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“You’re bored. And I’m going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it’s boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it’s on you to make life interesting, the better off you’ll be.”
Maybe she was a little quiet, but sometimes that happens, because on the way to school she listens to “The World” on PRI, which is usually a downer, and that day was no exception.
HAAA
Bernadette and her enthusiasm were like a hippo and water: get between them and you’ll be trampled to death.
People say Seattle is one of the toughest cities in which to make friends. They even have a name for it, the “Seattle freeze.” I’ve never experienced it myself, but coworkers claim it’s real and has to do with all the Scandinavian blood up here.
She’s wearing this backpack with yarn coming out of it, so she can knit while she’s standing. And she’s just knitting and looking at everything.
There’s a story that during the filming of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola had a sign on his trailer: “Fast, Cheap, Good: Pick Two.”
My daughter did an art project called a “step book,” which started with the universe, then opened up to the solar system, then the Earth, then the United States, then Washington State, then Seattle—and I honestly thought, What does Washington State have to do with her? And I remember, that’s right, we live here. Poof.
Just last night, I woke up to pee. I was half asleep, with no concept of myself, a blank, and then the data started reloading—Bernadette Fox—Twenty Mile House destroyed—I deserved it—I’m a failure. Failure has got its teeth in me, and it won’t stop shaking.
Inside me roiled something so terrible that God knew he had to keep my baby alive, or this torrent within me would be unleashed on the universe.
The motto of this city should be the immortal words spoken by that French field marshal during the siege of Sebastopol, “J’y suis, j’y reste”—“I am here, and here I shall remain.”
But every time it rains, and you have to interact with someone, here’s what they’ll say: “Can you believe the weather?” And you want to say, “Actually, I can believe the weather. What I can’t believe is that I’m actually having a conversation about the weather.”
can feel the irrationality and anxiety draining my store of energy like a battery-operated racecar grinding away in the corner. This is energy I will need to get through the next day. But I just lie in bed and watch it burn, and with it any hope for a productive tomorrow. There go the dishes, there goes the grocery store, there goes exercise, there goes bringing in the garbage cans. There goes basic human kindness. I wake up in a sweat so thorough I sleep with a pitcher of water by the bed or I might die of dehydration.
People like you must create. If you don’t create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.
Maybe that’s what religion is, hurling yourself off a cliff and trusting that something bigger will take care of you and carry you to the right place.
“Princeton,” he said. “That’s an American university, like Harvard.”
“When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Do you know what that means?”
I got a huge knot in my stomach because if Antarctica could talk, it would be saying only one thing: you don’t belong here.
That’s why your brain is considered a discounting mechanism. It’s literally a matter of survival.”
My heart started racing, not the bad kind of heart racing, like, I’m going to die. But the good kind of heart racing, like, Hello, can I help you with something? If not, please step aside because I’m about to kick the shit out of life.
I had to go. If for no other reason than to be able to put my hand on the South Pole marker and declare that the world literally revolved around me.
“the quilted universe.” I’m not talking about Galer Street pickup, with the parents standing around in their North Face. It’s a quantum physics concept where everything that can happen, is happening, in an infinite number of parallel universes.
