blogcontent

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.

Cars Are Death Traps

Every time I merge onto the highway (or am in the passenger seat while someone else merges onto the highway), I envision hundreds of possible deaths. "OK. We're merging. We're merging. There's a truck four lanes over! It looks like it's changing lanes. Oh shit. It's gonna change ALL FOUR LANES AND BE IN OUR LANE. Wait... there's a car a thousand feet ahead. Is it slowing? It's slowing. WE SHOULD BE SLOWING. If we don't slow at the same speed as that car is slowing we will collide and the engines will combust and everyone will be charred to death. Good luck finding our body parts! They're EXPLODED AND CHARRED. And that car probably has A FAMILY IN IT. A family AND A FAMILY PET, SUCH AS A FERRET. WE ARE ABOUT TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE VIOLENT BURNING DEATHS OF A WHOLE FAMILY AND THEIR BELOVED PET FERRET. WAIT. WAIT. HOLY SHIT. WHAT IF THE TRUCK CHANGES LANES AND THE FAMILY WITH THE FERRET SLOWS DOWN AT THE SAME TIME AND THERE IS A THREE WAY COLLISION UNLIKE ANY ANYONE HAS EVER SEEN BEFORE AND ALL THE OTHER CARS ON THE HIGHWAY ARE LIKEWISE AFFECTED. OH MY GOD WE ARE HITLER."

Bird-Watching

I have always sort of had a crush on Bert. Of all the characters on Sesame Street, he just seems the most rational and down-to-earth. He likes to sit inside, he collects bottle caps, and his catch-phrase is, "Yes I do mind." Doesn't he seem like the kind of guy who would be fiscally responsible enough for the both of you, and would always fold the bath towels? Also, he is yellow. But hands down the hottest thing about Bert is his fondness for pigeons, and subsequently, bird-watching.

VACATION

I'm out of town for a while. Access to my writing supplies and painting supplies are limited. Stay tuned.

Dating

Dating is hard. To be successful at it, you have to smell like you shower regularly, and you have to wear more than just a night shirt. You can't just sit down and start talking about the thing you really want to talk about (cookies; or why haven’t books been any good since The Babysitters’ Club?). At dinner, you have to say things like, "What are you having?" When what you mean is, "I'm going to order a whole pizza and I'd really prefer if I didn't have to share any of it with you." But we still do it. We even take it pretty seriously, because at the end of a good date, someone might give you unspoken permission to rub your mouth on their mouth.

Reflection

This time last year, I knew that I was leaving New Orleans. Yeah, New Orleans had been great and everything, but I felt stuck. I wanted to move to Portland and live near my sister, where it was always raining, no one danced in the streets, and plaid and moustaches were a dime a dozen. I'm from Portland, for the record; it's not like I just arbitrarily decided to move from an increasingly colonized white-hipster hotspot to the white-hipster mothership. I wanted to live closer to my family. (Also, sorry, but the coffee is just soooo much better there.)

We Pray Before Dinner

I have the same relationship with God as most liberal white people my age. We all tend to clam up around religion like we are in the presence of a grandparent who hasn't seen our nose ring yet. Eventually we chime in passively: "Oh yeah, I believe there's something greater, but I don't know what it is."

Birthday

I spent the golden years of having birthdays doing them wrong. Maybe you're thinking, "Child Sophie, you were perfect and you couldn't fuck anything up. Surely your birthdays were treasure-like occasions, and you're too humble to admit it now that you're an adult." Unfortunately, reader, you're wrong this time. They were all disasters, and it was all my fault.

Ducklings

Most people pick the colleges they go to for normal reasons. For example: "Terrific science department" would be a normal reason. So would, "Small class sizes," "Lots of Princeton Review superlatives," "Far away from my parents' house," and "The girls seem hot there." I picked my college, however, primarily because of its duck population.

Five Things I Learned From Alexis Johnson

My sister is this extraordinary person who I always fail to describe correctly. I start by telling people she has very blonde hair and very white teeth and very big boobs, and that all of this comes naturally to her. But then people picture this gum-chewing sorority-type, which my sister is not. I tell people that she is a wizard at video games (Nintendo variety only, for the most part), and that when she goes to settle Catan she always settles it. But then people see this nerdy Comic-Con chick with acne and see-through skin from staying in a basement too long, which is also not my sister.

Sketchbook: Willa

Willa is one of the most interesting, effusive people I know. I daydream about what it would be like if she was a comic book all the time. She would be very difficult to capture. Last night we had drinks together at my favorite neighborhood bar, and she was so beautiful it was sort of difficult to think.

Mom

The first thing I remember ever wanting to be was a mom. This was just one of the many ways in which I was a huge cliche as a female child -- others included my penchant for Babysitters' Club (and subsequent hatred of Goosebumps, even though Trevor Hancey liked Goosebumps and I was hopelessly in love with him), and the sheer number of Barbie dolls I had (hundreds. I did mutilate them when I got bored with them, but in a way I think that's a cliche too).

Flying Dogs

I can't sleep with my feet under the covers. This is because when I was very young, I believed that if my feet were covered up for too long (by anything -- socks, blankets, sleeping bags, sleeping cats, etc.), the bones inside my feet would melt.

Bee Sting

A few years ago, during a dark time, my then-therapist told me I should start cultivating a gratitude list. This sounded dumb to me, because obviously I had nothing to be grateful for. Everything about my life was the worst; things would frankly be better if I lived in a pit filled with dirt while tiny snakes slowly gnawed at my toenails.

College Radio

After spending altogether too much time researching the historical significance of letter-writing yesterday, I pulled out this book that gathers dust on my shelf called Obsolete. The book calls itself "An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By," which I guess is accurate -- it's an alphabetical list containing short, anecdotal histories of everything from adult book stores to landlines to, yes, writing letters. But it feels more like an Order of Service at a funeral: a symbol to mark that something once lived; a last-gasp effort to ease the onslaught of forgetting.

Letters

When my dad sat down to write his most recent book about Darwin, he did so with over a dozen written volumes so thick that they would have been as tall as me if you'd stacked them up. This was primary source material -- which might surprise you, because maybe you know that Darwin didn't publish that may actual books in his lifetime. But they weren't published books at all: these were the seemingly endless troves of Darwin's many obsessively-kept letters. There are 19 published volumes as of today; more are promised to come as the task of transcribing Darwin's correspondence continues to be an undertaking. (If you're curious -- and who can blame you -- most of this stuff is readily available online.)

Pardon My Correspondence

OK. I know that I just wrote a thing about writing lots of things, even when it's hard to write things, and then here I am today, appearing to not write any things. But that is just because I spent literally five and a half hours writing letters. One of these days I will write a thing about writing letters, but for now, this is what my desk looks like:

Does this kind of make you freak out? Piles of paper and scary drawers open and too many bottles of water? This is how I work BEST.

So in lieu of an entry, here are three excerpts from three separate letters. I wrote twelve. Letters. They go slowly downhill. That's what happens with typewriters.

I will be back with stuff for everyone to read, all the way through, tomorrow.

Writer's Block

Once I was experiencing writer's block at a coffee shop. That's is a very public place to experience writer's block, and in hind's sight, it looked silly. I was sitting there, drumming circles on the table with my thumbs, with my face screwed up into the shape of a fist. The coffee shop was busy, but I was on the moon: What am I writing about? What am I trying to say? What concept am I getting to here? What am I doing exactly? I didn't even notice when someone I sort of awkwardly know* came and sat down across from me.

Donald Sterling

OK. I'm going to tell you what I think about Donald Sterling. Just like everyone else on the Internet.

Raw Diet

I am rounding out day six of a weeklong raw diet. You probably stopped reading after you saw that sentence. You probably were like, "Last week, Sophie wrote an entire entry about yoga. I tried to forgive her for that. But now this? She should buy some Kabbalah beads and move to Los Angeles already."

Bad Yoga

Yoga is one of those culturally appropriative things that I can't really resist. Even though all the yoga classes I have ever taken are made up of students who look like they just walked out of a Kappa Kappa Delta yearbook photo, I like the breathing and the stretching and the slowing down of everything.