what we call things matters. ... The words we use, and how we perceive those words, reflect how we value, or devalue, people, places, and things.

Frankly, I'm mainly telling the story to myself. Thinking about audience is too daunting, and worst case, invites you to homogenize, to soften the hard edges of things.

I've always had a certain facility with words.

More than a decade after our fellow citizens began bedding down on the sidewalks, their problems continue to seem so intractable that we have begun to do psychologically what government has been incapable of doing programmatically. We bring the numbers down--not by solving the problem, but by deciding it's their own damn fault.

Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it's sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest.

Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.

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.