why doesn't this happen to people all the time?

I was driving into the sun. I couldn't see the signals without nearly blocking them out with my hand. There were dark streaks on the pavement--those must've been people. Those driving towards me, I realized, would never guess that those of us driving the other way were nearly blinded. To them, we just looked exceptionally well-lit. I slowed down, afraid I would run into one of them. I wished for sunglasses, and wondered why is the light like this in winter?

I'm becoming convinced that "it's always darkest before the light" is a convenient distortion. Isn't it always lightest when it's darkest? Fall kills all the leaves, and they glow warmly in the cold before dropping off entirely, removing all obscurity but the bare limbs. Whenever I go outside it's pure glare--the cars are white flares, even the nearest mountains are nearly the color of the sky. If it snows, the ground becomes painful to look at.

I couldn't see the speedometer because it was all green. When I finally turned off from that street perfectly aligned with the sun and arrived at my brother's house, everything was still green, as it is, as if the leaves are haunting us (it's all about the trees, clearly). But it would sound strange to mention after-images. What can one say but hello?

Thor: The Jumpy World

The main thing about Thor is: he jumps. Like a yellow lab tethered to a stick, he's flung as much as he flings his hammer--an object of which he "will try to be worthy." I have a sketchy feeling there's something reversed about that, but I'm certain that villains stop thrown objects. Hence the hero's motivating envy, because his life is all topsy-turvy. Thor hops between planets more impulsively than we hop between countries. He appears behind a woman with a magical umbrella to shelter her from the storm that follows him around (a bit troubling, I know). He, ahem, crosses stars to save the damsel he sneaks up on. His brother, the ur-trickster, is no help. It's not even clear the writers know what he wants.

Meanwhile, what kind of story is Thor in? At first I thought (with glee) he was in a princess plot. His stern, battle-scarred father (so stern he has to speak in tedious implicatives to say anything kind) wants him to have a practical marriage to the warrior princess (an obvious choice, as she appears to be the only female warrior in the nine realms, and indeed, one of two non-mortal females). But he doesn't love her, daddy. Sadly that is not the story. There is a kind of metaphorical rape-revenge plot, which seems totally thoughtless. Jane gets unwillingly invaded by a malevolent liquid called "the ether," which makes her faint, turns her eyes black, and violently dispatches anyone who tries to touch her other than Thor. For half the movie she's just wandering around asking "how do I get it out of me?" Once the evil elf man sucks it out of her, somehow it becomes power to wield instead of burden to bear. Hm.

Is that the story? There's also a caper. The gang of vaguely recognizable warrior-buddies rescue Jane, free Loki, and dash off through Loki's secret passage. On the way there, one of the gang turns it into a pirate movie for five seconds, swinging by rope from one ship to another. There's also a few minutes of Star Wars, all pwee-pwee dogfight and destructive sperm trying to enter a well-protected sphere. And some grave Peter Jacksonesque mythological backstory, complete with CGI battles with elves. By the way, about the ether, Thor tells power-hungry Loki "you cannot wield it."

Fittingly, the overarching plot becomes in the end about the colliding of worlds. Things fly wily-nilly in and out of portals. Thor is in his element, jumping around blind trying to stop bad things. In this case, he must stop the elf from bringing about that venerable standby of diabolic plots: the destruction of the universe. This vampirically pale man has plunged his dagger-like ship smack in the middle of Greenwich, like a burning cross, or a to-scale Google Earth pin. Because with a flourish lifted from Ancient Aliens wingnuttery, all the great wonders of the world point to Greenwich. All the portals float overhead there, variously inbibing and disgorging villain, henchmen, hero, sidekicks. It does seem the logical aesthetic climax of such a mishmash of tones and genres. It felt much like a firework: a bunch of sparkles and pops, accompanied by a concussive bang and a dispersal of glowy bits.

To be honest, I would prefer the barriers between worlds didn't collapse. Thor and Jane are more bearable when they can't reach each other. The pining shakes them up a bit, and for that short moment they have pathos, even if it can only be signified by a black cloak or a half-hearted date. When they meet, the instant affection runs an iron over them. I think this long distance thing is working just fine for them.

Enough Said

The title gives the impression of a movie fed up with speech. And its dialogue feels driven by pity for speaking. There are few lines whose comedy is seperable from the empathetic cringe they induce. But are words really the issue?

The warp of the movie is awkwardness, the weft, aggression. When Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) blurts something blunt, she gives a shot of color to a surprisingly drab California cloth of mildly painful fake warmth. The pain is nothing more fantastical than everyday interpersonal drain--that seemingly impossible rule that, contrary to Paul McCartney's maxim, the love you take is just a little bit less than the love you make. As a messuse, Eva gives the strength of her hands and in return she puts up with her clients' unwelcome intimacy. They babble, they groan, they have bad breath, they don't offer to help her with her massage table up two flights of stairs. The debt is repaid in money, as it tends to be. The math may not work, but it has to.

(One needs a hand massage to give a hand massage.)

More than a decade later, I still remember Ben Bova's Mars for the dust. It got into everything. Well-marinated in their own granular atmosphere, these are not characters that connect. The closeness of Eva and Albert's (James Gandolfini) dates is just close mutual scrutiny, with a bit of irony to make the lines they're drawing around each other bearably sketchy. Their flirting is somehow composed of anti-play, that substance that can be found in children's assessments of their peers.

Throw a few of these miserable couples together, and we get an exchange of cheery bile (a dinner party). Every pet peeve is aired; everyone lives up to their cariacature.

But Enough Said performs a jaw-dropping feat of instrumental delusion. I have too strong a desire for truth-telling, so I was revolted, but I have to congratulate the movie's one act of imagination. It might live, after all. Relationships are only hard because they can be "poisoned" by too much critical talk. It's true that once criticism gets rolling, it's hard to stop, but here there's a convenient scapegoat: Albert's ex wife, who has aired everything she couldn't stand about him. It's perfect for Eva. She gets an actual person on whom to offload all her negativity. She doesn't have to partition herself.

Chantrelle Hunting and Net Cleaning

One Jack O Latern is eating the other, smaller one. They're both smiling. "Do we light another candle in the little one?" One hopes that question is anachronistic.

The icy water gives me a hollow ringing in my head, but my numb hands burn up. It shocked me at first, this feeling that my hands couldn't stand going back in the water. Not because it was surprising that cold water is cold, but because all I could say about it was that it's really cold, pause. He suggested gloves. It's a common complaint that men hear complaints as repair requests, one I am too happy to deploy, but it was a good idea. I think I haven't looked for gloves because that would be giving up the part of the job I look forward to.

Can one be blunted? At the least, one needs bluntness sometimes. "Do you enjoy these things?" No, but I need them. Is enjoyment fair to ask?

The flavor of chantrelles is hard to define, but umistakeable, maybe even a little grotesque. Raw, they're reputedly "peppery and upsetting." They're supposed to smell like apricots, which sounds like synesthesia.

The hills look golden these days, but those same oak leaves up close are a dull ochre. Looking and being might be the other way around. The leaves are all precious anyway, rotten spots and all, until they wash down into the net. Left alone, the net becomes a dam, the water overflows. Why clean the net?

Why find new ways to faint? I have forgotten to say that cleaning the net is work. The question of whether it's worth it--the degree to which work releases from work--is replaced by the fact that I have to do it. I said I look forward to it, but I try to avoid it. I'm sick of the monotony of the routine that surrounds it, but I'm sick of my routine being interrupted by scraping every leaf-clogged surface of the net.

Hunting for mushrooms is actually two things, searching and finding. It's almost annoying to have to stop looking to get down on my knees and collect the trove. Greed turns into the work of brushing off dirt and needles, plucking each mushroom and deciding if it's too damp, too dry, too moldy, too difficult to clean. Soon they're all uprooted, and I'm once again interrupted to go back to looking intently at the forest floor. It's no wonder that after only an hour of this, it's all ennui. Mushrooms as good as those jostling around in my backpack are no longer perfect enough to bother with. Even a largish patch just looks like effort.

That's the trouble with eating them, too: Given the hour-long drive on a sick-inducing road, it only makes sense to gather them in large quantitites. And what does one do with that many chantrelles? It's not a flavor I want in every meal, but there they are. Supposedly they freeze well, but freezers require trust, and I suspect them of mangling the texture of everything. The only option, really, is sharing them as widely as possible. It's not altruism it's ventriloquism. I imagine their taste is more appreciated by those who aren't stuck with them.

After I wrote this I realized the fruit cake is delicious.

Eraserhead is a nightmare of fatherhood, but its problem is matter. For the moment, mine is persistence--"nothIng's more changeable than a young man's heart," as Mrs. Patmore puts it, before a cut to a young man carrying flowers. I would say that Downton Abbey's scene-to-scene cuts have gotten less subtle, but it's been pointed out to me Downton is the model of consistency. It's true, or at least, one has to get one's bearings somehow.

First let me say that Nigella's choice of fruit cake fruit are a stroke of genius. But I only realized this at first glance, and then later, when I tasted my one slapdash substitution. I convinced myself that figs might actually be better than pears. Figs are twofaced. Fresh, they are lush; they carry just the right hint of exoticism requisite for winter sweets. But dried, I can only taste fig newtons. These ones had me confused: they were a cheery yellow on the outside. How could they taste like the filling of a mealy cookie? Nigella's choices had worked all this out to arrive at a consistently sunny tone, by eschewing both the obvious tropical choices and the somber traditionals. Apricots, pears, and golden raisins (in her parlance, sultanas, which sounds as good as the figs looked).

But dried pears were nowhere to be found, and my "contribution" started to sound better, in retrospect, because it was there, because I wanted the fruit I had already bought to matter. This bizzarre aspect of my heart became apparent when I took a bite of the cake.

Fruit cake is so dense it takes more than a night to cool, so to arrive at this point involved about twenty-four hours of zig-zagging. My baking partner had her doubts and therefore I did. Making the cake was the reverse of a Sarah Waters novel: every step made me more uncertain it was a good idea, so that the end result only confirmed my suspicions. No, that's a lie, I had never smelled anything so good as dried fruit simmering in rum and butter. I was in love until I held its weight. It was one in the morning. It had been cooling for several hours and it was still hot (more evidence of its superpastry density). I suddenly felt very tired. Or maybe I had been yawning the whole time?

In any case, the evidence of one's own self-servingness, however obscure, is never very welcome.

Pressure Systems

Seasons are a ploy. A New season can fall instantly (in this week's case, like a grey blanket), yet it sneaks. The beginning of every season is an opportunity to toy with forever: what will life look like from now on? There's an "until," but ignore it. Three months is a lifetime. Except when you hear a date six months in the future, and realize it's almost here.

It's 60 degrees and drizzly, and I'm already calling it Winter. Fall and Spring are intermediaries; Winter and Summer allow me to cultivate delusions of time depressurized. The difference is the setting: inside with endless cups of tea, or outside under a tree. There seems to be a presence there, in the seasonal rescue from the current. Holing up or getting lost.

Hence, Christmas cookies. Making them is a tedious ritual lasting several days. The point isn't the cookies themselves, but the needless work. If I'm lucky, I can get lost in the tactile kingdom of dough. Is this more, or less difficult alone? It can be a social event, cookie-making, but company is only a means to an end. If the weather is just right, it's easier to forget in company. It can despine conciousness, which can get like a cactus, cooking alone.

Winter is supposed to be the season of gluttony, but when it's me who has to cook, it ends up being the season of neglect. Tea for breakfast, because it's as a ritual it calms rather than disorganizes. It's not that food is so distasteful in the morning, but the thought of thinking about food is too much to bear. I get desperate sometime in the evening, but if nothing is at hand, hunger transmutes into simple exhaustion, and I can go to sleep.

Also, hunger and restlessness and intimately related. Being sick of something feels like hunger. Hunger can coexist with involvement, but it's almost soothingly far off, like thunder.

So you can imagine the appeal of this to me. I don't particularly want marzipan fruit, but I imagine the required attention to detail will save me. My habit is to call this kind of focus a rest from language. But restlessness also falls away when I'm working on a piece of code, which is as symbolic an activity as I can imagine. On the other hand, writing prose is a performance, so self-consciousness cannot entirely leave the picture. The difference isn't quite the addictive properties of playing god. Restlessness might recede in the imaginitive part of writing fiction, but one doesn't come away in quite the same clockwork daze. Someone I know drifts from conversation into engineering drawings. The need to tinker persists as an insulating itch. Rather than starting far away, writing tends to overknead its relation to the world. It's much like conversation: everything that could've been put differently comes back like sports commentator video loops. (Maybe that's the redemptive dream of watching football, a sport that spends a lot of time considering very short plays: that anyalsis and second-guessing have value?) Post-programming, my head fills with everything I will do next--the red shoes of the mind.

Phenomenologically, programming is thoroughly technical. It has more in common with home improvement than prose or cookie-making. Cookies seem like they might save me from both. Where writing involves an fraught distance/intimacy with oneself, and programming liquidates experience for products, a craft takes the air out of the self and is only productive as an excuse.

But that's just how I imagine it. I'm not that patient. Every little tectonic shift in experience, like the seasons, are there to negate. A few hours meticulously painting marzipan, and I can feel like never doing it again. That's the product: being over it.

Cake is never for later.

I boil the apples in the sugar and butter. The peaches I throw on top of the caramel once it's done. They crackle and hiss like my fingers those times I accidentally grab hold of the skillet's handle without an oven mitt. My fear is if I cook the peaches like the apples, the peaches would release so much water that by the time they caramelized, they would become a sticky, undifferenciated goo. I suppose there's nothing wrong with jam.

Two days later, the peach cake tastes like mildew. Normally, the whole thing gets eaten within twenty-four hours. This last 1/3 of the cake two mornings later is like stumbling on hidden treasure. I congratulate myself for my restraint, before I take a bite. It wasn't really restraint, anyway--I just didn't eat much cake. My apetite for it dimmed after I pulled it out of the oven.

My friend is trying to stay away from gluten--"I've become one of those people"--but still has a mania for baking gluteny things. If anything, she bakes more when she doesn't eat the products. Dozens and dozens of cupcakes. "I like baking."

My father made turkey soup. "What should go in there? Potatoes, carrots, peppers, tomatoes, sour cream, cabbage?"

"Mostly I just like the broth."

Now there's a massive pot of soup in the fridge, shiny and cold. I just stare at it.

My brother has developed a tamarind habit, which is another way of saying he bought some blocks of tamarind mass. "Mass" and not "paste" because you have to soak it in hot water, mash it with your fingers, and then strain out the husks and seeds. Maybe if it were at home I would never bother to make tamarind water (tamarind, water, sugar), but over at his house I love squishing the debris-filled muck. It's like playing in mud--something adults have generally decided they're above. Scatological comparisons are obvious, but, obviously, unwelcome if spoken.

I make it concentrated, so that it can be diluted to taste, like Russian tea. My brother's girlfriend likes it very dilute--"refreshing." He likes it fairly concentrated. I can't decide. Dilute, I drink glass after glass, because every swallow is unsatisfactory. Concentrated, I drink half a glass and leave it on the table. Its cloudy solids settle to the bottom. You'd think there would be a happy medium, but I haven't found it.

There are those things that I repeatedly vow never to eat again, like eggs on toast. Then I look in the fridge in the morning, and think what else am I going to make? There they are, greasy as ever. It would be reasonable to conclude that eggs on toast are, like anything else, something to have sometimes. But I only seem able to think in always and never.

Watery Cookies

The day before yesterday, it rained. Not an everyday occurance in summer, so the everyday shifted. In the middle of the day, my hair still shower-damp, dark clouds became something to plan for.

Some were very excited. They opened their windows to its smell and sound. At the same time, they hoped they wouldn't have to walk anywhere.

I ran from the car to the coffee shop, and inside I gulped a few glasses of water. My shirt was well hydrated.

I went to dinner with a friend. I decided it was a day for hot soup, but I also ordered iced green tea. I gulped at the tea, even though it didn't taste right.

"What's that?"

"It's odd."

She tried a sip. Neither of us could identify the flavor.

In May We Be Forgiven the secret to good (read: indestructible) cookies is a tablespoon of warm water. The narrator suspects his soul is made of brackish water. Having read him for the past three hundred pages, his suspicions seem well-founded.

In summer it's a pleasure to have hot coffee in the sun. Though I know someone who drinks gallons of juice at all times of year, instead. One can imagine his body as a water feature. Nothing could remain insoluble. And yet he suffered for weeks with kidney stones.

Bipolar According to Silver Linings Playbook

I wanted to see Silver Linings Playbook because I thought it might be about manic depression in some way. The trailer wasn't encouraging, but everyone said it was good. In other words, improving--to use Jeeves' only adjective for a book he's reading. It's fine, but it has nothing to do with mental illness. "Bipolar" is code for "quirky and inappropriate."

It's not impossible for manic depression to have some thematic resonance. Homeland at least framed mania as a crisis of judgement. Carrie always seemed a bit nuts to her coworkers, but note that she was able to hide that she took medication for most of her career.

If we pretend Silver Linings is about a bipolar man, his mania is never in the least bit sneaky. He seems to be always manic, yet the script seems to actually believe him when he says he's getting better. And this constant hyperoptimism ("silver linings") and need to be doing shit is punctuated by "episodes" during which he wakes up his parents, yells about Hemmingway for the dumbest reason, and breaks things. I don't deny that this could happen, but watching the scene, you'd think mania is just a quirk, like not wearing underwear--not to everyone's taste, but with few serious repercussions. I guess this is an attempt to make it as much of cinematic spectacle as possible. I longed for Kay Redfield Jamison's narration of her manic explosions of thought. She convinces herself of her own genius in that state, of course, but she also might well be a genius.

Everything for Pat is on the surface. The only character that seems to have any interiority at all is the depressive, Tiffany, and the romance plot becomes his quest for it. Which is not exactly a revelation. Likewise that the proof of true love is sexuality supressed for friendship until the right moment (the end, when the whole room is shocked by the sexuality of their dance moves, inexplicably).

So if I want to believe the screenwriter isn't clueless, the only option as far as I can see is that it's a romance of two pathological liars who really like to be "weird," and so self-diagnose themselves bipolar and nymphomaniac. Because it makes them seem interesting.

Conversations with Dead Women

In the finale of Battlestar Galactica, father and son are abandoned by their respective loves. I would say “the women they love,” but in Battlestar that would be redundant. All sex ends up being about the survival of one species or another, and although one of sex’s enthusiastic practitioners says that “love has nothing to do with sex,” it seems only to occur between man and woman.

Then again, filial love is the strongest of all. Son weeps at father’s admission that he cares whether son lives or not. Mothers chase daughters across ship and dream, gorge their eyes out when torn away.

Only at the end do the show’s queen and princess in-spirit die, but from the beginning the men are haunted by dead women dear to them. One is a full-fledged character.

It’s a curious gender reversal of Dorothy Parker’s “Sentiment,” in which a woman melodramatically suffers through her memories of a man. In fits she realizes that many of her memories of him are probably counterfeits of her imagination. She wishes he were there to correct her imagination with his real presence, and then she imagines him there telling her “don’t sentimentalize.”

Battlestar’s hauntings are vertiginous in a much nerdier sense: the question is not are they true, but what classification of thing are they? Is she a figment of his imagination, a chip in his brain, her spirit, God, something else? Fans of the show were reportedly disappointed by the finale not because it flattened all complexity, but because it didn’t reveal the real mechanics behind the show’s mysteries. There’s something especially funny about interrogating the clockwork of a universe populated with religious machines.

These apparitions are so generous. Conversations with absent people sounds like a perfectly serviceable definition of consciousness to me, but these are not the insinuations of those you only later recognize, but hallucinatory. Embodied solidly enough that you might find yourself being “fracked” by them. Poe would find it terribly poetical, which worries me.

Watching some shows, I wish character’s minds weren’t so obscured. Watching Battlestar, I find myself wishing my own experience of consciousness felt so unequivocal.

Every year, the aforementioned father, Adama, summons his dead wife. They chat. Actually it’s more fraught than that. Like a good feminine principle, she undermines all of his clear-cut rules. Hence she must be put to rest at the end of the day/episode. Ultimately, her purpose is to reinvigorate the moral ground on which he stands by taking it apart and slipping cleanly away.

There are some entertaining fireworks--watch Baltar, whose interiority makes up about a quarter of the show, as his brows go from worried to unconsoleable--when these haunted men encounter the living women whose ghosts they banter with. It's especially upsetting to the drunk who sees his dead wife's face in the face of a Cylon woman he sees in the brig. (This show takes fantasy's role in love very literally.) She becomes pregnant and then, his wife returns.

This awfully intimate relationship with the deceased does not necessarily favor the living. When one man's wife dies, he remembers only what a dumbshit she was. Everything becomes to him a doomed, misguided fiction; he yells at Adama "you want to make a dead woman into an angel" and mocks "your precious ship." The ship is the only thing keeping them alive, but he's right--their attachment to living is pretty funny.

The show's tendency toward annihilation is perhaps its most pleasurable aspect. We go to blockbusters to confirm our lust for spectacular immortality (see e.g. Elysium and every superhero movie). We watch television to bask in the reflection of our own desire for life to stop.

An addiction to a lengthy serial drama has the happy effect of bringing life to a halt. It's no wonder that Battlestar, whose addictiveness is on par with Damages and Buffy, allegorizes the viewer's dependency on it.

The Galactica is on a journey to Earth, where humanity's struggles will end. I don't especially want them to find Earth; it would be the end of the show and I've have to step back out into the sunshine. The Cylons are the enemy and so a godsend (pun intended) for an addict: they keep making it very hard to arrive at the end of the story. Their constant interdictions are the lifeblood of the show's drama.

They find a shitty but hospitable planet before they find Earth. All the show's heroes don't want to stay there, but they do for a year (in the gap between seasons). Then the Cylons come back to conquer them. A relief! That planet was getting boring. It was even filmed in the drab colors of the everyday.

And before they find the Earth they'd hoped for, they find a planet called Earth that's been nuked into oblivion. It's all wrong, but it's an omen of things to come because a verdant Earth means a nuked supply of episodes.

An endearingly angry pilot named Starbuck is prophesied to lead them to Earth, and she hears through the Cylon grapevine "you will lead them to their end." She's devastated by this. What's the contradiction?

Her husband receives a bullet to the head, which is just short of lethal and gives him access to the memories of his past life--essentially, the backstory of the Cylons. It kills him to keep talking, but he's really excited about telling this story. The doctor has him wheeled away to remove the bullet and he screams at Starbuck: "don't take this away from me!" How can I not sympathize? Who wouldn't take a bullet to the brain for a tale?

When they finally do arrive at Earth (shit), Adama's son has a crazy idea: he wants everyone to settle on the surface without any technology, just some provisions to get started. Baltar says "I'm surprised how amenable everyone is to this plan" and Adama, "never underestimate people's desire for a clean slate." Given how this episode is taking shape, I couldn't agree more. Please, send the ships into the fucking sun. I never want to see another minute of this. The show exorcizes itself!

I don't have the newfound love of life that those who have neared death are rumored to gain, exactly. It's more of an aesthetic rejection of not-life. Which is exactly what the God(s) at the show's annoying Matrix-y close espouse regarding humanity. They think the 21st Century's technological renaissance (itself a questionable notion) is a sin that deserves a reboot of the species. I get the impression this is Ronald D. Moore's contention, too, which makes me want to ignore the nuance or at least ambiguity of the 60-some hours I watched. Moore apparently regards the entirety of human history as a fall from grace. Give me a break. (Ha.)

Papal Infallibility

Scandal could easily be a sword-and-sandal drama, because it's not about people so much as it is about flawed gods. (However, I don't mean to overstate how much people are like people.) Undoubtedly I have this image because one of these characters calls them "gladiators in suits"--the cheesiest line that ever was, as another acknowledges. Every character is remarkable and/or "weird" (and "weird is good"). Even their names seem ostenatiously legendary or fictional: Cyrus, Gideon, Pope, Huck. But greatness only lands on them like so many traumatic bricks; the rest they have to work at. The plane of infallibility is out of reach insofaras it is already within them.

While the writing begins with a bountiful antagonism reminiscent of Aaron Sorkin, it moves quickly toward forceful monologue. Olivia Pope executes takedowns not with elaborate ploys, as Gossip Girl's Blair Waldorf would, but with a single bomb of a speech made up on the spot.

Cyrus has the sarcastic version of her eloquence, and naturally becomes more her enemy throughout the course of the first season. There are reasons for this, but I'd like to entertain the possibility that Cyrus is untrustworthy simply because the mechanics, motives, and effects of his speech cannot be reconciled with Olivia's. Nobody really listens to him, so he is oblique. In one scene he tells the President how his life will be now that his dirty secret is out. He ends this acid prophecy with "but you just work on your speech, because that's important," and a little chuckle.

Olivia Pope is the clearest manifestation of greatness around. But if she were a stable element, it wouldn't be much of a show. The first episode reveals that her gut is never wrong and is wrong, that she doesn't believe in crying and cries. Yet this hadly diminishes our devotion, nor her employees. It seems to us that life's chaos can only be met with rash decision. Anything less is wallowing, or so we are convinced, watching her. With a little swallowed whine of discontent.

Her advice to her cohorts borders on patronizing aggression. She advises everyone to "get some normal," while she herself freely admits "I'm not normal." One of her worst moments is, to use the new employee's word, "demolishing" a girl who claims to have had sex with the president. And if she had not? For her, contemplation is done through action. Which is a fine thing for television. For someone who has made contemplation the only possible thing, it's also tempting, by way of sheer self-loathing, to say Olivia's knowledge through mistakes is the finest thing. Her attitude reminds me of a very defensive thing Michel Foucault wrote (if it were shorter, today it could be called a subtweet):

As to those for whom to work hard, to begin and begin again, to attempt and be mistaken, to go back and rework everything from top to bottom, and still find reason to hesitate from one step to the next--as to those, in short, for whom to work in the midst of uncertainty and apprehension is tantamount to failure, all I can say is that clearly we are not from the same planet.

It's at once inspiring and arrogant. He defends analytic thought from contemplative paralysis, which is nearly tantamount to giving himself a free pass to analyze whatever and however he wants. Olivia Pope means to move herself and everyone around her into such great motion that nobody will ever be stuck or lost ("giving up is not an option"), and her noble cause gives her justification to destroy or manipulate whoever stands in her way.

Also, Olivia Pope is not from the same planet.

Being from a different planet can inspire respect as much as it can eros. A funny thing, for her--she's mostly indifferent to it. But she does have desire. The president's romantic gesture is to ask her for "just one minute." Taking one minute to stand staring into each other's eyes could not be more alien to her nature. Inaction being under such a foreceful prohibition, perhaps for her it's better than sex. They do have sex, but annoying as it is to watch two people look into each other's eyes for this long, surely it's the pause that's apotheotic.

She trusts him; she hates how her trust blinds her. She loves him; she's at war with him. Lucy Snowe (Villette) says it best:

Reader, if in the course of this work, you find that my opinion of Dr. John undergoes modification, excuse the seeming inconsistency. I give the feeling as at the time I felt it; I describe the view of character as it appeared when discovered.

Maybe it's best not to think in terms of opinion. Yet it is so often solicited. The "gladiators" have a ritual of observing their clients from behind glass, before they take them on, but Olivia has always already decided. They're supposed to vote whether they believe the client's story, but the vote never matters. Why do this? Why have a minute of looking into each other's eyes? Any show with a bit of self-respect (or maybe vanity) is more interested in the eyes averted, glancing, or spying. Oddly, the cynical view of characters with cynical gazes gives a clearer picture, while Scandal's direct and sustained eye contact (tearing people apart, too, is done face-to-face) makes character more difficult to gauge. There is no one-way glass. The potential clients know they're being observed. In these open conditions Olivia sees clearly the "character as it appeared when discovered," while everyone, including us, are busy trying to get to the bottom of things.

If the show is so counter-voyeuristic, why this love of bevelled windows? At nearly every opportunity, the camera pans slowly across the edge, yielding a rainbow-tinged double of whoever's there that's always slipping in or out. It seems incongruous that the barrier of the window is necessary to introduce this nagging visual error. In the world of the show, all that is necessary is to pull down all barriers, and one senses a lie crawling away.

Variety

Apparently, astronauts suffer from "food boredom," or are hypothesised to. I like the idea that someone could die from lack of variety, but only because it assumes the importance of the kind of thing often thought of today as not real. The other hypothesis given sounds more like science fiction: "their sense of smell changes as microgravity shifts fluids around in their heads."

I'm entertained by this inversion of credibility, but I think the food boredom hypothesis is believable becauses the need for variety is already pervasive. I would say it's not usually matter of life or death, but in the sense of wasted life or the nonlife implied by expressions such as "you're not really living," it is. If you live in an abundance of variety of food, eating the same thing is a little death. It is as if we try to live life in imitation of our market's plethora.

There is also a chicken-and-egg problem in this life of variety, especially if you cook for yourself. I often say I'm in a rut. It's a kind of trench warfare--all the action happens on the brief, perilous run to the next rut. At all other times the rut leads back to the rut: Making and eating repetitive food dulls the spirit, and you need to be in high spirits to even think of cooking something outside whatever rut you're in.

There's something bizarre about feeling one must always be consuming something novel. After all, the most ritualistic foods are often great pleasures. Okay, that would just be coffee and tea, for me. I know someone, though, who decided she didn't need coffee, she just needed the ritual, and began making smoothies in the morning. It doesn't matter that the preparation literally never changes, just that it solidifies into a ritual, and that it continues to convince you of its efficacy.

Efficacy is the thing, isn't it? We rush from one "ethnic" restaurant to the next because we imagine it will have more oomph than the last. We travel around the world (our own place is not a part of this world, of course) in hopes that life elsewhere is more intense than it is where we are. Travel snapshots look best with impossibly high color saturation. Memory can be sanctified if never revisited.

MFK Fisher once quarrelled with her then husband over this. He refused "to back to a place where once he had been happy." (The place was a town in France, unshockingly.) He thought it was "foolish to try to recapture happiness." She "wasn't trying to recapture anything." The two come to an equitable solution, of sorts. He can have his precious memory; she went back with her sister and had a lovely time.

This isn't a matter of knowledge versus happiness. Fisher didn't go back with the intent of ruining a beloved thing by revealing its underbelly--the investagatory renunciation of pleasure that academics (and I) get off on. It is foolish to try to make the same cup of coffee another morning. The coffee wasn't what was good. This doesn't mean one shouldn't try to make another good cup of coffee, perhaps even the same way.

Kitchens

In college I only learned that it's dreadful for a stranger to live in your kitchen. And this only at the very end. I was never much concerned with kitchens. I had no need to be. Like the socks my parents always gifted me for Christmas, most of the necessary implements and space were just always around. When landlords rent to summer vacationers and students, the kitchens are never quite empty. In houses in small towns, kitchens are rarely cramped.

It took moving to an apartment (a word that became more ghastly with every week I lived in one) to realize how lovely the kitchen of my childhood and current home is. Not because it has the latest doodads, but because cooking there doesn't feel like a perversion.

Between a house on a hill and a shoebox of a converted hotel room, I became an aesthete of kitchens. Oddly, the top and bottom of this relief were built in the same year, 1905. But where the house's kitchen has always been the kitchen, the apartment's kitchen was added in 2003 in a slobbery effort to turn a dilapidated building into rent revenue.

If the windows are eyes, the apartment's kitchen is hidden in the dark. The fact that it's as far away as it can be from the windows, and only connected by a narrow doorway, gives the hot air it generates the longest, most arduous escape. There's a fan, but it doesn't do much. To cook there is to steam in my own cooking.

The excreta of cooking is all close enough to touch. I must be vigilant in cleaning, and prepare ingredients in just the right sequence, because there's only enough counter for one cutting board.

For all of its visual obscurity, the sounds of cooking can be heard by all. If I can hear my neighbors watching a movie, or the incomprehensible mumble of their conversations, they must be able to hear me whipping cream in a metal bowl at one in the morning. That's the thing about an apartment--it's apartness is shouted for all to hear. Tolerance belies antagonism, and an apartment is specified amidst intimacy.

Everything in the pantry I bought for myself. While at home I grumble about having to put up with other's neuroses, in an apartment all to myself there is nothing but my own neuroses. It's nice not to encounter someone else's dessicated oatmeal or molding bread, but it's needful to find ingredients I didn't think I wanted. Despite and because I hate excess, I take pleasure in making something out of my father's neglected, nearly-rotten vegetables.

At home, the kitchen is porous. Light comes in the windows, air flows. The counters are usually a mess, but they can be cleaned if I need more room. With space and food going to waste, I'm not intensely aware of time passing. It's not a pod in which to carry out the necessary task of making something to eat, but a place to do whatever.

By aesthete I really mean I admire and am jealous of kitchens. Like yards, they seem of a better life. Not every kitchen, of course. But sometimes my eyes grow wide and I say "what wonderful light." And then they tell me about their plumbing problems, their mice, or how the height of their sink has given them chronic spinal pain.

Cherry Preserves

For all its sugar, according to its packaging, jam needs to be refrigerated. A fridge collects of all those things that would otherwise spoil. It puts side by side items that would otherwise have nothing to do with one another. You may object that food has to be stored somewhere, next to something. The fridge is not remarkable in this way. True, but what it brings together is particular to refrigeration.

Another property not at all unique to the fridge is its extension beyond the practical need it fulfills. Some things go into the fridge not because they'd go bad otherwise, but because they go in the fridge. I want to say there's paranoia in storing eggs in the fridge, but that hinges on the "rationality" of leaving eggs out. Gross. I'll keep that for later. Or maybe for never. An uncanny consequence of having a receptacle of instant preservation is that more ends up going in than gets used. Cleaning out a fridge is an archeology of desires never acted on. Or more often, incompletely consumed. At some point they go bad, and even if they haven't, ancient jars are easily shunned for the possibility they might be spoiled.

Going in the opposite direction, the taste of cherries is smelled more than tasted, and anticipated more than smelled.

The trouble with the essay is its preoccupation with putting things together in sequence. One comment about refrigeration becomes a thesis, which is a kind of smell. If I say, for example, that sometimes I think there are no thoughts, only images, I must insist upon why this is relevant. Of course, you could say that my trouble with the essay is my insistence on turning it into a fridge. Rather than a thesis I have a theme, overextending into everything that happens to fall under my preoccupations. Then again, who is to say my preoccupations are unrelated?

If not necessarily related, a 92-year-old man tells me that his life's stories, between them, have everything. "Everything's in there," he says. He thinks his job as a typewriter repairman in New York extended into every cranny of life. "There are over 200 stories in there," he says, patting his tome. If his life is his job, as he says, then his job is also as he says--a survey of every form of life, or at least every job. That made use of a typewriter. His book at once has demographic ambitions and is contained by a peculiar circumstance.

He also tells his life as an ideal example of the universal possibility of the American dream. He began impoverished; now he's comfortably retired in the city of retirement. The way he claims himself as an example is, of course, an awfully exemplary example of a common idea. Is the idea of his life as a proof of an idea related to his life? In one of his stories, the woman he later marries calls him a crook, because instead of going to dinner he goes to repair a typewriter. The joke is, as it is in situation comedy, that he's a victim of circumstance, not a crook. He's not much of a crook, but the name "the crook" stuck.

It's the same with lemons. You know what I mean? You can't really intend something to be uncalculated, can you. Even absolutely nothing can insinuate itself. Forget essays, this is the trouble with being awake--everything has to be related! If late at night in the dark you happen to be thinking of haunting, it's hard for any subsequent screaming not to be related. I thought I heard the screamer scream "WHO'S THERE?!" but surely not. I'm not convinced that doubt isn't a kind of faith. Obviously the noises following the screaming, of rustling and clanging and thumping and creaking were the noises of other doubters waking up, and walking down the hall to investigate. Everything turned quiet soon, but I kept the lights on until it got light out, and only then slept. It's not that in sleep nothing is related, but is relation even a question? What goes in a dream journal without the idea that dreams mean something?

What is the life story of a successful young entrepreneur without his belief in the positive effect of a positive outlook? What else might've brought together these incidents? With his girlfriend & business partner he traveled across country, sleeping in the car, washing in university bathrooms. It can't be a coincidence that his business is gift wrapping. His favorite form of anecdote is pride wrapped in incredulity. "They flirt with me for hours, but they won't have a business meeting with me!" "When they hear me talk about gift wrapping they ask me 'you're straight?' Seriously!"

Hold on, there's a spider on my desk.

Nails

For about a month I had been noticing that my toenails needed clipping. Every time I walked around in shoes I thought "I really need to clip my toenails," because the nails jammed into the toes, which hurt. Then one day I did it! I don't know where the motivation came from.

I went to meet someone, and she said "you should really clip your fingernails, they're getting out of hand." I don't sleep with this person, but I was proud of the fact that I would not scratch someone in my sleep with my toenails, even though I had not been. I thought she would be pleased, even though she couldn't see my toenails. She just kept reminding me to clip my fingernails! I mean, politely, but still I almost took off my shoes and socks to show her what I had been up to.

There we were, eating chips on his floor. I'm sorry, I lied earlier. I thought it would sound better if he were a she, for some reason. Probably sounded worse. Anyway, I don't think his grooming advice was meant maliciously, because he was very friendly otherwise. "We should get high, dude," he said.

I said, "your floor is really dirty." In my defense, I really didn't want to get high. Or maybe I did, so I really didn't. Semantics, I guess. He didn't seem to hear me, because he was eating the chips really sloppily, getting crumbs all over the floor.

I can't really remember if we talked about life or played video games. I was too preoccupied. I couldn't figure out if I had a right to be angry or not. Besides, I was really quite happy, despite being uncertain.

Apparently, he was quite a chip connisseur. He told me about the factory these chips came from, and how they are made. He had been there once, on a chip tour. The workers were really quite well payed, with lots of benefits, he said. We could feel good about eating them. The Tostitos nacho dip was the ideal pairing for this chip, he said. I was engrossed by all this. I began not to care about how ruthlessly he had judged my fingernails. He had picked out the right dip for us.

It was late by then, and I didn't want to walk several miles home. "You don't mind sleeping on the floor, do you?" he asked. "No," I said, chips & dip already dancing in my head, and possibly my stomach.

In the morning, I looked at his toenails. They looked like mine did before I clipped them, except without the layer of fungus. He rolled over. His eyes were closed, but I could tell he was awake.

"Can I borrow your sandals?" I asked. He squinted. "Okay, but shouldn't we eat breakfast?" "Oh, yes! Absolutely. Never mind about the sandals."

After breakfast I scraped the crumbs off my feet, and put on my socks and shoes. As I was going out the door he called after me "really do something about those fingernails!" in a kind of loving tone.

A month later, I bought sandals. I left the store wearing them. The sun was out, so I walked to a park where children screamed and splashed in a shallow water fountain. I felt there was something strange about a giant fountain designed for children to play in. Someone later told me it's called a "water park." Every time I stopped admiring my sandals and opened a book, I got a whiff of sewage. I looked around at the other people basking in the sun reading hefty books or simply looking at the children playing and burping. Did they smell what I smelled?

I was determined to read just one more short story, but the smell kept nagging. More annoying than the smell, of course, was my inability to ignore it. I walked two blocks to another park, where I nestled low in the reeds, away from the wind. The day and the horizon, now obscured by cheerful vegetation, seemed to become the same thing. I was content. I ate a cookie. I felt I might pass out or throw up at any moment. I don't mind vomit so much; it's the feeling that I'll stop being me. I looked down at my toes. The nails were long and scaly.

Putting on my shoes, I saw a bus that was headed to where I lived. I got on with one lace untied. At the next stop, a man sprinted nearly three blocks to get on the bus. He was panting, but I envied him. Then a troop of children got on, who I recognized from the water park. They were all eating ice cream. I expected the ice cream to drip from their cones onto the floor, but they seemed to be expert at licking their cones to prevent this. It smelled like strawberry flavoring on the bus. More nausea. This time, I felt the absence of blood all over. I felt like I was dying. That's what it is, when you stop being you. I almost texted a friend "I'm dying!" But as I was about to hit send, the feeling passed. Then it returned, and passed again, and so on. I thought that if I sent the text, I would no longer feel this way. Because I didn't send it, I imagined myself collapsing as I got off the bus. Someone would come look after me. Maybe they'd carry me back to my apartment. Maybe they'd take me to the hospital. Maybe they would see my now immaculate fingernails. Or maybe they'd just assume I was a homeless drunk! I became determined to stay conscious until I got home.

As I exited the bus, my shoe fell off. I was embarassed, so I didn't tell the driver, and consequently didn't have time to pick up my shoe. I put my sandals back on. The chip conisseur was knocking on the door to my apartment. "Oh hey," he said, looking down at my feet. "My god! Your toenails are monsters!" I couldn't think of anything to say, so I unlocked the door and gingerly got into bed. He came in looking cheerful. "You okay?" Then he pulled a shiny pair of metal clippers from his bag. "Look what I brought!"

The End of the World

He's cute, but keeps his distance. He's careful never to propose anything that could be agreed with. Her hand on his is wrong, but necessary. "Are you hurt?" He looks hurt by the notion that he's hurt. "Frustrated?" He takes incommensurability to be evidence of his genius. A little singularity, words spinning off, not meant to be understood.

You can't blame her for disagreeing with his inwardness turned outward, but she does. At least outwardly. Apologies and laughter twitch. She's sorry for telling him "you have this line, that we're all doomed." Sorry because correct.

If you met either one of them on the street you wouldn't know it. Their faces are obscure, even from three feet away--peripheral, even straight-on.

Just their voices, and clouds with no brakes. Easy to tell in the rustlings of leaves the difference between a nice breeze and a storm. They argue about population control and resource shortage.

Admittedly, vision can fail. An eyelid can flutter involuntarily. What does disrupted vision look like? Anything?

He's hungry for himself, but after so long wandering with the pressure of emptiness in his belly, hunger has become nausea. If he got a chance to dig in, he'd have to take little bites. The meal would be too rich. It wouldn't make him more solid, but less. Eating himself ought to leave him about the same, but some would be lost in digestion. By the time he ate all of himself there'd be a lot of waste, and someone would have to clean it up. Probably that dogooder of a girlfriend. Isn't it her fault he gets white in the face whenever he has thoughts of self-actualization?

Though she seems unconcerned by what he says (more amused by what he says and concerned for him), privately she's somewhat of a megalomaniac. There's no bloodflow to show for it, but her retrospective shame makes her shout. All the wrong things she says to him! She can never remember what he says. She remembers attending closely to what he says, but his words are lost. Perhaps, she sometimes reflects, the shame of her selective memory accounts for her enthusiasm for listening.

For all their verbal discord, they're well-coordinated. In silence they slip into the back room. They prepare to leave, circling and brushing past each other in nearly identical backpacks. They're ostentatiously sly. The darker clouds are overtaking, maybe speeding away. Everyone is wondering will it rain? Trying to ignore these two pivoting on the linolium. They leave the door to the back room ajar.

Crying

The baby is crying. "I know, honey," her mother coos, and rolls the stroller gently back and forth. Seeing her across the cafe, the deaf man is troubled by the privacy of her pain. "You can't walk around, honey, it's too dangerous," she tells the baby, though she appears to address the sky.

"What took you so long?" she asks her husband as he sits down. He says the baby wants to get out of the stroller. He lifts her out, and when he sets her down she begins crying again. "You just got out, and now you're angry again?"

Behind him, a girl is saying to a boy "no, you really can't understand." They're wearing identical black jackets. She leaves (in a huff, he thinks) to get their drinks, and when she returns there's a whining dog in her way. "It's okay, it can't reach you," he says, and she slips past.

"That poor dog," says the husband, "he's been waiting for his owner for so long." "He's a she," says the wife, "and her owner's just inside. She's just a whiny dog."

The baby starts toddling over to the dog, and hits her head on a chair. The deaf man reflects how poorly the world is made for babies. The baby's parents are amazed how often the baby runs into things. The baby reaches the dog. Still whinng, the dog doesn't see her. Her mother picks her up.

The owner comes out to the dog and holds her head in place. "Sit," he says, "stay." As soon as he goes back inside, the dog strains her leash towards him.

Another man comes in with another dog. "My dog is ridiculously well-trained," he tells his friend. "His training cost as much as a new car. He's an expensive puppy. Sometimes I think he's smarter than I am." He tells his dog to sit. The dog stays standing. "Don't be a punk."

Meep Meep

The first thing I did when I got back to the city was take a walk in the park. Inevitably, it wasn't much of one. Some people are prone to this stupidity. When I got to the trail, this gaggle of mountainbikers was rolling about like there was nobody in the world but them. Two of them were at the edge of the trail, actually considering going down the cliff. "That's just one of those things, you know, you've just got to go for it." I found myself preoccupied with crashing through the ferns and brush, a stick going between the spokes, and ending up Wile E. Coyoted in the creek.

In Ashland I discovered I missed the small-town, middle-class projection of calm. Walking down residential streets in the sunshine I feel so wonderfully obscure. It's a hipsterdom of neighborhoods. I flatter myself that I don't belong in Ashland's seemingly monolithic community. A far more comforting feeling of outsiderness than skirting the city's plethora of imminent scenes, cliques, and classes.

The next day I told my friends "I think a spider bit me!" I didn't think a spider bit me. But who knows? My cheek felt red, or white--stung, or numb. Did they notice anything, driving off in their minivan? The kids kicking their skateboards up the hill would've made an effort not to notice.

The trail--not quite a trail, going up a small stream overhung with bushes--was a last ditch obscurity. When did I start asking myself what are you doing? At the beginning?

I felt my cheek. There wasn't anything on it, but my fingers came away perfumed. Maybe it was just the raspberries doing what they do.

This is stupid. This is the stupidest thing you've ever done. Well, not the stupidest.

In the mirror there was nothing. Disappointing.

It's getting dark. Oh my god, You're going to be stuck out here in the mud in the dark!

Just because I couldn't (you should really) turn around.

Just because I wanted to get over the ridge and look at the sunset. Something I didn't believe was feasible even when I began, an hour before dark. That must be why I went.

Obviously it didn't turn dark, either. In Ashland I went up to the dam that stores the town's water. It looked fragile. It occured to me that if the dam broke, it would be a tsunami in a canyon. It would destroy downtown. I felt a shiver, but titilation doesn't make things happen any more than willpower.

Good Interests

Last year, when he wasn't trying to emote from underneath several inches of wrinkley latex, Guy Pearce gave the biggest TED talk ever. It was a dytopian future of TED: on a tiny stage in a stadium, an entrepreneur peddled his "idea worth spreading" with grave tones and allusions to Greek mythology.

Now he pitches the idea that human DNA "is destined for an upgrade," shows off a room-sized hologram of his brain, and says things like "the next iteration." He drops "mimesis" and preens, as if this word alone just solved the universe.

These touches are of course intended to set him apart in sliminess. Robert Downey Jr.'s problem is that he came from the same slime. Back when he was a part of the "party scene," he said "you've basically hacked DNA!"

He has anxiety attacks because "nothing's been the same since New York," apparently not alluding to 2001. He confides to Gwyneth Paltrow, "I experience things, and then they're over." Yet he's not relieved when the fake terrorist interrupts a TV broadcast (again) to tell the world "don't worry, the final lesson is coming"?

Doomsday didn't deliver, but the DNA-hack he was so excited about offers a kind of solution for his malaise. He can't sleep, and all of his activity is side-stepping "tinkering."

Him being a man, confessing these problems to his mother-accountant-wife, Paltrow, is a Big Gesture. Not only does his small admission of vulnerability nullify their disagreements, it earns him a big cookie, like a baby who finally pooed in the right place.

In any case, for him, time doesn't really pass. "Extremis" punctuates by exploding people.

While it was him who ended up in the spotlight, it was the slimy idea-slinger around whom a network organized. But the whole thing gets a bit too hot.

This is how Downey Jr. describes Extremis: "You know when a girl's straddling you and she glows from the inside, kind of orange?" The troubling substance is emphatically tied up with an interrupted sexual encounter. His innuendo-y puns leading up to the inventor's bedroom and his insistence on her bedroom are relentless. When the stuff blows up in the next room, an even more blatant visual joke lands on top of him in the form of his concerned body guard.

For being immortal, the Extremis-ists are awfully precarious. Extremis doesn't always "take", and explodes you instead. Pearce insists on a rhetoric of purification, and the film insists that the Extremis makes one more oneself, contrasting bare bodies with metal suits. For all their bare drive, they're oddly decentered, their rengerative and destructive power emanating from Extremis.

The hero and the villain compete at first for Petter Pots' interest. Hence Pearce's schmoozey holopowerpoint in her office.

While Pearce was busy getting connected, Downey Jr. isolated himself.

Rebecca Hall describes the process of becoming interested: "first you're all wide-eyed, then...[you get compromised]". Being a scientist is for her an accumulation of compromises. Yet the thing her compromises unleashed, Extremis, is a reversal of wonder cooling into scientific interest. Rather than being in between anything, you are the thing. Your body generates enough heat to melt things. Extremis is a nightmare of overconnectedness. A destructive rather than productive network.

Morality in this movie is a matter of how to manage your interests. The hero is preoccupied with how his hobby is more like an addiction, taking him away from his relationship.

When he says he's renouncing his "cocoon" of hobbies, he's towing the burnt remnants of his workshop. Is it possible to read his self-reinvention as anything other than the very fantasy that draws him back to the workshop? His whole life was organized around the energy-producing contraption which made time stand still near his heart, to keep a piece of shrapnel from penetrating it. He's repaired his damaged heart, and renounced his distracting shell. Can anyone survive on only what they ought to be?

Subjects

What

We uh filled it in with uh some uh fill.

Like

Oh no, I like popcorn. I don't like what it does.

Spying

Is she a spy?

Words

Water goes out the inlet and in the outlet.

50

Under 50 or over 50, everyone loves it here.

Them

Really all faiths have so much in common.

Murder

What an imagination he has.

Health

I see what comes out of people's bodies.

Education

Wind. You can't see it, but it's a force. It acts on the world.