I'm Always Happy," Sasha Said.

I Know I'm Famous And Irresitible - A Combination Whose Properties Closely Resemble Radioactivity - And I Know That You In This Room Are Helpless Against Me.

Rebecca Was An Academic Star. Her New Book Was On The Phenomenon Of Word Casings, A Term She'd Invented For Words That No Longer Had Meaning Outside Quotation Marks. English Was Full Of These Empty Words--"friend" And "real" And "story" And "change"--words That Had Been Shucked Of Their Meanings And Reduced To Husks. Some, Like "identity" And "search" And "cloud," Had Clearly Been Drained Of Life By Their Web Usage. With Others, The Reasons Were More Complex; How Had "american" Become An Ironic Term? How Had "democracy" Come To Be Used In An Arch, Mocking Way?

I Guess In My Own Life, Privacy, Anonymity, And The Mystery Of Being Lost Are Important. I Also Feel That People Are Mysterious And Complex No Matter What They Do, And No Matter How Hard They Try To Reveal Their Own Mystery.

I Write Fiction Longhand. That's Not So Much About Rejecting Technology As Being Unable To Write Fiction On A Computer For Some Reason. I Don't Think I Would Write It On A Typewriter Either. I Write In A Very Blind Gut Instinctive Way. It Just Doesn't Feel Right. There's A Physical Connection. And Then In Nonfiction That's Not The Case At All. I Can't Even Imagine Writing Nonfiction By Hand.

Happened As I Listened: I Felt Pain. Not In My Head, Not In My Arm, Not In My Leg; Everywhere At Once. I Told Myself There Was No Difference Between Being “inside” And Being “outside,” That It All Came Down To X’s And O’s That Could Be Acquired In Any Number Of Different Ways, But The Pain Increased To A Point Where I Thought I Might Collapse, And I Limped Away.