What the hell, summer spell.

Photo

Sat, 04 May 2013 20:44:17 -0400

Why did your pagan lord create crust punks?

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 01:35:00 -0400

Some crustie on the sidewalk said, “You dropped your smile.” I said “fuuuuuuuucck youuuuuuu” in response, but the joke’s on me, because after that I smiled REALLY BIG.

"I worry when somebody from one particular tradition stands up and says, ‘The novel is dead. The..."

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 15:56:05 -0400

““I worry when somebody from one particular tradition stands up and says, ‘The novel is dead. The story is dead.’ I find this to be unfair, to put it mildly. You told your own story, and now you’re announcing the novel is dead. Well, I haven’t told mine yet.””

- Chinua Achebe, a man who leveraged the full humanistic potential of literary writing. Rest in peace.

Case of the Ex

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 22:19:30 -0400

Case of the Ex

Felines I Have Known

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 23:52:22 -0400

Felines I Have Known

A.S.

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 21:44:00 -0500

Like most people who will read this, I think, I first heard of Aaron Swartz following his suicide. A few photos of him popped up on my Tumblr dashboard, and a post showed that he was going to be buried in Highland Park, the Chicago suburb where I spent most of my childhood.

Highland Park is not a small town in that it’s not provincial, cozy, or physically disconnected from other suburbs. But when someone from my hometown makes the news, I take notice. It’s not rare for Highland Parkers to pursue high-status careers—the city is an incubator for white-collar professionals and local politicians—but Aaron Swartz was obviously exceptional.

Highland Park is a very Jewish community that’s obsessively serious about college education, and I’m both grateful for and resentful of the unfair advantages it gave me and others. In a lengthy article about Aaron Swartz, Wesley Yang wrote,

“Swartz had described Highland Park, not uncharitably, as one of the places where the parents were educated and well-meaning, and had looked upon the struggles for justice of the sixties with sympathy, though they did not themselves participate.”

I had barely learned who Swartz was when I learned that we had (at least) one mutual friend, and it dawned on me that he might have gone to my high school. Maybe we had even met, I thought; a name like Aaron Swartz hardly sticks out in Highland Park.

I learned later, from a friend, that he had gone to a private high school, and I learned from Yang’s article that he didn’t stay in high school for long. This is how I’m becoming acquainted with him—both through official news sources and other Highland Parkers, a mix of organic and official sources. Each time I hear about Aaron Swartz, I experience a sort of rotten-fruit intimacy. It’s a reversal of the natural order. This is a person I could have known during his life—whom I could plausibly have met—whom I’m only now getting to know, better and better, after his death. I’m not trying to claim someone else’s grieving as my own, only trying to define this sad, untidy semi-distance.

I started swimming again

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 23:19:50 -0500

In Buenos Aires, I joined a health club where the pool was full of hot water and at least one clump of unidentifiable mossy growth. There was no limit on how many people could swim in a lane. It was wack; I didn’t stick it out.

For a short time during my childhood, I wanted to be an Olympic swimmer. At the age of 8 or so, I could swim something like 40 laps (!). True to the cliche about brainy kids, I was athletically untalented, as slow on the court as I was quick in the classroom. Swimming was my one exception. But between those two periods—childhood and last year—I never swam at all.

I didn’t join the swim team during high school, since I was recovering from having my tonsils removed during training season. After that first year, I lost my sense of perspective and threw myself overzealously into my schoolwork. I was still a bloodthirsty competitor, but my personal happiness and growth did not factor into my decisions. I spent about three years feeling like an anxious racehorse. When I crossed the finish line, there was only more school.

Being back in the water is both a challenge and a comfort. I’m not the first to point this out—Murakami probably isn’t, either—but there are parallels between the creative process and endurance sports. Both involve slowly building something, improving technique, and (possibly) sustaining pain. If you’re creative and a swimmer, both processes involve holding your breath.

Another thing I loved when I was very young was writing fiction. I let that go to fallow, too, turning my focus instead to essays, comedy, and magazine journalism. I’ve tried to pick up the pace with my fiction writing, but I get so angry with myself when I create something lackluster, which is always, maybe because I’m young. Sometimes I’m so disappointed in myself that I don’t even get started. It’s entirely possible that I’m too fragile for the life I’ve chosen for myself. But you know, you get stronger.

“Yes, I’m calling in regards to the four year old...

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 00:08:29 -0500

“Yes, I’m calling in regards to the four year old boy position. Is it still vacant?”

Matthew: these people are all saaaaaaad http://25.media.tumblr.com/80a1ca9a00f511960910706214f01861/tumblr_mf9a9xsOTN1s0cjm8o1_500.png

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 14:26:13 -0500

Matthew: these people are all saaaaaaad http://25.media.tumblr.com/80a1ca9a00f511960910706214f01861/tumblr_mf9a9xsOTN1s0cjm8o1_500.png
"i'm sorry for not being sorry anymore"
how is that not a kelly clarkson lyric

me: whoa that's just nuts
why are you looking at this?
for most of these people it's just their looks
it's not that they're too nice
there's this myth that women don't care about how men look and just want someone who can make them laugh
it's a lie
being too nice is not a problem for handsome men

Matthew: haha
well, yeah
but that myth fucks your head up, when you're not at that level of attractive
where you can sit on your hands and girls will approach you
hah, the fact that girls care about physicality as much as men do, about as much at least
damages a lot of long held ideas about attraction, relationships, etc.
it's probably harder for a lot of people
to face that, than it is to rationalize "these girls are mean to me because i'm too nice"
but it's not even that, really
in order to think "these girls don't like because i'm too nice"
you've got to be some kinda big bitch
i imagine being unattractive is about as bad as being a huge self-effacing bitch
i bet none of the dudes on this blog listen to rick ross
i say that as someone who doesn't even like rick ross
but ricky rozay would probably change these dudes' life
*lives

me: hahahaha
you are a miracle

Prairie State of Mind

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 00:55:00 -0500

Out of every year of my life, this is the one in which the most time has passed. I left behind a lot of selves, living in different cities and passing time in distinct ways. There’s a version of my life in which I’m still living in South America, bickering with my roommate, eating gelato every day, and drinking red wine in loft apartments with other expats. In another version of my life, I never left Chicago, and I’m still fuming because I haven’t seen much of the world. Some say that cats have nine lives. How many lives do I have?

I’m back in my hometown for a couple of months. Once you’ve found your friends, Chicago is an almost perfect city. Housing is cheap; tacos abound. You could go out every night of the week if you wanted to, and the drinks here are inexpensive and strong. This is a city full of broad alleys and wide streets that look like lungs full of air. It’s a cosmopolitan city, but it’s still very easy to live here, so much so that some people never leave. That’s why I had to pull the plug.

I couldn’t really tell you what I’m doing right now, other than vaguely explaining my plans for my work, and my ideas about my next move. Desperately, I want someone to tell me I’m doing this right, that I’m planning my life well, that I’m picking good friends, and that I’m taking care of myself the way functional people do. No one really has the authority to do that, least of all me. When I’m not ecstatic about being home, I feel a little disoriented and claustrophobic, in sort of a broader, metaphorical sense. I might still look back on this time fondly later in life. Sometimes I get really nostalgic for the parts of my life in which I was working through shit and feeling kind of miserable. I was building so much muscle. I was growing so much bone.

revealing screen shot 1 revealing screen shot 2

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:15:08 -0500

revealing screen shot 1

revealing screen shot 2

theblacksupremacist: roboland: Please reblog and help find...

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 20:01:50 -0500

theblacksupremacist:

roboland:

Please reblog and help find this young boy. He is the brother of someone I consider a family member of mine and anything will help right now.

please reblog this, regardless of where you live

attn NY people

Pro-Feminist Bro: Male Ally Tips - Things You Can Do Every Day!

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 17:32:45 -0500

Pro-Feminist Bro: Male Ally Tips - Things You Can Do Every Day!:

Please take a look at my friend Steve’s helpful (and quick) guidelines as to how men can support gender equality.

profeministbro:

I was looking around for something that gives strategies that men can do to prevent rape and rape culture. Outside of Jackson Katz’s “10 Things Men Can Do To Stop Rape,” I didn’t find anything that was more recent. I put this list together as a handout for the male-identified training. I didn’t…

Chicago's Segregated Schools: A Case Study

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 14:16:00 -0400

Chicago's Segregated Schools: A Case Study:

TL;DR “Research in the 1970s blamed the inferior performance of low-income minority students on their poverty and family background—not their schools. But a meticulous reanalysis of the evidence, published in 2010 in the journal Teachers College Record, strongly indicted segregation. The authors, University of Wisconsin professors Geoffrey D. Borman and Maritza Dowling, found that ‘going to a high-poverty school or a highly segregated African American school has a profound effect on a student’s achievement outcomes, above and beyond the effect of his or her individual poverty or minority status.’ That effect was harmful enough to ‘deny African American children equality of educational opportunity,’ the authors concluded.” - from Steve Bogira’s article for the Chicago Reader

**Required reading for Abigail Fisher**

Some of the statistics in this story are shocking—for example, most black students in Chicago are going to schools that are 90+ percent minority. The author describes that reality as “apartheid conditions,” and I don’t think that’s too strong of a term.

“Integration” is a term that’s more or less disappeared from public discourse, but why? As a nation, we’re strikingly far from that goal, especially in segregated cities like Chicago. To me, it’s intuitive that diverse environments promote empathy in ways that homogenous environments do not. Are you going to sympathize more with a real-life human, or someone you had to imagine in your head, because no one who looks like that is around? Would you be sadder if someone in a book died, or if someone you knew died?

If you’re a minority kid at a homogenous school with few resources, and you’re looking at a homogenous white school with every imaginable resource, then that makes a clear, negative statement about the way your race fits into society as a whole.

Another thing that stuck out to me—while both of the women in the article seemed smart, aware of their position in society, and likeable, you can already observe the trend toward self-segregation by the end. Segregation starts in the schools, but it certainly doesn’t end there.

<----

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 15:00:44 -0400

Here I am in Brooklyn. A friend told me to apply for a job within her company, and after four interviews and an intercontinental flight, I found out that I didn’t get it. I stayed with her and slept on her couch, and stood naked in front of an oscillating fan with a 101 degree fever. I shared the place with four other women and only one bathroom. It was a sticky, humid late-September.

I’ve moved again, to a different part of Brooklyn. It’s gorgeous and tidy, but I’ll leave this place soon enough, too. I’m still looking for a job, while living off my savings and a bit of freelancing money. At home, I don’t have an internet connection, which means that I spend a lot of time just walking around, meeting sweet little puppies like this one:

The uncertainty of this time period doesn’t bother me—not deeply, anyway. Thanks to my parents and privilege, I’ll always have a place to stay. Psychologically and financially, I can afford to fail.

When I think back to my life one or two years ago, it’s striking to remember my frame of mind and daily habits. They were so different than they are now. My early 20s were a time of constant challenges and self-exposure, and yet I was so unsure of myself. Picture a wedding photo in which the smiling young bride is covered in newly-healed burns.

I flipped through my past blog posts and felt embarrassed at some of what I’d written. Trying that hard to be novel and clever is sometimes exhausting. Still, I also had this pointed feeling of loss, like the time I looked at a beach photo of myself and discovered that I didn’t look nearly as awful as I’d assumed. Here was a person who desperately needed my approval and whose vulnerabilities I’d ignored. Here was a person I never took proper care of, someone I’d hardly loved at all.

Q. Since it’s about Celeste separating from a man, not about her searching for one, did you think...

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 21:00:49 -0400

Q. Since it’s about Celeste separating from a man, not about her searching for one, did you think about how it fit in the canon of romantic comedies or about subverting those conventions? It seems like we’re seeing more of that on screen.

A. We tried to create an element of surprise: He’s her gay best friend, but he’s not very good at being gay. Women have been interesting forever. I’ve had so many women come up to me and say they were being fully represented, that they’re complex, and it’s O.K. to be complex, and it’s O.K. to be emotional one moment and really pragmatic the next. We’re going through a major evolution, and men haven’t had the same evolution. At some point we’re going to have to do something to bring them along. What are they doing? Get it together! We’re going to have an entire generation of smart, stable successful women go without men, because they’re just playing video games and dating younger girls.

—I finally read this New York Times interview with Rashida Jones, and boy, am I glad I did

family portrait

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 14:41:52 -0400

family portrait

“True to the book’s title, Rothbart often turns his focus to his own failed attempts at...

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 08:43:51 -0400

“True to the book’s title, Rothbart often turns his focus to his own failed attempts at romance. While he treats his platonic acquaintances as individuals, his love interests all blur together. They’re pretty, tragic, and unfamiliar; they do not have comfortable lives. ‘I’m always drawn to girls in the service industry—waitresses, baristas, bartenders, concierges, strippers—basically anybody who’s working for tips,’ Rothbart writes. ‘I dream of burrowing through their lacquered shell of professional friendliness to investigate the soulful edges I glimpse underneath.’” — me on Davy Rothbart’s essay collection, My Heart Is an Idiot, over at The A.V. Club

"Do you know how long it initially took us to produce At the Movies? Six hours! They would argue..."

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 22:56:00 -0400

“Do you know how long it initially took us to produce At the Movies? Six hours! They would argue incessantly. If Roger [Ebert] talked for four minutes of a six-minute segment, Gene [Siskel] would holler, “That’s not right!” The same thing happened whenever Gene would talk longer than Roger. They demanded that the other didn’t get one more second of screentime. (Joe Antelo)”

- —an excerpt from Enemies: A Love Story, posted on Slate.

I urge everyone to read this story, especially if you’re at all familiar with Siskel & Ebert or if you’ve lived in Chicago. The show was a brainy, populist institution that did good on behalf of the Windy City. Before reading the piece, which was printed in The Chicagoan, I had no idea that Siskel and Ebert’s rivalry was so marked (or funny). The oral history takes a very fluid form, and it’s informed by more than 20 speakers. For real, read it!

The night before last, my roommate slept over at her...

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 21:05:00 -0400

The night before last, my roommate slept over at her girlfriend’s house. Two days ago, I was diagnosed with a sinus infection, which I know is a minor health problem.

I hate being alone when I’m sick, even more so after getting calamitously sick in January. I lived alone then, and I staggered around my one-bedroom apartment, my consciousness pulsing on and off. When I woke up on the floor, at the peak of my illness, I thought I might die.

“I’m 23 years old,” I thought to myself. “I’m not going to die.” I thought it with solemnity and conviction, as though I was making a decision. While that idea was just as true on January 12 and 11, I do not need that reminder every day.

++++

I have a lot of needling phobias; it’s just something I live with. For me, it’s like getting the hiccups in your stream of consciousness. I hate to ride elevators and I’m afraid of being poisoned, which is probably the result of too many warnings about Halloween candy. It’s somewhat unpleasant, but it’s hard to nix a phobia, because it’s hard to un-imagine something.

In January, even after I decided that I wouldn’t die, I asked almost everyone who saw me for confirmation. I asked the two policemen who came to the door and the the man who rode with me in the ambulance. I asked the nurse and the doctor at the hospital, whose bathroom floor was sticky against my bare feet. The next day, I even asked my parents if I would live. Anything is possible.

One of my phobias is conditional. If I’m far away from home, I get scared that I won’t be able to return. I’ll get sick, or die, or become embroiled in some sort of conflict. Getting sick here has been difficult, and I’ve been asking others for reassurance. It’s hard when I’m alone.

The night before last, when my roommate left, her fickle cat crawled on top of my bed. I woke up every hour, because I’m taking pseudo-ephedrine. The apartment was still and the traffic outside was intermittent, but noisy. Periodically, I’d pet the cat a little, then fall back asleep.

I wish I could write that I’m growing less terrified of my body’s vulnerabilities, but that’s not really true. Though I can say that the opposite isn’t true, either—I’m not getting more scared. I haven’t developed any confidence in my own health, much less an overarching faith in the goodness of the universe. For the moment, I’ve just been telling myself to “see it through”—expatriation and my illness, my life as a whole.