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This is the archive page for my blog. I am now putting my writing here, and I have a newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

Substitute

Sometimes I look at substitute teachers and think, "Hey. Most substitute teachers seem pretty sad and fat." Yesterday, while substitute teaching, I realized that there is a reason for that. The reason is that substitute teachers deserve to be sad and fat. What I mean to say is that they've earned it. It's a very depressing, fattening job. I want to buy all the world's substitute teachers vats of ice cream and jars of fudge -- the saddest food combination out there -- just to say, "I get it."

Torrential Downpour

I woke up this morning at 3 a.m. to the kind of rain that begs you to submit to it. It sounded like the sky had found millions of tons of dry rice and was emptying the grains mercilessly onto the sidewalks.

The Archaic Torso of Apollo

This Rilke poem, "The Archaic Torso of Apollo," has come up in my life many times. This weekend, it turned up at the wonderful Mel Chin exhib it, which just opened at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Here's the poem.

A Lid For Every Pot

I recently decided to be honest with myself about the kinds of people I like to be around and act accordingly.

In middle school, here was my policy: if a person was willing to spend time with me, then I liked to be around that person. There were no exceptions to this. The person did not even have to be nice. As long as the person would put up with me for more than 15 minutes, the person was my favorite person.

Everything Is Magic

I've been playing with gouache lately. I wanted to try a comic with just two colors, but I think this is a failure. Oh well. Keep trying!

30 Americans

I had meant to spend yesterday afternoon working in sulky solitude on all the projects I have to do but have no interest in doing. Obviously I failed at that because I have virtually no self-regulation. Instead, I ran into my friend Ned at the coffee shop (where the work was supposed to be done), and he said, "Do you want to go to this exhibit at the Contemporary Art Center called 30 Americans right now?"

Valentine

On Friday (Valentine's Day), I was asked to substitute assistant teach in a kindergarten classroom at the charter school that had employed me for five years. I spend a lot of time at this school anyway, since it is one of the closest approximations to a home I have ever really known.

Four Truths

Yesterday I got a letter in the mail from a pen pal in Portland. It was written by a girl I thought I was going to hate -- she was dating one of my best friends from high school, and I'm really picky about the people my friends date. I want them all to be dating humanitarian celebrities, since whomever they marry is going to end up one of my new best friends, too. It's all very selfish. Anyway, the girl turned out to be incredible -- like, if you read her character in a comic book you'd say, "Man, I love everything Dan Clowes does, but frankly, this girl is too good to be believed."

Insomnia

When I was six years old, I had insomnia, and it was cute. I was little, and I had adorable fears the way children do: lizard monsters, cave monsters, bed monsters, closet monsters, invisible monsters. Just your basic monster stuff.

Girl Power: Some Adjustments

My favorite magazine, hands down, is Seventeen. I think I subscribed to it for the first time at the age of 22 because I saw an ad that promised free lip gloss with a $10 subscription. I'm a sucker for free gifts -- I have so many New Yorker Dog Books that I could outfit every upscale vet practice waiting room in the city of New Orleans. Anyway, Seventeen is my favorite because (1) It's pretty offensive, and nothing gets me off more than feeling self-righteously better than everyone else by calling out other peoples' (or magazines') insolence; and (2) GREAT MAKE-UP TIPS.

Panic Attack

I want to write about literally anything else. I am racking my brain for a subject. Let's see let's see let's see. This weekend I went to a letterpress opening, and I watched two really girly comedy movies, and the weather wasn't so bad, and I coached improv; I'm trying to find a good angle for those things, but all I can think about is how I had a very public, very ugly panic attack last night. I still feel it in parts of my body. I should probably still be sleeping it off, but my cat is like an Insane Clown Posse concert at four in the morning (very loud, lots of black and white).

Baskerville

Amelia Bird might dislike me. Or, at least, she might not trust me very much, because when I walked into the letterpress print shop she is helping to open in New Orleans on Saturday, I lost my shit completely and acted exactly and precisely like a four-year-old who just found out that toys were a thing. That kind of behavior is charming for about three minutes, but I bounced around the studio space -- aptly called Baskerville -- for more like forty-five, rubbing the gorgeous letterpresses and fingering the heavy-grain paper. When a person is effusive like that for that extent of time, one should probably assume they either want something from you, or are on cocaine. Neither were true for me last night, and you have to believe me: I was just really, really excited to be in that space.

Morning Pages

I have been writing morning pages every morning for three years now. Morning pages were probably not Julia Cameron's idea, but she's the one who named them "morning pages," and so she's the one who gets all the credit.

Strep Throat

On Friday night, I had a single margarita and was basically instantly drunk. That's not unlike me, mind you. That's really pretty typical. I shouldn't say "Friday night," though. I should say, "On Friday at 6 p.m."

Baths

I just got out of the bath. I have to go to work really early today -- I mean, I have to be there by 6:30 a.m., which was my reality Monday through Friday for five years in a row; but just a few months out of the cycle, I feel like I'm being tortured. If you see a teacher on the street sometime, seriously, hug them or something. They really need it.

Mix CDs

There's a terrific mix CD in my car right now, like it's 2005 or something. I actually received it in the mail just a month or two ago, when I was feeling sad. (That's my default emotion. The friend who sent this to me clearly thought that sadness was a novelty -- like, a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of thing. This is a new friend, obviously.)

Snow Days

New Orleans has declared it a "snow day." What this really means is that New Orleans hasn't heard about salt. But no matter. I am inside, listening to it "snow," thinking about actual snow, and actual snow days, like all the other people here who are not from here and are reminiscing about the exact same thing.