Jolene > Recent Status Updates

"And Catherine, try to be glad, without being absurd! The whole household need not witness the sight of your welcoming a runaway servant as a brother." 👀

I'm told I must draw a line, but I can't figure out where I end and my children begin -- like the mint in the garden that jams its appendages in the ground, travels sideways, sprouts up feet away, clear across the lawn.

I have cried so many times while reading this book. I love it. It makes me feel so incredibly seen.

One PDF featured a series of impenetrable bar graphs charting my pregnancy's risks. At the time I received it, it had felt so reassuring, so precious in my inbox. I did not consider that it only ran the odds on a small band of conditions and that it had nothing to say about an obscure genetic disorder with a name I had already forgotten how to spell.

When Will turned his head quickly his hair seemed to shake out light, and some persons thought they saw decided genius in this coruscation. Mr Casaubon, on the contrary, stood rayless.

Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness, Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets in the mosaics above, and the red drapery spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.

It had not occurred to Lydgate that he had been a subject of eager mediation to Rosamond, who had neither any reason for throwing her marriage into distant perspective nor any pathological studies to divert her mind from that ruminating habit, that inward repetition of looks, words, and phrases, which makes a large part of the lives of most girls.

"You are a good young man," she said. "But I do not like husbands. I will never have another."

And to me it is one of her most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her, and to whom she is grateful.

Mr Bulstrode had also a deferential bending attitude in listening, and an apparently fixed attentiveness in his eyes which made those persons who thought themselves worth hearing infer that he was seeking the utmost improvement from their discourse. Others, who expected to make no great figure, disliked this kind of moral lantern turned on them.

Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own.

She did not look at things from the proper feminine angle. The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for heaven.

She was perfectly unconstrained and without irritation towards him now, and he was gradually discovering the delight there is in frank kindness and companionship between a man and a woman who have no passion to hide or confess.

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps us.

Dorothea's inferences may seem large; but really life could never have gone on at any period but for this liberal allowance of conclusion, which has facilitated marriage under the difficulties of civilization. Has anyone ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?

This elevating thought lifted her above her annoyance at being twitted with her ignorance of political economy, that never-explained science which was thrust as an extinguisher over all her lights.

The limits of variation are really much wider than one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and favorite love-stories in prose and verse.

(... and gay hockey shows)

The therapist was going to just say this was about my dead parents and my dead uncle, maybe my aunt who was still alive in Ecuador doing this and that without me, eating salad and going for haircuts and knitting in front of the news. I was too cute and smart and interesting to have been damaged by such low-hanging fruit, could you imagine?

Everything that moved my flesh was typically in the minor tones, cumbias, boleros, the Hava Nagila, the Locrian mode in Björk. But I had not yet tried tenderness from a man who hadn't hurt me. I had not yet tried having my tears kissed away by a starry-eyed boy with beautiful hair. I had not yet tried E major in the spring. That I had not tried.

Like the other Facebook photo albums dedicated to his travels, this one was titled something in Spanish. La tierra del olvido. In his hands, Spanish had the aesthetic appeal of raw chicken, the liminal monstrosity stuck between a frightened animal and a date-night roast chicken.

The Latine campus groups seemed to be full of people who loved their families. When they performed moving spoken-word poems about their ancestors or about their abuelas cooking or singing or sharing gems of wisdom, I found myself disassociating and, like in a fever dream, all the abuelas melted together into one large, magnanimous superabuela that shared a room with Jesus in the sky and sat above us like a pancake.

It was my first time seeing white people dance outside of television and for what it's worth I thought it was very brave.

You can't pretend you don't give a shit when you're comping a secret society. You clearly care, a lot. The thing about being at Harvard is that in order to be there at all, you would have had to be the kind of person who applies to Harvard.

I could tell he wanted me to be impressed. He wanted me to ask him how he knew Spanish, but I was not curious because there were a finite number of explanations for a boy such as him at a place such as this and I felt no interest in exploring the known world.

It didn't seem right that a smart boy would be so stunningly sincere.

My grandfather taught me how to pick a lock with two bobby pins; he taught me the extradition laws of major Latin American countries; he taught me the difference between the Marxism of the Sandinistas and the FARC and how to make Nescafé taste good (cinnamon and condensed milk). He said it was simply what you had to know as a cultured person and that it was a shame that schools didn't teach anything these days.

Magnanimous of the man with the mind that brought forth Middlesex to also possess the heart to volunteer his time with artsy college kids. We had long aged out of being precocious, and we all tried so hard. A litter of children and their god. . . I wanted to think about him, I didn't want us to be friends. I lived in the real world, and the real world was sad, and he lived in literature, and literature was beautiful.

Everything is good, except we miss you dearly, I said.

Had I been your age and had I been your friend I would have been bright and sharp with you. And I truly wish we had been friends. I love you so much but I can only love you as your mother. Sometimes a mother becomes the worst enemy because she can't be the best friend.

I would only say it's sad. It's so sad I have no other adjectives left.