Wonderful Weekend Quotes

For them, it was nothing but an ordinary day on an ordinary day on an ordinary weekend, but for her, there was something revelatory about the notion that wonderful moments like these existed.

One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer... is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating, more perceptive, than anything you're going to manage to get down on paper. (And if you ever think otherwise, then you've turned into an arrogant self-satisfied prat, and should look for another job or another avocation or another weekend activity.) So you have to learn to live with the fact that you're never going to write well enough. Of course that's what keeps you trying -- trying as hard as you can -- which is a good thing.

Suicide is just a moment, Lexy told me. This is how she described it to me. For just a moment, it doesn't matter that you've got people who love you and the sun is shining and there's a movie coming out this weekend that you've been dying to see. It hits you all of a sudden that nothing is ever going to be okay, ever, and you kind of dare yourself. You pick up a knife and press it gently to your skin, you look out a nineteenth-story window and you think, I could just do it. I could just do it. And most of the time, you look at the height and you get scared, or you think about the poor people on the sidewalk below - what if there are kids coming home from school and they have to spend the rest of their lives trying to forget this terrible thing you're going to make them see? And the moment's over. You think about how sad it would've been if you never got to see that movie, and you look at your dog and wonder who would've taken care of her if you had gone. And you go back to normal. But you keep it there in your mind. Even if you never take yourself up on it, it gives you a kind of comfort to know that the day is yours to choose. You tuck it away in your brain like sour candy tucked in your cheek, and the puckering memory it leaves behind, the rough pleasure of running your tongue over its strange terrain, is exactly the same.... The day was hers to choose, and perhaps in that treetop moment when she looked down and saw the yard, the world, her life, spread out below her, perhaps she chose to plunge toward it headlong. Perhaps she saw before her a lifetime of walking on the ruined earth and chose instead a single moment in the air

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

KAREN: Sometimes I wonder, if I was Graham, maybe I would have wanted a baby, too. If I knew someone else would raise it, someone else would let go of their own dreams, someone else would sacrifice and keep everything together while I went and did what I wanted and came back on weekends…maybe then I might want a baby, too.

Oh, hello," Dr. M says, shaking Balder's hand. "Wonderful costume. I'm a bit of a role player myself on the weekends. Tell me, where did you get the helmet?" It was forged in the North, blessed by the hands of Odin, given to me by my mother, Frigg," Balder answers. Lovely. I got mine on the Internet.

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.

There's always a 'but' when it comes to jobs. Like, I love my job but my colleagues are first-rate, but...a couple of them like to dress like superheroes on the weekend and I can't help but wonder if they're nuts." - Logan

I know it doesn't feel this way all the time, but we get to choose what we care about and what we spend our resources on. We choose what - or ideally whom - to lust after. We choose what to watch, what to like, what to build, how to spend the breaths that we've been alive. And the fact that many of our choices are unconscious - get that handbag, get that Starbucks, look at that Snooki - does not in any way make us less responsible for those choices. I'm happiest when I feel like I'm part of a community that helps me choose more intelligently and with greater empathy. And I, for one, like the choices we made this weekend.

You do things just to irritate me, don’t you?” Smiling, enjoying himself immensely, and determined to give her a wonderful and relaxing weekend, Van pushed Irene’s wet hair from her face. “Don’t be silly, doc.” He kissed her lips, nuzzled her chin. “Of course I do things just to irritate you.

It might seem to you that living in the woods on a riverbank would remove you from the modern world. But not if the river is navigable, as ours is. On pretty weekends in the summer, this riverbank is the very verge of the modern world. It is a seat in the front row, you might say. On those weekends, the river is disquieted from morning to night by people resting from their work. This resting involves traveling at great speed, first on the road and then on the river. The people are in an emergency to relax. They long for the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. Their eyes are hungry for the scenes of nature. They go very fast in their boats. They stir the river like a spoon in a cup of coffee. They play their radios loud enough to hear above the noise of their motors. They look neither left nor right. They don't slow down for - or maybe even see - an old man in a rowboat raising his lines... I watch and I wonder and I think. I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom.

I’ve never been very good at doing what I’m told. It’s a problem. Or a reflex. If they say left, I go right. If they say sit, I jump. If they say behave, I get drunk and spend the weekend screwing all three of the Archbishop’s tripled nieces. They were nice girls. I wonder what they’re doing this Friday?

So let's not ruin this by thinking too much about tomorrow. Don't make a wonderful weekend into a bad Monday.

Always take some of the play, fun, freedom and wonder of the weekend into your week & your work

Ms. Casey is standing in front of the class explaining how she worked all weekend to get the tests graded so she could hand them back on Monday morning, and you're wondering if you're supposed to be impressed that she did her job.

To Poetry" Don’t desert me just because I stayed up last night watching The Lost Weekend. I know I’ve spent too much time praising your naked body to strangers and gossiping about lovers you betrayed. I’ve stalked you in foreign cities and followed your far-flung movements, pretending I could describe you. Forgive me for getting jacked on coffee and obsessing over your features year after jittery year. I’m sorry for handing you a line and typing you on a screen, but don’t let me suffer in silence. Does anyone still invoke the Muse, string a wooden lyre for Apollo, or try to saddle up Pegasus? Winged horse, heavenly god or goddess, indifferent entity, secret code, stored magic, pleasance and half wonder, hell, I have loved you my entire life without even knowing what you are or how—please help me—to find you.

You make out with a boy because he’s cute, but he has no substance, no words to offer you. His mouth tastes like stale beer and false promises. When he touches your chin, you offer your mouth up like a flower to to be plucked, all covered in red lipstick to attract his eye. When he reaches his hand down your shirt, he stops, hand on boob, and squeezes, like you’re a fruit he’s trying to juice. He doesn’t touch anything but skin, does not feel what’s within. In the morning, he texts you only to say, “I think I left the rest of my beer at your place, but it’s cool, you can drink it. Last night was fun.” You kiss a girl because she’s new. Because she’s different and you’re twenty two, trying something else out because it’s all failed before. After spending six weekends together, you call her, only to be answered by a harsh beep informing you that her number has been disconnected. You learn that success doesn’t come through experimenting with your sexuality, and you’re left with a mouth full of ruin and more evidence that you are out of tune. You fall for a boy who is so nice, you don’t think he can do any harm. When he mentions marriage and murder in the same sentence, you say, “Okay, okay, okay.” When you make a joke he does not laugh, but tilts his head and asks you how many drinks you’ve had in such a loving tone that you sober up immediately. He leaves bullet in your blood and disappears, saying, “Who wants a girl that’s filled with holes?” You find out that a med student does. He spots you reading in a bar and compliments you on the dust spilling from your mouth. When you see his black doctor’s bag posed loyally at his side, you ask him if he’s got the tools to fix a mangled nervous system. He smiles at you, all teeth, and tells you to come with him. In the back of his car, he covers you in teethmarks and says, “There, now don’t you feel whole again.” But all the incisions do is let more cold air into your bones. You wonder how many times you will collapse into ruins before you give up on rebuilding. You wonder if maybe you’d have more luck living amongst your rubble instead of looking for someone to repair it. The next time someone promises to flood you with light to erase your dark, you insist them you’re fine the way you are. They tell you there’s hope, that they had holes in their chest too, that they know how to patch them up. When they offer you a bottle in exchange for your mouth, you tell them you’re not looking for a way out. No, thank you, you tell them. Even though you are filled with ruins and rubble, you are as much your light as you are your dark.

God is not merely at your fingertips but within your grasp. Live each day like a child digging through a treasure chest, rifling for the next discovery. Open your arms and your eyes to the God who stands in plain sight and works miracles in your midst. Look for him in your workdays and weekends, in your meeting-filled Mondays and your lazy Saturdays. Search for him in the snowy sunsets and Sabbaths, seasons of Lent and sitting at your table. Pray for—and expect—wonder. For when you search for God, you will discover him.

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.

Do you write every day?' 'Oh, no. Oh, I sort of try. I don't work very hard, really. Really I'm on vacation. All the time. Or you could say I work all the time, too. It comes to the same thing.' He'd said all this before, to others; he wondered if he'd said it to her. 'It's like weekend homework. Remember? There wasn't ever a time you absolutely had to do it - there was always Saturday, then Sunday - but then there wasn't ever a time when it wasn't there to do, too.' 'How awful.' ("Novelty")

You think you have it all figured out—you’ve timed your commute, you’ve fit in your weekend run or you haven’t, you’ve got life down to a science, a mathematical equation of time, interest, and energy. But one day something stands up to you, surprises you in a place where you’ve determined never to be surprised. And that’s when you run. You move fast the wrong way through traffic. You think it’s working. But something deep inside, driving the rhythm of your steps, tells you that it isn’t. So you try again. You search for that tiny space hidden in you, untouched by everything that you’ve experienced or survived.

Sometimes I wonder, if I was Graham, maybe I would have wanted the baby, too. If I knew someone else would raise it, someone else would let go of their own dreams, someone else would sacrifice and keep everything together while I went and did what I wanted and came back on weekends... maybe then I might want a baby, too.

Sometimes, she wonders why she and Ed couldn’t settle together into a sexless but pleasant marriage. Hadn’t that been what their grandparents did, and their grandparents before that? Why was it that her generation had to demand transformation, sex, adventure, comfort, stability, romance, conversation, intimacy, all from the one person? What’s so bad about settling?

He looks up. Our eyes lock,and he breaks into a slow smile. My heart beats faster and faster. Almost there.He sets down his book and stands.And then this-the moment he calls my name-is the real moment everything changes. He is no longer St. Clair, everyone's pal, everyone's friend. He is Etienne. Etienne,like the night we met. He is Etienne,he is my friend. He is so much more. Etienne.My feet trip in three syllables. E-ti-enne. E-ti-enne, E-ti-enne. His name coats my tongue like melting chocolate. He is so beautiful, so perfect. My throat catches as he opens his arms and wraps me in a hug.My heart pounds furiously,and I'm embarrassed,because I know he feels it. We break apart, and I stagger backward. He catches me before I fall down the stairs. "Whoa," he says. But I don't think he means me falling. I blush and blame it on clumsiness. "Yeesh,that could've been bad." Phew.A steady voice. He looks dazed. "Are you all right?" I realize his hands are still on my shoulders,and my entire body stiffens underneath his touch. "Yeah.Great. Super!" "Hey,Anna. How was your break?" John.I forget he was here.Etienne lets go of me carefully as I acknowledge Josh,but the whole time we're chatting, I wish he'd return to drawing and leave us alone. After a minute, he glances behind me-to where Etienne is standing-and gets a funny expression on hs face. His speech trails off,and he buries his nose in his sketchbook. I look back, but Etienne's own face has been wiped blank. We sit on the steps together. I haven't been this nervous around him since the first week of school. My mind is tangled, my tongue tied,my stomach in knots. "Well," he says, after an excruciating minute. "Did we use up all our conversation over the holiday?" The pressure inside me eases enough to speak. "Guess I'll go back to the dorm." I pretend to stand, and he laughs. "I have something for you." He pulls me back down by my sleeve. "A late Christmas present." "For me? But I didn't get you anything!" He reaches into a coat pocket and brings out his hand in a fist, closed around something very small. "It's not much,so don't get excited." "Ooo,what is it?" "I saw it when I was out with Mum, and it made me think of you-" "Etienne! Come on!" He blinks at hearing his first name. My face turns red, and I'm filled with the overwhelming sensation that he knows exactly what I'm thinking. His expression turns to amazement as he says, "Close your eyes and hold out your hand." Still blushing,I hold one out. His fingers brush against my palm, and my hand jerks back as if he were electrified. Something goes flying and lands with a faith dink behind us. I open my eyes. He's staring at me, equally stunned. "Whoops," I say. He tilts his head at me. "I think...I think it landed back here." I scramble to my feet, but I don't even know what I'm looking for. I never felt what he placed in my hands. I only felt him. "I don't see anything! Just pebbles and pigeon droppings," I add,trying to act normal. Where is it? What is it? "Here." He plucks something tiny and yellow from the steps above him. I fumble back and hold out my hand again, bracing myself for the contact. Etienne pauses and then drops it from a few inches above my hand.As if he's avoiding me,too. It's a glass bead.A banana. He clears his throat. "I know you said Bridgette was the only one who could call you "Banana," but Mum was feeling better last weekend,so I took her to her favorite bead shop. I saw that and thought of you.I hope you don't mind someone else adding to your collection. Especially since you and Bridgette...you know..." I close my hand around the bead. "Thank you." "Mum wondered why I wanted it." "What did you tell her?" "That it was for you,of course." He says this like, duh. I beam.The bead is so lightweight I hardly feel it, except for the teeny cold patch it leaves in my palm.

You have a bunch of cracked-out hoes fighting over Flavor Flav, the king of funk nasty. You have to wonder what in the hell must be going through these women’s minds to have to want to hook up with him. He’s nasty! I would rather hook up with some of my relatives in a weekend than with Flavor Flav. Of course, it would have to be a long weekend filled with tranquilizers and alcohol – in mass quantities – but, point being said that that scrawny man is funky. Don’t let the clocks or Viking hats fool you. The show is already entertaining enough as it is but I believe that it would be even better if the producers were to throw some blind contestants on who have never heard of him. That would be great.

she felt a sudden, unexpected surge of hope. Despite the tragedy they'd all gone through, this was what a happy family looked like; this, she thought, is what a loving family did when they were together. For them, it was nothing but an ordinary day on an ordinary weekend, but for her, there was something revelatory about the notion that wonderful moments like these existed. And that maybe, just maybe, it would be possible for her to experience similar days in the future.

We knew better than to ask when they would return. They would simply be away until the grief they felt had been processed and the mourning concluded. Shakespeare, too, knew the logic of this when he said: “He who lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend.” And yet our culture tells us to cut our losses—say goodbye to the old and get on with the new as quickly as possible—no use crying over spilt milk—what’s done is done. How wonderfully efficient and productive all this sounds!

Parent time is like fairy time but real. It is magic without pixie dust and spells. It defies physics without bending the laws of time and space. It is that truism everyone offers but no one believes until after they have children: that time will actual speed, fleet enough to leave you jet-lagged and whiplashed and racing all at once. Your tiny, perfect baby nestles in your arms his first afternoon home, and then ten months later, he's off to his senior year of high school. You give birth to twins so small and alike, they lie mirrored, each with a head in the palm of one hand while their toes reach only to the crooks of your elbow, but it's only a year before they start looking at colleges. It is so impossible yet so universally experienced that magic is the only explanation. Except then there are also the excruciating rainy Sundays when the kids are whiny, bored, and beastly, and it takes a hundred hours to get from breakfast to bedtime, the long weekends when you wonder whose demonic idea it was to trap you in your home with you bevy of abominable children for a decade without school.

Don't get caught in the trap of "Waiting". When I retire.... When I get off work When I go that party this weekend When this happens then I can live. People miss the present and then wonder where time went. Allow life unfold in its divine sequence by being utterly present.

It’s tempting to believe fairy tales and imagine recovery is this meteoric rise from darkness, but I think it must be stated for the sake of honesty, integrity and solidarity with others going through it, that recovery doesn’t feel at all like strength. It feels like giving up, like failing. It feels like lying in a useless lump all weekend, crying about the weight you gained. It feels like the deep shame you carry around all day because you actually can’t stop yourself eating anymore. It feels like the maddening conflict of being hungry and healthy. You gaze back at your skinny pictures wondering what happened – was that really you? It was seemingly moments ago, but now you are asking yourself what happened to the girl who would have given her life to be thin. It feels like you’re being weak and lazy and surrendering to your own worthlessness. It actually, on many days, feels like you’ve lost a battle.

The young family who'd moved into the Miller home had gotten rid of the Millers' trademark overflowing flower boxes. The new owners of the Davis place had ripped out those wonderful shrubs Bob Davis had worked on every weekend. It all reminded Myron of an invading army ripping down the flags of the conquered.

Sometimes I wonder, if I was Graham, maybe I would have wanted a baby, too. If I knew someone else would raise it, someone else would let go of their own dreams, someone else would sacrifice and keep everything together while I went and did what I wanted and came back on weekends…maybe then I might want a baby, too.

In my classes, we read great fiction obsessively, and then attempt to see how a writer managed to affect us. We try to understand which elements—diction, syntax, point of view and so forth—made us feel that way. After we spend several weeks reading this way, wondering how the author made us shiver like that, we try our own hand. I ask students to begin with ‘green lines,’ to isolate writing so good it makes one writer envious of another. Which parts do they wish they had written themselves? Students start to understand how their own writing works, where it ripples with energy… What they really want is to have some kind of firsthand, visceral relationship with a book—to see what it’s like to take a work apart and put it back together—using great stories as structural models, just the way the kids I grew up with in Detroit fell in love with cars by spending weekends trying to make derelict Ford Mustangs run again. When the engine finally starts, when you figure out how to make it fire, it’s an incredibly powerful learning experience.

Retreat is a form of pause—it is a time apart in solitude, a precious space in which we can see our world in a different light—acknowledge the grief, celebrate the gifts, and honor our own unique spirit without worrying about how others see us or what jobs still have to be done. For me, retreat is a time to endure suspense; find, not seek; relish what comes by chance; repair body and soul; wait patiently; and live into the questions. It is a time to get acquainted with silence—that friend we’ve kept at a distance; a time to be open to the spaciousness of a day; a time to live on the other side, in another world, where spirit, deep thought, and a new kind of wonder can flourish. Above all, retreat is a time to honor all that we have experienced and the way it affects our hearts. Webster’s dictionary defines “retreat” as the “act or process of withdrawal . . . a receding from a position” to a place that affords peace, privacy, and security. But I prefer Jennifer Louden’s assertion that retreat is “an act of self-nurturing, a radical leap into the hallowed halls of selfhood.

Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since. I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since. But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen. As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal. But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong. Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant. The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too. The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up. I mean, what does a child know about faith? It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known. Life is like that. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about. Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. And he was like a second father to me. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg. I was devastated. I remember sitting up a tree one night at school on my own, and praying the simplest, most heartfelt prayer of my life. ‘Please, God, comfort me.’ Blow me down … He did. My journey ever since has been trying to make sure I don’t let life or vicars or church over-complicate that simple faith I had found. And the more of the Christian faith I discover, the more I realize that, at heart, it is simple. (What a relief it has been in later life to find that there are some great church communities out there, with honest, loving friendships that help me with all of this stuff.) To me, my Christian faith is all about being held, comforted, forgiven, strengthened and loved – yet somehow that message gets lost on most of us, and we tend only to remember the religious nutters or the God of endless school assemblies. This is no one’s fault, it is just life. Our job is to stay open and gentle, so we can hear the knocking on the door of our heart when it comes. The irony is that I never meet anyone who doesn’t want to be loved or held or forgiven. Yet I meet a lot of folk who hate religion. And I so sympathize. But so did Jesus. In fact, He didn’t just sympathize, He went much further. It seems more like this Jesus came to destroy religion and to bring life. This really is the heart of what I found as a young teenager: Christ comes to make us free, to bring us life in all its fullness. He is there to forgive us where we have messed up (and who hasn’t), and to be the backbone in our being. Faith in Christ has been the great empowering presence in my life, helping me walk strong when so often I feel so weak. It is no wonder I felt I had stumbled on something remarkable that night up that tree. I had found a calling for my life.

He was terrified (his word) of us becoming “isolated.” What alarmed me is that his idea of isolated was much closer to my concept of ideal. If we lived on a great expanse of land, Dennis would want a grand swimming pool so that we could invite all our friends over for long, leisurely weekends. Whereas I would want a moat filled with saltwater crocodiles to keep the riffraff out. *

If I had three lives, I’d marry you in two. And the other? That life over there at Starbucks, sitting alone, writing — a memoir, maybe a novel or this poem. No kids, probably, a small apartment with a view of the river, and books — lots of books and time to read. Friends to laugh with; a man sometimes, for a weekend, to remember what skin feels like when it’s alive. I’m thinner in that life, vegan, practice yoga. I go to art films, farmers markets, drink martinis in swingy skirts and big jewelry. I vacation on the Maine coast and wear a flannel shirt weekend guy left behind, loving the smell of sweat and aftershave more than I do him. I walk the beach at sunrise, find perfect shell spirals and study pockmarks water makes in sand. And I wonder sometimes if I’ll ever find you.

You went to med school at Hopkins,” he says with quiet wonder in his voice. “Undergrad at Tufts. I’m so proud of you, Mace.” My eyes go wide in understanding. “You rat. You Googled me?” “You didn’t Google me?” he shoots back. “Come on, that’s step one post-run-in.” “I got home from work at two in the morning. I fell face-first into the pillow. I don’t know if I’ve brushed my teeth since this weekend.

Once I had a wild fling on an otherwise boring weekend holiday in Edinburgh, with a guy I met who turned out to be a psychiatrist. He agreed with me, after hours and hours of our naked cavorting in a hotel, that I was a sex addict; although he did stress he wouldn’t change me for the world. It turned him on that I was so sexual, and we turned a dull weekend in a grey city into something wonderful for the two of us. So, what was the problem?

When he got out, I rolled my window down. “You look like you’re going to throw up.” He grimaced, pressing a hand to his stomach. “I don’t know if it’s from this, or if I actually am sick. I think Avery got sick from the weekend. She was puking this morning when I left.” “Avery, huh? At your place?” He rolled his eyes. “Don’t even start.” “But you see, I have to. I have to start. Avery’s my friend. I’m hanging out with your brother. You and I are classmates. I think we can develop our friendship to the stage where I give you shit. We should even start sitting next to each other in class.” “Don’t press your luck.” I kept going, “It’s a natural progression. Don’t fight it, Marcus. It’s like evolution. Don’t fight evolution. You’ll never win. Mother nature is a bitch. She’s always going to win.” “What the fuck are you talking about?” “How I get to give you shit. It’s an amazing experience in life, like giving birth. It’s painful for one person, but breathtaking for another. I’m the baby here. I get to feel air for the first time on my skin. Let me breathe, Marcus. Let me put my baby lungs to work and scream.” “I swear you’re making me even sicker.” “If you gotta puke, don’t suppress. It’s a natural body process.” He eyed me a moment. “Did you rhyme that on purpose?” “Maybe. Or I might be crazy?” I winked. “Or just a classy lady?” “Stop. I’m really going to puke now.” He groaned, pressing his arm against his forehead. “I was going to tease you back about Caden, but forget it. I don’t think I have the energy to deal with your rhyming.” “I’ve been told I’m amazing like that.” “Who told you that?” “Who hasn’t is the real question.” “You’re not making sense.” “I do that too. That’s very true.” I wondered if I should find him a bag, in case he actually was going to upchuck.

I missed you." A humorless laugh closed his eyes. When he opened them, the redness had turned them deep mossy green. "Sorry." Trip's own eyes welled up. "Not like, gosh-I-wonder-what-Trip-is-doing missed you. I meant I actually started to feel like I'd survived some horrible amputation and part of me had been hacked off and lost in a haunted warzone being gnawed by the walking dead. I missed you because you were missing. I actually spent weeks trying to imagine what you were doing at any given Moment... obsessing, really." He didn't wipe his wet cheeks. "Trip must be seeing the new Superman this weekend. I wonder if Trip's asleep. I wish I could swallow Trip's load right this second. Trip needs to stop and eat now, something not dyed or in plastic. I even went to watch the Big Dog office doors a couple of times, like the Little Match Queer, when I knew you had pages due, just to make sure, you were okay, but then you... I dunno: vanished.

They looked like children from three separate families, Alex the athlete, all shoulders and biceps, off into the wild blue yonder every other weekend, canoeing, mountain biking, Benjy a kind of boy-liquid which had been poured into whatever space he happened to be occupying, and Daisy … Angela wondered if something dreadful had happened to her daughter over the past year, something that might explain the arrogant humility, the way she’d made herself so ostentatiously plain.

Jay sat down across from Chelsea and took both of her hands in his. The oversized lunchroom was buzzing with activity, and he practically had to yell to be heard. “Chelsea, for the love of everything good and holy, please…please stop ruining my friend.” Violet bit her lip to stop from laughing at the two of them. She knew what he was talking about before he even explained. It was the new facial hair. Chelsea jerked her hands out of his. “Oh, relax, drama queen. He’s not broken. Besides, I’m gonna fix him this weekend.” Jay seemed relieved. “I wish you’d do it sooner. The poor guy’s really taking a ration of crap over that thing.” “He’ll be fine. Trust me. It’s like a character-building exercise. When this is all over, he’ll be a stronger person.” She said it like she meant it. She was actually trying to convince someone that this was all for Mike’s own good. Jay wasn’t buying it, but he let the subject drop when Mike came up behind Chelsea and panted an enthusiastic kiss on her cheek. Obviously, Mike wasn’t too much from Chelsea’s little experiment. Chelsea rubbed the spot where his lips had touched her and made a face that only they could see. “There’s my guy!” she said. “Jay was just telling me that he doesn’t like your ‘stache, baby. But I told him he’s crazy. I think it’s hot.” Mike looked embarrassed that they were talking about it again. Violet realized that it was a sore subject and wondered what Chelsea had done to make him so eager to please her.

He got into the tub and ran a little cold water. Then he lowered his thin, hairy body into the just-right warmth and stared at the interstices between the tiles. Sadness--he had experienced that emotion ten thousand times. As exhalation is to inhalation, he thought of it as the return from each thrust of happiness. Lazily soaping himself, he gave examples. When he was five and Irwin eight, their father had breezed into town with a snowstorm and come to see them where they lived with their grandparents in the small Connecticut city. Their father had been a vagabond salesman and was considered a bum by people who should know. But he had come into the closed, heated house with all the gimcrack and untouchable junk behind glass and he had smelled of cold air and had had snow in his curly black hair. He had raved about the world he lived in, while the old people, his father and mother, had clucked sadly in the shadows. And then he had wakened the boys in the night and forced them out into the yard to worship the swirling wet flakes, to dance around with their hands joined, shrieking at the snow-laden branches. Later, they had gone in to sleep with hearts slowly returning to bearable beatings. Great flowering things had opened and closed in Norman's head, and the resonance of the wild man's voice had squeezed a sweet, tart juice through his heart. But then he had wakened to a gray day with his father gone and the world walking gingerly over the somber crust of dead-looking snow. It had taken him some time to get back to his usual equanimity. He slid down in the warm, foamy water until just his face and his knobby white knees were exposed. Once he had read Wuthering Heights over a weekend and gone to school susceptible to any heroine, only to have the girl who sat in front of him, whom he had admired for some months, emit a loud fart which had murdered him in a small way and kept him from speaking a word to anyone the whole week following. He had laughed at a very funny joke about a Negro when Irwin told it at a party, and then the following day had seen some white men lightly kicking a Negro man in the pants, and temporarily he had questioned laughter altogether. He had gone to several universities with the vague exaltation of Old Man Axelrod and had found only curves and credits. He had become drunk on the idea of God and found only theology. He had risen several times on the subtle and powerful wings of lust, expectant of magnificence, achieving only discharge. A few times he had extended friendship with palpitating hope, only to find that no one quite knew what he had in mind. His solitude now was the result of his metabolism, that constant breathing in of joy and exhalation of sadness. He had come to take shallower breaths, and the two had become mercifully mixed into melancholy contentment. He wondered how pain would breach that low-level strength. "I'm a small man of definite limitations," he declared to himself, and relaxed in the admission.

The noise from outside is now almost unbearable; neighbours in the street are waking up in their beds. Paul stirs once more. He is now out of the REM sleep stage and is in the next stage of waking up. His conscious mind is aware of the external environment and he is now awake enough to work out what the noise is: it’s a car alarm; the same one that goes off every time a strong enough wind current passes it, triggering its ultra-sensitive setting. Paul curses the car alarm for waking him up out of his slumber. For all the noise they create, he wonders if there is any point to car alarms. Thieves intentionally trip them to mask the sound of breaking glass and can disable them in seconds, and alarms go off so often these days that most people ignore them when they hear them, assuming the owner has accidentally triggered the alarm and will switch it off any second; in reality the owner is normally the last one to realise it is, in fact, their car alarm that is going off annoying everyone, so what is really the point of them?

Miss Martin," he said. "How on earth did you get a name like Isabella?" Just one of the many things that he'd wondered about as he had sat hunched behind his desk over the weekend. She shook her head, obviously confused by the change of subject, but then smiled. "Ah, it was my mother. I received my imagination from her. She was constantly telling me stories about Spanish princesses and English princes. She named me Isabella after the Spanish Queen." See, Anthony thought, nothing so extravagant that it should be pondered to death over an entire weekend.

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.

To make way for more resorts with spectacular views, developers destroy native habitats and ignore local concerns. Preservationists decry the growing propensity to bulldoze old hotels and buildings in favor of constructing new resorts, water holes and entertainment spots that look identical whether in Singapore, Dubai or Johannesburg; a world where diversity is replaced with homogeneity. Another catastrophe for countries betting on tourism has come from wealthy vacationers who fall in love with a country and buy so many second houses that locals can no longer afford to live in their own towns and villages. Among the more thoughtful questions is how mass tourism has changed cultures. African children told anthropologists that they want to grow up to be tourists so they could spend the day doing nothing but eating. The tourists who do not speak the local language and rely on guides to tell them what they are seeing and what to think marvel at countries like China with its new wealth and appearance of democracy. Environmentalists wonder how long the globe can continue to support 1 billion people racing around the world for a long weekend on a beach or a ten-day tour of an African game park.

Finally, the survey findings also lent a helping hand to those men who wanted to engage in some heartfelt wooing, by identifying the gestures that women view as most, and least, romantic. The top-ten list of gestures is shown below, along with the percentage of women who assigned each gesture maximum marks on the “how romantic is this” scale. Cover her eyes and lead her to a lovely surprise—40 percent Whisk her away somewhere exciting for the weekend—40 percent Write a song or poem about her—28 percent Tell her that she is the most wonderful woman that you have ever met—25 percent Run her a relaxing bath after she has had a bad day at work—22 percent Send her a romantic text or e-mail, or leave a note around the house—22 percent Wake her up with breakfast in bed—22 percent Offer her a coat when she is cold—18 percent Send her a large bouquet of flowers or a box of chocolates at her workplace—16 percent Make her a mix CD of her favorite music—12 percent Interestingly, it seems that gestures that reflect a form of escapism and surprise top the list, followed by those that reflect thoughtfulness, with blatant acts of materialism trailing in last place—scientific evidence, perhaps, that when it comes to romance, it really is the thought that counts.

Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment. Realizing this, many people begin to wonder whether a deeper source of well-being exists. Is there a form of happiness beyond the mere repetition of pleasure and avoidance of pain? Is there a happiness that does not depend upon having one’s favorite foods available, or friends and loved ones within arm’s reach, or good books to read, or something to look forward to on the weekend? Is it possible to be happy before anything happens, before one’s desires are gratified, in spite of life’s difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?

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.

I’ve had the other kinds of love. Sunday love, all comfortable and familiar. Tuesday love with its caring and closeness. Saturday love where you know it’s too good to be true and you’ll wake up the next day and it’ll all be over. Monday love, where you wonder what the hell you were thinking and the next weekend seems to be incredibly far away. Thursday love where it all seems so close and yet there’s so much standing in the way. Wednesday love where you’ve got all this history but feel like you’re in a rut and every day is the same thing. Forget all of those. Right now, I want a Friday kind of love. I want that possibility and recklessness and passion that only comes knowing there’s so much that could happen, and never mind that sometimes it doesn’t live up to your expectations.

If time and money were no object and I did not have to seek anyone’s permission, what kinds of experiences would my soul crave? Let’s apply this to the first four items in the Twelve Areas of Balance. Each of these four items relates to experiences: 1.​YOUR LOVE RELATIONSHIP. What does your ideal love relationship look like? Imagine it in all its facets: how you communicate, what you have in common, the activities you do together, what a day in your life together looks like, what holidays are like, what moral and ethical beliefs you share, what type of wild passionate sex you are having. 2.​YOUR FRIENDSHIPS. What experiences would you like to share with friends? Who are the friends you’d share these experiences with? What are your ideal friends like? Picture your social life in a perfect world—the people, the places, the conversation, the activities. What does the perfect weekend with your friends look like? 3.​YOUR ADVENTURES. Spend a few minutes thinking about people who’ve had what you consider to be amazing adventures. What did they do? Where did they go? How do you define adventure? What places have you always wanted to see? What adventurous things have you always wanted to do? What kinds of adventures would make your soul sing? 4.​YOUR ENVIRONMENT. In this amazing life of yours, what would your home look like? What would it feel like to come back to this place? Describe your favorite room—what would be in this wonderful space? What would be the most heavenly bed you can imagine sleeping in? What kind of car would you drive if you could have any car you wanted? Now imagine the perfect workspace: Describe where you could do your best work. When you go out, what kinds of restaurants and hotels would you love to visit?

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?

Johan had been away working for several weeks and home only at the weekends. Sigge missed him and I missed him and we were walking through the park on our way to daycare, two tired and sad souls. Sigge was sitting quietly in the buggy. He usually asks about everything we see along the way, why the air is so transparent, where the sun actually lives and if I like ice cream with pears and whipped cream. But today he was just sitting there quiet and tired, and I wanted to stop and hold him but instead I walked even faster. And then in the middle of the silence his questions started to come. ‘Mommy, why does Daddy have to work in Växjö?’ I gave him a tired, noncommittal answer. ‘He just has to. That’s where his job is right now.’ ‘But why?’ Sigge continued. ‘To earn money so we can buy food and pay the rent.’ ‘Why?’ Sigge said again, and I realized that he really did not understand and then I started wondering whether I really understood. ‘People have to work,’ I said and heard how hollow it sounded.

Suddenly he thought of Wick. He would be at the opera now. Helen would be there too, sitting beside him in the great nearly dark house (she’s only going because of you). The two of them would be looking at the brilliantly lighted sailing-ship scene that was the first act, and now and again one of them would lean toward the other and whisper something about the performance. Not about him; they wouldn’t be talking about him now. Chiefly because he was the only thing on their minds and neither wanted the other to know it. Helen would be wondering if he really wasn’t feeling well, or was he off again; and Wick would be wondering if Helen had accepted the excuse. She didn’t give a damn for the opera under any conditions and he certainly didn’t under these. He would be staring at the stage, half-turned toward Helen to catch her next whispered comment, and thinking: “If he isn’t there when I go back; if he’s gone out—” Don felt sorry for the distraction he knew he was causing them, and yet he couldn’t help smiling, too.

Jason, it’s a pleasure.” Instead of being in awe or “fangirling” over one of the best catchers in the country, my dad acts normal and doesn’t even mention the fact that Jason is a major league baseball player. “Going up north with my daughter?” “Yes, sir.” Jason sticks his hands in his back pockets and all I can focus on is the way his pecs press against the soft fabric of his shirt. “A-plus driver here in case you were wondering. No tickets, I enjoy a comfortable position of ten and two on the steering wheel, and I already established the rule in the car that it’s my playlist we’re listening to so there’s no fighting over music. Also, since it’s my off season, I took a siesta earlier today so I was fresh and alive for the drive tonight. I packed snacks, the tank is full, and there is water in reusable water bottles in the center console for each of us. Oh, and gum, in case I need something to chew if this one falls asleep.” He thumbs toward me. “I know how to use my fists if a bear comes near us, but I’m also not an idiot and know if it’s brown, hit the ground, if it’s black, fight that bastard back.” Oh my God, why is he so adorable? “I plan on teaching your daughter how to cook a proper meal this weekend, something she can make for you and your wife when you’re in town.” “Now this I like.” My dad chuckles. Chuckles. At Jason. I think I’m in an alternate universe. “I saw this great place that serves apparently the best pancakes in Illinois, so Sunday morning, I’d like to go there. I’d also like to hike, and when it comes to the sleeping arrangements, I was informed there are two bedrooms, and I plan on using one of them alone. No worries there.” Oh, I’m worried . . . that he plans on using the other one. “Well, looks like you’ve covered everything. This is a solid gentleman, Dottie.” I know. I really know. “Are you good? Am I allowed to leave now?” “I don’t know.” My dad scratches the side of his jaw. “Just from how charismatic this man is and his plans, I’m thinking I should take your place instead.” “I’m up for a bro weekend,” Jason says, his banter and decorum so easy. No wonder he’s loved so much. “Then I wouldn’t have to see the deep eye-roll your daughter gives me on a constant basis.” My dad leans in and says, “She gets that from me, but I will say this, I can’t possibly see myself eye-rolling with you. Do you have extra clothes packed for me?” “Do you mind sharing underwear with another man? Because I’m game.” My dad’s head falls back as he laughs. “I’ve never rubbed another man’s underwear on my junk, but never say never.” “Ohhh-kay, you two are done.” I reach up and press a kiss to my dad’s cheek. “We are leaving.” I take Jason by the arm and direct him back to the car. From over his shoulder, he mouths to my dad to call him, which my dad replies with a thumbs up. Ridiculous. Hilarious. When we’re saddled up in the car, I let out a long breath and shift my head to the side so I can look at him. Sincerely I say, “Sorry about that.” With the biggest smile on his face, his hand lands on my thigh. He gives it a good squeeze and says, “Don’t apologize, that was fucking awesome.

Do you know if John McClaren still does Model UN?” He gives me a funny look. “How should I know?” “I don’t know. I was just wondering.” “Why?” “I think maybe I’m going to go to the Model UN scrimmage this weekend. I have a feeling that he’ll be there.” “For real?” Peter hoots. “If he is, what are you going to do?” “I haven’t figured that part out yet. Maybe I’ll go up to him, maybe I won’t. I just want to see how he turned out.” “We can look him up online right now and I’ll show you.” I shake my head. “No, that would be cheating. I want to see him with my own eyes. I want to be surprised.” “Well, don’t bother asking me to go and keep you company. I’m not going to waste a whole Saturday on Model UN.” “I wasn’t planning on asking you to go.” Peter throws me a hurt look. “What? Why not?” “It’s just something I want to do by myself.” Peter lets out a low whistle. “Wow. The body ain’t even cold yet.” “Huh?” “You’re a little player, Covey. We aren’t even broken up yet and you’re already trying to talk to other guys. I would be hurt if I wasn’t impressed.” This makes me smile.

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.

was no one else there to comfort her. There was only him. The real him. She stepped forward and laid her head against his chest. Samantha: I’ll never forget the moment when Perry and Celeste walked into the trivia night. There was like this ripple across the room. Everyone just stopped and stared. 23. Isn’t this FANTASTIC!” cried Madeline to Chloe as they took their really very excellent seats in front of the giant ice rink. “You can feel the cold from the ice! Brrr! Oh! Can you hear the music? I wonder where the princesses—” Chloe had reached over and placed one hand gently over her mother’s mouth. “Shhh.” Madeline knew she was talking too much because she was feeling anxious and ever so slightly guilty. Today needed to be stupendous to make it worth the rift she’d created between herself and Renata. Eight kindergarten children, who would otherwise be attending Amabella’s party, were here watching Disney On Ice because of Madeline. Madeline looked past Chloe at Ziggy, who was nursing a giant stuffed toy on his lap. Ziggy was the reason they were here today, she reminded herself. Poor Ziggy wouldn’t have been at the party. Dear little fatherless Ziggy. Who was possibly a secret psychopathic bully . . . but still! “Are you taking care of Harry the Hippo this weekend, Ziggy?” she said brightly. Harry the Hippo was the class toy. Every weekend it went home with a different child, along with a scrapbook that had to be returned with a little story about the weekend, accompanied by photos. Ziggy nodded mutely. A child of few words. Jane leaned forward, discreetly chewing gum as always. “It’s quite stressful having Harry to stay. We have to give Harry a good time. Last weekend he went on a roller coaster— Ow!” Jane recoiled as one of the twins, who was sitting next to her and fighting his brother, elbowed her in the back of the head. “Josh!” said Celeste sharply. “Max! Just stop it!” Madeline wondered if Celeste was OK today. She looked pale and tired, with purplish shadows under her eyes, although on Celeste they looked like an artful makeup effect that everyone should try. The lights in the auditorium began to dim, and then went to black. Chloe clutched Madeline’s arm. The music began to pound, so loud that Madeline could feel the vibrations. The ice rink filled with an

His months of teaching experience were now a lost age of youth and innocence. He could no longer sit in his office at Fort McNair, look out over the elm trees and the golf course, and encompass the world within "neat, geometric patterns" that fit within equally precise lectures. Policy planning was a very different responsibility, but explaining just how was "like trying to describe the mysteries of love to a person who has never experienced it." There was, however, an analogy that might help. "I have a largish farm in Pennsylvania."...it had 235 acres, on each of which things were happening. Weekends, in theory, were days of rest. But farms defied theory: Here a bridge is collapsing. No sooner do you start to repair it than a neighbor comes to complain about a hedge row which you haven't kept up half a mile away on the other side of the farm. At that very moment your daughter arrives to tell you that someone left the gate to the hog pasture open and the hogs are out. On the way to the hog pasture, you discover that the beagle hound is happily liquidating one of the children's pet kittens. In burying the kitten you look up and notice a whole section of the barn roof has been blown off and needs instant repair. Somebody shouts from the bathroom window that the pump has stopped working, and there's no water in the house. At that moment, a truck arrives with five tons of stone for the lane. And as you stand there hopelessly, wondering which of these crises to attend to first, you notice the farmer's little boy standing silently before you with that maddening smile, which is halfway a leer, on his face, and when you ask him what's up, he says triumphantly 'The bull's busted out and he's eating the strawberry bed'. Policy planning was like that. You might anticipate a problem three or four months into the future, but by the time you'd got your ideas down on paper, the months had shrunk to three to four weeks. Getting the paper approved took still more time, which left perhaps three or four days. And by the time others had translated those ideas into action, "the thing you were planning for took place the day before yesterday, and everyone wants to know why in the hell you didn't foresee it a long time ago." Meanwhile, 234 other problems were following similar trajectories, causing throngs of people to stand around trying to get your attention: "Say, do you know that the bull is out there in the strawberry patch again?

It takes no skill to find a bald eagle. You look for flat rabbits on country roads. Wait a while and the national emblem will appear, menace anything that got there first, and plunge his majestic head deep in a mass of entrails. Alternatively, you can follow some industrious hawk through swamp or bottomland forest until he dispatches a squirrel; an eagle is likely to descend, savage the smaller bird, and steal his prize. The eagle can hunt, of course; he just prefers not to. Benjamin Franklin called him a bird of bad moral character. It takes no skill to find the nest, either. Look for a shipwreck in a tree, layered in feces . . . The likeliest impediment to (the eagles’) reproductive success was a human observer bungling around twice a day, but their welfare was almost incidental anyway. The point was for patriotic human hearts to swell with pride on outdoor weekends, and convincing replicas would have sufficed; the compulsive monitoring was not good husbandry, just an expression of national guilt. I did what I was paid for. Privately I sided with the furred and feathered residents of the area who must have wondered why humans were loosing winged hyenas in their midst . . . They’re glorified vultures. An apex predator that never hunts. Absurd.

Do you know, I was rather excited about this whole weekend, and now I can't wait to get home. Feed the cats, write school papers. That sort of thing." Tabitha said nothing. She had no home to return to. "Don't you want to go home? That's right, though, you said you would be leaving the country." "Just my parents are leaving. I'm orphanage bound," Tabitha told him, studying the kitchen tiles. "I'm to be a washer girl at Augustus Home." "A washer girl?" Oliver blinked, incredulous. "You can't mean it." Tabitha kept her eyes focused on the red squares, observing how they fit neatly together to form a single unit of floor. Her parents had taken away her ability to fit in anywhere. She felt the boiling sensation in her belly again, and she finally recognized it. It wasn't sadness or fear or guilt. It was anger, and it wanted very badly to be released. "No, I don't believe you." Oliver shook his head. "Nobody is that horrible." "They are," Tabitha affirmed quietly. "They are horrible, horrible people and even worse parents." She stared at him in wonder, letting a hot rush course through her. "Do you know that's the first time I've said that aloud?" Her heartbeat quickened. "And I think perhaps they deserve my disfavor. They've earned it, the same way I tried for years to earn their love.

Well, hello, Cameron.” “Vanni, how are you?” “Very well, thanks. And you?” She chewed her lip a little bit. Why couldn’t this just be Paul? “I’m good. Listen, I know Virgin River is perfection, but I was wondering if you’d like to get out of town for a weekend.” “A weekend?” she asked, completely unprepared for such a question. “There’s a great seaside hotel in Mendocino, on the ocean. Lots to do around there. Very relaxing and entertaining.” “Cameron, I have a baby.” He chuckled. “I thought maybe I could bring along a pediatrician.” “But, Cameron, I’m really not ready for—” “Easy, Vanni. We’ll get two rooms. Think of it as a chance to get to know each other better, that’s all. And no, I have not mentioned my plans to Carol.” “Oh. Listen—I appreciate the invitation, but I’m not sure I’m ready for something like a weekend date. That’s moving a little fast for me…” “I’ll be a Boy Scout,” he laughed. “Two rooms, good views, great food, a little relaxation, conversation, no pressure…” “I appreciate the thought, really. It’s very nice of you, but…” “All right,” he said. “It was worth a try. Well, then, can I wrangle another run down to Virgin River? I have Jack’s phone number. I could make a reservation at that little cabin…” “You’re welcome anytime,” she said. “Maybe this weekend, since I scheduled it off?” “Sure,” she said without enthusiasm. “Let me know if you decide to come down.” *

The loud rasp of leather yanked through Carson’s belt loops sent her attention to his torso. “What are you doing?” London’s panicked gaze shot to his face. “I don’t have a collar on me.” “I am wholly disinterested in being collared.” “One weekend, London.” He grasped one of her hips with his free hand. “If you’re disappointed at any time, you can walk. I’ll never speak of it again. Our work together will go unaffected. No one—and I mean no one—but us will know.” “Would you put that in writing?” Her eyes filled with mischief. Priceless. London lured him toward a lightning storm. He could play. Hell, nothing appealed in the moment more than a weekend playing with London. Yes, this is what he wanted. Now he needed to know if she was willing. “I’ll do one better.” He snaked the belt around her waist until the leather rested against her hips. “I’m not a notch on a belt.” “You could never be a notch, London Chantelle. You’re the whole belt, sugar.” Her face softened, and the playfulness in her eyes died. He recognized the deliberation behind them, the wonder if she’d be safe, here and at work. London needn’t have worried. She might get scared, but mutual satisfaction was the only way his brand of sexual fulfillment worked. “Say yes or no.” He pressed his torso to her corseted body, the last space between her body and his obliterated. “But say yes.” “What will happen if I say yes?” “What you want. What you’ve probably always wanted.” Her eyes misted with a surprising vulnerability. “Yes.

That’s not the only present I brought you. It’s not even the best one.” He peels away from me and pulls a little velvet jewelry box out of his backpack. I gasp. Pleased, he says, “Hurry up and open it already.” “Is it a pin?” “It’s better.” My hands fly to my mouth. It’s my necklace, the heart locket from his mom’s antique store, the very same necklace I admired for so many months. At Christmas when Daddy said the necklace had been sold, I thought it was gone from my life forever. “I can’t believe it,” I whisper, touching the diamond chip in the middle. “Here, let me put it on for you.” I lift my hair up, and Peter comes around and fastens the necklace around my neck. “Can I even accept this?” I wonder aloud. “It was really expensive, Peter! Like, really really expensive.” He laughs. “I know how much it cost. Don’t worry, my mom cut me a deal. I had to sign over a bunch of weekends to driving the van around picking up furniture for the store, but you know, no biggie. It’s whatever, as long as you’re into it.” I touch the necklace. “I am! I’m so, so into it." Surreptitiously I look around the cafeteria. It’s a petty thought, a small thought, but I wish Genevieve were here to see this. “Wait, where’s my valentine?” Peter asks me. “It’s in your locker,” I say. Now I’m sort of wising I didn’t listen to Kitty and let myself go a little overboard this first Valentine’s Day with a boyfriend. With Peter. Oh, well. At least there are the cherry turnovers still warm in my backpack. I’ll give them all to him. Sorry, Chris and Lucas and Gabe.

When Diana returned to work on Monday, September 16, she came directly to my bedroom and announced, “Mrs. Robertson, I have something important to tell you.” I could see out of the corner of my eye that she had a slight, mischievous grin on her face. “Go right ahead,” I said as I continued to blow-dry my hair in front of the mirror above the dresser. “No, Mrs. Robertson, I’d like your full attention.” I switched off my hair dryer and faced her as she stood in the doorway. “When you leave for work this morning, you’ll notice a lot of reporters and photographers at the entrance to the mews.” I wondered aloud if the press were following either Lord Vestey, a notorious international financier, or John Browne, a bright young M.P. known as one of “Maggie’s boys,” both of whom lived on our small street. “No, actually, Mrs. Robertson, they’re waiting for me,” Diana said with a great deal of blushing, staring at the floor, and throat clearing. “Good heavens, Diana, why?” “Well . . . I spent last weekend at Balmoral.” “With Prince Andrew?” I asked, remembering my friend Lee’s comment on the way to Glyndebourne. “No, actually, I was there to see Prince Charles.” More blushes and throat clearing, quickly followed by her disclaimer, “But he didn’t invite me. His mother did.” Hearing Diana speak of Her Majesty the Queen as “his mother” certainly gave me a clear picture of the circles in which Diana moved. I gasped and asked, probably rather tactlessly, “Gosh, do you think there’s any chance of a romance developing?” “Not really,” she said with noticeable regret. “After all, he’s thirty-one and I’m only nineteen. He’d never look seriously at me.” So modest, so appealing. I couldn’t imagine him not learning to love her. We certainly had. “Well, Diana, I wouldn’t be so sure,” I replied, thinking of my prediction from July.

But then I don’t begin to understand a lot of things about Sweden and Norway. It’s as if they are determined to squeeze all the pleasure out of life. They have the highest income-tax rates, the highest VAT rates, the harshest drinking laws, the dreariest bars, the dullest restaurants, and television that’s like two weeks in Nebraska. Everything costs a fortune. Even the purchase of a bar of chocolate leaves you staring in dismay at your change, and anything larger than that brings tears of pain to your eyes. It’s bone-crackingly cold in the winter and it does nothing but rain the rest of the year. The most fun thing to do in these countries is walk around semi-darkened shopping centers after they have closed, looking in the windows of stores selling wheelbarrows and plastic garden furniture at prices no one can afford. On top of that, they have shackled themselves with some of the most inane and restrictive laws imaginable, laws that leave you wondering what on earth they were thinking about. In Norway, for instance, it is illegal for a barman to serve you a fresh drink until you have finished the previous one. Does that sound to you like a matter that needs to be covered by legislation? It is also illegal in Norway for a bakery to bake bread on a Saturday or Sunday. Well, thank God for that, say I. Think of the consequences if some ruthless Norwegian baker tried to foist fresh bread on people at the weekend. But the most preposterous law of all, a law so pointless as to scamper along the outer margins of the surreal, is the Swedish one that requires motorists to drive with their headlights on during the daytime, even on the sunniest summer afternoon. I would love to meet the guy who thought up that one. He must be head of the Department of Dreariness. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if on my next visit to Sweden all the pedestrians are wearing miners’ lamps.

Anyone reading or rereading Infinite Jest will notice an interesting pertinence: throughout the book, Wallace’s flat, minor, one-note characters walk as tall as anyone, peacocks of diverse idiosyncrasy. Wallace doesn’t simply set a scene and novelize his characters into facile life; rather, he makes an almost metaphysical commitment to see reality through their eyes. A fine example of this occurs early in Infinite Jest, during its “Where was the woman who said she’d come” interlude. In it we encounter the paranoid weed addict Ken Erdedy, whose terror of being considered a too-eager drug buyer has engendered an unwelcome situation: he is unsure whether or not he actually managed to make an appointment with a woman able to access two hundred grams of “unusually good” marijuana, which he very much wants to spend the weekend smoking. For eleven pages, Erdedy does nothing but sweat and anticipate this woman’s increasingly conjectural arrival with his desired two hundred grams. I suspect no one who has struggled with substance addiction can read this passage without squirming, gasping, or weeping. I know of nothing else in the entirety of literature that so convincingly inhabits a drug-smashed consciousness while remaining a model of empathetic clarity. The literary craftsman’s term for what Wallace is doing within the Erdedy interlude is free indirect style, but while reading Wallace you get the feeling that bloodless matters of craftsmanship rather bored him. Instead, he had to somehow psychically become his characters, which is surely why he wrote so often, and so well, in a microscopically close third person. In this very specific sense, Wallace may be the closest thing to a method actor in American literature, which I cannot imagine was without its subtle traumas. And Erdedy is merely one of Infinite Jest’s hundreds of differently damaged walk-on characters! Sometimes I wonder: What did it cost Wallace to create him?

Then, as if he’d figured out what produced the maximum reaction in her, he switched back to Chopin. Just like that night in her childhood, the music slipped past her defenses and produced a deep contraction inside her, equal parts pain and pleasure. It went deeper still, until the tears began to rise, and she could only sit there, crying, trying to display only her expressionless left side so he wouldn’t notice. She’d been numb and it had felt good. Okay, not good. But safe. Manageable. He kept playing, soulful, stirring pieces that seemed chosen for their ability to pierce her heart deeper, deeper. She was crying audibly now, and he stopped and regarded her impassively. It couldn’t have been more awkward. She worked to compose herself and only then did she look up and meet his eyes. “Well,” he said, “I think it’s safe to say that dance is not done with you yet.” She stared at him in disbelief. “You did this on purpose. Tried to provoke a reaction.” “I suppose I did.” What a horrible, disreputable person he was. No wonder Misha had seemed anxious about having him around this weekend. “That was a pretty shitty thing to do.” “Not at all,” he replied. “I was just helping you see where you stand with your art. You need it. It nourishes you. That’s not going to go away just because you’re sidelined for a year or two.” “Two years?” She wasn’t sure which appalled her more, his words or his casual attitude. “Whatever. Point being, you’re still a dancer. It couldn’t be more obvious. That gorgeous body of yours, the way it moves. The way you’re sitting there now, all swept away by the music. You’re a dancer. You can’t not be one. Ever.” The truth of this, the twin emotions of fragile hope and crushing despair, crashed into her. He was right. And right then, the truth hurt. Now that the numbness was gone, it all hurt. The tears rose up again and spilled out. She heard Misha come in through the front door. David looked anxious. “Look, Dena. I just want to make sure you’re looking at the issue clearly.” Misha

Betsy didn’t want to be at the party any more than Cole did. She’d met the birthday girl in a spin class a couple of years earlier and had been declining her Evites ever since. In an effort to meet new people, however, this time Betsy replied “Yes.” She took a cab to the party, wondering why she was going at all. When Betsy met Cole there was a spark, but she was ambivalent. Cole was clearly smart and well educated, but he didn’t seem to be doing much about it. They had some nice dates, which seemed promising. Then, after sleeping over one night and watching Cole wake up at eleven a.m. and grab his skateboard, Betsy felt less bullish. She didn’t want to help another boyfriend grow up. What Betsy didn’t know was that, ever since he’d started spending time with her, Cole had regained some of his old drive. He saw the way she wanted to work on her sculptures even on the weekend, how she and her friends loved to get together to talk about their projects and their plans. As a result, Cole started to think more aspirationally. He eyed a posting for a good tech job at a high-profile start-up, but he felt his résumé was now too shabby to apply. As luck would have it—and it is often luck—Cole remembered that an old friend from high school, someone he bumped into about once every year or two, worked at the start-up. He got in touch, and this friend put in a good word to HR. After a handful of interviews with different people in the company, Cole was offered the position. The hiring manager told Cole he had been chosen for three reasons: His engineering degree suggested he knew how to work hard on technical projects, his personality seemed like a good fit for the team, and the twentysomething who vouched for him was well liked in the company. The rest, the manager said, Cole could learn on the job. This one break radically altered Cole’s career path. He learned software development at a dot-com on the leading edge. A few years later, he moved over and up as a director of development at another start-up because, by then, the identity capital he’d gained could speak for itself. Nearly ten years later, Cole and Betsy are married. She runs a gallery co-op. He’s a CIO. They have a happy life and gladly give much of the credit to Cole’s friend from high school and to the woman with the Evites.

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.

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 was late May, and as the weather got nicer, seniors were outside on the circle constantly, an even bigger group--after lunch and during free periods and on the weekends--and more than once, as I walked by and pretended not to look at the clock of them, I could make out Aspeth shouting, "I do not!" Or another time: "That's so gross!" Why didn't I ever join them? I wanted to, but there would be that one unbearable moment after I approached when I stood on the fringes of the group, and they would shade their eyes and look up and wonder why I was there. There was something I would have to say, there was a place in the grass I would have to sit, a posture I would have to sit in. For other people, these decisions seemed effortkess, not decisions at all; for me, they had never stopped being decisions.

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

If no one told you this today: God loves you, and you're amazing. You're going to have a wonderful weekend ahead. Trust. x

One family described their core value of hospitality, lived out as they cleaned the house together each Friday for the express purpose of welcoming people over the weekend. They wanted to be able to spontaneously invite others over, knowing their space was ready to receive them. All this was explained to their kids by connecting the dots between the practice of keeping house and the immense welcome of God. They talked about their apartment as a gift and a refuge, and how important it was for it to feel inviting. Hosting people was not about living some Magnolia life; it was how they loved their neighbors. Thus, Friday night cleanup was a faith practice. One family used the tradition of a summer road trip to visit relatives as a means to support being who God uniquely made each of them to be. Each family member got to design the itinerary for one day of the trip. On that day, everyone else went along with that person’s choices for restaurants and an activity. They talked about the wonder of God’s image in each person and how this was a fun way to see each member of the family just as God made them to be. Thus, a family trip was a faith ritual. What about your family? What unique characteristics need to be accounted for as you craft a vision for faith? • Who makes up your family? List the members. You may share a living space with them or not, live in the same town or not, be relationally close or not. • Next to each person on the list, jot down a few distinguishing key traits of that person. What are they like? What are they interested in? • What are some of your family’s strengths and loves as a group? Do you love a good party? Cheer for a certain team? Love a particular place or meal? • What are some of your family’s unique challenges right now? Do you have a child who doesn’t “fit the mold,” for whatever reason? Are finances tight? Have any of the relationships been strained or broken? • List anything else that feels important to you about who your family is and what they are like. What other traits make you, you?

is Monday – the beginning of another week following an incredible weekend." • "I am well and alive, and I wonder what today has in store for me." • "What small objectives am I going to concentrate on today?

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:

Dear Lindy, Over ten years ago a ten and a half foot Amethystine python tried to take my not quite two year old son from his bed… this weekend I attended a writer’s workshop with… Kate Llewellyn and after reading the enclosed poem she said I MUST send it to you and so here it is… The Letter I should Have Written to Lindy Chamberlain I believe you, Lindy, I know that even now with all that is tamed the Wild is always near In the black of night I lifted my child from his winter bed only to feel a cold weight, skin to skin along my length. Python jaws around my baby’s leg. Two day’s later on TV, whodunnit: the Dingo or the Bitch But I believed you and I wonder Would they have hissed at me on the steamy courthouse steps: ‘The snake is innocent.

No longer do I wonder why the clay of your body attracts stardust, hands, weekends.

Dahmer was a third-shift worker at a chocolate factory and found it difficult to sleep during the day. He remembered reading in the newspaper that President George H. Bush used a new drug called Halcion to help him sleep during the tension of the Gulf War. Jeff went to a doctor and convinced him to give him a prescription for the sleeping pill. It worked like a knockout drug, putting him to sleep quickly. He wondered how these pills might work on his weekend pickups.

As a young child, I realized that if I presented myself as perfect—caring, generous, understanding, and compliant— then I could control how people felt about me. At all costs, I wanted to be loved! I’d created a fantasy persona, but even now, I couldn’t recognize how far I had strayed from my self-imposed standard of perfection. I guess that’s what happens to a person when they receive too much praise. Was I as wonderful as everyone painted me? Or was I a skilled con artist? I had been riding the superiority- inferiority seesaw all weekend. As I grappled with a carousel of gnawing thoughts, I drank my third shot of scotch and snorted some blow, all to crush any self-doubt.

A Tale of Two Brains Let me paint a picture of a day in the life of someone who doesn’t have a Second Brain, and someone who does. See if either of these descriptions sounds familiar. Nina wakes up on Monday morning, and before her eyes even open, thoughts are flooding her brain. Things to do, things to think about, things to decide. It all comes rushing in from the depths of her subconscious, where it’s been simmering all weekend. Nina’s thoughts continue to swirl around her brain as she gets ready for work. Like jittery birds, they flit and flutter around her head because they have nowhere else to rest. There is a constant hum of background anxiety that she has come to expect, as she wonders what needs her attention and what she may be missing. After a hectic morning, Nina finally sits down at her desk to start her workday, opens up her email inbox, and is instantly engulfed by a torrent of new messages. Flashing with urgent subject lines and the names of important senders, these demands fill her with a cold adrenaline rush. She knows that her morning is shot, her own plans ruined. Pushing aside the important work she wanted to focus on this morning, Nina settles in for a long slog of replying to emails. By the time she gets back from lunch, Nina is finally done handling the most urgent issues. It’s finally time to focus on the priorities she’s set for herself. This is when the reality sets in: after a morning spent fighting fires, she’s far too scatterbrained and tired to focus. Like so many times before, Nina lowers her expectations, settling for chipping away slowly at her ever-expanding to-do list full of other people’s priorities.

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.

Happiness is day drinking in the middle of Oxford Street whilst dancing to Megan Thee Stallion on a busy weekend after having mixed up all your meds because surprises are fun, and sometimes it's important to be reminded of why you first moved to this weirdly wonderful, obscenely overpriced city. That is happiness and you don't need a therapist or a witchy, wasted transwoman to tell you that shit. Invest in a bombass vibrator, be nice to sweet old ladies on the tube because if you're really lucky, you too will one day grow old and you'll want someone to treat you with a modicum of kindness and care. And stop making yourself go grey with needless stress! Now get the fuck out of my house. You're starting to harsh my buzz.

... she'll be describing the things that she learned about herself through being his mother; a wonder at the world that she hadn't felt since she was little. He helped her to see the world as a place where even the oldest, dreariest things could become new again if you only looked at them sideways.

Madame Egloff, who stood, hands held out in front of her, expressing her admiration. ‘Please make the alterations, Madame, and have the gowns sent round to Brown’s Hotel by the weekend.’ Half an hour later, when they left Madame Egloff’s salon, Sophie had been dressed and pinned into each of the garments Matty had chosen, and promises had been made to deliver the clothes to the hotel by Saturday morning at the latest. * Monday morning saw them at Paddington Station being conducted to a private compartment on the train. Sophie had never travelled in such style before, being more used to the uncomfortable rowdiness of a third-class carriage, but Matty had insisted. ‘I always travel this way,’ she said. ‘The journey is quite tiring enough without being crammed in next to crying children and shrill women.’ Having directed the porter to place their luggage in the guard’s van, Matty had settled herself into their compartment with a copy of the new Murray’s Magazine, which she had bought from a news-stand at the station. Beside her on the seat was a hamper, provided by Brown’s, with the food and drink they would need for the journey. As the train drew out of the station and started its long journey west, Sophie felt keyed up with anxious anticipation and was grateful for the comforting presence of Hannah, ensconced on the other side of the compartment. Dressed in her new plaid travelling dress, with a matching hat perched on her head, Sophie knew she was a different person from the one who had sat at her dying mother’s bedside, holding her hand. No longer a young girl on the brink of adulthood... but who? There had been too much change in her life in the past weeks that she still had to come to terms with. Who am I? she wondered. I don’t feel like me! She looked across at Hannah, so familiar, so safe, huddled in a corner, her eyes shut as she dozed, and Sophie felt a wave of affection flood through her. Dear Hannah, she thought, I’m so glad you came too. When they had left Madame Egloff, Matty had taken Sophie for afternoon tea at Brown’s. Looking round the famous tea room, with its panelled walls, its alcoved fireplace and its windows giving onto Albemarle Street, Sophie

It was so exciting,” Vivian said. “I’d wonder: Will he call me back? Can I see him this weekend?” That possibility of rejection created anxiety, a feeling Vivian confused for butterflies. And when the guy started pulling away, she felt it even more intensely.

he’s the most normal, boring dude in the world until it comes to dressing up as his favorite old-timey TV characters. It’s like the fun part of his brain is unleashed, which is cool, but sometimes it can be a little TOO fun, you know what I mean? I know I should just expect it whenever we go to conventions together, but is there really any harm in lowering my expectations? Oh, and in case you’re wondering where my mom and sister were, they decided to sit this one out to have a spa weekend together at some fancy schmancy hotel…

Going for a weekend silent retreat might be a wonderful idea. Doing so for a decade might be a terrible idea, as humans flourish in communicative sociality. Too much of anything even a good thing, can become detrimental.

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.

I stared at his outstretched hand, wondering if he’d bumped his head and developed a sudden case of amnesia over the weekend.

At the weekends,’ Christopher says, ‘when I’m out for a walk with my wife, along the cliff tops near here, on a sunny day, I know our bodies are wide-meshed nets, and that the cliffs we’re walking on are nets too, and sometimes it seems, yes, as miraculous as if in our everyday world we suddenly found ourselves walking on water, or air. And I wonder what it must be like, sometimes, not to know that.’ He pauses, and it is clear that he is thinking now beyond the confines of the salt cavern, beyond even the known limits of the universe. ‘But mostly, and in several ways, I’m amazed I’m able to hold the hand of the person I love.

This was the tiny sliver of joy that had replaced the days when she had friends. And a hectic schedule. And places to go, obligations to meet, a son to take care of. Her life had been full and chaotic and some parts of it had been wonderful, but not now. Now, all she had was the sun on her face in the morning. And today, like yesterday and tomorrow, it would have to be enough. For now.

It’s been almost four weeks now. He never showed up to run with me again and he never apologized. He doesn’t sit by me in class or in the cafeteria. He doesn’t send me insulting texts and he doesn’t show up on weekends as a different person. The only thing he does, at least I think he’s the one that does it, is remove the sticky notes from my locker. They’re always crumpled in a wad on the hallway floor at my feet. I continue to exist, and he continues to exist, but we don’t exist together. Days continue to pass no matter who I exist with, though. And each additional day that plants itself between the present and that weekend with him just leaves me with more and more questions that I’m too stubborn to ask. I want to know what set him off that day. I want to know why he didn’t just let it go instead of storming off like he did. I want to know why he never apologized, because I’m almost positive I would have given him at least one more chance. What he did was crazy and strange and a little possessive, but if I weighed it on a scale against all the wonderful things about him, I know it wouldn’t have weighed nearly as much. Breckin doesn’t even try to analyze it anymore so I pretend not to, either. But I do, and the thing that eats at me the most is the fact that everything that happened between us is starting to seem surreal, like it was all just a dream. I catch myself questioning whether that weekend even happened at all, or if it was just another invalidated memory of mine that may not even be real.

Investment banking may not be the absolute worst, but it’s up there, full of pride when they describe their requirement to work three weekends out of five. Client service, they say, just demands it. But I wonder how thrilled their clients would be if they knew how brain-dead the service they receive often is.

I log into my account and see a new email from him, thanking me for such a wonderful date and asking if I am available next weekend to stand in Times Square with him. I could hold the coffee can for the tips. Where in his foggy state did he think this actually went well?  

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.

Nikki— I had a wonderful weekend with you. You left too soon and broke my heart. I want to talk to you again, see you again, and according to Vanni, you don’t want to be contacted by me. I don’t know what went wrong. For me, everything went right, and I thought it went right for you, too. I know you’re still recovering from a bad breakup, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with you and me. Call me. Tell Vanni to give me your number so I can call you. I hope I didn’t do or say anything to hurt you, to make you feel bad, but if I did, at least give me a chance to apologize. Nikki, it was one of the nicest weekends of my life. Come on, baby. I’m dying here. Love, Joe. He