I don’t consider myself unfeminine at all. I think I’m very girlie. I like lots of products. I like unguents and creams. I could spend hours in a really nice drugstore. But I’m not sure that I match the regular standard of girlie — vulnerable, lovable, malleable.

For a while it was just he and I kidding around, laughing at our own jokes, but soon it became a powerful passion. It was us against them, and “they” were anybody, everybody — whoever they were, they were out there, and we were against them, jokingly.

Because secrets do not increase in value if kept in a gore-ian lockbox, because one’s past is either made useful or else mutates and becomes cancerous. We share things for the obvious reasons: it makes us feel un-alone, it spreads the weight over a larger area, it holds the possibility of making our share lighter. And it can work either way - not simply as a pain-relief device, but, in the case of not bad news but good, as a share-the-happy-things-I’ve-seen/lessons-I’ve-learned vehicle. Or as a tool for simple connectivity for its own sake, a testing of waters, a stab at engagement with a mass of strangers.

Is it weird to have a president who knows science fiction? I just saw a speech John Hodgman gave in front of Obama, and there were all these Dune references, and seeing that Obama knew what he was talking about was just crazy.