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.

poisonous people who unfairly escape retribution and humiliation

or, people i shouldn't let get to me, but who do anyway.

1. PR people, esp. in press offices
2. real-estate agents you aren't paying
3. real-estate agents you are paying
4. subway pushers
5. hairdressers who don't listen

suggestions welcome.

hooray for backposting! i meant to add this at the time and now i'm typing in preview mode and the letters pop up in the heading right as i type them.

yesterday i interviewed for an internship at a magazine i'd really like to work for. i thought i would just be talking to this one scruffy guy who recently graduated from my program, but instead i was faced with a mini-conference room of 3 important people to charm. i think it worked—they asked me to bare my soul, talk about my dream job, what i really want from work and hence life, and i totally confessed to wanting to be a series of old men: harper's ed lewis lapham, septagenarian (but so sexy!) brit artman john berger, and my media theory hero thomas de z, the only one of the group under 60. i left feeling pried open and good, but slightly embarrassed in that morning-after way, when you wake up realizing you got too drunk on a first date and revealed your soul to a cute guy you'd like to see again, except he hardly talked about himself at all.

myself as a man

it has taken me till 4 to start on the day's task, even tho i got up at 8:30. that is because it's a tedious one. for my anthropologie project i must transcribe an hour-plus-long interview (normally i reconstruct conversations from my notes, which is faster, but this must be a word-for-word transcription, as stipulated by the prof).

i'm doing slow playback so that i can get everything, which makes my interviewee and me sound like men. stoned men. yet gay, because we are being chatty women, talking about clothes, and that rhythm and inflection comes through even in slow-mo.

this is funny because the company is run by a gay couple, who live in philly but keep a pied-a-terre in manhattan. the headboard on their bed was inspired by an english garden gate from the 1870s, i recently learned from a shelter mag. they had repros made for the store, and now you can own one, too—for $1,348.

sparkles, ruffles, and other grownup pursuits

almost two years ago i found this bag at a now-defunct boutique on curry row in the east village. but like so many over-the-top things that i love, the purse, i determined after a mental assessment of my wardrobe, belonged with dorothy.

i was right, but later i missed it dearly, just like dorothy now misses the ruffle she cut off the bottom in a pointless bout of asceticism. we both looked for the bag online, googling for the mysterious 'malina' scripted in plastic and dangling from a removable string on the handle. nothing. the boutique made it out to be from a local designer, which is probably true, if by designer you mean machine and by local you mean china.

fast forward to last weekend, when ed and i were eating at a peruvian place around the corner from our apartment. the woman at the table next to us had a bag that looked just like this one, except it was pink and had brass handles. when i interrupted her conversation with her date, i learned that she had gotten it on the street in new orleans and that her date hates holding it for her.

less than an hour later i had found the same green one as d's on ebay and bought-it-now. along with my yellow cherry dress from anthropologie, this bag signals my early-life crisis, in which i buy up fashion items i could've only dreamed about as a five-year-old.

still looking for those blue-gray sparkle mary janes, tho.

amazing and pathetic food-industry interest group

i'm up early/late preempting a hangover with leftover chinese and cheese toast. this week's new yorker is on the table, opened to an ad that says 'concerned about mercury? you shouldn't be, unless you eat this,' around a fictional can of whale meat. after some explanatory text that poses a no-win hyphenation setup—'heavy fish-eaters'—the ad says 'fish is good for you. baseless anxiety (or whale blubber) isn't' and refers the reader to fishscam.com.

the page is run by the innocuous sounding center for consumer freedom, whose press releases unite the government and PETA in a conspiracy to make us all anxious as hell and not buy foods that are good for us.

here's my favorite quote:

'Is there any doubt that the animal rights movement is targeting your kids? In a new report, "Your Kids, PETA's Pawns," the Center for Consumer Freedom explores how one group, the $24 million People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), devotes substantial resources toward capturing children -- the next generation of potential meat eaters, milk drinkers, circus-goers, and fishermen -- in its cult-like web.'

and this headline from the fishscam site should retire to the onion: Fishy Mercury Scare Based On Study Of Whale-Heavy Diets, Says Ad in U.S. News & World Report.

now in brooklyn: edwards key lime

the pie finder is wrong! heretofore unavailable in new york city, the delicious key lime pie has found its way to target on atlantic avenue, formerly a total hellhole. now it's a total hellhole with a prize gleaming in the freezer section.

i got the last one. not even a whole pie, but the box of two slices, which cost $2.02. i am serious, this pie is better than any i have ever made. and yes, it's frozen. the best way to eat it is only partially defrosted and accompanied by cheap asti, as we in jam304 found.

in other news, i got really excited and then partially bummed, but still sort of excited. my culture-critic hero, thomas de zengotita, was slotted to teach a class on the history of media theory in the fall in a different program. i emailed him—spending hours on a few simple lines, of course—to ask permission to register for it, and he got back to me very quickly. unfo, the class will be next spring, after i've graduated (unless i get especially delinquent these next few months), tho i imagine i'll still be able to audit.

he signs his emails 'tdez.' that's pretty awesome.

fifteen minutes early and 3.5 months late

as of 11:45 last night, i am finally done with my incomplete. now i can in good conscience drink the bottle of prosecco ginny brought before my last week of school in december. tho it was not a gift meant in reward for finishing, it became a symbol for it, and so all winter and through the very late beginning of spring here in ny (i.e., last week), that beribboned bottle has sat atop my fridge, taunting me with the knowledge that i have made it halfway through the program without managing to finish my first semester. but now. it is time to drink. at 8:56am saturday morning. yeah. no. instead, it's time to go to the whitney biennial.

look at these pictures of my cats

if it's true that the engine of technological progress is porn, it's equally true that feline fixations bring up the caboose. either way, you can't get on the web without being inundated with pussy.

and so, in lieu of getting a little too friendly with ed's digital camera, i present pictures of our new(ish) kittens, peas and tilde. peas is peas's full (and birth) name, given by his foster mommy. his sisters, carrots and potatoes, made their home with a man who probably didn't stick with their original names. but peas can never be anything else. after considering some unfortunate names for sugar, his adoptive companion (ranging from 'poops' to 'Qs'), we settled on tilde (formally: mrs. tilde [~] peabody). her feisty pursuit of anything that moves—feet, for instance, but more often string attached to something jingly—is often punctuated by desperate cartwheels and three-foot-high leaps, and so she has quickly earned the nickname tilderator.

	peas is the stripey one. he has lots of riblike stripes on the skin of his belly, giving him the appearance of wearing one of those skeleton-torso shirts, but on his whole underside. tilde has patches on her skin that line up exactly with the patches on her fur. the black over her eyes extends in a V-shape down the back of her head, mullet style. shown here keeping some sort of mafia secret.
	this candid shot reveals peas's softer side, thanks to ed's ruthless paw-parazzi pursuit.
	tail-er trash?
	tilde wows with her catlike ninja skills, while peas exhibits his catlike...skills.
	also it snowed here. this is the basketball hoop in our downstairs neighbor's backyard.

penises change the world

today in slate, kent sepkowitz contends that debates over how best to measure wangs will train us to be more critical of studies' methodology, thus making way for a less dupable populace when it comes to studies that actually matter.

bra size, for instance.

really? reminds me of that n+1 article on reality tv, in which mark greif argues that by working ourselves up over who's getting voted off the island, constituents are better prepared to participate in democratic government. what are we still doing with c-span, then? that money belongs to murdoch.

so it turns out size does matter. but for a better-informed democracy, not sex.

happy valentine's day, all you patriots out there.

will provide hours of nostalgic, slightly derisive fun

there's a section for davidson college on ratemyprofessors.com. profs get ratings on easiness, clarity, helpfulness, and—gratuitously (or perhaps not?)—hotness, signified by a red chili pepper next to their names. malcolm campbell got one chili pepper; shireen campbell got 3. my favorite so far is d. robb's entry. the vast differences in response to him ('MOST BORING MAN ALIVE' vs. 'clear, precise, and rigorous') reflect the vast differences in humor level among davy students.

durwin striplin, chem prof and onetime wailer for the briefly incarnated band enormous power, also got a chili pepper. enormous pepper, greg pointed out. just the fact that there is a person named durwin striplin walking around on this planet is cause for celebration.

also, someone thinks randy ingram looks like kevin spacey. another compared his class to dead poet's society. kuzmo, too, is 'a professor out of a movie,' though the 'evil-twisted-santa-claus exterior' is agreed to be just that.

i can't believe shaw smith and cort savage haven't gotten any chili peppers.

two extremes

either i can't get myself to slow down, or i can't get myself to do anything at all. mostly the latter. i'm not very interested in what i'm supposed to be doing, which is finishing that class. i am, however, intensely interested in season 3 of gilmore girls, which i am inadvertently cut off from because lost highway was at position #1 in my netflix queue the moment they received the last disc i returned, and i had forgotten to move the next gg disc up front. i will often fool myself into thinking i am using netflix to watch actual movies, and then at the last minute i'll reshuffle my queue. but this time i happened to be shopping at the co-op and sticking my face in the adoption window of the kitty clinic when the crucial moment arrived.

that show is sweet valley high for my adult life. which is great and terrible at the same time. the problems—not the overarching dramatic ones, but the ones that get resolved within each episode—are of the kind that only really count as problems on tv. in the episode i just watched, rory is mad at her grandpa for setting up a 'spontaneous' meeting for her with his friend, the head of admissions at yale. and she wasn't prepared. oh horrors! after a family-laundry scene in the echo-y and quite gilded chamber of a yale building, lorelai and rory huff away to the comfort of tacos, and later, before studying, rory smooches her new bad-boy boyfriend (who raises eyebrows around town but isn't so bad that he's not way into books) outside a gas station. meanwhile lorelai has ample opportunity to say things like, 'don't study so much that your head gets so large and grows into a bald and shiny egghead, because i want to go shoe shopping tomorrow.'

why do anything other than watch this show? seriously. the only good reason i can think of is that there's a finite number of episodes. i guess the only way out is to get sucked into the final season of six feet under, which i was afraid to watch because i was too embarrassed for claire. hbo is my methodone (sung to the catchy tune of 'angel is my centerfold').

good news re: kitty adopting tho, because i found one today. it's a boy, 7 weeks old, and we get it in the next two weeks once it's neutered. gray tabby-ish with darker stripes and blue eyes. name and pictures forthcoming. what would a blog be without pictures of a cat? time to put tinfoil on the chairs.

i can anticipate the good grammar

i love cut-and-paste cover-letter writing. that could be the next magnetic poetry set. remind me to sell that.

i'm applying for jobs because for nearly 24 hours i've been toying with the idea of going part-time with school. i hear there's an onion internship. maybe i could sell them my cover-letter magnetic poetry idea.

went to the acupuncturist today for the second time. it was awesome. which was awesome, because last time it was not. except strange thing: the office had this lingering smell underneath all other odors (soap, copy paper) of weed. maybe the doormen sneak in there at night? maybe there's something i didn't know about chinese herbs—namely, that they're not plural after all.

happy new year from: the drunk people

ed intervened just before i cracked open a smirnoff ice and took me home. it was that kind of night.

deep down, walmart knows my soul

i have the greatest hoodie ever. a beatles yellow submarine hoodie. and i got it at walmart of all places, thanks to a tip from the publix checkout girl in gville who was wearing one. i bought the last one, and the rest of the rack was kiss and acdc and that was it. when every other five-year-old's drool-spotted chin was reflecting the glow of star wars laser swords, mine was shining in the light of the beatles' huge bellbottoms and the mickey-mouselike ears of the head blue meanie. psychedelic graphics are perfect for five-year-olds. and now that our morally repellent superstore has placed one of its invisible fingers on the pulse of my first childhood salivation, i am sold.

no matter how i save it, the picture will not appear upright. below the logo it says nothing is real.

so most of you have prolly gotten emails from me about that 'video games that help you focus' story i'm working on. i have spent 2+ weeks thinking about this stuff, and so it has dawned on me that journalists lead strange lives. here are some highlights:

i heard from an equipment salesman that fortune 500 companies (which he would not name) and the accounting firm ernst & young have had these programs in place to help their employees' business performance. after i got off the phone with him i realized he was just reading off the sidebar on his website. he wouldn't give me any more details about what these companies had been up to. so i, like a freak, called up ernst & young and said, 'so, there's this thing where you play a video game with your mind, and you do it by sticking electrodes on your head...no, i'm not kidding. this is real...did you ever have a program like this for your employees?' she had to get back to me on that one.

and that, strangely enough, happened not to be the most out-of-left-field question this PR lady had been asked recently.

i also ended up calling an indiana funeral/medical services company that another equipment website claimed would appear in a harvard business review article about their success with the technology. no luck their either. not sure what's up, but maybe these salesmen just make stuff up, not expecting the mothers of ADD children to call Polly PR to confirm.

i've also been getting hundreds of message-board postings via email, mostly from professionals on a yahoo forum. they are a wild bunch, posting robustly even at 11pm on a saturday night during the holiday season. [and i, the shut-in journalist, was close at hand to read them.] aside from all the expected internet-forum backbiting and mudslinging, one of my favorite dr.s must use bartleby's quotations like a thesaurus. there are like 3 mentions of historical figures, along with the quotes they are most famous for, in every email. george santayana, fdr. it's the email signature as email. this person also wedged in a comparison of the group's debate about licensing to the christian reformation. just as luther proclaimed that all should have direct access to god through personal readings of the bible, so too should neuroscientists be generous with their prefixes: ph.d.s and other fancy-degree holders shouldn't monopolize the administration of brain training.

here are kt, me, & D at homecoming, behind summit, which is where we spent most of the weekend when we weren't at the depot. all had homework/projects to do, and it was a little bizarre to be back there doing work, walking around the same places, and yet being strangely disconnected from everything going on.

"if i start having marxist thoughts about elvis, you start having technological solutions."

i miss the quoteboard aspect of communal college living. the heading is what i said to ed when he kept having those shower-inspired good ideas while i was busy working on an assignment.

you've probably never desired to read a marxist essay on elvis, but i have just finished one, on the day of the birth of my Mother, no less. and though she may not remember to call herself such, she may indeed be a bit of a marxist and maybe even an elvis fan?

the assignment was to find a way to write about the most-written-about figure in pop culture from our own critical angle. it took me about twelve minutes to open the only book that they actually had at the library out of my list of twenty and find my hook. i use it in a paragraph about clearasil. really--i consider myself lucky. i've never been a savvy researcher. things just happened to go my way this time. and now i can't sleep because i got so jacked up on caffeine to finish this thing (dragged ed on a 2am walk around park slope), and it's only kicked in now that i'm finished.

so i'm drinking a beer and posting halloween pictures.

i was a corkscrew for halloween, the anthropomorphic kind with the head that twists and the arms that you push down. terrible thing was, i brought a bottle of wine to the party in williamsburg, and there was no corkscrew to be found. so i walked around dumbly with the unopened wine, dressed as the very thing i was missing. i even had a bit where i spun around and jacked my arms up and then sprung through the air. meant to drop a cork when i did it, but i couldn't open the wine to get it...

first pic shows my headpiece and 'wings' (made out of a fresh direct box, tinfoil, and foam coil), the second my legs as the twisty stick-in-the-cork part (foam coil wrapped in aluminum tape).

wasabi peas may smell like cat food, but they set your nose aflame

update since the last time i posted:

school.

that is all. oh wait, and rain. now cold.

i have been hunkered down all weekend making a dent in work incredibly slowly. i definitely feel that good writing and good grooming are mutually exclusive.

here is a review of shopgirl by one of my profs. also amusing are the letters he got in response. i like the one from bashir.

also don't miss the new yorker talk of the town on harriet miers.

subway wit

must give emily credit for noticing this. i walked right by it. must be because she is randier than i? or i am dislexicer. disexlic. i am afraid of what that means. which is why i will dream about it. or did. last night. uggh.

diaries of a painfully inexperienced reporter

i've been out on two reporting missions for my intro class—one to a polling place in alphabet city last week for the democratic mayoral primaries, and one today, at a meeting in protest of VA hospital consolidation. i find that it is easiest to get old men to talk to me. they slow down because they see a nice young lady, which is when i swoop in and...ask nearly incoherent questions while scribbling sloppily in my notebook. i think i need a tape recorder so i can go around brewton-style.

at the conference today i met a man without a bladder. he was very nice despite his bladderlessness, which i suppose indicates that a bladder isn't a crucial component of congeniality, tho it must surely help. i did wonder, as i sat in that overly air-conditioned hotel ballroom for two over hours, how in the world all those senior vets managed to stay there without a trip to the bathroom. perhaps they are all lacking in bladders.

vegan mac&cheese is gooey cardboard

i just made one of those boxes of vegan convenience food that is so freakin unexploitative it calls into question its very existence. the box contains nothing you might remotely associate with dairy or dairy alternatives; not only is there no lactose, whey, or egg, but also no soy or nut products, and no candida albicans, whatever that means. the box is made from 100 percent recycled paperboard and was printed using soy-based inks. aside from the soy disparity, i'm pretty sure the box and its contents are one.

the pervasiveness of vegetarian- and vegan-friendly convenience foods puzzles me. the whole point of the original convenience foods was to make replicas of homemade dishes so high in starch, animal fat, and salt that it doesn't matter how preserved and freeze-dried and pouchified they are—you still have the important conveyors of flavor. to then go and replace the animal products with something unfatty and unflavorful becomes an exercise in masochistic deprivation. all for the sake of what? having an imitation of something that is itself an imitation of a home-cooked meal? i'm sure if plato could've foreseen road's end organics' dairy-free mac & 'chreese' (cheddar style), he would've been furious. we're talking shadows of shadows here.

i once picked a fight with a soy-yogurt product representative giving out samples at my health food store. i informed her that nondairy foods should give up the fight, accept their unsuppressably unique flavors, and go and develop foods that work with, rather than against, these foreign textures and tastes. manufacturers of nondairy goods, i call on you to untether yourselves from the hegemonic reign of dairy and to adopt an adventurous new approach of culinary medium specificity! if it does not look like cheese or yogurt, i promise to still try it.

except keep making soymilk and those tofutti cuties, because they are good. rice dream can go fuck themselves.

last day of freedom slash boredom

school starts tomorrow. soon i will find out if my brain still works.

yesterday ed and i went to coney island. i've been in new york for two years and three summers before that, and yet i had never gone to coney island. craaazy place. you can get on the F train downtown and an hour later emerge, alongside throngs of people carrying towels and pails and impatient children, at a giant raucus yankee carnival on the beach. we walked along the boardwalk and then sat on the beach and went swimming (water very cold) and ate a mango on a stick carved both to enhance its bitability and its resemblance to a flower. then we looked at the games and rides and walked up to neptune ave for pizza at the famous totonno's, which has some or other claim to being the oldest pizza in new york. it didn't taste old, but did happen to be a little bland. the crust found great favor with ed, and the cheese was quite fresh. i prefer the spicier, greasier varieties myself.

les achats sur (ou avec?) l'herbe

for my last day in austin dorothy and i took a little nude shopping trip around the city. very popular with the kids these days. what better way to ensure that you come home in some new duds than the threat of getting arrested? i just love the way strapless dresses make pictures far more suggestive.









this is dorothy and travis's cat marilyn, who likes to climb in the 'cuties' clementine box. shown here with human-assisted mohawk.












here we are at the airport, properly attired. sad to leave dorothy and her city's perfect union of egg muffin and soy latte.

in austin the icecream melts really fast

here are dorothy and me modeling our skirts, together for the first time since d made mine last year. we have just eaten a very elaborate fish dinner with two sauces and wilted greens and are now waiting for our starlight-mint-doctored icecream to re-harden in the freezer. it melted after like 5 minutes in the 90+-degree kitchen.

have gone swimming twice, in two different spring-water pools. this is a bike-friendly town with plenty of trail access to the colorado river. and margaritas and barbeque. the only chorizo i've had so far tasted like cat food (but was compensated for by the 'STERONG' prickly-pear frozen margaritas), so we'll rectify that situation soon. PIE HEAVEN party is friday. ed'n'i'll be making my improv blend of chocolate peanut-butter oat-cereal bourbon ice cream goo with a graham-cracker crust to hold it all together and qualify it as a pie. dorothy will finish solidly inside the category with her two-time hit, the corn and tomato savory pie.

mother earth plies her trade

for sale at the health food store in gainesville, fl:

consumer hobo

look at this hat i found on the street. i think it may actually be a pink fluff-muff (with a black velvet reversible inside) or even skank tube top for a very small person, but i have chosen to wear it as a hat. when i first picked it up (off of a fence displaying free stuff here in the slope), along with a very large multicolored satisfyingly nubby scarf covered in cat hair, it was to be a hostess gift for dorothy or b, but, sorry girls, it would look adorable with your blond hair, but this one is mine. it probably makes me look like a tripped out hopper chick, but maybe that is what i am going for here.

ed and i made a giant trip to bed bath & beyonce today, an excursion which gave rise to my carrying a supersized shopping bag on the stick of a mop, hobo style. hence the title of this post and all of its i-ronic implications.

also we have wireless now, so i am blogging from bed while drinking beer. surprisingly easy to get used to. it is now easier for me to take a photo of myself on my cellphone, text it to gmail, and post it on my blog than it is to get a glass of water. the other day i was in the gap's underwear section and they had a bra promoted with the tag 'wireless.' i find this substantially more amazing than my technological feats. i mean, if i can put my boobs to work in terms of connectivity, how much better off wouldn't we all be?

blithe abuse of consumer technologies

with this post i join the ranks of indulgent and shameless bloggers who subject everyone to low-res cameraphone documentation of their lives. ahh it feels good to succumb. this is of ed and me on our way to a party in carroll gardens, where we ended up knowing everyone twice over through two separate paths of connections: the prolific brooklyn–austin exchange program, and ed's workmate jordi, who had extended the invitation.



on saturday lacey and her friends invited kt and me to the beach. we ended up going to the rockaways, in queens, which was quite close thanks to l's car and quite beachy thanks to water and sand and neighboring mexicans who taught us how to say bottleopener in spanish when we asked for one (forgot the word). it might've been a dirty word which is why they laughed at us, but kt said the woman, not the man, told her the word so it was less likely to be dirty? who knows. here are kt and lacey posing. immediately sent to dorothy, which prompted a call from her. see cameraphones are great.



here are josephine and holly after dinner the other weekend at a yum i-talian place in park slope.












and here are the trees and fire escape outside my kitchen window. maybe i will take another without the screen.

salaciousness in the NYT

this is pretty fun:

first read the new nanny diaries are online (sunday styles, 7.17.05)

then read the blog in question, instructions to the double

onesies for little rebelsies

ok, since ed hasn't posted about this i'm stealing it. a few times we've walked by this boutique on 5th ave that sells these che guevara onesies. if there can be said to be a heartbeat of park slope, this is surely it. it has everything: decadence, preciousness, rebellion via materialism, baby-centricity—this little playsuit is the locus of park slope identity.

sometimes when i walk around and see all the little kids here against the backdrop of lovely brownstones, trees, cafes, and gay-friendly shops, i wonder where they will go to rebel and be edgy once they are teenagers. their parents already patronize all the coffeeshops and alt-looking places here, so they'll grow up seeing the slope as a firmly entrenched establishment, whose tropes they will feel compelled to kick sand at using whatever style of boot is popular by then. i mean, if you wore che when you were still pooping yourself, you are obviously going to have to find your own style of heroes to commodify.

oh my god saturday night i dreamed i was being turned into a bug. a SCARY bug. i was still me but i had bug features stuck on, particularly my left arm and abdomen, which were so gross i don't even want to describe. at first i thought it would go away, like with physical therapy or something. but then it wasn't and i was noticing weird antennae everywhere and i slumped and was like oh god god god please make it go away. ed woke up and assured me that i was not a bug. still it was bad. THEN last night i was making a salad and tossing it and noticed something moving and there was this big spider/not-spider bug crawling around covered in berry vinaigrette, moving slowy and creeping through the organic spring mix. it had to have been in the lettuce bag, eating and shitting the lettuce since being packed away at earthbound farm and barely surviving the journey through those microengineered eighteen layers of semipermeable plastic. otherwise i would've seen it crawling on the counter and scaling the slippery pyrex upside-down. which, judging from its motor skills, was not so plausible. i am now afraid to eat the lettuce (and too lazy to wash it) even tho ed promised that no spider eggs would hatch in our stomachs and eat away at us from our insides.

please no kafka jokes.*

*unless they rule. (unlikely)

cleanliness and grooming aren't necessary, but they make you feel better

been doing an okay job not descending into total slothitude at my one-month mark of unemployment. managed to email some stuff to the profs in charge of my program, doing this new gyrotonic thing (via work-study a.k.a. cleaning so i don't have to pay tons of dollars) under the aegis of this really cool girl i met at the co-op, watching admittedly too much pirated gilmore girls, reading some things, and trying not to run up the daytime minutes on my phone. might try kickboxing at the gym tomorrow. ed and i are about to embark upon a sunday-night pizza retrieval operation.

post-employment: phase 1

been unemployed for nearly two weeks now. this state of grace began, after my last day of work, at a karaoke bar, where ed and i performed a drunken but still well-coordinated 'billie jean' for my ex-coworkers.

i have spent the two weeks capitalizing on intro offers for various forms of exercise, being victimized by three different cell phone companies, and reading things that i've been meaning to read for a while. ed and i found a new copy of the dvd outfoxed for the taking on a stoop, so we will watch that sooner than i will finish reading the vinland (icelandic) sagas, also from the stoop.

i also, through no fault of my own, am now the owner of a cameraphone, so be expecting gratuitous and low-res pictures of me and/or my possessions and habitat to appear in your inboxes.

cumming attractions...

new to our apartment: the moving image. yesterday ed and i found a large nice-looking but old tv sitting on the sidewalk next to our place (since monday is trash day, the sunday evening walk takes on new furniture-acquiring dimensions). of course it acted busted when we (he) took it upstairs and turned it on, but he figured out what was wrong and tonight soldered something onto something else after taking the bad thing away. and now there is an aqua teen dvd playing in our 'parlor,' a.k.a. 'the five-thing room,' since only about five things (not including people) can fit in there at once.

'a-' is the new 'homo-'

lots of people are now claiming an 'asexual' identity and asking that others not try to 'fix' them, says the nyt.

thought this was interesting, tho it would probably make a better premise for an onion article. some bleary-eyed porn producer could lambaste the new brand of sexual deviants for not being up to anything kinky. or they could do a series of people claiming new identities left and right. the noisemakers, the outdoor adventurers, the people who like to eat sandwiches mid-act. they should all run out and form a club before they can be stigmatized, or worse, studied by graduate students.

it happened

i got laid off from my first job. it was hard to keep a straight face during the whole thing. the vp who did it (i must've been about her sixth that day) had to effect this pained demeanor (even tho she knew i was leaving anyway) and give the 'it's not you it's the position' speech. by the end she was dropping all the key verbs: 'you have until june 17...if you wanted to ____ before then....if you feel ____ is difficult for you....of course we could....but s--- is on vacation and the paperwork....' lots of sideways glances and buried ante-ante-antecedents. if i wanted to what? scream like a banshee and set the place on fire? decry the decline of life as i know it because my filing techniques are, it turns out, entirely stoppable?

the museum is a sad and warped place and can only become more so with this new round of absurd cuts. it doesn't really affect me—my life will only be made easier with a june 17 departure date, severance, and unemployment—but i'm angry on behalf of my friends there. the cut people are lucky; it's the ones who are staying who are really being shat on. i wish our board's bad behavior would incite large-scale resignations on principle. i wish workplaces everywhere had informal unions of conscience (not consciousness; i'm sick of all those articles about jesus on the job) so that badly run institutions would have to make wiser decisions if they wanted anyone at all to work for them. um. i wish bullies weren't so effective.

when i leave reality, realty is there waiting for me

my compulsive 'nesting' efforts via craigslist have taken me to many different neighborhoods, most recently murray hill and yorkville. murray hill i found especially unsettling. it's nice, clean, and hip in a safe, this-was-edgy-ten-years-ago,-have-i-got-it-right-yet? sort of way. it's the kansas of manhattan (even tho the people who are actually from kansas are all in williamsburg). all the new york fixtures are there—duane reades, pizza places, dry cleaners, delis—but nothing else is. it's a clean, generic new york neighborhood. i didn't know that existed. i knew there was anywhere, USA, but i didn't know there was anywhere, NYC. everything was rootless and scary. the whole point of being a young person in new york is the way the purpose and importance of the place is allowed to stand in for the obvious lack of those things in your own life. and now i'm finding out that i can be anywhere and be in new york at the same time.

which may explain why i have red hook envy. i'd rather be nowhere than anywhere. faced with the many aspirational-lifestyle themeparky 'nabes' hyped in time out, i'd feel downright transgressive moving to an overgrown weedlot waterfront only accessible by bus. whenever i read about the bakery on van brunt with its malted chocolate cake or see a mention of the liberty tap room's six-point ale or remember the roofdeck view of the apartment ed and i saw, i am struck by the overwhelming singularity of each thing—there just isn't anything else. park slope has so much. i couldn't begin to pick a restaurant. i want the choices made for me and i want the things around me to be monumental. living in red hook is the real-estate equivalent of the raw-foods diet. it is extreme and not always satisfying and often lonely. but it has definition. that is about all it has.

i can see that i'm better of in park slope, mainly because i'd spend most of my red hook time transgressing on the bus, loaded down with groceries from whole foods.

$2.75 POM and 33-cent cinnamon

yes, this weekend ed and i joined the park slope food coop, where there's only a 21 percent markup in exchange for three hours of work per month and a sort of dippy but admirable (and sometimes downright grudging) community work-together feeling. unlike at the sleeker, anti-dismemberment chains like whole foods, here our human imperfections are in plain sight, not buried beneath shiny curved surfaces and customer service jargon, where words like 'team member' supplant the wordlier 'cashier.'

one month to go at the museum. there's a board meeting soon and a probable round of layoffs, so i'm glad to be kicking it before i get kicked. i don't really wanna be laid off from my first job. tho maybe i won't give notice with 'hr' (it's only one person) and see if my boss and i can swing a freelance deal for the fall, making it seem as though i hadn't planned on leaving at all. not sure how much i want to work when i start school, tho.

i just got called drew barrymore by a gay bike courier

i snuck out of work to get a muffin and was about to cross the street when i heard a particularly effeminate 'toodly-doo' issuing from the direction of a particularly scruffy-looking bike courier. this person was all the way across the intersection from me, waving and blowing kisses, and i decided the attention was not meant for me. until. five seconds later he was circling around me, still doing the dainty waving and kiss-blowing, calling 'dreeewww, teeheehee, dreeewwww! drew barrymore! teehee,' and then circled back to the street he came from, still waving and laughing and blowing kisses. i gave a mock wave back, and the glee continued until he disappeared down 54th.

perhaps he was taking the drugs. still, it was educational. i didn't know they had gay bike couriers.

i think i will further today's themes of gayness and celebrity. i think i'll go to the moma for lunch.

postscript (unintentional self-parody)

when i got to d.c. on friday, kt and i passed a bum near union station who asked for money for food. i offered him my banana, he took it and said thanks, and then i started to walk away but then turned back around and added encouragingly, 'it's organic.'

i was twenty feet away before i started laughing.

goodbye whole foods, hello brook(lyn) farm

i will be frequenting the wf less once i join the park slope food co-op. i'll pay a fee and work four hours a month in exchange for a delicious and reasonably priced variety of organic and often local produce and products whose organic-hood and naturalness is perpetually under review and rigorously compared to other possibly even more insanely ecologically friendly goods. after reading on their website about the tightly legislated standards and policies of their research team, i got so excited by their hyperbolic commitments and their success in applying them (people who don't live in the neighborhood or even in nyc belong and shop there) that i wanted to jizz all over the screen. except i was at work. i was trying to explain my excitement to coworkers before a meeting without using the word jizz and i think i ended up pounding at my heart and saying something vague and lame like 'resonating.' hmm i suppose all romantic language is the result of self-censorship from coarser expressions.

moving day

i just wrapped up a roll of tp in anthropologie tissue (left over from some frustrating and since-returned purchase) and the effect was amazing. this is a company that can make even toilet paper look romantic.

re: lewis lapham hangup

the tribeca film festival is showing the american ruling class, which is somehow billed as an energetic combo of fiction and documentary satire without ever being called a mockumentary. heard it wasn't that great, but i must say i'm curious. lapham wrote the screenplay, in which two yale grads (fake) are taken around by mentor lewis lapham (real) to meet major cultural figures like vonnegut, cronkite, and robert altman, as well as targets like larry summers (all real). if they're using real cultural elites, why use fake ivy elites?

the ny times noted with (understated) amusement that the afterparty for the film's premiere was held on the floor of the new york mercantile exchange (see 'bashing the rich, then celebrating at a hub of commerce', april 18, if it's still up).

i'll have to see if i can catch the last screening tomorrow. may be in the throes of moving, though. whenever we get internet in the new place, i'll post pics for y'all. before and after, for sure. we'll be painting before we leave for july, getting a cat after we return. i keep asking ed what color he wants to paint the cat, but no decisions have been made.

pergo slope

so ed and i got a place today. and it's actually in park slope. i'd resigned myself to the idea of living somewhere on the slope perimeter, or even in some parkless section of brooklyn, but then this listing (below market value and rent stabilized) just popped up on craigslist and here we are.

it has a big bedroom on one end and then a railroad configuration of two doorless rooms and then the kitchen. fake wood floors, fake marble in the kitchen. the fake wood makes me feel slightly unsettled, which unsettles me further. why should i feel attached to the authenticity of walking on a real dead waxed tree instead of a fake one?

the bedroom has two windows that look into trees. not big ones but trees!! i suppose i'd rather look at living trees than walk on dead ones. i look forward to one day living in a place where trees are not a luxury. that just feels so wrongheaded.

the cover of this week's ny press is a cartoon by david rees called get your friedman on. it is awesome. please go look at it. the article's ok too because it makes fun of thomas friedman, albeit nongraphically.

i suppose his other option would've been 'my new flattening technique is unstoppable,' as long as by unstoppable you mean entirely stoppable.

craigslife - $900 obo (park slope)

my new pastime is looking for the many elements of my new life on craigslist. now that i may be closing in on an apartment, i'm starting to hunt for trashcans and shelves and pyrex cookware (no aluminum and no teflon, intones worried mother) on CL. damn, a lot of people sure have ugly stuff. sort of the humbling underbelly (humderbelly?) of the shiny new death-deferring no-interest-till-christmas-2013, as-seen-on-tv offerings of our daily existence.

i think i will shell out for a new mattress, tho, because of that scary new yorker talk of the town piece on bedbugs. those things suck!!

suburban oasis just 25 minutes from midtown

ed and i checked out astoria saturday night, and we were impressed. it is truly diverse, as they say. unlike most ny neighborhoods, which are predominantly one race or another, astoria is one big 'rainbow' of a party that would make any college admissions counselor cry. i submitted that it's something of a yankee berkeley (without the posturing), except i've never even been to california, so that's probably not accurate. i've noticed that descriptions of queens tend to follow that rubric—"something of a ____, but without the posturing."

there's A LOT of stuff at the last stop on the N, ditmars. we thought we were going to some dissipated, end-of-the-line area, and it was truly hopping. we ate at this italian place that new york mag made out to be an out-of-the-way find, but was actually a warehouse-sized suburban-style restaurant with valet (if you've ever eaten out in charlotte, it was like that), waterfalls, sucky murals of vineyards, and a lounge singer who performs his own stuff. it was really hard to get a table, but i had to do it because the whole thing was just so weird, so strip mall, so not new york. all the natives of suburban brooklyn and queens flock there in their cars and use the valet and eat giant plates of pasta and meat and order ex-presso. we overheard a lot of conversations about baby formula, mortgages, and the way-out-there neighborhoods (middle village, mesbeth?) i've always wondered about on the subway map, all in accents you don't hear so much in soho.

they took us into the wine bar to wait for a table. turns out the wine bar is not a bar at all but a whole separate creepy room with little tables and more murals. this is where the lounge singer puts on his 'show.' we were so weirded out by the time we got a table, and so full of the pretzels, cheese, and bread that you get before you even order, that we barely finished half of our entrees. ed's lasagna was rather disappointing, but my gnocchi with tomato sauce was pretty good. everything was real—no shortcuts or substitutions. when the assistant manager came by and saw that we were not eating and actually wanted to leave, he was dismayed and forced complimentary tea on non-tea-drinking ed and coffee on a sheepish me. the macchiato was great, i have to say, even if it contained enough milk to be a cappuccino. they tried so very hard to make sure we would come back (also a new experience in this city), but that's just never gonna happen. for a while i thought it would be a fun joke to play on my roommies when they come visit ("hey, i know this great restaurant—it's new york's best-kept secret"), but ed pointed out that anyone who lives outside of new york drives by these places all the time, and it would not be funny.

at last, word arrives

i got into nyu's cultural journalism program!!!! (i maintain that cult jism is a better term. maybe i can get them to change it once i enroll.)

found out over email—it was so weird. i've been checking my mailbox compulsively, fearfully, unreasonably, since mid-march, and it never occured to me to be afraid every time i open my email. good thing, too, considering how often i check it. i'd be an emotional wreck. oh wait...

if we were cooking roommate dinner in jam304...

i would be ranting about armpit hair and its shades of meaning. for example, right now, i have armpit hair. quite a bit of it. haven't thought of shaving in a while. not that important. it's cold out.

now, i would like for the follicular status of my underarms to have nothing to do with my identity, to not signify as a meaning-laden political choice. yes, i'm a feminist, and i happen to know my share of ani songs thanks to a rather limited cd rotation in college, but that has nothing to do with the trifling matter of shorn b.o. factories.

but no. i live in a world where R&D for razors, which resemble luxury automobiles* more with each passing day, expends more of the nation's creative energy than your average hairy folksinger can muster. of course it has to mean something when i don't use the damn things.

instead of having an apartment full of lovely lady lushes on this friday eve, i have a blog. damnit. and i have to move out of my actual apartment. screw the world!

* men's = exterior, women's = interior

i woke up feeling very satisfied with myself, which is rare these days considering that any day now my fate for the next year and a half will be determined arbitrarily by a piece of mail, and that my brain has entered superscramble mode from doing every variation of a craigslist search for the "SWEEET BKLYN 1BR SUblet (byebye manhatten)" of my future.

i suspected that i did something impressive in my dream, and, sure enough, about five minutes into my shower it came back. i had gone to jury duty, which didn't look at all like jury duty. there were all these little tables with nice chairs in a darkened room, and people were scrunched around them talking intently. it was like a hotel dining area with the impersonal edge taken off—no febreeze, no offensive minimuffins. i squeezed myself into a group at one of the tables, and a friendly 40something fellow was talking about what the experience of jury duty should be like. a blond woman piped in, very excited about the idea of people coming in to little tables and talking and learning from each other. 'i could learn languages,' she enthused. and, rather unnecessarily, 'i could work on the language that so many people speak here in america.' spanish, of course, but she didn't think it PC to say as much. normally i would scoff at a declaration of this sort, but the energy of the group was so earnest and engaged in the ideas themselves that i didn't even mind. this was totally a liberal-arts circle jerk.

yes. in my sleep, i invented the academic's jury duty, which apparently combines the highbrow intimacy of a bistro with the democratic expansiveness of a walmart. the whole affair was very much in the style of those self-consciously clunky believer inquiries, like, 'what for are english departments?' except this time it was, 'what for is jury duty?'

it was one of those self-reflexive moments where we were participating in the very scene we were inventing, right as we were inventing it. sort of a phenomenological chicken and the egg performance—the kind you can walk in on in any upper-level english class. i can't remember whether i thought it was brilliant or shameful that all these people were so engaged in a conversation that would never reach high enough on the bureaucratic ladder to effect any change. was it enough that these people felt like their voices were important, or did they actually have to be important? is there a difference? there wasn't one in this case, because the thinking was the doing, and that was the point of the exercise. in the dream i tried to imagine the infrastructure that would carry people's ideas up the civic ladder, more as a perfunctory ass-covering measure than anything. you know, in case anyone demanded that reality actually match what was in their heads.

some people dream in black and white. some dream lucidly and have wild crazy sex every chance they get. this morning pretty much confirms that i dream in caricature. five years ago it was the fashion to be self-consciously self-deprecating (which is probably redundant, but then, that's in style too). what to do with a person who is subconsciously self-mocking? if someone wanted to make fun of me, they could hardly do better than to write a little one-act in which i turn a bland symbol of civic responsibility like jury duty into an opportunity for indulgent self-reflection among the citizenry...unless they have me holding a sweat lodge in the camping section of walmart.

it seems like my brain is manufacturing its very own grad school curriculum while the turbo digressive lush in me is asleep. totally the opposite of college, when i would dream i was writing a brilliant paper (i swear the phrase 'donut darwinism' really meant something at the time) just so i could keep hitting snooze on my 3am alarm.

the swindle of organic snacking

yesterday i bought some 'carrot chips' from the health-food store. there are pictures of carrots on the bag, and the ingredients list contains both carrot juice and carrot puree in the first few items. the very first ingredient, tho, is organic stone-ground corn.

it took me ten chips of a hauntingly familiar salty cornfried taste to realize that i was eating fritos.

i'm beginning to grasp the cleverness of the organic-foods spin machine. they are clearly learning from our current legislative architects, whose basic premise is: if it sounds like an improvement on what came before, it is. to question the healthfulness of these carrot chips would be, in effect, to question the judgment of our president. and that would be un-P.A.T.R.I.O.T.-ic.

so i will go back to my organic bologna sandwich and my organic creme sandwich cookies and congratulate myself on knowing the difference between what is good for me and what isn't.

the armory show

on saturday i went to the armory show (big art show at the piers in midtown) with gabriel and ginny, who adopted me into their art-world circles so that i could get in for free. the few things that i liked were all drawings with a playful/cartoony element. i definitely like my art with a punchline. marcel dzama is the only name i'm remembering right now.

some of the more silly sights:

· a giant red watering can that played 'hey-ya.' there was a toddler trying to stick his face in it.
· a print/drawing of four large hourglasses, the first of which said 'art' on top and 'life' on the bottom. i was about to roll my eyes and walk away when i saw that the next one said 'mary-kate' and then 'ashley.' the one below that was '60 minutes' and 'nightline.' awesome. the last was lame, optimism and depression or something.
· a long, vertical print/drawing called 'the pen is mightier than the sword' but with the words broken up like this:

THE
PENIS
MIGHT
IER
THAN
THES
WORD

no doykee, says sean connery on SNL celebrity jeopardy.

kindergarten snack

my gooier, crunchier answer to last summer's hippie snack is nothing but kashi heart to heart cereal (same idea as cheerios, yet so much better) and whole foods 365 creamy peanut butter (just peanuts and salt) eaten with a spoon.

i could live on this stuff. also easy to eat while multitasking at work.

i fucking hate multitasking. it is a miserable perversion of ford's already miserable assembly line in which people do not one mindless thing repeatedly, but many mindless things at once, thus removing any possibility of order and ruining the (already tenous) zenlike joy some find in monotonous repetition.

some perspective

in my old life, i would get emotional over the problem of intimacy in artificial communities, and in defending students' right to talk about such things without censorship.

in my new life, i get emotional when my solution for the dangling modifier is not adopted.

well, i could go for a quirkier occupation, like the "mouth sounds expert" who is coming to the museum's event for pucker up, a new documentary about whistling that's supposed to be as charming as spellbound and best in show.

why worry? counting all the ages i have ever been, i've found that my mean age is 11.1. my median age is 12. so much lies ahead.

i don't have a mode. working on that.

lake tea party

lake tea party
Originally uploaded by grammar lammer.

dorothy and me at katie's lakehouse in TN last august. aren't dresses fun!

the chair that no one wanted

Originally uploaded by grammar lammer.

tonight i got a call from a giddy holly, who said, 'you'll never guess what i found.'

me: what, holly, what?

'the most fabulous chair. in the street,' says holly, who has a history of adopting chairs she finds on the street, particularly in the west village. there are four of the armless orange velvet variety currently inhabiting our apartment.

me: where are you?

holly: [giggling] the west village.

me: of course you are.

holly: it's blue corduroy and it's darling. as you know, i have no more space in my room for chairs i find in the street, so this one's yours.

me: ok, stick it in a cab and i'll pay you back. if i love it, great, if i hate it, we'll just stick it back on the street.

i hated it.

it's a component of a la-z-boy set. has that tier of fat floppy cushions, which holly described as 'vaginalike.' i took one look at this pathetic beast of a chair, grimaced, and there was much laughter. a photo shoot with Reject Chair and a somewhat baffled ed ensued. holly insisted on thoroughness before we parted with the chair, and so i was ordered to assume such poses as 'whistler's mother' as well as make various lovey-dovey faces at ed. five minutes after the chair was back in the street (which confused our brazilian doorman very much), the photos were transferred onto my ibook and i was winging it with the .2 iphoto skills i have to make a slide show. itunes automatically opened and allowed me to select a soundtrack, and so i picked what was already highlighted—the magnetic fields' 'absolutely cuckoo'—which, i must say, matched the mood of the chair photos quite well.

it's sort of sick that we have all these technologies set up so smoothly that i could instantly, effortlessly create a multimedia presentation about the chair that holly brought home from the street. and here i am posting it to my blog before the chair's even had time to get cold out there.

so, to see all twenty photos of the chair and us, click on either photo, and it'll take you to my flickr account. i'll get them up tomorrow, because all this instant gratification shit has gone too far.

so happy:

thanks for the sympathetic emails. it seems like things are straightened out. i went down there and got to talk to a reasonable woman. it's comforting to know that behind the formidable wall of the bureaucracy is a nice human being happy to sit down with me. i probably overreacted, going down there with a prepared speech (including the smart-alecky thinks i shouldn't ever say, like 'it would be lovely if i could see the future so that i could've known the post office would screw up, but if i could see the future, i wouldn't be applying to journalism school now would i?') and every piece of documentation i could think of, including my passport, but i am glad i can rest assured and start thinking about more interesting things. like the next book i want to read, on bullshit, by a princeton philosopher. see the new york times article.

so crappy:

my nyu app is being counted as late. when i called i got the troll of the graduate admissions office. you know the type--the unresponsive, dead-sounding admin lady whose every answer is constructed so that you'll hang up asap. she told me it was late and that i could send post office documentation but that it would only be 'added to my file,' end of story. i called back but i got her again, so i hung up.

i'm going down there during lunch with my whole pile of stuff to try and sort things out. i only hope i can get through to these people...my boss said you never know, sometimes screwups like this can help in the end because my application might land under the nose of someone important. eh. i'd like to think that. if i were of the 'footprints' mentality, i'd say it's all part of god's plan, but i'm much more of the onion mentality ('bullshit, god, those were my footprints'), and i can't shake the feeling that i'm pretty much fucked.

i'm a cock, i tell ya

my mother called just to tell me that it's the year of the rooster and therefore my "power year." you know, i thought i'd been so damn hyper because only this week did i return to all those postsurgery hallmarks of normalcy (going to the gym, walking more than four blocks at a time, packing a full pair of shoes when i go on trips), but you know, my recent emancipation from the binds of apapthy and juvenile tantrums must just be because the year of the rooster began yesterday. i mean, duh.

poll: has anyone ever heard or used the expression "no doykee" (pronounced "no DOY-kee") as an intensifier of "duh" and the slightly more confrontational "no duh"? it was common in my elementary school, and i want to know if it was a florida thing, or even a tallahassee thing, or even just a fad insult at my school? i.e., has anyone besides anna ever heard of it?

this came up because i have the occasional but very strong urge to use this phrase in formal situations, like, say, the meeting i'm about to go into here at work. adults, who didn't so much grow out of immaturity as learn how to sublimate it effectively (or ineffectively, as evidenced by the daily show's "great moments in punditry as read by children"), should really be more forthright with their disdain for others' opinions. except it would be dumb if i said "no doykee" to someone who didn't know what that meant. i mean, no doykee.

look at my adorable friends

brewton and ginny at joshua tree 12.20.01
Originally uploaded by grammar lammer.

finally, a photo hosting service that allows me to post directly to here, without those lame links to fotolog's weirdly sized pics and maddeningly backward apostrophes.

here are brewton and ginny at the joshua tree bar, near santa maria novella in florence. those are [brewton's host mom] manuela's fingers as she gestures at freddy, not shown.

this morning i was listening to NPR (guess i'm an adult now), and the news segment was an analysis of bush's proposed $250,000 "hard cap" on pain and suffering damages in medical malpractice suits. the segment was brief without sacrificing nuance, and it even suggested the kind of underlying cause that most newscasts avoid, the systemic kind that can't be swept away by one tidy piece of legislation. i could feel a deep love for public radio, nurtured by kodak-style dream sequences of our future together, taking root in my heart. the main point was that the malpractice liabilities that drive up doctors' insurance costs are not pain and suffering, but the actual fuckups that they make in treating people. this is not because the formerly rugged individualist physician archetype has been hijacked by a bevy of incompetent liberal ninnies unfamiliar with the maladies of jus' folks, but because medical advances over the past fifty years have created a lot more situations in which doctors can be blamed. (the example the newscast cited was that fifty years ago, diagnosing cancer early didn't matter; you were going to die anyway. now, in some cases, it can mean the difference between life and death.) in short, bush's proposed cap trivializes the problem and fails to remedy anything other than his shortage of policy initiatives to thump his chest over. all of which you could read in any times editorial, except they then played a statement from paul o'neill about how we live in an adversarial society where people think of misfortune as the fault of malevolent (suable) perpetrators.

brilliant. it is so true. i was at peace with the world this morning as i drank coffee and listened to my beloved NPR until, on the walk to work, some asshole (see? see? delusions of others' malevolence) gave a big rude honk, directed at the car in front of him, which was turning but letting me (the wronged victim, the girl in the legbrace) and others cross the street on our walk sign. angry at this small injustice even though the honker couldn't have known he was lashing out at the handicapped, i tumbled irretrievably into the me-first indignance of every pedestrian and motorist and everybody in new york, and now another day has been contaminated by arrogant suspicion of my fellow citydwellers. it's hard to go twenty feet without experiencing or even witnessing that emotion in others, which is a big part of my problem with new york. it's a hundred times more adversarial than any other place i've lived (which, admittedly, isn't so hard to do, considering i come from small-town florida and went to school in even-smaller-town davidson). i can understand how it happens here, because we're nine million people, all with our own agenda, crammed into such a tiny space. but i still don't like it, especially when i see it in myself.

i've started drinking my coffee black. amazing. my father told me this would happen, and i didn't believe him at the time, which was when i was like three and, although (involuntarily) not a coffee drinker then, i could not fathom a time when i would elect not to add sugar to something. i also am getting gray hairs, which i don't mind at all, but all i ask is that my body stop producing pimple-causing hormones. pimples AND gray hair is unreasonable.

eh. interview was yesterday. i'm not sure if i'll make it to the next round. this one was a preliminary with HR, and as i'm sure you all know, HR ladies are demons who think you need to be metaphysically aligned with whatever job they happen to be offering. when prodded, i will always admit that i prefer editorial to production. that is what HR ladies are there to do. prod.

the other day i saw a job ad for a copyeditor for something called mediamatters.org in dc. they correct and re-spin conservative misinformation in the media. i like the idea of promoting accuracy (see the institute for public accuracy), but it sounds like they only do it when it's to their advantage.

ah. and. once again, the onion presents a dark vision of what my life could one day be like: Someday, I Will Copyedit The Great American Novel.

also don't miss The Fabulous Friends: Conservative Christian Groups' Least-Favorite All-Star Cartoon. it's a bright day out there on the internet.

yeow

days when i actually do my job are taxing. which, nowadays, is many of them. which is why i'm in the market for a new job. if i'm constantly uninitiated, i'm never responsible, eh? i wouldn't mind being worked hard if it were something i cared about, and then this bourbon here i'm drinking (i never drink bourbon) would be celebratory rather than habit-forming.

so my newsgeek interview's tomorrow, and i'm going to find out exactly who these people are who put all the damn subscription cards so loosely in the magazine pages so that they fall out at all the wrong moments. i wonder if they are creepy or dignified. or artless. or look like litterers. or if they're just like the people at the museum, and if so, are they the nice reasonable ones or the scary bulldozing nincompoops?

i may be a newsgeek!

next week i'm interviewing for a production assistant opening at newsweek, which is, like, closer to my apartment than the museum. and pays much more. it's basically my job here but for their circulation dept (i.e., those pesky blow-in cards and other satellite pieces), but i figure it'd be wise to move to a magazine, and not a terribly embarrassing one at that (yes, i admit to scoping out elle decor when i saw an editorial opening there, but i just couldn't bring myself to apply). as for the voice internship option, i'm realizing it's merely a context for networking and wheedling assignments out of editors. in theory a job at newsweek provides the same context, as long as i can manage to hang out with editorial. or move there after a year.

not sure why my nyorker subscription notice is asking me what i've been doing this week to combat the despair of the nation and the world

i've been scurrying around trying to organize my head and my priorities by shuttling objects and bits of paper around my room. i feel inundated by Big Questions and i'm attempting to get a handle on them by controlling the messy little piles that consitute my life.

all i've really done is reconfigure the piles from my desk into slightly different piles on the ironing board, which is smelly and wasn't much help last night when i was facing off against two pairs of indefatigably wrinkly pants.

my pants are still wrinkled and i don't have any solutions.

i've determined that the world is both more and less arbitrary than i thought. more arbitrary because all of my striving produces nothing but sweat and illusions, and if it yields nothing, i'm more comfortable blaming my hair and not what's under it because i can change the former but not the latter. striving is more about self-esteem and getting through the day than willing into reality some idealized lamar who lives in the future. my thank-you note to the village voice will have no effect on the world or my place in it, and neither will the resume i just sent to newsweek....less arbitrary because there is logic to how things happen, it's just not always the logic i prefer.

why aren't there peppermint lollipops?

is it because peppermint was originally consumed in stick form, and the transition just never happened when the rounded starlight mint swept the nation?

the application is done and gone. now that i'm no longer fussing over personal statements and GRE absurdities, i can go back to fussing over (or putting off fussing over) bills, bank statements, cleanliness, orthopedic woes, food, items i can't afford, my netflix queue, and grammar. eh. maybe i should find more grad schools to apply to.

home stretch

soon my personal statement will be finished and i can go back to exercising and drinking beer. until then, i am fidgety sack of bones hell-bent on picking my brain for brilliant things to say.

buyblue.org

phew—tangueray, j crew, and netflix gave money to the democrats this year. starbucks and barnes & noble, evil as they are, did too. my mother won't like the news that saks gave $110,000 to the bushies.

eGREgious suffering

it was awful but it is over. i was not prepared for the absurdity of such arbitrary judgment exacted by an unfriendly computer terminal while being forced to sit on my butt for four hours, addled by hunger and frustration at the strange mentality that demanded repeatedly, cruelly, that i answer committee-formulated, whole-picture questions from an uninformed yet well-adjusted perspective.

the inanity of the princeton review's practice tests did not prepare me for the bludgeon that is ets mentality. extra stress on the mental there. here's an analogy to summarize my experience:

princeton review :: ets: cafe lolita :: a) kahlua b) everclear c) franzia d) a kahlua bottle that actually contains...heroin.

the correct answer is d).

ambitions in canary yellow

trying to make everything happen for my nyu app and trying to be articulate at the same time is making my brain hurt. it feels less like a race against the clock than a stampede traced on a flurry of post-its. maybe they would like an all-post-it grad school app.

re: diculousness of corporate titles

Did you know Les Moonves is the Co-President and Co-COO of Viacom?

Apparently he's not the only one.

actual sentence from a GRE practice reading comprehension

from the princeton review's test-prep cd (the novels in question are toni morrison's beloved and faulkner's absalom, absalom!):

"Both are considered by some critics a Bildungstroman, or coming-of-age novel. Morrison's Sethe and Faulkner's Quentin, find self-worth instead of relying on dominant society's values. Also, although using psychological realism plot style, both novels have a complex, experimental structure, using fragmented viewpoints to further the plot and juxtapose perspectives. I call this method psychological juxtapositioning."*

elsewhere in the passage, the author says morrison addresses the 'psychological affects of slavery,' a flub repeated in one of the questions. how disheartening to be trying to beat a test asking me to comprehend writing that belongs on engrish.com.

*this sentence is faithful to the original. i carefully typed all the errors as they appear in the test. just imagine one giant sic over the whole thing.

harper's rejection came in the mail yesterday. even tho i was prepared for it and had even already rationalized it away, it was still totally demoralizing. i had planned to start my nation letter and study for the GRE, but i just couldn't do it. so ed came over and we drank port with holly's theatRE friends and scarfed many varieties of chocolate.

well, i didn't get an elite internship, but i did get cute shoes for a steal on ebay. they are $240 mary janes made by birkenstock (i know! the nerve!), and i got them new for $60.

so really, my evening had happy ending. my dreams of catapulting into secret literary zones where no one makes excel charts were capitulated,* but as long as i'm pumping my meager paycheck back into the economy for identity-reaffirming goods, who cares? it's the beauty of the capitalist machine that you can't have bootstraps without first having boots.

*more slightly flubbed uses of GRE words coming soon

hopped up on coffee and calling insurance companies

i went to the rockefeller center postal service (amazing that i was able to distinguish it from all those mail-delivery-system-wannabe emotronica bands out there. cuz they're so hard to tell apart. just like wilco and those bible-belt fillin' stations of the same name. i never know who to ask for cigarettes and who to boogie to.) to mail some internship applications, and the concourse was crawling with tourists sucking on starbucks and becoming acquainted with the bathroom line and the concept of 'bathroom usher.' most people complain about tourists, but i've developed an affection for them. they are nice, pleasant people who are nearly always happy to be here. they have a sense of humor about being crammed up against each other in the elevator. and they walk slower than i hobble.

today i will do EVERYTHING.

heh heh.

forget liberal bias—butt bias is the real issue

"Astronomers took a closer look at Uranus, and found it stormy, with 'vigorous convective activity in the southern hemisphere'; they described the rings around Uranus as 'a layer of chunks.' " —Harper's Weekly Review

"Earlier human ancestors, like chimpanzees today, had pelvises that could support only a modest gluteus maximus, nothing like the strong buttocks of Homo." —New York Times

strong buttocks of homo . . . could be the tagline for the next abercrombie catalogue, or another suppressed lynne cheney novel going for $1,000 on ebay.

direction

i just registered for the GRE. i'm applying to NYU's cultural criticism & reporting program at the j-school so that i can learn how it's done from former voice and harper's editors. screw internships. i knew i was sluggish on applying to MFA programs for a good reason. writing isn't the thing i need schooling for; it's the body of knowledge cultural critics have that constitutes the gulf between my current job prospects and the ones i want to have. i just applied for an assistant editor job at parenting.com, and i don't think they want to hear about how their advertiser-driven content is part of the slow but pernicious brain-warping that causes people to rely on purchases for emotional meaning.

this morning on the way to work a lady with a headset wouldn't let me get within fifty feet of my building. they were shooting a movie, and i had to stand on the sidewalk until a silver car ostensibly containing matthew mcconaughey pulled up to the 21 club. they stopped all the real pedestrians so that the extras who were skillfully playing new yorkers could bustle past and ignore the movie set. i'm really good at ignoring movie sets, and i'll be good at bustling once my cast comes off tomorrow, so they should pay me to walk and fro in front of work.

activists are normally such understated, delightful people

(from the open newswire) "Students and activists interrupted the launch of Victoria's Secret's 'Angels Across America' tour today with a rowdy protest by people dressed in angel wings and lingerie and wielding chainsaws, and including a large banner reading 'Victoria's Secret: Their Catalogs Destroy Endangered Forests.' "

i've been googling for independent press outfits that look interesting enough to ask for a job. it occurred to me today that although interning at a literary magazine certainly would be more relevant to my interests than my current job, i might have better luck trying to work for some indy paper or indy media advocacy group. unfortunately, alternet is out in san francisco with mother jones, and they're the ones who are really legit and on top of their game. so i googled for ny organizations and came up with indypress.org, whose superearnest populism i recognized from some distant freakfest my memory had muddled with bust, bitch, butch, and all the other self-marginalized media i came across in college. three clicks later the words 'campus alternative journalism awards' brought it all back. russ and i entered libertas my junior year, and after i wrote our application and spent ten minutes on the phone explaining to some indypress fellow in arizona why we didn't just write off the meatheads and the godsquad at our school even though, yes, they were funny—oops, of course i meant 'poisonous'—russell the love muscle and i were shocked by the kind of tripe they hailed as winners. and we were proud to have lost.

i don't think i will ask them for a job. i want to be independent of corporate control, but i also want to be independent of sucking.

discovery!! followed by democracy in scare quotes

the #2 bran muffin in the new york metro area is a four-minute hobble from my apartment. (#1 lives at phoebe's, the cafe that is unassumingly neither too cute nor too scruffy and very assumingly near ed, and is delicious toasted with butter.) this muffin is bran fig, and it has big, spaced apart crumb-units, as though it's made of a larger sub-muffitomic particle, that are buttery but not too sweet. satisfying big rough-textured muffin top, too.

i voted in midtown manhattan this morning. crazylong line all the way down the block, understaffed voting center, mysterious vending machines full of crayons. never a better time to be on crutches. one guy working saw me and said, honey, you sit down, we'll get you to the front of the line. it then took fifteen minutes for him to communicate to the only other person working the lines that he had someone on crutches and could she get through.

my boss voted on the upper west side, where they had only one machine per district and no one to move along the hundreds of disgruntled voters more efficiently. you'd think in a city with thousands of ATMs we could manage voting at least competently. ATMs even give receipts. how hard could it be to write software that would allow the sweet juices of our beloved republic to course through every city's ATM system for one day every four years?

i think kerry will win the election, but who knows if he'll become president.

when i got to work this morning i discovered a big brownish-yellow stain on the side of my blue corduroys. this stain, invisible in the yellow light of my apartment, is glaring and gross in the fluorescent light of the office. mmm, scary to think what i would find if i systematically wore my entire wardrobe to work. i just hope no one notices, because any attempt to explain it would land me in the slob's catch-22. either i know about the stain and a) don't care or b) none of my other pairs of pants is any cleaner OR i have revealed myself as someone who thinks i can get away with avoiding laundry even when i have spilled coffee all over myself.

nothing to be done but eat cookies for breakfast.

last night i went to a book party i was invited to through class. my prof edited this book, food for the soul: selections from the church of the apostles soup kitchen writers' workshop, which has an intro by ian frazier because he runs the workshop. a bunch of the writers read, but it was hard to understand them without a copy of the book because they either stood too close to the mic or too far away, had thick foreign accents, or were retarded. the stories were pretty much what you'd expect from a soup kitchen's writers' workshop, except for one woman with this beautiful voice. she was a tall, striking, mulatto ex–manic depressive alcoholic drug user who was sharp. perfect for an oprah segment only much deeper and more real. she sang her own song about hard times and grace and god in the soup kitchen and everyone cried.

mainly i went to the party to confirm that there was no point in going; otherwise i would've convinced myself that i had missed my chance to meet X harper's or new yorker editor, or at the very least, my mom's friend's writer son who told me about the prof whose class i'm taking now. being connected with him seemed to offer some promise last november when i called him for advice (he said he got my prof her job at the new yorker), and i've felt really stupid for never following up and sending him the piece i said i would. so i was looking forward to asking my prof about him and maybe finally meeting him. after spending most of the reception talking to other students of limited interest, i found my prof and asked her if he was here, and she was like, 'oh him? he's nutso! i love him to death, but last time i saw him, he showed up to a thing with his dog and was flipping out about how the world was going to end.' she then introduced me to a retard writer and moved on.

awesome.

born-again ankle

i just got back from the orthopedist's, where the nurse removed my bigheavy splint and gave me a cast. she tore apart the splint and the buttload of cotton i had sort of suspected was in there, and afterward it looked as if my foot had very forcefully hatched itself out of a giant cocoon.

there were all kinds of crazy used casts lined up on a shelf. there was a little mermaid, a kermit, a green cast with googly eyes and a tongue flap just where the toes come out, and a virgin mary done in sequins. i chose baby blue for mine. if i were a cast-plaster manufacturer, i'd sell wraps in stripes (brown and baby blue, of course) and license designer logos like luis vuitton and the burberry plaid so that sufferers of orthopedic trauma no longer must give up their brand loyalty in such difficult times. when you can wear only one designer shoe, you've got to make up for it somehow.

i just looked at my insurance website and discovered that i have a $6,000 tendon in my foot. whoa. it was itemized under 'prostheses.' my ankle has become my priciest accesory.

first day back at work and it is quiet. i'm the only one who didn't leave for lunch. it's usually the opposite. i didn't expect this, but crutching around the office makes me feel sort of pathetic. something to do with the way the crutches blend in with all the gray plastic in here. and how their rhythmic creak can be heard over the hum of computers and kitchenette appliances.

last week's recovery was an excellent break from work. i got my harper's intern app done friday (ed took it down there for me and, through an entertaining series of snafus in their office's system for receiving packages, actually ended up putting it in the hands of the man who will read it), which astounds me, because i never really believed i would hand it in. this weekend i had dreams about telling my boss i'm leaving. in between dreams involving accidental walking and what my stitches look like.

here you can see a video of jon stewart's appearance on crossfire.

if that link doesn't work try this one.

another friend getting married! let's see, now that's one from childhood, one from high school, one from college, and one from study abroad. i find this awfully...symmetrical. i don't keep up with anyone from summer camp, so who's it gonna be next?

arise, frankenfoot!

is my daily incantation for keeping my new, post-operative ankle elevated. for those of you who knew i was going to have my right ankle surged upon by an orthopedic surge-on this thursday past, i am ok and my new clubfoot and i are getting on fine. on those of you who didn't know, i bestow the relief of never having worried.

the surgery was for ligament repair (i had ligaments so stretched and barely there i needed a tendon transfer, i.e., a tendon from a dead person, hence the frankenfoot nickname, coined by greg, to give all credit where credit is due), took four hours, and will keep me on crutches for 6 weeks. the foot is bigger than my face and will be pacified by narcotics (great buzz when combined with coffee, fyi) for a few more days. i'm taking the same class of hydrocodone that got rush limbaugh in trouble...it was that or the robert downey jr–endorsed vicadin, a prescription i could still fill if i were into spending a week of my life doing some truly mind-bending dvd watching. in all seriousness, i think skipping work, lying around my apartment, and taking federally controlled substances is just the break i need to attack that harper's internship application i keep saying i'm gonna do.

leave comments with netflix recommendations or costume ideas for my foot and me for halloween.