You tell yourself that noise is what defines silence. Without noise, silence would not be golden. Noise is the exception.

Portland in particular is a cheap enough place to live that you can still develop your passion - painting, writing, music. People seem less status-conscious. Even wealthy people buy second-hand clothes and look a little bit homeless.

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

The short stories tend to be a journalistic gathering of anecdotes that are put together to make something larger.

You cannot be the person they know and the great, glorious person you want to become. Not at the same time.

Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.

For the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn't such a great skill to have.