"They left the park chatting about Trump. Seema liked that Luis had to bend down at least half a foot just to talk to her."

"It wasn’t only that he was tall, it was that his height made him a bit clumsy, and that was sweet. They continued to talk about Trump on autopilot, the way people were doing that summer. All of a sudden, Seema wanted to say something real. 'When things are tough with my family,' she said, 'I like to watch Trump, because he just takes my mind off stuff. No matter what happens personally, there’s this much greater disaster taking place.' 'Very well put,' Luis said. 'I do a lot of private-slash-public toggling of my own. So, how do you handle shame?' 'Sorry?' 'Is there a Hindu mechanism for dealing with shame, or is it just internalized like Julianna’s Confucianism?'"

I'm reading "Lake Success" by Gary Shteyngart (the author of that "This American Life" segment about the stabbing of the ending-spoiler in the Antarctic that I liked so much).