impt
So I’m on this flight from NYC to Charlotte today, it’s super-delayed on the tarmac and I’m sitting next to two people about my age who did not know each other but talked so loud that I shared that ugh i know ARE THEY EVEN HUMAN? look about them with two separate people. I would give some examples of their conversation but it would be too painful for me to revisit. Okay wait I can’t help but remember: the girl kept joking about us being in the exit row and DYING and when there was turbulence she was like, “Am I going to have to pull this lever?” (to open the door!) and I had just read that fucking, fucking article about the french guys crashing the plane in the Atlantic and it was all I could think about (this plane crashing) meanwhile this unstable woman with a extra large coolatta was making jokes about pulling open the goddamn emergency exit.
Anyway so halfway through I really have to pee and I’m telling myself stuff like, “Okay, as soon as you finish this chapter, you can pee.” (along with musing about how I’d react if I found out the plane was going down) Then I realized I could pee when I wanted because I am an adult human so I put my book away and started sheepishly assessing the situation. See, the seatbelt light was on but I always forget if that means Don’t move around or, Fine move around but if you’re sitting down, put on your seatbelt. I figured it was the latter because that’s what I wanted so I found a way to justify it. Then I looked right and left. No one was up and about to reassure me I wouldn’t get “in trouble.” I craned my neck to see what the fight attendi were doing. They buckled in in the back, but I decided to LIVE ON THE EDGE and then to go to the bathroom in the front since it was closer and there was some turbulence but fuck it right? I’m an adult.
So I got up half-expecting to get yelled at (as always) but creeped on forward in my newish boots and then stopped and stood frozen under the glowing green bathroom sign when I couldn’t find the fucking door to push in and crawl inside. Ahhh. I felt the eyes of every human on the plane on me while I squinted into dark corners and wondered if I was about to walk into the cockpit . but was like whatever guys, I can do this. Then a flight attendant from the back GRABS THE MIC and says in a fluster, JUST A REMINDER THAT THE FIRST CLASS LAVATORIES ARE RESERVED FOR FIRST CLASS PASSENGERS ONLY.
Cut to me wandering around first class like a lost puppy. This lady is basically telling me, from the back of the plane, over the loudspeaker to get the fuck out of the first class section. WHAT? So I SPIN around on my heels (rather amazingly I might add) to face THE ENTIRE PLANE, shrug dramatically and say SORRY EVERYONE! in the most teenage, sarcastic tone of voice. I don’t even know where this audacity came from. But I saw this sea of faces staring at me and rolling their eyes at the situation and laughing with me and literally like, making little comments of solidarity as I walked past. Like I just committed this brave act, crossing enemy lines to pee into a little toilet vacuum. I mean people were truly making eye contact and saying like, “Come ON!” and, “Oh like they are all just LINED UP up there waiting to get into the bathroom!” And I just nodded and shrugged and wanted to like, high five everyone as I cruised by, but instead made some kind of bad kid in the back of the class type of dramatic exhalations then sauntered, victoriously, all the way to the back of the godforsaken plane, where the flight attendants would not look at me, and peed in my proletariat toilet (proletoilet).
Anyway there was total class warfare going on in the sky somewhere over, I dunno, Virginia, today and it was amazing.
9:30 pm • 21 December 2011 • 129 notes
“I learned that money can be a lot of things. It can be something that is hoarded, fought over, protected, stolen and withheld. Or it can be like an energy, fueled by the desire, will, creative interest, need to laugh, of large groups of people. And it can be shuffled and pushed around and pooled together to fuel a common interest, jokes about garbage, penises and parenthood.”
— Louis C.K. sold over 100k copies of his special, making more than $500k.
10:56 pm • 13 December 2011 • 142 notes
“When I’m at work on a story, I never compose paragraphically. I write stand-alone sentences. I might fixate on three or four sentences a day. I’ll enlarge them to at least twenty-six-point type on the screen. I’ll futz around in their vitals, recontour their casings, and work a kind of reverse cosmetology on them to bring out any defining defects or birthmarks or swoonworthy uglinesses and whatnot. Only much later will one such sentence overcome its aloofness or diffidence and begin to make overtures to another sentence, which might be pages and pages away in the draft. The sentences eventually band together into paragraphs. The paragraphs, to me, are nervous little cliques or sororities of like-natured outcasts who put up with each other despite the friction. There’s a lot of rubbing the wrong way and very little mating of a peaceable kind. Getting something that might pass itself off as a story out of these uneasy alliances is in fact a pretty maddening and brutal ordeal. Among my deficiencies is a freaky neurological setup that keeps me from seeing wholes. So all I can see are parts, pieces, flickery fragments. I will never be up to writing a novel. It’s all I can do to even read one.”
— oh, Gary Lutz. I love him, or his sentences, and his sad sad recurring themes, so much. But I also want to shake him. Stop putting your sentences in 26-point font, Gary. You deserve to be happy.
9:29 pm • 13 December 2011 • 130 notes
“People have to understand that their short-term decision to save a couple bucks undermines their long-term interest in their community and vital, real-life literary culture.”
— Tom Perrota re: Amazon.
12:18 pm • 13 December 2011 • 96 notes
Nuclear Football
During their presidencies, both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan preferred to keep the launch codes in their jacket pocket. On one occasion, Jimmy Carter left nuclear launch codes in his suit when it was sent in for dry cleaning.
10:20 pm • 7 December 2011 • 16 notes
christ-the-retweeter:
Let’s Move To The Country - Smog
Let’s start a
Let’s have a
This song has been in my head all day. We went to buy a Christmas tree, we ended up with a real one, and by that I mean not what I envisioned, which was one you put on a little table or a stool or something. It was $55 dollars. We both stood there wavering. Of course we want a Christmas tree but we know there are better things to spend you’re money on. This is silly. I won’t even be here on Christmas. But we split it, dividing our cash up and standing there for a while, too long, watching everyone else, not talking to anyone or asking to be helped. “Is this how much Christmas trees are normally?” “In New York, yes.” “Yeah, but—” “No, in the rest of the world you go out into the woods and chop one down — ” “And it’s like 20 bucks right?” “Not even.”
This is our myth we’re already building about what life would be like outside of here. That we’d go out into the woods and cut down a tree for $5 instead of stand here in what is usually, I think, a barren fountain or a dog park, in the middle of a big intersection, surrounded by $60 trees, our view a highway overpass, a diner, a gas station, and a few bars. We felt foolish. Or young. Or new. Which was nice, too, granted.
A couple with a little baby took pictures of each other in front of some of these trees and two friends buying a table tree asked the tree guy to take their picture. “Everyone’s trying to have a moment here, on this street corner. It’s sad.” I stood up on the edge of the dried up fountain, where I could reach to kiss his temple. “Are you trying to have a moment?” “No.” I jumped down. Someone took the tree we wanted. We’d been standing there 10 minutes, watching these weird swarms of bugs fly around and wondering how they got there, if they lived in the trees. I wondered if they were what in Louisiana they called “no see ‘ems.” This wasn’t a word used in my family but a word I’d hear my friends say, so that I never wholly got a grip on what no see ‘ems were, yet appreciated the sentiment, and have spent the rest of my life turning the phrase over in my head and wondering if what I’m seeing are no see ‘ems (as you can imagine, a bit of a conundrum).
We got our $55 tree and walked proudly home, across the street from the couple with the little red-haired baby (“a ginger baby!” “I knew you were gonna say that. I knew.”) who did not, as it turns out, buy a $55 Christmas tree. They just went over there with their stroller and took some pictures.
(via christ-the-retweeter-deactivate)
7:41 pm • 4 December 2011 • 60 notes
This has been reissued and it is so great. I bought it tonight, among other things that it turns out i hate and want to throw away (I’m terrible at music. TERRIBLE.) While I was in line a man hovering near me bumped into me while I wasn’t looking and then patted my arm and apologized very intensely. Then he asked me what records I was getting. WHAT. I guess this is how it works. I mean, I’ve seen movies but some guy asking you what records you’re getting is a thing you always imagine is about to happen but never does and really, never should, if you ask me. I mean what am I supposed to do? Hug the records to my chest and say, “no I’m not going to show you.” god. I just kind of half heartedly flipped through them and even skipped the last one because I wanted to what, show him who was boss? I don’t know. Anyway he said he bought this Charlie brown thing too. ALLEGEDLY. I dunno what I said. But he will never know what my last record was. (it was a smog record that it turns out is “early” smog and not warbly enough for me. I am so filled with regret. I hate everything).
12:41 am • 4 December 2011 • 55 notes
