When I read that not forcing kids to hug their relatives is a new trend, I have to smile. My mother never forced a hug. When my bombastic uncle insisted on a kiss on the lips, a big ol’ smackeroo, I turned my cheek. Even at age five, and…
Is Charm Offensive?
The pad Thai was meh, and the fortune cookies a great disappointment. One just said “Behind a successful man is always.” And my husband’s said he would “win over others with his charm.”
I snorted. “That’s so not you.”
Our friends were aghast,…
Bargoers said aloud by rote, cynically but accurately, “That ain’t no Jimmy Dean,” because whatever the meat was, it was not pork sausage. Everybody called it monkey meat, or mystery meat, which did not diminish patrons’ appetites and in fact sold more skewers due to its mystery.
This is our newest parlor game: talking with AI chatbots as though we are talking to another person. These conversations can be amusing, terrifying, instructive, or blandly predictable. They have addicted many of us, and the chatbots are responding in kind, using the first-person pronoun and developing whatever persona…
Nobody should want to run a business like the lighter factory, with its puny, per-unit profit scheme. No American company would even try to do what the Chinese do, by hyper-control of their people.
Surely the most delightful of our monsters is Nessie. Nothing jarring or subliminally weird in her backstory, no hopeless crushes on miniature mortals, no wreaking of harm or sucking of blood or heedless toppling of skyscrapers. Just a friendly, long necked, improbably ancient creature who surfaces now and again,…
Risk in romance is friction with the potential of reward. Being alone is the friction of no prospect of reward whatsoever.
Gloppy paint, a velvet couch, the ridges meant to cool a coffee cup to the touch, a lid that when spun emits a hollow sound of increasingly lower pitches as it empties, like a bottle whistle….
What could class mean now in America, where populists decry education as brainwashing, influencers look rich in things and lifestyles, and oligarchs spend their time pasting fool’s-gold to everything instead of governing for the benefit of the people?
There is no arguing against winning and success, which invariably feels great. The problem with winning is that it is nowhere near as interesting as failure. It sounds just like the loser to complain that winning is “boring,” in that it prompts no reflection or analysis. But that complaint also rings true.