"I'm a lot of things, Mom, but vacant? I didn't put down 'The Bell Jar' until the end of junior high. I won first and second place in a poetry contest when I was 9 - and both poems were about the Holocaust! Vacant! 

It knows when you have on a fresh coat of MAC gloss and some cute heels you got on sale at Charles David and clean hair that's looking halfway decent. It knows. That's the night you won't meet anyone.

In an instant, I saw how I must look with Big Blue, my electric-hued 1995 Ford Taurus. We had just taken a trip to the desert together, and only one of us had bothered to shower. The windows were grimy. Newspapers and books-on- tape cluttered the passenger seat. Gum wrappers filled the ashtray. 

Let the courts decide who gets custody of kids. What I want to know is, who gets custody of the coffee shop? The grocery store? The brunch place? 

Don't bother me with the guy voted "Cutest smile." That guy's gonna go bad on you. That guy will be of no use. Worse, someday soon he will bore you; he will frustrate you with his basic inability to understand human suffering the way a geek can.