February 2012
7 posts
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Mouse Rat’s version of “The Way You...
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“I think that’s one of the hard parts about being a teenager is...”
– Lionel Shriver
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I'm just going to leave these two quotes from...
“It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.”—The Guardian
“I’m just saying my hit-counter’s going crazy. I’m getting hot-linked all over the world.”—Freedom
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January 2012
13 posts
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What I Read This Month: A New and Boring Series
Women Writing the Weird, edited by Deb Hoag. I know I’m in this book and everything, but I thought it was pretty good! There are some stories that really stood out for me—Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Blood Willows,” Nancy A. Collins’s “Catfish Girl Blues,” Helen Burke’s “Safe As Houses,” J.S. Breukelaar’s “Lion Man,”...
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“Everything’s Coming Up Roses,”...
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Never Let Go
I just explained to Kevin how Leonardo DiCaprio’s desperation for an Oscar is exactly like when one of your friends is really desperate for a boyfriend, and you’re just like, “Girl, if you just chill out and be yourself, it will happen.”
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“Don’t pick me up [from the airport], I don’t want you to miss the...”
– He just gets me.
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Ever Just the Same, Ever a Surprise
Today at the 4:30 p.m. showing of Beauty and the Beast in 3D that I attended as a 25-year-old, the little girl beside us, who was wearing a winter hat made to resemble a polar bear’s head, whispered—cryptically, triumphantly, as Belle descended the staircase in her golden ball gown—”I’M HER,” and I totally knew how she felt.
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Here's a really good* story about exercise.
I started using the pilates DVDs on Netflix this week because, you know, it’s a New Year, and I’m a cliché, and I don’t want to die before I turn 30 and at the rate that I consume buffalo chicken products, that is an increasing possibility, but I didn’t want to go to gym because I don’t know; I just hate it there; I hate staring at CNN reports of Kardashian goings-on...
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Look, I'm just being honest here:
In the last two weeks or so, every time I’ve heard about anyone I know having professional success of any variety, to any degree, I’ve wanted to stick rusty nails into my own eyeballs.
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December 2011
17 posts
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“It’s amazing. It’s like landing on the moon.”
– My father, re: Netflix Instant.
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“My old boss used to compare me to Lisbeth Salander. My old boss never understood...”
– “Eleven Thoughts About Lisbeth Salander,” by The Rejectionist
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Year in Review
It’s a Tuesday. It’s raining. I feel like I haven’t stopped moving or eating since last Tuesday morning. Kevin just left. He set up my mom’s new Wii; he gave my parents six free months of Netflix for Christmas. Sometimes I’m like, is this my boyfriend? Or just a cyborg sent to dramatically heighten my expectations of the human race. I’m not hungry but I’m...
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I Did This on Purpose: "Undercover Christmas"
Last night my friend Amy and I watched a 2003 Lifetime Original Christmas Movie called Undercover Christmas, starring Jami Gertz (and featuring Tyne Daly!) and it was so good, you guys. Jami Gertz plays a cocktail waitress who is going to testify against her Bernie Madoff son-esque boyfriend (although I just realized that this movie actually precedes Bernie Madoff as a news story, so way to be...
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“We stepped out onto Madison Avenue, dizzy with desire, overcome by that...”
– “Winona Ryder’s Forever Sweater,” by Sarah Miller.
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Well, I've written (a draft of) a book.
My MFA manscript features:
a plane crash
a floating girl
a superhero
a dead bird
a verbally abusive wax figurine of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
a sphinx
the ghost of Katharine Hepburn
dream sequences
witches
Also!:
typos (presumed)
puns (too many)
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“But above all, as the department’s rallying around Leslie showed, it shares a...”
– James Poniewozik on my favorite show (at least until Doctor Who comes back next year and hopefully makes River Song less pathetic [I have a lot of feelings]) Parks and Recreation, and its ties to Friday Night Lights (which I have never seen [I know]) and Frank Capra (at the end of this episode I...
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Here's a Post About Me Getting In Touch With My...
So I met with my manuscript committee chair on Monday to talk about the first fifty pages of my manuscript, and she was kind of like, “These stories are good but also not good,” and I was like, “Ugh, I know.” She said what everyone’s always said, which is that she doesn’t know what’s at the heart of them. I told her the thing one of her former colleagues...
November 2011
12 posts
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"Goodbye Giggles"
Last night my 12-year-old cousin told me that Zooey Deschanel’s character on The New Girl reminds her of me.
“You mean the character who doesn’t know how to have a social interaction?”
Basically, yes. That is what she meant.
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“Publishing is kind of a little reward for your labor, if you think about it in a...”
– I’m proofreading for Hot Metal Bridge’s Best Of book, and this interview with Kevin Moffett from 2007 is just really, really good.
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AWP
Oh hey guys the AWP conference schedule is up. I’m going to that; are any of you going to that? I am already reading these panel descriptions skeptically inside my head. Half of them seem to be like: how to use Twitter. Last year I forced myself to go to this conference and then halfway through just threw up for no apparent reason. I think it was a metaphor, but I don’t know for sure...
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“Q: What are you working on now?
A: A new collection of stories and, very...”
– It should come as a surprise to no one that I love Karen Russell.
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Time to Graduate:
I took only one note in my one class today, and it was the word “Ugh.”
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Things That Made Me Cry Today Just Thinking About...
When everybody stands on their desks and says “Oh captain, my captain.”
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Keeping Up
Today I woke up from a two hour nap that I took one hour after waking, and turned on the E! network while eating my second breakfast (it was a chicken leg). I watched the last fifteen minutes of a reality television special featuring a young woman’s wedding, a young woman whom I know, being a citizen of the internet, to have filed for divorce yesterday, 72 days into her marriage. The fact...
October 2011
13 posts
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