Example of Sadness: Raspberry Jam

We were eating breakfast and talking about resolutions. We were saying our own resolutions, and then someone made a resolution for someone else, and then several of us made resolutions for others, and then it was like we were just telling each other what to do, and what we do wrong, and so the conversation--trite, innocent--became this cross-hatched intervention, this vehicle for criticism veiled thinly by New Year's protocol. My mouth felt gauzy and my face felt like it was vibrating between good humor and hostility. The night before we had played Taboo and maybe were still feeling confined by words we could not say. Someone recalled the game of Taboo and said something about how a buzzer would "come in handy" in real-life situations. Briefly we all contemplated this, the implications of the real-life buzzer, life as a board game, etc. A few more pointed, heated things were said about how one of us refuses too much, how another of us is too judgmental, how one person is constantly misunderstanding the other and walking out of the room. One person walked out of the room. Another person absently licked jam off the side of a knife.