She had been in situations like this, where people said, Convince me, and in none of those had they actually wanted to be convinced. She could lay down a perfect argument and they just invented new bullshit on the spot to justify why the answer was still no. When people said, Convince me, she knew it didn’t mean they had an open mind. It meant they had power and wanted to enjoy it a minute.

I will not be what I was made, but what I make.

My own fault. The equipment had safeties but your primary piece of protective equipment was your brain. There was a presumption that anyone entering this room was intelligent enough to keep away from hot things, sharp things, and things carrying large stores of momentum.

Someone from the Internet Writing Workshop sent me a link to the Gender Genie, where you paste in a section of text and it uses an algorithm to detect whether the author is male or female. Or, if you're an author, you can tell whether you're really nailing your opposite-sex characters. I mean, nailing their dialog.

That's the thing you learn about values: they're what people make up to justify what they did.

I read once that you need two things to be happy: any two of health, money, and love. You can cover the absense of one with the other two... But now I realized this was unmitigated bullshit, because health and money did not compare with love at all.

Apparently we're now in a state where most ads are full of people looking at us in a way that would heat us up down to our toes if it happened in real life, and we don't think anything of it.