Ferris Mx > Recent Status Updates

I have to assume there are betrayals in most marriages. The goal, I suppose, is not to allow any that are larger than the strength of the partnership.

I felt at once as if I were protecting him from and streeling myself for the destruction he didn't yet know that I would cause.

Was this what marriage was, the slow process of getting to know another individual far better than was advisable?

I couldn't have imagined at the time that the applause was the moment of my greatest professional achievement. It was the most public recognition I ever received for being myself rather than an extension of someone else or for being a symbol. A few teachers clapping is a humble triumph, but it touched me. In years since, I have received great quantities of attention, and I have never enjoyed it a fraction as much.

"Just because it feels good doesn't mean it's wrong", said the rabbi.
vs. earlier
"Just because it feels bad doesn't mean it's wrong" - Dr. Mahjoub

Now I don't feel so brilliant.

Quick marker of my prediction that Miriam is the golem made from the therapy clay.

So the little shit had witnessed my process. I felt violated, disgraced. I prayed that he couldn't fully comprehend what he had seen. At the very least, he knew it was something freaky.
Well, my yogurt was ready. I could eat in self-disgust and peace.

It's like I asked for a back massage and the masseuse used her tongue.

"Maybe it's the grad student in me, but I think I want to be challenged more than seduced."
"Robbie, they're the same thing."

Opening the laptop day after day, I realized it had happened: I was what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Like a fool, he answered his wife's questions honestly, believing only complete and total debasement could bring him closer to redemption.

Simone kept saying "I gave you clear instructions not to fuck her" until finally Ethan, in a spectacularly misguided moment of self-defense told her, "But I already had."

"We made a plan for phone sex. I don't want to be late."
This was a trick of hers, one I would come to understand as a classic Simonian tactic. In performing her bottomless appetite for her spouse, who was not me, she ostensibly pushed me away. But in telling me she'd be touching herself within seven minutes, well. She invited me to use my imagination. The contradiction was clear. I believed I knew what she wanted.

The most important thing to remember when you're in the pool is that you are in control. The moment you forget you wield the water you weave through is the moment ..., slowing you so even as you cup your hands ... there is no way to fully make up for what you have lost.

I think that's how everything went wrong. I started to panic.

Aren't you mad? Darcy's given me grief for eavesdropping, but at least I do it competently.

Jasper had said to her, "I love you in my life," and she'd replied, "I love you in mine." It had been a triumphant and horrible moment, never replicated.

The eleven-year-old widened her eyes. I could see she was impressed; that she understood she'd just witnessed some new dimension of heretofore impossible-to-imagine familiarity and derangement between these two adult women. On the other hand, Bruce gasped. Though the gasp might have happened after the plucking, when my sister grabbed my finger and ate the spinach from it.

My father texts again-
2nd ketamine experience now over
I order another double round and then-
I'm OK it was quite a ride
And then-
Yeah I'm OK it's anytime you wanna talk I'll tell you about it

My parents split us up by gender - my brother, twelve, the oldest, went with my father; my sister and I went with my mother. "That's fairy-tale cruelty," Bruce said when we were first getting to know each other. He didn't believe me. But that was before he'd met either of my parents, before either of them had moved to town.

"Wag the dog", I tell my freshmen, is an image that houses an idea. "Irrelevant circumstances are dictating our actions" is an idea without an image. Give me images, I tell them. They give me images by way of cliches - as in, "My mother's loove was a gift." I say yes, an image, readers love images, but can you make the image your own? They describe the gift's wrappng paper. Better, I say. Still wrong, but better.

When we fight - which isn't often - if I cry, I always tell Bruce to ignore the tears. "That's not me," I say. "That's just society's conditioning."
And he says, "It's okay to have emotions."
And I say, "Please don't use that word with me."

The movie's familiar dialogue mumbled in the background as he ate snacks and flipped through Triathlete. Afterward, he drank liberally from a family0-sized sports drink to replenish the electrolytes that get depleted by reading about elite athletes. Twelve minutes later he was sound asleep.

She watches Katherine pace across her office with quick birdy steps. She is slight but not tiny. Iona stopped befriending tiny women. They have Napoleonic predilections.

Her curiosity in Dominic used to be endless. How she marveled at his long-toed feet. Now they seem suspiciously arboreal.

With his jacket unbuttoned and his hands louchely pocketed, it was obvious Ichimonji was far too fit for fifty-five. As with any straight man with a six-pack after forty, this proved he was a psychopath.

Friday nights the family drove to Montauk where Henry proved himself an excellent father. Setting up bocce, stomping croquet wickets into the lawn. Spraying the hose for the kids to run through. Monopoly in front of the fire when the nights got chilly. But it was performative, most of it. He never lost himself entirely.

Most friendship quartets don't function in squares but in lines.

You can't trauma-proof life, and you can't hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up, really badly, and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up. It's the same with oppression. You don't gain any special knowledge from being marginalized. But you do gain something from stepping outside your hurt and examining your oppression.

This was one of my first lessons in how you make the future: moment by. moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you.

I didn't understand that my value system was a system, rather than a point on a line that represented *progress". My drugs were cleaner, my goods were abundant, my rights were enshrined. Was this not *progress*? I struggled with the same bafflement over *history*, which I still understood in rigid, narratively linear terms. I should have listened more carefully to Adela about history. I know Adela would say the same.