Marsha > Recent Status Updates

In one corner is a fairly small, not overly influential but relatively militant lobby that advocates Hognorsk ('High Norwegian'). This is similar to Nynorsk, but even more similar to its predecessor, the Landsmal ('the country's language'), which was the variety of Norwegian created by the Romantic poet Ivar Aasen in the nineteenth century, based on what he saw as the most unspoilt, traditional dialects.

The sound of it made Dex's blood sing, but the laugh hadn't been for him, and at the thought of that, fury raced through him, shocking him like a spark of fire. Damn it all to hell and back. Even with his head muddled by Jurum, Dex couldn't blame the intoxicating brew for what he knew he was about to do. Tonight, he was going to be an idiot. He would deal with the repercussions tomorrow.

I was pleased to see Nip looking so bedraggled after trekking around the forest with the twins, who'd doubtless kept up an unaccustomed pace for the tall boy. If Nip were tired out from exercise, he would, I hoped, be too tired to cause trouble. Soon we had a fire crackling in the clearing and a couple of the fattest rabbits on spits, watched over carefully by Del, who was the best thing we had for a cook.

"Is Alec gay?" Isabelle's wrist jerked. The eyeliner skidded. "Oh hell," Isabelle said, putting the pen down. "It's all right," Clary began. "No, it isn't. You absolutely can't tell anyone," said Isabelle. "Not even Jace?" "Especially not Jace!" "All right. I guess I didn't realize it was such a big deal." "It would be to my parents," said Isabelle. "they would disown him and throw him out of the Clave--"

IT'S NOT EVERY night that Elisa makes it into the lab, and on nights when she does, eggs in hand, and finds the creature inside the tank instead of the pool, her heart breaks. This rouses her from selfish exuberance, reminds her that there is no joy inside F-1, not really. Yes, the pool is preferable to the tank, but what would be preferable to the pool? Anything, everything.

His parents might have brought him here in hopes of securing further social advantage, and Victor's parents might have brought him here in hopes of securing further socialization for their own troubled son. But Henry? Henry was here to have fun. "I like him," I whispered to Victor. "He is silly. We should keep him."

The oncoming winter weather hadn't halted the flow of tourists at all. Zoe had thought that tourism in Scotland, like most places, would be seasonal, but had found out that on the whole it was fairly constant - nobody expected good weather any month of the year, so it didn't really make much difference when you came.

She'd made him weigh out the flour while she'd fiddled with the temperamental oven, and mix in the butter and the salt and the little bits of cheese and ham and onion they'd found around the place, and he'd watched them rise up, golden and fresh in the oven and smelling absolutely delicious, while she had completely enjoyed the genuine pleasure Shackleton had taken in it.

Maybe this was how they said it underneath the ocean. It was a testament to his differentness, the sense of an old soul I got from him in spite of the way he looked, and it made me love him more. As he began to come, his voice moved up an octave: a full scale that went through my whole body making me feel as though I was Sappho's lyre. I gyrated against him too, making him come, helping him to let go. I was a vessel.

Now that he had complimented me about my proximity to death and I had owned it, and thrown it right back at him, I felt cool. We had both decided now that death was my territory. I was the Professor of Death. Much more than a middle-aged woman who was beginning to get serious crushy feelings for a young stranger in the water.

Of course Jaz was late. Of course he was. After it took a million texts to even get him to agree to a time. Zoe had tried saying to him once, what if Hari was in trouble? What if they were at the hospital and he'd done the usual thing he did of simply shutting her down, shrugging and saying, 'Don't worry -- just text me, babe.'

Dominic didn't come bounding toward me as usual. Instead he sniffed the air repeatedly and kept his distance. His ears went flat and he growled. I had never seen him like that before and it made me wonder if I was haunted now. He continued to growl, but the sound was cute to me. He was trying to be like a dog in the wild or a wolf. Did dogs still live in the wild? Did anything?

Gabriel's gaze snapped to the Consul's face. "You would rather I lied to you?" "Oh, no," said the Consul. "Not to me." The Lightwoods have always had honor. Your father made mistakes. You should not pay for them. Let me give you back what you have lost. Let me return to you Lightwood House, the good name of your family. You could live in the same house with your brother and sister."

If I had this incredible asset, this wealth just handed to me, I would take obsessive scrupulous care of it. I would mend the fence myself. Prune back the trees. Oil the locks. Take a second job. Set aside forty dollars a week for a garden rake and seed packets and some soil. The property sags and crumbles each year, subject to weather and vandals, and no one puts up a fight.

I am suddenly wondering what I've been so afraid of and what I've so diligently kept my distance from these past twenty years. A quiet internal frenzy starts in which I try to recall and to catalogue all of the reasons I might have ended my relationship with this perfectly nice woman who has roasted chickens, built a fire, and who is now casually fixing herself a disgusting wine cooler.

I ordered a sandwich and sat in the grip of my own f**kup--impossible to go back home, impossible to wander another frozen minute in another impenetrable city, impossible to last much longer on my dwindling traveler's checks and impossible to go straight to balmy, exotic and indecipherable Indonesia until I'd gotten some more experience as a lone female traveler in friendly western recognizable Europe.

"But what am I going to give them to drink?" I asked, discovering that the milk "cow", that refrigerated stainless box with the two heavy levers that spout milk when you lift them, had run dry. "Kool-Aid!" Debbie replied. She was used to opening big cans of corn and beans and mashed potatoes that they served at school lunch and I didn't know anything about this, and I knew even less about kids.

All those books telling you to declutter for peace of mind are actually making you more boring. Cleanliness encourages you to live a mundane lifestyle. A predictable lifestyle. One with beige walls and floors and ceilings that keeps you enclosed in its little cube of boredom as you advance slowly toward mediocrity and death. But escape is easy enough. And if your desk is already messy--congratulations!

Most men were born to a life of labor in the fields, most women to a life of grinding, chopping, and cooking. "Servitude," said my mother as she prepared home-cooked breakfast, dinner, and tea for eight to ten people three hundred and sixty-five days a year. She was right. Churning butter, skinning and cleaning hares, without the option of picking up the phone for a pizza if something goes wrong, is unremitting toil.

You walk into a nice two-star place in Tribeca on a sleepy Monday evening and you see they're running a delicious-sounding special of Yellowfin Tuna. Why not go for it? Here are the two words that should leap out at you when you navigate the menu: "Monday" and "Special." Here's how it works: The chef of this fine restaurant orders his fish on Thursday for delivery Friday morning. He's ordering a pretty good amount.

We walk next door to my house and Mrs. Manarelli knocks loudly, then comes halfway in, yelling up the stairs to my mother. Mom comes down the stairs, patting at her new bouffant hairdo, tall and firm and shiny. Mrs. Manarelli holds up her basket, tells her that she's brought a picnic and doesn't want to eat it at the round, speckled table in the kitchen, she wants to eat it outside. Mom starts laughing.

WHEN I WAS growing up in my mother's house, there were spices you grated and spices you pounded, and whenever you pounded spice and garlic or other herbs, you used a mortar. Every West Indian woman worth her salt had her own mortar. Now if you lost or broke your mortar, you could, of course, buy another one in the market over on Park Avenue, under the bridge, but those were usually Puerto Rican mortars.

Albie and Toby came into our room while I was reading A Separate Peace for class that night. "Hey," I said, pretending to be engrossed in my book, even though my interest in Gene and Finny was pretty low. I had gotten along with Albie and Toby over the weekend when we'd been in the room together. They were weird but harmless. Albie said strange things and never laughed, which made me a little uncomfortable.

An ear-busting, roaring sound jarred me awake first thing that Thursday morning. I lurched out of bed, grabbed for my robe, swinging it on as I ran down the steps and peered out the front window. My breath caught. A helmeted man, dressed in all black leather, was parking a motorcycle. I was deliberating whether I should go for Daddy's shotgun, when he reached up and removed his helmet. My jaw dropped. It was him.

To my dear Mrs. Branwell--You may be surprised to receive a letter from me so soon after my departure from London, but despite the sleepiness of the countryside, events here have continued apace, and I thought it best to keep you abreast of developments. The weather continues fine here, allowing me much time for exploring the countryside especially the area around Ravenscar Manor, which is indeed a fine old building.

"Blanche, why doesn't your husband want me to look for the codex?" There was a long pause. "He said that?" He sensed that he'd broken an unspoken rule, that their temporary rapport was fragile and could disappear in an instant. "Well, I'm sure he didn't mean anything by it. So you talked to him, did you?" "No, of course not! It came through Laura. But why don't you want him to know I'm looking for it?"

The conversation stalled. They all sipped their Japanese beer, and the waiter, a surly-looking teenager with a scraggly mustache, quietly slipped the check onto the table facedown and skulked away. "Oh, Fabrikant wants to know why you didn't go to his party," Zeph added. "That guy," Edward said. "What does he want with me?" "I don't know, exactly," Zeph watched the people passing on the sidewalk.

In a letter written the year after his book's publication, Mark Twain wrote, "The Committee of the Public Library of Concord, Mass., have given us a rattling tip-top puff which will go into every paper in the country. They have expelled Huck from their library as 'trash and suitable only for the slums.' that will sell 25,000 copies for us sure."

Catch-22 is one of those terms that is more often misused than not. As described in Joseph Heller's 1961 novel of the same name, Catch-22 is a rule or set of circumstances that inherently denies a solution to a problem, usually by employing circular logic.

Ernest Vincent Wright, Gadsby: Champion of Youth (1939): Though many writers had written shorter works under similar conditions, Wright challenged himself to write a complete novel without using the letter "e": The 50,110-word Gadsby is the staggering result. The preface notes that as he wrote, "a whole army of little E's gathered around my desk, all eagerly expecting to be called upon."