Tuesday—we had school for the first time. Madame O’Malley had a moment of silence at the beginning of French class, a class that was always punctuated with long moments of silence, and then asked us how we were feeling. “Awful,” a girl said. “En français,” Madame O’Malley replied. “En français.

Why are breakfast foods breakfast foods?

Interesting capitalization,' I said. 'Yeah. I'm a big believer in random capitalization. The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle.

It's almost as if the way you imagine my dead self says more about you than it says about either the person I was or the whatever I am now.

Teenagers are extremely funny, and extremely clever and intellectually curious. But they're also willing to ask questions about the meaning of life without disguising them around irony, and ask questions about what are our responsibilities to other people without having to couch it in irony.

It was nice - in the dark and the quiet... and her eyes looking back, like there was something in me worth seeing.

In retrospect Hank I don't know why I spent four years writing this book when I could have just made a hit sing-a-ma-jig album.