My personal experience of 2011
(my personal experience of 2010 is here: part 1, part 2)
2011 in…
MUSIC
- doing the mashed potato to “Nodding Off” by Wavves/Best Coast
- I don’t wanna be like the other girls, guess the Vivian Girls don’t wanna be like me either
- TV Girl made this great song that makes me think of riding bikes in the summer; too bad my face broke ;_;.
- Lil B is just as gay or HIV-positive as you need him to be, and also he wants to be unchained.
- THANK U BASED GGD for “Mindkilla”
- Beyoncé, duh
- RELAX RELAX RELAX RELAX
- Tune-Yards
- “I’m a rude bitch n word what are you made of?”
majority of bad bitches agree this is the best cut for straight hair
THREE BOOKS I READ AND ENJOYED
No More Nice Girls by Ellen Willis (an Emily Books pick)
Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas (I excerpted a passage)
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
FAVORITE THINGS I WROTE
- An interview with Tune-Yards’ Merrill Garbus for The A.V. Club
- “I Like Fucking/I Hate Danger” for Emily Books (the blog and the quarterly)
- “Cool Kids Never Have the Time/In Which We Choose a Brutally Self-Negating Credo” for This Recording, which was 1) psycholocially taxing for me to write and 2) cathartic, making me feel as though I should a) write about my childhood more at b) some unnamed point in the future.
- Facebook is preeeetttty gnarly and Hairpin readers seem to agree
AUTHORS I MET
Emily Gould came to Chicago and she hung out with me and Britt. Beer and waffles were both involved.
I met Achy Obejas at this thingy hosted by Women and Children First where I went by myself, thinking there would be a lot more people than there were. But it wasn’t awkward at all! No, that’s a lie. That said, Obejas’ partner (wife?) gave birth this year, so maybe meeting me wasn’t the most memorable thing that happened to her. MAYBE.
Dave Eggers came to a party at my work in celebration of our collaborative program with 826 Chicago. He was able to guess that I was a Taurus without any hints (example hints: “so this astrological sign is stereotyped as being stable, shallow, materialistic, stubborn, basically every bad quality—wait, how did you know?”).
PEOPLE COMPARING ME TO EVERY BRUNETTE ACTRESS
just Aubrey Plaza this year
SOME THINGS THAT MADE ME SAD
* global warming
* Steve Jobs’ death and snark about his death
* some dudes
* NYT articles about my generation that sounded like,
“Browsing Constance’s home, you’d never get the sense it had been touched by the recession. Her parents, both professors, hang classical portraits along the walls; the stuffed bookshelves suggest ample leisure time and an impressive academic pedigree.
Constance graduated at the top of her class from Harvard in 2010 with a B.A. in Modern Aquitanian Sculpture (Stone Busts and Installations). When her initial attempts to find a job failed, she enrolled in Columbia University’s prestigious publishing program, only to graduate with more debt and fewer prospects than before. Her unstable financial situation forced her back into her parents’ Manhattan home, where she still sleeps in her childhood bedroom.
On her parents’ couch in the Upper East Side, Constance appears delicate and circumspect.
‘I just thought things would be different,’ she says, dissolving a kale chip on her quivering lower lip. ‘By 25, I thought I’d be putting down roots, but instead I’m swimming in debt.’”
SOME DUDE HELPED ME CLIMB ON A SCULPTURE
Internet, you have every right to make fun of me for this, but I do not regret what I did:
I DECIMATED MY FACE IN A BICYCLE ACCIDENT
My face! Oh my god, my face!
(Why is it that my eyeliner survived the accident but my front teeth didn’t?)
Sometimes when I pose for pictures I’m afraid that the flash will shine through my fake teeth and reveal my pathetic little shards but that’s impossible, I know.
BEST OF MY FRIENDS, MATTHEW AND ALLISON
Matthew: what’s doper than the earth
