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When I first moved into my own apartment, he bought me an EggTastic, one of those As Seen on TV products that sounds far more useful in theory than it is in practice. It’s a glorified ceramic mug that lets you make an omelet in the microwave. I pointed out to my dad that cooking an egg is not really a task that requires innovation. But he raved about his EggTastic, and wanted to share with me the gift of convenience. When the package arrived and I stared at the little white-and-yellow cup, the chirpy cartoon lettering, I was struck not by sadness but by the bite of pity that comes when you
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Money and culture were now separate economies, or at least, they were incompletely conjoined. Woolf defined the middlebrows not by how much money they had, but by how proficiently they consumed.
Freed from its associations and reduced to mouthfeel, olive garden is a sumptuous phrase, like mountain dew or hidden valley. Say it a few times aloud, and you forget the restaurant. Say it a few more times, and it loses all meaning. You can summon everything at once: sun-bleached stone and warm yellow walls, plush grasses, pillowed booths, incandescence, the smell of bread, the smell of oils, the smell of a fruit that is said to be holy. Chain restaurants are soothing because they are the same everywhere, like hymns.
My photographed body was more real than the one in the mirror because it was the one that didn’t belong to me at all.
They both kept saying the other was dead to me, that phrase exactly, which I’d never known anyone to use in earnest. But dead was the right word. They were obsessed with each other’s absence. It was really not so different from mourning.
immaterial. I needed to become an expert in any desire I had, even ones I couldn’t yet fulfill, so that when the time came, I’d be armed with knowledge. If I navigated to a product page and scrolled down to find that no reviews existed, it was as if the bright, crowded room had emptied and gone dark. I was back in the cave with the rocks and the worms.
When you ask for ease, comfort, and stability and receive it in enormous quantities, you are then left to wonder whether you even wanted it in the first place. Then you must find new things to want.
I could throw it halfway around the world, but it would always be mine. All my belongings—past, present, and future—were a big belly I dragged across the floor.
I once thought that by abandoning something, you also abandoned the space it took up in your mind. I thought that, once you stopped seeing it, touching it, you got to stop caring about it, too, like throwing an apple core out the window of a moving car. But it was clear, now, that abandoning something is more like saying it’s dead to you. The attachment is never really yours to sever.
Everyone wastes the core because they think the seeds are poison, but anything’s poison if you have too much of it, even water. The seeds are poison only if you eat too many. If you just have one apple, you can eat the core too.
