MaxPoe

“ The Paradoxical Commandments

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.”
― Kent M. Keith, The Silent Revolution: Dynamic Leadership in the Student Council

“Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It’s a blessing and a curse, being in this place of comfortable marital security. On one hand, you’ve got someone who will come right out and tell you if you have broccoli in your teeth or if you neglected to apply enough deodorant, somebody who will lie to you and tell you that you don’t need a face-lift and that he can see the triceps muscles you’ve been working diligently to unearth, somebody who’s seen you naked on numerous occasions without laughing or cringing or running screaming into the next room. On the other hand, you also have evenings out that look like this:
[Sitting at a stoplight on the way to dinner.]
ME: What are you doing?
JOE: I’m trying to [yank] pull out [tug] this three-inch [rip] nose hair. Where did it come from, anyway? Damn it, I can’t get it. Hey, your fingers are smaller, and you have nails. Can you grab it?
ME: You want me to pull your nose hair out?
JOE: Well, I can’t sit there at dinner with it just hanging out like this. You didn’t notice it before we left?
ME: I was very busy trying to squeeze into these Spanx, thank you very much. I think I have manicure scissors in the glove box. [Finds scissors, hands them to Joe. The light turns green.]
JOE: Hold the wheel while I do this.
ME: I don’t think this is such a great idea.
[Joe sticking scissors tips up his nose and snipping randomly; Jenna gripping steering wheel with white knuckles.]
JOE: Shit, I can’t see it without my cheaters. You do it.
ME: Honey, I would rather not stick scissors up your nose while you’re driving. I’ll do it when we get to the restaurant.
And, of course, I did, because it turned out Joe forgot his reading glasses* (which always makes for a fun and romantic game of “Wait, Read Me the Entrée Specials Again” at restaurants) so he simply couldn’t.
“You’re going to write about this,” Joe accused me as I stashed my manicure scissors back in the glove box.
“Are you kidding me?” I asked, offended. “Of course I’m going to write about this! This shit is comedy gold right here.”
Like I said, the man knows me inside and out.”
― Jenna McCarthy, I've Still Got It...I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It: Awkwardly True Tales from the Far Side of Forty

“I’m going to guess that in our seventeen years together, Joe and I have eaten an average of at least one meal out a week—plus at least one or two weeks a year when we are on vacation and we get to enjoy twenty-one restaurant meals. Using this rough calculation, I have heard my husband utter that exact line approximately one thousand four hundred times. If I didn’t madly love the man, or I had years of bitter resentment born of unmet needs and unheard desires festering in me, I can see where this might make me want to stick something sharp into his eye socket and twist it around a few dozen times for good measure. But I do and I don’t, respectively, so his attempted joke is actually endearing. It’s one of his things that I’d miss tragically if it went away. It would be that “Yeah, I hated it” line—not his dashing good looks or prowess with power tools or skills on the basketball court or anything else the rest of the world can plainly see—that I’d get most choked up on if I were delivering his eulogy today.
There was a breakthrough, pivotal scene in the epically good movie Good Will Hunting, where Robin Williams plays a therapist reminiscing about his dead wife with his patient (Matt Damon). “She used to fart in her sleep,” Williams tells the clueless Damon character during an otherwise unproductive therapy session. “One night it was so loud it woke the dog up . . . She’s been dead two years, and that’s the shit I remember . . . little things like that, those are the things I miss the most. Those little idiosyncrasies that only I knew about; that’s what made her my wife. People call these things imperfections, but they’re not. No, that’s the good stuff.”
That.”
― Jenna McCarthy, I've Still Got It...I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It: Awkwardly True Tales from the Far Side of Forty