There's also something - whether it was my parents, or my school, or my friends - that has taught me, or bred me, to be optimistic.
I needed them to confront that the shortcomings they'd bred me on – their sense of inferiority, a fear of emotion – had come home to roost.
With a few more years of fandom under his belt (after all, this man is the one who doomed me to a lifetime of sorrow... I mean, bred me Bills), my dad had more realistic musings.
As Roger Angell, the longtime dean of baseball writers, wrote in regard to a previous Yankee dynasty, having a different team win every year "would breed in me the suspicion that baseball was too capricious, too easy and too much subject to luck or chance for anyone to care about it very long.
California Breed," "breed" to me, of course means "fellowship".
"Civilian supremacy was bred into me," Palmer told me.
Nothing breeds "me-too" investor confidence like past success.
The diaries with calories crawling up the margins, the hours memorizing a Stairmaster's display, the loneliness and isolation it bred in me that nearly broke our family: If my sister's path ever steered me back toward those old compulsions, I'd draw lines and re-evaluate myself.
And it's bred into me to be a fighter.
Worse, cult life had bred in me a learned helplessness.
