inflammatory writ April 5, 2008

What’s this blogging thing about, anyway?

My involvement with the vile word has been going on for about a year. I swore I was going to be a responsible, respectful, and most of all, discreet blogger. Oh, how I hated the oversharingness of most blogs. My blog was going to be about politics, and food, and food politics, and maybe The New Yorker. And maybe an outfit now and then. Just some frosting to make the whole wheat muffin go down a little easier.

I pretty much broke all those rules in the first month. In the past year I’ve told all my secrets to the internet, used more expletives than I thought humanly possible, and bitched like it was a full time job. I didn’t know I was annoyed so often until I got this handy way to catalogue my irritation at the world.

I can’t reread most of the blog posts. It truly hurts my heart to read my lashing out, all the vitriol and bile, especially in the past few weeks. It has been pointed out that it’s probably not the best way to represent myself to the world. It scares my good friends and makes them worry about me and completely turns off everyone else. But here’s the thing: no one told me how good it would feel. It’s like when you come home and immediately take off all your pretty clothes and put on your pajamas at 8 PM. Have you ever tried letting it all hang out, all over the internet? No shame, no censors. When I’m not worried about my clients and potential clients reading it, it feels so amazing. What if we didn’t have to keep our shame and hatred a secret? Has the world split open yet? Because I am really telling the truth here.

The charge leveled against bloggers is usually that they are, in J.D. Salinger’s slightly-out-of-context words, “pedants and conceited little tearer-downers.” Hating on the world without contributing anything of value. Writing about useless personal drivel.

The other side of that is that new media critics like bloggers are outside of the traditional media/capitalist systems and so see their flaws more clearly (the “we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore” mentality), and that useless personal drivel is sometimes actually the meaning of life.

And, as all our favorite indie musicians know, there is such power in whispering your darkest secrets into the microphone. Dispersing all the horror by spreading around, a little bit to everyone in the world with internet access, pushes it right out of you in the most wonderful way.

This blogging business is a fine line, and I’m trying to walk it mindfully. I know it makes people uncomfortable and sometimes it’s unpleasant, but that’s what I love about it: it’s human. Have you noticed how hard it is to be a human being lately?

It’s not going to be unrelenting fuck yous forever on this old blog, though. I have plans. A recipe for miso, New Yorker stats, cooking tidbits, summertime. I have some complaints about Bust magazine that need a public airing, and there might be a fuck you-laden post about Vincent Gallo coming soon (thanks to Kevin for that one), but there are so many good things in the world, I guess I should stop writing about things like how I’ll be so free when my dad dies and give a little more love to…well, love.

Eew, gross. Well, maybe productivity – a word that fills me with all the gooey happiness that sappy love songs are supposed to. My dearest little blog, happy birthday – here’s to productivity and honesty and humanity.

It’s bound to melt your heart / one way or another January 31, 2008

Sometimes it’s hard to tell if a good day is just an aberration, or an indication that the world isn’t quite so hanging-by-a-thread, baseline, to-the-core rotten as I usually assume.

Such was the case with my recent good day.

first blog controversy! December 3, 2007

Wooo! How exciting! Read all about it in the comments to this post and this post! It’s not exactly a controversy, it’s actually more like an argument. But I’m trying to to keep the blog out of the realm of the ugly name-calling bloggie argumentative comment wars, so I’ll call it a controversy. Let’s pronounce it with British accents, shall we? Even better!

Man oh man that Crocsmamas post was mean. I admit it! But every time I go to erase it I reread it and love it and can’t do it. I think before you get mad at me about it you should have to go get Green Party ballot access-petition signatures in front of your local supermarket – put yourself in my shoes for once, people, before you’re so judgmental. (Winky icon here!)

(Where is the beloved New Yorker Whiteboy Watch? Soon, soon soon! And so much more! Still being a business tycoon! Push push push!)

hot topic is the way that we rhyme November 24, 2007

Oh darling blog, I’ve missed you these fourteen days! I’ve had so much righteous outrage / pink outfits (my life pretty much divides evenly into those two categories) to share with you, but I have to be a business tycoon few more days, cooking and making truffles for often unexpectedly famous people, which always makes me feel a little funny. People tell me I should brag about it on my website but I can’t bring myself to, as my official position is active disagreement with the whole celebrity cult crap thing in the first place. But I guess by mentioning it without mentioning it here I’m doing just what I say I’m against, so oh well. Anyway, I’ve got a long vacation coming up, filled with plane rides (hello carbon offsets!), handmade swimsuits (click on “swim suits,” #7, so pretty!), and ample blogging time, so be excited.

six likable, lovely things November 4, 2007

So much negativity on this blog lately. A little balance:

1) I’m reading a kid’s book I just adore: Gaia Girls Way of Water. I’m so excited to read the whole series!

2) TV-less solitary cooks around the world (well, maybe just me) rejoice as the new Daily Show website allows us to spend hours and hours watching whole Daily Show episodes!

3) Khaela’s interview with Hey Boy is just about the best thing I’ve ever seen. Hopes of a new Blow album at some point keep me moving forward on days when my stereo seems utterly blah, all currently existing Blow songs indelibly imprinted onto my memory and nothing else appealing on the horizon. But hopefully eventually there will be new Blow tunes to memorize, and that’s a sweet sparkling thought to hold on to.

4) Little birds have told me that my next bestest favoritest band, the adorable amazing Whispertown2000 (née Vagtown 2000), will be coming out with an album any month now. The future shimmers! Though I must confess that I hold a not-so-secret terror that a new and potentially slick album will feature Morgan’s voice all prettified in a way that will ruin the whole Whispertown2000 enterprise for me…but this is a positive post, so I will do my best to believe that her vocal strangenesses will be left intact.

5) Within the genre of annoying self-taken couples pictures, I have a weakness for those in which the subjects pretend to be mad at each other. A cursory look through my photos revealed almost a dozen such snaps. Two favorites:

I call this one “accusatory torso:”

(And now I have officially become the worst kind of blogger – the dreaded “I love my boyfriend” blogger!! PUKE! In my defense, we say “partner,” which I find not quite so pukey as “boyfriend,” though the rest of the world disagrees. Also in my defense, I believe people in long distance relationships are allowed more leeway than everyone else. This applies to everything, by the way – parking spots, cuts in line, free samples, extra curse word allotments, etc. The pain of constantly waving goodbye to one’s sweetheart merits free samples, I tell you!)

6) And finally: words cannot begin to express how happy I was to come across this woman and her shirt reading “FBI: Female Body Inspector” whist she was engaged in the act of doing just that, complete with requisite hands on hips:

i can hear the heart beating as one October 24, 2007

(I can’t figure out why I can’t shake this trend of using song names as the title of all my posts, no matter how strained the connection. I do believe I got it from Ivan, though. I don’t even like the album referenced above! But it’s a pretty title.)

 

I didn’t realize until yesterday that I am really into listening to the machines in my house.

At night in the summertime I often hear the cows across the street and the tinkling stream that I love so much, and I always hear the birds and the cicadas and the cars cars cars, but what I really listen to are the machines.

Though my partner is a fancypants sound engineer, our home stereo often buzzes until I fiddle with the wires (I just pick them up and drop them until they hit something that makes the whole thing go quiet – the sound engineer’s partner never learned how to fix a stereo buzz), and sometimes I get gigantic shocks when I touch the vintage light that is not quite grounded immediately adjacent to the stereo, especially if my hands are wet, which they are rather more than they should be. So, because I am afraid of getting shocked, I mostly just listen to the buzz when it mysteriously appears.

Sometimes my home phone and cell phone and computer are all in close proximity and they all have a little buzzy conversation, which is strange and pleasant to me, especially when I’m on the phone. Fully one quarter of the time my home phone decides to make weird beeps and/or not work altogether, and this doesn’t really bother me. I’m not much of a phone person, and the beeps are interesting – I always try to spice up my conversation in case my phone is tapped.

But my absolute favorite house sound is the loop I make when I forward the home phone to my cell phone, which I do every day so I can always know whose calls I am not picking up. I just press *72 and dial my cell phone, then wait for it to pick up. Then I spend a minute (or two or three) talking to it and holding the two phones close and moving them apart.

It has been pointed out to me that the aforementioned partner as well as bff Than store astonishing quantities of amazing vintage instruments and toys in the basement
that have the ability to make far more interesting loops, but the phones work just fine for me.

So this week’s This American Life segment on a dude who “mapped the ambient sounds in his world” sort of blew me away.

things I should stop doing but probably won’t, but at least i’ll try a little more than i have been September 12, 2007

So Peter Berley emailed me today to say that “likes my blog” and he doesn’t remember me at all and I can’t hate him since I don’t know him. I SO wish he had left his remarks in a comment to the post, how awesome would that have been? But alas. It gave me only the slightest frission of flushed cheeks, then I promptly crafted a polite-enough response and put it in my “fan letters” folder and moved on with my life. I thought of modifying my post about him for about a second, then read it over, loved it all over again, and decided against it.

I shouldn’t be surprised at all that he found the blog. All egotists probably have Google alerts for their names (I do!) (is this what RSS feeds do? Could someone ´splain me?) and we have at least 2 friends in common. Recently a business acquaitenance pointed out that another business acquaitenance (make that frenemy!) copied parts of his site directly from both of our sites (compare and contrast my site and his, it’s quite fun! Note that my site is five years older, and he was once a client of mine.) People – the internet does not hide anything.

I speak from experience, sadly (or hilariously, or both), as I’ve had more than my share of comeuppances with this phenomenon.

my little slot in the universe: a counterweight August 21, 2007

Sometimes, when I’m shouting at the top of my voice something like “How much do you fucking hate Hillary!!!!” with many exclamation points instead of question marks ending the sentence, someone will gently ask me if the kind of liberal infighting I like to engage in is really useful.

Gentle reader, since I have subjected you to seemingly endless negativity recently, I thought I would quickly address this question.

While I don’t exactly think “infighting” is necessary, I do think that what got Democrats to the place they are right now (a mauve, taupe,”meh” place filled with bleh people owned by corporations) was unearned support by lefties. I really think it’s crucial that  – especially right now when the stakes are so high – those of us to the left of Democrats are not quiet.

Most of the time I think of myself as a counterweight, and you won’t be so annoyed at my relentless negativity if you think of me in that role.

I don’t want to close my eyes to the annoyances perpetrated by well-meaning Democratish people, usually men, usually white. It is my hope that by being honest about the radical places where my heart lives I will gently slide everyone over to the left a little.

Sure, most people will be put off by my honest belief that more abortions would make the world a better place* but that “radical” position means that a regular belief in the right to any abortions at all seems rather tame.

*Of course, I believe first that all women should have access to contraceptives so that abortions would not be necessary. But so many children are born to so many women who are not prepared to take care of them, emotionally and/or financially, and overpopulation is one of the biggest problems facing us right now. Thus yes, I am sadly in favor of more abortions, while admitting that it’s pathetic that this is what we’ve come to.

the sandwich’s the thing August 9, 2007

I’ve been in a bad mood all day, and though I’m trying to keep the blog free of “I had such a shitty day today! My hair looked all weird and there was so much traffic on the morning commute” bullshit, my bad day started with a sandwich and that sandwich can be used to explain what’s wrong with everything, all the time, everywhere, and why good people have reasons to always be grumpy, so I’m going to indulge.

At the very apex of my bad mood it occurred to me that on a certain level all I’ve ever wanted is to be mean. To be mean, aloof, wear tight well-fitting jeans, and have the strength to remove myself from society and focus on creating whatever it is that I want to create. That’s really all I want out of life, and I pretty much fail at it every single day. (That and a more egalitarian society based less on free market capitalism gone wild and more on respect for each other, our planet and the other creatures that share it with us.)

no tv, but an iphone July 6, 2007

Or: The luddite with an iphone

Or: In which an anarchist falls for a trendy consumer item and doesn’t even feel all that guilty.

So, although I have gigantic problems with the way we use technology and try to use it wisely, I cannot be said in any way to be a luddite. But (dearest blog reader: have you noticed that all the cool people start all their sentences with prepositions?) it is true that I do not own a TV. And (see?), shamefully, the other part of that sentence (fragment) is true, too.

The story of the iphone and me, a long and sordid story, starts with me losing my cell phone. The same ratty old cell phone I’ve had since 2002. Which (see??) is not long compared with, say, the relationship I’ve had with certain dental cavities, but is pretty long in the world of cell phones – admit it. My cell phone was half dead all the time, but I prided myself on its age and shitiness, especially in comparison with my sweetheart, who is the kind of person who actually watches online videos about cell phones for literally months before he decides which one to buy. On (!!) the other hand, he uses his phone about 1,000 times a day and I use mine .5 times a day, not being a fan of the telephone in general and cell phones in particular, especially since our house gets no reception whatsoever.

But (I’m going to stop pointing it out now) whatever, so I lost my phone. And (last one) did I mention that 2007 has been self-designated the Year of Dental Work? After 5 years of inattention, I finally decided to take control of my mouth. My dentist suggested that the mind-blowing pain I am about to embark upon (eight times this year, nonetheless) might be alleviated by listening to music, which got me thinking about buying an ipod.

And you see where that line of reasoning ended up: standing in line for 3 hours at my local AT&T store last Friday. I really enjoyed waiting in line. Living in a completely self-contained/created bubble, I never have access to the unwashed masses (overwashed, really – mainstream people are smelly like that aisle in the supermarket with the laundry detergent that I can’t go down without my throat closing up), so it’s always a minor thrill to move about in the American strip mall landscape in the company of the Average Consumer. They unapologetically drink Starbucks iced mochas, out in the American average-Joe world, did you know that? No one on line mentioned any guilt about the non-fair trade coffee at Starbucks, or gave the old “usually I bring my own mug…” line. So easy and free, those line-waiters were! There was even a big “you’re cutting!” fight to watch that got so hilariously entertaining that the police were called. Really!

I wasn’t even going to mention the damn iphone on the damn blog, but it feels like a big lie to write about how I agonize over sweatshop clothespins while I am simultaneously euphorically trading most of a months’ mortgage for a (made in China) cell phone. But have you seen how the pictures flip around when you tilt the phone? So fucking cute!

But I do feel horrible about having to drop Working Assets as my cell phone carrier (so horrible that I haven’t broken the news to them yet, I’m just hoping that AT&T will magically notify them or something). I really adore Working Assets, and I know, I know: AT&T was totally in the pocket of the Bush administration after 9/11 and probably continues to be so today.

I’m not going to put some leftist spin or justification on owning an iphone. It’s really unconscionable, considering all the other places I could have spent my money, and the AT&T thing, and the made in China thing, and the consumerist thing, and the fact that its way more phone than I need. But I did it, and I really love it, and there is something to be said for good design and all that.

OK, I’ve come clean. Now at least I’ve balanced out this “I’m so perfect” entry!