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reader, writer, unregenerate comma-splicer |
I was glancing at house listings and found this little gem:
“Nestled against redwood grove on the west, with creek along northern boundary. Private gate into the grove. Large, level yard behind home.”
Awesome, right? A creek, and redwoods, and there’s nestling happening…hard to beat!
Then you come to the next, entirely unexplained sentence in the listing: “Due to safety concerns, don’t let children into the house.”
I am pretty sure this house has a troll.
Next!
Do you ever take a moment to feel grateful that you don’t have a cold? I recommend it. Just take a deep breath through your nose. Isn’t it great?
While you’re at it, give a little love to any part of you that doesn’t hurt. Flex your toes, reach your arms over your head, whatever. So many muscles and bones and joints and veins and organs working for you. Your neck isn’t sprained right now, your toe isn’t stubbed, and aren’t you lucky? Aren’t you just the luckiest thing?*
*Except Michele, who has rope swing bruises.
Gene’s heading off to Europe next week with Clark (his dad). I would go, but, you know, that’s the three week period when New Moon is released on DVD, so it’s just not really a good time for me to be away.
One of the many exciting activities they have planned which I am totally not jealous of is taking the seven hour train trip across Norway that somebody filmed and put online. I figure I’ll watch that video while Gene and Clark are on the train and it’ll be just like being there. I can even put a couple of Ted Talks on in the background and it’ll be as if I’m listening to a Gene and Clark conversation, with the added bonus that when it gets too obscure, I can open New Moon in a new window, which, as I understand it, is not so easy to do on the actual train.
“I tried revising my monster book,” I told my dad. “It was awful. Just terrible. It turns out I have a really hard time writing an original monster hunter, since I’ve never been one or met one.”
“Write what you know, eh?” my dad said. “I told you that.”
“So now I’m writing a book about a woman who works in an office and nothing magical or weird happens,” I said.
“I told you that two years ago, I think.”
“Because I know exactly how it feels to be a receptionist, and I think I can be funny about it.”
“Basically, exactly what I’ve been saying you should do all along.”
I gave him a look. “Next, I’m writing a book about a dad who says ‘I told you so’ once too often and his daughter gets annoyed and feeds him to the neighbor’s dog,” I said.
“No, no,” he said. “Write what you know.”
– Ate goat tacos
– Drank raspberry beer (but not with the tacos)
– Met a zombie prison guard
– Participated in a Jewish temple ceremony
– Rediscovered the marvelous prose of Shirley Jackson
– Had gourmet cupcakes from two different places
– May have told some people that my fiance is Amish
– Hung out with the best of Kims!
I was surfing around this morning and started reading a humorously ironic article about a racially-motivated MUNI fight. At first I was kind of entertained by the author’s ironic use of archaic racial slurs, but after a few paragraphs, when the terms kept coming, I started to realize that maybe I was reading an actually racist article, not an ironically racist one. With this flip of perspective, I was suddenly a horrible person who laughs at racist jokes. Just that quickly, everything changed.
I’m posting this as a cautionary tale. You kids think the irony is so hip, but let me tell you: it can turn on you. You think it’s cool to make fun of things that are empirically good? You think it’s funny to wear ugly clothes? It’s only a matter of time before you forget all about the mockery. Before the moog starts sounding as good to you as a wholesome old-fashioned electric guitar.
Lucky for me, I saw my own problem in time and stopped before I turned into a real, lifelong racist. But thousands of irony users haven’t been so lucky.
Remember, kids: Irony is a gateway drug to sincerity. Take it from one who knows.
At the grocery store today I was loading my items onto the conveyor belt when the check-out guy in the next aisle leaned over to my check-out guy and started urgently talking to him. “Just calm down,” said not-my-guy. “Calm right on down. Everything’s going to be cooool, man. No need to get upset.”
I looked at my guy, who had seemed to be dealing with the customer in front of me in a relaxed, ordinary way, and at the other check-out guy, who seemed really worried that my guy was about to lose his mind. Usually you can tell who the crazy is but in this case I wasn’t sure. And as I was about to spend a couple of minutes standing with my back to one of them, this was a real problem for me.
I’ll save you the suspense and just tell you now that I didn’t get sliced with a safety razor or anything. But I was able to eventually identify the crazy, which was the other check-out guy, because I remembered while I was paying my bill that I’ve had that other guy before and sometimes he sings about my asparagus.
Saw an article today about a recent march held in SF with the headline “March raises awareness.” I love that “raising awareness” used to be a step on the path towards getting people to act and has now become an end in itself. It is awesome how many things I am aware of now: breast cancer, Haiti, the war in Iraq. And how little I do about any of that.
However, I’ve realized that there are categories of awareness-raising that will lead to actual changes in someone’s behavior. A few examples:
– Raising awareness in your boyfriend about the stove being on fire.
– Raising awareness in the guy hitting on you about your particularly horrifying STD.
– Raising awareness in your dinner guests about your dismissive attitude towards personal hygiene.
If you’re wondering, the march referenced in the article was raising awareness for National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Week, a multi-layered cake of awareness-raising that blows my little brain.
I’m starting to worry I might have made myself a reputation for being an awkward drunk. I know the solution: stop drinking at social events. But I don’t want that to be the answer, so I keep looking around for some other option.
So far, all I can come up with is to start drinking exponentially more than I do now, to increase my tolerance. Will that work? There’s only one way to know, I guess.
Just when you thought you could not love David Belle more, he goes and says something adorable:
“I feel that when I move around God is looking down upon me from high. If he looks at me, I have nothing to be ashamed of. I am not doing anything bad. He will see a human being who is happy and who is climbing rocks.”
Happy human being.