I searched for "salamander" in my Gmail box on a whim (who knows. I don't know. It just felt like what I ought to do) and this came up. It's an old love letter. It really struck me deeply, and against maybe my better judgment I'm sharing it.
Read MoreIt's amazing what makes sense in the woods.
Vastness, for one thing. How big everything is. The scope of a single tree: leaves, branches, bark, needles, seed pods, roots. The scope of many trees: oaks, sycamores, pines, alders, in groves, along hillsides, upwards. The sky, which is deep, like a bowl you will never glimpse the bottom of. The earth, which is old and dark and wise.
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I was a fat kid. Like, really, really fat. I'm not saying this to get your pity (although, pity me if you feel like it; I was pitiably fat). I was fat enough that my family was concerned and spoke to me about it several times. My mother took me to a nutritionist and everything. People talked to me about it like I didn't realize I was fat. This kind of gentle, "You know, honey... what's going on with... your body... is a serious thing." Because I was so aware I was fat, and so aware that everyone was aware I was fat, I stress-ate in private. I couldn't fit under my bed, but BEHIND my bed was a great spot to drink soy sauce and eat maraschino cherries.
Read MoreIt's not just me. There are lots of us who are weird about books. We just don't necessarily announce ourselves. Crazy book people are notoriously introverted.
Read MoreI have been traveling since the week of Thanksgiving.
I should re-write that, because I haven't been "traveling" the way that long-haired, beautiful, bohemian people who wear waterproof pants and straw hats mean it. Yesterday I went to my local bike shop, and the owner said, "It's been a long time since I've seen you! Where have you been?" I said, "Oh, traveling." He said, "Where have you been traveling?" I said, "Oh, you know, Belize, Greece. Places like that."
Read MoreFor a while, I was writing in my blog every day. That was back when I was doing it "secretly." In quotes, because I always sent everything to my sister Alexis, who reliably said, "SOPHIE YOU ARE THE BEST WRITER IN THE WORLD LET'S BE BOYFRIENDS." That was, for a while, enough for me, and I was in a pretty good practice.
Read MoreDear 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 More- Make breakfast. How good is breakfast? All the good foods are relevant at breakfast: pancakes, waffles, steamed green things, scrambled whatever-you-want, caramelized onions, assorted breads in assorted baskets, coffee, orange juice, all the fruits -- I could go on and on. It's like at the beginning of time someone was like, "Man, mornings really suck. I have an idea! Let's have a designated time where we eat ALL THE GOOD FOODS in the morning, and then we won't think being alive is the worst thing possible." That person was a really smart person. Breakfast makes life seem a lot less dire. And yet, alas. Busy, busy Modern-Day Man is always SKIPPING breakfast! Or throwing a Pop Tart in her backpack and running out the door. Or going to Burger King to order a Diet Coke at 7 a.m. One day, Modern-Day Man will be old and dying, and she will look back at her life and wonder why she didn't eat more breakfast. There are so few complete and total pleasures in life. Breakfast is one of them. It is also really good for you: there are scads of articles on the health benefits of breakfast. So this year I will go to bed a little earlier so I can wake up a little earlier so I can make more breakfast. I'll try not to Instagram it too often.
I 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.
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This 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 MoreSHORT DESCRIPTIONS OF ALL THE MEN I HAVE MET SINCE I HAVE BEEN IN GREECE, ALL OF WHOM I HAVE CONSIDERED MAKING OUT WITH:
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.
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A 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.
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