Little Victories: Perfect Rules for Imperfect Living
Jason Gay
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0385539460
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Wall Street Journal's popular columnist Jason Gay delivers a hilarious and heartfelt guide to modern living.
“The book you hold in your hand is a rule book. There have been rule books before—stacks upon stacks of them—but this book is unlike any other rule book you have ever read. It will not make you rich in twenty-four hours, or even seventy-two hours. It will not cause you to lose eighty pounds in a week. This book has no abdominal exercises. I have been doing abdominal exercises for most of my adult life, and my abdomen looks like it’s always looked. It looks like flan. Syrupy flan. So we can just limit those expectations. This book does not offer a crash diet or a plan for maximizing your best self. I don’t know a thing about your best self. It may be embarrassing. Your best self might be sprinkling peanut M&M’s onto rest-stop pizza as we speak. I cannot promise that this book is a road map to success. And we should probably set aside the goal of total happiness. There’s no such thing.
I would, however, like for it to make you laugh. Maybe think. I believe it is possible to find, at any age, a new appreciation for what you have—and what you don’t have—as well as for the people closest to you. There’s a way to experience life that does not involve a phone, a tablet, a television screen. There’s also a way to experience life that does not involve eating seafood at the airport, because you should really never eat seafood at the airport.
Like the title says, I want us all to achieve little victories. I believe that happiness is derived less from a significant single accomplishment than it is from a series of successful daily maneuvers. Maybe it’s the way you feel when you walk out the door after drinking six cups of coffee, or surviving a family vacation, or playing the rowdy family Thanksgiving touch football game, or just learning to embrace that music at the gym. Accomplishments do not have to be large to be meaningful. I think little victories are the most important ones in life.”
— From the Introduction
haul me off to military school. ★ Do teenagers try to dress like celebrities anymore? I know that people like Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus are considered “style influencers,” but I am talking about people dressing exactly like them, as if it were Halloween. There is a moment in the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High in which Phoebe Cates is pointing out the various school cliques in the cafeteria to Jennifer Jason Leigh and she mentions the girls who dress as Pat Benatar. She doesn’t mean
terrified to eat, fearful of vomiting and diarrhea. Chris ordered crates of high-calorie drinks sent to the house. They were the worst thing you ever tasted, kind of like cream of chalk chowder, but if Dad could keep them down… He couldn’t keep them down. Or he ignored them altogether. It drove my brother crazy, but mostly it made us all so sad. — In early June he went to visit the doctor for a checkup, and when they got a look at him, they rushed him straight to intensive care. The cancer
pig Latin, drive a powerboat, fire a pistol, and fall asleep on the toilet, has worked in a jail with prisoners, emceed a bug-eating contest in college, and dressed up as Edward Scissorhands two separate times in one Halloween night (long story), and she speaks with great pride about the time she successfully peed into a water bottle while flying over Crater Lake in a two-passenger airplane. I feel I know all these stories, and yet very rarely does a day go by when I don’t learn something new,
they’re games. As soon as we are able to stand on our own and play sports, a cheery phrase is repeated ad infinitum by adults: It’s only a game. It sounds so good—just play the game, it’s all for fun. Then we’re dropped off at the field and abandoned to a stern-jawed coach who calls us by our last names and reminds us subtly (or not subtly) that it is in fact sliiiiiightly more than a game, that while we’re all here to have a good time and run around and learn and be good teammates, it would be
off a bridge. What’s obvious is that so much of the agitation on the Internet is redirected loneliness. Social media offers an opportunity for instant reaction, and that reaction, like any intoxicant, is both euphoric and dangerous. You can become reliant on it, and when it goes away, it can make you sad, angry, depressed—and inclined to lash out. So much of the anger seems to be born of that kind of disillusionment. And it serves no broader purpose. The handful of times I’ve found myself in