I'm reading The letters of Madame Sevigne (Barnwell's translation), and one of the footnotes says that after her early marriage to the Duc de Rocquelaure, Mme de Roquelaure had fallen in love with the Marquid de Vardes. Her love being unrequited, she died of a broken heart at the age of twenty-one. What is it to die of a broken heart? Is it a euphemism for a specific end?

I've never understood paragraphs. When I was in elementary school, I never used them, and it didn't seem to be a big deal. From middle school through high school, we wrote the same five paragraph essay over and over, varying the filler. That was good training for writing five paragraph essays, but not much else. In college I managed to avoid writing classes altogether. Now, all of my writing is disjointed. You could remove a single paragraph from one of my "essays", and it would flow just as ...

The last time the powerball was over two hundred million, people here waited in line for hours to get tickets. Other came in from out of state to "play". Even if it is assumed that these people make minimum wage, the cost/payoff ratio is worse than that of normal powerball ticket. Who are these people that come crawling out of the woodwork when lottery jackpots hit record levels? Perhaps they consist of multi-millionaires, people to whom another one million is pocket change, but one hundr...

It’s over. The statute of limitations expires today. In the beginning it was just another quarrel involving a circuit court judge, two kissing cousins, my great uncle, the unbearable lightness of being, and a Selectric: nothing out of the ordinary. We were young and stupid; we-can’t-let-them-get-away-with-this expressions of outrage led to an elaborate plan involving eggs, TP, and half a ton of pork. They had a security system that only protected the doors and windows – no cameras or motion s...