Today is the only guarantee you get.

Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.

My sister is a public school teacher. She makes far far less money than I do, and gets almost no public attention for her work. Yet I believe what she does is infinitely more important and more difficult than what I do.

What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone.

Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.

We take our vitamins, we go to exercise class, we put on our seat belts. And then something blindsides us and gives the lie to our carefully constructed facade of safety.

You want to have fun with your kids, and no one has fun with someone who runs roughshod.