It takes more than one kick in the pants to reverse a lifetime of unplanned apathy.

I think our generation has been called to apathy just as our grandparents were called to defeat fascism and the baby boomers were called to get divorced and fuck around for most of their adult lives before bankrupting the entire goddamn country when they retire. But we have the chance to do something really special here. Imagine a world where people didn’t care enough to go to war over anything. Where some guy gets up in the morning and says, “I know God wants me to kill the infidels and keep gay people from marrying each other, but I just don’t give a shit. I’m going back to bed.” It would be paradise on earth. This is our mission. I think we can make it happen, but I really don’t care either way. And that’s called hope.

Nobody knows how to just shut the fuck up and look out the window anymore.

It was nice of her to want to believe the best about me. People tend to do that with the strangers they're fucking. If she wanted to think that apathy and independence were the same thing, good for her. Maybe she was right.

I’d never actually talked to a deaf person before but I’d been swimming and gotten water stuck in my ears lots of times, felt that underwater silence as I shook my head and watched people’s mouths moving without hearing the words, so I knew what it was like for her. I could empathize.

I heard them complain sometimes, but it was the ineffectual bitching of people who didn’t expect anything about their situation to ever change, and who wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if it did.