be cool, soda pop

Yesterday after workshop I got drunk with my friends and decided that it was time the University of Pittsburgh put more effort into bragging about how great we are. I put out a call for everyone’s publications this far, so that I could make a list and present the world with irrefutable evidence of our talent, and now I’m not drunk but still getting surprisingly emotional at all the responses coming in. We may be just a ragtag group of morose and unemployable adults, but we are following our dreams with style. We’re #78! We’re #78!

In other news, I dropped out of a class today because it was too hard. Now I am only taking one class.

A 5.9 earthquake in Virginia feels, to a person who lives in a basement in Pittsburgh, a little bit like a ghost trying gently to move a couch while you’re still sitting on it.

I really love the people who are just now getting on Facebook to ask, “Am I crazy or was there just an earthquake?”—not realizing, apparently, that three hundred of their friends have already voiced this concern. I really do love them; this isn’t sarcasm. It’s exciting to me that there are still people out there in the world whose first response, in times of confusion or turmoil, is not to Tweet about it. Meanwhile, my internal monologue went, “Is…there a ghost trying gently to move this couch? Or, wait, was that an earthquake? Better check Tumblr.”

First Bella Swan sleeps through most of the action sequences in the Twilight novels; now someone seems to sedate Katniss Everdeen every five pages or so of Mockingjay. Wake up, girls, you’re the protagonists of these books!!!

(I like The Hunger Games, but I don’t love The Hunger Games. Corinne put it best: “They’re like water-skiing—intense, but no depth.” I can’t seem to get close enough to any of these characters, and the Katniss-Peeta-Gale love triangle is, sadly, about as compelling to me as the Bella-Edward-Jacob one [only less aggravating].)

I want to write a Really Serious Blog Post about the fact that I will be starting my last year of graduate school and turning twenty-five within a month or so, and how much symbolic mileage a person could get out of these two events occurring in such close tandem, if said person were prone to measuring one’s value by the amount of personal and professional milestones one had achieved by x age, or even if said person tended to think about death all the time—“Will this be the Diet Coke that solidifies the tumor in my brain?”, etc.—because, naturally, one could get very depressed at the prospect of being twenty-five without really so much as an idea of what to do with one’s life, besides the writing of “weird” short fiction (and let’s face it: an MFA in creative writing provides the recipient little more than total, unshakeable certainty in the indifference of the rest of the world to one’s own “weird” short fiction); said person could spend a lot of time attempting (and failing) to ignore the oncoming storm of decisions he or she will have to make, or crying, or removing the first-person article from his or her run-on sentences about his or her own slightly desperate situation, in order to impersonalize his or her very real fear and also for comedic value. But instead, I would like to say that I’m, like, really wondering if I should spend the two dollars in my wallet on a dark chocolate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup right now? Or if instead I should go hide under my bed.

more like STUPID stupid love. 

(We didn’t like this movie very much. Characters don’t really act like human beings. There is much reiteration of the value of the Grand Romantic Gesture [i.e., wooing people who are not interested in/divorcing you] and it made me grimace a lot at the screen. Lots of boring sexism [like the fathers-protecting-daughters-from-men trope, the women-not-having-discernible-goals-or-characteristics trope]. A 17-year-old babysitter gives a 13-year-old babysittee a naked picture of herself and maybe you are supposed to laugh, but I threw up in my mouth. Let me tell you one thing, though: Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling are sexy, sexy, sexy people. I could keep writing the word “sexy” for the rest of my life and it would never be enough. You should give these two a better movie, Hollywood.)

We’re in New Jersey now. I’ve been awake for so many hours, except for the one or two that I spent asleep with my mouth wide open on a plane, the picture of youthful grace and elegance. Watch out, Kate Middleton!

Speaking of whom, I saw her wedding dress on display. It looked just like it did on TV, except closer and with more sweaty strangers surrounding me on all sides.

We saw a man bleeding from the head casually walking his dog.

I waited outside the stage door of Much Ado About Nothing for a while—longer than I would like to admit here. I had a flyer for David Tennant and Catherine Tate to sign, but I gave it away at the last minute to an adorable group of tow-headed siblings who were hopping up and down to catch a glimpse over the shoulders of the grown women who lined the barricade. I gave it to them even before the little boy used his mother’s lip gloss to give himself a spiky 10th Doctor hairdo, but once he did so, I found that I did not regret it even a little.