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IF I kept a (live)journal for an extended period of time, is it wrong to state my title as "Journalist" on a resume?
Furthermore, IF I was abroad at the time of this journal-keeping, is it wrong of me to state my title as "Foreign Correspondent"?
I'm not speaking ethically, of course, but in terms of the meanings of the actual words.
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Comments: Read 5 or Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
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"I love the brown Tupperware. When I carry it around, I feel as though I am toting a giant melted chocolate bar. 'Look at her chocolate bar,' people think as they walk by me. 'I am so jealous.' "
-Harper Lee
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
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it's taken me 25 years for me to even understand what the feeling of want is like. i always thought of it in a great, goal sense--something you meditate on, a clear decision. But I have only recently discovered that it can also be something like an impulse. For example: I see your arm; I want to hold it, so I do. Ideally, this comes to pass.
What actually happens is: I see your arm; I want to hold it, so I think about whether or not it would be okay for me to hold it. Would you mind? Did you want me to hold it? Is that what you're trying to do--get me to hold it? Am I picking up a signal that isn't there? Wait, was that a "Get Away From My Arm" gesture? I better hold off on this touching altogether.
See it, want it, do it: that's what it should be like. That's what I should be doing.
And if you don't want me to touch you, that's your problem. Either quit hanging out with me or hide your godamn arms.
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Thursday, January 15th, 2009
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"But I really urge you most of all to understand that there is no "real world," there is no “reality,” there is no one way to do things versus another way. There's an infinite number of ways to do anything, and it's up to you to listen to that very subtle yet very clear instinct that resides deep within your soul that really makes you who you are."
-Andrew W.K. from his column How To Live in Anthem Magazine
Until a few months ago, I thought that Andrew W.K. was just another hot rock star who looked good all bloodied up. Now I know that he is also an incredible person (people?) who has a lot of great ideas about livin'.
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Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008
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Friday, Dec. 5:
"Dust off those fedoras: it's the 75th anniversary of Prohibition's repeal, and LA is wetter than ever. The folks at Dewar's never tire of promoting social drinking, and at over a dozen venues from the Mandrake in Culver City to 3 Clubs in Hollywood, they're serving up 75-cent drinks until 11pm. Expect flapper-style fun on the Ramble 'Round Downtown, a self-styled pub crawl connecting a slate of the city's most whisky-friendly joints. Venues include Golden Gopher, Broadway Bar, and Casey's Irish Pub, but the big attraction is the grand-reopening of Cole's, the latest of LA's Art Deco landmarks to get a makeover. "
HOLY GUACAMOLE: 75 cents!!!!!!! Golden Gopher, you are MINE on Friday night.
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Comments: Read 3 or Add Your Own.
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Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
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He is the Queen of France. His spoon is too big.
Oh man, incredibly funny, totally awesome animator Don Hertzfeldt of Rejected and Everything Will Be Okay fame is going to be at the Silent Movie Theater on Sunday! I don't know if it's sold out but if I weren't going to be in Arizona, I'd be there.
INFO
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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Saturday, November 15th, 2008
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on the second date with a guy, he asked me if he could kiss my feet. i didn't say anything. in these cases, silence is usually perceived as consent.
he french kissed my feet.
the foot guy was alright. he had a kink but i think that somewhere out there, there is a person who likes to have their feet kissed. and when they meet, they will fall in so much love.
i was followed for a block and a half by a guy who looked like he had recently used some kind of drug made by things you can find in your house. he was on a skateboard in cowboy boots, wearing eyeliner, and he told me that he was nervous to talk to me, and that when he got nervous, his mouth got dry. could i help him out with that, with his dry mouth?
it is much easier to go on dates with people you aren't really interested in or to talk to weird old drug users than it is to ask a guy you like out on a date.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Monday, November 10th, 2008
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When you think that the only thing you have to offer anyone is your sense of humor, you may mistake someone doubling over with laughter and telling you that you're pretty funny for being proposed to.
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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Monday, October 27th, 2008
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Dear Dude Who I Went Out On A Date With,
I thought you were just okay, but now that you aren't returning my genuinely urgent, totally legitimate text about getting something out of your car, I am insane for you. Well played.
On the off-chance that you aren't playing hard-to-get, I apologize for telling that story that had the n-word in it.
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Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
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Suspicions I have had about white people that are confirmed by watching Sons of Anarchy:
1. They kiss their kids on the lips. Gross!
2. They smoke a lot, even when they have congenital heart defects.
3. Young white guys are always hot.
4. Old white guys are ugly and wrinkled.
Preconceived notions I have about bikers that are confirmed by watching Sons of Anarchy:
1. They have hearts of gold.
2. Any overt racism (e.g., slurs)is based on business disputes, not on the basis of skin color. In truth, bike gangs are very accepting: you can be Jewish or a guido or even a vegetarian.
2b. But they don't care for Nazis.
2c. Or black people.
3. Bikers love bare-knuckle boxing but it's all in good fun, never in malice. Afterwards, there are usually hugs.
4. They are loyal to their women, no matter how drug-addicted or conniving.
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Monday, September 15th, 2008
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Breakfast:
two scrambled eggs with tapatio
two corn tortillas
multivitamin
Lunch:
BLT with tempeh bacon, avocado, veganaise, tomatoes and sprouts
Dinner:
pickles
tecate
tecate
newcastle
Good start and a killer finish.
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I was having a discussion about gum the other day. The person I was talking with said he hated gum, and with good reason. It was not the fault of the gum, though. He neglected to see that, but I forgave him.
Today I had to go look nice and go to Century City. Black shirt, brown pencil skirt, elaborate hair style that is not at all sensible for so windy a day. All the way there on the bus, I was so nervous that I couldn't sit down. I got there-it's a terrible place, by the way, and you have to go through Beverly Hills to get there which is a million times AWFULLER than any place should ever be)-and did my thing and then I sulked about how badly it went. Then I took a bus back. I sat in the part of the bus that rotates. It's quiet there, so quiet that I can hear my stomach rumbling. I had forgotten to eat.
Thinking about the food I would eat all the way back to Wilshire and Western, I caught the subway home. Korean? Italian? Mexican? Sandwich? Korean-Italian sandwich in a burrito. I got off at Westlake. I wanted tamales or Langer's. Both were closed. AT 4!! WHY?! Exhausted, starving, I got on the subway. Salad bar at the downtown Ralph's, you are delicious. I love beets.
Running errands with Britt, I crouched down to pick up a t-shirt from her art show. My hand grazed the back of my skirt. My nice brown skirt. My $50 skirt that is now sticky. I can feel the tiny bits of something hard stuck to the sticky splotches on my skirt. I can feel the hair and lint and-paper? That is paper. Paper is stuck to my skirt.
Maybe it's gum. Maybe it's candy. Maybe it's semen and root beer and rubber cement all mixed together. Whatever the fuck it is I blame gum and I hate gum and I am never sitting on the bus again. I might even start carrying a plastic sheet and putting it down on the seats like I'm Howard Hughes.
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Written to Kirin a year ago.
"re: drunken puke
I got FACED two weeks ago and made out with an australian at a bar (to which I can never return); gave a lecture to two asian girls about how playing cute with guys is annoying; threw up on my gay boyfriend's hands, my pants, my shoes, and the street; then in typical bianca fashion, I sat in the road and refused to get up.
Jaeger is the devil."
I like to document my embarrassments because when something else embarrassing happens, I can point to the previous embarrassment and say, "Well at least I didn't _______________!"
For example, this last weekend: I commented on the good looks of an author I saw at a lecture at the L.A. Times Festival of Books. Kirin says, "I like him for you," and decides to match-make. This man does not know I exist. He is a brilliant, hilarious Yale graduate who wrote a memoir about his Peace Corps days; I carry plastic dinosaurs in my purse and wear sparkle nail polish.
Despite my protests and attempts to physically restrain her, Kirin decided to give him my number, along with the small, glow-in-the-dark Tyrannosaurus Rex that was in my purse. Later, he walked by us (talking to some cheap-looking but attractive woman with an even tan) and acted like we didn't exist. But was not covered in alcoholic vomit, so I emerge a winner from that situation. Thank you, experience.
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Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
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Today, I found a beautiful dresser on the street, in a pile of stuff. It's gorgeous. It's real wood, and it has three drawers, each with a nice drawer pull that looks like two leaves. As I was looking at it, a girl on the balcony said that if I wanted it, I could take it. So I did. Free stuff is great.
I carried it home, worked on my taxes, and went for a run. Then I came home, took a shower, and went to move the dresser into a new place. That was when I noticed a little bug on the dresser. Ew, I thought. Spiders.
Upon closer inspection, it was not a spider but a baby cockroach. FILTH.
I quickly moved the dresser into the kitchen and began to do what I should have done in the first place: a total cavity search. I hit a secret cache of vermin. I was previously unaware that roaches could infest wood. I know better now.
It was hot out today so all the windows were open, allowing the neighbors to hear me yell bilingual insults at the roaches and exclaim, "You die now!!!" Since the windows were open, I was able to hear Lindsay coming down the walk. Poor Lindsay hates roaches more than she hates anything else and now I've brought them into our home.
I went outside to meet her on the walkway. Shutting the door behind me, I told her not to look in the kitchen. I assured her in my most trustworthy voice that whatever that was in the kitchen that she shouldn't be looking at was 700% dead.
I took the dresser out to the dumpster, drawer by drawer. Returning to my room, satisfied that an infestation had been averted, I saw a thumb-sized roach having a stroll on the wall next to my bed. I'm chasing this fat brownie all over the wall and into my bed, spraying like a lunatic because now I'm worried that there might be more hiding somewhere in my room.
The only thing I could think of was to call my mom, who told me that the best thing to do would be to move everything, vacuum under it, and spray the room with roach spray. That's what I'm doing.
I want the cockroach community to know that I do not have time for this. I should be filing my taxes.
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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Saturday, October 27th, 2007
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Dana and I were drunk in a hotel in Moscow made to house guests for the 1980 Olympics. It was our most expensive lodging thus far at about 100 dollars American a night. We were also a little burned out on roaming the continent. Sometimes the exhilaration of a new place crosses a line and becomes the contempt for never knowing if you're paying too much for shawarma. We also needed to budget; we had not planned on hotels in Moscow being quite this expensive. Our plan to conserve funds logically led to imbibing in our hotel room. After a bottle of wine and some leftover vodka, Dana says deliberately, "I want to braid your hair."
My initial reaction is alarm. My hair is very dirty. I try to communicate this to Dana but he doesn't care. "I want to braid your hair," he says again, this time whispering like it's a secret. "I want to French braid it."
"You know how to French braid?" Dana has a documented history of short hair and no sisters.
"Yeah. I had horses as a child." He waxes on about braiding hair for show ponies, putting ribbons in their tails. It seems wrong to deny someone something non-perverse that would conjure such happy childhood memories.
I give him a comb and he sections off my hair. He's sitting on the bed, got the drop on me as I'm cross-legged on the floor. I can't see what he's doing but it feels alright. He doesn't pull my hair like my mom used to.
I'm telling him something unimportant when he interrupts, exhausted and slurring, "I wanted to braid your hair because you have horse hair, but your hair isn't like horse hair. It's all coarse and kinky. And it's really dirty."
I'm laughing now, because I told him so. He thought he couldn't be disgusted after three weeks on the road with me, but clearly I am The Most Disgusting Person on the Planet. I win! But also, lose.
He gives up and ties off a stumpy loose braid in my hair. We go to sleep.
The next morning, Dana is on the floor at 7, doing push-ups. I get up, too. "Did I ask to braid your hair last night?" Yeah. "Oh, weird."
"And you told me I had horse hair."
Dana cracks up but is clearly embarassed. "I'm so sorry. Really. SO sorry. I don't know what it is about you, but you bring out all the really inappropriate things in me. I'm always saying rude shit and making really awful jokes whenever I'm around you."
He is not the first person to tell me this. He isn't even the fifth. Almost all people with whom I have spent a great deal of time tell me that I make them dramatically more inappropriate and I wonder, Is it that I make people very comfortable, or is it that I myself make jokes so horribly offensive that others feel that their own tasteless jokes are of no consequence in comparison?
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Friday, October 19th, 2007
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"Sounding more like a professor than a comedian and magician, Teller described how a good conjuror exploits the human compulsion to find patterns, and to impose them when they aren’t really there.
‘In real life if you see something done again and again, you study it and you gradually pick up a pattern,’ he said as he walked onstage holding a brass bucket in his left hand. ‘If you do that with a magician, it’s sometimes a big mistake.’
Pulling one coin after another from the air, he dropped them, thunk, thunk, thunk, into the bucket. Just as the audience was beginning to catch on — somehow he was concealing the coins between his fingers — he flashed his empty palm and, thunk, dropped another coin, and then grabbed another from a gentlemen’s white hair. For the climax of the act, Teller deftly removed a spectator’s glasses, tipped them over the bucket and, thunk, thunk, two more coins fell.
As he ran through the trick a second time, annotating each step, we saw how we had been led to mismatch cause and effect, to form one false hypothesis after another. Sometimes the coins were coming from his right hand, and sometimes from his left, hidden beneath the fingers holding the bucket.
He left us with his definition of magic: ‘The theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to.’ "
Slights of Mind: The Science of Magic, by George Johnson
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"Before I was a year old, they quit medicine shows and started into the smallest of the small-time vaudeville, trying to work their way up. They had some very tough times. Of course, they had makeup on me and were walking me out just as soon as I could walk in front of an audience. By the time I was 4 years old, I was a regular member of the act, wearing grotesque clothes with a bald-headed wig and Irish beard on, and slap shows. It started when a manager in Wilmington, Delaware, said, “Keep him in the act and I’ll raise your salary $10 a week.” That’s what started me.
It wasn’t Sarah Bernhardt who said, “How can you do this to this poor boy?” when they were throwing me around madly. Everybody said that. From the time I was 7 or 8 years old, we were the roughest knockabout act that ever was in the history of the theater, not only in the United States but all over Europe as well. We used to get arrested every other week–that is, the old man would get arrested. The first crack out of the box here in New York state, the Keith office raised my age two years, because the original law said that no child under 5 could even look at the audience, let alone do anything. So they said I was 7. And the law read that a child can’t do acrobatics, can’t walk a wire, can’t juggle–a lot of those things–but there was nothing said in the law that you can’t kick him in the face or throw him through a piece of scenery. On that technicality, we were allowed to work, although we’d get called into court every other week, see.
Once they took me to the mayor of New York City, into his private office, with the city physicians here in New York, and they stripped me to examine me for broken bones and bruises. Finding none, the mayor gave me permission to work. The next time it happened, the following year, they sent me to Albany, to the governor of the state. Then in his office, same thing: state physicians examined me, and they gave me permission to work in New York state.
Massachusetts thought I was a midget."
Buster Keaton
http://www.fathom.com/course/10701030/
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Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007
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| Time: | 9:31 pm. |
| Mood: | trying not to get excited. |
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Looking for appropriate writing samples really makes one realize how much one curses in things one writes for publication.
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Wednesday, September 12th, 2007
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written to dana in april, regarding our train voyages:
"And of course, if we are stranded in China, I think we should open up a 'traditional American medicine clinic.' Because alcohol is the most traditional of American medicines, we are really just a bar but we have a giant stuffed eagle over the door and you and I wear war paint, NASCAR shirts, and puffy MC Hammer pants made of the American flag. Also, when it is someone's birthday, you will lasso them. Do you know how to do that? You've got until July to learn, buddy."
"I actually paid the Orientation team off not to pick you. Please don't be bitter-- I did it for us!! (This excuse will also be used during the entirety of our trip, when I bet our train tickets on Mongolian horse races and hit a man in the face with an empty bottle of vodka in Tomsk 'for us.')"
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Wednesday, August 15th, 2007
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ellahitsgerald's journal