it ended up giving them a big boost. They grew closer as classmates and more confident as individuals. She could tell they all seemed more relaxed and joyful. About ten years later, Helen learned that one of her favorite students in that class, a charming boy named Mark, had been killed while serving in Vietnam. She received an invitation to the funeral from Mark’s parents, who included a note saying they wanted to be sure she came to their farmhouse after the services to speak with them. Helen arrived and the grieving parents took her aside. The father showed her Mark’s billfold and then from it he removed two worn pieces of lined paper that had been taped, folded, and refolded many times over the years. Helen recognized her handwriting on the paper and tears came to her eyes. Mark’s parents said he’d always carried the list of nice things written by his classmates. “Thank you so much for doing that,” his mother said. “He treasured it, as you can see.” Still teary-eyed, Helen walked into the kitchen where many of Mark’s former junior high classmates were assembled. They saw that Mark’s parents had his list from that class. One by one, they either produced their own copies from wallets and purses or they confessed to keeping theirs in an album, drawer, diary, or file at home. Helen the teacher was a “people builder.” She instinctively found ways to build up her students. Being a people builder means you consistently find ways to invest in and bring out the best in others. You give without asking for anything in return. You offer advice, speak faith into them, build their confidence, and challenge them to go higher. I’ve found that all most people need is a boost. All they need is a little push, a little encouragement, to become what God has created them to be. The fact is, none of us will reach our highest potential by ourselves. We need one another. You can be the one to tip the scales for someone else. You can be the one to stir up their seeds of greatness.

What about after? Getting back through the lobby, I mean. Assuming you’ll need to leave at some point. For the bachelorette party, if nothing else.” “That’s not until the weekend.” He grinned. “Your point being?” “You know,” she said, tipping up on her toes and kissing his cheek, “I like it when you do the thinking.” “Well, I was going to mention that, but--” She pinched his butt, making him laugh. “Careful or I’ll swing you up and carry you up to my room over my shoulder.” Kerry spluttered a laugh, then said, “You know, it’s almost worth doing, just to blow everyone’s minds.” He pulled her closer. “Don’t tempt me.” She batted her lashes again. “But I thought you liked it when I tempted you.” Now he slid his hand behind her and gave her a little pinch, making her skip a little step but laugh at the same time. “I guess I had that coming.” “There’s a lot I’d like to do that has coming in the description.” “Okay, okay, so assuming I will have to leave your pirate’s lair at some point, then yes, how to do that without being the front-page story of the gossip gazette.” She looked up at him, her expression serious. “I could always come down the ramp carrying a box of tiddledywinks. Then no one would suspect for sure.” “A real funny one, you are,” he said dryly. “I was revisiting the whole black spandex cat burglar idea. Maybe you could sneak out under cover of darkness, shimmy down a rope from my window.” “Okay, you’ve given that particular scenario way too much thought.” They were still laughing when they reached the end of the pier.

It’s tougher than you think to end it all, take my word. And after a failed attempt? You thought your life sucked before, just wait.

Why did the guys seem okay with their second request being rejected?” “Although you smelled good to them, they knew it wasn’t just right.  When it is, they won’t give up, which is why staying with me is so important.  We have laws that control certain aspects of the social side of the pack.  One is that unMated human females, like you, cannot be approached without the approval of the nearest Elder.” “Then, why can’t you just tell them all ‘no’ for me in advance, so we don’t have to mess with this whole Introduction thing?” “Because I have to give them the chance to see for themselves that it’s not right.  Was it that bad?  Meeting people?  No one treated you the way some human men have treated you.” I couldn’t disagree.  “How often is this going to happen?” “Once a month.” I sat up straighter.  “No way.”  I shook my head for emphasis.  It was a cool enough place, but sixteen hours of driving in a single weekend every month would get boring.  “Once every two months.” “Every five weeks, with flexibility to switch weeks if needed,” he said. “Seven weeks.” “Six,” he said with a sideways glance at me. “Fine, every six weeks,” I compromised.  Then I threw in another condition.  “Until I graduate.  Then, I’m going to college and won’t be obligated to take time out of studying for dating—or whatever you want to call this—if I don’t want to.” “Deal,” he agreed. I stared at him.  He’d agreed too easily.  Was that a hint of a smile on his mouth?  Why did I feel like I just got the raw end of the deal? 

Suppose boredom is a backstairs to liberation — insignificant, and so often overlooked. No one who has not known its higher degrees can claim to have lived. Not the Relative Boredom of long waiting at junctions for railway connections on the way to visit friends—or the rashly accepted week-end with acquaintances—the reviewing of a dull book. In such Relative Boredom the "wasting-of-time"-feeling only heightens the enjoyment of the coming escape, the anticipation of which sustains us meanwhile. Absolute Boredom is rather the pain of nausea, it is the loss of one's livelihood as for the pianist who loses his hands, the unsatiable desire for what we know makes us sick, it is the Great Drought, the "Carnal physic for the sick soul", the Dark Night of the Soul after the climbing of Mount Carmel, it is the pillar of salt, the exile from the land which is no more, the Sin against the Holy Ghost, the break-up of patterns, the horror that waits alone in the night, the entry into the desert where Death mocks by serving one one's daily food and one cannot bear hut to keep the darkness of one's own shadow before one for the very brightness of the light that reveals the universal emptiness. Do not try to turn back now — here in the desert perhaps there are doors open—in the cool woods they are overgrown, and in the busy cities they have built over them.

Rachel . . .” He ran a nervous hand through his hair and paused for a second, as if trying to figure out what to say. “The school year is about to end and you’ll be going back to Cali over the summer. I feel like I’m about to miss any chance with you I may have. And I don’t want to. I know you liked me when we were growing up. But, Rach, you were way too young back then.” “I’m still five years younger; that hasn’t changed.” He smirked. “You and I both know a relationship between a thirteen-year-old and eighteen-year-old, and a twenty-one- and twenty-six-year-old are completely different.” So? That doesn’t help my argument right now. “Well, you and I have both changed over the last eight years. Feelings change—” “Yes.” He cut me off and his blue eyes darkened as he gave me a once-over. “They do.” I hated that my body was responding to his look. But honestly, I think it’d have been impossible for anyone not to respond to him. Like I said. Adonis. “Uh, Blake. Up here.” He smiled wryly, and dear Lord, that smile was way too perfect. “Look, honestly? I have an issue with the fact that you’re constantly surrounded by very eager and willing females. It’s not like I’d put some claim on you if we went on a couple dates, but you ask me out while these girls are touching you and drooling all over you. It’s insulting that you would ask me out while your next lay is already practically stripping for you.” His expression darkened and he tilted his head to the side. “You think I’m fucking them like everyone else?” Ah, frick. Um, yes? “If you are, then that’s your business. I shouldn’t have said that, I’m sorry. But whether you are or not, you don’t even attempt to push them away. Since you moved here, I’ve never seen you with less than two women touching you. You don’t find that weird?” Was I really the only person who found this odd? Suddenly pushing off the wall he’d been leaning against, he took the two steps toward me and I tried to mold myself to the door. A heart-stopping smile and bright blue eyes now replaced his darkened features as he completely invaded my personal space. If he weren’t so damn beautiful I’d have karate-chopped him and reminded him of personal bubbles. Or gone all Stuart from MADtv on him and told him he was a stranger and to stay away from my danger. Instead, I tried to control my breathing and swallow through the dryness in my mouth. “No, Rachel. What I find weird is that you don’t seem to realize that I don’t even notice those other women or what they’re doing because all I see is you. I look forward to seeing you every day. I don’t think you realize you are the best part of my weekdays. I moved here for this job before I even knew you and Candice were going to school here, and seeing you again for the first time in years—God, Rachel, you were so beautiful and I had no idea that it was you. You literally stopped me in my tracks and I couldn’t do anything but watch you. “And you have this way about you that draws people to you . . . always have. It has nothing to do with how devastatingly beautiful you are—though that doesn’t hurt . . .” He smirked and searched my face. “But you have this personality that is rare. And it bursts from you. You’re sweet and caring, you’re genuinely happy, and it makes people around you happy. And you have a smile and laugh that is contagious.” Only men like Blake West could get away with saying things like that and still have my heart racing instead of making me laugh in their faces. “You’re not like other women. Even though these are the years for it, you don’t seem like the type of girl to just have flings, and I can assure you, that’s not what I’m into, nor what I’m looking for with you. So I don’t see those other women; all I’m seeing is you. Do you understand that now?” Holy shit. He was serious? “Rachel?” I nodded and he smiled. “So, will you please let me take you out this weekend?” For

There was another whole bunch of hopefuls. They would diminish down at a startling rate. We had seen it happen before. This time, though, we were there as the “old hands.” And it helped. We knew what to expect; the mystique had gone, and the prize was up for grabs. That was empowering. It was now wintertime, and winter Selection is always considered the tougher course, because of the mountain conditions. I tried not to think about this. Instead of the blistering heat and midges, our enemies would be the freezing, driving sleet, the high winds, and the short daylight hours. These made Trucker and me look back on the summer Selection days as quite balmy and pleasant! It is strange how accustomed you become to hardship, and how what once seemed horrific can soon become mundane. The DS had often told us: “If it ain’t raining, it ain’t training.” And it rains a lot in the Brecon Beacons. Trust me. (I recently overheard our middle boy, Marmaduke, tell one of his friends this SAS mantra. The other child was complaining that he couldn’t go outside because it was raining. Marmaduke, age four, put him straight. Priceless.) The first few weekends progressed, and we both shone. We were fitter, stronger, and more confident than many of the other recruits, but the winter conditions were very real. We had to contend with winds that, on one weekend exercise, were so strong on the high ridges that I saw one gust literally blow a whole line of soldiers off their feet--including the DS. Our first night march saw one recruit go down with hypothermia. Like everyone else, he was wet and cold, but in the wind and whiteout he had lost that will to look after himself, and to take action early. He had forgotten the golden rule of cold, which the DS had told us over and over: “Don’t let yourself get cold. Act early, while you still have your senses and mobility. Add a layer, make shelter, get moving faster--whatever your solution us, just do it.” Instead, this recruit had just sat down in the middle of the boggy moon grass and stopped. He could hardly talk and couldn’t stand. We all gathered round him, forming what little shelter we could. We gave him some food and put an extra layer of clothing on him. We then helped him stagger off the mountain to where he could be picked up by Land Rover and taken to base camp, where the medics could help him. For him, that would be his last exercise with 21 SAS, and a harsh reminder that the struggles of Selection go beyond the demons in your head. You also have to be able to survive the mountains, and in winter that isn’t always easy. One of the other big struggles of winter Selection was trying to get warm in the few hours between the marches. In the summer it didn’t really matter if you were cold and wet--it was just unpleasant rather than life-threatening. But in winter, if you didn’t sort yourself out, you would quickly end up with hypothermia, and then one of two things would happen: you would either fail Selection, or you would die. Both options were bad.

You like the Eagles?” His eyes light up in interest. “I love them. I used to watch games with my dad every weekend when I was growing up.” I laugh. “You can thank Finn for that.” “How so?” He raises a brow in question. “He showed up at our house one time when I was, I don’t know, around twelve, wearing an Eagles jersey. So of course I told him how much I loved football.” “Of course you did.” “I’d never watched a game in my life. But Eric heard me telling Finn how much I loved football, so he retaliated by telling our dad how I was dying to watch the games with him every Sunday.” I shrug. “I ended up loving it.” He grins. “I gave him that jersey. Finn never cared about anything but running.” “So you’ve been unintentionally messing with my life for a decade,” I mock complain. “I’d have intentionally messed with you given the chance.” He frowns. “Scratch that. Thank God I didn’t meet you before now. Eric would’ve killed me.” “Probably,” I agree.

It is not known why motorists, who sing the joys of the open road, spend so much petrol every week-end grinding their way to Southend and Brighton and Margate, in the stench of each other's exhausts, one hand on the horn and one foot on the brake, their eyes starting from their orbits in the nerve-racking search for cops, corners, blind turnings, and cross-road suicides.