Emily D. Threlkeld

<p>What&#8217;s a &#8220;Pittsburgh Rare&#8221; steak?</p> <p>It means the same as “black and blue,” which is to say, burned on the outside and almost-raw inside. It&#8217;s a crude and brutal way to eat meat, and should be considered a red flag for potential sexual partners.</p>

<p>“It makes me feel like even though Albert Einstein was a big shot, he didn’t take himself so seriously. It’s like he’s a genius but also chill. You know, work hard, play hard?”</p> <p>I’m of the mind that Albert Einstein was fine taking himself seriously. Not everyone needs to be an entertainer. (That’s why I hate it when President Obama goes on talk shows too much.) Anyway, if it had just been a kiss, you never would have had to hear this stupid opinion. You wouldn’t shudder remembering “the Albert Einstein-photo guy you slept with.” You would still smile, thinking back wistfully to the “nice-smelling guy you smooched during intermission at ‘The Book of Mormon.’ ”</p>

Houston was built, like much of the New World, I suppose, on a lie. It was an uninhabitable swampland crawling with insects and reptiles that was made into the fourth-largest city in the country through will and greed and fear and desire, the usual motivators of our species. Our story is as old as the story of human migration itself, escaping the undesirable towards the imaginary and, then, trying to remake the reality of our new home into something better. And so we have created a global headquarters of the energy industry, a center of medical innovation and care, and a major port of commerce. In the process, the city has taken new migrants in waves large and small: from Vietnam and New Orleans, from Europe and Latin America, from the Middle East and the Northeast. And, somehow, they have all managed to find their place among others.

Most Houstonians seem to be from elsewhere and, often quite delightfully, bring the elsewhere with them.

Cinema is a specificity of vision. It’s an approach in which everything matters. It’s the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn’t made by a committee, and it isn’t made by a company, and it isn’t made by the audience. It means that if this filmmaker didn’t do it, it either wouldn’t exist at all, or it wouldn’t exist in anything like this form.

I&#8217;m so glad I stayed until the end. I&#8217;m so glad I hung on through the awkward James Spader season and the dozens of episodes where Michael Scott&#8217;s (Steve Carell) antics sucked the air from the room. Because in the end &#8212; in this final season, and especially in last night&#8217;s exceptional series finale &#8212; The Office had something to offer. Something small, maybe. Something familiar. One more reminder to stop for a minute and be grateful. But that&#8217;s a message worth repeating.

This is easy to parse with a simple mathematical formula: Don + windows, phones, advertising, Hawaii, children, British people, luggage, California, whorehouses, fathers, or anything else, really = death. Write it down.

Although they spent their entire marriage moving toward her death, my husband says they didn&#8217;t spend much time talking about this destination. A therapist once told him those discussions were like &#8220;looking at the sun&#8221; —something one could do only glancingly because of the pain. At the end, Robin told him she wanted him to have a child. She made him promise he would do that, because she knew how much he wanted children. In their conversation Robin acknowledged that if he did it would mean he had found a new wife; she said that was harder for her to think about, but she wanted him to find love again. I asked him what he said when she told him this. He told her, &#8220;I can&#8217;t imagine life without you.

Two years of halting wandering hands as they grazed under blue jeans, and the second we have the permission from God, we hug. These are what red flags look like; my rearview mirror is lined with them.

These are five words that have cognates in at least four of the seven Eurasiatic language families. Those languages, about 700 in all, are spoken in an area extending from the British Isles to western China and from the Arctic to southern India. Only one word, “thou” (the singular form of “you”), has a cognate in all seven families.

My head was a condemned church with a ceiling of bats but I swung from this dark mood to euphoria when I thought about leaving.

You know life&#8217;s not like that. Right? It&#8217;s more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tastes wonderful, and you don&#8217;t even think of it ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it&#8217;s nearly burned down to the end. And then&#8217;s when you&#8217;re conscious of the bitter taste.

I think sharing experience makes everything better. When people get talking about how they&#8217;ve overcome something or how they haven&#8217;t, it&#8217;s nourishing. I don&#8217;t know where we got away from that.

I’d read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I’d begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the internet was “doing to me,” so I could fight back. But the internet isn’t an individual pursuit, it’s something we do with each other. The internet is where people are.

But I have seen the elephant now. It would not have been the worst way to go&#8212;kinda quiet, as Biggie would say&#8212;but it would have been going all the same. And I am most happy to still be here, to be with my family, and my friends, to be in the world with you. I&#8217;m not very good with crisis. I tend not to grasp the import until years later.

And for the moment, we let ourselves imagine that we were still in Max’s diner—with our knees knocking under the table top and seagulls circling the Trinity steeple and all the brightly colored possibilities dangled by the New Year still within our reach.<br/> Old times, as my father used to say: If you’re not careful, they’ll gut you like a fish.

<p>Like an adventuress trying to complete the first solo flight across the Hudson River, she hoped type as fast as was humanly possible. And as a result, whenever a case surfaced requiring a few thousand pages of duplication, you can bet that the next light that clicked on over Miss Markham&#8217;s door would be the one under the F.</p> <p>Which is just to say, be careful when choosing what you&#8217;re proud of—because the world has every intention of using it against you.</p>

Ain&#8217;t no dramatic music swells big enough to cure that OCD or teach you to live in the world or grow those bangs back, girl.

I endured the chapter titled, &#8220;Measurement of the Whale&#8217;s Skeleton,&#8221; and so should everybody else. Strength through mutual agony&#8212;that&#8217;s the dictum of the great literary canon, and if you think otherwise, you&#8217;re an idiot.