For my mother’s entire life, her mother was less a mother than splintered bits of shrapnel she carried around in her body, sharp, rusty debris that threatened to puncture an organ if she turned a certain way.
Novelty has a way of intensifying memory. The less often you do something, the deeper the memory burrows in.
Life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally — and sometimes maddeningly — who we are.
In the history of the world, a whole story has never been told.
My goal in life is to be content. By that I don’t mean “fine” or “basically satisfied.” I don’t mean settling. I mean, for last of better terms, feeling like I’m in the right life.
At some point in my early forties I realized that my primary goal in just about any verbal exchange is to lighten the mood.
For a kid, self-esteem can be as close at hand as a sports victory or a sense of belonging in a peer group. It’s a much more complicated and elusive proposition for adults, subject to the responsibilities and vicissitudes of grown-up life.
We use our gadgets for distraction and entertainment. We use them to avoid work while giving the impression that we’re actually working hard.
The search for happiness has long been a dominant feature of American life. It’s a byproduct of prosperity, not to mention the most famous line in the Declaration of Independence.
Air travelers, of course, are famous for their hubris. They carry on too many bags and use the restroom when the seat-belt sign is on.
In the world of opinion writing, there’s something called the ‘to be sure’ paragraph. A sort of rhetorical antibiotic, it seeks to defend against critics by injecting a tiny bit of counter-argument before moving on with the main point.
I have a distinct memory, dating back to 1989 or so, of sitting around with my college dorm mates talking about a new term that was popping up everywhere: ‘political correctness.’
What I want is to have people’s notion of adulthood no longer be so defined by being a parent. There is some kind of conventional wisdom that you’re not really a mature person until you become a parent.