Respect isn’t something you command through intimidation and intellectual bullying. It’s something you build through a long life of treating people how you want to be treated.
I know he loves talking about death. It just takes him a second to get warmed up. “You know,” he says. “It just can’t be a bad thing. Because it’s everything.
Hugs feel good even when they come from strangers. Ergo, we should all be hugging more.
Things I’ve learned from my mother: Luxury is nice, but creativity is nicer.
I’ve never seen Star Wars or The Godfather, so that would be a good excuse for us to spend a bunch of time together.
When someone shows you how little you mean to them, and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself. You are not made up of compartments; you are one whole person. What gets said to you gets said to all of you.
And one day you’ll get out of bed to pee, and someone will say, “I hate it when you leave” and you will WANT to rush back. You’ll think, stuff like this only happens to characters played by Jennifer Garner, right? but it’s happening to you and it keeps happening even when you cry or misbehave or show him how terrible you are at planning festive group outings. He seems to be there without reservation. He pays attention. He listens. He seems to want to stay.
I know that when I am dying, looking back, it will be women that I regret having argued with, women I sought to impress, to understand...
I have only the vaguest memory of a life before fear. Every morning when I wake up there is one blissful second before I took around the room and remember my daily terrors.
A night of carousing never passed without me stepping outside the experience to think, Yes, this must be what it is to be young.
I especially like it when a guy starts out rude, explains that it’s a defense mechanism, and then turns even ruder once I get to know him.
Soon you will find yourself in more and more situations you don’t want to run from. At work you’ll realize that you’ve spent the entire day in your body, really in it, not imagining what you look like to the people who surround you but just being who you are. You are a tool being put to its proper use. That changes a lot of things.
Remember when you discovered your father owned a book called “How To Disappear and Never Be Found?” You’re sure it was just research for new and creative ways of thinking, for concepts that might apply to his work, but it raised the distinct possibility that there is something very upsetting that people you love could do instead of dying.
I can’t wait to be eighty. So I can shock people by saying “rim job” in casual conversation.
A month into the semester, I would start showing up twenty minutes late to class again. The rewards weren’t enough to keep me on task, and life got in the way. My mind wandered to the future, postcollege, when I’d create my own schedule that served my need to eat a rich snack every five to fifteen minutes. As for the disappointment written across the teacher’s face? I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, care.
I couldn’t always remember his face, so my visual for him became my feet, bare and pale and pressed against the wall as we talked for hours.
I can feel them. The babies. They’re not crawling all over me. They’re not vomiting in my hair or shrieking. They’re doing perfectly normal baby things, and I’m keeping them alive. But I resent them. Their constancy, their intrusion on my relationship and my free time and my naps and my imagination and my heart. They’ve come too soon, and I can’t do any of what I had planned. All I can do is survive.
Intrigued as I was by this new dynamic of disrespect, at my core I didn’t want to be spoken to like that. It made me feel silenced, lonely, and far away from myself, a feeling that I believe, next to extreme nausea sans vomiting, is the depth of human misery.
I think a fair amount about the fact that we’re all going to die. It occurs to me at incredibly inopportune moments – I’ll be standing in a bar, having managed to get an attractive guy to laugh, and I’ll be laughing, too, and maybe dancing a little bit, and then everything goes slo-mo for a second and I’ll think: Are these people aware that we’re all going to the same place in the end?
Finally, one day, I couldn’t stand it anymore: I walked into the kitchen, laid my head on the table, and asked my father, “How are we supposed to live every day if we know we’re going to die?” He looked at me, clearly pained by the dawning of my genetically predestined morbidity. He had been the same way as a kid. A day never went by where he didn’t think about his eventual demise. He sighed, leaned back in his chair, unable to conjure a comforting answer. “You just do.
Menstruating is the only part of being female I have ever disliked. Everything else feels like a unique and covetable privilege, but this?