Question: how can one manage not to lose time? Answer: experience it at its full length. Means: spend days in the dentist's waiting room on an uncomfortable chair; live on one's balcony on a Sunday afternoon; listen to lectures in a language that one...
The farm work they hated was the only work they knew. Often, even the basic skills of plumbing or electricity or mechanical work were mysteries to them – as were the job discipline and the subtleties that children raised in the industrial world lea...
...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office l...
She’s beautiful, but she’s also got brains. I’ll bet zombies would love to eat out of her skull like a bowl of Jell-O that had an IQ of 180—which is absurd, because the last bowl of Jell-O I ate only measured in with an IQ of 123. Still, an I...
And then there's the perverse joy of subtly working in references to marathon training in daily life, say at the post office or while waiting outside my first-graders' classrooms at the end of the school day.
For the senior officers in Iraq, at least in 2005-2006, the responsibility was to the men at the top, the media, the message, the public back home - anything and everything, it seemed, but the soldiers under their command. And that's the ultimate bet...
I never once thought I wanted to be a soldier. I wanted to be a teacher. As soon as I left college, though, they sent me my draft notice, stuck me in officers training, and I ended up on the continent for twelve years. My life went by like a dream.
It wasn't exactly like I'd sold out on my life and dreams and all that other bullshit, because the truth was I'd never actually had anything to . It was more like I slowly froze in place, inside my little office at the museum; more like some part of ...
Anytime I hear about another one of us gone berserk, shooting up his ex’s office or drowning her kids to free herself up for her Internet boyfriend, the question I always ask is not, like every other tongue-clucking pundit in the country, how could...
I had a dream about you. You were washing your car, and I was washing my horse. You thought I belonged in the 19th century, and I thought you belonged in a zoo. I wasn’t alone in thinking that—so were the other 49% of the population that didn’t...
I do my best stuff midmorning and superlate at night, from 1 to 5 in the morning. Some people don't need sleep. I actually do need sleep. I just sleep all the time. I'll catch naps in the afternoon, or I'll take a 20-minute snooze in the office - jus...
Obama, he wouldn't have been in office without what happened to me and a lot of black people before me. He would never have been in that situation, no doubt in my mind. He would get there eventually, but it would have been a lot longer. So I am glad ...
Words alone can effect great good as well as evil. A few apt words have swept candidates into office, ended as well as started wars, paved the way for peace and carried with them both hope as well as despair. Words alone have ruined lives, but have a...
I need to feel as if everything is clean and in its proper place before I can even attempt to write one word. At least, that's what I tell myself. I make the bed, I put away the dishes, maybe I dust, maybe I do the laundry, maybe I go to the post off...
I wasn't political in 1984, but I did have a friend in Winnemucca who was a 'Southern Democrat.' He was raised in Georgia, and when he moved to Nevada, he was still a Democrat, and he ran for office, and I knew that I couldn't vote in the primary for...
I read about a number of generals and colonels who are said to have wandered about exhorting the troops to advance. That must have been very inspirational! I suspect, however, that the men were more interested and more impressed by junior officers an...
For all the folks whose job it was to be ready for [Hurricane] Katrina, but who weren't, from the Oval Office, right down the chain of command to the New Orleans police department, Wal-Mart was a vivid reproach.
For many of us, work is the one place where we feel appreciated. The things that we long to experience at home - pride in our accomplishments, laughter and fun, relationships that aren't complex - we sometimes experience most often in the office. Bos...
I was one of the hardest-hitting conservatives on George W. Bush. Republicans didn't like me on George W. Bush. Republicans still don't like me on many things. If any Republican thinks I've been hard on Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich or any of these gu...
Oh! To rationalize oneself into matrimony...Oh! To decide something so grave in life 'after mature consideration'! Choose the color of a dress after a thousand hesitations, but for God's sake, get married without reflecting on it! That's the grace I ...
Therefore, she hummed the provincial lullaby she had learned from the officers’ children in the English Quarter of Jerusalem, and watched in fascination while the savage radical’s eyes misted over with tears. For an instant, the prison bars melte...
