January 2012
14 posts
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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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Calling All Adult Readers of Books for Teenagers...
I’m pretty sure this is the best—possibly the only—place to ask the following question, which would assist me very much in convincing the professor of my last class of my graduate school career to let me write a paper about young adult dystopian novels*: what are some noteworthy contemporary young adult dystopian novels with female protagonists (besides, of course, the Hunger...
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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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“By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I had...”
– Oh, gosh, you should read Mona Simpson’s eulogy for her brother Steve Jobs all the way through to its extremely moving conclusion.
“Dance Macabre,” Camille Saint-Saëns
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“This is what I’m going to do. Every time a Knick game is supposed to be on, I’m...”
– Will somebody hear Sal Pane’s plea? It has something to do with sports but I worry that it’s going to end in his death.
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“Countless people have been devastated for reasons that cannot be explained or...”
– Dear Sugar
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Unfortunate Trends in My MFA Manuscript; Or, Why...
Setting scenes on Halloween to indicate that something spoooOOOOoooky may be happening.
Spelling the word “gray” with an “e” sometimes, but not all the time.
Describing silence as “deafening.”
Describing children as “bent forward by the weight of their backpacks.”
Puns.
Using blonde hair as shorthand for attractiveness and brown hair as...
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(Blame This Post on My Second Reading of...
When does the successful completion of a mundane activity (waking up before 9 a.m., writing thank you notes, buying groceries, sending e-mails) stop feeling like an accomplishment and start feeling like just another tiny mindless inch forward in the dull crawl through an absolutely ordinary adulthood that ends, as all adulthoods end, in one’s meaningless and unremarkable death? Probably...
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“The fact is if you make people laugh, they are less likely to shut you inside a...”
– The Rumpus Interview with Elissa Schappell