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So that’s it. Lost, arguably the most important genre show of the past decade, ended with a fizzle. People will tell you it was fine until the PRADA Handbags last 15 minutes, but they’re wrong. Spoilers below…

Oh, and hey, West Coast peeps and people who got up early to watch this in England. I mean it. Don’t read this until you’ve watched the episode. Really.

Sure, the last 15 minutes of “The End” were pretty wretched, and that’s when I gave up all hope that this was going to turn into something awesome. But rewind an hour and a half, to the moment when I suddenly realized I didn’t give two craps whether Desmond pulled a rock out of a hole. Or whether Jack put a rock back into that same hole. I just. Didn’t. Care.

Lost, the show, was absolutely genius at making you care about stuff. That was one of the half dozen things that Lost was brilliant at getting us to invest in, along with intriguingly murky characters and starkly surreal storytelling. Probably the greatest weapon in Lost’s arsenal was always its ability to make you care, desperately, feverishly about what happened to these people.

And in the end, I just didn’t care if that rock went in that hole or not. By extension, I had stopped caring whether the island sank. I had stopped caring about the fate of the Man In Black, long before he got kicked out of the episode prematurely. I didn’t care about any of it.

I’m carefully using the first person singular here, because maybe you did care about this stuff. I had cared about it, in some abstract sense, before, but this time around, I just stopped about an hour in. Maybe because it all became more and more abstract, until it just felt like I was watching people play a sport whose rules I wasn’t familiar with. Yes, Lost’s finale was a game of Baseketball.

I’m saying this as someone who actually kind of liked “Across The Sea,” because it made Jacob seem relatable, and who actually had been keeping an open mind about this. I had been aware that some last-minute spoilers about the finale were coming out over Hermes Wallets the weekend, but I hadn’t looked at them because of that desire to keep an open mind. That open mind turned, by degrees, into a sinking feeling.

Like I said, not even talking about the last 15 minutes of the episode yet. That’s a different – pardon me – circle of hell.

All through its run, Lost has had moments of kludgey storytelling, where it felt like people were doing stuff merely because the plot required it. And there have been times when the characters seemed to turn into rats in a maze of the writers’ design. And there have been moments where supposedly huge consequences were swept under a rug because a storyline was over and we were supposed to move on.

And then there have been moments when Lost felt like it was touching something grand and meaningful. When the show’s sweeping collection of characters and locales seemed like a fascinating web, and the show’s mysteries felt really sinister and terrible (in a good way.) There have also been moments when the characters felt both larger than life and like people we might have been friends with.

In retrospect, you can see how the show, over its final year, swung from the latter type of storytelling to the former type. But I felt this sapping of the show’s sense of purpose far more keenly tonight.

Someone took a rock out of a hole. Someone put a rock in a hole.

Instead of talking about all the stuff that left me unmoved, here are the things that actually did move me:

I really loved Jack telling Smokey that John Locke had been right about almost everything, and Smokey was disrespecting him by wearing his face. First of all, it needed to be said. And second of all, there was a spark in the midst of all the lifelessness, and it felt for a second like we were going to get the epic showdown we deserved, now that Jack had come over to Locke’s point of view and Locke was a fraud who espoused Jack’s former philosophy. It was a great moment.

I loved the redemption of Benjamin Linus – even though he did nothing to earn it, and we waited all season in vain for Ben to Do Something. I also loved Ben Designer Replica Handbags telling Hugo that he didn’t have to run things in the fucked-up way that Jacob had. And yay for the hint that Ben turned out to be a great Number Two. (No pun intended.)

And yeah, Hugo getting to be the new Jacob was also great, and much deserved – he was a much better candidate than Guilt Guy.

And I really, actually got choked up when Juliet and Sawyer finally recognized each other and she asked him out for coffee and they embraced and cried and kissed – of all the dozens of reunions and awakenings we witnessed in this episode, the Juliet/Sawyer one was the only one that made me get teary. A lot of the other teary montages just felt like the producers were saying, “Hey remember when this happened? Back when the show was awesome? Remember that? Huh?

Oh, and when Jack goes flying through the air to kick Flocke in the face, it was a nicely composed shot and a decent air-punching moment.

Apart from that, the island storyline felt really blah. Almost everybody was relegated to the status of “extra,” and I didn’t really care if Lapidus and his gang flew off the island or not. I mean, yay, I guess. But since that plane was crammed with characters I’d long since stopped caring about, it was a bit anti-climactic.

Sigh. And then let’s talk about the “flash-sideways” universe. So… almost everybody gets awakened to their memories of the “real” world by encountering their true love. Which means that Jack really was Kate’s true love after all? But Kate wasn’t Jack’s. And Shannon was Sayid’s true love? I mean, really? Shannon? Not Nadia? I mean, okay, whatever.

The two main exceptions, in this episode at least, were Jack and Locke. Jack gets awakened by his dad’s coffin, and it seems as though his “true love” was the whole community of castaways, whose well-being he’d cared for so ineptly throughout the show’s run. (Everybody else gets montages of just their love relationships, but Jack gets a montage of the whole gang, sort of.) And Locke, meanwhile, can’t be reawakened to the “real” world until he has the mythical surgery and regains the ability to walk. Because walking, not Helen or anyone else, was Locke’s true love. Or something. Wha huh? Or maybe it’s supposed to be that the island was Locke’s true love, and somehow regaining the ability to walk makes him think of the island.

And now we come to the revelation of the episode’s final minutes, which I’ve been putting off talking about. The flash-sideways universe wasn’t an alternate universe at all, it was… purgatory? Limbo? Some kind of afterlife way-station. And for some reason, the Losties had to come together in a church before they could move on to the real afterlife.

I can see this spawning a million parodies based around the opening monologue of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.”

So why was it 2004 in purgatory? Why was the island underwater? Why was Sawyer suddenly a cop? With Miles as his partner? (Even though Miles doesn’t get to be there in the end.) And why were the details of Locke’s accident changed so it was Locke’s fault? Not to Gucci bags mention, why did Jack and Juliet have that creepy Stepford kid? (Because we were supposed to think this was an alternate universe that resulted from Jack’s hydrogen bomb, and it was a fake-out.)

Those are questions we really shouldn’t ask, I guess, because they don’t matter. All that matters is that in the end, this particular community of people form something meaningful, even something holy, and they can’t go to Heaven unless they all leave together. Yes, it’s another set of Rules.

And the final moments, after Jack’s dad gave his heavy-handed explanation, and everybody was gathered inside the church from Madonna’s “Like A Prayer” video, and there were handshakes and reunions and a door full of light… I started swearing at my television set. I think I’m still in shock at how lame and idiotic the final five minutes or so felt.

In the end, it’s hard not to see Lost as the longest con of them all. Not because we didn’t get enough answers – it’s really true that after this episode, I don’t need any more answers than what we got. But because all along, Lost seemed to be a story. Until the end, when it wasn’t. In the end, it was just a bunch of stuff that happened.

It’s way too early to tell, but I have a feeling that this will go down in history with the “Patrick Duffy stepping out of the shower” thing on Dallas. It just felt like a cheap, cop-out ending. In a sense, nothing that happened in the “flash-sideways” universe mattered because they were all already dead, and they were going to “move on” eventually one way or another. And nothing on the island mattered, because… well, it just didn’t seem to matter very much.

We’ll have to wait a bit to see how the zeitgeist as a whole decides to think of this episode – maybe it’ll wind up getting a free pass, because the show as a whole was so good. Maybe it’ll wind up getting damned. But let’s hope that people do remember how great Lost was at its best, since Lost was such an influential, successful show, and I hope somebody else eventually tries to duplicate all of its achievements.

As for me, I think I’m going to wind up thinking of Lost as an anthology show, another Twilight Zone or Outer Limits. It served up some wonderfully weird, allusive stories. It gave us some brilliant mind-benders. There were individual episodes and story arcs that stand out as among the best hours of television ever created. You just can’t think of Lost as one unified story Prada Scarf any more, because then you realize it all leads up to this utter flatness. This zone of apathy and new-age “walk into the light” catharsis.

But maybe you loved this ending and I’m on crack. What did you think?

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Give anything 20 years and it’ll PRADA Handbags start to look like the makings of a joke. And so — welcome back to the ’80s, or, as LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge” put it, “borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered ’80s.” You don’t even need to have had first-hand experience with the decade to make fun of it.

Today’s opening of “MacGruber” — which Karina Longworth’s review clusters alongside “Hot Tub Time Machine” and “Cop Out” as movies whose primary subject is a decade’s worth of pop culture rather than actual people — confirms what we already knew: VH1′s “I Love The 80s” was far, far more insidious than we figured.

Compare and contrast — the trailers for “MacGruber” and “Hot Tub Time Machine” are below:

The ’70s didn’t suddenly see a big spate of films mocking the ’50s, nor the ’80s the ’60s and so forth. There is a joke in “Dazed and Confused” — the only one that really guns for the low-hanging fruit — where a character speculates on the rule of how every other decade is awesome, and figures out since the ’70s suck, maybe the ’80s will be totally awesome. But that’s about it.

That an entire decade’s worth of pop culture is, in and of itself, a punchline, is new and unnerving. It’s different from the numerous films taking old TV franchises as a starting point for a movie. The idea isn’t playing with an established brand and resurrecting familiar images; it’s toying with passed-down imagery as a joke whose currency is already established.

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The idea that changes in fashion (accessories, clothing, music, so on) automatically constitute hilarity, then, is a special rule we’ve come up with for the ’80s. Familiarity breeds contemptuous affection for a decade that’s just stupid, which was VH1′s whole premise — mention just a title or name, then laugh away. What’s unclear is whether thirtysomethings now getting to make their own movies will be able to sell that to kids too young to directly remember the ’80s, those for whom the below montage conjures no nostalgia.

What really gives me pause is wondering whether this is a one-off or a harbinger of something more sinister. 20 years hence, will we be deluged with movies portraying the aughts as a time of toxic smart-phone abuse, American Apparel and people writing their Hermes Wallets own Wikipedia entries? It’s easy to reduce a decade to its pop-culture sound-bites and trend topics when you have no memory of being complicit with them. Sneering is easy, compassion is hard.

Marriage gets better when kids leave the nest

Study of women finds an empty nest has its benefits

Marriages get better after the children grow up and move out, according to a UC Berkeley study that analyzed the marital satisfaction of more than 100 women over 18 years.

The study by three professors from UC Berkeley’s department of psychology and Institute of Personality & Social Research questioned the women at the average ages of 43 in 1981, 52 in 1989 and 61 in 1998 and found that marriages grew increasingly better after the kids packed up and left.

“We found that marital satisfaction increased as the women transitioned to an empty nest,” said Sara Gorchoff, one of the authors of the study and a doctoral candidate in the psychology department. “It was not that they spent more time with their partners but that they were better enjoying the time they spent with their partners.”

Though the women in the study were not named, several other Bay Area mothers shared similar views.

Terry Toczynski, a 55-year-old mother of three, said she noticed an improvement in her marriage when her three children went off to school. They were gone for about a year before one of them temporarily moved back recently.

“In the time they weren’t there, we didn’t have to focus 100 percent on raising children, and it was definitely better for us,” the Berkeley woman said. “We were a couple again, two individuals who chose to live together and be with each other. Got good at conversations

“At first, it is very quiet, but there is a lot of good in the lack of noise. We got good at having conversations. Our time is about us.”

The 123 women in the study were born between 1937 and 1939 and were first questioned for a study on creativity while they were seniors at Mills College in Oakland. Since then, they have participated in numerous studies, including one on the effect of the women’s movement.

“We realized what an opportunity we had to study these women over the years,” said Gorchoff, who conducted the study with psychology Professors Oliver John and Ravenna Helson.

Though all the women Designer Replica Handbags attended college, they chose different career paths and had varying income levels and numbers of children. Their martial status varied as well.

Some changed partners, some didn’t. Whatever the case, the study showed that they all reported becoming more satisfied when their children moved away from home.

“The increase was not at all dependent on whether they remarried,” Gorchoff said. “And the women did not report that the general global satisfaction with their lives got better, just their marriages. They were enjoying the time with their partners more.”

Shahla Piff, 59, of San Bruno said she initially felt like her purpose in life was gone when her two sons moved out about six years ago but soon realized her marriage was growing stronger.

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“We had time to pay attention to each other,” said Piff, whose sons are 26 and 28. “The boys were taking a lot of our attention and energy. When they left, we could behave like adults. We could do fun stuff, like travel and go to art shows. “It gives us more time to focus on each other and our interests.”

Marriages improved with age overall, according to the study, but women who experienced the transition to an empty nest were happier with their mates than women with children in the home and women whose children had been gone for a while.

The first survey was done when most of the women still had children at home, the second when some of them still had kids at home, and the third when most kids were gone. All were in middle age during the first survey. Some got married, some raised kids, some were divorced, some remarried and some were in domestic partnerships.

The women rated how satisfied they were in their relationships using a five-point scale.

“The transition to an empty nest may be associated with an increase in the quantity of time and energy invested in one’s marriage, an increase in the quality of time spent with one’s partner and with perceptions of one’s child’s success,” the study said.

Not everyone agrees. Barbara Lockwood, a 58-year-old Brookdale (Santa Cruz County) woman whose sons left home in 1998, said her marriage has remained pretty much the same.

Empty Nest Travel Club

Lockwood started the Empty Nest Travel Club for parents whose kids had moved out, because her husband doesn’t like to travel and she wanted to see the world.

“The kids leaving was a Gucci bags big adjustment and part of the reason I want to travel more, but I wouldn’t say my marriage got more satisfying,” Lockwood said. “We are now focused on ourselves and our discussions are about health problems, not the kids.”

The study, titled “Contextualizing Change in Marital Satisfaction During Middle Age,” was published in the November issue of the journal Psychological Science.

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We’ve all experienced bizarre dreams in which people we know look like someone else or we get freaky with an unappealing co-worker. But are those Designer Replica Handbags subconscious thoughts that zap through our brains at night really relevant in our waking hours?


Yes, according to Gillian Holloway, an internationally recognized dream expert with over 20 years of experience interpreting dreams under her belt.


In her soon-to-be-released book “The Complete Dream Book of Love and Relationships: Discover What Your Dreams and Intuition Reveal About You and Your Love Life,” Holloway uses her analysis of over 30,000 actual dreams to get to the bottom of what our dreams say about our romantic relationships.


And it’s not all chick stuff. “To my surprise, I’ve found that men’s dreams often focus on relationships,” she tells us. “I really thought that would be more of a woman’s thing.”


Read on to learn what eight common dreams say about your love life.


1. If You Dream About … Building or Healing


“Dreams about a healing wound or of building something new — like a house or a bridge — tend to occur when a person has just made a romantic connection that is going to be a positive force in their life,” Holloway explains.


2. If You Dream About … Bad Past Relationships


“On the other hand,” she continues, “if we are making a connection that might be less wholesome, people start dreaming of bad relationships they have been in in the past.”


3. If You Dream About … Contentment and General Fulfillment


When Holloway asks people what they were dreaming after they met the person that became their spouse, they tend not to be having erotic, sexy dreams. Instead, their subconscious feeds them dreams of general fulfillment and contentment. An example of this is a man who dreamed of buying a farm that become very fertile, right before he realized that the woman he was with was the one.


4. If You Dream About … Sex


As for those erotic, sexy dreams that heat up the night? Holloway says you should be careful not to read too much into them:


“Erotic, Hollywood-style dreams are more signals of excitement and attraction,” she said. “But what I see a lot of is people assuming because you had a dream about rolling in the surf, or some other erotic scene, that means you’ve meet your soul mate. For better or worse, this Gucci bags is not the sign your subconscious is sending.”


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5. If You Dream About … Other Happy Couples


According to Holloway, often single folks will dream about a couple they know, or even a fictional or famous couple who have a reputation for being happy. “That is an indication that the person having the dream is ready to get involved in a relationship again,” she told us


6. If You Dream About … Members of the Opposite Sex in a Surprising Way


Most people have had surprising members of the opposite sex pop into their dreams. But according to Holloway, having a dream in which there is chemistry between you and — for example — a co-worker, doesn’t necessarily mean you secretly pine for a romantic relationship with that person.


“A lot times these are partnership dreams,” she says. “Which could be all kinds of partnerships, including business, professional, intellectual, or a shared hobby or enthusiasm.”


7. If You Dream About … Flying


According to Holloway, when somebody in relationship has the famous flying dream, it is an indication that they’ve been having some really good sex. Hey, she’s the expert.


8. If You Dream About … Your Partner Cheating on You


“People often dream their partner is being unfaithful during a time when that partner has gotten really excited about their career, or is starting to work more,” says Holloway.


In general, Holloway believes discussing your dreams with your partner is a good idea because “you find out a lot about what your partner is thinking.”


But she does offer this disclaimer: “If you do discuss dreams with your partner, you have to put each other in what I call the witness Prada Scarf protection program,” she warned. “That way nobody gets incriminated if they bring up that romantic tryst with a movie star their subconscious conjured up.”


BTW, we’re pretty sure that if your girlfriend is willing to let you discuss your Angelina Jolie sex dream with her, it’s another good tip-off that you’ve found true love.

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Stieg Larsson is one of the hottest writers around right now. In 2008, various book-trade magazines, such as Publisher’s Weekly and the Bookseller, declared him Designer Replica Handbags the second-most-popular bookseller globally. His most recent work, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, became the best-selling book of 2010 (to date) in the United States just a couple of weeks after its release. Unfortunately, Larsson never had the chance to enjoy his success; he died in 2004, shortly before any of his completed manuscripts were published.

What to do with an author’s unfinished work after death is a controversial and messy issue within the literary world. Larsson’s case was a rarity: his manuscripts were finished and he wanted to share them. Many famous writers’ last words have been published posthumously, whether that was their desire or not. The outcome can be positive, but in other instances, some things are better left unfinished.

1. The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western, F. Scott Fitzgerald

A few months before his death at age forty-four, Fitzgerald started a novel about a movie producer trying to survive in Hollywood. Edmund Wilson, a literary critic and friend of the writer, put together his unfinished work and published it in 1941. Fitzgerald’s previous book, Tender Is the Night, was a disappointing follow-up to the classic The Great Gatsby, so it seems like even more of a shame that he was never able to properly introduce this novel to the world. The New York Times’s J. Donald Adams wrote in 1941 that it “would have been Fitzgerald’s best novel and a very fine one.”

2. Sleeping Murder, Agatha Christie

After writing the final installment of her Miss Marple detective series, Christie put it in a bank vault for thirty years. When her health deteriorated in the early 1970s, she gave her publishers permission to release it in 1976; she died in January of that year. Fans got to find out what happened to Miss Marple, and the book itself received decent reviews. Even after her death, only Shakespeare and the Bible outsell her impressive collection of published works.

3. The Trial, Franz Kafka

Before the end of his battle with tuberculosis in 1924, Kafka told his literary executor, Max Brod, to burn everything he’d ever written. Thank goodness Brod ignored his wishes, because though Kafka was largely unsuccessful in his time, he became one of the most famous and Gucci bags influential authors in all the literary world after his death. The Trial, a story about a man’s fight against the bureaucracy of law, is one of his most well-known works. Orson Welles developed it into a movie in 1963.

4. True at First Light, Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway’s memoirs describe a trip to East Africa in the 1950s. Patrick, his son, released it in 1999 after editing it down from two hundred thousand words to one hundred thousand. Not surprisingly, critics felt the story lacked many elements, particularly Hemingway’s magic with words. He abandoned it because he had trouble remembering the actual events, so Patrick added fictional details to fill in the blanks—a highly controversial move. Far more successful was A Moveable Feast, released a few years after Hemingway’s 1961 death; his chronicles of his life as a struggling writer in Paris are heartfelt and inspiring.

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5. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

Publishers rejected this novel when Toole shopped it around. It wasn’t until eleven years after his death that the book became the hallmark of Southern literature, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981. (His mom, Thelma, and fellow writer Walker Percy worked to get it published.) Now the famous story of Ignatius J. Reilly and his misadventures in New Orleans is printed in eighteen languages all over the world.

6. Pirate Latitudes, Michael Crichton

The story goes that Crichton’s assistant stumbled upon two manuscripts, one finished and the other partially finished, on Crichton’s computer after his 2008 death. Pirate Latitudes (the finished one), a fictional novel about piracy in seventeenth-century Jamaica, was released in 2009; Steven Spielberg has already agreed to produce a movie version, according to the Washington Post.

7. The Original of Laura, Vladmir Nabokov

Nabokov’s physical and mental health deteriorated a great deal near the end of his life. Displeased with his incomplete novel, he insisted that his wife, Vera, and son, Dmitri, get rid of its evidence once he passed. But neither of them could bear to destroy the famous writer’s last words, so they placed all 138 index cards (Nabokov often used such cards in his writing) in a Swiss bank vault. In 2009, Dmitri published the notes and called it “a novel in fragments.” The main character, Philip, is Prada Scarf obsessed with death and what follows afterward. Critics maligned Dmitri’s decision, saying Nabakov was clearly too ill to write as brilliantly as he once had.

8. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank

Anne Frank’s diary, an account of her time spent hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam, is one of the most famous posthumously published books in the world. It relays everything that happened to her during those two years, from the cramped conditions of the attic to the confusion and throes of adolescence. After she died at a concentration camp in 1945, the diary was found and given to the only surviving member of the Frank family, Anne’s father. He published it in 1947, to immediate popularity and praise.

It’s rare that a writer’s work is finished upon his or her death; more often, there are incomplete manuscripts and dilemmas about what to do with them. People presume to know authors’ intentions—or ignore them altogether—and manipulate their last words. Whether those practices are morally right will always be a point of contention. But literature would surely be remiss without some of these last novels. Even the more cringe-worthy ones serve a greater purpose: they remind us just how extraordinary these writers were in their time. As for the ones who achieved notoriety after their time, well, that’s even more extraordinary.

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Most people are aware that outdoor air pollution can damage their health, but many do not know that indoor air pollution can also have Designer Replica Handbags significant health effects. Environmental Protection Agency studies indicate that indoor levels of pollutants may be 2～5 times, and occasionally more than 100 times, higher than outdoor levels. These levels of indoor air pollutants may be of particular concern because most people spend about 90％ of their time indoors.

There are many sources of indoor air pollution in any home. These include combustion sources such as oil, gas, coal, wood, and tobacco products; building materials and furnishings as diverse as deteriorated asbestos-containing insulation, wet or damp carpet, and cabinetry or furniture made of certain pressed wood products; products for household cleaning and maintenance, personal care, or hobbies; central heating and cooling systems and humidification devices; and outdoor sources such as radon, pesticides, and outdoor air pollution.

Immediate effects may show up after a single exposure or repeated exposures. These include irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat, headaches, dizziness, and fatigue. Such immediate effects are usually short-term and treatable. Sometimes the treatment is simply eliminating the person’s exposure to the source of the pollution, if it can be identified. Symptoms of some diseases, including asthma, hypersensitivity, pneumonitis, and fever, may also show up soon after exposure to some indoor air pollutants.

The likelihood of immediate reactions to indoor air pollutants depends on several factors. Age and pre existing medical conditions are two important influences. In other cases, whether a person reacts to a pollutant depends on individual sensitivity, which varies tremendously from person to person. Some people can become sensitized to biological pollutants after repeated exposures, and it appears that some people can become sensitized to chemical pollutants as well.

Certain immediate effects are similar to those from colds or other viral diseases, so it is often difficult to determine if the symptoms are a result of exposure to indoor air pollution. For this reason, it is important to pay attention to the time and place the symptoms occur. If the symptoms fade or go away when a person is away from the home and return when the person returns, an effort should be made to identify indoor air sources that may be possible causes. Some effects may be made worse by an inadequate supply of outdoor air or from the heating, cooling, or humidity conditions prevalent in the home.

Other health effects may show up either years after exposure has occurred or only after long or repeated periods of exposure. These effects, which include some respiratory diseases, heart disease, and cancer, can be severely debilitating or fatal. It is prudent to try to improve the indoor air quality in your home even if symptoms are not noticeable.

While pollutants commonly found in indoor air are responsible for many harmful effects, there is considerable uncertainty about what concentrations or periods of exposure are necessary to produce specific health problems. People also react very differently to Gucci bags exposure to indoor air pollutants. Therefore, further research is needed to better understand the effects of indoor air pollution and to find efficient ways to protect our health.

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When my father came home there was laughter, rollicking, rolling laughter. He was strong and handsome; his thick, black, wavy hair fell into PRADA Handbags his black, laughing eyes. When he kissed me, I pushed his bristled mustache from my tender skin. His hands, thick and squared off at the tips, smelled of the sweet horsehair at the upholstery factory. His fingernails carried the cotton lint he used to stuff stain sofas.

He signed his name, Benjamin, but no one called him that, I called him Daddy Ben. People who could hear called him Benny.

My father, like my mother, was deaf, so I grew up living in two worlds, our private world and the “hearing” world outside. I was on intimate terms with silence and the language of silence.

My mother was born deaf, and so, I thought, was my father. Then one day he mentioned that he had not always been deaf.

“You weren’t ? How did you become deaf?” my hands asked.

“I was sick, a long time. Ask Grandma,” he replied.

When Grandma Lizzie came to our apartment, I rushed to her, demanding an answer. She said, “Spinal meningits,” and told how my father had been stricken with the disease when he was two. As he approached school age, his hearing diminished until there was none, not even the memory of sound.

He was a bright child, but his intelligence was locked away. Without normal speech at the age when children begin to play with syllables and sounds, my Hermes Wallets father was separated from his own wit. His other sense did become more acute with time. But he never recovered from early verbal neglect. He could not read a book page by page. The flowing language, line after line, chapter after chapter, was too difficult to sustain. At times the written word confounded him more than the lips he strained to read.

Even so, Daddy Ben was undefeated. He transformed pain into humor. “It is better to laugh at life,” he’d say. “It makes easier a hard time.”

I began to understand what he meant one evening when my mother gave me money to phone a message to my father at the small upholstery shop where he had found temporary work. I went to a pay phone and dialed the number.

“I have a message for Mr. Sidransky,” I told the man who answered.

“I don’t know any Mr. Sidransky.” The man was annoyed.

“His first name is Ben. He is my father.”

“Listen, girlie, I don’t have time for this. I’m busy.”

“He’s deaf,” I explained.

“Oh, you mean the Dummy. Why didn’t you say that before?”

I don’t remember the rest of that conversation. All I remember is the word dummy.

I had heard my parents described as deaf-and-dumb all through my childhood. I always took pains to explain that although they were deaf, they were not dumb, not were they mute.

“Why do you let your boss call you Dummy?” I asked my father the next day.

He shrugged. “It is easier for them. They remember me.”

I was enraged. “You are not a dummy. You are a smart man. Tell them your name is Benjamin.”

He smiled wanly. “It is all right. I know I am not dummy, that is enough.” He spoke of the men with benevolence, forbearing their disdain when they Designer Replica Handbags called him Dummy or too roughly poked his shoulder for attention. In a world of fools. Locked in stillness, he was pleased with himself. But I was not.

Dummy. I traced the hateful word on soot-laden cars and erased it with a swipe of my hand. I wrote it in my notebook, tore out the page and crumpled the defamation into a ball.

My father saw my anger. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I will improve my mind every day. I will learn new words, and you, Ruth, are my teacher. You are my dictionary.”

I hugged him.

From that moment, the anger and shame that had coursed through me crystallized into resolve. I was determined that no one would call my father by that name again. I read the dictionary every night, absorbing language, and taught the words to my father. He was insatiable. He and I had purpose. Our minds melded in study.

In this way, my father awakened my own thirst for language.

“I tell you,” he signed, then pulled his chair closer to mine. “Language is alive, like a person, like a river; always change, always new works. Not need to speak to know language.” He knew language in a way I never will. It danced from his soul.

His primary passion was clear thinking and comprehension. When I was in doubt about a concept that I was teaching him, he said, “You must ask the teacher again. Must be clear.”

The sign for the word clear is revealing. The tips of the fingers of each hand are closed, forming a small circle; the two circles join as the fingers touch, and then the hands are opened wide, permitting light to enter. It is a sign of illummination.

Knowledge alone was not what my father sought. It was the process, not the product, that thrilled him. He taught me the art of questioning. If I didn’t understand a teacher’s response, he assumed I had asked my question wrong. “You smarter than teacher,” he said. “Ask another question. Make sure teacher knows what you ask.”

And so I became skilled at Gucci bags communication. I questioned my teachers until I understood every facet of their teaching. It made no difference if the teacher was masterful of inept; each had a gift for me. Week after week, I learned whatever was set before me in class and taught my father whatever I could.

When I couldn’t answer his inquiry at the most fundamental level, I promised to search for the answer until I could satisfy his wonder. “Now I understand,” he would sign.

Then one day there was a betrayal of my dreams. My father told me, “It is not important for girls to go to university. I work hard. I am tired. Now you must work, help support the family.”

I looked at him, not caring, not understanding the burdens he carried. I could have shouted, “I want to go to university. I want to be somebody.” But I turned without a word and ran away. I stayed at my friend Julia’s until night fell.

My mother came looking for me.

“He does not understand,” I said. “I want to learn. I want to be a teacher.”

“We will explain all to your father,” she signed, “He is sorry.”

As we walked slowly down the street, my father came toward us. He signed solemnly. “Do not be angry at Ben. I love you, daughter Ruth. You will go to university. I will go with you. You will teach me.”

My university years were wonderful. When I came home, my father, still demanding a question mind would say, “What did you ask professor today?”

He would shaked his head at all the books – in the hall, on coffee tables, by the kitchen sink.

“So many books, Too hard to read,” he’d sign. “Tell me, who is the best writer in world?”

I signed an opening paragraph of Mark Twain’s, word for word. He watched my hands until his concentraition flagged.

“Too many words, falling everywhere, like rocks coming down mountains. You explain better.”

Defeated, I dropped my eyes. Then he Prada Scarf said with his fingers in the air, decreasing the space between his thumb and forefinger. “Next time we read thin book, I sure to understand every word.” His grin was huge. He made me laugh.

One afternoon I rushed home overjoyed. “I won a prize, Mamma,” I signed. “I earned a gold key for my university work; Phi Beta Kappa.” I spelled each Greek letter for her.

Our eyes met in a long smile. “You worked hard many years,” she signed. “I proud of you.” She took my face in her hands and kissed me.

The moment my father opened the door, my mother, unable to contain her pleasure, pulled him into the living room. “Ben, I have a surprise.”

“I’ll take off coat, hat.”

“No wait. I tell you now. Ruth has Phi Beta Kappa.”

“Funny words. What are you saying, Mary?”

“They are letters of the Greek alphabet,” I interjected. “It is the name of an honor society for the best students in university.”

He made the connection and shouted with his harsh voice and sweeping hands. “We have good luck! Tell me again how to spell the honor-club words.”

Once more I spelled the letters, and he etched them into his hand. Sitting on the sofa, he pulled me down to him and took me by the shoulders with both hands. In halting oral words he said, “Congratulations to daughter Ruth.”

We laughed, and he stroked my head in blessing. “Now I’ll take off my coat. Mamma, get some wine. We’ll thank God and honor our daughter.”

It was only then that I realized I did not teach my father. He taught me. It was he who had engaged me in the conquest of language. It was he who told me to be direct, to be watchful, to listen with my eyes and to ask with my mouth. From his silence, my father taught me the true power of speech.

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Hermes Wallets If you want to break up, you still say those ridiculous gnashing of malicious words have what use? If somebody has to let go, you don’t hold that some insignificant feelings deceive ourselves. Who knows, love is always easy, along too difficult. With long, flame will fade away. Passion natural And love and insipid, originally is one of twins. Thus, in the two people who love once happened between sad story, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Love is happy, now, get into the saddest thing, you think only one responsibility? Modern love, not the parents say, All the men in your free hand. And he was in what is happiness. Now, you may break up to do things he felt very disappointed. God gives every man, are ready to hell a one-way ticket. The key is, don’t put yourself as an angel, otherwise, they sometimes when a broken-winged pain. Don’t believe that pop songs “my heart you know only,” and that’s a lie. A man’s heart is, put your hand dug in, let you wear 10000 liang QianDu sighting glass, don’t see it. Besides, his heart, also well wrapped in thick skin. Imagine, if really only his heart, a man knows he leave you, and your life is no more understand? Nobody know life, is poor, pathetic life, life or it’s life. Do you think your life for a man to live? Meet this kind of person, you might as well against the sing: “my heart is only you don’t understand.”

Love is right, if you wisely points clear, it should learn to forget the wrong. Forget, is a kind of spirit, not forget the metabolism of a brain, as one of the intake, not only will the balloon, sooner or later, gas lets you die. Stifling Actually, you just know that not all cordiality, touching, Not all meet, can peer, Not all the love, can endure long, Will do. Love can walk, but, once the affective carry away. Face turned to the love, sincerity “say,” take heart hardened. Malicious words said

Many people with an open mouth shouted: “I love is going! Actually, are self-deceiving nonsense. Pay in the heart, want a return. People are meat, this thought is not ashamed. Like others, love, hate, but insisted that mouth of hate, like in the surface layer of love, is to cover the butter. Otherwise, love fire off, the pain will burn. But, don’t let pain in the brain, don’t burn when fools do break women or do stupid men, especially for the time that don’t choose to leave you feeling extremely glad and.

The opposite of love is hatred, positive is love. A margin of words, will somehow be positive. Love like chocolate, eats too fast, taste sweet time is shortened, Eat slowly, the rest will melt, Hate like wine, drink too fast, let a person get drunk also hurt a stomach, Drink slowly, and strong enough to feel. If you can’t love eat properly timely, cannot promptly properly to drink, let the hatred, they become like vinasse early evening is smelly and poisonous things, it is extremely harmful to health.

A relationship is going to end, you don’t want to dump the saliva to prove your cruel abandoned pain and innocent. If you do, you can make the wound good faster, Let your mind balance point, Let you rediscover ourselves a shorter time, so that you will spare no effort to have loved you and your loved one fierce fire! You must close aimed shots, and strive for DanWuXuFa ZhaoZhao, fatal. “Kill 1,000, early heard from loss of 800.” Don’t believe in your lips, and in the cruel word for the shooting, your heart is not painful?

If you really from the bottom to hate, that means you don’t love him, you just turn around you all day long he used his role, but the spare tire. Since you have not from here, for the people choose to another car service, you have what is not, what is the unbalanced?

The wound is love notes, many of the content is recorded in life to forget you need. Can accompany the life emotional, isn’t worth treasuring? Pain is a life important wealth, not easily trample, Loved you, and your destiny, preexistence must not verbal abuse. If his life is really a negative you, it is because your previous incarnations, gentle cycle, his plan without Gucci bags .

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“When you are sixteen, you will injure yourself with a spindle and die!”

“Oh, no!” screamed the PRADA Handbags Queen in horror. A good fairy quickly chanted a magic spell to change the curse. When she hurt herself, the girl would fall into a very deep sleep instead of dying.

The years went by, the little Princess grew and became the most beautiful girl in the whole kingdom. Her mother was always very careful to keep her away from spindles, but the Princess, on her sixteenth birthday, as she wandered through the castle, came into a room where an old servant was spinning.

“What are you doing?” she asked the servant.

“I’m spinning. Haven’t you seen a spindle before?”

“No. Let me see it!” The servant handed the girl the spindle … and she pricked herself with it and. with a sigh, dropped to the floor. The terrified old woman hurried to tell the Queen. Beside herself with anguish, the Queen did her best to awaken her daughter Hermes Wallets but in vain. The court doctors and wizards were called, but there was nothing they could do. The girl could not be wakened from her deep sleep. The good fairy who managed to avoid the worst of the curse came too, and the Queen said to her,

“When will my daughter waken?”

“I don’t know,” the fairy admitted sadly.

“In a year’s time, ten years or twenty?” the Queen went on.

“Maybe in a hundred years’ time. Who knows?” said the fairy.

“Oh! What would make her waken?” asked the Queen weeplng.

“Love,” replied the fairy. “If a man of pure heart were to fall in love with her, that would bring her back to life!”

“How can a man fall in love with a sleeping girl?” sobbed the Queen, and so heart-broken was she that, a few days later, she died. The sleeping Princess was taken to her room and laid on the bed surrounded by garlands of flowers. She was so beautiful, with a sweet face, not like those of the dead, but pink like those who are sleeping peacefully. The good fairy said to herself,

“When she wakens, who is she going to see around her? Strange faces and people she doesn’t know? I can never let that happen. It would be too painful for this unfortunate girl.”

So the fairy cast a spell; and everyone that lived in the castle – soldiers, ministers, guards, servants, ladies, pages, cooks, maids and knights – all fell into a deep sleep, wherever they were at that very moment.

“Now,” thought the fairy, “when the Princess wakes up, they too will awaken, and life will go on from there.” And she left the castle, now wrapped in silence. Not a sound was to be heard, nothing moved except for the clocks, but when they too ran down, they stopped, and time stopped with them. Not even the faintest rustle was to be heard, only the wind whistling round the turrets, not a single voice, only the cry of birds.

The years sped past. In the castle grounds, the trees grew tall. The bushes became thick and straggling, the grass invaded the courtyards and the creepers spread up the walls. In a hundred years, a dense forest grew up.

Now, it so happened that a Prince arrived in these parts. He was the son of a king in a country close by. Young, handsome and Designer Replica Handbags melancholy, he sought in solitude everything he could not find in the company of other men: serenity, sincerity and purity. Wandering on his trusty steed he arrived, one day, at the dark forest. Being adventurous, he decided to explore it. He made his way through slowly and with a struggle, for the trees and bushes grew in a thick tangle. A few hours later, now losing heart, he was about to turn his orse and go back when he thought he could see something through the trees . . . He pushed back the branches . . .. Wonder of wonders! There in front of him stood a castle with high towers. The young man stood stock still in amazement,

“I wonder who this castle belongs to?” he thought.

The young Prince rode on towards the castle. The drawbridge was down and, holding his horse by the reins, he crossed over it. Immediately he saw the inhabitants draped all over the steps, the halls and courtyards, and said to himself,

“Good heavens! They’re dead!” But in a moment, he realised that they were sound asleep. “Wake up! Wake up!” he shouted, but Gucci bags nobody moved. Still thoroughly astonished, he went into the castle and again discovered more people, lying fast asleep on the floor. As though led by a hand in the complete silence, the Prince finally reached the room where the beautiful Princess lay fast asleep. For a long time he stood gazing at her face, so full of serenity, so peaceful, lovely and pure, and he felt spring to his heart that love he had always been searching for and never found. Overcome by emotion, he went close, lifted the girl’s little white hand and gently kissed it . . .

At that kiss, the prlncess qulckly opened her eyes, and wakening from her long long sleep, seeing the Prince beside her, murmured:

“Oh, you have come at last! I was waiting for you in my dream. I’ve waited so long!”

Just then, the spell was broken. The Princess rose to her feet, holding out her hand to the Prince. And the whole castle woke up too. Everybody rose to their feet and they all stared round in amazement, wondering what had happened. When they finally realised, they rushed to the Princess, more beautiful and happier then ever.

A few days later, the castle that only a short time before had lain in silence, now rang with the sound of singing, music and happy Prada Scarf laughter at the great party given in honour of the Prince and Princess, who were getting married. They lived happily ever after, as they always do in fairy tales, not quite so often, however, in real life.

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The recent scandal over the Gucci bags handling of child abuse in the Catholic church has again focused attention on celibacy. But away from the arguments, what is it actually like to lead a life without having sex?

This is, we are told, a highly sexualised society.

In the 21st Century UK, indeed in almost all of the West, sexual imagery can be found in many places, and many young people expect to have a number of sexual partners before eventually settling down.

This perhaps may explain why the idea of a celibate lifestyle, as practised by the clergy of the Catholic Church, as well as adherents of other religions, causes a great deal of puzzlement among non-believers.

“In our sex-dominated society, people tend to view celibacy as a form of sexual anorexia – a sad and lonely state at best, unnatural at worst,” says Elizabeth Abbott, author of A History of Celibacy.

Jimmy O’Brien was a priest for the best part of a decade before deciding he had to leave his vocation. He has now been married for 20 years to a Designer Replica Handbags woman he met while still a priest, and he has two children.

Born in Tipperary, Ireland, he started his training at 18. From a Catholic background, he completely accepted the idea of celibacy. But after several years as a priest in the south of England he began to change his mind.

“Accepting it was one thing and living it was another. Four or five years into it, it’s only then the implications of the decision you made were questioned.

“It isn’t so much the celibacy aspect, it is the loneliness. At 28 or 29 a lot of my friends were settling down and having children, my older brothers and sisters were having children. There was no significant other there for you.”

By the time he was 34, Mr O’Brien felt he had to leave to preserve his “own personal sanity”. Although he says he did not break his vows while a priest, he had already met his future wife by the time he left.

“By this stage I had kind of got myself into a relationship with a woman and was having to make that decision. It was a friendship that developed. When I did leave, the relationship I was in went onto a different level.”

Even in slightly more conservative times, there have always been many for whom celibacy was not easily understood. Former nun Mel Baird encountered many baffled people in the late 1960s and 1970s.

“People thought I was completely mad,” she notes, and there were some who made wild allegations – that she was just odd, a lesbian, or even not celibate at all.

“Some people couldn’t understand it PRADA Handbags was possible to be fulfilled and to enjoy what you were doing without being sexually active. It didn’t mean I wasn’t a sexual being.”

But the times were certainly different when Mrs Baird began training to be a nun in 1965.

No imposition

“We are actually looking at quite a different climate. I had been brought up in a Catholic home in a Catholic school, educated by nuns.

“I never saw celibacy as a deprivation. I never denied my femininity. I was still a woman with the same feelings. It doesn’t mean I wasn’t interested in men or interested in having children.

“I saw my choice to become a nun as part of what I needed to do to achieve the whole. I didn’t see it as an imposition.”

And while the non-believer might be preoccupied with the idea of a constant battle against multifarious temptation, Mrs Baird had support.

“You had the whole back-up of a [convent] community, unlike priests.”

When the nuns were tempted they were encouraged to “pray or to go and do something positive – it is about channelling that energy”.

But Mrs Baird decided before taking her final vows that she was not destined to be a nun for life.

“I was beginning to wonder whether I was in the right place. At 26 I wasn’t the same person I was at 18. I had experienced life. I had grown up. I no longer found it fulfilling.

“I would have become miserable. There is such a thing as a temporary vocation.”

Human intimacy

Serving priest Fr Stephen Wang – who has written on the subject – does not see celibacy as a privation.

“There are struggles. Times of Hermes Wallets loneliness; sexual desires; dreams about what marriage and fatherhood would be like. I don’t think most of this is about celibacy – it’s about being human.”

Fr Wang sees practical arguments for celibacy, but is more moved by the idea that as a single person, Jesus and the parishioners have a central place in his life. And, most importantly, he is happy.

“You need affection and human intimacy. I’ve got some wonderful friends. I get home to see my family every couple of weeks. I escape to the cinema now and then. And I pray. Not to fill the gaps, because some of them can never be filled, but because the love of Christ is something very real and very consoling.

“I’m aware that it gives me a freedom of heart that is a unique gift. It helps me stay close to Christ, and draws me closer to the people I meet each day.”Neither Mrs Baird nor Mr O’Brien left their vocation to pursue a hedonistic lifestyle.

Both married and had children. Both are in professions that represent a continuity from the caring side of their previous calling – Mrs Baird has pursued a career in psychiatric nursing, while Mr O’Brien has worked with vulnerable children and now runs children’s homes.Both are still active and dedicated Catholics. Neither were condemned by fellow Catholics for the decision they made.

Mrs Baird does believe that those in a religious community, monks and nuns, should have to accept celibacy, or leave as she did. But she says Prada Scarf priests should have a choice about whether to be celibate, at least in part to stop the church losing otherwise devoted clergymen.

For Mr O’Brien there is an argument for married priests as there is an argument for women priests, but from a personal point of view he would not necessarily have stayed as a priest were he allowed to marry.

“From a personal choice I don’t think you would want to commit someone to living their life in a fish bowl.”

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Did you ever wake up in the morning and look at the loose change scattered around your Gucci bags night table and say: “Did I really spend that much last night at the club?”

If you can’t remember, then look on the bright side: You probably had a good time. And that’s fine for a night of drinking. But for your overall financial health it’s not such a good thing. Big picture: You need to get some structure in your financial life. You need to make a plan. But before you can make a plan, you need to have some goals. We’re going to recommend these five as the most important financial goals all men should make.

5 Pay off your consumer debt

Houses need to be built on firm foundations, and you can’t build a strong financial life if you’re sinking in a swamp of consumer debt. By “consumer debt” we mean any debt that is used to fund consumption (buying electronic toys) and not investment (real estate). Mainly that means credit card debt, but it can also be a car note for that ride you knew you couldn’t afford. If your financial liabilities outweigh your assets, then your goal is to get back to zero.

To get there:

-Have a realistic timetable: You’re not going to pay off $10,000 in credit card debt in two months. But you’re not going to pay it off in 100 years if you only make the minimum payment. So split the difference. Decide what the light at the end of the tunnel should be and make that your goal. Unless you’re buried under a mountain of debt, try to make it less than five years.

-Make steady progress: Sometimes people drop their diets or exercise regimes because they mess up one time. Realize that you’re going to mess up. Stuff happens. But don’t blow off your PRADA Handbags goal if you have a bad month. Stay focused on the big picture.

-Work a little harder: If you have to, get a part-time job. Work overtime if your job allows for it. It’s not fun and nobody wants to do it, but you’ll feel a lot better about yourself if you start seeing your debts go down.

4 Build an emergency fund

Nothing can send you back to square one quicker than an unforeseen incident like losing your job, getting hurt, getting in an accident, etc. If one of those things happens, and you don’t have cash in the bank in the form of an emergency fund, then you’re going to find yourself buried in debt again.

Most financial planners will tell you to have three to six months of living expenses saved. That sounds like a lot, especially if you have zero months of living expenses saved right now. But you don’t build up savings overnight. Set up a separate savings account with your bank or an online site like ING Direct that will debit a certain amount out of your checking account each month. The account should be “safe.” You’re looking for the kind of safety you get with a money market fund or an FDIC-insured account. If it pays a little interest, that’s great, but you’re not looking to get rich off this money. This is your rainy-day fund and if there’s one thing that’s certain in life besides death and taxes, it’s that rainy days come when you’re all set to play outside.

3 Amass equity in real estate

Record foreclosures over the past couple of years have made people think twice about buying a home. The fact that many people lost their shirts in real estate means that real estate is an extremely risky investment, right?

Well, it can be. It’s risky if you don’t manage it the right way. People lost money because they got in way over their heads on their initial mortgages (they bought too much house) or they saw the equity in their home as an ATM, started borrowing on it and ran up a mountain of debt that way.

So when it comes time to invest in real estate, don’t try to play “flip that house.” Real estate has always been a great long-term investment and, unlike a mutual fund, it has a practical use as well. After all, you can’t live in a mutual fund.

Make sure you go in with your eyes wide open if you do buy. There’s more to owning a home then just the mortgage. You’ll have additional insurance payments, taxes and Hermes Wallets maintenance. But if you can fit all of that in your budget and get into a home that makes sense for you today, the growth in the real estate market will pay off for you tomorrow.

2 Put 10% of your pretax income away for the long-term

People hate saving for retirement for two reasons:

1- They hate putting money into an account that they won’t get to spend for a very long time, and

2- They hate to admit that someday they will retire and have to put on white shoes and drive 10 miles below the speed limit to the early-bird special at the diner.

So don’t call it retirement. Just call it saving for the long-term. Whatever you want to call it, it’s a regular deposit you need to make in an account that will hopefully keep you from eating cat food in your golden years.

If you have a 401(k) at work and it has a match program, then you’ll want to do at least enough to get that match. Then try to increase it a little bit each year. If you don’t have a retirement plan at work, then call one of the big mutual fund companies (Vanguard, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, etc.) and Prada Scarf ask about setting up an IRA or Roth IRA. And don’t be put off by the subpar performance of the stock market over the past 10 years. You’re not looking to speculate or make a quick buck. You’re looking to build wealth over a long period of time. A diversified portfolio of stock and bond mutual funds is still your easiest, best hope to do so

1 Insure against risk

If you can become debt-free, build up short-term and long-term savings and buy your own home, then congratulations are in order. You are better off than roughly 98% of the people in the world. Your final challenge, then, is to make sure you stay that way. So be aware of the catastrophes that can bring you down.

-If you get hurt, you can’t work. And if you can’t work you can’t earn. So if you don’t have disability insurance through your employer (short-term and long-term), look into buying some.

-If you have a wife and kids and they depend on your income and you die, they’re going to be up a creek. So make sure you have adequate life insurance.

-If you need a car to get to work and you total it, then you’re going to need another car. So make sure you have enough car insurance. (If you have a car loan, there are usually minimum amounts of car insurance that you’ll have to get. But if your car is paid for, you’ll need to Designer Replica Handbags make sure you have comprehensive coverage).

Insurance is another “not so fun” thing to spend money on. And we all love to spend money on things that are fun. That’s called financial freedom and we all want to get there. Follow these five steps, and you’ll get there.

Reaching financial freedom via financial goals means having a job; here’s our Top 10: Things Bosses Love To Hear, which should keep him happy and you employed. Also, you don’t have to look for a reason anymore, here’s our Top 10: Reasons To Go To Happy Hour.