Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  “After the pre-prank, the Eagle will think the junior class has done its prank and won’t be waiting for it when it actually comes.” Every year, the junior and senior classes pulled off a prank at some point in the year—usually something lame, like Roman candles in the dorm circle at five in the morning on a Sunday. “Is there always a pre-prank?” I asked. “No, you idiot,” the Colonel said. “If there was always a pre-prank, then the Eagle would expect two pranks. The last time a pre-prank was used—hmm. Oh, right: 1987. When the pre-prank was cutting off electricity to campus, and then the actual prank was putting five hundred live crickets in the heating ducts of the classrooms. Sometimes you can still hear the chirping.” “Your rote memorization is, like, so impressive,” I said. “You guys are like an old married couple.” Alaska smiled. “In a creepy way.” “You don’t know the half of it,” the Colonel said. “You should see this kid try to crawl into bed with me at night.” “Hey!” “Let’s get on subject!” Alaska said. “Pre-prank. This weekend, since there’s a new moon. We’re staying at the barn. You, me, the Colonel, Takumi, and, as a special gift to you, Pudge, Lara Buterskaya.” “The Lara Buterskaya I puked on?” “She’s just shy. She still likes you.” Alaska laughed. “Puking made you look—vulnerable.” “Very perky boobs,” the Colonel said. “Are you bringing Takumi for me?” “You need to be single for a while.” “True enough,” the Colonel said. “Just spend a few more months playing video games,” she said. “That hand-eye coordination will come in handy when you get to third base.” “Gosh, I haven’t heard the base system in so long, I think I’ve forgotten third base,” the Colonel responded. “I would roll my eyes at you, but I can’t afford to look away from the screen.” “French, Feel, Finger, Fuck. It’s like you skipped third grade,” Alaska said. “I did skip third grade,” the Colonel answered. “So,” I said, “what’s our pre-prank?” “The Colonel and I will work that out. No need to get you into trouble—yet.” “Oh. Okay. Um, I’m gonna go for a cigarette, then.” I left. It wasn’t the first time Alaska had left me out of the loop, certainly, but after we’d been together so much over Thanksgiving, it seemed ridiculous to plan the prank with the Colonel but without me. Whose T-shirts were wet with her tears? Mine. Who’d listened to her read Vonnegut? Me. Who’d been the butt of the world’s worst knock-knock joke? Me. I walked to the Sunny Konvenience Kiosk across from school and smoked. This never happened to me in Florida, this oh-so-high-school angst about who likes whom more, and I hated myself for letting it happen now. You don’t have to care about her , I told myself. Screw her.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  was a growing awareness that middle-class comfort was an illusion. Two sociologists ironically concluded that the few authentic identities still claimable in 1970 existed in the isolated pockets of the rural poor: Appalachian hillbillies in Tennessee, marginal dirt farmers in the upper Midwest, and “swamp Yankees” in New England. 2 The broadcast of An American Family on PBS in 1973 gave millions of viewers a palpable sense of middle-class life. As television’s first attempt at a “reality” show, the Loud family saga was a study in dysfunction—a decade removed from Ozzie and Harriet, and emotional light-years from the tame, kid- friendly Brady Bunch. Three hundred hours of taping over the course of a year was edited down to twelve hours of riveting television. Outsiders may have cared about the new TV family, but a New York Times Magazine article on the Louds described their world as a cultural vacuum: they had few hobbies, cared little about suffering in the world at large, and seemed emotionally short-circuited when attempting to deal with one another. The parents, Bill and Pat, were getting separated, but to the husband, who avoided conflict and admitted to no failures, their pending divorce came devoid of introspection. In the words of commentator Anne Roiphe, the breakup of a marriage was experienced by him as “a minor toothache.” Amid filming, the Louds’ house burned down, and even that barely fazed them. They floated through life like “jellyfish,” transparent and unresponsive; they valued “prettiness” and gave no attention to any but their outwardly attractive and successful neighbors; they were nonplussed when it came to “those who do not make it.” As Roiphe sublimely put it, with reference to Mario Puzo’s Godfather clan, “Maybe it’s better to be a Corleone than a Loud.” At least the Sicilians’ tribal, violent character got the blood flowing. (She might just as well have used “redneck” in place of “Corleone.”) Blind to their blandness, the Louds were adrift, like so many others of the seventies middle class. Roiphe’s updated motto for the family sampler: “Be it ever so hollow, there’s no place like home.” 3 • • • Historical fictions provided a solution for cultural longing. Alex Haley’s Roots (1976) created a media sensation. It spent twenty-two weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list before becoming a twelve-hour miniseries that won nine

• From Cultish (2021)

  All the photos are accompanied by vague captions like “Feeling amazing and my journey is just getting started! #sugarshotresults.” She never says exactly what the product is or who she’s working for, but I can tell just by her hazily inspirational status updates, forced exclamation points, and nebulous hashtags that it could be nothing but the perky dialect of direct sales. “Welp, another one bites the dust,” I text my current best friend, Esther, who grew up in Florida and can name a dozen ex–high school classmates of her own who’ve been sucked into the same “cult” as Becca: the cult of Multilevel Marketing. Multilevel marketing, network marketing, relationship marketing, direct sales . . . there are at least half a dozen synonyms for MLMs, the legally loopholed sibling of pyramid schemes. At once a pillar of Western capitalism but relegated to the fringes of our workforce, MLMs are pay-and-recruit organizations powered not by salaried employees but “affiliates.” These are largely white-male-founded, white-female-operated beauty and “wellness” brands whose recruits peddle overpriced products (from face cream to essential oils to diet supplements) to their friends and family, while also trying to enlist those customers to become sellers themselves. MLM pitches always follow a similar script: They feature talk of this “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to be the “boss babe” you really are, “start your own business,” and “make a full-time income working part-time from home” to gain the “financial independence” you’ve always wanted. American MLMs number in the hundreds: Amway, Avon, and Mary Kay are among the best recognized, alongside Herbalife, Young Living Essential Oils, LuLaRo e, LipSense, dōTERRA, Pampered Chef, Rodan + Fields, Scentsy, Arbonne, Younique, and the iconic Tupperwar e. When I think of the typical MLM recruit, I think of women like Becca—middle-class shiksas from my high school who stayed in our hometown (or moved to Florida . . . always Florida), got married young, had babies shortly thereafter, and spend an impressive sum of hours on Facebook. A year or several into stay-at-home motherhood, they get roped into hawking the slimy serums of Rodan + Fields, paper-thin leggings of LuLaRoe, or something similar (you name it, I’ve seen it in my newsfeed). Most MLMs target nonworking wives and moms, and they have since the dawn of the modern direct sales industry in the 1940s. Direct sales advertising has always riffed on whatever “female empowerment” buzzwords were trendy at the time. While midcentury MLM recruitment language promised that Tupperware was “the best thing that’s happened to women since they got the vote!” in the age of social media, it plays on the fauxspirational lingo of commodified fourth-wave feminism.

• From Little Women (1868)

  If it is a feminine delusion, leave us to enjoy it while we may, for without it half the beauty and the romance of life is lost, and sorrowful forebodings would embitter all our hopes of the brave, tenderhearted little lads, who still love their mothers better than themselves and are not ashamed to own it. Laurie thought that the task of forgetting his love for Jo would absorb all his powers for years, but to his great surprise he discovered it grew easier every day. He refused to believe it at first, got angry with himself, and couldn't understand it, but these hearts of ours are curious and contrary things, and time and nature work their will in spite of us. Laurie's heart wouldn't ache. The wound persisted in healing with a rapidity that astonished him, and instead of trying to forget, he found himself trying to remember. He had not foreseen this turn of affairs, and was not prepared for it. He was disgusted with himself, surprised at his own fickleness, and full of a queer mixture of disappointment and relief that he could recover from such a tremendous blow so soon. He carefully stirred up the embers of his lost love, but they refused to burst into a blaze. There was only a comfortable glow that warmed and did him good without putting him into a fever, and he was reluctantly obliged to confess that the boyish passion was slowly subsiding into a more tranquil sentiment, very tender, a little sad and resentful still, but that was sure to pass away in time, leaving a brotherly affection which would last unbroken to the end. As the word 'brotherly' passed through his mind in one of his reveries, he smiled, and glanced up at the picture of Mozart that was before him... "Well, he was a great man, and when he couldn't have one sister he took the other, and was happy." Laurie did not utter the words, but he thought them, and the next instant kissed the little old ring, saying to himself, "No, I won't! I haven't forgotten, I never can. I'll try again, and if that fails, why then..." Leaving his sentence unfinished, he seized pen and paper and wrote to Jo, telling her that he could not settle to anything while there was the least hope of her changing her mind. Couldn't she, wouldn't she—and let him come home and be happy? While waiting for an answer he did nothing, but he did it energetically, for he was in a fever of impatience. It came at last, and settled his mind effectually on one point, for Jo decidedly couldn't and wouldn't. She was wrapped up in Beth, and never wished to hear the word love again. Then she begged him to be happy with somebody else, but always keep a little corner of his heart for his loving sister Jo.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  WHEN DWIGHT FIRST invited us to Chinook he'd won me over by mentioning that the rifle club was going to hold a turkey shoot. If I wanted to, he said, I could bring my Winchester along and enter the contest. I hadn't fired or even held my rifle since we left Salt Lake. Every couple of weeks or so I tore the house apart looking for it, but my mother had it hidden somewhere else, probably in her office downtown. I thought of the trip to Chinook as a reunion with my rifle. During art period I made drawings of it and showed them to Taylor and Silver, who affected disbelief in its existence. I also painted a picture that depicted me sighting down the the barrel of my rifle at a big gobbler with rolling eyes and long red wattles. The turkey shoot was at noon. Dwight and Pearl and my mother and I drove down to the firing range while Skipper went off to work on a car that he was customizing and Norma stayed home to cook. Not until we reached the range did Dwight get around to telling me that in fact there would be no turkey at this turkey shoot. The targets were paper—regulation match targets. They weren't even giving a turkey away; the prize was a smoked Virginia ham. Turkey shoot was just a figure of speech, Dwight said. He thought everybody knew that. He also let drop, casually, as if the information were of no consequence, that I would not be allowed to shoot after all. It was for grown-ups, not kids. That was all they needed, a bunch of kids running around with guns. "But you said I could." Dwight was assembling my Winchester, which he apparently meant to use himself. "They just told me a couple of days ago," he said. I could tell he was lying—that he'd known all along. I couldn't do a thing but stand there and look at him.

• From Real Sex for Real Women (2008)

  Although Anna felt passionately about Kamal, she didn’t enjoy sex and was lukewarm about his sexual advances. After a hormone test ruled out any underlying physiological reasons for Anna’s lack of libido, I spoke at length to her about her feelings and attitudes toward sex. It turned out that, in the past, Anna had really enjoyed sex and was always very adventurous. “I used to feel very confident and daring. Out of all my friends, I was the one to experiment. They used to ask me for sex advice!” Anna’s sexually adventurous spirit and healthy libido ended when she discovered her ex-husband’s infidelity. When I told Anna I thought low self-esteem was part of the reason for her lack of interest in sex, she became very emotional. “I’ve felt so low since Jo cheated on me,” she said. “I know Kamal loves me, but I’m waiting for him to find somebody thinner, sexier, or younger than me. I just feel like an overweight single mom—men don’t find me attractive or sexy.” What happened? Anna rebuilt her self-esteem slowly but surely. … She worked hard at putting her experiences with Jo behind her and she started enjoying sex with Kamal. She said: “When Kamal tells me how much he desires me, I’ve actually started to believe him—that makes him feel good too.”

• From Real Sex for Real Women (2008)

  Despite repeated efforts to seduce him, Kelly felt that Luke no longer wanted sex with her. “He used to be so turned on by me. Just the sight of me getting out of the shower used to give him an erection. Now he doesn’t notice me.” Her main concern was that Luke was having an affair. In an individual session with Luke, I asked him about his sex drive. He said he didn’t feel like sex because he was so stressed about his debts. He also felt he was failing as a provider and his kids didn’t need him anymore. When I explained to Luke that Kelly associated his lack of interest with an affair, he said, “I can’t believe she thinks that. It’s not like she makes moves on me and I turn her down!” After explaining to Kelly the reasons for his lack of interest in sex, Luke confessed that he couldn’t remember when he’d turned down her many advances. Kelly reminded him of a time when she suggested they go to bed early and he chose to stay up and balance the checkbook. Laughing, Luke said, “That was an advance?! I don’t notice stuff like that—you have to be more direct.” What happened: … Luke got more sensitive to Kelly’s sexual cues and she, in turn, became more overt. And Luke said, “Now, instead of avoiding sex I’ve started treating it as a way to relax.”

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  "I could cite many things," it said elsewhere, "if I were willing to discover my passions alone..." Well, the Consul ignored that and began a few lines here and there from the time of his marriage and his read first paternity. To be honest, this union hadn't been what you would call a love match. His father patted him on the back and drew his attention to rich Kröger's daughter, who gave the company a handsome dowry; he wholeheartedly agreed and from then on he honored his wife as the companion whom God had trusted in him...

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  The day arrived. As I stood in our bedroom, dressing for graduation—the culmination of seven years of residency—a piercing nausea struck me. This was unlike the usual nausea of chemotherapy, which washed over you like a wave and, like a wave, could be ridden. I began uncontrollably vomiting green bile, its chalky taste distinct from stomach acid. This was from deep in my gut. I would not be going to graduation, after all.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  I began to feel the effects the next day, a deep fatigue, a profound bone-weariness setting in. Eating, normally a source of great pleasure, was like drinking seawater. Suddenly, all of my joys were salted. For breakfast, Lucy made me a bagel with cream cheese; it tasted like a salt lick. I set it aside. Reading was exhausting. I had agreed to write a few chapters on the therapeutic potential of my research with V for two major neurosurgical textbooks. That, too, I set aside.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  The stress drove another resident out of the field entirely; she elected to leave for a less taxing job in consulting. Others would pay even higher prices. As my skills increased, so too did my responsibility. Learning to judge whose lives could be saved, whose couldn’t be, and whose shouldn’t be requires an unattainable prognostic ability. I made mistakes. Rushing a patient to the OR to save only enough brain that his heart beats but he can never speak, he eats through a tube, and he is condemned to an existence he would never want…I came to see this as a more egregious failure than the patient dying. The twilight existence of unconscious metabolism becomes an unbearable burden, usually left to an institution, where the family, unable to attain closure, visits with increasing rarity, until the inevitable fatal bedsore or pneumonia sets in. Some insist on this life and embrace its possibility, eyes open. But many do not, or cannot, and the neurosurgeon must learn to adjudicate. I had started in this career, in part, to pursue death: to grasp it, uncloak it, and see it eye-to-eye, unblinking. Neurosurgery attracted me as much for its intertwining of brain and consciousness as for its intertwining of life and death. I had thought that a life spent in the space between the two would grant me not merely a stage for compassionate action but an elevation of my own being: getting as far away from petty materialism, from self-important trivia, getting right there, to the heart of the matter, to truly life-and-death decisions and struggles…surely a kind of transcendence would be found there? But in residency, something else was gradually unfolding. In the midst of this endless barrage of head injuries, I began to suspect that being so close to the fiery light of such moments only blinded me to their nature, like trying to learn astronomy by staring directly at the sun. I was not yet with patients in their pivotal moments, I was merely at those pivotal moments. I observed a lot of suffering; worse, I became inured to it. Drowning, even in blood, one adapts, learns to float, to swim, even to enjoy life, bonding with the nurses, doctors, and others who are clinging to the same raft, caught in the same tide.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Allen wouldn’t let her take it, though, so she became a housewife. It’s clear from her journals that within about two months after marrying Allen, she realized she had made a mistake. But then she got pregnant with Erica.” “When Allen first became part of our family,” says Betty, “there was this instant attachment. We all liked him. He was like a wonderful big brother to us. At the time, we had no idea that there was all this other stuff going on in his family. Then we started to notice how fanatical they all were.” Betty remembers visiting Brenda and Allen one night when her sister was pregnant with Erica: “Brenda wanted to go out and get something to eat, but Allen wouldn’t patronize any restaurant that stayed open on Sundays. So we drove around from place to place, and Allen would make us sit in the car while he went in to find out if they were open on Sundays. Each place was, so he wouldn’t let us eat there. After a while, Brenda and I got so frustrated we just asked him to take us home. “Allen had a very successful tile business, but he insisted on always being paid in cash. He didn’t believe in having a checking account, because he didn’t want the IRS to be able to trace his income. He didn’t want to have a Social Security card. None of this came out until after they got married. “We started noticing that Allen was always trying to get around the law. When it came time to pay taxes that first year after they got married, Allen told Brenda that he wasn’t going to pay them. She said, ‘Oh yes, we are! That’s what you do. You honor the law!’ When Allen refused, she had our dad help her prepare the taxes for them. I remember when the car registration came due, Allen wouldn’t let Brenda go get it registered. She told him, ‘Yes I am, because I don’t want to get a ticket!’ They had a big fight about it. We just weren’t raised like that. So she always made sure to do the things they were supposed to: she paid the taxes, renewed the licenses, those kinds of things. She resisted Allen as much as she could. “But then the baby got sick and he wouldn’t let Brenda take Erica to the doctor. And it just kept getting worse and worse.” Allen’s father, Watson Lafferty Sr., had long been afflicted with diabetes, which he refused to treat with insulin. In late 1983, after he and Claudine had returned from their mission and were again living in the family home in Provo, Watson’s diabetes took a sharp turn for the worse. His sons continued to refuse medical treatment for him, however. Their herbal and homeopathic remedies failed to alleviate the illness, and he died. “The whole family seemed evil to Brenda by then,” says Betty.

• From Little Women (1868)

  It also touched her, and she showed that it did, by the cordial tone in which she said... "I'm glad of that! I didn't think you'd been a very bad boy, but I fancied you might have wasted money at that wicked Baden-Baden, lost your heart to some charming Frenchwoman with a husband, or got into some of the scrapes that young men seem to consider a necessary part of a foreign tour. Don't stay out there in the sun, come and lie on the grass here and 'let us be friendly', as Jo used to say when we got in the sofa corner and told secrets." Laurie obediently threw himself down on the turf, and began to amuse himself by sticking daisies into the ribbons of Amy's hat, that lay there. "I'm all ready for the secrets." and he glanced up with a decided expression of interest in his eyes. "I've none to tell. You may begin." "Haven't one to bless myself with. I thought perhaps you'd had some news from home.." "You have heard all that has come lately. Don't you hear often? I fancied Jo would send you volumes." "She's very busy. I'm roving about so, it's impossible to be regular, you know. When do you begin your great work of art, Raphaella?" he asked, changing the subject abruptly after another pause, in which he had been wondering if Amy knew his secret and wanted to talk about it. "Never," she answered, with a despondent but decided air. "Rome took all the vanity out of me, for after seeing the wonders there, I felt too insignificant to live and gave up all my foolish hopes in despair." "Why should you, with so much energy and talent?" "That's just why, because talent isn't genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing. I won't be a common-place dauber, so I don't intend to try any more." "And what are you going to do with yourself now, if I may ask?" "Polish up my other talents, and be an ornament to society, if I get the chance." It was a characteristic speech, and sounded daring, but audacity becomes young people, and Amy's ambition had a good foundation. Laurie smiled, but he liked the spirit with which she took up a new purpose when a long-cherished one died, and spent no time lamenting. "Good! And here is where Fred Vaughn comes in, I fancy." Amy preserved a discreet silence, but there was a conscious look in her downcast face that made Laurie sit up and say gravely, "Now I'm going to play brother, and ask questions. May I?" "I don't promise to answer." "Your face will, if your tongue won't. You aren't woman of the world enough yet to hide your feelings, my dear.

• From Little Women (1868)

  I heard rumors about Fred and you last year, and it's my private opinion that if he had not been called home so suddenly and detained so long, something would have come of it, hey?" "That's not for me to say," was Amy's grim reply, but her lips would smile, and there was a traitorous sparkle of the eye which betrayed that she knew her power and enjoyed the knowledge. "You are not engaged, I hope?" and Laurie looked very elder-brotherly and grave all of a sudden. "No." "But you will be, if he comes back and goes properly down on his knees, won't you?" "Very likely." "Then you are fond of old Fred?" "I could be, if I tried." "But you don't intend to try till the proper moment? Bless my soul, what unearthly prudence! He's a good fellow, Amy, but not the man I fancied you'd like." "He is rich, a gentleman, and has delightful manners," began Amy, trying to be quite cool and dignified, but feeling a little ashamed of herself, in spite of the sincerity of her intentions. "I understand. Queens of society can't get on without money, so you mean to make a good match, and start in that way? Quite right and proper, as the world goes, but it sounds odd from the lips of one of your mother's girls." "True, nevertheless." A short speech, but the quiet decision with which it was uttered contrasted curiously with the young speaker. Laurie felt this instinctively and laid himself down again, with a sense of disappointment which he could not explain. His look and silence, as well as a certain inward self-disapproval, ruffled Amy, and made her resolve to deliver her lecture without delay. "I wish you'd do me the favor to rouse yourself a little," she said sharply. "Do it for me, there's a dear girl." "I could, if I tried." and she looked as if she would like doing it in the most summary style. "Try, then. I give you leave," returned Laurie, who enjoyed having someone to tease, after his long abstinence from his favorite pastime. "You'd be angry in five minutes." "I'm never angry with you. It takes two flints to make a fire. You are as cool and soft as snow." "You don't know what I can do. Snow produces a glow and a tingle, if applied rightly. Your indifference is half affectation, and a good stirring up would prove it." "Stir away, it won't hurt me and it may amuse you, as the big man said when his little wife beat him. Regard me in the light of a husband or a carpet, and beat till you are tired, if that sort of exercise agrees with you." Being decidedly nettled herself, and longing to see him shake off the apathy that so altered him, Amy sharpened both tongue and pencil, and began. "Flo and I have got a new name for you. It's Lazy Laurence.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  To protect themselves they created an entirely new division and released the novel as Blume’s “first book for adults.” “Labeling it an adult book… was our way of saying that it didn’t belong on children’s shelves,” Jackson said years later, “and that we were not recommending this for every fourth grader.” Judy herself disagreed with that decision. She told School Library Journal that seeing the book described that way right on the hardcover flap came as a “shock.” By then, Judy had clout and employees at Bradbury were told to do whatever it took to keep her happy. “Dick told me, ‘Judy Blume is our big author, Judy Blume is the person who keeps this business going, basically,’ ” Peter Silsbee remembered. “She kept the lights on.” But in this case, Jackson did what he thought was best to keep himself and his star writer out of hot water. Blume had become wildly successful, thanks in part to a paperback deal with Dell. “The way Dick told the story was, they published her first books, all in hardcover, but then when they went to paperback… that’s when they really got into the hands of kids,” Silsbee said. A paperback at the time cost around $1.75, which was quite a bit less than the hardcovers. “They were on racks in the drug store. And that was it, it was all word of mouth. Like one kid would read it and pass it to their friend, pass it to their friend, and pretty soon you had this huge fan base.” That huge fan base was ravenous for books by Blume. In August 1976, the New York Times reported that Dell had printed over 1.75 million copies of her titles, calling her “a kind of heroine to the kids who read and re-read her books.” She was a complicated figure for parents, who supported their kids in reading but weren’t always in love with Blume’s subject matter. The paper of record’s review of Forever , which had run the previous winter, called the novel “a convincing date-by-date account of first love.” It made no mention of the various sex scenes, but rumors of the book’s contents traveled swiftly from kid to kid, mother to mother. “Rest assured the kids manage to wangle copies of ‘Forever,’ ” the Times wrote. The trade magazines panned the novel. School Library Journal hated it, saying, “Obviously it’s not a quality book, but that fact won’t bother the many girls who will read it.” Kirkus was also dismissive. “Cath [sic] and Michael fall in love when both are high school seniors, and Blume leads up to It date by date and almost inch by inch (hand over sweater, hand under skirt),” the reviewer writes. “As usual with this immensely popular author, Forever has a lot of easy, empathic verity and very little heft.” Forever had at least one powerful ally in its corner.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  My father had been in touch, she told me. He’d arranged everything. I would take the bus down to La Jolla as soon as school let out, and Geoffrey would join me there after his graduation from Princeton. “What about you?” I said. “What about me?” “Are you going to come too? Later, if things go all right?” “I’d be a fool if I did,” she said morosely, as if she knew that wouldn’t keep her from doing it. We talked about Dwight and his little ways. How he used to stay up late counting all the pieces of candy in the house to see how many I’d eaten that day. How he used to run into the living room when he came home and put his hand on top of the TV to see if it was warm. How he bought vacuum cleaner bags by the dozen and wrote month-apart dates on each one so they would last exactly a year. My mother said he’d been on his best behavior since she started looking for work. He didn’t want her to leave. Now that she’d found a job he was falling all over himself to be nice to her. He was sort of courting her, she said. Being friendly and having Pearl cozy up to her all the time. He had even applied for a transfer to Seattle so he could be close to her. “I don’t get it,” she said. “He doesn’t even like me. He just wants to hang on. It’s so strange.” Then my mother said she had something to tell me, and I knew from the way she said it that it wasn’t going to be good. It was about my money, she said, the money Dwight had been saving for me from my paper route. She knew I was planning to use it to pay the fees not covered by my scholarship. The trouble was, Dwight hadn’t really been saving it. It wasn’t there. Not a penny of it. She had asked him about it and he stalled and avoided the subject until she finally cornered him, and then he admitted that he didn’t have it. He also didn’t have the money she had earned at the cookhouse. The account was completely empty. “I’ll get the five hundred,” she said, “don’t worry about that.” All I could do was look at her. “There isn’t anything we can do about it. It’s gone. You just have to forget about it.” That wasn’t what I was doing. I wasn’t forgetting about it. I was remembering it. Over $1,300. But it wasn’t really the money that made me feel sorry for myself, it was the time. For two and a half years I had spent all my afternoons delivering papers. Most nights I went out again after dinner to collect from my subscribers and to try to recruit new ones. People didn’t like to pay me. Even the honest ones put me off again and again.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  In the face of such a narrative, it’s a comedown to wade through the planet-killing trash of a Pride parade, or to hear Chaz Bono cluck-clucking with David Letterman about how T has made him kind of an asshole to his girlfriend, who still annoyingly wants him to “process” for hours in that dreaded lesbian/womanly way. I respect Chaz for many things, not the least of which is his willingness to speak his truth to an audience ready to revile him. But his eager (if strategic) identification with some of the worst stereotypes of straight men and lesbians is disappointing. (“Mission accomplished,” Letterman declared sardonically in response.) People are different from each other. Unfortunately, the dynamic of becoming a spokesperson almost always threatens to bury this fact. You may keep saying that you only speak for yourself but your very presence in the public sphere begins to congeal difference into a single figure, and pressure begins to bear down hard upon it. Think of how freaked some people got when activist/actress Cynthia Nixon described her experience of her sexuality as “a choice.” But while I can’t change, even if I tried, may be a true and moving anthem for some, it’s a piss-poor one for others. At a certain point, the tent may need to give way to field. Here is Catherine Opie, talking to Vice magazine: Interviewer: Well, I think you going from the SM scene to being a mom, and all your new photos are these blissful domestic scenes—that’s shocking in a way, because people want to keep those kind of separate. Opie: They do want to keep it separate. So basically, becoming homogenized and part of mainstream domesticity is transgressive for somebody like me. Ha. That’s a very funny idea. Funny to her, maybe, but to those who are freaked out about the rise of homonormativity and its threat to queerness, not so much. But as Opie here implies, it’s the binary of normative/transgressive that’s unsustainable, along with the demand that anyone live a life that’s all one thing. The other day I heard a guy on the radio talking about prehistoric homes, and the particular way humans make home as opposed to, say, birds. It isn’t a penchant for decoration that differentiates us—birds really have a corner on that—it’s the compartmentalization of space. The way we cook and shit and work in different areas. We’ve done this forever, apparently. This simple fact, gleaned from a radio program, suddenly put me at home in my species.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  We can go back further, even, to ancient Mesopotamia. A remarkable Babylonian clay plaque2 depicts a man fucking a woman from behind as she drinks beer through a straw—she’s unbothered by the sex, but more focused on the beverage. (There are, surprisingly, many artistic riffs3 on the trope of Man Penetrating Woman While She Drinks Through a Straw, dating to around the first and second millennia BC. Petition to bring back drinking beverages during boring sex.) Of course, sex has always been pleasurable enough, useful enough, for people to continue having it and populating the species. To be fair, there are loads of centuries-old pieces of art and literature that are hot (see, Sappho, Giulio Romano, and shunga art from Japan’s Edo period). But my suggestion that sex has been tolerated, rather than enjoyed, by many people throughout human history is not a leap. “What is it that we demand of sex, beyond its possible pleasures, that makes us so persistent?” mused philosopher Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality, volume 1, a work that I return to repeatedly in my quest to understand how we, humanity, got so absolutely deranged about sex, so obsessed with sex that we would have bad sex again and again and again. All the social developments that have made sex easier—dating apps, birth control, a carte blanche from the sex-positivity movement (or was it the body pos movement?) to never shave my genitals—haven’t moved the dial on better. Bad sex has endured. Young people may be better at discerning good sex from bad sex, in part thanks to resource-sharing on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, but not necessarily getting closer to having it. I’m a professional sex writer who is labia-deep in the latest research on maximizing pleasure, communicating with partners, and feeling sexually confident, yet most of the sex I’ve had has landed somewhere between passable and “huh.” And it’s not just me, or because I’m single, having one-off encounters where both parties are too intoxicated or unobligated to reasonably deliver. The persistence of boring, unsatisfying, uncomfortable sex is top of mind for many sex therapists, social psychologists, journalists, and academics. “Sex is no better now than it was when I was in high school,” sex therapist Jessa Zimmerman told me. “There might be more about consent now, but it’s still not talked about, and we are not equipped to talk about it … I don’t think we’re any more equipped now than we were in the fifties.” The ’50s?? When sitcom couples slept in different beds? Man. So much has improved since then—sitcoms, haircuts, the taste of liquid medicine—so why not sexual pleasure? For one, I can watch any kind of porn anywhere at any time, even inside of this self-serious Brooklyn coffee “lab” where I’m writing this. For two, men are constantly explaining to me that they “actually like going down on women.” What’s gone so, so wrong?

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Jed Clampett was no Davy Crockett , even though Buddy Ebsen had in fact played the gruff sidekick to Fess Parker’s coon-capped Crockett in the fifties Disney saga. The differences between Jed and Davy were stark. Hollywood hillbillies could only be crude objects of audience laughter—mockery, not admiration. They conjured none of the frontier fantasy of the rugged individualist Crockett (or Fess Parker’s TV Daniel Boone). Nothing could redeem them. The Clampetts drove a 1930s-era Ford jalopy, and Granny sat on board in a rocking chair—a camp version of John Ford’s desperate Joad family. 11 Fess Parker’s buckskin champion was a jaunty country boy, a genial Gary Cooper–style suburban dad. All viewers understood that Parker’s Crockett represented the best qualities imagined of early America. The 1955 Davy Crockett craze caused adoring fans to mob the actor in a way that momentarily put him in a league with Elvis; coonskin caps flew off store shelves as Disney Studios staged a publicity tour. Parker, a towering Texan, even made a stop on Capitol Hill. In a photograph distributed over the wire services, then-senator Lyndon Johnson and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn struck up a pose with “Davy” and his rifle, Ol’ Betsy. 12 Their signature laugh track aside, sixties comedies were not purely escapist fare. They tapped into a larger anxiety amid the mass migration of poor whites who headed north and created hillbilly ghettos in cities such as Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, and Cincinnati—which only fueled existing prejudice against “briar hoppers” (recalling the nomenclature of an Odum respondent). Writing about poor whites in Chicago in 1968, the syndicated columnist Paul Harvey drew a practical connection for his readers: “Suppose a real-life likeness of TV’s Beverly Hillbillies should move to the big city without those millions of dollars in the bank.” 13 The trio of sitcoms tapped into suspicions that modern America had failed to create a genuine melting pot; the cultural distance between rural and urban life, between rich and poor, was immense. Don Knotts’s slapstick character Barney Fife, Sheriff Andy’s bumbling cousin, didn’t belong in the big city any more than the corn cracker of Davy Crockett’s Almanack of 1837 did in the 1830s. Despite his drill sergeant’s unrelenting badgering, Gomer, the hapless private, failed to conform to military culture; he wasn’t fit for the Marines, let alone for white-collar corporate America. And the Clampetts may have bought a mansion in the heart of Hollywood, but they had not moved even one rung on the social ladder. They didn’t even try to behave like middle-class Americans.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  All right, so the sushi wasn't so hot: The rice was cold and gluey, the uni (sea urchin) not the freshest I've had. Perfectly good otoro was cut too thick, and across connective tissue. But it's impossible not to be swept along by the enthusiasm of the place. Okada exudes high energy, pride, optimism—and the American dream of a successful future. It celebrates the different and the "exotic" in admirably bold fashion. Our server cheerily explained to Ruhlman and me (two jaded and grizzled food writers if ever there were any) what an omakase was (tasting menu), and we felt compelled to feign ignorance and wonder. What followed was a hilariously frenetic, yet intermittently delicious, trainwreck as food cranked continuously from the various stations without coordination. Our serious yet beleaguered sommelier struggled mightily to match always excellent sakes to a double-time procession of courses, arriving with a perfectly matched unfiltered sake, for instance, only to find another course had been plunked down in the few moments it had taken her to fetch it. Plated offerings and family-style tastings seemed stacked in holding patterns around the table like planes over JFK at rush hour. The always dangerously manic-depressive Ruhlman's mood began to swing. "I've got The Fear," he murmured, picking unhappily at the "lobster trio," an inexplicably smoked lobster tail which tasted of, well . . . smoke; a lobster croquette that could just as well have been "sea leg," and a "lobster gelee" served in the inevitable shot glass. "Maybe there's a downside to this. If Yagihashi had opened in New York first, before coming here . . . he would have been killed by the critics. He would have learned." Okada's offerings veered between the truly excellent and the sophomoric, but never without enthusiasm and pride. A sampling of skewered robata yaki arrived, a perfect grilled prawn, flawless "BBQ short rib," an unctuous grilled spear of otoro, and a bizarrely incongruous grilled lamb chop slathered with black olive tapenade—a discordant note which thankfully didn't take away from the excellence of the rest. But the "Baked Sweet Sake-Kasu Black Cod" was just fine; the sakes were wonderful; and looking around the beautiful dining room, spying a mulleted, shorts-wearing couple in T-shirts, the man in a trucker hat and sandals, the woman in sneakers, both happily picking over their food with chopsticks at a nearby table, I felt decidedly more sunny about things.