Category Archives: lists

why do you overestimate the size of the lie?

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My recent dreams come with vivid background music.  A few weeks back I dreamt that my friend Kari and I were on our way to meet B at the movies, and Ani DiFranco’s “32 Flavors” was playing on the car stereo.  We both sang along for the whole song, in real-time.  The other night Mike Doughty’s “Rising Sign”* was playing in the background while something or other dreamlike happened, I can’t remember what.  But the song was very real.

Two days ago someone wrote me an e-mail that contained the following sentence: “Nostalgia, for me, is as deadly as heroin.”  When I read this, I knew exactly what it meant.  Too often I become so mired in my own past that nothing happening presently is as good/bad as what happened before.  It’s dangerous in the sense that it prevents me from enjoying what’s happening presently, and renders me unable to view what happened before in an accurate light.

When I am thus mired (or mired in any swamp of negative thought as I’ve been lately), it becomes important to remember the following things:

I am not what my friends think of me.

I am not what I think my friends might think of me.

I am not my friends.

I am not my ex-boyfriends.

I am not my boyfriend.

I am not what anyone I used to know used to think of me or thinks of me now.

I am not anyone I used to know.

I am not the way I look.

I am not how much I weigh.

I am not what anyone says about me.

*Which I’m now playing on repeat, and I don’t know why.

my year in cities 2008

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Is it too late in 2009 to do my year in cities 2008?  I don’t care.  I’m bored, my allergies are acting up, the ill-advised wedge of fancy cheese I had for dinner isn’t sitting right, and so I’d rather think about all the places I went than where I am right now.  Star denotes places I visited more than once:

Houston, TX *
Falfurrias, TX
Dallas, TX
London
Brussels
Bruges
Amsterdam
Berlin
Oranienburg
St. Louis, MO*
Chicago, IL
Llano, TX

I’m a Spalding Gray in a Rick Dees world!*

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1. The way to get your house in order and everything hung up on the walls real quick-like is to move in and then have people over three weeks later.  You’ll spend those three weeks getting everything to look nice, instead of spending them staring at all your art and saying, “Man, I really should hang that shit up someday.”

Everyone will say your place looks “super-cute” and “very cozy!”  You will say thanks, that you think it looks a little bit like a cartoon, but secretly you will be proud of your new clown apartment.  Then you will get silly drunk and nearly fall asleep on your friends, who will take one look at your sleepy face and decide it’s time to go.

It was a good party.

2. My parents moved to St. Louis several years ago, and they’ve done a good job of keeping in touch with their Houston friends, most of whom they met through church.  They all visit each other relatively frequently and stay up-to-date on what’s happening in everyone’s lives.

After I decided I wasn’t going to go to SXSW next year (though I’ll be in town to hang out in the evenings), I made a point of going to Chicago to visit Andrew and Cinnamon, two of my favorite people I see at SXSW.  I’ve been toying with the idea of visiting Seattle for the same reason, though I’m not sure yet if that’ll happen.

While I was in Chicago, my parents happened to be there as well.  They were on their way to Elmhurst to visit some old church friends of theirs, and they stopped by to have lunch with Andrew and Cinnamon and me.  As we were walking back from the Indian restaurant, Andrew and my dad were walking ahead of me, and my mom and Cinnamon were walking behind me, and that’s when it occurred to me that I treat my internet friends the same way my parents treat their church friends.  We don’t get to see each other too often, but we try to make a point to visit and keep up.

Is the internet my church?

3. Despite my best efforts, things are not looking too good for Pushing Daisies, my new favorite TV show of late.  It’s the Arrested Development thing all over again, and it makes me sad. With the failure of my favorite TV shows comes the realization that most people don’t like the stuff I like, and the stuff I like that sticks around tends to suck after awhile.  Gilmore Girls, the X-Files, Scrubs, the Office,** etc.

With that in mind, maybe it’s good that AD and Pushing Daisies didn’t last that long.  They never got the chance to suck.  Maybe it’s time to move to England and watch shows that aren’t meant to be around that long.

*from this episode of The Simpsons
**The Office‘s suckitude is still debatable at this point, but that dinner party episode was really, really awful.