February 2010
30 posts
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“Then he pushed Maria Menounos to the ground and said, ‘Get...”
– What my father remembers of an interview with Matt Damon he watched on Access Hollywood.
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Poverty Snax: Part 1 in a Series
Take a piece of bread. I used potato bread from Giant Eagle. Put it in the toaster your grandparents gave you last year. This is how your grandparents gave you this toaster: they came to see your little brother in a play and brought an old toaster of theirs in the trunk of their car. When your parents refused the toaster, you accepted, thinking, “I don’t have a toaster!” You...
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I grew up in a house that saw a typewriter, word processor, and computer in appropriate succession, but I don’t remember, as a child, ever writing seriously in anything but notebooks. I had stacks of marble and spiral-bound notebooks which contained the immensely important (for future biographers) beginnings of my writerhood—including, but not limited to: the first story I ever wrote,...
I don't know what I'm going to do
on the day a neighbor finally knocks on my door and says, “Excuse me, we’ve never met, but the volume at which you are listening to ‘Goodnight Saigon’/’Where Have All the Cowboys Gone’/’And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,’ as well as the manner in which you are earnestly singing along, is really not acceptable.”
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The Disparate Sludge-like Thoughts of Someone Who...
Intelligently, we fiction co-editors of Hot Metal Bridge, the University of Pittsburgh’s online literary journal which you guys should really think about submitting to for reals before March 1st, requested that each e-mail should have the subject line “Fiction Submission,” in order to differentiate these e-mails from the multitude of spam we receive daily. However this does not...
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“(He gives up the ghost. A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts of sperm...”
– What nobody ever told me about James Joyce’s Ulysses is that it’s funny. They might have told me it was going to be a challenge, or that I would come out of it feeling different about myself or literature or Ireland or human beings or farting, but they never told me that at times,...
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It’s hard, sometimes, to be such a funny person, because you’re forever demanding that your boyfriend cease paying attention to whatever he’s doing in order to watch you ride an invisible bicycle while you play the E.T. theme on YouTube.
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“This time, the anger lasts long enough for Ebert to write it down. He opens a...”
– The moment in Chris Jones’s Esquire piece on Roger Ebert where Ebert discovers that Disney has taken down video of his At the Movies tribute to Gene Siskel is a doozy, emotion-wise.
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Selections From an Excellent E-mail Thread Between...
Elise: ...you want R.Kelly's ignition remix at our grandfather's 80th birthday party?!
Christopher: Ommmm chyea...I think you underestimate our grandfather
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Selections from My Freshman Year Intro to Dance...
Ever since the first man strapped the first shank bones of an elk to his feet and propelled himself across a stretch of ice using poles, the world has been captivated by the beauty and athleticism of figure skating.
Yet somewhere in the lonely shadows of figure skating’s gargantuan success lurks its sassy wallflower kid sister: ice dancing.
Ice dancing’s days of anonymity and...
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“I have nothing against Ohio or Dayton in particular, but there was simply...”
– Oh, Jerry Williams, will you ever.
Everyone is an idiot because no one ever thinks to bring a basket of cheeseburgers into work for all their co-workers to partake in. People bring in cupcakes left over from their birthday party this weekend, or chocolate-covered pretzels they don’t want sitting around the house anymore, but no one ever thinks about the cheeseburger-loving girls who don’t eat breakfast. No one ever...
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Hallmark! Corporations! Patriarchy!
Ahem.
Hey, Kevin. Thanks for letting me steal your jokes, and watching full episodes of That’s So Raven with me at midnight, and playing the What Is This Candle’s Scent game with me in Rite-Aid, and telling me that the video we are currently seeing CNN play is not actual video of the Georgian luger dying, when in fact it is, and for looking at me like this sometimes.
I am madly in...
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Claims Made on the Jennifer Lopez E! True...
“The dress made Jennifer look like a queen. The tuxedos were aristocratic, elegant, and warm. Instead of boutonnieres, they used diamond lapel pins!” (Woman Who May or May Not Have Planned Lopez’s Wedding to Chris Judd, it was unclear)
“I wish he had come to me for advice. I would have told him to say, ‘Look, you need to respect the fact that she is a married...
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Dialogue From "Community" That Really Spoke to Me:
Jeff: Let's not confine ourselves to your wheelhouse. This problem won't respond to tap dancing or casual revelations that you spent time in New York.
Britta: OK, if you’re going to get all Upper East Side about this, I think I’m done.
Saturday Night Picture Show
alywoowho:
After dancing to this and seeing this I went and drank lots and lots of this with a boy who wishes he was this. I managed somehow, at around this, to get back into this. Sunday, feeling like this, I suddenly thought this! Though glad I’d managed to retain what little I have left of this, I’d lost this! Which you may recall from this! And which one time also gave us this! So I did...
When a British man praises your timing as...
it’s hard not to feel like you’ve really accomplished something, when actually all you’ve done is step out of an elevator.
Snowpacolypse 2010 Update:
Kevin’s room is too cold to sleep in. The heat’s broken! And the rental company is terrible and never in the office and they don’t have a working answering machine. HA HA HA CONVENIENCE.
I didn’t go grocery shopping pre-snowpacolypse BECAUSE I AM AN IDIOT. Eating a lot of crackers.
Class canceled tomorrow but so is Maud Newton’s reading/discussion on Thursday. ...
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“Im so happy for them.They seem very happy together.God bless their union...”
– London-based Daily Mail online commenter Emily Beth provides a thoughtful, God-tastic take on the ongoing relationship between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
“There’s no way for readers to be online, surfing, e-mailing, posting, tweeting,...”
– YOUR POINT IS VALID, GEORGE PACKER
I just came dangerously close to starting a...
Why did I do this? Why didn’t I do this? I don’t have good answers to either question. Lately I’ve been thinking about the gross and necessary world of social networking. I’ve been watching the way my current and former professors—all working writers—utilize Facebook to promote readings and books and stories and articles. I’ve been following lots of...
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These Emotions Of Mine:
Last night I burst into tears after a couple of episodes of The Office’s third season, considering how awful it would have been if in the seven-month window between meeting and dating Kevin, he met a Karen Filipelli.
Earlier this morning I vindictively wrote “Women be shopping!” in the margins of a classmate’s story at a moment where a male character rues his wife’s...
