_ _ _ _ _ _ _

thedailywhat: Shut Up and Take My Money of the Day: A Guinea...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:18:19 -0700

Shut Up and Take My Money of the Day: A Guinea Pig Armor Suit

Need your guinea pig to be battle ready? Sean McCoy from Virginia has got you covered with a custom set of scale-mail! Originally custom tailored for his deceased pet rodent Lucky, the item was put up on eBay last week with the initial bid starting at $5, which has since skyrocketed to $15,100 as of this afternoon. McCoy says that he will be donating all profits to the Metropolitan Guinea Pig Rescue in Virginia, which aims to rescue, rehabilitate and find homes for animals in need.

Thanks for teaching me how to throw a baseball, introducing me...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 16:20:04 -0700

Thanks for teaching me how to throw a baseball, introducing me to the Stones, giving me my first Hunter S. Thompson book, and a million other things. You’re my favorite guy. Happy Father’s Day!

The next 3 1/2 hours of my life are spoken for. (at Phoenix...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:00:52 -0700

The next 3 1/2 hours of my life are spoken for. (at Phoenix Art Museum)

"I admire their commitment to cover all sides of the story just in case one of them happens to be..."

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 18:48:48 -0700

““I admire their commitment to cover all sides of the story just in case one of them happens to be accurate.””

- That’s what Obama said about CNN at last night’s White House Correspondents Association dinner.

Let me explain why that is such a great line. CNN sees itself as “in the middle” between left and right, MSNBC and Fox. Just recently, in fact, CNN president Jeff Zucker praised the middle as the place to be. But CNN also sees itself as a great newsgathering organization that is all about truthtelling rather than ideology. “Keeping them honest,” as Anderson Cooper, face of the brand, likes to say.

Put them together and what do you have? Keep ‘em honest, but stay in the middle. Which doesn’t work. For what happens when one side is BS-ing us more than the other? What happens when independent and honest reporting shows that these people on this side are mostly right in what they’re saying, and those people on that side are distorting the case?

CNN wants to believe, tries to believe and I think does believe that this problem does not exist. Therefore we have to remind them about it, because it does exist. And that’s what Obama did: “cover all sides of the story just in case one of them happens to be accurate” is saying to CNN: Accuracy and truthtelling will be sacrificed to your ideology— the middle, no matter what it takes.

(via jayrosen)

The sad part is, they had all these problems before they hired Jeff Zucker. And then they hired Jeff Zucker, a man whose entire recent career has been built on tone-deaf failures to understand his network’s audience, whatever that network might have been.

(via shortformblog)

One Night Stand in Wartime

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 09:59:34 -0700

I’m sitting in a strange kitchen right now, in a posh two-bedroom condo in Charlestown, Mass., with sprawling views of the Boston skyline and the upper deck of I-93. My head is pounding. I’ve already maxed out on the recommended daily intake of Advil, hung over from a long night of upending pint after pint of Guinness at the Warren Tavern down the road—a legendary pub located in the former home of Revolutionary War hero Dr. Joseph Warren, where my dad has been bartending for the better part of 20 years.

My memory is a bit strained on the details, but I think it went something like this: As news broke of a MIT police officer being gunned down, followed by a hot-pursuit car chase between the two suspects in Monday’s bombing, I was bellied up to the Tavern’s rustic, centuries-old bar. I remember saying something like “blarphgmchp” out loud, which in my head sounded like “Good lord friends, this week has really been a doozie, what?” And that’s when I got a text by a girl I know who lives up a cruelly steep hill from the bar. At 2 a.m. To come over.

Somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain, the little guy driving my core motor skills gave me just enough digital dexterity to reply with a “sure”. Shit’s hitting the fan, I thought. May as well.

I woke up this morning with the standard one-night-stand accoutrements (booze sweats, eyes and brain feeling like they’ve just come out of the microwave, an embarrassing case of gastrointestinal unrest). I put my bare feet down on the floor while trying to find my cell phone and my dignity (both proved elusive), and in doing so I stepped on a giant shard of a broken wine glass. It apparently fell to its end and shattered into a galaxy of twinkling shrapnel from atop the nightstand, which itself had nearly been toppled somehow. Then I hopped over to the TV and turned on CNN.

And it was then when I realized I had a problem. The whole city was locked down. Taxis were suspended. Public transit shuttered. Cops were going house to house. Armored vehicles were roaming the streets. No one could go out. You weren’t even supposed to open the door unless it was for a cop.

With a deadline to hit and a cell phone running on 8% battery, it quickly became clear that my plan to quietly slip out and return home to fulfill my work obligations would be a near impossible feat. I was trapped. And what was meant to be a discreet exit was now an agonizingly gratuitous small-scale walk of shame across the apartment from the bedroom to the bathroom. I paused in the living room to offer up an uncomfortable morning salutation to the roommate, who sat on the couch wearing a robe and a distinct “who the hell is this guy?” look on her face. Yup.

At that point, I really had no option but to just pull up my socks (literally and figuratively) and deal with the moment. One of the great joys (or at least essential requirements) of the boozy one-night-stand is the ability to throw on whatever clothes of yours found strewn across an alien bedroom, and saunter out the door on your own volition. Without it, you face the very real and comically awkward situation of hanging around, reeking of stout and sex, until the city resumes its regularly scheduled programming.

And so the long day began. First, work. I filed the story. Next, some half-awake hanky-panky. While rolling around we almost fell off the side again, knocking into the nightstand, which tipped over again. “Well shit,” I said, “that must’ve been how that happened last night.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it,” she said.

Then time elapsed and cabin fever began to take hold. We slipped out the door, contravening the governor’s orders, and hustled down the deserted Boston streets, hoping not to get shot by a SWAT team, to go to Dunkin Donuts (if Dunkies closes, the terrorists win) and get some smokes. Provisions secured, we hiked back up the hill to her place, whereupon she reminded me that last night I had apparently forgotten where her apartment was and attempted to locate her by literally yelling her name in the street. A full block from where she lives, as it turns out.

So here I am. Still in her apartment, the lockdown still in effect, the suspect yet to be apprehended, public transit still shut down. And I’m sitting at her kitchen table writing this on her computer. Her roommate is on one side, slightly baffled, and she’s standing behind me, reading this over my shoulder and absolutely laughing her ass off.

Journalism.

"More girls have been killed in the last FIFTY years, precisely because they were girls, than men..."

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:45:13 -0700

“More girls have been killed in the last FIFTY years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in ALL the battles of the 20th century.

More girls are killed in this routine gendercide in any ONE decade, than people were slaughtered in ALL the genocides of the 20th century.”

- Nicholas Kristof, Half the Sky

Read that AGAIN.

(via kateoplis)

nevver: e.e. cummings

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:21:31 -0700

nevver:

e.e. cummings

"And it seems impossible to me even still: how somehow, in some way, a mind can break, as if it were a toy."

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 09:49:00 -0700

“Sick” | Amy Butcher

I visit him on Tuesday nights at the only time they’ll let me see him. I show the receptionist my driver’s license, confirm my social security number and home address, and sign my name on a dotted line.

“Relationship?” I’m always asked.

“Friend,” I always say.

The woman—it is the same woman every time—looks, at first, disinterested. She doesn’t even bother to raise her head. She types my name into her computer—click click, click click—but when she finds me, her face lights up.

“Oh, there you are,” she says, smiling, as if it’s possible I’ve disappeared.

Most days, I lean in while she’s typing. I like to ask my questions while she’s distracted, because there’s no filter. “How is he?” I’ll ask, as if it’s a sneak preview of what is yet to come.

She’ll say, “Oh, today he barely ate,” or, “Today he ate a bite of pancakes,” or, “Yesterday was a holiday, so they got a slice of vanilla cake.”

“Great,” I always say; I never know what else to say. What can be said of people who aren’t eating, who are only rarely allowed a slice of cake?

“Go ahead,” she says, nodding toward the door, and this is where my imagination comes in: I like to pretend that it’s a game. I like to pretend that the tiles—each big and glinting under the hallway’s fluorescent lights—are ice floes, their shape bobbing with my movement, their edges rocking from side to side.

Easy! I think. Easy!

I walk slowly, carefully, imagining first polar bears and then penguins, tiny fish, blue-green water. I imagine men in thatched canoes, rowing toward some distant shore.

“Careful,” I sometimes say. To anyone else, this might seem wrong, but I have to pretend it’s a game—having a friend in a place like this.

Some mornings, I walk to my mailbox and attempt to predict what’s waiting there: a list of the books Kevin’s read most recently, a request for photos of a Matisse painting. Send me The School of Athens by Raphael, he writes. Send me The Red Vineyard, or The Sower, or The Round of the Prisoners by Vincent Van Gogh.

Sometimes, Kevin just wants a picture—of me, of Iowa, of anyone. Send me some from college, he says. I’m beginning to forget your faces.

I oblige him every time: I head down to the public library, type in my username, print in color. Or I look up French kings on Wikipedia and print all twelve pages, including citations. I stand beside the librarian’s desk and say, “The printer’s out of ink,” or, “The printer’s out of paper.”

I pay fifty cents a page, but there’s no way for me to know the things a man like Kevin needs. If I were in a place like this, I think, I hope someone would do this for me. Because what if I wanted to learn a new language? What if I still wanted to feel moved by art?

So these games, they make this fun. They are the only things that do. They suppress the grinding panic, the feeling that a child is sitting cross-legged on my chest. This is how I refer to it now, the seizing anxiety I feel when I think of Kevin. I joke to friends and family, because it’s the only way I know to cope. I say, “Today the child is patient.”

I say, “Today, there’s a temper tantrum.”

Some days, it feels like a million tiny feet grinding deep into my esophagus—everything seizes up, and I find it difficult to breathe.

So polar bears and seals. Harpoons and men in hats.

Crazy, you might think, but I will imagine whatever it takes.

When I reach the end of the empty hallway, I always pause before the door. When I open it, I know, Kevin and I will see each other for the first time in weeks, and just what his face will do—well, there’s really no way of knowing. When I open that door, things will happen, so I always wait a second longer. There’s a pleasure in that waiting. I may not know what’s yet to come, but I know that I alone control it.

“Okay,” I say to no one. I open the door, and there he is. I take a seat in the chair beside him and try to look happy to be so close. “Hi,” I say, smiling.

“Hello,” he always says.

Our conversations are strained at first. Often Kevin is weak, lethargic, so I try to warm him up. I ask about the cafeteria food, or the holiday, or the way he spends his time.

“Are you eating?” I ask, and he nods a subtle yes. “Good,” I always say. “You need to preserve your strength.”

When it’s his turn, he asks about the weather, or he asks what I’ve been reading. On the days he feels uncomfortable, he asks these questions quicker.

“It’s not like I really know,” he reminds me. “Not really, anyway.”

Kevin is allowed outside only twice a week, and his recreational field is just a splintered picnic table and a patch of dusty grass he politely calls “the courtyard.” The rest of the time, he looks at snow or sun or rain through glass an inch and a half thick, smudged, gray and gauzy.

“It’s okay,” I say. “Today it’s hot,” or, “Today there’s snow.”

When we exhaust the subject of weather, I ask about Scrabble. Scrabble, more than anything, is what keeps Kevin calm. He says it keeps him “sane.” This is what he writes in letters and stories, and what he tells even his mother when she asks him how he’s doing.

“He loves that game,” she told me once, as if I somehow didn’t know.

Kevin sends me a letter once a month, even despite my visits, because, he says, the written word affords him a certain sincerity. On the page, he can be more honest—he can say that no, he is not eating. That he thinks of it as a silent protest. That Scrabble helps him remain articulate and keep a sharp, fine-tuned mind. That most of all, he likes it because it reminds him of when we were students in college together. “Placate,” he writes. It used up all my tiles.

In letters, Kevin can tell me, too, that he is lonely, or that lately he feels scared. On several occasions, he’s used the word “diseased,” as in, “I feel like something diseased.” Like an animal, he says. Like something locked inside a cage.

But when I visit, Kevin smiles. He is mild-mannered. He asks what I’m listening to or for a recap of his favorite shows. What’s new in True Blood, he wants to know, and what does Sookie Stackhouse look like now?

“Straight hair,” I say, or, “Curly. She’s wearing a lot of dresses.”

Kevin has a crush on Sookie, although he will not admit it. He jokes he wishes he could read minds the way that she does, but I am very glad he can’t.

“Anyway, Scrabble is good,” he says. “Yesterday I beat Vinni.”

Vinni is the man who lives across from Kevin, and though he has only a ninth grade education, he usually puts up a pretty good fight.

“He almost got me,” Kevin says. “But I had a triple letter score on a y.”

Neither one of us knows why Vinni is here; we are both afraid to ask. But it is these moments, more than any others, that make me feel relieved. I am glad to hear about Kevin’s games. There are worse things Kevin could be doing with his time than playing a game of Scrabble, like, for example, not playing a game of Scrabble. On the days I don’t visit, I imagine him sitting on his cot, staring up at that blank white ceiling, imagining not ice floes at all but the days, endless as glaciers, and how he might not make it through them. Kevin sees a therapist here, someone who is coaching him through this process, this strange new lifestyle. She is supposed to make the transition easier, but it seems she only makes him angry. In his letters, he sends me updates: she’s diagnosed him with depression, or she’s diagnosed him as suicidal. Do you believe her? he writes. Of course I’m depressed, living in a place like this.

On the days I don’t visit, I see Kevin holding a plastic knife, the one they give him at every meal. It is a knife meant for frozen pizza or a baked potato, and it is dull, but still, I imagine him carving it somehow, flicking the plastic against the cinderblock until it is clean and sharp and smooth. I see him pressing it to his skin, so thin and white as paper, and I imagine him scraping. Digging. Carving.

I think, The next time I come to see my friend, he will no longer be living here.

The woman at the front desk will tell me he’s not eating, that now he’s not even breathing.

So I like to think of him playing Scrabble.

“What about you?” Kevin asks me, and again I don’t know what to say. Sometimes, I think of telling Kevin the truth: that life is good, very good, because I can move around and walk through alleyways and eat a sprinkled donut. I can put on headphones and listen to Bon Iver and pretend the world is my movie, that what I’m seeing is only mine, that the way the light bends across a cemetery or the way a bird angles in flight are things given to me because I am not sick like Kevin. I can feel a moment of melancholy and trust it will go away. I can eat apple pie, even if it’s not a holiday, and I can wear green, or red, or rings carved from emerald or jade. I can ride a bicycle or spray paint it blue or kiss a boy for hours on a fraying couch while a TV plays. I can stay up all night if I want, eating Raisin Bran and watching cartoons, or I can drive to Niagara Falls or hike a mountain or tie my shoes. I want to say to Kevin that life was better when he could do these things beside me—see a midnight movie, just drive around—and that since he’s been away, I haven’t ordered Chinese once, because who will eat the water chestnuts? They would just sit there on my plate.

Instead, I tell him work is work and that often I’m very tired. “Life is exhausting, frankly,” I say, because I want him to remember what it’s like outside of this place—how it can be good, but it’s not everything.

That sometimes I, too, feel very bad.

“I work until six most days,” I say. “I get out, and I just want to sleep.”

“I know what you mean,” he says, nodding. “That’s all I do with my afternoons.”

Kevin tells me things like this, and of course I feel awful, because of course I know it’s true. At least, I think, at least my day ends, and I can come home and watch Toddlers & Tiaras, and it doesn’t matter the show is awful because at least I can choose to watch it.

But Kevin can do none of these things. He cannot even hug someone, which is why, on my last visit, we decided to make a secret gesture. What happened was this: I was leaving, and I told Kevin I wished I could hug him right then, because he was making a face that broke my heart. But in this place, that’s not allowed, so I said, “How about I squint my eyes and mush my face and round my upper lip into my nose, and this can be our own no-contact friendship hug?”

“Like a bunny,” he said, laughing, and then he mushed his cheeks and twitched his nose.

But now I see rabbits everywhere and always think of him.

“The good times,” Kevin says. “Do you remember all the good times?”

I do. And there were years like that, I remind myself when I need to. There were four whole years of friendship before this happened,and yet when I think of Kevin now I only ever think of this place, this smell, this lighting.

“Well,” I say, “I should get going,” and as I head back down the hallway, I always make my footsteps loud. Klunk, klunk, klunk, klunk, because I want Kevin to hear the weight of me. I want him to know that I am there for as long as I am there.

In the parking lot, in my car, I sit and look up at his building. There he is, I tell myself, and there he’ll stay. And then I drive home picturing it: how now they’re dimming the lights, now they’re checking he’s in bed, now they’re ensuring he’s blinking and breathing and present and alive.

I slip into my house, or I slip into a bar, or I slip between the cushions of a couch next to a body, and because I visit with regularity, eventually people ask. They ask, and I always tell them that my friend Kevin is in a hospital.

“He’s sick,” I say, shrugging, and the place I go to has specific hours because it is a ward, not a prison. He’s a patient, not an inmate. “He needs me,” I say, though I’m no longer certain that’s even true.

Of course I don’t admit what really happened: that my friend Kevin experienced a psychotic breakdown three weeks before our college graduation. He walked me home and then returned to his own apartment, where he murdered a young woman with a kitchen knife from a set bought at Wal-Mart. Kevin stabbed that poor girl twenty-seven times in the neck and upper torso, then phoned the local police, saying he was so sorry, and would they come?

He said, “I’ll be waiting for you outside.”

It would sound far-fetched even to me—the idea of a psychotic breakdown, of a dissociative episode that renders a man unaccountable for his actions. Even now, I watch the news and see a violent man—Jared Loughner, James Holmes, now Adam Lanza—and think, That’s exactly what happened to Kevin.

My friend is not Adam Lanza, of course. He did not walk into an elementary school and shoot children, one by one. There are many, many differences. But what happened to Kevin is, for all intents and purposes, the same: he was sick, and no one knew.

In a mental evaluation completed just weeks after Kevin’s arrest, one doctor wrote, It is my professional opinion that Kevin demonstrated signs of impaired functioning prior to and at the time of the offense, and therefore lacked the capacity to comprehend the wrongfulness of his actions and conform his behaviors to the requirements of the law.

I believe, reads another, he had no thought of ever killing her.

And finally, there is this: This is truly a tragic case.

In the days immediately following the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, the Huffington Post published a provocative article by mother Liza Long, who articulates her own experience raising a mentally ill, gifted but oftentimes unpredictable, violent teen.

“I love my son,” she writes, “but he terrifies me.”

In her article, Long articulates the difficult moment of involuntarily committing her son to a psychiatric hospital after he threatened himself and his siblings. Later, Long discusses her options with her son’s social worker, who states the only real solution is to charge him with a crime, thereby creating a paper trail and inviting the possibility of incarceration—a long-lasting, consequential measure. “That’s the only way you’re ever going to get anything done,” the social worker tells her. “No one will pay attention to you unless you’ve got charges.”

“I don’t believe my son belongs in jail…” Long writes, “but it seems like the United States is using prison as the solution of choice for mentally ill people.”

And the inverse is true, as well. Because of our own refusal to eliminate the stigmas of mental illness and advocate effective, long-lasting treatment, prison is the inevitable ending place for those who are mentally ill and suffering. According to the Human Rights Watch, the rate of inmate mental illness is five times that of the general population, and since 2001, it’s been rising steadily with every year.

I knew Kevin was suffering from depression. I knew he had once been suicidal. During the fall of our junior year, he was required to take a medical leave of absence to resolve suicidal ideation. That was the official term. But what happened, when put simply, is that he filled a tub with water. He took the radios, stereos, and speakers from the bedrooms of his roommates, placed them along the rim, and prepared to enter.

And yet, after his return in the winter of 2008, just a little over a year before his psychotic breakdown, I never discussed that experience with him. I never asked him how he felt, or how it was that he felt now. Mental illness seemed too taboo, too intimate a conversation to share between two friends. It seemed some secret, private burden—one I, and many others, thought he could carry on his own.

Now, in the three years since it happened, I myself have been diagnosed with PTSD, as I was the last person Kevin saw that night, the last woman before he killed her. I’ve been diagnosed with depression. I’ve seen my own relationships fall apart as a direct result of that trauma, that fear, and I’ve flinched when a man touched my neck a bit too firmly. I often go for walks. I have been told, again and again, “You have to stop thinking about this.” Once, on a very turbulent flight, I watched as mothers clung to daughters, couples to one another, and my first thought was not, God help me, or I love my parents, or even No, but At least if we go down, I’ll finally stop thinking about what he did.

In the meantime, I am incapable. I think about it all the time. And it seems impossible to me even still: how somehow, in some way, a mind can break, as if it were a toy.

Worse yet, I don’t know the solution. I don’t know what to say. I often thought that by this far out—over three years—I’d be able to look at what Kevin did, and it would seem a distant pinpoint, something small on the horizon, something I could identify as a pivotal moment in my development that I experienced and then moved on from. The past is, after all, the past. Instead, it remains large and looming, shaping not only my own experience of our friendship—my silence and that hesitation—but my very present and inevitable future. I walk my dog now beside the reservoir and of course I think of him. It’s like momentum, I want to say, and what I mean is how it looks when a rock strikes a body of water—how ripples can form and move even long after the stone has sunk. I want to say that this is not the case. You were not the one affected, I often think. But my friend is in jail, and will be for twenty-seven to fifty years, and I still don’t understand what happened. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, and so I visit. I write letters. I ask, “How are the Scrabble games going?”

It was easier when I could think the way that everyone else seems to think: that a brain is just a brain, iconic in its structure. I used to picture gray strands, film, all of it looped and loped together. Now I see apartment buildings, poorly constructed and impossibly built, the kind you find along highways. I picture homes stacked above other homes, people cooking omelets on broken burners, heaters plugged in and oscillating. Most days, the residents of these homes live peacefully among one another—they take showers, sing songs, and bake brownies—but one day, an oven’s left on. Or someone forgets to unplug the iron. Or maybe that’s not it, either—maybe the people have nothing to do with it at all. But still come these chemical explosions, far too small and too complex to see, sending red, sparking embers into the drywall of our minds.

“Fire!” we say. “Fire!” But still we stand there and watch it burn.

maddieonthings: Coffee with Maddie. Atlanta, GA

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 10:49:21 -0700

maddieonthings:

Coffee with Maddie. Atlanta, GA

"You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch..."

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 18:22:19 -0700

“

You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

This is the experience of all writers.

”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald on the Secret to Great Writing

“Anxiety is freedom’s possibility” — Kierkegaard (The Concept of Anxiety)

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 21:04:57 -0700

So what does the existentialist say to me about my dream? He tells me that so long as I am letting myself be my own victim—so long as I interpret my worry as an unfulfilled purpose, as something that’s wrong about me or my life (so long as I am goaded, Nietzsche might say, in the wrong direction by the pain of my frustrated drive)—I will continue to have my night sweats. The fundamental way to make sense of life is to acknowledge that I am wholly responsible in this one: responsible not to some other life that I ought to be leading, but for this present one I am actually living, where I choose to be where I am, what I am, who I am.

(Kierkegaard thought that the worst thing that could happen to a human is that he or she would fail to experience anxiety, because that meant failing to experience yourself—but I think it’s a fair question to ask whether we want to experience ourselves).

Anxiety, then, is not the reflection of our inadequacy, but rather the knee-jerk response to our misguided, self-defeating, and logically doomed efforts to be someone other than who we are. The reason we feel inadequate is that we wonder if we’re up to the task—when the task has already been accomplished, is always already being accomplished, by each of us. So should I sit here in a maelstrom of worry? Or do I have what it takes to be free?

— I’m Worried About My Anxiety | Clancy Martin | VICE

durianseeds: “I Think I Am In Friend-Love With You” written by...

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 17:59:20 -0700

durianseeds:

“I Think I Am In Friend-Love With You” written by and illustrated by Yumi Sakugawa, published in Sadie Magazine, 2012.

Things I Did in 2012 That I've Never Done Before (Part Two):

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:55:46 -0700

got fired.

First snow of the year. (at Sharon, PA)

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 11:37:00 -0700

First snow of the year. (at Sharon, PA)

Things I Did in 2012 That I've Never Done Before:

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 13:11:52 -0700

got arrested.

Pittsburgh on a Friday.

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 14:00:06 -0700

Pittsburgh on a Friday.

Mi favorito. @theheavypedal #Merika #fuckyeah (Taken with...

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 02:13:32 -0700

Mi favorito. @theheavypedal #Merika #fuckyeah (Taken with Instagram at The Lost Leaf)

"Get the hell out of Dodge."

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 13:15:20 -0700

verb. ‘to get out of Dodge.’

To leave somewhere immediately. To evacuate with haste.

1. A reference to Dodge City, Kansas

2. Made famous by its use in “Gunsmoke”

3. Started to be used in its current form in the 1960s

Oh, by the way: etymology is the study of the history of words; entomology is the study of insects. Come on.

My favourite place to read is really anywhere so long as I can...

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 09:57:07 -0700

My favourite place to read is really anywhere so long as I can spread myself out. Couch, rug, bed, whatever feels best. This is because I’m a fidgeter. I flip-flop around a book like it’s the only thing I have to hold onto in a storm.

I wish I could tell you that I read in my favourite café with my legs neatly crossed, sitting next to a peppermint tea atop a dainty saucer, all in a beam of morning light. But I can’t, because I’m lying on my belly, ignoring the fact that leaning on my arms is making them fall asleep. When they do, no problem. I just plop around onto my back and hold the book above my head, or maybe curl around the book on my side in some unnatural fashion, or sit up and balance it on my knees.

Did you just step on something? Oh, that was me. I was rolled up in a blanket on the floor. Don’t worry about it.

When I was a teenager, I even threw sitting awkwardly upside down into the mix, legs thrown up and over the back of an armchair, but had to give that up when I became a Lady because no gentleman worth his salt takes an upside-down person to the altar. Not that I’m fishing for husbands when I’m halfway through the latest George R.R. Martin, but you have to draw a general conduct line somewhere, don’t you think?

— Kate Beaton

nevver: Steve Martin Letter To A Young Judd Apatow

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 15:13:28 -0700

nevver:

Steve Martin Letter To A Young Judd Apatow