August 2011
4 posts
SIMILARLY DISGUSTING
CULTURAL STUDIES
T-Pain’s bar logic (“Ooh, she made us drinks to drink, we drunk ‘em, got drunk”) bears a striking resemblance to one of the early New York tabloid police report subjects I read about last week:
William Smith (alias Fitz), “got drunk by drinking too much.” The magistrate informed him that this was the way in which people always got drunk, and admonished him to...
UNSOLVED MYSTERY
Here I am on the phone with my mom last Saturday, providing some visual analysis of this weird pod we found. She thought it might be carob, so I emailed her a photo for confirmation— just in case. Her response:
Hi Hon,
Not sure what it is. What I thought it might be rom [sic] your description wold [sic] have been much skinnier in proportion. Cool though but don’t eat it!
Love,
...
July 2011
3 posts
.
I sent this to myself on the train to Hudson on Friday. It’s what the guy-behind-me said his job was.
Copying sentences from university program websites into open emails can result in what to me is indistinguishable from most contemporary poetry:
Sociologists
refer
to
the
practice
of
connecting
with
like-minded
individuals
as
“homophily.”
Complex systems scholars
refer
to
ant hills
and
epidemics
as though
both
were just
two
drops of water.
June 2011
8 posts
SMART.FUNNY.NICE
When I meet a person, I often plot their personality into a mental Venn diagram that I call SMART.FUNNY.NICE. We can all agree that the best people are the ones who display all three of these virtues, to a high degree, with great consistency. We can also all agree that the worst people are the ones who display none of these three virtues, to a high degree, with great consistency (“The...
NULL SET
It’s when I’m walking that I think of the good ideas that will not pay me and see the bad ones that will; shoes wear out quickly when you operate this way. I don’t know what the alternative is to constant repair, so I keep going back to the same barking men who don’t recognize me at first without my glasses and then tell me I look better without them.
It’s one of...
KILLING BIRDS
It’s an utter disgrace that I was forced to construct my own visor while in the city of Boston, Massachusetts. I was always under the impression that if Boston was good for anything, it was visors. Apparently not: they’re nowhere to be found up here.
Visors are a non-negotiable summer accessory if you have blonde hair and know anything about multi-tasking.
SWISSISM
The best sort of cat is a British Shorthair cat. I believe them to be very intelligent, and they do not scream.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
It’s been two months now. Gotta stop re-googling “wired magazine + goldfinger”.
I SWEAR!
I’m cutting apart pages and rearranging paragraphs on the floor. The AC is on as high as it will go. For a minute, there was an actual cyclone of footnotes. I moved the chair so I could take a video, but they all just fell to the ground, and I now I can’t recreate the conditions.
ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MINERAL
A fun game to play with yourself is Literalizing Terms of Endearment. Sit back, close your eyes, and raise your interior voice a few octaves…
Now, imagine a honeybee. Tell it you love it. Picture a pumpkin. Urge it to hurry along to school. Envision sugar (cube-form is best, but your call). Whisper that you can’t wait to see it later.
Cool, right?
NOT GOING TO SCALE THIS
About to leave for the Whitney to confirm/deny for myself the genius of Cory Arcangel’s prankishness. I’m flipping though an old notebook to bring with me, tearing out already-scribbled-on pages. Scrawled in You Know Who’s handwriting is the following:
how you could love someone more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things
...
March 2011
2 posts
REFRESH RETURNS APRIL 29TH
leoncrawl:
TOM SCOCCA
KEYHOLEZ
JULI WEINER
AKIVA GOTTLIEB
ALICE GREGORY AND MOLLY YOUNG
—Happy Ending Bar, 8pm, free—
I HOPE THIS FINDS YOU WELL... THANKS!
I swear to God, if there’s not at least $3,000 worth of checks waiting for me when I get home tonight, I’m going to send some polite emails.
This is the funniest (and truest) construction. I say it to myself (and mean it) every single day.
February 2011
2 posts
NEVER DO THIS
“It’s not like you want to be [insert some less than respectable thing here], or maybe you do. I don’t know. What I’m saying is…”
The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of the Universe
secondbalcony:
How lucky are we that you can’t make a portmanteau out of literati, glitterati?
January 2011
7 posts
YEAH, SURE
The other day Molly said a very wise thing. “Jesus,” she exhaled, “why is that girl complaining about writing? It’s not like a day laborer goes around whining about their cramps.” Indeed. They do not.
I like thinking up occupational equivalences to plug into The Idea I Probably Hate Most In The World, which is when authors say that their stories “write...
SWISSISMS
Tell me a good novel. All I read nowadays is the philosophy that takes 15 minutes for a page.
You can be on the same antidepressors, yes, but still not of the same air.
I’ll marry him — not for the castle — but to finally have a particle in my name.
LOOKS LIKE A SHARK
Every podcast I listen to is now sponsored by the Hyundai Equus. Apparently, it has heated seats and something that has something to do with iPads. But what a terrible name. Equus. Are cars even still measured in horsepower? Does Equus imply one or multiple horses? I really hope multiple. The whole thing reminds me of driving with my little sister, who was tiny — maybe 5 at the time. She...
December 2010
6 posts
IS THERE ANYTHING BETTER?
You relay a series of terrible interactions with a person to a neutral friend. They break it down for you simply, revealing some hidden subtext, and say, “that’s all this is.”
REVISIONIST FICTION
In my future daughter’s younger and more vulnerable years I will give her some advice that she will turn over in her mind evermore. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” I will tell her, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had. They know not to lie about the things you do.”
THINGS THAT BEGET OTHER THINGS
The first rule you teach a kid with a lemonade stand (or a homeless person) is to start out the day with some money already in your cup. Customers (or Samaritans) will see the dollar bills and be more inclined to purchase (or donate). You just look more legitimate this way.
I think the same logic might apply to email. The other day, I went through my inbox and opened all my unread mail, 100% of...
ALL GOOD THINGS
See it if you’re the kind of person who remembers how cool that brand Trovata seemed like it was going to be when it was launched all those years ago. I was in high school. They’re post-9-11, but only just. Their whole shtick was California-surfers-temporarily-back-east-at-boarding-school. Or so they said. In reality, they just went to town with the contrast stitching and...
NESTING
Harriet was trying to explain to Sport how to play town. “See first you make up the name of the town. Then you write down the names of all the people who live in it. You can’t have too many or it gets too hard. I usually have twenty-five.”
That’s the opening of Harriet the Spy, and from it I’ve always extrapolated a really neat fantasy of what suburban living is...
November 2010
20 posts
GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS
Your skirt should never be shorter than your fingertips. It’s guaranteed to be unflattering and uncomfortable. That might not be something you’re able to articulate, but you know it intuitively to be true. Check next time you get dressed. Likewise, there’s a certain invisible mark on the back of all girls with long hair that only we ourselves can see. It’s the only reason we ever get...
THE LAST OF THE WRATH
The defense of Impressionist art — that in thinking it’s boring or tacky, you’re reacting to its overeproduction, not the quality of the work itself — is a flimsy one. I think it’s valid to be suspect of anything so vague and noncontroversial: blurry flowers, blurry pretty girls, blurry sunsets. I’m glad for Impressionist art though; it gives me something...
WHY DON'T YOU...
-Buy, and subsequently return, an American Apparel sweatshirt each time you’re cold? It’s very comforting to have a gift card in your wallet that can warm you up at a moment’s notice.
-Go to the supermarket once per week and just never unpack your groceries from the trunk? If you live in the Northeast and drive a car and it’s winter, there’s no point; they’ll...
HOW TO BE HONEST - wikiHow
Some people have faces that match their names, others do not. If you’re of the latter category — as I am — just try experimenting with simple typos. See what works, you know? “Alcie Gregoyr” is way closer to what I look like, and I know it.
RODS N CONES
Eye-rubbing — like nail-biting and word-mumbling — only seems deranged when other people do it. When I emerge from these private fits — manic, vision seared — I’m quick to self-defend. Look, I suction latex disks onto my eyeballs every day and then dab what basically amounts to black paint around the whole area. What do you expect?
EDUCATION REFORM
If I ran the GREs, I would require test-takers to write concise plot summaries of late James novels. It’s a skill that implies all sorts of other skills. There’s a good example embedded here. Maybe for the analytical writing section, the concise plot summaries could turn to haiku. For example:
Widower sent to/Paris on a grand mission/toothpicks, artifice
A precocious girl/a tonal...
CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
A. Swab entire body in rubbing alcohol, eliminating even the faintest traces of natural oil, and then re-moisturize with a very emollient lotion.
B. Dehydrate yourself by weeping for a few days, and then restore that lost water weight with beer.
SAD CLOWN
I quit my job last week, which means so many great things that I can’t even begin to list them. I could probably ham the feeling up with some real New Testament language if I wanted. But office-related misery breeds a really specific (and really worthy, I think) kind of writing. I fear that in the absence of circumstantial, semi-suicidal feelings, I might no longer have access to it.
For...
GERMAN MAG'S SICK MADDIE JOKE
Thanks, LDB! My ever-reliable foreign aggregator…
I’M NOT HERE TO MAKE FRIENDS
A good strategy for getting out of social obligations is to call the person with whom you have plans and dismantle the prospective engagement, making it sound as though it consists of many separate grievances. Exaggerate blocks to be walked, list each subway transfer, plant the possibility of a wait time, remind them the place doesn’t take reservations, say the G isn’t running even when it is. Be...
MAN UP
There’s a crosswalk at 69th between 1st and 2nd where a few strategic pixels in the digital walk sign are missing, so the figure looks really scrawny. I pass it every day, and each time I’m disturbed. It belongs to the same register of horror as when 50 Cent lost all that weight or how you can really only tell how slight the skeleton of a poodle is when it’s soaking wet.
ON GNARLS BARKLEY, FROM A GUY I KNOW:
I hear music like this, and I feel like I’m out buying a pair of jeans.
