One Day, Today

"Call me or I'll call you, but one of us will call, yes? What I mean is it's not a competition. You don't lose if you phone first" (Nicholls, 434).

I had thought that it was a competition--one that required careful tactics, practiced flair, blasé attitude--and if it were, then I had lost so many times to him. But who would care? He doesn't know he's winning.

I finished the book. It was supposed to be Lizzy's belated birthday gift but I had never read the book myself, so I took the chance and read the first two chapters of it. Phenomenal. What impressed me most was that Nicholls knew not only of the human mind, but of the female mind in particular. I understood so much of Emma. She was me, I was her. So--sorry Lizzy if you're reading this, but I kept on reading to the end, and now I know you will love your birthday gift.

I love the ending. I love how Nicholls goes back to that first day Emma and Dexter meet. And I love what Dexter tells her. Call me or I'll call you. You don't lose if you phone first. I wish I knew sooner. Take down the book, pick up the phone.

" 'If I loved you I would have written differently.' " 

Alice Munro, "Too Much Happiness"

If I hated you I wouldn't have written at all. 

For Mr. Less

The buzzword at General Electric these days is "Six Sigma," meaning that its goal is to make product defects so rare that in statistical terms they are more than six standard deviations away from being a matter of chance--almost a one-in-a-million occurrence. 

--Atul Gawande, "Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science"

I was reading this book on Gawande's experience as a general surgeon and suddenly thought of Mr. Less at the words "sigma" and "standard deviations." If I had his email address, I would have sent it right away. I remember the joke about CLT. Central Limit Theorem. Also the airport at Charlotte, Virginia--where he is now. 

my dream that happened at the beach of Rome, which is contradictory because there is no beach in Rome

I woke up with the wish it were real. I wished you were real. I wished to see you again, but I no longer felt your lips on mine, and like a blown candle I could no longer revive my dream as I cannot revive the flame that went out. What was left behind was only the vivid, eidetic feeling that I did kiss you, a memory, like how the faint smoke is evidence of the flame that was just blown out. 

One Day

So they were pen pals now, Emma composing long, intense letters crammed with jokes and underlining, forced banter and barely concealed longing; two-thousand-word acts of love on air-mail paper. Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them. 

--David Nicholls, One Day 

I had felt like Emma. "Composing" is the right word, if not the only word, to describe how I wrote letters to him. I wrote them thoughtfully, proofread them critically. I was the soi-disant poet-master of composing those "long, intense letters." They were smart, funny, expressive. You could tell I loved him. They were just so good. And what I got as replies, after hiatuses of three or more business days (as if he were FedEx-ing his emails), were several lines of objective, general pieces of irrelevant fact. There was not much feeling. Or was there? Did I fail once again to discover the hidden meaning underneath "I just got back home from Rome"? I had weighed every word, punctuation, emoticon, line break and still I could not understand him. He was fleeting me. His emails were so short that I memorized each one. I recited them to my mother, and afterwards she'd look at me in this incredulous, vicarious, sympathetic disappointment and ask, "That's it?" 

Marilyn Monroe

"I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together."

Quote given from my best friend Emily

Then let us fall apart so that I can fall for someone better.