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)

(Courtesy of The Glow)

Been interacting with babies more than ever this summer. Having and raising a kid seems like the wildest thing you could ever do.

A FINE LIFE, JUST A FINE LIFE