Category: categories

You Shall Know Our Velocity

I’ve been sick for a week. This gave me a chance to finish Dave Eggers’s latest book. I also watched several episodes of “Newlyweds” the new MTV reality series. If you have some spare time, allow me to recommend the book. My favorite parts:

“Passing a middle-aged couple in matching jackets:

–You two need to change.

–What? Why? the middle aged couple said, to my head, in my head.

–Because you are wearing the same jacket.

–We bought them while on vacation in Newport.

–You must be hidden from view.

–The jackets are nice.

–They are not nice. You must change to save us all.”

“–You, on the motorcycle.

–Yes.

–It’s only a matter of time.

–I know.”

“I would know that in any city, at an hour like this, there are people sleeping. That most people are sleeping. But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there are a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it’s here that we need to be.”

Wedding Quotes

Me: What about, ” Where there is love, there is pain.”

Her: That’s perfect.

Me: “Three things can’t be hidden: coughing, poverty, and love.”

Her: Coffee and what?

Me: “Three things can’t be hidden: coughing, poverty, and love.”

Her: Pottery?

Other promising options include:

  • Loving a woman who scorns you is like licking honey from a thorn.
  • Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.
  • What female heart can despise gold?

Copy Paper Run

Office Max has stereos for sale. A customer who’s testing the speakers tunes it to a hip-hop station.

Me: Nothing makes you feel whiter than gangsta rap

Rachel: Gangsta rap in Office Max.

Me: True dat.

Details

Flipping through the invitation book at our local stationer.

Me: These are lovely.

Bryan: Wow. Yeah.

Me: They’re not red though.

Bryan: That was my thought.

Me: But do people really remember enough about the invitation to be surprised that it doesn’t match the wedding colors?

Bryan: No way. I can’t imagine a single person doing that.

Me: What if they do? What if there are entire groups of people sitting around wondering why our wedding invitation doesn’t match our table clothes and the bridesmaid dresses?

Bryan: Come on. No one is going to notice.

Me: I think I might be one of those people who noticed.

Bryan: No, you wouldn’t.

Me: I might.

Bryan: Well then, I think you may be the exception to the rule.

Me: And/or the kind of person we wouldn’t want to be friends with anyway.

Bryan: Ha! True. Let’s get them.

Me: OK.

Unbearable and Trifling

From Life of Pi by Yann Martel:

“I would have won the Governor General’s Academic Medal… were it not for a beef-eating pink boy with a neck like a tree trunk and a temperament of unbearable good cheer.

I still smart a little at the slight. When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.”