Oh good grief, it's a holiday

Flashbacks from grad school and restaurant work aside, I'm not exactly sure how I wound up starting off my 4th of July morning with these?

1) Question:
"Your regimen involves running 10 miles every other day, a ton of push-ups and a strict one-meal-a-day policy, of which you once wrote, “By dinner, I’m starving; more crucially, I’m deserving.”

Answer:
"I can see how the fact that I eat one meal a day is eye-catching for a journalist, but you know, David Petraeus eats one meal a day, and nobody says that’s a really disturbed relationship to food. The assumption with David Petraeus is, Oh, that’s a military man. In women the assumption is you’re some kind of neurotic."       

--http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/magazine/lionel-shriver-does-it-the-hard-way.html?_r=0

~~~~~

2) "The men reminded me of frat boys or something, the type of guys who see getting drunk in public as a way to assert prowess.

They left around one in the morning. I stood by the table and watched them go, dazed and relieved. An older waitress, still an aspiring actress at age 50, came up and said, "Now there goes a cautionary tale.'...I was mad that the old waitress who called herself an actress thought of him rather than herself as the cautionary table. Hers was the fate I feared for myself, not his. And I was mad that Jay Mac made it easy for her to think that. Before I knew who this guy at my table was, I’d already decided I didn’t like him. I never disliked any strangers. Except the ones at this table. And then, that old waitress told me who he was, and I almost lost my mind...

So I left. I moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, where I wrote all day and read thick books and when I got stuck on the thick books, I bailed myself out with Jay McInerney. Reading McInerney in Georgia, his work came to feel like an elegy for a phase I was glad to be done with. And, reading McInerney in the South has its charms. He writes about the South a lot. Alison in Story of My Life is from Virginia. The Last of the Savages takes place in the Delta. Jeff from The Good Life recovers from his affair’s fallout in Tennessee. But reading Jay Mac from the distant precinct of the Deep South, his world started to look, maybe, quaint? Like, taking it as self-evident that beautiful women, financiers, and writers made for the sexiest possible conglomerate of people was a tired-out trope?

I met a girl in Milledgeville. We were at a party and I was fucked up out of my mind and I’ll never forget how her entrance sprung me from my stupor, so incredible was her beauty and command of the room...I don’t know what the hell’s going to happen with her, but at least she’s 21 now, so when I pull into town, I can take her to dinner at Minetta and we can legally split a bottle of wine.

I have a fantasy that Jay Mac will be seated right beside me."

--http://www.salon.com/2012/10/03/jay_mcinerney_the_new_york_fantasy_and_wine_salpart/