Breeding and Other Such Nonsense - Part I

Many years ago now, I mentioned a book a friend had given me as a gift. With the gift, she said it reminded her of me, and after reading it, I completely understand why! And when the first chapter is entitled, "Drugs Make You a Better Person," you know it's going to be good!

Because I had my underlining pencil on overload during this read, I've broken this installation into two posts. Without further ado, here are some of my favorite comments from the author, Kristin Newman, all of which could have been spoken from my own lips:

"My friends who met their spouses young have often told me they live vicariously through my adventures." 

"So I'm not so good at sexy face." In my former dance life, a coach once said to me that my sexy face looked angry. He told me just to smile instead. Sigh.

Kristin's appreciation of one of her lover's skin color: "'Dulce' because his skin is the color and smoothness and sweetness of a baby covered in Argentine caramel."

"I was now the type of woman who...acquires lovers and uses the word lovers." 

"Why wouldn't she want to go to the place that was her 'favorite place'? I was afraid it wouldn't live up to my dreams." I often dreamt of going back to my Caribbean island of bliss, yet I knew it would be just like Kristin's experience with her Argentine lover.

"It's almost impossible to have a meal alone without something to read."

"If there is one thing that is my favorite thing in the world, it's making out on the dance floor." 

"I'm someone a little different on the road."

"My life was starting to become what it was supposed to be."

"He kissed the SHIT out of me. One thing that a tortured, dramatic worldview does for someone is it makes him a HELL of a kisser."

"I could only communicate with our eyes, and our bodies. And we communicated really effectively that way."

"Having sex with foreigners is not the only whorish thing I do."

He was a "combination of ethereal and sexy beauty." 

"Running away from home to someplace wonderful. And then, sometimes having sex there."

"When I complained to my friend...that she lapped me in the marriage department, she replied, 'I'm not sure the goal is to do it as often as possible.'"

"I wanted love, but I also wanted freedom and adventure, and those two desires fought like angry obese sumo wrestlers in the dojo of my soul."

"You can have both love and freedom when you fall in love with an exotic local in an exotic locale."

"I love to do the thing you're supposed to do in the place you're supposed to do it."

"You're always rushing to fill up your life with fun fun fun. But nothing new or good can come in without a void to fill. Voids are necessary and wonderful."

"I didn't regret my path of fun and freedom for a moment, and really didn't wish I had settled down earlier, but there was going to be a cost."

"A hateful little ex-boyfriend once said that a house full of cats used to be the sign of a terminally single woman, but now it's a house full of souvenirs on foreign adventures...But I say that plane tickets replacing cats might be the best evidence of women's progress as a gender."

"Life is almost never about choosing between one thing you really want and another thing you don't want at all....life is an endless series of choosing between two things you want almost equally."

"Expectations were always my undoing."

"The deep feeling of oneness you have with someone when you've done all of the work on yourself you have to do to make a marriage work doesn't take away your independence. It frees you to be the person you actually are."

"...fell madly in love in the way it turns out you only fall in love when you're twenty and doing it for the first time. (It took me fifteen years of unsuccessfully chasing that first high to understand that. Slow learner.)"

"To me, marriage was an ending, not a beginning."

"The problem had never been our commitment to each other - it was a fact that we wanted to live different lives."

"I realized what a life raft Juan had been for me all of those years...even when we weren't in contact. He was out there. He made me different. He was a possibility, a maybe, just maybe. And that was now over."

"It never occurred to me that I was the only twentysomething woman who found thirtysomething successful men creepy."