#amityreads

IV | Chuck Klosterman | 2006

227: Meanwhile, every woman also has a former friend (usually someone from high school with large breasts) whom she has loathed for years and whom she will continue to loathe with the intensity of a thousand suns, even if she only sees her once every ten years. This is her archenemy. Women intrinsically understand human dynamics, and that makes them unstoppable. Unfortunately, the average man is less adroit at fostering such rivalries, which is why most men remain average; males are better at hating things that can’t hate them back (e.g., lawn mowers, cats, the Denver Broncos, et cetera). They don’t see the big picture.

 291: I’m not sure how we all became convinced that machines intend to dominate us. As I type this very column, I can m toaster, and I’ll be honest: I’m not nervous. As far as I can tell, it poses no threat. My relationship with my toaster is delicious, but completely one-sided. If I can be considered the Michael Jordan of My Apartment (and I think I can), my toaster is LaBradford Smith. I’m never concerned that my toaster will find a way to poison me, or that it will foster a false sense of security before electrocuting me in the shower, or that it will politically align itself with my microwave. My toaster does not want to conquer society. I even played “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” in my kitchen just t see if my toaster would become self-aware and go for my jugular; its reaction was negligible. Machines have no grit.

 Killing Yourself to Live | Chuck Klosterman | 2005

70: “Now – obviously – dreams don’t last 100 years. Dreams last like 20 minutes. So that means we are somehow able to understand an accelerated passage of time while we dream. We can just naturally tell – somehow – whether the dream is happening in ‘real time,’ or if it’s happening in ‘dream time.’ And if it’s happening in dream time, what we experience in the span of 20 minutes can feel like a span of 20 years.” … “What I’m wondering is if TV taught people how to have longer dreams. Because TV is always flashing forward: If sitcom characters are in the living room, then a commercial for Tide comes on, and then those same people are suddenly lying in bed when the show returns, we all automatically understand that time has advanced. We take for granted that the story has moved from daytime to nighttime. This is something we have all come to understand completely, and without even trying. Books do that all the time, too.”

The Visible Man | Chuck Klosterman | 2011

137: People think about themselves constantly, but not in the way you imagine.  The only time people are conscious of how they feel is when something hurts them. Most of the time, we train ourselves to ignore the entire sensation. I certainly don’t believe it’s possible to be successful at anything complicated if you let feelings dictate the way you live.

148: Our society is really backward, Victoria. It’s backward. Look what society does. It takes a handful of people who know how to succeed and makes them feel terrible for being different. Everyone is supposed to be mediocre, I guess. Everyone is supposed to be dragged into imposed malfunction. These people don’t need a support group. These people needed someone to tell them they were okay. They needed to be told that the morality they’ve been forced to accept is manufactured and fake, and that their guilt is just the penalty for not being a failure.

156: The reality I got to see was not “movie reality.” The reality I saw was just reality, without quotes. You want to know what I really learned? I learned that people don’t consider time alone as part of their life. Being alone is just a stretch of isolation they want to escape from. I saw a lot of wine-drinking, a lot of compulsive drug use, a lot of sleeping with the television on. It was far less festive than I anticipated. My view had always been that I was my most alive when I was totally alone, because that was the only time I could live without fear of how my actions were being scrutinized and interpreted. What I came to realize is that people need their actions to be scrutinized and interpreted in order to feel like what they’re doing matters. … Every once in a while, I’d come across someone who was really happy when they were alone. That was always a little beautiful, but also a little confusing. You know who seemed happiest alone? Consumers. It wasn’t the people who read the best books or had the most hobbies. It was the people who bought the most bullshit. … As it turns out, the lonely millionaire is way happier than the lonely pauper. It’s not even close, and the explanation is obvious: The rich man can buy things, and those things distract him from loneliness.

 178: The Theory of the Mind describes, basically, the ability to understand what people are really thinking. It’s what autistic people don’t have. … It’s the ability to know what other people mean when they say things. The ability to understand how your own words are received by others. The ability to understand how words and actions are understood differently by different people.