MTV introduced me to punk music and gay people.
Acting lets you escape the real world and make out with people you are not married to. It lets you live in the skin of another person and run away from the person you actually are.
Every mother needs a wife.
Imagine spreading everything you care about on a blanket and then tossing the whole thing up in the air. The process of divorce is about loading that blanket, throwing it up, watching it all spin, and worrying what stuff will break when it lands.
Gavin de Becker talks about this in his wonderful book The Gift Of Fear. He talks about how the word “no” should be the “end of discussion, not the beginning of a negotiation”.
Career is the thing that will not fill you up and never make you truly whole. Depending on your career is like eating cake for breakfast and wondering why you start crying an hour later.
You are six or twelve or fifteen and you look in the mirror and you hear a voice so awful and mean that it takes your breath away. It tells you that you are fat and ugly and you don’t deserve love. And the scary part is the demon is your own voice.
I was trapped in an awful spiral of insecure narcissism.
Even demons gotta sleep.
Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled with leather novels and chai tea.
Annie taught me that orphanages were a blast and being rich is the only thing that matters. Grease taught me being in a gang is nonstop fun and you need to dress sexier to have any chance of keeping a guy interested. But The Wizard of Oz was the ultimate. It dealt with friendship and fear and death and rainbows and sparkly red shoes.
It’s just that sometimes anger should just stay anger and tears can change anger to something else. However, if you do start crying in an argument and someone asks why, you can always say, “I’m just crying because of how wrong you are.
If it’s not funny, you don’t have to laugh.
You guys missed my cue,” I said. “No one noticed.” “I did.” “Relax, it was great.” “Relax” is a real tough one for me. Another tough one is “smile.” “Smile” doesn’t really work either. Telling me to relax or smile when I’m angry is like bringing a birthday cake into an ape sanctuary. You’re just asking to get your nose and genitals bitten off.
It can be hard, this life. Beautiful too.
Now everything is backed up on the cloud and you can find your phone if you lose it in a taxi. Don’t you realize it’s only a matter of time before our phones can FIND US?
I love Boston, but we sound like idiots.
Speaking of music, we will arrive with our own. We plan on delivering our baby to the soundtrack of Pink Floyd’s The Wall while simultaneously watching The Wizard of Oz. If this kid works with us, we guarantee your minds will be blown!
It was hard to feel like somebody didn’t like me. It felt like such a failure. I don’t care as much now. It’s really great. It’s like I can finally eat spicy food without the gut ache later, or something similar. I have a stomach for other people not stomaching me. Or at least I am working on it.
Sometimes this book stays in the present, other times I try to cut myself in half and count the rings. Occasionally I think about the future, but I try to do that sparingly because it usually makes me anxious.