More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I do not typically dissect the English language in my free time, but this line of semantic contemplation was sparked by something much more flagrant than a four-year-old telling me he has drip.
The year was 2001 and Dr. Google had not yet gotten their medical degree.
The Totalitarian Regime of Idiot Soothsayers with A Sunday Gravy Complex.
I’d assumed that a prophet was an unemployed mafia wannabe in a two-tone dress shirt.
My youth was categorized by the chaos of terrible Italian cooking, phony healing, and an FBI sting operation whose name would become one of the top trending hashtags on Twitter when HBO produced a documentary on a failed investigation ten years later. Long live #Focacciacolypse.
I ordered a gin and tonic because craft beer was a cult.
I pushed the gin and tonic away. It tasted like someone who’d be up all night worrying into her pillow while listening to a Daniel Kahneman audiobook on her AirPods.
my homeschool teacher wasn’t the brightest bulb in the…bulb store.”
“One word. No, two words. Garbage disposal. You thought you knew how to work that, too. And a third word...you’ll have fun and get outside your head for at least two hours unless you let the dude spend the night, which I can’t imagine. But maybe you will, and I’ll become Aunt A to a cute little FBI baby with itty bitty Air Maxes and an anxiety disorder.” “I cannot even begin to explain how that is way more than three words,” I replied.
“Your eyes are the color of the Pacific…Cooler,” he said. “And yours,” I answered, “are finer than a BOGO sale at Office Max.” Kyle pulled one of my hands between his. “That place closed.” His fingers laced with mine, the rough hands of a man who knew how to use them. “Bankruptcy,” he added, enunciating every syllable. Legal foreclosure had never sounded so sexy.
Luke gave me quite a victorious smirk as I walked toward the door. I refrained from tossing him the evil eye. That bit of apotropaic magic was intended some five thousand years ago to ward off wickedness, not repay it. There I was, a thirty-one-year-old woman, abandoning maturity to feud with a minor.
And so I headed for Sephora. The beauty conglomerate, founded in 1969 in Limoges, France had been named for Zipporah, one of Moses’ wives in the Hebrew Bible. I wasn’t in love with the fact that Moses had several wives, some of whom had been given to him by their fathers, but I’d done enough cultic studies on the Old Testament to understand that systems of female oppression are sometimes tinted in Easter pastels. Zipporah, an Ethiopian Midianite known for her good looks, inspired the name of the beauty chain to which I was headed. She meant something different to me, though. Zipporah had been
...more
I thought of the pens I’d bought. In particular, a pink one covered in looping silver script that read NOT THRIVING, JUST SURVIVING. If a pen could express my internal state of affairs, that was it.
socks kept slipping, balling up against my toes. I could’ve stopped to fix them, but who wants to pull sweaty fabric off her feet in front of a man she’d bought funny pens for? While on a covert mission? The socks were also covered in baby seals, and that felt personal.
The first envelopes were developed in ancient China, clay spheres designed to hold royal correspondence and be smashed upon receipt. In the Middle Ages, paper envelopes became sturdy enough to send messages, usually between the Church and aristocracy. Later, Sam Adams, patriot not brewer, sent the first long-distance letter in a proper envelope from Boston to Philadelphia during the American Revolution.
“It’s the Baador-Meinhof Phenomenon,” I told her. “The Frequency Illusion. Something’s on your mind and you see it everywhere.”
“Scared people run, Dalmatia Scissors. And that’s exactly what you didn’t do.”
The strings of James’ hoodie fluttered against his chest, and I thought of Kyle. I had a type. Liars in loungewear.
“Sure.” I took the cat in my hands. No, not the cat. My cat. My son, Al the Cat. He sure was beautiful.
When Aashri tickled Al’s nose with a cat toy she’d pulled from a bag, I wasn’t sure if she’d made it better or worse. “What is that?” I tried to grab it from her hand, but she was quicker. “Is this what I think it is?” “A sex toy? Yeah.” Aashri made little cooing sounds as she traumatized my son. “Get that away from him! He’s a baby!” “I thought he was an old man?” she answered.
