Books are surviving in this intense, fragmented, hyper-accelerated present, and my sense and hope is that things will slow down again and people will want more time for a contemplative life. There is no way people can keep up this pace. No one is happy. Two or three hours to read should not be an unattainable thing, although I hope we get to that stage without needing a corporate sponsored app to hold our hand. The utopian in me has my fingers crossed that we haven't quite figured out the digital future just yet. After all, the one thing we know about people: they always surprise.

For a long time, I let my mother say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.

Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women.

She's sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.

Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.

If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.

It's never the changes we want that change everything.