August 24, 2009

sour grapes.

Burning Man is next week. Time to dust off the beater bike, patch up the paisley loincloth and rig that flamethrower on your car so that bursts of flame explode in time with some sort of electronica beat. Before you descend into the thumping neon dust storm that art built--What? What's that you say? You don't have the bazillion dollars it takes just to survive for a week on the playa? Yeah, me neither.

Well, so one time my friend went to Burning Man and she saw a drunk guy peeing on the door handles of random cars.

August 19, 2009

politics interlude.

I've been too busy picking my jaw up off the floor whenever I tune in to the healthcare debate to post here. I'm thinking of investing in a chin strap. This isn't a politics blog so I'll keep it brief: Yay, Barney Frank! and Et tu, Whole Foods?

Side note: A country where people do not have access to quality education is a country where people are susceptible to the kind of anti-factual fear-mongering we are seeing right now.

I'm just saying.

August 11, 2009

happy sunday.

Like a month into being unemployed you start to lose track of what day of the week it is. This is understandable. Everyday starts the same: roll out of bed and walk the dog, thumb through the paper, maybe hit a museum or read a book. So it makes sense that I always think it's Sunday, right? Whatever.

Cool stuff that's happening now:

Blackberry season! Wild blackberries are the tastiest because you can pick them when they're ripe. The ones you buy in the store are picked early when the fruit is still firm enough to hold up while being transported from god knows where, and that's, I think, why they're often sour. Plus they're expensive.

You know what's not expensive? Pork, apparently. Freakonomics said that the Economist said that pork prices are down 24% this year. You should make pulled pork.

If you've been able to stick to the Infinite Summer schedule, you are officially halfway through the book this week. Congratulations to you! I'm pretty far behind, but why don't we keep that our little secret, shall we? Keeping to the schedule feels somewhat...irrelevant for me, since I've already read the entire thing and can slog through IS forums without worrying about spoilers. What's that you say? IJ is gathering dust on your nightstand ever since you begrudgingly read the entire Poor Tony section without the faintest clue what the hell was going on? I feel you. And I'm not the only one.

In DFW's defense, I think the reason we get irritated is because we feel like he can do better. You get through the first, like 100 pages or so, and you think, yes, this guy is a storyteller like no one's ever been a storyteller before. He's Mr. Rosewater. This is going to be the most poignant, funny, human story of my lifetime! He's a genius, a capital G Genius, I tell you! So you forgive him the footnotes. You forgive him the obfuscation, the intellectual gymnastics, the fucking prescriptive vocabulary. And when there's no payoff you feel like you've been duped by the smuggest depressive in town.

Buck up little reader. There's been ongoing conjecture about the possibility of a film adaptation in the IS forums (Michael Cera as Hal? Directed by Wes Anderson? This is the nerd version of a fantasy football team). Over at Howling Fantods there is a DFW-inspired motivational poster contest of some sort. The entries are hilarious. There's more to Infinite Jest than scrambling to find enough bookmarks (side note: I'm using loteria cards. El Diablito keeps my spot in the narrative, El Borracho's got footnotes).

August 3, 2009

but then how would i hold the lighter?

So no posting last week because I quit smoking (again) and spent most of the week feeling like: Fuck. This. Did you know that cigarettes are the only thing standing between me and a physical misery so strong I would prefer to chew my own fingers off, because maybe that would take my mind off the not smoking for a while? Which sucks, because chewing your fingers off makes you want a cigarette.

Then I fell into a Youtube hole. Did you know about these videos of teletubbies dancing to hip hop and techno?