We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler

I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up. I made a mental note to remember this in my own life, but it got lost the way mental notes do.

res ipsa loquitur,

recent studies suggest that people behave with more charity if they’ve just gone upstairs and less if they’ve just gone down—if studies like that weren’t just an enormous pile of crap. There’s science and there’s science, is all I’m saying. When humans are the subjects, it’s mostly not science.)

When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.

Maybe you think you can, but you really can’t. Maybe anosognosia, the inability to see your own disability, is the human condition and I’m the only one who doesn’t suffer from it.

ISSA Look, don’t kill that fly! It is making a prayer to you By rubbing its hands and feet.

Last week’s word was frugivorous. This week’s is verklempt.

I still haven’t found that place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either.

In 1972, Endel Tulving coined the phrase episodic memory to refer to the ability to remember incidents in one’s individual life with detailed temporal and spatial information (the what, when, where) and then access them later as episodes through a conscious reexperiencing of them, a sort of mental time travel.

If modesty were a human trait, we’d have learned to be more cautious over the years.