Fiona > Recent Status Updates

This writing is so same-samey. "When I pulled my forehead off the glass, there was a huge greasy smudge where I’d touched it. I tried to wipe it away but it just made the window cloudy. I remember looking through this cloudy window, trying to rub it to make it better and nothing would help. I just kept rubbing and rubbing and rubbing. Until Rod found me somehow."

"Actually, no. I don’t like putting it that way—you’re never not yourself. You’re always you. It’s just, sometimes, who you are…who you are is a shitty person."

"I was sick to my stomach without him. I was…kicking myself. Every day. Waking up in tears. My mom kept telling me to track him down. To take it back. But it felt like it was too late. He’d gone on without me. To make his dreams come true. As he should have." This is the kind of stuff that works in writing but not when spoken, which takes me out of the illusion a little that this is all from "interviews."

"'No,' I said. “She was nervous even before I mentioned seeing her in the car. Sorry if I bungled getting information out of her.'
'I didn’t have high expectations,' Gin said. 'Don’t worry about it.'"

"'So that I could be happy right where I am, I decided to do things ‘in moderation.’ So that I can look after myself and those I care about, I work at a moderately busy workplace, earn a moderate wage, have fun in moderation.… People look at me and say I lack ambition. But isn’t ‘moderation’ the greatest ambition we can have? I’m being really ambitious in trying to stay happy and within the lines of moderation.'"

"It was her decision how long she would rest for and when she would get back up on her feet again. Perhaps it was only when a person became able to choose to take time off and set their own pace that they’d truly grown up."

"She realized that there was no miracle cure for inertia better than responsibility. Her body, once heavy and waterlogged, grew light like a towel dried crisp in the sun. That feeble voice that’d echoed round her ears, questioning her right to take responsibility for another life, gradually faded away."

pg. 515
"Avoid condoms with spermicide, as they are impregnated with nonoxynol-9, which does not improve their effectiveness, shortens their shelf life, and paradoxically increases the risk of sexually transmitted disease if exposed, as it damages the vaginal microbiome."

"People say the poor love to dream, but that isn't quite right. Dreaming is the privilege of the moneyed, and the world has all kinds of ways to protect their dreams."

"If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own."

"Connor realized that going through a tough time wasn’t the issue, it was letting it change you permanently. He’d lost sight of how Enduring Hardships Connor was a sharper-edged, less tolerant character. That Connor went in expecting the worst of everyone, wearing it as his armor. […] A doom spiral, where whatever lever you pulled, you were going down into the sea."

“Some people—and I don’t mean bad people, all sorts of people—have no interest in changing their behavior in order to seek better outcomes, and the condition is lifelong. Once you realize you’re dealing with one of those people you can make an informed decision about how much energy to give them.”

"If you’d been sent a dick pic tonight, intended for another woman, and I said you’re ultimately in the wrong for not loving me enough, how would that go down?"

"But he wasn’t angry. He was shocked and bereft, bewildered and queasy, in that particular way you were when you complacently thought you were going to choose the moment, and it was chosen for you."

"Bel wondered at a world where you needed men to protect you against other men, patriarchy as Mafia racket."

"Knowing something was ending, and that it was better off ending, didn’t stop it hurting. Nor, apparently, stop the mad urge to last-minute repair it."

Too much detail with names, positions, etc. I've never read this genre and thought I'd try but it's not for me.

"To have a uterus and ovaries is to walk the line between the potential for reproduction and trauma, and that can only go on for so long."

"The [Environmental Working Group], an activist group that reports on toxic chemicals and pollutants, often overstates risks associated with everyday products (in one survey, 79% of toxicologist felt the EWG overstated risks from chemicals). You may be familiar with their 'dirty dozen list' for fruits and vegetables, but a peer-reviewed study [says it doesn't follow established scientific procedures]."

"They are not “feminine hygiene” products because: • Needing them is not a sign of being feminine; it’s a sign that you need something to catch blood. • They’re not hygiene products because menstruating is not unhygienic. They are menstrual products. And they’re essential."

"In Ali's mind, anxiety is a rubberized running track you visit at predictable times, looping around and around. Grief, however, is a dark, endlessly meandering tunnel you can fall into anytime you're not looking."

"As such, the soldier-police were predictably increasing their presence around all Chain-Gang All-Stars events and many politicians had already appeared before holostreams to implore nonviolence. An absurd thing for the murderous state to plead for, but, as always, the massive violence of the state was “justice,” was “law and order,” and resistance to perpetual violence was an act of terror."

"'Look around you. Those who care enough to risk anything real for what they love are actually surprisingly few. First of all, it’s very rare just to discover that you feel that way about anything. And when you do, the environment and circumstances you need to devote yourself to it are fairly hard to find.'"

"It is important to know that earlier periods are associated with some health conditions, most notably breast cancer, endometriosis, and chronic pain conditions. [...] The increased risk of breast cancer is believed to be the result of a greater cumulative lifetime exposure to estrogen, but the mechanism for the increased risk of endometriosis and chronic pain is not well understood."

"I must yet again insert an exasperated comment about how naming things because they were first found in men is hopelessly misogynistic. But if you have been doing medical research by looking primarily at men, what do you expect? It’s a wonder the heart isn’t called the andro because it was first studied in a man."

“I don’t deserve you,” he used to say, before they were married. “Your goodness, your stability, how calm you always are—the way you just get on with things, and make it look so easy…” Respect—that was what she’d taken his words to connote, but might they not in fact have been intended as a confession, that whatever it was he felt for her, it was nothing even remotely resembling love?

"He was worn out, and life revolted him. He couldn’t cope with all these things it contaminated. The past ten or so years’ worth of work was quietly turning its back on him. It wasn’t his anymore. It belonged to a person he used to know, or thought he’d known—once upon a time."