June 2010
9 posts
May 2010
22 posts
change of plans
me: Hey, you’d better come to my going-away party next week.
james: What?
me: My going-away party.
james: What?
me: Did you not see the email?
james: I don’t read emails!
me: Oh, well — I’m leaving! Going to a startup dating website.
james, authoritatively: No.
Hooray for our side: !!!!!!!!!!!!! →
mollykay.tumblr.com
Matt, fiddling with his hair on a bench outside the bagel place: I think maybe the problem is that I blowdried my hair last night at the gym. Maybe that’s what made it so fluffy and weird.
Molly: Oh, yeah, that would definitely make sense.The conversation segues briefly into gym culture. Matt…
To answer the question at the bottom of the post: Um, no. But I’m impressed with your ability to resist making the joke about blow j…nevermind.
p.s. Everyone should follow Molly,who is a friend of mine and a fellow former Wondertimer and a recent Tumblr convert. Hooray!
“
She loves the color yellow; when she emerges from the limo at the start of the season, you half-expect her to be accompanied by chirping animated bluebirds. Ali also gets right to the point, speaking in simple declarative sentences (“I love hugs!”) and describing most of what she encounters as “awesome.” Her next metaphor will be her first.
As for the 25 suitors, they have well-aligned teeth and count among their interests everything from fitness and nutrition to exercise and push-ups.
” —I’ve never watched the show, but I heart Larry Dobrow.it. is. time!
time to start unsubscribing from email newsletters with subject lines like,
Don’t Forget the Foreplay, From Partners to Parents
Squeeze in Your Kegal Exercises
Are You Still Fertile?
and so on and so forth.
“You live very self-consciously, in Brooklyn. Do you drink juice or coffee or eat vegetables? How do you live with yourself and your bourgeois lifestyle choices? Have you ever grown a plant? You monster, you gentrifying Brooklyn monster. Your plant is a symbol. Punch that up on your sushi iPhone app where you get your food from in your new robot Brooklyn dystopia, you invasive specie. Do you like quirky things? It’s people like you who are ruining the Brooklyn remembered by old folks who sit on stoops and provide readily available sound bites about the days of old.”
—Brooklyn is Cool Until You Start Reading About It (Gawker)
“Do One Thing Really Well: You’re pretty much going to spend the entire day G-chatting with your friends and reading silly blog posts (and maybe buying something cute at Gilt Group) but you must have at least one accomplishment for the day so when your boss gets back you can say, “I finally finished the Peterson proposal.” Make sure you focus for like an hour and dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s and all the other cliches that you are actually paying attention to your work. Once your decoy assignment is done, the whole internet is out there just waiting for you. Go explore, my friends.”
—
This post = brills.
“
Splitting our attention between real and virtual worlds can produce a kind of neural intoxication, research shows. Through our devices, we find a way to disappear without leaving the room. By splitting ourselves off and reaching out electronically, we fill empty interpersonal space and ignite our senses. We can find relief and a fleeting sense of freedom.
Decades ago, the sociologist Barry Schwartz commended the group-preserving functions of dissociating. Everyone, he said, reaches a threshold beyond which working with others is irritating, even unendurable. Finding a mental escape can help us deal with the problem. But electronic devices have led to a serious overuse of this strategy — to the detriment of everyone.
” —Sending a Message That You Don’t Care
“Of course, they are also trying to sell their six-story (and five-bathroom) West Village home for $20 million in a bad market, and there’s no better advertising. “We’re in it just like everyone else,” she said.”
—
Just like everyone else. Riiiiight.
Big City - The Imperfect Novogratz Family in “9 by Design”
(Side note: I haven’t seen the show, but reading about their family in Cookie and Babble years ago left a vaguely fameball-ish aftertaste in my mouth. See also: Jealousy, real-estate envy, and a generalized dislike for anything having to do with the competition.)
falling back in like
“So, I had a really cathartic dream last night that I drove to [redacted’s] apartment and yelled at him for having been such an unavailable boyfriend.”
“You know, the brief bromance C had with [redacted] really meant something to him…I wonder if *he* ever has dreams where he yells at [redacted] for failing to love all of us.”
“Oh! I saw the other day that [redacted] had liked C’s status on Facebook. Was he excited about that?”
“OH MY GOD yes. He wouldn’t stop talking about it.”
“Like many people, I had come to New York City with this idea that I was somehow extraordinary. The important part wasn’t “extraordinary,” it was “somehow” — I wasn’t quite sure what kind of renown it was, exactly, that I was destined for. I just knew that I was really good at something, or that I could be, if I could just figure out what. Free-floating ambition is toxic because it means that anyone who has accomplished anything in any realm of human endeavor is the enemy because she might be your competition. So you hate everyone a little bit, but behind this wall of hatred you still feel vulnerable. And you are vulnerable, but not because of the competition. You’re vulnerable because if anyone points you in anything that seems like a direction, that’s where you’ll go.”
—And the Heart Says Whatever
