想到GB，心里总是酸痛，为什么会是这样？为什么我们无法在一起？在人生的一路上，我们遇到很多人，也许相识过，也许相知过，也许甚至相爱过，但常常我们放下他们，继续前行。可是有些人，总会在心中，无法放下。

在我们分开整整三个星期的时候，我们又见面了，为了一起去看S。S病了，很突然，而且前景未卜。从去年感恩节开始，几乎每到一个节日或者纪念日，就会有坏事发生，连S生病的消息我都是在情人节那天知道的。

昨天在S家陪了她几乎一整天。临走的时候，我拥抱她，正在她耳边轻轻地告诉她 you’ll be fine 的时候，她拿在手里的药片掉在了地上。我赶紧把药捡起来，放回她手里，却发现她的手在抖。她之前是那么独立，那么精力充沛，几乎转眼之间就成了现在这个样子。当然，就像她自己说的，想想很多其他人，她觉得自己已经很幸运了。但想到那么多健康的人，我还是会禁不住地问，为什么一定要是她？

昨天快半夜的时候才回到GB家。住在他家是我的决定。太晚了没办法回家是一个原因，另一个原因就是在我心里，他就是家。S病了，只有他最了解我心里的感受，我想他陪着我，也想陪着他。我们分开住在卧室和客厅，但知道他就在我身边，我心里好过很多。我哭了很久，因为S，也因为我和GB，我觉得家没有了。GB告诉我，他什么时候都在，一切都会慢慢好起来，而我们要往前走，不能原地打转。我们都已经很努力过了，心里不应该有遗憾。

早晨，我又哭了。GB告诉我让我把他当成家人，哥哥或是弟弟都可以。我问他之前他不是说不愿意当家人吗，为什么改变主意了，他说可能是因为S病了的事情吧。家人永远都在身边，永远都不会变。我们都无法想像在自己的生命中没有对方，所以，这可能是最好的选择吧。生活中还有那么多值得去追求、去体验、去探索的事情，也许只有在我们肯定对方永远都在的时候，才可以勇敢地、安心地去做吧。GB，希望有一天你会看到我写下的文字，知道我心中最柔软的一块地方永远地放着你。

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204369404577211322856873852.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read

Yeah, it’s about Gisele’s reaction after a unclassy Giants’ fan yelled “”Eli owns your husband!” at her after the game. Read what Jason Gay wrote in his point #4:

“4. The last thing I thought was this: Wow, Gisele Bündchen really loves Tom Brady. She loves him in the irrational way that people who are in love love each other. She loves him blind.

This is a comforting, uncynical thing. Maybe you’re married, maybe not—maybe you were married once—but one of the things you want in a union is that kind of unconditional, unrestrained, forget-everyone-else support. Everybody should be lucky to have a fierce advocate in their corner, and you should be a fierce advocate in their corner too. Leave the measured consideration and the caveats to the friends and the shrinks. You want your spouse to tell you it’s going to be OK. To defend you when nobody else will.

Even when it’s wrong. Even when it sounds like lashing out. Even when it’s the absolute incorrect thing to say. Because they’ve got your back. Because you’ve got theirs. Because that’s love.

I’m not saying she was right, I’m not saying she shouldn’t regret it. But the supermodel loves the quarterback.

The fairy tale is actually a fairy tale. It’s so unfair, but it’s also pretty sweet.”

Autobiographies of the powerful can make disappointing reading. They’re frequently dull, defensive works—evasive, self-serving and, all too often, badly written, whether penned by the principal or a hired hand. Katharine Graham’s “Personal History” is a luminous exception. As the publisher of the Washington Post in the 1960s and ’70s, Graham, who died in 2001 at age 84, was arguably the most influential American woman of her time. Yet she was plagued by self-doubt and quick to condemn herself for her supposed lack of energy and decisiveness. She took over the newspaper only with great reluctance, after the devastating suicide of her husband, Philip, in 1963. “Left alone, no matter at what age or under what circumstances,” Graham writes, “you have to remake your life.” The trick, she says, is just “to put one foot in front of the other, shut [your] eyes, and step off the edge.” To her own amazement, she lands on her feet.

和GB每天都写几个Emails，分享一下有趣的文章，或是简单地问候一下。我想念他，想回去，但转念再一下，之前不能接受的事情还是无法接受。不能回头，唯有前行。

大部分的时间都和J在一起。他说遇到我之前，他一直都是抱着走着看，过一天算一天的想法。知道遇到我，他才想到永远，想能永远和我在一起有多好。想想之前我为了R不说永远那么地纠结，那么地在心里埋怨他，我现在释然了，不怨他了。我并非他的永远，他又怎能说出口呢？J说他愿意和我去任何地方，回国也行，他只要每个月回来看一次娃就可以了。那么爱孩子的他能说出这样的话来，我还求什么呢？J说他现在是在补课，他从来没有这样地爱过一个人，从来没有这样地想和一个人在一起过。而我呢？

I so wanted to be a better person because of them. Today, I decided to start with FOCUSING BETTER. That’s the only way to have the possibility of realizing my potential.

“The most common commodity in this country is unrealized potential.” – Calvin Coolidge.

Don’t let mine be a commodity, worse yet, the most common type.

I think that I may be one of them – with breathtaking capacity of self-deception when it comes to being green.

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203889904577198922867850002.html?mod=ITP_review_0

A favorite trick of people who consider themselves friends of the environment is reframing luxury consumption preferences as gifts to humanity. A new car, a solar-powered swimming-pool heater, a 200-mile-an-hour train that makes intercity travel more pleasant and less expensive, better-tasting tomatoes—these are the sacrifices we’re prepared to make for the future of the planet.

Our capacity for self-deception can be breathtaking. In 2010, a forward-thinking friend of mine took me for a ride in a Ford Fusion, a gas-electric hybrid that gets more miles per gallon than comparable cars with conventional engines. His dashboard fuel gauge filled with images of intertwining green foliage, a symbolic representation of the environmental benefits we were apparently dispensing from the tailpipe as we aimlessly drove around.

I felt a twinge of idiotic virtue while in that car, as I also do when I leave an especially large pile of cans, bottles and newspapers at the end of my driveway for the recycling truck. Like many concerned Americans, I’m susceptible to the Prius Fallacy: a belief that switching to an ostensibly more benign form of consumption turns consumption itself into a boon for the environment.

If only all big problems could be tackled with product substitution. We’re consumers at heart, and our response to difficulties of all kinds usually involves consumption in one form or another. My car’s a problem? Tell me what to drive instead. Wrong water heater? I’ll switch. Kitchen counters not green? I’ll replace them. The challenge arises when consumption itself is at issue. The world faces a long list of environmental challenges, yet most so-called solutions are either irrelevant or make the real problems worse. That’s the conundrum facing anyone who yearns for “sustainability.”

Energy efficiency—which has been called “the fifth fuel”—is especially problematic. In 2010, I flew from New York to Melbourne, Australia. My plane consumed a lot of energy and had a big carbon footprint; in fact, my proportional share of the jet fuel burned during my round trip was greater than the total amount of energy that the average resident of the Earth uses, for all purposes, in a year.

But the environmental problem with modern flying isn’t that our airplanes are wasteful; it is that we have made flying so efficient that the main impediment to traveling 10,000 miles isn’t the cost but the unpleasantness of spending a whole day watching movies and sleeping in a cushioned seat.

When people talk about reducing the energy and carbon impact of air travel, they almost always focus on improving the design of engines, wings and fuselages, or on using computer systems to shorten flight paths and eliminate delays. By this point, though, the total potential gain in any of those areas is small. Today’s passenger jets are already something like 75% more fuel efficient than the jets of the early 1960s, and the physics of flying imposes a low ceiling on further advances.

The main effect of additional engineering improvements will be the same as for all such improvements in the past: to make travel easier, cheaper, more convenient and more attractive—thus encouraging us to do more of it. That’s a good thing for those of us who love to play golf on other continents, but it doesn’t move the world closer to resolving a long list of energy, climate and environmental challenges. In fact, it pushes the solutions further away.

Even if you think that climate change is a left-wing crock, this ought to be a matter of gnawing concern. Global energy use is growing faster than population. It’s expected to double by midcentury, and most of the growth will be in fossil fuels. Disasters like the BP oil spill attract world-wide attention, but the main environmental, economic and geopolitical challenge with petroleum isn’t the oil that goes into the ocean; it is the oil we continue to use exactly as we intend.

Many people assume that we’ll conquer our addiction through technological innovation. But engineering breakthroughs not only enable machines to do more work with less fuel; they also make it possible to manufacture new and desirable products, swelling our contentment as consumers and further increasing our dependence.

Many supposedly green strategies pose a similar conundrum. Consider locavorism—the idea that it’s irresponsible to eat food that was produced more than a short distance from where it’s eaten. But shipping is almost always a trivial contributor to the environmental impact of eating.

Much more ecologically meaningful is what we eat, how it was grown, how much irrigation it required, what was sprayed on it and how it was prepared. Locavorism is appealing because it feels enlightened but entails no actual sacrifice. A colleague of mine produces her own eggs by raising chickens in her backyard. But she also drives individual hens to the veterinarian, giving her breakfasts an impressively huge carbon footprint.

Even when we act with what we believe to be the best of intentions, our efforts are often at cross-purposes with our goals. Increasing the efficiency of lighting encourages us to illuminate more. Relieving traffic congestion reduces the appeal of public transit and fuels the growth of suburban sprawl. A robust market for ethanol exacerbates global hunger by diverting cropland from the production of food.

We may believe that we care about the world’s deepening environmental challenges and are merely waiting for scientists, environmentalists, politicians and others to come to their senses and implement effective solutions. But we already know more than enough, and we have for a long time. We just don’t like the answers.

Flying from New York to Melbourne in 1958, on a propeller plane, consumed more energy per person than my 2010 flight did, but it was “greener” nevertheless. It required stops in San Francisco, Hawaii, Canton Island, Fiji and Sydney, and it cost each coach passenger something like a quarter of that year’s U.S. median family income, each way.

If comparably slow and costly flights were the only travel option available today, I and almost all of my fellow passengers would certainly have stayed home: a gain for the environment, though a loss for the global economy. The only unambiguously effective method of reducing the long-term carbon and energy cost of air travel is to fly less—a behavioral change, not a technological one.

But where’s the fun in going nowhere?

—Mr. Owen is the author of “The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse,” from which this piece is adapted.

All of a sudden, I started to have interest in parenting and came across this article. No, it should be the other way around.

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204740904577196931457473816.html?mod=ITP_review_0

When my daughter was 18 months old, my husband and I decided to take her on a little summer holiday. We picked a coastal town that’s a few hours by train from Paris, where we were living (I’m American, he’s British), and booked a hotel room with a crib. Bean, as we call her, was our only child at this point, so forgive us for thinking: How hard could it be?

We ate breakfast at the hotel, but we had to eat lunch and dinner at the little seafood restaurants around the old port. We quickly discovered that having two restaurant meals a day with a toddler deserved to be its own circle of hell.

Bean would take a brief interest in the food, but within a few minutes she was spilling salt shakers and tearing apart sugar packets. Then she demanded to be sprung from her high chair so she could dash around the restaurant and bolt dangerously toward the docks.

Our strategy was to finish the meal quickly. We ordered while being seated, then begged the server to rush out some bread and bring us our appetizers and main courses at the same time. While my husband took a few bites of fish, I made sure that Bean didn’t get kicked by a waiter or lost at sea. Then we switched. We left enormous, apologetic tips to compensate for the arc of torn napkins and calamari around our table.

After a few more harrowing restaurant visits, I started noticing that the French families around us didn’t look like they were sharing our mealtime agony. Weirdly, they looked like they were on vacation. French toddlers were sitting contentedly in their high chairs, waiting for their food, or eating fish and even vegetables. There was no shrieking or whining. And there was no debris around their tables.

Though by that time I’d lived in France for a few years, I couldn’t explain this. And once I started thinking about French parenting, I realized it wasn’t just mealtime that was different. I suddenly had lots of questions. Why was it, for example, that in the hundreds of hours I’d clocked at French playgrounds, I’d never seen a child (except my own) throw a temper tantrum? Why didn’t my French friends ever need to rush off the phone because their kids were demanding something? Why hadn’t their living rooms been taken over by teepees and toy kitchens, the way ours had?

Soon it became clear to me that quietly and en masse, French parents were achieving outcomes that created a whole different atmosphere for family life. When American families visited our home, the parents usually spent much of the visit refereeing their kids’ spats, helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build Lego villages. When French friends visited, by contrast, the grownups had coffee and the children played happily by themselves.

By the end of our ruined beach holiday, I decided to figure out what French parents were doing differently. Why didn’t French children throw food? And why weren’t their parents shouting? Could I change my wiring and get the same results with my own offspring?

Driven partly by maternal desperation, I have spent the last several years investigating French parenting. And now, with Bean 6 years old and twins who are 3, I can tell you this: The French aren’t perfect, but they have some parenting secrets that really do work.

I first realized I was on to something when I discovered a 2009 study, led by economists at Princeton, comparing the child-care experiences of similarly situated mothers in Columbus, Ohio, and Rennes, France. The researchers found that American moms considered it more than twice as unpleasant to deal with their kids. In a different study by the same economists, working mothers in Texas said that even housework was more pleasant than child care.
Previous Saturday Essays

Rest assured, I certainly don’t suffer from a pro-France bias. Au contraire, I’m not even sure that I like living here. I certainly don’t want my kids growing up to become sniffy Parisians.

But for all its problems, France is the perfect foil for the current problems in American parenting. Middle-class French parents (I didn’t follow the very rich or poor) have values that look familiar to me. They are zealous about talking to their kids, showing them nature and reading them lots of books. They take them to tennis lessons, painting classes and interactive science museums.

Yet the French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren’t at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. “For me, the evenings are for the parents,” one Parisian mother told me. “My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it’s adult time.” French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.

I’m hardly the first to point out that middle-class America has a parenting problem. This problem has been painstakingly diagnosed, critiqued and named: overparenting, hyperparenting, helicopter parenting, and my personal favorite, the kindergarchy. Nobody seems to like the relentless, unhappy pace of American parenting, least of all parents themselves.

Of course, the French have all kinds of public services that help to make having kids more appealing and less stressful. Parents don’t have to pay for preschool, worry about health insurance or save for college. Many get monthly cash allotments—wired directly into their bank accounts—just for having kids.

But these public services don’t explain all of the differences. The French, I found, seem to have a whole different framework for raising kids. When I asked French parents how they disciplined their children, it took them a few beats just to understand what I meant. “Ah, you mean how do we educate them?” they asked. “Discipline,” I soon realized, is a narrow, seldom-used notion that deals with punishment. Whereas “educating” (which has nothing to do with school) is something they imagined themselves to be doing all the time.

One of the keys to this education is the simple act of learning how to wait. It is why the French babies I meet mostly sleep through the night from two or three months old. Their parents don’t pick them up the second they start crying, allowing the babies to learn how to fall back asleep. It is also why French toddlers will sit happily at a restaurant. Rather than snacking all day like American children, they mostly have to wait until mealtime to eat. (French kids consistently have three meals a day and one snack around 4 p.m.)

One Saturday I visited Delphine Porcher, a pretty labor lawyer in her mid-30s who lives with her family in the suburbs east of Paris. When I arrived, her husband was working on his laptop in the living room, while 1-year-old Aubane napped nearby. Pauline, their 3-year-old, was sitting at the kitchen table, completely absorbed in the task of plopping cupcake batter into little wrappers. She somehow resisted the temptation to eat the batter.

Delphine said that she never set out specifically to teach her kids patience. But her family’s daily rituals are an ongoing apprenticeship in how to delay gratification. Delphine said that she sometimes bought Pauline candy. (Bonbons are on display in most bakeries.) But Pauline wasn’t allowed to eat the candy until that day’s snack, even if it meant waiting many hours.

When Pauline tried to interrupt our conversation, Delphine said, “Just wait two minutes, my little one. I’m in the middle of talking.” It was both very polite and very firm. I was struck both by how sweetly Delphine said it and by how certain she seemed that Pauline would obey her. Delphine was also teaching her kids a related skill: learning to play by themselves. “The most important thing is that he learns to be happy by himself,” she said of her son, Aubane.

It’s a skill that French mothers explicitly try to cultivate in their kids more than American mothers do. In a 2004 study on the parenting beliefs of college-educated mothers in the U.S. and France, the American moms said that encouraging one’s child to play alone was of average importance. But the French moms said it was very important.

Later, I emailed Walter Mischel, the world’s leading expert on how children learn to delay gratification. As it happened, Mr. Mischel, 80 years old and a professor of psychology at Columbia University, was in Paris, staying at his longtime girlfriend’s apartment. He agreed to meet me for coffee.

Mr. Mischel is most famous for devising the “marshmallow test” in the late 1960s when he was at Stanford. In it, an experimenter leads a 4- or 5-year-old into a room where there is a marshmallow on a table. The experimenter tells the child he’s going to leave the room for a little while, and that if the child doesn’t eat the marshmallow until he comes back, he’ll be rewarded with two marshmallows. If he eats the marshmallow, he’ll get only that one.

Most kids could only wait about 30 seconds. Only one in three resisted for the full 15 minutes that the experimenter was away. The trick, the researchers found, was that the good delayers were able to distract themselves.

Following up in the mid-1980s, Mr. Mischel and his colleagues found that the good delayers were better at concentrating and reasoning, and didn’t “tend to go to pieces under stress,” as their report said.

Could it be that teaching children how to delay gratification—as middle-class French parents do—actually makes them calmer and more resilient? Might this partly explain why middle-class American kids, who are in general more used to getting what they want right away, so often fall apart under stress?

Mr. Mischel, who is originally from Vienna, hasn’t performed the marshmallow test on French children. But as a longtime observer of France, he said that he was struck by the difference between French and American kids. In the U.S., he said, “certainly the impression one has is that self-control has gotten increasingly difficult for kids.”

American parents want their kids to be patient, of course. We encourage our kids to share, to wait their turn, to set the table and to practice the piano. But patience isn’t a skill that we hone quite as assiduously as French parents do. We tend to view whether kids are good at waiting as a matter of temperament. In our view, parents either luck out and get a child who waits well or they don’t.

French parents and caregivers find it hard to believe that we are so laissez-faire about this crucial ability. When I mentioned the topic at a dinner party in Paris, my French host launched into a story about the year he lived in Southern California.

He and his wife had befriended an American couple and decided to spend a weekend away with them in Santa Barbara. It was the first time they’d met each other’s kids, who ranged in age from about 7 to 15. Years later, they still remember how the American kids frequently interrupted the adults in midsentence. And there were no fixed mealtimes; the American kids just went to the refrigerator and took food whenever they wanted. To the French couple, it seemed like the American kids were in charge.

“What struck us, and bothered us, was that the parents never said ‘no,’ ” the husband said. The children did “n’importe quoi,” his wife added.

After a while, it struck me that most French descriptions of American kids include this phrase “n’importe quoi,” meaning “whatever” or “anything they like.” It suggests that the American kids don’t have firm boundaries, that their parents lack authority, and that anything goes. It’s the antithesis of the French ideal of the cadre, or frame, that French parents often talk about. Cadre means that kids have very firm limits about certain things—that’s the frame—and that the parents strictly enforce these. But inside the cadre, French parents entrust their kids with quite a lot of freedom and autonomy.

Authority is one of the most impressive parts of French parenting—and perhaps the toughest one to master. Many French parents I meet have an easy, calm authority with their children that I can only envy. Their kids actually listen to them. French children aren’t constantly dashing off, talking back, or engaging in prolonged negotiations.

One Sunday morning at the park, my neighbor Frédérique witnessed me trying to cope with my son Leo, who was then 2 years old. Leo did everything quickly, and when I went to the park with him, I was in constant motion, too. He seemed to regard the gates around play areas as merely an invitation to exit.

Frédérique had recently adopted a beautiful redheaded 3-year-old from a Russian orphanage. At the time of our outing, she had been a mother for all of three months. Yet just by virtue of being French, she already had a whole different vision of authority than I did—what was possible and pas possible.

Frédérique and I were sitting at the perimeter of the sandbox, trying to talk. But Leo kept dashing outside the gate surrounding the sandbox. Each time, I got up to chase him, scold him, and drag him back while he screamed. At first, Frédérique watched this little ritual in silence. Then, without any condescension, she said that if I was running after Leo all the time, we wouldn’t be able to indulge in the small pleasure of sitting and chatting for a few minutes.

“That’s true,” I said. “But what can I do?” Frédérique said I should be sterner with Leo. In my mind, spending the afternoon chasing Leo was inevitable. In her mind, it was pas possible.

I pointed out that I’d been scolding Leo for the last 20 minutes. Frédérique smiled. She said that I needed to make my “no” stronger and to really believe in it. The next time Leo tried to run outside the gate, I said “no” more sharply than usual. He left anyway. I followed and dragged him back. “You see?” I said. “It’s not possible.”

Frédérique smiled again and told me not to shout but rather to speak with more conviction. I was scared that I would terrify him. “Don’t worry,” Frederique said, urging me on.

Leo didn’t listen the next time either. But I gradually felt my “nos” coming from a more convincing place. They weren’t louder, but they were more self-assured. By the fourth try, when I was finally brimming with conviction, Leo approached the gate but—miraculously—didn’t open it. He looked back and eyed me warily. I widened my eyes and tried to look disapproving.

After about 10 minutes, Leo stopped trying to leave altogether. He seemed to forget about the gate and just played in the sandbox with the other kids. Soon Frédérique and I were chatting, with our legs stretched out in front of us. I was shocked that Leo suddenly viewed me as an authority figure.

“See that,” Frédérique said, not gloating. “It was your tone of voice.” She pointed out that Leo didn’t appear to be traumatized. For the moment—and possibly for the first time ever—he actually seemed like a French child.
—Adapted from “Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting,” to be published Tuesday by the Penguin Press.

今天第一次和J的娃们见面，一起吃了午饭，晚上又去了一个晚会。娃们很easy-going，又sweet。看着J带娃，我才真真切切地意识到他是怎样的一个好爸爸，更重要的是，我有多爱他。他的自信，他的深情，他的温柔，让我的心里既温暖又踏实。可是即便如此，我还是会禁不住想GB，我真的放不下。

和GB分开整整一个星期了。说是一个星期，却像是一个世纪。虽然忙，虽然有J陪着，可为什么日子还是过得那么地慢？我跟J说，我真希望可以skip掉十年的生活，一下子到40岁的时候。他笑着说我是傻孩子。可是，至少在此时此刻，我真的这样希望，因为在十年以后，现在大多的迷惘、痛苦、不确定，就应该都已经烟消云散了吧。

今天我忽然在想，一个人对自己和自己爱的人能做到的最基本的一件事就应该是真实吧。做一个真实的、忠于自己的人，才能全心全意、心无旁骛地去爱别人。开心的时候就应该尽情地开心，难过的时候就应该肆意地难过，不要因为应该怎样亦或是不应该怎样而强迫自己的心情。意识到这些是因为今天下午和J吃饭午饭在街上闲逛的时候我觉得好幸福，可是转念想到GB,我就觉得很内疚，觉得自己不应该开心；也是因为，这几天和J在一起的时候我总是努力地想显得开心一点，但其实我心里可能很难过。这样是不对的，他们也一定都不愿意我这样生活。做一个真实的自己，为了我，也为了我爱的人们。