dysfunction

Reading Chip's college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he'd bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. "You'll appreciate these on a cold night," he told Chip. "You'll be surprised how much they cut down drafts." But Chip's freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan McCorkle who would soon be leaving thumbprints, in what appeared to be Vaseline, on the fifth-grade photo of Denise. Roan laughed at the curtains and Chip laughed, too. He put them back in the box and stowed the box in the basement of the dorm and let it gather mold there for the next four years. He had nothing against the curtains personally. They were simply curtains and they wanted no more than what any curtains wanted - to hang well, to exclude light to the best of their ability, to be neither too small nor too large for the window that it was their task in life to cover; to be pulled this way in the evening and that way in the morning; to stir in the breezes that came before rain on a summer night; to be much used and little noticed. There were numberless hospitals and retirement homes and budget motels, not just in the Midwest but in the East as well, where these particularly brown rubber-backed curtains could have had a long and useful life. It wasn't their fault that they didn't belong in a dorm room. They'd betrayed no urge to rise above their station; their material and patterning contained not a hint of unseemly social ambition. They were what they were. If anything, when he finally dug them out of the eve of graduation, their virginal pinkish folds turned out to be rather less plasticized and homely and Sears-like than he remembered. They were nowhere near as shameful as he'd thought.

Thomas had a younger sister, Ester, who was a facsimile of the womanizer brother, who had behaviors that mirrored her brother__ treatment of women, for she treated men the same way, for the same reasons. The younger sister had raised her sons with a hurtful echo in their minds that said __en are no good_, and because they heard it so much from their mother__ mouth, I feared that they would one day believe it to be true.

And could you, from a place of love, actually stand up and, use force, to give someone back, the suffering, they were trying to put on you? Would I do it? Maybe it would even be, an act of fierce compassion, as Enso Roshi sometimes talked about, to not take it any more. To not cow down, anymore. To let my father know, the tyrant, the aggressor, that if he hits me, I__ going to hit back, and hard.

She had gills while other people were breathing with lungs. There was, however, no point in dwelling on it, as it was too later to grow up differently.

Being loud after drinking wine doesn't help. Being silent after drinking wine doesn't help. Nothing really ever gets solved either way.

For an entire wing of the G.O.P., a dysfunctional government, whose only visible activity is mismanaging crises, is not an embarrassment but the vindication of a worldview.

The dysfunction was not the character of one person, it was the split of family by divorce, with the ripples felt for eternity by bloodline.

It's my opinion, with some people, just knowing they are alone, living inside of their own miserable, self hating, dysfunctional mind, with their own immature, insecure, self pitying self is its own revenge. Their existence is their karma.

This is what we desire in intimate relationships but this deep connection is often so frightful that most do not take advantage of the opportunities presented for honesty.