From today’s Huffington Post:

NEWTON, Mass. — Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough has a suggestion for what young people can do for their country.

“Please, please do what you can to cure the verbal virus that seems increasingly rampant among your generation,” McCullough implored Boston College’s class of 2008 at commencement ceremonies Monday.

He said he’s particularly troubled by the “relentless, wearisome use of words” such as like, awesome and actually.

“Just imagine if in his inaugural address John F. Kennedy had said, ‘Ask not what your country can, you know, do for you, but what you can, like, do for your country actually,” he said.

Graduates apparently thought his speech was, like, awesome. They gave him a standing ovation.

AND I learned that the new David Sedaris book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, will be released on June 3rd. That’s only two weeks away!

I already have some awesome (sorry, Mr. McCollough) books in my reserve pile at the library to read at the beach this weekend; what an incredible way to start the summer!

Suddenly, bizarrely, I find that people are reading the things I write, that I am no longer screaming into the void, holding conversations with myself. How strange! I feel hesitant, somehow this affirmation makes me afraid; my confidence falters, my voice trembles.

Again to my father’s binder. What strength can I find there today?

THROW YOURSELF LIKE SEED

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit;
sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
that brushes your heel as it turns going by,
the man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
but to live is to work, and the only thing that lasts
is the work; start then, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,
don’t turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,
and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead in yourself,
for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;
from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

Miguel de Unamuno