i am a pretentious hack.

       i'm not dead!

Sunday, June 25, 2006

spelling counts!

from the "neatest trick" department:

a 2-year-old girl's stolen prosthetic legs apparently have been found. a maintenance worker at a new haven apartment building discovered the derby girl's legs yesterday—two days after a car they had been in was stolen in milford—and turned them into police.


. . . who then arrested the car thieves, in a brilliant turn of magical-realist poetic justice. this blurb was spotted in the 6/23 weekend edition of the boston metro, from which i expect nothing but a crossword puzzle i can solve in under fifteen minutes, but still . . . in a perfect world, i'm not the only person who's paying attention. hence the melting ice caps, eh?

speaking of crossword puzzles, though, here's something lovely: patrick creadon's wordplay, a movie about crossword puzzles and the americans who obsess over them, particularly the ny times' crossword editor will shortz, features a charming (as if it could be otherwise) bit with jon stewart. that's two of my favorite things in a combination i would never have come up with on my own, and i'm positively giddy over it. it's like the make-a-wish foundation has had me on twenty-four-hour surveillance for the past half a decade and one day decided i'd been a good enough (and perhaps sick enough) girl after all. the metro ran an ad for this movie in the same edition, so the error is atoned for in my eyes, but i think it still has some apologizing to do to the rest of its readers—even the ones who didn't notice or care, who likely amount to a hefty sum.

Labels: , ,

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

you killed the minimum wage increase! YOU BASTARDS!

WASHINGTON - the republican-controlled senate smothered a proposed election-year increase in the minimum wage wednesday, rejecting democratic claims that it was past time to boost the $5.15 hourly pay floor that has been in effect for nearly a decade.

the 52-46 vote was eight short of the 60 needed for approval under budget rules and came one day after house republican leaders made clear they do not intend to allow a vote on the issue, fearing it might pass.

the senate vote marked the ninth time since 1997 that democrats there have proposed - and republicans have blocked - a stand-alone increase in the minimum wage. the debate fell along predictable lines.

"americans believe that no one who works hard for a living should have to live in poverty. a job should lift you out of poverty, not keep you in it," said sen. Edward M. Kennedy, d-mass. he said a worker paid $5.15 an hour would earn $10,700 a year, "almost $6,000 below the poverty line for a family of three."


now, i never really believed that the increase would pass, just like i don't really believe that all of that recycling i take the time to wash and separate every week ends up anywhere other than on a garbage barge headed for some impoverished nation where $5.15 an hour is an unattainable eden. but i keep on washing and separating it, just like i keep on hoping people will get it together and do right by each other. and so does ted kennedy. look, look how sad he is:

that is the face of a man who can no longer see the sense in fighting the good fight. i know, because i make it every time i rinse out a plastic cup. but the day i don't rinse out the cup is the day i realize i have nothing to live for, and that's what it'll say on my suicide note: "i decided to stop rinsing out the cup." and if teddy could see my suck-it-up-and-keep-recycling-you-crybaby face, he'd recognize that expression, too; it's the one he was wearing when he said this:

"when the democrats control the senate, one of the first pieces of legislation we'll see is an increase in the minimum wage."

you and me, teddy bear. we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams. you should come over some time and lick some wallpaper with me. i think you'll especially like the mural of the current republican majority beating a gaggle of malnourished children away from a mound of food and clothing; the heartless fuckers taste like heartless fuckers.

Labels: , ,

Saturday, June 17, 2006

let's have a pity party.


this is john hodgman. he's my new favorite imaginary roommate. you may know him as the pc in the "i'm a mac, and i'm a pc" commercials. or you may have seen him in one of his quasiregular appearances on the daily show, in which he is consistently hilarious and absolutely darling. he is also both of these things in his book, the areas of my expertise, said areas reaching far and wide across the ever-expanding ocean of human experience. john grew up in brookline, massachusetts, all of ten minutes from where i'm sitting right now, but by the time i got here he had long since left for new york. that's why he's my imaginary roommate and not my actual roommate. i suppose there could be some other reasons, like that he's been married for four or five years, but that first one is the real root of it. new york takes all of my boys from me, makes them monstrously famous, and then waves them over my head. she's like a cruel-hearted babysitting older sister who tells me i can't have dessert and then breaks out a tray of tiny, delicious cupcakes and says i can have as many as i want . . . if i can reach them. it's so unfair! she's, like, ten miles taller than me. oh, alas and alack. oh, sigh.

anyway, john's very smart and will probably make you laugh, and if that sounds like the kind of boy for you, tough. he's taken. but you can read his book and then hang his picture on the back of an armchair that you're sitting across from and have a fictional conversation with him about it. i mean, i don't do that. but you could. if you wanted to. i don't care, it's your armchair.

stop looking at me like that.

Labels: , ,

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

how i didn't meet chuck palahniuk

yesterday i read in the local newspaper that chuck palahniuk would be visiting the brookline booksmith, one of my favorite local stores, to read from his new novel, haunted. here's what i thought about that:

SCORE!!!!!!

i do love me some palahniuk, and some brand-spanking-new, potentially autographed palahniuk sounded even better than the rest. so i made absolutely certain that i left work (where i am suddenly a senior editor, which is beautiful and bizarre, like the indigenous fauna of australia or the deep sea) exactly at five, knowing what should have been a twenty-minute drive would take me at least forty-five in evening traffic and wanting to be at the store by six, when the reading was scheduled to begin. i assumed that i'd have to stand around at the far edge of the room, if i could even get inside, so i was elated when i reached the store at 6:05 and saw a fairly minimal crowd. and then i was not thrilled anymore, because i realized that the minimal crowd was actually a single(ish)-file line winding up and down the aisles to the table chuck was already sitting at. here's what i thought about that:

hmmmm.

i asked the trendily nerdy boy at the counter if the reading was going to take place later on, since the sandwich board out front said chuck would be there from six to nine, and three hours seemed like an awfully long time to sit in a folding chair huffing sharpie fumes, especially for someone who doesn't need the press. but the boy said no, it was just a signing, until nine or they ran out of books, whichever came first. here's what i thought about that:

screw you guys, i'm going home.

but i didn't really leave, of course. not then. i got in line and did my best to tune out the cluster of giddy, chirpy nineteen-year-olds directly in front of me, whose idolatry of trite adjectives could be rivalled only by that of tom cruise and katie holmes, particularly when they're raving numbly about each other (GREAT! THAT'S GREAT! YOU'RE GREAT! THAT BOOK IS GREAT! SWEET PICKLES ARE GREAT!). i was standing directly across from chuck, and, as we happened to be about a foot in front of the endcaps of the main aisles, and people who become accustomed to waiting and moving in lines cling to walls and don't stray from aisles, there was no one between us. so i watched him.

i had seen and heard him on television and in interviews, but never in person. he always seemed extremely animated to me, almost hyperactive, with a lot of hand gestures and elongated vowels. he tends to explain himself with the wide-eyed vim of a little boy who is working triple-time to impress people by convincing them that he doesn't need to impress anyone. from his folding chair behind the low table, his voice was the same, the rhythms and intonation, the volume, all his standard "people are listening to me" patterns, and maybe that's the way he sounds all the time, alone in his kitchen or bathroom or car. who the hell knows. but his face was not the same. he looked like he had been awake for about three days, and every time he had started to nod off over those three days someone had lobbed a chilled water balloon at his face. he looked startled and aged and lost and unnervingly eager to please. he looked small. really, really small.

i thought about the exhausting dichotomy of being a professional writer. the work is, by necessity, utterly reclusive. you have no choice but to set up house in your head and turn up the volume of your own thoughts until they're all you hear all the time, sometimes for months and months, sometimes for years. and then you have to go out on a publicity tour and convince crowds of strangers that they really, really want to know what you were thinking about. so either you love the writing and dread the crowds, or you live for the crowds and loathe the writing, but either way, you are made a little bit sick by about half of your life. it could have been that he was feeling under the weather, or maybe all of the people in this particular line were as lovely to chat with as the ones adjacent to me, but chuck was looking like he was hating the half i was in. here's what i thought about that:

poor guy. he just wants us to listen to his story.

and then i did go home. but on the way i stopped at a book store closer to my apartment and picked up haunted. if you aren't familiar with the premise, it involves eighteen writers who respond to an ad for an artistic retreat, hoping to isolate themselves from all of the distractions that have been preventing them from completing the masterpieces that will undoubtedly win them international fame and lifelong security. so, things get a little weird, and there may or may not be a titch of cannibalism… well, here's what i think about that:

maybe chuck's decided he doesn't love either half.

Labels: , ,