[...] It's not unlike the religious confidence that one is 'loved unconditionally' by God--as the God in question is defined as something that loves this way automatically and universally, it doesn't seem to really have anything to do with you, so it's hard to see why religious people claim to feel such reassurance in being loved this way by God. [...]

[...] the CBS daytime network announcer's voice would say ,'You're watching As the World Turns,' which he seemed, on this particular day, to say more and more pointedly each time--'You're watching As the World Turns,' until the tone began to seem almost incredulous--'You're watching As the World Turns'--until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement. I don't mean any sort of humanities-type ironic metaphor, but the literal thing he was saying, the simple surface level. [...] The truth is I was not even aware of the obvious double entendre of 'You're watching As the World Turns' until three days later--the show's almost terrifying pun about the passive waste of time of sitting there watching something whose reception through the hanger didn't even come in very well, while all the while real things in the world were going on and people with direction and initiative were taking care of business in a brisk, no-nonsense way [...]

[...] when I came in and said I was ready for advanced processing, and gave him the forms from the homework I'd plowed through, looked from me to the forms and back again, giving me the exact kind of smile of someone who, on Christmas morning has just unwrapped an expensive present he already owns.

[...] the point is that I journeyed to Peoria on whatever particular day in May from my family's home in Philo, to which my brief return had been shall we say untriumphant, and where certain members of my family had more or less been looking at their watches impatiently the whole brief time I was home. Without mentioning or identifying anyone in particular, let's just say that the prevailing attitude in my family tended to be 'What have you done for me lately?' [...] It was a bit like a for-profit company, my family, in that you were pretty much only as good as your last sales quarter. Although, you know, whatever. I most definitely was not offered any kind of family ride to Peoria [...]

A further irony: During an April 1987 tornado outside De Kalb, a detached portion of one of these FARM SAFETY billboards whirled in and for all practical purposes decapitated a soybean farmer--that was pretty much it for the 4-H sign.

[...] The employee beside me now looked, peripherally, as though he'd been mechanically raised out of a body of water, which made the pretense of my not noticing the incredible sweating even more creepy and farcical. [...]

[...] the whole thing looked haphazardly jerry-rigged and chaotic, and one figured that there couldn't possibly be this many newly arrived and/or reassigned transfers to the REC as a typical daily thing, or else the disembarkation and check-in system would be much more permanent-looking and streamlined and less like some small-scale reenactment of the fall of Saigon. [...]

[...] One of the quirks of human memory is that the most vivid, detailed recall doesn't usually concern the things that are most germane. The as it were forest. [...]

[...] sitting still and concentrating on just one task for an extended length of time is, as a pratical matter, impossible. If you said, 'I spent the whole night in the library, working on some client's sociology paper,' you really meant that you'd spent between two and three hours working on it and the rest of the time fidgeting and sharpening and organizing pencils and doing skin-checks in the men's room mirror and wandering around the stacks opening volumes at random and reading about, say, Durkheim's theories of suicide.

[...] In Philo, educating yourself was something you had to do in spite of school, not because of it -- which is basically why so many of my high school peers are still there in Philo even now, selling one another insurance, drinking supermarket liquor, watching television, awaiting the formality of their first cardiac. [...]