Being Mortal

A great passage I read in Pascal Mercier's Night Train to Lisbon:

"Who could in all seriousness want to be immortal? Who would like to live for all eternity? How boring and stale it must be to know that what happens today, this month, this year, doesn't matter: endless more days, months, years will come. Endless, literally. If that was how it was, would anything count?...It is death that gives the moment its beauty and its horror."

And then this: "So the fear of death might be described as the fear of not being able to become whom one had planned to be."

Be who you want to be--now.

Overheard...

...in a bar last night.

"Are you skiing tomorrow?" says one male bartender to the other.

"Not really, I'm skiing with a girl."

And, in case you were wondering, his tongue was not in his cheek.

Having Ovarios

Here's a quote I came across in Natalie Angier's fascinating book, Woman: An Intimate Geography, from which I could pull quotes for this blog for a month, it's so chock full of great insight.

"Men take strength for granted. Women have to fight for it. They have to trick themselves into their strength, or rather their strengths. Physical strength is but one allele of strength. There are all the other strengths: of self-conviction, of purpose, of being comfortable in your designated plasm. I don't know if physical strength can enhance those other, intangible strengths, if a better-braced body can give one ovarios of heart. It's a good gimmick, though, a place to start, or to return to when all else fails."

p.s. Ovarios = cojones

pps. Angier may not "know" if physical strength enhances our other strengths, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I "know" and it does.