My friend Courtney sent me a conversation. She says:

I was on my way back to the apartment this morning after moving the car and saw a woman dropping her 6-ish-year-old girl off at the bus. I thought you would appreciate their exchange:

“Now, you behave today. You got a problem, you talk to the teacher. No gettin’ in any fights.”

“OK.”

“And no talkin’ back!”

“OK”

“And no hittin’ anybody…”

“OK”

“less they hit you first.”

The best parts of The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood:

Good egg, he says. Small things like good eggs delight him, small things like bad eggs depress him. He’s easy to please, but difficult to protect.

West is not the tool-using type, though: the only hammer in the house belongs to Tony, and for anything other than simple nail-pounding she looks in the Yellow Pages. Why risk your life?

throwing your leftovers out the window, the ribbons, the wrapping paper, the half-eaten filo pastries and the champagne truffles, things you’d used up just by looking at them.

The best part of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon:

time is not like space. And when you put something down somewhere, like a protractor or a biscuit, you can have a map in your head to tell you where you have left it, but even if you don’t have a map it will still be there because a map is a representation of things that actually exist so you can find the protractor or the biscuit again. And a timetable is a map of time, except that if you don’t have a timetable time is not there like the landing and the garden and the route to school. Because time is only the relationship between the way different things change, like the earth going round the sun and atoms vibrating and clocks ticking and day and night and waking up and going to sleep.

time is a mystery, and not even a thing, and no one has ever solved the puzzle of what time is, exactly. And so, if you get lost in time it is like being lost in a desert, except that you can’t see the desert because it is not a thing.

And this is why I like timetables, because they make sure you don’t get lost in time.

An excerpt from my Writer’s Almanac a few days ago:

Today is the first day of autumn. In the next few weeks, the shortening of daylight hours will tell the trees around us that winter is coming and they’ll begin shutting down their food-making process, preparing to live on the sugar they’ve stored for the winter. All the green chlorophyll in their leaves will be withdrawn into the trees’ branches and the leaves will turn red and yellow and orange and brown.

one egg

do not think me twisted

when, despite the world’s galactic

ricochet of violence, i prefer, these days,

the retreat of breakfast.

over strong, creamed coffee i have time to contemplate

the blessedly innocuous catastrophes:

burnt toast. a shortage of butter.

how to make the meal for two using only one egg.

believe me,

i know how lucky i am.

-Maya Stein (who has a blog)

(via Andrea>

From the May 2005 issue of O Magazine, Brain to Brain: How to Get Anyone to Agree with You.

Howard Gardener, a Harvard cognitive psychologist and author says, One interesting fact is that totalitarian leaders almost invariably have not traveled. Hitler didn’t travel. Stalin didn’t travel. Saddam Hussein never traveled. I think they didn’t want to have their orthodoxy challenged.

Three of my favorite secrets from those currently available on Postsecret:

• I dance in vacant elevators.
• I don’t eat Twinkies, but when I’m in the bakery aisle at the store, I like to smash them in their packaging.
• Never liked your poetry.

Send your secret to:

PostSecret

13345 Copper Ridge Rd

Germantown, Maryland

USA 20874-3454

(via Fussy)

I like this poem. It’s from a book called Sure Signs.

Selecting a Reader

by Ted Kooser

First, I would have her be beautiful,

and walking carefully up on my poetry

at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,

her hair still damp at the neck

from washing it. She should be wearing

a raincoat, an old one, dirty

from not having money enough for the cleaners.

She will take out her glasses, and there

in the bookstore, she will thumb

over my poems, then put the book back

up on its shelf. She will say to herself,

“For that kind of money, I can get

my raincoat cleaned.” And she will.

“They had my mouth all stretched open, and my lips were cracking, so they kept putting Vaseline on, but it would dry out and get all stiff. They would just slap more on, like everywhere, without looking where they were putting it. I was laying there thinking, this is basically my personal hell, my mouth stretched open and my lips cracking as strangers apply Vaseline without discretion all over my face.”