You mistook endurance for hospitality.

I just ate a huge burrito. I was conscious of every gulp going down my gullet; even the largest bite took less than a second to swallow. Despite mustering all of my concentration, I couldn’t feel the food making its way to my stomach at any speed. Maybe I don’t have any significant nerves in my esophagus, or maybe I’m just as oblivious to my alimentary canal as I am about most things.

I’ll probably never consider the speed at which food travels down my throat again; such knowledge is pointless. I wish I knew why it takes days for new information to get from my eyes or ears to my brain; that’s insight I could really use.

“Why didn’t you just get a cheap Korean motorcycle?” I asked. “They’re faster, dependable, use less fuel, have more ...”

“Forget it,” Buzz interrupted. “Riding a Korean bike is like kissing your sister; it’s not bad until someone finds out you do it.”

I was relieved to remember that Buzz doesn’t have a sister, and that Buzz is still an idiot.

Poor Annie doesn’t understand that mistakes are a critical component of any creative pursuit. Good mistakes and bad mistakes are equally important parts of a balanced inventive diet.

Only the wrong survive. If necessity is the mother of invention, then errors are the midwives. Paternity remains in doubt, as usual.

?!

I thought Wanda was joking, but she was atypically serious. She explained that industrial agriculture uses huge amounts of energy for fertilizer, production, and distribution. She calculated that the food I’d need to provide energy for my wine ride would release more carbon into the atmosphere than her automobile.

I was happy to learn that I was doing my part—perhaps more than my part—to ruin the environment. I dislike being commended for being an exemplary person for merely riding a bicycle; Wanda’s data should put an end to such unwanted and unwarranted flattery.

For reasons known only to women who’ve borne children, every December mothers are overcome by a powerful desire to ship fresh fruit to their distant offspring. When they do, fruit magnates ship their wares from a temperature-controlled warehouse in trucks that pass through every climate from the frozen mountain passes to the scorched desert.

By the time the fruit arrives, it’s been heated and chilled a number of times while bouncing around in a lorry for thousands of kilometers. Stephan’s gift was in worse shape than usual since it was shipped to the wrong address. The pears rotted in storage while the mistake was being rectified.

Stephan poured the pear paste on the compost heap. Then, like every other good son or daughter, called his mother to thank her for such a wonderful and thoughtful gift.

I told him he should tell his mother the truth, but he said it would be boorish to let her know that her gift ended up as marijuana fertilizer.