Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

Sharing and shouting isn’t the issue so much as the corruption of living in real time.

“It’s not a lack of confidence in oneself preventing people from going after jobs where they don’t meet all of the qualifications, but a lack of confidence in other people’s abilities to view them as capable of doing the job, and therefore hiring them,”

One’s early experiences in a new place are the most charged. They imprint the deepest and have the most influence over how one relates to that place.

Sometimes I imagine he treats my outbursts like he does the angry mice he works with. With care, with gloves.

Have I made myself this accommodating? A harmless vessel for their confusion and rage? They must see me as soft and small and unthreatening, because I have never suggested otherwise.

What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself. —Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

The first use of “trailing spouse” appeared in print in the 1981 Wall Street Journal article “Problems of Two-Career Families Start Forcing Businesses to Adapt,” written by reporter Mary Bralove. (An

For the last several years I have said to him that I do not ever want to be pregnant. It’s not that I don’t like children. I love them. I want to adopt. There are so many babies who need homes that it doesn’t make sense to me to make another baby of our own. Truthfully, the impulse was selfish at first. I don’t want to carry anything in my uterus, and I don’t want my body to blow up and my bones to lose density, and I absolutely don’t want to deal with the pain of giving birth and the possibility of my vagina tearing into my asshole.

Also, it isn’t “shoe in,” it’s “shoo-in” as in to shoo somebody in a certain direction.