"I spent two weeks building my daughter a rocket ship out of cardboard boxes. Then when I finally finished, she started crying because it wouldn’t fly."
"I’ve always been a listener, which can make it really hard to feel included. Whenever I’m working in a group, it seems like the outspoken people are always the ones who get acknowledged. Even if I do more work."
"People have been waving at me lately. I think my daughter may have put my picture on The Facebook."
"I recently lost my job in IT. When I started working over thirty years ago, computer technology changed slowly. It was like going from a skateboard, to a bicycle, to a motorcycle, to a car. Now it’s changing so fast I can’t keep up. Every five years it goes from a skateboard to an aircraft carrier. So I’m sitting here sketching the library to keep from going nuts."
"When I was 22, I fell off a fishing boat in the middle of the night. We were about 200 miles from shore, fishing for swordfish. I was trying to bend a pipe into place when it gave way and dumped me in the ocean. They didn’t notice I was gone for about 20 minutes. The waves were about twelve feet high, and between the waves I could see the boat going further and further and further until it completely disappeared. You know how they say that when you’re dying, you’re supposed to go toward the light? Well, when I thought I was dying, the light was moving further and further away."
"I left Belize when I was 12 or 13, just as all my friends were getting swept up into gangs. The gangs would get kids to do the dirty work, because they knew the kids wouldn’t go to jail. I actually have an old photograph of the group of friends I used to hang out with— there were seven us. After I came to America, they were all killed in the exact order that they were standing in that photograph."
