But Martin knew Billy to be a generalist, a man in need of the sweetness of miscellany.

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I know how it is to live in the inescapable presence of the absence of the father.

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Billy went for his ball, kissed it once, massaged it, chalked and toweled his right hand, spat in the spittoon to lighten his burden, bent slightly at the waist, shuffled and slid, a bazoo-bazoo, boys, threw another strike: not just another strike, but a titanic blast this time which sent all pins flying pitward, the cleanest of clean hits, perfection unto tidiness, bespeaking power battening on power, control escalating.

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He salted his oatmeal and spiced it with raisins, those wrinkled and puny symbols of his own dark and shriveling years.

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She was remote cousin to Charlie’s mother and would want to lend whatever strength she had to the troubled family, a surge of good will that would now be intrusive.

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a reporter whose stories were so sugary that you risked diabetic coma if you read them regularly.

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Pray to Jesus, but where is Jesus? Jesus, Charlie, sits at my desk in the person of an equivocating Welsh rarebit who doesn’t understand sons because he never had any. But he understand money and news and power and decency and perhaps such things as these will help save the boy we remember. (more…)

Our research has documented that the negative thoughts which cause your emotional turmoil nearly always contain gross distortions. Although these thoughts appear valid, you will learn that they are irrational or just plain wrong, and that twisted thinking is a major cause of your suffering.

---

There’s a difference between feeling better – which can occur spontaneously- and getting better – which results from systematically applying and reapplying the methods that will lift your mood whenever the need arises.

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For this reason I call negative thoughts “automatic thoughts.” They run through your mind automatically without the slightest effort on your part to put them there. They are as obvious and natural to you as the way you hold a fork.

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Nearly every depressed person seems convinced beyond all rhyme or reason that he or she is the special one who really is beyond hope.

(more…)

She assumed the problem was that she is too needy. Research findings support the exact opposite. Getting attached means that our brain becomes wired to seek the support of our partner by ensuring the partner’s psychological and physical proximity. If our partner fails to reassure us, we are programmed to continue our attempts to achieve closeness until the partner does.

---

It turns out that the ability to step into the world on our own often stems from the knowledge that there is someone beside us whom we can count on – this is the “dependency paradox.” If you want to take the road to independence and happiness, find the right person to depend on and travel down it with that person.

 

This is an important lesson for someone with an anxious attachment style: If you wait a little longer before reacting and jumping to conclusions, you will have an uncanny ability to decipher the world around you and use it to your advantage. But shoot from the hip, and you’re all over the place making misjudgments and hurting yourself.

---

Activating strategies: to reestablish closeness with partner. When they fail, you may resort to

Protest behavior:

-excessive attempts to reestablish contact

-withdrawing

-keeping score

-acting hostile

-threats to leave

-manipulations

-making him/her feel jealous

(more…)

• Trauma is worse if you feel you were betrayed
  • Raped when campus was negligent is harder to overcome
• Any questioning of the experience counts as invalidation
  • “You’ll get over it.”
  • “It’s not a big deal.”

• Tepidness sounds worse – you can’t hide
• Dwelling the badness makes it worse
• It’s not too late to be good again

The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.

---

Furthermore, while I am undertaking these tasks I will refrain from indulging in such remarks as “Shit,” “Goddamn sonofabitch,” and similar vulgarities, as such language is nerve-wracking to have around the house when nothing more drastic is taking place than the facing of Necessity.

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I’d like to develop as a writer, but who’s got the bar-bells and the gymnasium?

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“No,” Hellers says, “because I have something this man will never have.”

“What’s that?”

“I know when I have enough.”

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Whenever you are aware of a nice moment, even a small one like having a glass of lemonade under a tree, you say to yourself, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

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I am so tired of people who examine their pasts and find nothing but mortal woundings….

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There is a snide saying: “The big dreams go to New York the little dreams stay home.” The biggest dreams, in fact, stay home. They build cities like this one with hospitals and universities and libraries and theaters and concert halls and supremely civilized gathering places like the Athenaeum. I say to all stay-at-homes, “Congratulations.”

Dream on, dream on!

 

 

These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.

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Sam hated being told to “fight,” as if sickness were a character failing. Illness could not be defeated, no matter how hard you fought, and pain, once it had you in its grasp, was transformational.

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Long relationships might be richer, but relatively brief, relatively uncomplicated encounters with interesting people could be lovely as well. Every person you knew, every person you loved even, did not have to consume you for the time to have been worthwhile.

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It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.

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You couldn’t be old and still be wrong about as many things as she’d been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.

---

 

Alexis de Tocqueville:

submitted to complete isolation; but this absolute solitude, if nothing interrupts it, is beyond the strength of man; it destroys the criminal without intermission and without pity; it does not reform, it kills

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Victor Hugo:

The entirety of hell is contained in one word: solitude.

---

Ippolit Terentyev

Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it; you may be sure that the highest moment of his happiness was, perhaps, exactly three days before the discovery of the New World, when the mutinous crew in their despair almost the ship back to Europe, right around! The New World is not the point here, it can just as well perish … The point is in life, in life alone – in discovering it, constantly and eternally, and not at all in the discovery itself!

 

• “What do you think of the service here?”
• “Do you usually find rooms to be so noisy?”
• “Why do you want to work here?”
• “What are ten words your spouse or partner or friend would use to describe you?”
• “What’s the most courageous thing you’ve done?”
• “If you joined and then in three to six months you were no longer here, why would that be?” (Ask the same question about five years as well, and see how the two answers differ.)
• “How did you prepare for this interview?”
• “What did you like to do as a child?”
• “Did you feel appreciated at your last job? What was the biggest way in which you did not feel appreciated?”
• “Who are our competitors?”
• “What are the open tabs on your browser right now?”
• “What have you achieved that is unusual for your peer group?”
• “What is one view held by the mainstream or as a consensus that you wholeheartedly agree with?”
• “Which of your beliefs are you least rational about?” (Or maybe better yet: “What views do you hold religiously, almost irrationally?”)
• “Which of your beliefs are you most likely wrong about?”
• “How do you think this interview is going?”
• “How successful do you want to be?” (A variant is: “How ambitious are you?”)
• “What would you be willing to trade to achieve your career goals?” Or “How do you think about the trade-offs that might be required to achieve your career goals?”
• “In the context of the workplace, what does the concept of ‘sin’ really mean? And how does it differ from a mere mistake? Can you illustrate this from the experience of one of your co-workers?”
• “In which ways might a Skype or Zoom call be more informative than a person-to-person interaction?”
• “In what ways are you not WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get]?”
• “Is this person so good that you would happily work for them?”
• “Can this person get you where you need to be way faster than any reasonable person could?”
• ‘When this person disagrees with you, do you think it will be as likely you are wrong as they are wrong?”
• “How would you rate yourself on a scale of 1-10 on X? … And why is that rating the right number for you?”
• Something about revealed preferences in their past lifetime.

Lonely people tend rather to be lonely because they decline to bear the emotional costs associated with being around other humans.

---

Now, seeming unwatched in front of a TV camera is a genuine art. Take a look at how civilians act when a TV camera is pointed at them: they simply spaz out, or else go all rigor mortis. Even PR people and politicians are, camera-wise, civilians. And we love to laugh at how stiff and false non-professionals appear, on television. How unnatural. But if you’ve ever once been the object of that terrible blank rpound glass stare, you know all too well how self-consious it makes you. A haried guy with earphones and a clipboard tells you to “act natural” as your face begins to leap around on your skull, struggling got a seemingly unwatched expression that feels impossible because “stemming unwatched” is, like the “act natural” which fathered it, oxymoronic. Try driving a golf ball as someone asks yo y whether you in- or exhale on your backswing, to getting promised lavish rewards if you van avoid thinking of a rhinoceros for ten seconds, and you’ll get some idea of the truly heroic contortions of body and mind that must be required for Don Johnson to act unwatched as he’s watched by a lens that’s an overwhkemniung emlbelm of what Emerson, years before TV, called “the gaze of millions.”

(more…)