New York City Romance

I always suspected that I would never fall in love here. There's too many attractive, interesting people, and everyone is constantly running around, partying, playing games...

It's hardly the environment to find someone exceptional, because there's always the idea you could easily find someone else.

For me, falling in love requires something powerful - the mysterious connection between two people that violently excludes the possibility of anyone else interfering with it. It's that thing people say comes once in a lifetime. You could go on a hundred dates and never find it, or you find it once and lose it, or never notice it even when it's right under your nose.

Is it safe to say we're all too busy for love? Building our own mini empires?

Busy busy blob

GREAT excerpt that makes fun of American busyness. Mediated pgs 179-181.
..."Nowadays, in our more competitive schools at least, twelve-year-old have appointment books and family lives are scheduled as if they were presidential campaigns going into the last week before an election"

GREAT excerpt about the driftedness after college 182-183

About trying to find your keys "205"

Now I think it's interesting...that the multiplicity of options in the "blob" makes us have to invent ourselves. The focus is on us. Invention is a possibility. We "flatter ourselves" but is it really our fault? How much of self invention is necessary? Biblical? Harmful?

I Get Free Things

I think when Jesus said, "you have not because you ask not," what he was trying to say was...

Don't just go into Jamba Juice and accept that the deal is 10% off. Ask for 20% off!

I don't know...worked for me. And the next time I wore THESE glasses. 50% off.

Sucka what.

An Angel Rides in the Whirlwind and Directs this Storm

What you do is as important as anything government does. I ask you to seek a common good beyond your comfort; to defend needed reforms against easy attacks; to serve your nation, beginning with your neighbor. I ask you to be citizens: citizens, not spectators; citizens, not subjects; responsible citizens, building communities of service and a nation of character.

Americans are generous and strong and decent, not because we believe in ourselves, but because we hold beliefs beyond ourselves. When this spirit of citizenship is missing, no government program can replace it. When this spirit is present, no wrong can stand against it.

After the Declaration of Independence was signed, Virginia statesman John Page wrote to Thomas Jefferson: “We know the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?”

Much time has passed since Jefferson arrived for his inauguration. The years and changes accumulate. But the themes of this day he would know: our nation’s grand story of courage and its simple dream of dignity.

We are not this story’s author, who fills time and eternity with his purpose. Yet his purpose is achieved in our duty, and our duty is fulfilled in service to one another.

Never tiring, never yielding, never finishing, we renew that purpose today, to make our country more just and generous, to affirm the dignity of our lives and every life.

This work continues. This story goes on. And an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm.

God bless you all, and God bless America.