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September 14 - October 22, 2025
There’s a world of people and things, if you can manage to stop being a misanthrope for a second.”
“Why make anything if you don’t believe it could be great?”
For Sam, greatness meant popular. For Sadie, art
A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you?
And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.
I’m going to play until the end of this life.” “That’s a good philosophy,” Anna said.
“Will she be okay?” Sam said. “I think so,” Anna said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. She would be okay. Dead was okay.
wrapping her fingers around the cylindrical chamber of blood sponges that was his (and every) penis.
“If he’d been a girl,” Midori said, “everyone would have called him a slut, but he was just a stud.”
Her eyes were softer and her expression was less arch and self-conscious; her hand, entitled, as if she owned Marx’s cheek; her posture, slightly canted toward him, relaxed and pliable; her cheeks flushed.
She was pretty all the time, but she was beautiful in love.
But to return to what I was saying, the middle-aged—” “Those cursed souls worn down by the inevitable compromises of life, you mean?”
To build a world for someone seems a romantic thing from where I stand.”
She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.
She was trying hard not to romanticize her daughter’s personality. She didn’t want to ascribe characteristics to her that were not truly hers.
So many of the mothers she knew said that their children were exactly themselves from the moment they appeared in the world. But Sadie disagreed. What person was a person without language? Tastes? Preferences? Experiences? And on the other side of childhood, what grown-up wanted to believe that they had emerged from their parents fully formed? Sadie knew that she herself had not become a person until recently. It was unreasonable to expect a child to emerge whole cloth. Naomi was a pencil sketch of a person who, at some point, would be a fully 3D character.
“You have different things,” Dong Hyun said. “You were born into a different world than I was. Maybe you don’t need what Grandma and I have.”
Sadie had invented a game where if Naomi called bedtime before Sadie did for seven nights in a row, Naomi received a prize. Yes, it was manipulative and basically bribery, but it was also effective at getting her five-year-old to bed.
The book about consciousness that Sadie mentions when she is talking about the brain having an AI version of deceased loved ones is I Am a Strange Loop, by Doug Hofstadter, a source suggested to me by Hans Canosa.