Thank you, Adam Sandler

You are helping me to change in ways I never have imagined. I'm seeing that life doesn't have to be a struggle with clenched teeth and fists. Thank you, baby, thank you.

Lionel Shriver, "We Need to Talk About Kevin"

"The only way my head was truly going somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not to a different airport."

"You were ambitious -- for your life, what it was like when you woke up in the morning, and not for some attainment. Like most people who did not answer a particular calling from an early age, you placed work beside yourself; any occupation would fill up your day but not your heart. I liked that about you. I liked it enormously."

Frances Ha and loneliness

Adam and I saw Noah Baumbach's latest, Frances Ha, yesterday. Neither one of us were particularly impressed. It was an aimless story with uninteresting (and, in fact, irritating) characters and the plot seemed plucked from a middle-school screenwriting course.

However, it did bring up memories of loneliness on many different levels, especially around that age. (Frances is in her mid-20s.) The loneliness of losing people as they move on. The loneliness of watching others' lives eclipse yours, while you feel like you're not going anywhere.

How do you think I wound up in the Czech Republic?

There are a few scenes where Frances is flitting around Paris and I could really relate to that loneliness, the wanting to share it with someone but having no one by your side to do so. Uncomfortable memories, but memories nonetheless.

First-world problems read by people who know better