Sometimes when we think we’re protecting ourselves, we’re really hurting ourselves. And sometimes the people around us too. - Dale Peck

"I'm sorry, I don't understand. Could you tell me more about this 'profanity'?"
Mrs. Miller nodded at my dictionary. "I'll assume you don't need a definition. Perhaps you'd prefer an example?"
"That would be so helpful, thank you very much."
Without missing a beat, Mrs. Miller rattled off a stream of obscenities so fully and completely unexpected that I fell off my chair. Mothers were defiled, their male and female children, as well as any and all offspring who just happened to be born out of wedlock. AS for the sacred union that produced these innocent babes, the pertinent bodily appendages were catalogued by a list of names so profoundly scurrilous that a grizzled marine, conceived in a brothel and dying of a disease he contracted in one, would've wished he'd been born as smooth as a Ken doll. The act itself was invoked with such a verity of incestuous, scatological, bestial, and just plain bizarre variations that that same marine would've given up on the Ken doll fantasy, and wished instead that all life had been confined to a single-cell stage, forever free of taint of mitosis, let alone procreation.
Somewhere during the course of all this I noticed I'd snapped my pencil in half, and now I used the two ends to gouge out my brain.
"Guhhhhhh guhhhhh guhhhhhh guhhhhh guhhhhh," I said, by which I meant: "You have shattered whatever tattered remnants of pedagogical propriety I still possessed, and my tender young mind has broken beneath the strain." Nervously, I climbed back into my chair, the two halves of my pencil sticking out of ears like an arrow that had shot clean through my head.
Mrs. Miller allowed herself a small self-congratulatory smile.

I hate it when people repeat the last thing that’s been said to them because they’re too afraid to ask what the other person meant by it. “You want to remember this moment,” I said finally, because when it comes right down to it, I’m a coward.

A physicist once told me that one view of our universe is that its stability is an accident, that thousands upon thousands of relationships are unstable and that chance alone holds ours together.