"Eat, Pray, Love" [.]

[fiefoe]

The third stop, in which real life triumphs over fiction in producing a love interest that doesn't have to be bad for you in the third act:

• Every Balinese child passes through a momentous puberty ceremony in which the canine teeth, or "fangs," are filed down to a flat level, for aesthetic improvement. The worst thing you can be in Bali is coarse and animalistic.
• She took bag of (holy) water away with her as she leaves; it looks like she has just won a goldfish at the state fair, only she forgot to take the goldfish with her.
• sit still and smile / four brothers
• There is a bright red kitchen here, a pond full of goldfish, a marble terrace, an outdoor shower tiled in shiny mosaics; while I shampoo I can watch the herons nesting in the palm trees... Little secret paths lead through a truly enchanting garden... monikers-daffodil tree, cabbage-palm, prom-dress weed, spiral show-off, tip-toe blossom, melancholy-vine and a spectacular pink orchid I have christened "Baby's First Handshake." The unnecessary and superfluous volume of pure beauty around here is not to he believed.
• In the dead of night the dogs howl about how misunderstood they are. Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters. ("We are ROOSTERS!" they holler. "We are the ROOSTERS!")
• The family compound is so vital that the Balinese think of it as a single, living person. The population of a Balinese village is traditionally counted not by the number of individuals, but by the number of compounds.
• "If somebody brings me a sick tiger, do I bandage its teeth first, so it doesn't bite me? If a snake gets sick and needs medicine, where is the opening?"
• ... watch the lean brown and white Indonesian and Western surf-cats slice across the water like zippers ripping open the backs of the ocean's blue party dress.
• We choose a thin, pretty seashell to stand for the Empire State Building, and another shell is the Chrysler Building.
• ... playing Milton Bradley board games with the owner's elegantly effeminate teenage son. (It occurs to us only later that this pretty teenage boy could well have been the beautiful female dancer from the night before.)

__ You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever.. to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.
__ Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else.

__ press sharply against life / "Why don't people talk more about the Council of Trent?"

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