Growing up

Growing up...

I thought priceless was synonymous with worthless. Made those Mastercard commercials confusing.
I thought quicksand would be a much bigger problem in the world than it is.
I thought when the car blinkers signaled "left", it was telling my dad to turn left.
I thought a tornado was capable of forming spontaneously within my living room.
I thought I lived in Astoria when I lived in Long Island City.
I thought people were essentially good.

Now...

I think things that are priceless may well be worthless. It's all relative, anyway.
Somedays I wish quicksand were a bigger problem than it is.
My GPS serves the role I used to attribute to the car blinkers.
Tornados do not form spontaneously in living rooms.
I live in neither Astoria nor Long Island City.
I think people are mostly but not essentially bad.

is there a common thread here?

"How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. Heis descended from slaves. I deserve it more. I tried not to believe his foul words, but they were already said, and it was hard to erase from my mind. If this is actually true, if this ugly black filth was able to have sex with a blonde white girl at the age of thirteen while I’ve had to suffer virginity all my life, then this just proves how ridiculous the female gender is. They would give themselves to this filthy scum, but they reject ME? The injustice!" - Elliot Rodger, in a document he sent online to someone from a body-building forum. 

He followed James and Julia past bodegas, laundromats, hipster boutiques, cell-phone stores limned with neon piping, past a bar where old people were already drinking at three forty-five in the afternoon, past a brown-brick Veterans of Foreign Wars hall with plastic patio furniture on the sidewalk in front of it. All of it just confirmed his belief that his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy. This couldn’t be it. It had been diverted somewhere else, to somebody else, and he’d been issued this shitty substitute faux life instead... The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain.  - Lev Grossman, The Magicians 

"It is not enough for the knight of romance that you agree that his lady is a very nice girl—if you do not admit that she is the best that God ever made or will make, you must fight. There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil who has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Natural Law

She is mine. I am hers. I approve of her, and consequently, approve of her every movement, every touch. 

Most badass verse in the Bible.

You shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child. If you afflict them in any way, and they cry at all to Me, I will surely hear their cry... and I will kill you. Exodus 22:23