I DONT ALWAYS HERP BUT WHEN I DO I PREFER TO DERP

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

But my sentiments can be more accurately summed up in the words of one who will always be known to me as @albedocash: "won't you cast off in a romantic sailboat with me on a gently swelling moonlit ocean of man chowder"

Gross.

The Texas BBQ Day Tour

A couple of weeks ago, Devon got this idea to take a Saturday to sample the best BBQ within driving range of Houston (meaning, within a couple hours of the city), and posed the idea to Noel and me to see if we were interested. We thought it was a good idea, so he invited like TWENTY other people, some of whom had an ounce of sense and said, "uh, no." For those of you still recovering from that day: I salute you.

We all got together at 8:30 at Devon's apartment; the idea was to get started as early as possible because Snow's, our first stop, is only open on Saturdays, from 8AM to "whenever we run out of meat."


This is Snow's.


Here's our group at Snow's.


This is one of Snow's BBQ pits. That's the owner there, showing us how everything works. As I understand it, the smoking process goes something like NOM NOM NOM NOM okay I admit it, I was not listening at all.

We arrived in Lexington (after many a false start, because of course) at around noon, and they only had brisket left at that point. They had gone through 800 pounds of meat - pork, beef, and chicken - before we even got there. I hesitate to say "only" brisket though, because OH MY GOD you guys. This is the best brisket I've ever had. This is some of the best food I've ever had, full stop.


And here is what 2 and 1/2 lbs of meat looks like.

One of my favourite things about the trip was the standardization of certain practices within the BBQ Restaurant Industry. For example, the restaurants never had plates: they just gave us each a square of butcher paper, a set of dinky plastic forks and let us have at it. Here's a picture of my plate at Snow's:


Aren't you glad I made you wait for the colour pictures?

At this point I was fully aware that we had three more stops, so I decided to just have a couple of bites at each place after this. Not everyone was as smart (DAVID). Our next stop was in Lockhart, which is about a 20 minute drive from Lexington. And of course we all had to get on our phones to look up directions...



...or (in my case), Twitter-document our experience:


"Thank god for Crackberries."

The drive to Lockhart was just gorgeous - we were all perfectly satiated, and on the freeway, we got a great show of of really lush fall colours in the trees; it was the kind of nature display you rarely see in Houston.



Of course, Noel's photos are all in sepia tones. Meanwhile, in our car, I chose to do this:


That's helpful.

Even though he had a badass GPS navigator IN HIS VERY PHONE, Devon eventually had to pull over and look at an actual map to find his way:



David saw us from the other car and sent me one of the best in-the-moment-texts I've ever received:



Oh, here's a picture of David from when his car pulled up next to ours in the parking lot while Devon consulted his sextant...doesn't he look like a drug dealer?


Who wants some crack?!

Finally, we got there. Smitty's!



The food here was really good, too, but it didn't have sauce like Snow's - and the saucier, in my opinion, the better. Even if some (unnecessarily combative) places do consider it "cheating". The sausages were delicious, but were really...explodey. Like when you bit into them they had a defense mechanism. A tasty defense mechanism that did not deter me at all, really.


Here is a guy preparing the sausages. MMMM.


Here's one of the meatcutters. He just looks like a badass, doesn't he?

Another standardized procedure of the BBQ Industry was to tie the sausages into these little U-shapes that each weighed a pound (or maybe half a pound?). Think about how much food we've eaten even this early in the game, and Jessie and I decided that it would be a good idea to buy some ice cream. I don't know why. But it was fucking just what the doctor ordered and I don't regret it at all.


Mmmm. Thick...meaty...explodes in your mouth. That's what she said.

After Smitty's, we noticed that our next stop, Kreuz Market, was a mere jaunt away, so we decided to walk it - "to try to burn off some calories" as though that were possible. As it turned out, the route we chose took us under a freeway into this terrible ditch and we had to cross a river and I was like AUGHHH and everyone had to wait for me, OF COURSE. But we did manage to find some cool (if you're 15) graffiti:



So obviously everyone had to have a picture with it:


This explains a lot, when you think about it.

We finally got to Kreuz and saw the following sign that we were in for no sympathy whatsoever:



There was another sign next to this one that said, "No sauce: We've got nothing to hide. No forks: They're at the end of your arms" and then something along the lines of "no napkins: you're wearing one on your back" and "no mercy: you came here for meat and we're gonna give you some goddamn meat so stop your crying, you little babies! What, are ya worried about your daily caloric intake? Take your $200 dungarees and go back to your mama in the city! (spits in the dirt)" You can tell just how much of a wall we were hitting at this time, because look at the sad little amount we ordered here:



But it gets worse. After cramming that down (and a second helping of ice cream - I CAN'T ANSWER FOR MY ACTIONS I WAS OBVIOUSLY CRACKED OUT ON BEEF), we had just one more place to visit. At this juncture, we'd all just started sweating grease freely, and none of us were smiling. Noel looked up after finishing off the ice cream and said, "does anyone else feel like a marathon runner? Like, we're just working through the pain?" and just as he said it I wondered if there was such thing as an eater's high. And then I wondered just how angry an actual Kenyan marathoner would be if he had heard what we had just said.

NEXT UP: City Market, in Luling. This is what we ordered.


Just PATHETIC.

After we picked away at this tiny pile of meat, we wiped our faces and hands as best we could, and packed up our stuff. Devon thought we should commemorate the event with another group picture - kind of a before and after thing, I guess? And here we are:


This is our group (minus Devon, who was holding the camera), wishing that we could all just lie down. Right here in the road, maybe.

As we dragged ourselves back to the cars, we passed a table stacked high with Girl Scout Cookies. A brownie poked her head out from behind a pile of Samoas and said, "Would you like to buy some - "

"NO THANK YOU" yelled David, almost tonelessly. That should paint you a vivid picture of our respective states of mind: David - DAVID - yelled at a little girl for offering him one of the most delicious treats known to mankind, and we couldn't even muster up the energy to chastise him properly. And yet, stuffed though we were, to the point of not being able to comprehend even ONE Thin Mint entering our collective system, the lesson of the day was: "NEXT year, we'll pace ourselves better."

January NaBloPoMo

Hey guys, you'll notice I put a little image in the left margin - it says January NaBloPoMo. NaBloPoMo stands for National Blog Posting Month. It started in November a few years ago as NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month, wherein a bunch of fucking crazy people got together and tried to write a full-length novel by writing a certain number of words every day for just ONE MONTH omfg. I mean...crazy like a fox. I do want to try it sometime. Anyway. It's morphed into this thing where you can opt into any month you want and try to post every day during that month, not just November. I did this in 2007 and 2008 (it's actually really hard to believe it's been that long since I tried it again [TWO YEARS?] - apparently I really was traumatized by it, haha). You can find those posts by clicking on the pertinent tabs under this entry. So...that's what that's all about. Looks like posting will be another thing I leave till the next decade. In the meantime, I'll girding my loins (read: fortifying my underground bunker) for the inevitable clash of the amateurs that New Year's Eve will be. I suggest you do the same.

PS. I'm, like, compulsively trying to come up with a dirty joke for Girding My Loins = Fortifying My Underground Bunker...and still I got nothing. Help?!

How to Never be Invited to Your Own Mother's Parties Again

She: "So what are your plans? You know, after school?"

K: "Well, I'm going to be in school for a while, if everything goes according to plan, so I have some time to think about the actual projected trajectory of my, like, career."

She: "No, I mean...are you going to get married soon? Are you seeing anyone?"

K: "I think I'm going to concentrate on my career for now."

She: "But...don't you want kids?"

K: "Right now? Not really. Maybe never."

She: "Never? Isn't that kind of...selfish?"

K: "Selfish...not really. I actually think it's the ones who procreate that are the selfish ones, you know, if you really consider WHY they have kids."

She: "..."

K: "Well, think about it. People want children because...they aren't concerned with or moved by the plight of a million starving orphans that are already born, they don't believe or don't care about the dwindling resources of the world in general, they want someone to love them unconditionally, they don't want to be forgotten when they die, they want someone to take care of them in their old age, they think babies are cute, they want a little version of themselves - because they think the world would really benefit if there was another person that looked exactly like them running around...So not only is it selfish, but it's kind of conceited too."

She: "...!"

K: "And on top of that, you want me to go on this little venture with a man? Seems like kind of a risky proposition to me. And everyone's all up in arms about the birth rate of today's youth - babies having babies and all that - but the real menace is the 'grown-ups' a lot of the time, don't you think? And all this noise about having kids, which is ostensibly about, like, creating something real out of the love you and your husband have for each other. I mean...love. I'm not convinced that love even exists, or at least not on the terms we've set for it as, um, a societal benchmark or catchphrase or whatever."

Mom: "Don't you have somewhere to be right now."

K: "As a matter of fact, I do. It was really a pleasure to meet you, ______. You have a beautiful family."

A Long Time Coming [via Personal Issues]

For a long time, I've been a relatively boring person. I filled this website's pages with superficial value judgments of pop culture happenings, and sometimes took a stab at actually writing something wherein a recognizable desire to be something better could be discerned, but never eked out anything that was really great. I have come to the realization that this is probably because almost nothing I've published here has come from a moment of really personal motivation. I mean, why does any great author write about anything? How do they make it good? It's good, and so are they, because they are invested. I care about pop culture, duh, but I'm also intensely aware that each moment in that arena is just that - a moment, with no lasting worth - and so it is hard for me to care that much.

Lately, however, I've become a lot more interesting. Still waters run deep, sure, but the deepest ones can be very busy places beneath the surface, too, and the last three months have set my emotional ocean churning like nothing else. This is endlessly frustrating for me, but so is writing for the internet in general - I tend to vacillate between the oversharing resultant of unquenchable insecurity (which demands proof that I can be likable after all, despite years upon formative years of social rejection), and my probably surprising natural tendency towards privacy and solitude.

I do my best, I think, but sometimes I also find that I fall egregiously short of the goal (to find out what's important, examine it thoroughly, and share it with others through the language I love so well...and preferably do it with a degree of gravitas?). What's the point of writing things down anyway, though, when even the supposedly momentous events of my life seem to have the same amount of consequence as those pop culture tidbits do? For all my swinging around from private to public and back again, I also vary wildly as far as my opinion of the importance of my own life goes. I think it's what makes me an Atheist: how can you really respect a deity when he/she/it/they is/are constantly having more of an interest in what happens to you than you do? I mean, I'm pretty much set on dying before I turn 50 - I'm practically planning for it. I drink heavily, I smoke more and more regularly, I can't concentrate on anything for more than ten seconds, and am constantly spiraling closer to rejecting actual nutrition altogether, sequestering myself in a darkened cave with internet access, and subsisting forever on Muddy Bears and Coke Zero. What the hell!? Maybe this is the kind of degeneration that goes hand in hand with quarter-life crises, but I doubt it. Maybe it has to do with my purposefully rejecting the Lord Our God Jesus Christ, but I also doubt that. So what now, Dear Reader? Is Fairly Alarmed doomed to infinite self-deprecating introspection whose only conclusion will be my relatively early death, or can I aspire to be - and actually become - something better than a brand, an interesting person: an artist?

Or Maybe It Doesn't Mean Anything

The behavior known as The Hook Up has been around for so long now that the only time we lift an eyebrow, or bother to give it any thought at all, is when it happens with someone unexpected. Did you go home with someone of the same sex? Did you go home with someone of the opposite sex? Did you go home with your nemesis/ someone ugly/ someone else's boyfriend?
Most of the time, the fact that the person you went home with was - more often than not - a complete stranger doesn't even factor into the conversation. We all roll our eyes at our friends and say the perfunctory things: you better have used protection, was your wallet still there in the morning, just how shameful was your walk out of her building this morning, wait - how many times did you puke last night? And we don't really care what the answers are (except for that first one): mostly we want to know because no matter what you say, we are pretty sure it will be hilarious. This is a safe assumption when The Hook Up is the bang with which a night ends.

But the reason we really keep talking about it as, like, a social movement is because we've been circling around the point - what does it all mean? - like water around a drain in the shower, for about forty years now and still nobody has managed to figure it out. Maybe it's because the point keeps changing. Does it have to do with women's liberation? What about our so-called sexual revolution? Are you really getting back at your dad for not coming to your softball games?
Sometimes I wonder. Most of the people I know are either staunchly single or safely paired up: I haven't seen a real Hook Up in the flesh in almost three years. This is what happens when your people are nerds. Complete, unapologetic, chaste little nerds. Regardless, it seems to me that whatever the person's gender identification, they're going home with strangers because they've vetted them to be sane enough, hot enough, and willing enough to fuck without consequence. It's the not knowing them first that interests me. Granted, this is a small subset of the Hook Up spectrum (the other subsets include - but are not limited to - all the times you've gone home with an ex, a friend you've had a crush on forever, someone you actually kind of hate, and so on and so forth), but when did we start thinking THAT was a good idea? All the other kinds of people we have ill-advised sex with seem like pretty straight-forward choices: they're hot, we're hot, why not? But strangers. Why don't we all get robbed more often? My theory is that at our age, everyone is more or less in the same poverty bracket and there's nothing really worth taking in the morning when the wrong end is throbbing and all you want to do is find solace in the most womb-like structure available. I mean, is jacking a full screen version of The Chronicles of Riddick really worth it? No. Go home and have a Gatorade.

Why strangers? Is it just another group of people you fuck because you want to fly and they just happen to willing to shop at your Duty Free? Personally I'd be too psyched out by all the idiosyncracies of just having met someone new - it's why I haven't made a lot of spontaneous friends in the last ten years: I'm too shy and weird and shamelessly abstruse (to the point that I will consciously make references in casual conversation to things only I could possibly know) to get along in a meaningful way with someone I've met without context. And I'm juuuust crazy enough to want to make it all meaningful: the one time I went home with someone and never saw them again was - and still is - one of the strangest nights of my life. I felt like a grown up when it was all going down; the polite "How long are you in town? I'll call you (I have no intention of doing this)/ Oh yeah, you have my number (no, you don't, but I don't want to see you again anyway)?" the carefully close-mouthed kiss when he dropped me off...it was all very textbook. But later...I have to admit I felt kind of cheap about it for a while.
And now I've come full circle to being cynically amused by it, but with an added shade of "why do people think that could possibly be a satisfying experience?" One would think that we're steering clear of the emotional danger inherent in repeated sexy encounters at the risk of a reduced quality of said encounters, but is emotional connection such a bad thing? Who taught us that being sincere necessarily means getting hurt?

And here is where I think we end up: my generation justifies fucking strangers because we're afraid of being uncool. We deny outright that it has much to do with the biology of spreading our genes around or wanting to scratch the primal itch, and instead have constructed a reality wherein caring about anything is ridiculous. We geeks are familiar with the feeling: you admit that you think something is worth your enthusiasm, and the next thing you know, you're being publicly humiliated because people actually think The Borg isn't that interesting a concept (even if you know it IS). In the sexual world, even the private dismay of being unable to provide an orgasm can cut as deep as the first time someone asks you, "you thought we were friends?" Thus, we never take the chance to find out it was faked, all the while trying to forget that it's all fake when you can't remember what happened the next day. To that end, what do a few notches, or signatures, or Polaroids actually prove? They hold value only for a short while, at which point the pursuit of a new batch begins...or so I can only assume; I am not cool. I never have been. Maybe that's why I am so fascinated by the behaviors of those who deal in this "currency of cool" (if you will) with any degree of authority. Sometimes I want to be one of that number - I've yearned for the right hair, the right skin, the right whatever for so long that I can hardly remember when I first became conscious of it - but mostly I just want to be my silly, geeky self: I want to fuck the ones who can actually understand what I'm talking about...and fuck being cool.

Fuck-All

WHOA YOU GUYS I have been super lazy over the last...er...month. Lazy about writing here, I mean, not lazy in general - that is something I've been my whole life. Sorry I've been treating this as my own personal Remember To Watch This Again Later Clipboard. I'll be back soon with something pithy, I SWEAR. I'm working on something about guys, sort of. Guys. Boys, really. Men, I wish. Oooh, emasculating. But no, seriously, this is something I've been thinking about for a long time and it's going to be gender-respectful if somewhat rambling and confused (not unlike this sentence). I'm not doing it consciously, but you can bet all the references will be sort of mysterious and sort of obvious. So you can look forward to that, if the haphazard dismantling of a halfway grasped and yet completely tired social construct (the hookup) might be something you might be into. If not, I have some videos you might like, or I may just cut and paste a funny conversation I had with a friend. If not that either, go fuck yourself.

In the meantime, however, it's four fucking fifteen in the morning and despite my three hour nap this afternoon - purely accidental, I tell you - I'm beginning to fray at the edges. So I'm going to put a nice little dot at the end of this sentence here and go to bed.

Working, Working, Working...Worked

So I owe you all a post from Friday. I'm sorry I fell down on the job, you guys, but I was...having kind of an insane weekend.

I just tried to type out a little synopsis of what I did on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, but I kept mixing up things that happened on various days. It was kind of a blur. I guess we can just suffice it to say that I hung out with Marion, Amanda, Amanda's boyfriend Chris, Kris, Matt Kic, and various other (un)savory characters on and off for three days. For a further example of how far overboard I went, on Saturday I got out of bed at 5pm (I know! Sinful) and was out the front door by 7. It got pretty ridiculous there for a bit. But I'm done with that now. Until next Thursday.

As some of you know, I am in Austin this week, visiting Lauren, John, and Robert. I'm here to work a little bit on writing with John, and to detox, and to get away from my parents for a bit. It's a mental health vacation. About the work: John and I went on our first hour today (which is showbiz lingo for "turned off our cell phones and internet and worked for one solid hour") and I think it actually went really well. I'm really happy with what we did. I hope to get enough writing done in the next few days that I can continue to build on it when I'm not in Austin. I'm kind of toying with the idea of coming back for a weekend every once in a while over the summer to continue the process, but I haven't really run it by Lauren and John yet. and I don't know what my class workload (I'm taking a theology and an astronomy in Summer I, and a philosophy in Summer II) will be like. So I guess we will all have to wait and see. Because you care. Heh.

John and I are going to try to do another hour at some time tonight. Tomorrow, Lauren, John, Robert, and I plan on going to play trivia at the Flying Saucer here. Should be a good time - they do this pretty often and are still really enthusiastic about it so it must be fun, right? I'll let you know.

Plans

I'm lazy and uninspired right now. I tried writing something today, like, "creative writing" or whatever, and it just turned out to be a personal manifesto. It was like, "She disdained most and admired only the top 1% of anything" and I was like, oh, that sounds strangely like ME. They say 'write what you know,' but I would hope that I know more than what goes on directly inside my own mind. So I abandoned that. I think I may not be cut out for fiction writing, since it requires creativity and stuff. Kyle and I had a conversation yesterday about how he had this insane dream and I told him that I can only dream in concepts which already exist: even my craziest dream ever (which I had only because I happened to be on malaria medication at the time) involved elephants, zebras, and fuzzy brown balls. All of those thing exist already. Kyle then told me about his dream and spent ten minutes describing the alien spacecraft/hovering camera/reality show element which appeared in it.

Then I decided that I should study for my 19th Century Novel final tomorrow. But then I said nevermind. Then I thought I should study for my Macro final which takes place on Monday (and I really do legitimately need to study for that), and then I decided nevermind on that one too. I need a nap. Well, I don't need one. I just kind of want one.

Then I talked to Kyle for an hour just now. I'm going to go visit him for 2 weeks in mid-January, thank god. I can't wait to see him, and all my LA friends, and all the smugly familiar LA landmarks. I'm trying to convince Marion, Lauren and John to go too, just for a weekend, for funsies, but they all gave me the same answer, "we'll see". Yeah, we'll see, alright. WE'LL SEE. Ooh, sorry about that; sometimes when I lose an argument I get threatening for no reason.

Hmm, what else? Well, I did just talk to Kyle for an hour so I guess I better start writing those damn econ notes. Wish me luck.

The The Impotence of Proofreading

This is what it's like to read papers in my English class. NOT YOUR SECOND LANGUAGE, PEOPLE. NO EXCUSE.



(courtesy of Schmutzie)

Journalism Majors, Read No Farther

I fucking hate modern journalism sometimes. It's full of redundancies and dumbed-down deliveries of already dumb concepts. And we're supposed to think that this is what we need to be reading. This is what you read if you consider yourself a thinking man or woman. Current events!

Current events like Oprah's crowning the "next Harper Lee" on her show this week.

"I will say that, yes I said it," Winfrey said.

Oh my god. Behold the sound-byte of the 21st Century! You will listen, but you will not hear. Or something. I'm going to kill myself.

And THIS article got the best placement possible on the MSN.com homepage!

Criticizing the Critics
Tired of professional film critics? Isn't every opinion valid? Wellll ...

By Kathleen Murphy

First, the title sucks. It means nothing. Let's continue:

You know who we're hatin' on here. Film critics. That oh-so-special species mostly sighted at press screenings, film festivals, and panels on "The Death of Cinemah."

But wait...'cinemah' isn't a word! OH, I GET IT. The author here misspelled 'cinema' because 'cinemah' is what the word sounds like when you take it too seriously!

From coast to coast, certain critic types stand out: There's Jabba the Hutt, a barely ambulatory IMDb who's watched every movie ever made while nesting in his mom's basement. And Ichabod Crane, that juiceless, gray beanpole poised to club a harmless piece of escapism to death with some smarter-than-thou diatribe.

I like that the author wrote "some smarter-than-thou diatribe," which is supposed to make his 6-grade reading level audience feel like they're special because they know what a diatribe is, and what it means to be 'smarter-than-thou'.

And who can forget monkish little Gollum, painfully conflicted about whether he loves or hates the flickers. Am I, he stews, slumming in a low-rent medium when I could be swanning about with genuine intelligentsia, reviewing the great American novel or dissecting Broadway's latest extravaganza?

OOH. 'intelligentsia'! I KNOW WHAT THAT IS!

These guys don't review movies for real people like you and me. They do it for their own selves -- and some highfalutin, probably long-dead niche audience with nothing better to do than think about "ahhhhht." Those of us who have lives, high-speed browsers and can't spare the time? We'd rather hit the blogosphere, where my opinion is as good as anyone else's -- and if you don't like it, you can IM uncensored, spontaneous brain-spew.

Didn't we already do the thing where you lamely make fun of something because people take it seriously? Also, "blogosphere"? *shudder* Also, "brain-spew"? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!

Critics are Them. Bloggers R Us.

Here's a good idea! Let's misdirect your sense of being excluded from the recognized set to reinforce the idea that blogging is for uneducated, self-selecting 'wits' to publish their worthless opinions and call it Important.
Some could say that I'm being hypocritical here, but I'm not. This blog isn't Important. It's a newsletter. I have, like, 6 readers. Nobody is mistaking me for a pundit on anything, and I'm not asking them to.

Now here are 10 things that the fanboys hate about critics. Each point has been edited down somewhat because I can't bear to read ten long paragraphs.

1. Dream Job

You get to see movies for free. You get paid to watch movies. You work part-time and get a full-time salary. You enjoy a private screening of "The Dark Knight" weeks before my buds and I queue up. And then some of you badmouth Batman and the Joker! Show some love for the folks who keep you in lattes and DVDs.

Points for using the words "queue up", but I would have worded this whole thing differently (which is to say, I would have worded it better). For one, the header is...prohibitively succinct. And the whole point is kind of misdirected, because movie fans don't pay critics' salaries. Whoever owns the newspapers and magazines does. This smacks of those Beverly Hills girls who get annoyed when they don't get five-star service. "Don't you know who I am? I could buy and sell you!" First off, you really need to think twice about telling anybody that you can buy or sell them.

2. Geezer Syndrome

A lot of you have been writing about movies since the beginning of time, blathering on about blasts from the past and filmmakers no twentysomething ever heard -- or wants to hear -- of.

Fair point.

Oughtta be an age limit that kicks in when a reviewer hits 30 (see "Logan's Run"). When dotard brains can't stand up to heavy-duty media bombardment, geezer critics hunker down in prehistoric, analog notions about what makes a megahit.

Ohmygod. You want movie critics to be under 30!? We'd just get twenty-seven reviews of "Zack and Miri Make a Porno", like anything needs to be said about that. Don't get me wrong, I'm going to be forking over my $8.50 (student rates have kind of risen lately!) just like everyone else, but as a major fan of both Seth Rogen AND Elizabeth Banks, even I realize that a Kevin Smith movie is pretty much whatever the title says it is.

Haven't you ever heard of the fierce urgency of NOW?

Okay, okay. I get it. You're 25. You're desperate for a job in the movie critiquing business but nobody will listen to you because you suck (as is evidenced by this "essay" thing). Your mom and dad want you to pay rent now that you've graduated from your 6 year Film School program. You're frustrated. You're desperate.

Geezers mostly mumble to themselves these digital days, cuz print's fast going the way of T. rex. You need to know we're the demographic to die for -- fanboys and himbos romping through our teens and early 20s! And if you can't tell us what we need to know in a blurb or a capsule or an up-or-down thumb, our attention wanders at warp speed.

PLEASE DON'T WRITE 'cuz' AS AN ABBREVIATION OF 'because' ANYMORE! AGHHH. And shortening Tyrannosaurus Rex to 'T. rex' doesn't make you sound hip. And 'rex' should be capitalized. Also, "fanboys" and "himbos". What's a "himbo"?

3. No Respect for Comic-Book and Superhero Movies

Obsessed with movies older than dirt, weird flicks from Burkina Faso and oddball releases that grossed $2.98, too many reviewers have the gall to look down their noses at the super-black, ultra-kinetic, freak-filled universe of the graphic novel.

And a lot of these highbrows are soooo in the dark when it comes to superheroes -- not to mention pirates of the Caribbean. Hunks and mutants and Transformers rock, especially when they throw bloody fits that crush whole cities and populations.

Get with the program, guys. Superhero flicks deliver fanboy fantasies, where freaks and geeks get off on breaking things and having a smash-palace good time -- while saving the world, of course. When real life keeps everything tight and tame, hooking up with Hellboy or the Hulk gives you the chance to fly your freak flag -- without having to pay for breakage.

But uptight dweebs and geezers can't feel the juice. A couple of you even nit-picked "The Dark Knight," droning on about "incoherent action sequences" and "pretentious" storytelling. What rock do you people live under?

Everybody knows "The Dark Knight" is the greatest movie ever made. Contrarian critics totally missed the way this flick broke brand new ground, showing all that deep and scary stuff about Batman and the Joker being two sides of the same coin. And all the supersized explosions and car chases? Gravy, man, just gravy.

Betcha "Watchmen" will go right over geezer heads.

You reviewers whine that it's hard to take superheroes seriously, carping that Super-, Spider- and Iron-men aren't pumped up with complexity of character and moral choice, just super-strength and -powers. Chill out, guys: Wolverine's got angst, Hulk's a raging id, Hellboy's wrestling with commitment issues and what about Iron Man's long, hard road to redemption?

Not everybody has to go up Brokeback Mountain or into some country that's not for old men to get all sad and soulful. I mean, Batman's parents got murdered, his girl's blown to smithereens, and now the Joker's all up in his face with, "You complete me." How heavy is that?

If you can't spot at least 50 things wrong with this one (which I left at full length to give you a taste of what I've been protecting you from), you're not paying attention. I might have rendered you brain-dead already by asking you to read this far. For those of you about to drool, I salute you.

4. Lighten Up

You gotta realize you aren't writing about Shakespeare or Picasso here -- just consumer reports on what lots and lots of regular folk use to kill time over the weekend. Some of you write so dead-serious it's like you think someone's grading you, or civilization as we know it hangs on your every word.

Write blog-breezy, throw in some jokes, sprinkle lots of puns and pop culture references around. What we want are snark and zingers and yuks in film reviews, not head-scratching insights about what's the most recent nail in the coffin of Cinemah.

And can't reviewers get a little more creative about those cute little symbols you use to rank movies -- five spliffs for super stoner movies? Two Manolo Blahniks for a so-so chick flick? That thumb thing is so yesterday.

5. Snobbery

Don't get all up in our faces with wordy, ivory-tower gibberish that's just so much noise to real moviegoers. Who wants to pore over that elitist jabber when slang-and-snark pleb talk spreads over the Internet like instant kudzu?

Why waste my time showing off how much you know about the film's director or what genre it's in and how it measures up to the last 40-something examples of that genre or how the movie fits into the grand scheme of things cinematic?

What we want is a consumer reporter, dig? Someone who can give us the buzz, the pitch, the scoop, the high sign that will get us up off the couch and into the multiplex.

Mostly we don't pay much attention to you anyway -- we already pretty much know what's hot and what's not, from ad raves and RottenTomatoes.com blurbs and "Entertainment Tonight" reports. Jacked directly into the action, we don't need snobby critics for middlemen.

Apologizing for his preference for Cinemah over popcorn movies, highbrow New York Times critic A.O. Scott actually had the nads to claim that he's doing us a favor by sharing the "pleasure, wonder and surprise we associate with art."

Don't bother beaming us up, Scotty. What we crave is consensus, write-ups that mirror the majority, the movie tastes of the teens and proles who rule the box office.

My Hero

David Foster Wallace was just confirmed dead by the Los Angeles Times. He was 46.

Wallace was another writer who motivated me to be better, and I'll miss knowing that his genius is out there somewhere, just being as excellent as he was - being the unflagging standard to which I hold myself.

Getting Better

You need to read this. Immediately.

This is the kind of writing I aspire to. Not because it's funny, or because it's timely (even though it's totally both of those things). I aspire to it because it's smart. This is writing capable of sounding like it's coming from someone else. Everything I write, even if someone else was supposed to have said it, sounds like it's coming from me. I want to be better.

I want to be like that.

I saw a clip of Ira Glass on finslippy - he's talking about the struggle to be good at the creative process (whichever creative process you choose). I think I should be better at this; I've kept an online journal in one place or another for like seven years. But I still struggle along and get nowhere.



This makes me feel marginally better.

Hunter S. Thompson is Not the Man I Wanted Him to Be. Or: He Was an Asshole.

I just got back from seeing Gonzo with Marion.

Having gone in with only the dimmest idea of what Thompson wrote about or what he represented politically and morally in his private life (vs. what he represented in the public eye), I can only blame myself for actually sitting through it till the end, hoping to see something interesting. I need to quit my habit of being completely uninformed; I did this when I saw that Bob Dylan movie (ed: I'm Not There) and there was a giraffe in that one. The sharpest impression I'd had of Hunter S. Thompson going in was the one I got from the cover of the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas movie.

What I know now, more definitively than ever, is that I'm tired of hearing about the 60's. I'm tired of hearing old people talk about how cool they used to be. The whole movie was masturbation and I paid six dollars to see it. Thank god I'm a student or it would have been eight, and even that would have been an overly generous contribution to the My Elders Have Nothing New To Say fund.

I'm tired of reading men and their dick jokes. I'm tired of their "...and then his cock slid into her pussy..." books. I'm tired of their concern with my birth control. Far be it from me to point my finger at anyone and call them vulgar, but the men that our culture is interested in reading are base. Tell me I'm wrong. Please, for the love of God, give me a book, written by a man, that isn't about sex. Restore my faith in them, and show me some words that don't spell out MY MOTHER DIDNT BREASTFEED ME LONG ENOUGH/ MY MOTHER BREASTFED ME FOR TOO LONG.

Thompson was yet another misogynistic, drug-addled jerk produced by a generation marred beyond repair by war, and lionized by the misogynistic, drug-addled jerks who came after him. It's no wonder to me in that case that literature is in the state it's in (looking at you, Frey) or that the world is run by people who get off on controlling my uterus.

If I ever have to watch another movie, or read another column, or another novel, or another (auto)biography about or by a man, especially one born anytime before 1972, I will scream.

In Which I Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Blogger Post for a Livejournal Moment

My being hung up on you had nothing to do with the person you were or the person you've become (both are too boring for words) - it had to do with your rejecting me. I thought I doing the best I could, under the circumstances. You thought I wasn't what I advertised. That fact that you thought I was advertising at all kind of sucked, but said rejection taught me to question what kind of impression people got from me, when I was just trying to be nice; I wanted to be smart, pretty, helpful, friendly (in that order). And at the points in my life where those qualities come to intersect, the results have always been Trouble.
I need to thank you, though, and I never have. You opened my eyes to the futility of trying to satisfy ignorant boys. And you taught me that I'm too smart for you, and that most guys my age can't keep up. I date up now. Keep dating down, and I'll know that we've both found what we looked for and missed in each other: companionship, compatability, and equality.

Limericks, continued.

After coming up with my first, second, and third limericks the other day, I have been thinking hard about what I can do with this new favourite pasttime. My conclusion was that it would be a good expenditure of my energy and time to come up with a set of limericks to catalogue all the lovers I've had in various neighborhoods around the world. Unfortunately, I've had, like, three "lovers", ever, and that's using the word "lover" EXTREMELY loosely...and a set of three limericks (one beginning with the line "I once kissed a man in Regina") is just too pathetic to really consider seriously.

So. *drumroll* I have decided to write a series of limericks about FAKE lovers I've had in various neighborhoods around the world! This opens up so many options, and I'm quite looking forward to it.

Neighborhoods/areas I want to cover in my new limerick series:
- Greenlake
- Queen Anne
- Silverlake
- Bel-Air
- Brooklyn
- SoHo
(I wanted to do one about the Meatpacking District, but, you know, too many syllables for it to be useful. But I already have an idea for it, so I may have to write a different kind of poem for that one.)
- Houston
- Dallas
- Austin
- Milan
- Rome
- Sicily
- Madrid
- Paris
- London
- Anguilla
- Bombay

Midnight Knife Fight

Kyle and I are going to see a midnight screening of Fight Club tonight, and we're both anticipating it greatly. However, for every event which we long to enjoy, there is inevitably a ridiculously long stretch of time before it that we must endure first, and mine is that I have to wait at Whole Foods until 11:30 for Kyle to get out of work and we can go to the theatre together. It's only about half an hour from now, but keep in mind that I've been here since 8:30 with no books or computer to soothe me. Bah. Instead of reading blogs, I have been thinking up more "naughty" limericks (since my first was met with total adulation from the critics).

I once had a lover in Midtown
Whose hair was a nice shade of dark brown.
He was strong as a bull
And he made me feel full
IN MY HEART whenever he came 'round.

And don't forget this is only my third limerick...ever! Pretty good, huh? I would show you my second limerick, but it's too dirty, even for this blog. I got a little carried away with that one.

Things That Swirl in My Mind, as I Ride the Bus

A coworker today said, "I once had a lover from Long Beach," in a wistful tone, and I thought it was hilarious in that it was the kind of thing an inappropriate aunt might say. But now that I've been repeating the phrase in my mind all day, I realize it is the beginnings to a naughty limerick that has yet to be written!

I once had a lover from Long Beach
Whose ass was as round as a new peach.
I sure loved to grab it,
And made it a habit
To always keep him within arm's reach.

Haha!

Mitchell and Webb - working with an editor

As the incredible Heather B. Armstrong (author of www.dooce.com, link under "favourite blogs" on the left, I'm too lazy to make a link) said, this link will make anyone who has ever worked with an editor groan.



Or if you ARE an editor, it will make you claw your eyes out with recognition and self-loathing.

Sucking it UP

Hey!

I know. You're shocked. I'm in front of a computer, about to do a real live real blog entry. Your head's exploding (or, as a recent Viagra email said, eploding). Eploding. Pronounced Eeee-Pl-OH-ding. That makes me giggle.

I want to apologize for missing the mark completely with my Domestic Disturbance post the other day. What I meant to say - without coming right out and saying it - was that when you're committed to a relationship, you don't just get up and walk away, even if you have planned to do so. You suck the hardship up and deal with it, because what you would lose if you gave up is more than what you currently lack. Does that make sense? Clearly, I need to try harder with this "writing" thing.

The fact that that post failed so miserably is disheartening in a lot of ways - people used to say I was a good writer, and I thought I at least had potential. But the first time I actually try to "show, and not tell", the way Mrs.B always told us to in High School, it didn't work. At all. Am I only good enough to write the easy funny shit? Something to think about.