THEY'RE JUST GOING TO BE GOOD

DAVIES: ...Do you have a sense of yourself over the next 20 years? I mean, you've certainly got an active career now.

EPHRON: You absolutely don't know. The next 20 years, we're talking about 85. This is just a crapshoot. This is a lottery. Who knows? So I feel - I don't think about the next 20 years. I think about today. So today, I have already been to a bakery. This is the thing that I'm obsessed with, is carbohydrates.

I feel that I'm now living in an age where there's the best bread we have ever had in the history of the world. There has never been more bread that is good out there. So it seems to me a shame not to eat some of it, even if - and this is one of the terrible dilemmas of old age. You know, do you save all your money as if you're going to live till you're 90, or do you spend it all because you might die tomorrow?

Do you diet like a fanatic in the hopes that it's going to buy you a couple of extra years, or is it going to have nothing to do - are you going to be hit by a bus, and your last thought will be: I should have had that donut?

And it's very confusing to know what to do, but I'm coming down on the donut side.

DAVIES: Yeah.

EPHRON: So I feel that, you know, that's one of the things - I'm not so into 20 years. I'm kind of into: Is this meal I'm having something I really want to have? And if someone says to me let's go somewhere and it's not good, I say let's not. Let's not, because I have a finite number of meals ahead of me, and they are all going to be good.

DAVIES: You're going to make them count.

EPHRON: They're just going to be good. That's the truth.

--Dave Davies interviews Nora Ephron

SUM SUM SUMMA TIME

I've been doing the same for almost a full week now.

Vacations with my parents, though wonderful, give me too much time to think (see: Alaska 2008, Florida 2012).

Nine more weeks of school then--?

DAVEY SIMON GETS IT

"It's so fucked up," he says. "You know what I'm saying? Does everybody else see how fucked up it is? Does anyone else see that? Do normal people see something like this and get pissed off?"

--David Simon, Homicide

See also.

There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I’d like to know. I wish someone could tell me.

― Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read....but after three solid years of taking literature courses, Madeleine had nothing like a firm critical methodology to apply to what she read. Instead she had a fuzzy, unsystematic way of talking about books. It embarrassed her to hear the things people said in class. And the things she said. I felt that. It was interesting the way Proust. I liked the way Faulkner.

--Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

If you were wandering around Chapel Hill yesterday, you may have happened upon this scene: a bride whose cape tickled the grass; a groom surrounded by his tuxedoed, dancing daughters; an audience timidly singing along with Stevie Wonder, then timidly swaying along to the beat of tribal drums; beakers turned centerpieces; a girl's mouth flying open in wonder when the magician made foam balls multiply in her hands; and shivering guests viewing the smudge of star clusters through telescopes.

If you had wandered down the path towards the gazebo, you would have seen two friends who hadn't seen each other since another wedding, talking as if nothing (and everything) had changed. Feeling so old and so young at the same time.

PARENTS

(via Hark! A Vagrant)