What’s with her?” says the painter. “She’s mad because she’s a woman,” Jon says. This is something I haven’t heard for years, not since high school. Once it was a shaming thing to say, and crushing to have it said about you, by a man. It implied oddness, deformity, sexual malfunction. I go to the living room doorway. “I’m not mad because I’m a woman,” I say. “I’m mad because you’re an asshole.

Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself.

But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life.

I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it.

A word after a word after a word is power.

I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.