It is certainly true that cooking is therapeutic, creative and all those other faintly creepy self-helpish words. I would love to tell you that learning to cook was part of my journey toward actualization. I would love to tell Oprah this. I would love to tell Oprah this while weeping. But I learned to cook for a much simpler reason: in the abject hope that people would spend time with me if I put good things in their mouth. It is, in other words (like practically everything else I do), a function of my desperation for emotional connection and acclaim.

There's an invisible army of woman and men who really don't get why we give so much of ourselves to football. And they need to SPEAK UP.

A good teacher, after all, wields the authority of a parent with none of the psychological baggage. The best of them are semi-mysterious figures whose wisdom seems boundless and whose approval helps us discover who we are.

Football offers us a sanitized spectacle of combat that has a clear resolution, which we need more and more today given our incoherent overseas "wars."

If you want to fight a cult, you've got to form a cult.

Americans seem to be living in a state of fear about the world, one that just keeps intensifying. I mean, look at our cars and homes. They've become these massive barricades. Look at what we watch on TV and in the movies - it's all a bunch of violent ideation. And all these TV shows about dead bodies.

The single biggest reason I got my stories taken in various literary magazines - and I want to stress this - is because I refused to give up. Period.