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[...] she moved her soap, pillow, blanket, and toothbrush to the office. At this stage, she would not let the scale of her concerns be diminished by piddling twenty-something drama. Only sacrifice mattered now.
so sad
inspiration for MC who throws himself into his work briefly as a way of finding salvation? or maybe intern?
[...] The sense of Asian men was of conspicuous arbitrariness in a culture of the special. Whose social modes of being had been enshrined in national policy: internment and exclusion. Conforming yet abnormal. Another and an Other. [...]
i just like the titular phrase
Will tipped the girl thirty dollars to make up for his hysterical crying, and left the salon [...]
after his thought monologue about the position of Asian men in society. i like this literary technique (not sure what it's called ... not quite minimalism but close)
She paused often to fight low blood sugar, and in lengthening blinks she dreamed of an afterlife in which the turfy fire blanket on her head was brushed out into a blade of satin and she had a big scary wardrobe and hit Pilates every day until she'd burned off the paradoxical melancholy of feeling worthless and underappreciated, of doing work that was frivolous and insurmountable.
this paragraph (Cory's) is way too melodramatic but the idea of Pilates as a way of burning off resentment is interesting
I also like "big scary wardrobe" as a way of revealing her hope that she can upgrade herself mentally by upgrading herself physically
[...] He knows she's out to transgress, but she also has a puritanical streak that makes her wary of fun qua fun; everything must be a step toward metamorphosis. [...]
I can relate
"Power users! I don't just want uniques or impressions, eyeballs are cheap! I want young, cool, engaged, legitimately disabled influencers who'll bring in other active registered goddamn users!"She slapped her armrest and glowered at her glowering screen. "We only get one launch."
hello there drift
The crowd picked up again. She'd missed her window. I did this for you, she should have said, and if you're not enjoying yourselves, it's because you don't know how hard this was.
I feel like the word "bathos" would be appropriate here
I always knew narrative was oppressive--narrowing things down to one or even a thousand perspectives is still an abridgment of infinity. I have real pity for fictional characters, the clueless dupes of dramatic irony--especially the female creations of male novelists, the Lolitas, Caddies, Bovaries ontologically fucked with, their every foible delectably plated. [...] didn't have to die--except to serve their narratives, of which they're denied basic awareness. Vessels for the writer's outlook, for the reader's vicarious experience. For them there's no nature or fortune: just guile. Forced to be interesting, plausible, coherent, deep, through the corrupt brokerage of a narrator. The better the novel, the more enchanting the characters, the more their mysteries are spread-eagled, the greater glory to their creator.
You call it denial, resentment, narcissism. I call it Catholicism. No, I don't think "'writing something makes it real'"--I think reality is text-based. Not poststructurally--postscripturally. We lapsed Catholics have long had our reality debunked as fiction, but we're still in the habit of worrying that Providence is hashing us out. Another reason to pity fictional characters: their Providence is a person, whose subjects are his objects. No matter how a charcter acts out--gets vengeance, gets closure, breaks it down, sees it through--it all serves narrative progress.
Postmodernism was supposed to plug the leak. And it did: like a backed-up septic tank. The revenge of text on author. Tempting; but I can't let go to the Self and become some layer cake of context. Not after all the shit this Self has gone through. Whose teeth are missing? Mine.
this passage annoys me in a way that Broom of the System never really did. idk. just feels like he doesn't quite pull it off. too clunky.
still interesting though
WHEN I WAS TWENTY-FIVE, working as an analyst at Fidelity Investments, I made over three hundred thousand dollars. I took my bonus, went to the Bloomingdale’s outside of Boston, tried on dozens of pairs of shoes, and left empty-handed. Some part of me felt jealous of people for whom money seemed to bring joy, ease, and happiness. A confirmation that they were on the right path. Gold diggers, I envied them—and anyone else who knew exactly what they wanted. Right around then, I started dating someone with money, the same man who, over time, feared that my career aspirations might conflict with his plans for me to be a doll in his house. We flew in his family’s private jet to his family’s multiple homes. But the more money I made and the more I was surrounded by wealth, the more I found myself recoiling from it all. I planned my getaway and quit Fidelity after four and a half years, hoping to do a pivot. Two months later I started on a new path at the University of Pennsylvania, enrolled in a joint-degree program between the School of Arts & Sciences and the Wharton School of Business. When I arrived on campus, I found myself steeped in a culture that seemed to prioritize drinking and partying over working and studying. So suboptimal, so inefficient. A colossal waste of time. This was the culture from which I was trying to escape, evinced by an offhand remark a coworker at Fidelity made to me one night: “I basically sit on my ass and do nothing and make millions. What could be better than that?”
nah you're right to be suspicious of it
[...] “How are you with positive feedback? Because I don’t give it.” That’s fine: I had a Korean piano teacher who was not one for positive reinforcement; plus, my mom’s Chinese. I avoided alluding to Amy Chua because I did not believe I had a tiger mother; not once did Mom (or Dad) ask to see my report card. (Although they did find a way to comment on all other parts of my life—how I chewed at the wrong pace or smiled at the wrong width—I was determined to excel at everything so they would have méi huà jiǎng, a phrase used when something was so good, there would be no words speak.) [...]
annoying ... one step above cut fruit poetry