1001 Ways to Embarrass Yourself While Avoiding Injuries

Money is a many splendored thing. I spend time worrying about money like someone who cares about the planet spends time thinking about all the ways Mother Earth could combust or collapse from all the fucking terrible stuff we're pouring into her. I dream about money, all the ways I could spend it, the clink-clinking sound of coins dropping onto cold, hard marble-topped counters ringing in my ears. Man, nobody wants money like I do. I dream of holding it in my hand, the green dollar bills crisp and tight and smelling like Wall Street Greed, which to me, smelled like bagels and lox. It smelled like high-end sofas and shit like that. It's a pity when when Gordon Gekko said, '' Gimme guys who are poor, smart and hungry," he forgot the girls and he definitely forgot someone like me. I kept a copy of the Wall Street Journal under my pillow at night and I read it like the Bible. People around me always aspiring to be doctors to cure cancer, engineers and lawyers- sure,...

I'm so indescribably happy; it's as if someone has put me on the highest cloud and allowed me to glimpse upon humanity. Somehow, from up here, I can only feel tenderness for how frail and fragile we humans are, and ebullience at how perfect we are. How we can FEEL, and love and hurt and anger and sadden and then gladden our hearts again and again. I can feel the connection between my soul and whoever I am meant to meet, their happiness pumping vibrantly into my own bloodstream. How red and beautiful the union; and suddenly I am aware. Hyperaware of the world. I can almost see the light rays split into the spectrum, is he listening too? Can he hear my heart beating up-down-up-down like I can feel his? A breathtaking moment suspended in time and space, and all the anguish is gone. I love you, I whisper into the air, and I know the wind is carrying these soft words of love to his ears somewhere in the distance. The human heart has felt all this before, and still, every t...

He's a professor, but not mine, of history and Classics at my college, with dark brown hair and dark, deep-set eyes and a strong squarish chin. He never talked to me until the day we were stuck in the elevator in the Hirsch Humanities Building, and he was trying to light a cigarette. He asked me for a lighter which I had kept in the back pocket of my jeans under my winter coat. "Thanks," he mutters elegantly into his palm, with the Marlborough dangling between his teeth, a hint of his pink tongue showing. I smile for too long at him, when he had stopped looking. "How long do you think we'll be here?" I ask, a natural deference to authority, or his natural gravitas. He looked deeply intelligent, as if his Oxford education had imprinted itself upon his brows, cheeks, forehead and eyes. His eyes look so dark, so black that you could scarcely see the pupil. They were opaque eyes that frightened me and because of this, intrigued me. He fiddles with his co...