Occasionally when I'm procrastinating writing, I'll while away the hours on iTunes. You can just keep going forever and find these bands you'd never normally hear of.

It’s hard, in America, not to equate ‘happiness’ with ‘things’.

People had an illogical, self-serving rationale when it came to interpreting the behavior of others.

She told me her father taught her to live life way beyond the cusp of it, way out in the outer reaches where most people never had the guts to go, where you got hurt. Where there was unimaginable beauty and pain ... They were always reminding themselves to stop measuring life in coffee spoons, mornings and afternoons, to keep swimming way, way down to the bottom of the ocean to find where the mermaids sang, each to each. Where there was danger and beauty and light. Only the now.

It felt as if we'd been to war together. Deep in a jungle, alone, I had relied on them, these strangers. They'd held me up in ways only people could. When it was over, an ending never felt like an ending, only an exhausted draw, we went our separate ways. Be we were bonded forever by the history of it, the simple fact they'd seen the raw side of me and me of them, a side no one, not even closest friends or family had ever seen before, or probably ever would.

It's a common feeling for people to feel intermittent antipathy toward individuals they're familiar with.

Dad's Theory of Arrogance--that everyone always assumes they're the Principal Character of Desire and/or Loathing in everybody else's Broadway Play.