It's the kind of job that fits the skills I have.

I'm excited about the race the more I've been thinking about it. I'm usually one to shy away from publicity, but it's time to make things happen.

This is certainly an opportunity. There were some other good candidates. This is a level where I think I can help do something for the office.

I think most people are just trying to be happy, and that most of their actions, however misguided, are in line with that goal. Most people just want to feel they belong somewhere, want to be loved, and want to feel they're important to someone. If you really examine all the wrongheaded and messed-up things they do, they can most often be traced back to that basic desire. The abusers, the addicted, the cruel and unpleasant, the manipulators --these are just people who started this quest for happiness in the basement of their lives. Someone communicated to them through word or deed that they were undeserving, so they think they have to claw their way there over the backs of others, leaving scars and creating damage. Of course, they only create more misery for themselves and others.

Emily looked into his eyes. They were blank, unreadable. That was the worst kind of person, the scariest—the one who’d learned to keep his feelings out of his eyes. Or who didn’t feel anything at all. Emily had known people like that; they were the destroyers. They took things—everything you worked for, all your silly dreams—and smashed them beneath their boots for no reason at all.

Uselessness, she thought, was the permanent condition of parenthood.