Life is hard. Here is someone.

Can’t stop won’t stop

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:01:18 -0500

Can’t stop won’t stop

I feel the need to catch everyone up because recently people...

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:20:00 -0500

I feel the need to catch everyone up because recently people have started sincerely asking me what’s new and if I’m happy and that makes me feel like obviously I am not writing about my life on the internet enough.

Just to get you up to speed, the soup I made was Orangette’s broccoli soup. It was very good. Well, I think so. I made it and Dustin was very enthusiastic about it but I found myself just sort of shrugging, then remembering that I don’t really “get” soup. You just sit there eating this puree of things that is basically just a very fancy warm liquid, which, sure, I love liquid as much as the next person but it doesn’t really beat out food on my list of things to put in my body (it’s a short list, that one. I won’t go into the rest of it here).

Anyway so I did sit there wishing I was eating the actual food (broccoli, leeks, butter) itself but still eating many bowls of it. And it was indeed better the next day (womp womp, SOUUUUUP, better the next day! ugh, shut up I hate that). A few days later I even got a phone call that basically went like, “Guess how much of the soup I just ate?” “How much?” (there was like, a quart of soup left) “ALL OF IT.” He requested that we put this soup in our vows, and we don’t even have vows. That is our only vow: to make this soup. At least one more time. So I guess it was a success in that regard. Do you like liquid broccoli? Well do I have a soup for you! (It’s actually very good soup.)

A week or so later, because I have misplaced ambition, I made the 44-clove garlic soup. Now THIS soup I can get behind. Mostly because 44 cloves of garlic cannot really be eaten without being put through the souping process. You roast half of the garlic (roasted garlic: the best thing. And yes I deeply resented having to put that amazing roasted garlic in a damn bucket of liquid) and then peel the other half, which is a perfect opportunity to do the two bowl magic trick! We did it and it worked and our hearts were filled with a joy known only to people who have better lives! After you let it cook in broth for awhile and then PUREE it like it’s really ill-advised baby food, it tastes unlike anything that really exists! Well, that and garlic. It is creamy without having much cream. It’s not even that garlicky! Your coworkers will ask what is in your soup and you will say, “44 cloves of garlic,” and smile knowing you are about to blow their motherfucking minds. It’s a conversation starter, this soup. And for that, I will abide it.

It bears mentioning, however, that I did feel a little “crazy, maybe in a good way” after I ate this soup. My heart was beating fast? I googled “garlic overdose” and there were many results? Mostly from people like me writing into insane forums? But I did not die.

Soup aside, things are good. Great, even. I feel like we are really beating this winter thing. Like maybe we have evolved past it (by ruining the planet). But also a part of me feels guilty and is waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like maybe this means winter will come in March and stay til June? I’m scared. Happy but scared.

I also have a false sense of confidence lately that this year is the year that I have mastered winter. Mostly because winter has meant 44 degrees. These are my new winter Things that I am using as a defense against seasonal affective disorder:

Clementines. Literally 5 a day.
Wool socks. Why did it take me so long? WHYYYYY?
Buying flowers (see above). This was my new year’s resolution. I know. My ambition truly knows no bounds.
I dunno, soup?

Really just, “clementines,” though. Fuck these root vegetables. Go back where you came from (the ground). We went to the farmer’s market today and I thought it would be great and we’d get some kind of Life merit badge for just even being there at this point but THERE WASN’T EVEN CELERIAC. Fuck everything.

Oh, and if you see my theme — ha. I just accidentally deleted everything and now it’s some insane one from like 2004 (2004 in Tumblr years is like, ‘09).

WHAT ELSE?

Philadelphia was fun! It was a trip that gave you that trip feeling you wish all trips gave you (and this point I am just saying “trip” again to fuck with you), where it falls outside of good or bad and just felt necessary and right and new. I want to ride a train again soon.

This sign made me so excited. It’s so perfect.

I wanted to go back to school. My stomach jumped peering in classroom windows. We sat with Arielle and had tea. I was sure no one would come. Who did we know there? We made that book so long ago. But the first person who came was a backer, a stranger, who never actually got her book in the mail (oy, oy, oy) but who was still so great. And there were dozens (I mean, at least two dozen? Probably) of people there. And we had this little outline of what we wanted to say and got through it so quickly and there we were, 10 minutes in to our 60 minute talk. We flailed in a way we reassured ourselves after wasn’t completely perceptible but could have been. But there was much to talk about. And Melissa is going to keep doing great things with this thing we started, and I feel good about it. I want to cheer from the sidelines but I can’t help getting all caught up again, talking about this thing that practically consumed our lives for a year.

Afterward college-aged ladies came up to us declaring their nervousness, and their awkwardness, and I got to declare it back, and sign their books, not knowing what to write or if I should sign my last name? That felt odd. We ate crackers and I asked some girls if it would be awkward to eat a deviled egg and I think we all agreed that yes, the eating of deviled eggs in mixed company was an inherently self-effacing experience but completely worth it. Then one girl asked me for relationship advice. Sex advice even? I had had enough wine to actually answer. When I called my boyfriend after I told him about this and he found it quite hilarious. He asked if I could give him sex advice some time. Sure, I said. Then Melissa and I stayed up late talking and ate clementines in the morning and I went straight back to work, feeling new.

The sun sets 1 minute later every day, you know. At least according to this calendar I stare at when I am feeling hopeless. We are making it! On March 11th the sun won’t set til 7pm. FYI.

I really hope they meant “underappreciated.” Poor...

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:56:29 -0500

I really hope they meant “underappreciated.” Poor Jim Harrison.

Eeep!

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:39:34 -0500

Eeep!

Let’s play a game called, “Which Soup Should I Make?” Parsnip soup. Broccoli...

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:17:00 -0500

Let’s play a game called, “Which Soup Should I Make?”

If I make the soup you voted for, I will send you the soup.

(Not really.)

an email I am about to send:

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:21:02 -0500

Did you open up a Word doc on my computer, a sort of embarrassingly poem-ish thing actually, about DYING, and change the title to, “Don’t You Eat All of My Leeks”? Or did I call it that myself, for some reason I am no longer in touch with?

Plz advise.

Coming & Crying: January 25 at Kelly Writers House: Feminism/s presents Melissa Gira Grant and Meaghan O'Connell

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:04:11 -0500

Coming & Crying: January 25 at Kelly Writers House: Feminism/s presents Melissa Gira Grant and Meaghan O'Connell:

comingandcrying:

January 25, 2012
6pm
Kelly Writers House
3805 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Join us (Melissa and Meaghan) at Kelly Writers House to talk Coming & Crying, writing, feminism, and ladybiz. There will be a reception and there will be books!

If you live in Philadelphia, come hang out with us at the Kelly Writer’s House, which as I understand it is a very utopian little place at UPenn which is, among other virtues, employer to thewordunheard.

Hopefully some of you live in the area and are up for some awkward conversation!

2011

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 17:59:00 -0500

There is a bobby pin on the ground outside of the front door of our apartment building. It’s sitting on the concrete steps and what’s notable about this bobby pin is it has been there for at least a month. At least! I remember seeing it in its earliest days of being there and smiling to myself, thinking it probably came out of my hair when I was putting on a winter hat on the way out the door. Now I check for it most times I come in the door. The very fact that I haven’t stopped to pick it up all these days, all these trips to and from the apartment, fills me with a little thrill. I smile to myself wondering if D has noticed it, if he’s also figured it was mine, if he laughs too that no one has picked it up, and also if he, too, is a little thrilled by his own refusal to bend down and grab it. Why has it not blown away, or been kicked away, or carried away by that stray cat that sometimes walks with another cat, side-by-side, tails intertwined, through our backyard?

I didn’t look today. Maybe it’s gone.

I also have this situation with the soap in our shower, wherein we had a tiny circle left of our last soap, and it was bright yellow, and the new soap is white, so I have been trying to make it so the yellow disc of soap will become one with the big, white soap, that it will meld in and stick in the middle, and that this big soap entity will look like an egg with a yolk. I’m sorry to say, though, that it isn’t working. Every time I’m in the shower I run it into the water and sort of pet it gently hoping they’ll melt a little and combine, but then as soon as I go to use the soap they come unglued and I have to start over.

But I do start over. And those are my goals for 2012: continue to see the bobby pin on the cement steps and laugh; one day realize my dream soap amalgam.

I feel like sitting with small, important things like this are all I did this year, day in and day out. I thought a lot about writing but did not write. I read a lot, but nothing I need to recount here besides sitting up in bed reading next to each other before bed is all we usually need. If I am having a particularly bad go of things (ie, I saw Drive that week and was thinking too much about Death), we read out loud. Or sang, in the middle of the night, what we remembered of 69 Love Songs. I continued to be terrible at music but we now have a record player that makes our house feel more like a home and feels meditative and right. During the same week that I thought to myself that I missed living alone and singing in my apartment, he told me he liked to hear me sing (I’m laughably bad). So I have tried to forget myself and do it anyway. We cooked. I even brought my lunch to work a few times (bringing my lunch to work is pretty much the primary aspiration of my life). We made cookies and smoothies and oatmeal and pesto and pizzas and thanksgiving dinner for our families and popcorn for our Christmas tree. We learned to not really cook together, because we are controlling know-it-all’s. We learned I’m terrible when I’m too hungry (“hangry”) and he’s terrible in the morning. I taped Jolie’s list of how to keep your apartment clean on our fridge for months and we really almost did it. We become decent, dish-doing people in spurts. And then things go to shit and we decided that’s okay. That is, I cried a little, facing the idea that yes, I’m not a Clean Person even though I’d been trying to keep up appearances every since we met. But this is us and how we live, and that’s okay. At some point this year we became a family. I stopped drinking coffee, which was a bit of a betrayal (I got him to come home with me the first time by telling him I had an espresso maker). I started leaving the wrappers for tea bags on the butcher block every day, without really noticing (so I’m told). I drank so little that now my face gets red with half of a beer. I bought a bike that was too big and sold it on Craigslist to a woman who wanted to pay me more than I was asking for. Then I got another one. I didn’t really go anywhere, besides Michigan with his family and Florida for Christmas. I only blogged 20 pages worth of posts this year. We started two different zines and never finished them. I started paying off my student loans again. I exercised my stock options. I lost 10 lbs. I started writing copy for work — holing up in a little room and going to the Good Place, at least there if hardly ever at home. We spent the night in a boatel. I made dinner for friends every Sunday night as a rule, and then decided I was being a little crazy. We found an apartment together and the old woman who lived there at the time refused to leave. “Two weeks,” she said. We put our stuff in storage and stayed at friends places, and then his dad’s, and the day before we were set to move in the broker said she had good news and bad news. There really was no good news. I walked over the Williamsburg Bridge, often with Cassie, often talking about anxiety and the vain ways I try to “earn” happiness, to Be Good as a type of insurance, instead of living. On my birthday there was a rainbow. Then I came home and we watched You’ve Got Mail and I cried, not because of the movie but because I hate my birthday. Not because I’m getting older but because everything is not perfect and I want it to be, even when I try to make it no big deal. And we’re all going to die. Coming to terms with this is probably most of what I did this year. Better to do it, to see it, to notice it, and let it be what it is and not be afraid to enjoy it. I hate the word “enjoy” so much, but my boyfriend uses it all the time. And this is what this year has been for me. I have had to learn to sit with it and trust it and take it in of all its bare earnestness, without distractions, and without laughing or rolling my eyes.

"I read a profile of her once in which she talked about the black holes of outer space, not the soul...."

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 17:46:00 -0500

“I read a profile of her once in which she talked about the black holes of outer space, not the soul. She told her interviewer the note that emanates from them is a deep and constant B-flat, a key she loves. She added, too, that a man who once played bass for her had synesthesia—meaning that when he played notes, he saw colors—and that when he played a B-flat what he saw was “very, very, very black.””

- Nell Boeschenstein on Emmylou Harris, in a piece for The Morning News that is about much more than Emmylou Harris (this is not to say that Emmylou Harris wouldn’t be a totally laudable focus for a reflective essay). (thx, Edith’s longreads!)

Already scheming how I can steal these from my mom.

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:09:52 -0500

Already scheming how I can steal these from my mom.

The only copy of Moby Dick I ever finished. (Taken with...

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 23:23:48 -0500

The only copy of Moby Dick I ever finished. (Taken with instagram)

impt

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:30:00 -0500

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.

Back home with Joon. (Taken with instagram)

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:18:10 -0500

Back home with Joon. (Taken with instagram)

Really warmed to see Halle’s truest talent finally...

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:15:00 -0500

Really warmed to see Halle’s truest talent finally recognized: Resident Diva Expert.

"I learned that money can be a lot of things. It can be something that is hoarded, fought over,..."

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:56:40 -0500

“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.

"When I’m at work on a story, I never compose paragraphically. I write stand-alone sentences. I might..."

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:29:00 -0500

“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.

"People have to understand that their short-term decision to save a couple bucks undermines their..."

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 12:18:48 -0500

“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.

Nuclear Football

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 22:20:00 -0500

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.

christ-the-retweeter: Let’s Move To The Country -...

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 19:41:00 -0500

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.

Photo

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 16:31:39 -0500