Do I Mind?

"What difference would it make if I minded? It wouldn't change anything. Do I mind? It never occurs to me to mind.  Okay, I got overemotional.  But minding? What's the point of minding? What was the point of trying to find reason or meaning in any of these things? By the time I was twenty-five I already knew there wasn't any."

~ Philip Roth, Sabbath's Theater, 1995

First Day of School

Our Japanese class started last Saturday.  It’s been a while since I lasted attended classes that I felt like a child bursting with excitement for her first day of school.  Armed with a spiral notebook, a pen and several markers, I wanted to feel like a student once again.  And when I entered that tiny classroom with all those beckoning armchairs all lined up, I did feel like a student. It didn’t matter that the topics we took up that day were concepts that I’ve already mastered.  It just felt wonderful to be in that classroom, learning a foreign language and meeting new people.

Rejection

It must take some amount of courage for a guy to approach a girl and ask for her name and number. How do guys do it? I always wonder.  Have they been inured to rejection that it’s become easy for them to expose themselves to the perils of being scorned or, even worse, ignored?