career determinism, please step back, turn around, and walk away. i do not want to face your derisive laughter.

when i got home after the last cringe, i read the beginning of my very first diary (ages 10–11), which i'd previously overlooked as boring, and realized there's some stuff to be mined in there. apparently i was a hypercritical little shit. also, i copyedited my own diary. when i was 11. i can tell the corrections by their different ink color—and it's not just a spelling fix here and there, but things like end parentheses and even pronoun consistency. i find this far more troubling than "The reason I think Sarah B--- is being especially mean to me is because she's jealous that I have parents that are home, and Bill and I are good friends."

liquid asse(t)s

"cash, check, or ass wallet?"

in an awkward, near-surreal twist on the appeals made by the more famous 5th avenue, this electronics shop on 5th ave in brooklyn kindly lets customers use their dimpled flab to purchase a bevy of remote controls, laser-light key chains, and other utility-drawer clutter-uppers.

fitting that the country with the most thongs (and flavors of doritos) per capita would see to it that our asses become the latest engine of consumer growth.

update

in december i finished CRC and am now all graduamated. soon i will get a piece of paper in the mail that calls me 'master' or something. it seems like a tactic credit-card companies should look into. after all, i gave NYU a buttload of money for a bunch of 'credits.'

on monday i start work as a copy editor for a national art magazine, thus fulfilling my vow not to work for any publication that uses the word 'fab.' (it shouldn't be too hard to figure out which mag it is by looking at this blog, but i remain paranoid about anonymity/workplace appropriateness within posts).

the great thing about the job will likely be the people and the (finally) paid magazine experience. working for a cultural publication is exactly what i want, and i'm relieved to get there without a pointless/existentially depraved detour into the slum-trap of women's magazines.¹ the not-great thing about the job is the noncompete agreement, which forbids me from writing for other art magazines. not a huge deal, but i did have my sights set on cabinet, which, now that i'm barred from submitting, is bathed in a glow of allure and untouchability previously occupied only by harper's.

¹incidentally, i did interview at one of these places—a mainstream women's mag with recipes and tips on powerwalking and flower-and-bauble arrangements on the cover (their dotage on vases and round objects is downright reproductive). what cost me the job? perhaps it was the moment my interviewer asked me what i thought of the magazine, and i told her it wasn't as bad as cosmo.

two wrong things

the mary-jane sneaker.
















and the goo-goo onesie.


the buttons below the search field say 'goo-goo search' and 'i'm feeling silly.'

'stache of understanding flaccid in hands of actually good writer

find your latest gleeful tom friedman mockery here.

there's also this older one that's pretty satisfying.

inscrutable post-it i found while cleaning my desk

"what if everything were emergent like wiki or google? toast? dates? once in a while you date a sponger [sponge?] or a spoon that makes it thru, or something."

the NYT has an article today about how the president of kazakhstan is displeased by sacha baron cohen's borat character and his mangled-english portrayal of kazakhstan as a backward place with a narcissistic president.

many kazakhs interviewed thought borat was funny, but one tv editor begged to differ. how did she express her displeasure for cohen's act? by calling it "humor below the waist."

coffee shortcut for hard times

eat chocolate-covered espresso beans.

drink water.

delicious drink

so much more than a smoothie, so much healthier than a milkshake (but it'll still get you sloshed):

• ripe bananas, frozen
• milk or soymilk
• rum (or kahlua or creme de cacao)

blend milk and bananas, add rum to taste. the frozenness of the bananas gives the smoothie a whipped texture that approaches the icecreamlike. the rum gives your brain a whipped texture, too, which may approach the completely smashed. also, it can be vegan!

tonight, self-reflective new yorkers will venture to east 65th st and pay $10 to hear the talk East Side v. West Side, Downtown v. Brooklyn: Does your choice of neighborhood say something about you and your neighbors?

so after paying $1400 to live in the east village and feel edgy and slightly underground (but still pretty), we need to pay $10 more just to hear someone else tell us that? on the upper east side?

once again, sunday styles confirms my worst fears about america

last week, the nyt ran an amusing yet thoroughly disturbing story on plastic surgery for skinny people. check out "do my knees look fat?" for a well-proportioned serving of complaints by enviably attractive women who are bothered by things like chunky ankles and bra fat. an excerpt:

"'I had a little roll of fat hanging over the back of my jeans, like a spare bicycle tire in the back,' said Dana Conte, a bartender in Manhattan. It was so obvious that her mother constantly came up behind her and pulled her shirt down over it, Ms. Conte said. 'When your mother is doing that, it means there's a problem.'"

no, it means you should lay off the low-rise jeans, or at least buy longer shirts. since when does a mother's corrective measure translate in a daughter's mind to a call for surgery? it gets better:

"Dr. Lawrence S. Reed, the plastic surgeon who operated on Ms. Conte, the bartender, said some patients who choose micro liposuction want to reduce such negligible deposits that doctors can have trouble seeing the problem when the patients are undressed."

why can't these women accept that if they look good naked, they're doing well? why can't they just avoid certain styles of clothing? (maybe that hasn't occured to them since their biggers don't, but everyone's so distracted by an actual tummy or bum that offense by muffin top is completely ruled out.) and wait, right, this is the country that likes to throw fancy technological solutions at simple problems. commission an expensive and unreliable missile defense shield instead of building better international policies or, hey, cutting back on oil consumption. develop genetically modified strains of rice that will thrive off of global warming instead of working to offset the trend. have costly and painful surgery instead of buying better-fitting clothing. i woke up (yet again) believing in a logical world, but the nyt reminded me that this is how we operate around here.

i, too, can eradicate bra fat—and for a lot less money. with no medical training whatsoever, i am prepared to surgically remove spandex and lycra-blend tops from malls everywhere. and if you think your knees look chunky, try gaining some weight in the thighs. that should do the trick.

i have 0 friends; i've watched 666 videos

that's what youtube says when i arrive at their site. how alarming.

for my internship (where i mostly dig up not-yet-viral videos for a video blog), i spend all day numbing my brain with boring pet videos and keg stands gone wrong so that everyone with a real job can come to our site and waste time more efficiently.

here are two things i can't post because they're too old/they've already made the rounds.

a QVC demo blooper from 2003:



from last year's scripps howard national spelling bee:



so...if any good videos cross your inbox that haven't already graced boingboing or snopes, or if you or anyone you know makes funny sketches or animations and posts them online, i'll make you/them famous.

i've been skeptical of anyone who attempts the harper's notebook column after lewis lapham stepped down, but this month's essay by ben metcalf, on simple human decency, is both smart and playful. he lobbies for the right of anyone to say in print, "I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands," toying all the while with the possibility that he really means it.

-istas

since school ended, my interest in shopping has returned to its museum-employment levels. i just got back from a trip up 5th ave (the bklyn one, not the mnh one, to speak in craigslist abbreviations), only to get sucked into the new anthropologie catalog as soon as i walked through the door. anyone know any interesting shopping blogs out there? i'm tempted to post pictures of my booty (the pirate-metaphor kind, not the anatomical kind), which includes some skirts and a dress made by german designers, acquired during our trip to bonn/cologne.

i find myself, though, miffed at this season's fashions, wondering why anyone in her right mind would want to wear stretchy cotton koolats and those boob doilies known as bolero sweaters and especially those hippie empire-waisted blouses. who wants to wear maternity clothes when they're not pregnant? it's great for women who are, because they can just shop at the regular stores without having to seek out fashionable maternity boutiques, but anyone who wants to show off her waistline must make do with whatever's already in her closet. why slim down for summer when you can fit a whole chocolate cake under the halter tops they're selling now?

maybe i'm looking at this the wrong way. maybe the fashion world has finally acknowledged women's tendency to, well, eat, and i should be celebrating my stomach's independence from scrutiny. oh, except wait—those stretchy koolats don't look good on anyone who isn't already so skinny they'd look hot in a garbage bag (ahem, D.) if they decided to put one on. designers might be applauded for cutting women some slack if it weren't for the unsightly koolat cameltoe they've inflicted on all of us by making the pants in sizes above 2.

i know that fashion cycles are as demanding as 24-hour news channels, that there's a recurring space that must be filled with something new to keep people hanging on. they sold us leggings in the 80s only to have us repudiate them in the 90s so that we'd nostalgically embrace them now. there's clearly strategy at work here, some manufactured consent involving long strands of beads and stretch-cotton koolats (which i'm told were very fashionable during a decade not disclosed to me because it would've revealed my interlocutor's age), but mustn't there be limits? are there no fixed standards of taste that accompany us into the stores each season?

the popularity of the koolat suggests not. we'll be encouraged to laugh at them in 2016, to feel shame when perusing old photographs of ourselves looking wide-hipped and wedgie-ridden, but i don't need hindsight to feel shame. why don't people who, when confronted with a Mapplethorpe or a dung-strewn Virgin Mary, argue for unchanging aesthetic standards in the nation's editorial pages carry those same standards with them to the mall? art may depart from habitual notions of beauty and still be successful because no one's asking us to wear the elephant dung. but the utilitarian nature of everyday clothes should guarantee a world in which we don't prance around in humiliating outfits. somehow, that's precisely the world we live in.

seasonal habits

two things that i was unaware of having acute needs for till this week:

• iced coffee. until i developed a craving for it while walking in the brooklyn heat up to a memorial day party last weekend, i had no idea that such a substance was even necessary. turns out it's the life force. which is not an invitation for starbucks to market the cappu"chi"no, which would probably be some unnatural form of espresso infused with green tea (this year's most promiscuous ingredient), topped with pistachio whipped cream. in fact, i can totally see that. i may have even received a coupon for it in valupak.

• the future bible heroes' 'real summer.' this song is really important.

unspeak

here's a blog that disassembles the words of dissemblers: steven poole's unspeak.net. his book just came out, and i'm afraid the too-convenient barnes & noble will get my money again because i really want to read it. poole, who writes for the guardian, does an orwell-style dissection of common sound bites—'climate change,' 'war on terror,' 'muslim community'—to reveal the partisan viewpoints bound up in them. entire chapters are devoted to 'freedom' and 'terror,' and poole also pays attention to more minute shifts in idiom—e.g., how using 'asylum seekers' for 'refugees' shifts the emphasis 'from what a person was fleeing to the demands he was making on the country he arrived in.'

as for the blog, the may 18 entry on global warming is rote, but the previous ones on 'islamic terrorism' and 'turning points' are really sharp.

because the nyt won't print the word 'cooter'

from the below-mentioned "war on contraception" article:

"The linking of abortion and contraception is indicative of a larger agenda, which is putting sex back into the box, as something that happens only within marriage." —William Smith, vice president for public policy, Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.

back in the box, eh?

guess that's what the anti-gay activists are going for, too.

p.s.

i've committed the folly of backposting. scroll down to april 18 if you want to see something old but new. man, it's like april 18 is dead but now all these illuminating letters from it are coming out posthumously.

almost done

last week, from sunday to saturday, i wrote about 7500 words. i have maybe 1500-2000 to go, plus an internship application that is making me nervous as hell, before wednesday, when ed and i leave for germany. 2 classes down, 1 to go, and maybe i can finally drink that bottle of prosecco on top of (oops—now in) my fridge, waiting since the last time i did craploads of work but couldn't pause for more than a day before beginning anew.

from friday morning to yesterday at 4pm, with a pause somewhere in there for 3 hours of sleep, i wrote my anthropologie piece. i think it's a good draft and i'm excited about it. i cracked open a beer at 3, once i knew it was safe and had the ending cinched. there are only two kinds of papers that call for beers in the home stretch: really good ones and really bad ones.

then, in honor of anthropologie, i put on a dress and went to manhattan to drink a gin & tonic before heading to a rooftop barbecue. i was in bed by 11, tho, and every time i got close to sleep, i'd start trying to edit the random sentences that were running through my head. i remember having lots of trouble with subordinating clauses. then i'd get frustrated and remember i was finished with my article. this happened maybe 5 times before i fell asleep. it was just like in high school, when i'd spend all week studying and when i was finally finished and sleeping over at my friend's house, i'd be falling asleep and scrambling to list the 4 main functions of the judiciary branch and their significance.

anyway, hooray for spring, which i have completely missed, and on to read the sunday times. i'm glad someone has finally done the article on the war on contraception, even tho i almost can't bear to read it.

also: thankyoustephencolbert.org has 51,524 thank-yous as of this posting. mine was 37,840 or something, and that was on wednesday. it'd be way cool if it got to 100,000.

this has been a post about numbers.

unanticipated perk of nyu library database access

dr. phil's advice columns in the oprah magazine are more interesting than ann 'here's the 800 number for the domestic abuse hotline' landers, yet also uninhibited by the nyt mag ethicist's occasionally tiresome mantle of intellect and do-gooderism. they are pure voyeurism, and dr. phil's answers have a satisfying pop (which the meandering and verbose cary tennis of salon would do well to learn from).

through eight months in the journalism program, it had never occurred to me to use my proquest and nexis access to read trash. yes, i have arrived. tho i still think a real-life subscription to us weekly is in order, since you can't see pictures in the databases. goodbye mother jones, hello brangelina.

a downside to this unprecedented wallowing is realizing to an even fuller extent what a retard chuck klosterman is. oh well. i suppose knowledge has always had its compromises.