You’re waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you don’t know for sure. But it doesn’t matter, because we’ll be together.
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Reading was like an addiction; I read while I ate, on the train, in bed until late at night, in school, where I’d keep the book hidden so I could read during class. Before long I bought a small stereo and spent all my time in my room, listening to jazz records. But I had almost no desire to talk to anyone about the experience I gained through books and music. I felt happy just being me and no one else. In that sense I could be called a stack-up loner.
Haruki Murakami (via eccentric-eeyore)
He waited until the train was in motion to make his move—a true sign of someone who knows how to make the environment work to their advantage. Then he leaned forward. “Hi.“ “How you doing?” “What are you reading?“ “What’s your name?” “I really like your hair.“ “That’s a really nice skirt.” “You must work out.“
It was painful to watch. She clearly wanted nothing to do with him, and he clearly wasn’t going to take the hint. Her rebukes got firmer. “I’d like to read my book.” And he pulled out the social pressure. “Hey, I’m just asking you a question. You don’t have to be so rude.“ She started to look around for outs. Her head swiveled from one exit to another.
The thing was, I had already heard this story, many many times. I knew how it would play out. I knew all the tropes. I probably could have quoted the lines before they said them. I wanted a new narrative. Time to mix it up.
So I moved seats until I was sitting behind him. I leaned forward with my head on the back of his seat.
"Hi,” I said with a little smile.
He looked at me like I was a little crazy—which isn’t exactly untrue—and turned back to her.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” he said flatly without ever looking back.
“I really like your hair,” I said. “It looks soft.“
That’s about when it got…..weird.
He sort of half turned and glared back me, and I could tell I was pissing him off. His eyes told me to back the hell away, and his lips were pressed together tightly enough to drain the color from them completely.
But no good story ever ends with the conflict just defusing. He started to turn back to her.
"Wait, don’t be like that,” I said. “Lemmie just ask you one question…"
“What!” he said in that you-have-clearly-gone-too-far voice that is part of the freshmen year finals at the school of machismo.
And I’m not exactly a hundred percent sure why I didn’t call it a day at that point, but…..maybe I just love turning the screw to see what happens. I gave him the bedroomy-est eyes I could muster. “What’s your name?“
Right now I’m sitting here typing out this story, and I’m still not entirely sure why I’m not nursing a fat lip or a black eye. Because that obviously made him so mad that I still am not sure why it didn’t come to blows. There are cliches about eyes flaring and rage behind someones eyes and shit like that that are so overdone. But it really does look like that. When someone gets violent, their eyes just kind of “pop” with intention—pupils dilate, eyelids widen. And his did. Even sitting down he was clearly bigger than me and I was pretty sure he was kind of muscular too, so at that moment I was figuring I was probably going to need an ice pack and sympathy sex from my girlfriend by day’s end.
“DUDE,” he shouted. “I’M NOT GAY.“
That’s when I dropped the bedroom eyes and switched to a normal voice. “Oh well I could see not being interested didn’t matter to you when you were hitting on her, so I just thought that’s how you rolled.”
Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
(via vintageanchorbooks)
(via vintageanchorbooks)
If you have someone that you think is ‘the one,’ don’t just sort of think in your ordinary mind, ‘Okay, let’s pick a date. Let’s plan this and make a party and get married. Take that person and travel around the world. Buy a plane ticket for the two of you to travel all around the world, and go to places that are hard to go to and hard to get out of. And when you come back to JFK, when you land in JFK, and you’re still in love with that person, get married at the airport.
Bill Murray (via oncealoyallover)
that photography of women on their periods was great and shouldn’t be as shocking and I want to find more like that but in all honesty fuck periods so much today I sat and cried my eyes out for ten minutes over an advert to win tickets to see billy elliot and i don’t even like billy elliot, i’ve...
I always love reading things toddlers say to their parents about their past lives. I imagine some of the things are difficult or startling for the parents to hear, but the appropriate response is probably very easy - “Im terribly sorry hear that, I do hope you’re having a better time here so far.”...
do you ever think about how weird reading is
our eyes are able to scan these different symbols and construct the scenarios and concepts they describe in our mind
and these concepts have the power to twist our emotions and make us cry and laugh and wow reading is weird
when it comes to reading i’m either reading 400 pages a day or taking a month to read 200 there is no inbetween
My 5-year-old insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl.
The first time she made this claim, I protested. Part of the fun of reading to your kids, after all, is in sharing the stories you loved as a child. And in the story I knew, Bilbo was a boy. A boy hobbit. (Whatever that entails.)
But my daughter was determined. She liked the story pretty well so far, but Bilbo was definitely a girl. So would I please start reading the book the right way? I hesitated. I imagined Tolkien spinning in his grave. I imagined mean letters from his testy estate. I imagined the story getting as lost in gender distinctions as dwarves in the Mirkwood.
Then I thought: What the hell, it’s just a pronoun. My daughter wants Bilbo to be a girl, so a girl she will be. And you know what? The switch was easy. Bilbo, it turns out, makes a terrific heroine. She’s tough, resourceful, humble, funny, and uses her wits to make off with a spectacular piece of jewelry. Perhaps most importantly, she never makes an issue of her gender—and neither does anyone else.