"...they’re awful. They smell wrong. The Ylang Ylang scent, which I feared would stink like rutting pandas, smells like very old people. That’s the only way I can describe it. The “melon” kitchen cleaner smells nothing like melons - but what does a melon smell like, anyway? It has a musky-vanilla odor that wars with the overall citrus profile of the other cleaners, and I don’t like it. The bathroom cleaner smells like cucumber, as advertised, but so what? That’s like saying “leaves your bathroom celery-fresh” or “cleans your toilet with the power of watercress.” They’re not exactly words I associate with efficacious surfactants. I love that word: surfactants.

"And every so often - say, when you’re standing in the aisle of Target, woolgathering, recalling something you heard on the radio on the way over, or read on the web that morning, and you see headlines: Israel retaliates; Syrian forces push south or Smallpox appears contained, for now and you wonder whether this simple trivial moment will seem unutterably precious in six months, or three - and then you shake it off, and buy Tupperware. Another normal February day. March is named after which Roman god? Yes, yes. Of course."