By Robin Abcarian
Los Angeles Times - April 15, 2013
Random violence hits us hard because we can’t tell ourselves what we might have done to avoid it. “I would never live in that neighborhood” or “I would never walk there at night” don’t work as rationalizations when you are talking about something like a footrace in downtown Boston on a sunny day.
By Anonymous
Thought Catalog - April 4th, 2013
In response to the article:
This is the most shameless and disgusting admission I have ever read in all of TC’s entirety. I once was in her same shoes, but also at the same time in his - I was in love with someone whose lack of confidence / secret wandering genitals trapped me in a cage. I received it all - the what-are-you-wearing texts, the you-cant-go-with-your-friends conversations, the why-are-you-drunk-on-your-twenty-first-birthday argument, and of course, the why-havent-you-texted-sad-face after an hour bullshit inquiry. I was in it all. And then I heard it all - all this author is saying and more.
What this author doesn’t seem to get, as well as the callous men and women who divulge in serial-cheating for the sake of “escaping their somber lives”, is that the problem is themselves. The problem was always themselves. There is none of this “he drove me right into that basketball player’s arms” or “he should have known” crap. It’s all a fistful of bull crap. You can’t have every pie in the store, you buy yours and you eat it, or you throw it away when you’ve decided you’ve had enough.
All of you who are over the age of mental maturation and yet can say “I love you” to someone who actually loves you and then turn around and let your genitals drip on someone else deserves nothing more than .
By Heidi Liu
Thought Catalog - March 4, 2013
I need win the race because if I lose, well, then I Lose and I think again about what my best friend had once told me when we were children: “I just think that every time you love someone, even in the smallest way, you give them a bit of yourself. But we are finite beings and if you give too much away, you will have nothing left. Then, you will never be able to love again the way you can, now. And the idea of that is just so sad to me, to not feel anything.” So, to keep from running empty, I try to snatch back the pieces of myself that I had let you hold on to.
“It’s mine, give it back. I was just letting you borrow it for a while but I want it back now because I need it. It’s not for you.”
Burning bridges is my bad habit and perhaps the biggest problem of all is that I am really fucking good at it. Practice, I guess. So now, in the face of all these goodbyes I am about to embark upon, I say ugly things that I don’t mean. Even worse are the ugly things I say that I do mean, that I never said because I loved you but now, if I say them, it means I don’t love you anymore, right? I get too drunk and do ugly things like lie, or yell, or let go of your hand when you want me to teach you how to waltz on the balcony with a cigarette pressed between your pale lips that I used to kiss (it’s cold out tonight).
I look at you and you and you and I think to myself, I could have loved you, and then I think with morbid glee, but I won’t. There is not enough time for me to love any of you and so while it is all right for you to think I am interesting it is not all right for you to think anything beyond that. We are passing fancies so let’s not make it more than it is.
By Claire Suddath
Bloomberg Businessweek - January 7, 2013
Jia Jiang wants to write for Bloomberg Businessweek. He has never written for a magazine and doesn’t have an idea for an article, but he still wants to see if we’ll give him a shot. After I tell him “no,” he drives to the University of Texas, Austin, where he plans to pester a professor into letting him lecture a class. In the past month, Jiang has asked a Southwest Airlines (LUV) flight attendant if he could give the on-board safety announcement and a Domino’s (DPZ) employee if he could deliver pizzas, and he also urged an ice cream shop to invent a flavor just for him. He makes at least one preposterous demand every day, records a video of himself doing it, and posts it on a blog at his website, entresting.com.
The Wall Street Journal - January 8, 2012
At first, Bitiya had wanted to be a doctor. But her father couldn’t afford her tuition or find a suitable guarantor for a loan that a bank would require.
By Williams S. Burroughs, 1959
The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.
By Cole Kazdin
The New York Times - January 3, 2012
Right around the time I reached my goal weight, I met the man I would marry. I was living in New York and working briefly in Los Angeles as a television producer; he was my video editor. I was 5-foot-3 and weighed 90 glorious pounds.
By Jeff Gordinier
Details Magazine - December 2012
If you go to Davis, California, and try to pay a visit to Slade Fiero, it’s quite possible that you will drive right past his house. Because of his peculiar line of work, one that gives him a unique vantage point on the wormy root cellar of the male psyche, you might expect to find him somewhere dank and drippy and catacombed. A place, maybe, like that tumbledown Victorian in Fight Club. But what you’ll find instead, under a cloudless blue Sacramento Valley sky, is a well-tended suburban house. There’s an orange tree basking in the sunshine and a wrought-iron fence around the lawn. There are tinkling wind chimes and cacti in terra-cotta pots. Elementary-school kids float down the street in a bicycle squadron just as Fiero opens the front door.
By Haruki Murakami, 2012
Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that’s where I imagine it - there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.
