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Eleven Heart-Shaped Balloons

Janna came home last night and presented me with eleven giant, red, heart-shaped helium balloons.

She apologized one was missing.

She told me on her way home from teaching American Sign Language at New York University she found a guy selling bunches of balloons for .64 cents each. She bought a dozen.

Waiting for a PATH train at the Christopher Street station, a man tried to strike up a conversation with her.

That happens to us a lot and since Janna is Deaf she usually just smiles and points to her ears and shakes her head to let the person know she isn’t interested in communicating.

The guy followed her onto the train and persisted in trying to speak with her. Wrangling twelve helium balloons onto a packed train is no easy task.

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From Russia with Lust

I receive email pleas and scams all the time but, the following letter was especially interesting for its wonderful pretend warmth and cunning, hazy, directness. I am posting it exactly how it was formatted and spelled. For a moment, I thought this was a nice note from the eKaterina I know, but, alas, it was not from her. Take the following note — edited down a bit to remove repetitiveness — as a warning and a wonderment. 

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Why Google Loves You

There are days when you may not feel up to writing a blog entry or updating a web page, but you must create something anyway.
You publish not for yourself or for your readers.
You publish for Google.
Google is waiting.

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Why I Love Difficult People

If you have ever been labeled “difficult” by someone else, I know we will get along great! Is it because I am “difficult” as well?

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Promise Before Dying

I have permission to tell this story.

I am sharing this with you because it was a human moment that shocked the core of me with quiet tremors.

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Everything Crashes

by Louise O’Brien

I want to get over you. But it’s not working out that way. I have no delusions about who you really are, but my heart does. My heart has plenty of delusions left. She still believes you are coming back. She still waits for the phone to ring in the middle of the night, for the letters that never come. She’s still waiting for you to realize that life without her must be as empty as she is without you. You’re still inside her. She hasn’t been able to shake that.

The Initial Encounter
I barely noticed you. You were flapping around the party, trying to get people to pay attention to you. You’d already spoken to me three times. I was having a hard time remembering your name as you approached me for the fourth time. I plastered a smile of greeting on my face and searched my brain for a memory of something you’d said in the last couple of hours.

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The Luck of Love

There’s a scene in the 1998 Woody Allen film Celebrity which I have been thinking about lately. The main character, Lee, is having a conversation with his ex-wife and, in a move that essentially summarizes one of the main themes of the film, she says “When it comes to love, it’s luck.” Oh, how true those words are.

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