Dear Satchmo,
What's up? How are you? Have you been sleeping with the electric blanket on during the day? That's a fire hazard, but I approve because it's very impressive that your little non-human paws can turn that thing on all by themselves.
Read MoreI have kept a diary religiously since I was five. (I say "religiously" at least in part because until I was an atheist, I believed that my diary was basically a telegram service to God.) I often wrote open-ended questions as if someone was going to read my diary and answer them. A sample: Who will ever love me? Will I ever be loved? Would I be loved if I was less fat? What IS love, anyway? I am alone, and fat, and should I therefore basically be dead? Etc.
Read MoreThis list is depressingly white-male-dominated. There are two entries here that blatantly benefited from affirmative action (guess which two!), because I got to number seven and was like, "Oh my God, there isn't a female comedian on this list."
I don't think that's because there's a shortage of funny women in the world. I think it's because for whatever reason, mainstream stand-up comedy is a woefully masculine world, and old habits die hard. So I have two honest requests for you, world:
Read MoreYesterday's list was long, involved, heady, and very pretentious. This list is also pretty pretentious, but I decided to keep my defenses down to 100 words or less, so lucky you. Scroll to the bottom for a Spotify playlist. (Or you can just follow me on Spotify. I hang out on there like a sixteen-year-old with hair in his eyes at a Hot Topic.) The list, just so you know, is in reverse order. (So the best is at the bottom, just like yogurt.) (Good analogies today, Sophie! You were an English major.)
Read MoreThis morning I woke up from a really scary nightmare in which a murderer who had the same voice and disposition as the dog Doug from the movie "Up" was trying to stab my friend Molly and me with a knife in a dark suburban neighborhood. When I woke up, I was traumatized and felt certain that actual death was imminent. Alexis said, "Let's go to a coffee shop." I thought, "I might as well. It might be the last coffee shop I ever go to, what with all the soft-spoken murderers just wandering the streets."
Read MoreIt's list time. I'm obsessed with lists, and I start my "Best Albums" list research in January, in a Moleskine designed for that very purpose, LIKE THE GIGANTIC SNOB THAT I AM. It comes from the days when VH1 was all I really cared about, and I used to sit about three inches from the TV waiting to see if "Push" by Matchbox 20 would have the number one spot again (it always did). So anyway, this list isn't just thrown together. I have been listening, rating, and thinking about it since January 14, when I reviewed my first "album up for consideration" of the year -- Yo La Tengo's "Fade." Which didn't even come close to making the cut, by the way.
Read MoreA book demands an incredible balance of order and chaos, more than any other art form. To physically make a book requires math and measurement; patience and exactitude. It requires all the most beautifully frustrating parts of sculpture and mechanics: count the pages, set the type, measure the spine, adhere, bind, sew, mold. But to decide what to put inside a book requires uniqueness, brilliance, and a little bit of insanity. You must know what makes a poem beautiful; what makes a story deserving; what makes an essay move like a tree. You must understand the divine, disorganized order of language. A book can also contain paintings, or prints, or drawings, or photographs. It can hold any visual image that can be made flat. When you are deciding what to put inside a book, you are a genius of arrangement: you must have a firm grasp of what should go next to what, and what should come before what, and what should follow. A book engages every human sense: it is meant to be held, interacted with, manipulated. Books necessarily relate to human beings the way lovers do: no one has the same experience with a book as anyone else. To make a good book is to have mastered the art of collecting: to know just how to place every letter into every word into every sentence alongside every image onto every page into every signature into a beautiful, handheld, wholly singular edition, and it is the most amazing thing Man has ever learned how to do. Also, books smell great.
Read MoreYesterday we went to an island called Aegina. The fact that this island's name is very similar to a certain part of the female anatomy was not at all lost on my family. If anyone spoke English on the ferry on the way to Aegina, I can promise you that they were disgusted and disappointed, because my family is loud, and we think we are VERY funny.
Read MoreI am in Greece.
I don't really know what I want to write about Greece yet, and that has prevented me, largely, from writing. I keep thinking, "I don't have a crux. I don't have point. There's no purpose to this writing. I will end up just listing."
Read MoreI got back from Belize two nights ago, very late. I secretly love coming home from vacations: there's almost always one piece of good mail, and for a little while the cats aren't jerks because (they hate to admit it but) they were a little lonely. Sometimes I look forward to coming home from a vacation so much that I fail to enjoy the vacation itself properly. I tried not to let that be the case in Belize, although I found parts of Belize to be a challenge: namely, when you are there, you are supposed to relax.
Read MoreWe spent two nights in Caye Caulker -- a small limestone coral island off the coast of Belize. When I say "small," I mean you can easily walk the length of it -- in fact, that's really the only way to get around. The roads are made of sand-dirt-mud; the houses are all wide open and breezy and choked with swinging hammocks and candy-colored Adorondak chairs and reggae music. Every single building is either a place where you can have sex on your honeymoon, or a place where you can buy dirt-cheap grilled lobster. It's heaven.
Read MoreI have only ever spent Thanksgiving with my family.
I have these big dreams about how Thanksgiving should look, which are not unlike my big dreams about how the Fourth of July should look, which are not unlike my big dreams about how My Birthday should look, and so on and so forth. That's right: I'm a Holiday Romantisizer. I should probably come clean.
Read MoreLast night my coupled-up roommates had a pair of coupled-up friends over to eat chicken in our kitchen. I was invited, but I am a vegetarian, and also, I am woefully un-coupled-up. Usually, this isn't a big deal, but it stressed me out last night because the boy in the coupled-up friend pair was someone I had briefly dated, and who had rejected me, I am pretty sure because my breasts are too small. He said it was because I was too nice, but that's a stupid reason that no one would ever believe. I think it's because my breasts are too small. That's generally what I assume when I get broken up with. My bra size is 34-Nearly-A. That's literally what it says on the tag: "Nearly A." It's like the bra company wants me to think that if I try hard enough, I might be able to do better. To protect everyone's identity here, we will call this friend couple Diane and Woody.
Read MoreYesterday I met my friend Allie for tea. Because it was under 70 degrees in New Orleans and no one has central heat or any sort of grit, everyone else in the city had the exact same idea, and the coffee shop where we met up was super-crowded. We lurked near the tables of the people with empty cups like vultures hoping for something to die, but to no avail. These were the 22-year-olds-moving-back-in-with-their-parents of coffee-shop-goers: they were going to hang on as long as they could.
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