...this is the kind of American story that rarely happens...and to me, the life survived was not worth the windfall. I was unmoved by the big sum, heartbroken instead at the few rupees by which choices are made to exploit children, subjugate women, engage in casual brutality, and trample the meek.

McAvoy plays the ingenue well, and Jolie reprises the coy killer with a conscience. Rigorous training (though applied fraternally) is presented as the most compelling motivation to improve, and I suppose is a giveaway - don't trust a mentor who bloodies you in the process. Though distinctions are made, violence is violence, especially when slowed to the pace of premeditation.

If it is a beautiful fiction, it is a more beautiful fiction than I can imagine otherwise to live by in this life.

I don't have as much contact with kids any more, so it takes some time to re-adapt. The basis of conversation with children is generally in asking them questions, which prompts them to respond. Children also seek responses from adults, due to the learning curve involved in navigating novel circumstances. Adults, in contrast, fall back on topics of conversation, and will ask each other for updates. A couple of my colleagues in communications are more aware of this, and with each person they work with they have a few 'entry points.' It is transparent to me when they run through these social exercises, perhaps because their strengths are greater in communications than marketing (i.e. message vs. means), but it does work. Adults also tell stories to elicit a reaction (generate content for a response).

In some ways I can still slip back into a child-like reticence, 'speak when spoken to,' and look to others to be the character studies they can sometimes be so willing to be.

Sometimes a word interjects itself into the stream of consciousness and appears, fully formed, swimming into my ken, apropos of nothing. Just now I picked up: cabriolet

Over seven months, and it's still a novelty to me to be here. Three moments of homecoming:

-being housebound in illness for a season, I sense the solidity of the house around me, capable of containing our greatest hopes and greatest fears

-during the holidays, I am struck in the thought that my parent's house is no longer home, as it had seemed since I moved out for school, and later for work

-as a property owner as well as a homeowner, I go outside inappropriately dressed to do a task, realizing after that I didn't consider it to be 'going out in public,' and then relishing the thought of becoming an eccentric neighbour

From dreamless sleep to instant publishing...

I seek, as all must, to contribute. The revolving planet captures it all and allows some to have an audience of others.

Over the course of my professional life, my sense of a year has been changing from an academic September-May to a fiscal year of April-March. It is better this way, to work 12 months with breaks interspersed. It feels more like life.