float right

i'm going to try something. here it goes:

why should anyone get married? it's a shortcut to finding out if you're capable of compassion and listening. staying married is a different animal altogether. one may remain attached after realizing she can endure and ultimately enjoy his company for a lifetime. for similar reasons boys linger in college through middle-age.

this was my paltry attempt at writing. i used kurt vonnegut as a model. in school i worked alongside a grad student who tried to get all us writing novices to consider authority in literature. what it was, which writers had it, and how did they come by it. the whole semester i never got past what it was. and the thing about authority in writing is this: it's like the concept of time, only you needn't anyone else to agree. you simply tell the time. present things as they are without apology and, like magic, what follows has extraordinary say-so.
the passage above has authority, i'd say. it presents an idea, follows with a definitive (but not too definitive) answer. the next sentence presents an obvious, linear issue that springs from the answer. and finally ends with a bland abstraction, which i bet would be a whole lot cooler as a metaphor. let's see:

does the misanthrope suspect his shadow?

not a great one. but it is interesting to start and end with questions.

in much the same way, the earth, whose orbit is elliptical, is only moving away from its colleague the sun one ten-thousandth of a centimeter a year. they're going to be roomates for quite a while.

this one is way off topic and a real stretch. it has nothing to do with compassion and listening. worse, putting things in term of astrophysics feels like a cheap attempt at sounding like kurt vonnegut. it's just as well. i'll keep practicing:

since compassion means "with suffering" being married ever in one's life merits a nod from the buddhists...

man this is hard.