The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

Venice Beach: proof of the biological impossibility of imagining a person being simultaneously good-looking and poor.

Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective. Sometimes I'd just like to mace them. I want to tell them that I envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. And I want to throttle them for blindly handing over the world to us like so much skid-marked underwear.

Ten commandments yet seven deadly sins: conflict?

Unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn't arrive.

Workshops and seminars are basically financial speed dating for clueless people.

Below a certain point, if you keep too quiet, people no longer see you as thoughtful or deep; they simply forget you.