Friendly failure

Today I tried to type 16 pages and only wrote 7. That is a really crap result to what might turn out to be a very useful experiment. It is also the reason that this post is going to be so enormously boring, since that is about 4 times my daily average in word count.

Lessons learned today in this attempt:

1. My average daily work count might be too low. Only letting this mess sit and then examining it will tell.

2. Inside of people, at the point passed 2,000 words without a set fictional topic, there is only sadness. And ironically, I find this very depressing. I would like to think that deep in side of me there is resilience and a secret store of ass-kicking awesomeness, but I am pretty sure there is just a wealth of sadness. Stupid g.d. emo predisposition.

3. At some point I thought to myself that I would like to write a bunch of profiles on the freaks that I have known. Not the honest-to-goodness freaks that end up institutionalized or living off the government but the everyday subtle freaks. Because it seems to me that I know a lot of hilarious disturbed characters. Unfortunately, I think that that falls under libel or something so don’t look forward to seeing a brilliant expose of coworkers, ex-roommates and my favorite waitress at Applebee’s here.

4. Finally, I want to note that this brain exhaustion is very welcome. I worry a lot that because I am not really tired that I haven’t done anything all day. And this day, which went by in a blur, I don’t have to worry about that.

Now to find out whether 7 single-spaced pages can be pushed to16 pages with double spacing. (P.S.: I know that it can’t. I did college and all of that crap.)

g.d., J.D.

J.D. Salinger died, at 91, out in Cornish at his hermit house. At first glance it didn’t seem like that big of a deal – I’m not one for stalking authors personally and I always avoid reading about J.D.’s personal life in particular because the accounts are so controversial. But as the fact sunk into my infamously dense understanding, I realized that it is a big deal. It’s a big, goddamn deal.

Now I’m not trying to be cute and Salinger-y by throwing around the curse words. I am just trying to get at, in a round about and too conversational way, the fact that Salinger’s works are very important to me. Not Cather in the Rye specifically, though I was overjoyed to hear a coworker mention the novel as the most pretension novel in their name-dropping arsenal. I am more enamored of Franny and Zooey (to don my hipster cap) and Nine Stories and the craziness of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters with the Tom Collins and the deaf uncle and the terrible, giant paragraphs of Seymour, An Introduction.

I love Salinger’s descriptive passages and his perfectly chosen details. I would rather read Salinger’s description of a chicken sandwich than some other jerk-wad’s impassioned tribute to the Sistine Chapel any day. Salinger was a recluse, a religious flip-flopper and a hotly debated pervert but there is no one, alive or dead, who knew as much about chicken sandwiches and glasses of milk. And don’t get me started on his descriptions of very wet cocktails.

So here, unresearched and unrehearsed, I give you a list of my favorite Salinger moments off the top of my head:

- The scene where Mrs. Glass surveys the bathroom cabinet in Zooey and dumps cigarette ash into the empty wastebasket.

- The passage in The Laughing Man where the narrator says that he has only seen three immediately beautiful women in his life, one of whom threw a lighter at a porpoise from a cruise ship.

- When Franny orders the chicken sandwich at the French restaurant in Franny and Lane thinks about being in the right place with the right-looking girl.

- Anything about Just Before the War with the Eskimos, except when the brother picks food out of his teeth with his fingernail and ruins the romance for me. Another excellent chicken sandwich scene; another great tennis jacket.

- When the whole party comes back to Buddy’s apartment in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Buddy mixes drinks, gets drunk and lies to the deaf uncle.

- The incredible narrative self-indulgence of Seymour, An Introduction. My favorite line: “Please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).”

And since I doubt that I can muster up anything worthy of following that line, I guess I’ll close here.

The holidays make me cranky

I am starting off this particular post with a fair forewarning: I plan to be awfully negative so people sensitive to that sort of shenanigans would do well to shield their eyes. Actually they would do well to click along elsewhere; the internet is boundless. Go ahead and click that alluring “Next Blog” button at the top of the screen. We don’t need any positive people here, anyway.

I am full of writing rage today (not unrelated but not identical to my frequent bouts of retail rage) and I plan to make full use of it here. I am having a hard time getting anything done despite vast improvements in my internet dependency. (I lightly compressed the small internet button on my keyboard and disabled the whole scenario.) Also, what is with my apparent overwhelming love for parenthesis today? I could expand this to talk about how I am thinking in small asides instead of in strong narrative threads and therefore being unproductive, but since that would probably require several snide asides (detailing my extensive love of metaphor, undoubtedly) it seems absolutely counterproductive.

Without further (or parenthetical) ado, here is a list of things besides writing that are pissing me off this morning:

• People/media outlets making their list of “Best of _____” for 2009. I know this is the easy and obvious piece to write but I’m quite tired of reading lists of albums, movies, books, and celeb scandals. Let’s try, for the sake of reflection and variety, to limit these lists to every other year, or every other obvious category. *
• People in my neighborhood who have those huge inflatable Christmas things. What’s wrong with lights? Lights are classy. Snowmen on sailboats with Santa hats are just damn ridiculous. And ugly. And probably a phenomenal waste of electricity. (See I told you: I am pissed off AND I love parenthesis today.)
• Finally, I hate how people are so perplexed by the fact that a person might want a decaf coffee beverage. Some of us can’t handle the caffeine, you know. If we had caffeine we’d be twice as rowdy as I am being on this blog.

* I offer full amnesty to the Whitney-and-Kevin Best Person of 2009 contest. The current favorite to take the title is Lisa from Fun Cuts, the crazy masseuse who once charged me half price because I was short and can only identify me as part of “that cute couple.” The winner for 2008 was either PJ from the T-Mobile Store or the hostess at Applebee’s whose perfect first date ends with a platonic game of Twister…I can’t recall.

My please-employ-me voice

The best parts of being unemployed:

- Shopping in an empty grocery store at midday.

- Never sitting in traffic.

- Not seeing other humans.

- Eating lunch at 10 a.m.

- Bonding with my dog.

- Getting to read the news in “full screen” windows.

The worst part of being unemployed is:

- Looking for work.

Seriously, it is the worst part. I could say that not making money is the worst part of not having a job as everyone knows that I’m a greedy miser, but I venture that currently, as my savings is not yet overly diminished by my activities, actually looking for a job is worse.

Take today for example. I went to the Safeway a few hours ago to get some mexi-cheese for taco salads. As I walked out I noticed that a nearby Pete’s Coffee had an abnormal number of colored leaflets in the window so, always vigilant, I sauntered in that direction. Sure enough the one of the leaflets was advertising seasonal hiring. I debated going inside for a few minutes because I was in a my usual slob attire but I rationalized that Pete’s pretends that it services the hippie demographic and so I just went inside.

I strode up to the counter and in the differential voice that I’ve acquired over the last few weeks said to the disinterested kid behind the counter, “I saw the advertisement in the window that you guys are hiring.”

He nodded. I smiled ingratiatingly. When he didn’t take the hint I asked with the same quiet tone for an application. He handed it over. I thanked him dramatically. We stared at one another for a moment.

“So,” he asked with an air of impatience. “What can I get you today?”

I bought a guilt-coffee because I couldn’t think of how to properly articulate that I’d only wanted the application and that my entire casual demeanor was an act.

Also, I just realized that the last three posts have revolved around coffee shops. What sort of puesdo-bohemian loser am I? Obviously I need to get a job, like, pronto.

PS, this post is dedicated to my favorite bro who is my only blog fan and is also seeing a doctor today (in the biblical sense).

Cheesy chips with stealth

When I was driving home, I planned on blogging about my discomfort with the gobs of pop culture references in novels these days. The concept was already in my mind, since I had gulped down a new release for nefarious purposes over the weekend and was been rendered unable to shut up about the topic since. But now, having been molified by a burrito dinner, I don't feel quite the need for such carrying on. Furthermore, I suspect that it might have come off a little hoity-toity, especially since I was, with careful phrasing to spare my feelings, told just yesterday evening by the the sole reader of this blog that I was being pretentious.

And here I'll stand my ground: though it may seem pretentious to want a little purity in the novel, or to write a blog post about how people should never reference YouTube in an attempt to ground a story [the internet, as its sole determining feature is intangibility, should be ignored as a method of defining characters or space, and here I'll stop as I'm sprouting undergraduate bullshit], but I am not pretentious.

Worshiping the novel is a not a symptom of snobbery, though it can be a reaction to it. As a note of interest, worshiping the novel also does not mean that you recycle, love the homeless, and eat hummus with the cat that you've named Chaucer. And so, because I love lists and I love talking about myself, I offer to you the list of reasons that I can talk relentlessly about the allure of literature without being pretentious:

• I have on occasion been forced to wipe my cheesy fingers on my socks while secretly eating cheesy-chips at work
• I have a messenger bag that I'm too embarrassed to use it in cities where I know even one person.
• I have lately been accused of loving sitcoms.
• I have lately affirmed that accusation by ordered one on netflixs.
• I once ate McDonalds while very drunk in London (a classically American move).
• I am whole-heartedly a spaz-ish person and pretension requires a certain poise.

Pocket watch for ladies

Unsurprisingly (dare I say predictably?), I am very fond of solving all of my problems with a certain kooky-named search engine. That trusty engine failed me today, however, when all of the searches entered with a combination of the words “graduation,” “coming of age,” and “gift” fed me links of bar mitzvah DJs and L.L. Bean embroidered hand towels.

I was in the midst of a gift-giving crisis concerning the pending graduation of my littlest little sister from high school. I was torn between wanting to select a gift to convey the gravity of the situation and the contrasting suspicion that (18 year olds being the scourge of the earth that they are) she would rather me just purchase an umbrella with the Twilight guy’s face on it.

What do you give to a person graduating from high school when desire to discourage kids in high school from thinking that their lives (transported through cyberspace in a mass of fragmented texts and twits) are important? All I recall from my graduation party is wearing some weird Bugs Bunny shirt and threatening my mom with suicide if she attempted to enforce an event theme.

But let us return to the topic of gifts. Because I am melodramatic, I was leaning toward something Victorian and metallic in nature. A gold watch or a locket with a snippet of my hair inside would have suited my mood perfectly. But my main squeeze assured me that pocket watches are for men, and that since I would never afford the female equivalent (one set of sterling silver soup spoons) I decided to widen my search.

I provide below for your enjoyment a list of gifts considered and rejected for my sister’s graduation during one tour of the mall this afternoon:

• Lave lamp,
• Locket with Jesus etched on the cover (to be presented if purchased with visage pointing away from receiver , since sister is known to be very intimidated by religious symbolism and cries when forced by wayward religious relatives to attend services),
• Single soup spoon,
• McDonalds money,
• Hospital scrubs,
• Large, yet cheap, oil painting,
• Netflix subscription,
• Candles shaped like happy faces that burn lopsidedly (remember when these came briefly back?)
• Cool sneaks,
• A kimono,
• Vintage-covered copy of The Catcher in the Rye.

The only time skim milk is acceptable

Excuse me for sounding obnoxious and hyper-patriotic on a Wednesday afternoon, but sometimes a Coke is just awesome. I’m having one now and I’m pleased as punch.

I don’t have too much to relate (my brain is the mucky state at the crossroads of bored and caffeine) so I will just share a few random thoughts to avoid being called a blog-bandoner.

1) It’s a “free jeans” day at my workplace. It is very unnerving to see coworkers who would never usually soil themselves with denim donning it painfully for a show of solidarity. People get insulted if you don’t wear jeans on “free jeans” day. Strangely they are often more upset at this than they are if you violate the everyday no-jeans policy.

2) I am forcing certain persons of my very close acquaintance to experience select volumes of prairie literature. I’m pleased to find (yet again) that my brain has not evolved to a point where reading descriptions of skimming milk is not the most pleasant thing comprehendible. Please, list yet again the process of dressing in wool for sub-zero weather. This is how I get my kicks.

3) It has been quite cold and I was very excited that the weather had finally decided to act like winter. However, the sun came out very determinedly this afternoon and rendered me incapable of fully appreciating a semi-truck with a Christmas wreath attached to the front. I simply cannot enjoy thinking about that truck driver making the long trek home in snowy weather to arrive in the nick (I’m really resisting a bad joke here) of time on Christmas Eve when I’m busy sweating inside of my car.

While I am yapping on about the weather, I’d like to petition for it to rain already, so that I can use my totally bitchin’ umbrella.

Dogs can climb chain-link fences.

I was very distracted last week by my search for employment and various betrayals (artistically rendered by my car with special malice) that I did not write. Not that I feel guilty about it or that I am a blog whiner, but I just thought that I would mention it. In an off-hand way, you understand.

Even though I was too preoccupied to actually perform my blogging duties, I won’t have you going around thinking that my brain was barren, completely free of the pointless sort of commentary that I find suitable for the Internet. On the contrary, I opened my Word program several times last week with the great intent of writing something driveling. But I found that after I had set my window to the correct rambling settings (10 point font, 75% zoom and Print Layout view) I was utterly unmotivated to continue.

So back by popular un-demand, is a list of the things that I neglected to blog about recently.

A) I spend a hearty chunk of my day cruising down the freeway, listening to various yelping DJ’s hawk their stations and while I’ve got no problem with pre-paid self-aggrandizement, I really hate when radio stations run little sampler-platters of the sort of music that they play. In my experience it nearly always leads to a severe disappointment.

For example, an ad might go something like this: “This is blad-blah-blah FM, playing the best music ever, in the best regional subsection of the best state ever!” and be followed by a loud animal call and a series of 5 second spurts of a few songs.

If you are an easily appeased individual like myself, you probably nod along with these partial songs in distracted appreciation. However, I inevitably find that the entire song that eventually follows this compilation is totally crap. And so now I greet these ads with wariness, hoping that each semi-decent fragment will continue to its full length, instead of stopping short to make room for a more obnoxious song. But it never happens that way.

B) I am in a literary funk. And not the fun kind of funk, either. I just can’t seem to finish anything that I start and just meander around starting new things for the sheer joy of getting bored and giving up. On my bedside table there is a variety of ambitious (Daniel Deronda, assorted stories by Maugham, To The Lighthouse) and lesser ambitious re-read (Franny and Zooey, The Fountainhead) undertakings.

Here I would like to make some kind of play on words that incorporated “literature” and “littering,” but nothing really leaps to mind.

C) Twitter. Could it provide me with the happiness I once realized during the AIM away message hey-day of my college career?

Counting minutes; Counting pointlessly

Bad audio things come in pairs.

Today I heard:

1) Two people independently describe the rock-path at my workplace as “the yellow brick road” of Dorothy fame.

2) Two Alanis Morissette songs during one 30 minute drive.

Lista? Listo.

Things that I am currently giving a chance:
1)Books by Charlotte Bronte other than Jane Eyre.
2)Bobby pins, in the service of harnessing my multitude of small-bangs.
3)The frequent rate that people are pick-pocketed in Disneyland, despite commercials and mottos implying general felicity.
4)Kettle-Korn.
5)Curtailing my internet reading habits: the news keeps getting more depressing.

Bonus footage---

Today I received an email from my sister containing only the following text:

“this week is weak ahahaha...i crack myself up”

Listless list

List of things that I’m currently refusing to give a chance:
1) Books by that guy who wrote The Notebook.
2) Rats as pets.
3) Buying the 2 liter of milk, even though we are using two one-liters a week.
4) Free live streaming of Olympics footage online, because although it is instantaneous it is silent: no commentary or human-interest bios.
5) Crucifixion art.

Musings a la Monte Carlo

Things I was considering today while driving to work…

1) I should think that the very worst job would be to work in an airport restaurant. Just consider it. Everyday you would get up and put on your uniform and special no-grease shoes and head off to work. Your commute would consist of a daily battle against airport style traffic with no rewarding little peanut pack (or vacation, whatever) to sustain your goodwill. All of this followed by a whole day of dealing with grumpy travelers and skeezy business fellows, clipping your shins with their rolling suitcases and drinking whatever a “highball” is. [Note: Probably I will have this job soon, since I have proved to be hideously unemployable in the post-collegiate sense.]

2) I forgot my cell phone but remembered Brideshead Revisited, because I am a lady of impeccable priorities.

3) I really hate it when people in the work place refer to a certain f-starting explicative as the “f-bomb.” I’m relatively certain they aren’t aware of how silly this appears in the middle of an otherwise civilized situation. Since we’re all adult-sized people, I should like to see people either manning-up and just saying it, or thinking of an alternative phrase meaning “well, this situation has gone to all sorts of hell” that you aren’t too chicken to utter. I personally love to curse; it’s a shortcut when explaining your feelings.

4) Today I saw a personalized license plate holder that said “Janis Joplin: I Miss You.”

Just when I discovered a good away message for being in class...

Today I attended my last lecture. I also picked up my graduation outfit, but as the sentimental realizations there were limited to the chagrin of knowing that I was paying 40 buckeros to rent a gown that has shoulder pads and smells like hot-dog wienies in BBQ sauce, I'll skip the weepy descriptors.

I spent my last lecture drawing a robot man with square eyes on the desk and after giving him (the robot) six legs and adorning each foot with a hiking boot I wrote very melodramatically "Last Lecture" above him. I am well aware that I should have been listening to the Professor discuss "The Deserted Village" by so-and-so Goldsmith, and as eighteenth century poetry goes it's really not bad (the best couplet: "His best companions, innocence and health/ And his best riches, ignorance of wealth"). However, I was fairly distracted and felt that the last lecture of my career was hardly the best time to begin acting studiously.

Okay, that last bit was sort of a lie. I am largely very studious. I even re-read "The Deserted Village" before going to class, despite the fact that I abhor haughty English poetry and I vaguely recalled having read it some time ago in some Masterpieces class. When is comes to being a geek, I summon all other geeks to proclaim me as their overlord and pay me a yearly tribute in Buffy comic books. Geek though I may be, I just feel that there is no real reason to behave in such a fashion during lecture.

Chronological Development of my Lecture Behavior Patterns:

1)Falling asleep in class, in bold defiance of twitching motion that implies the weird falling sensation that characterizes these sort of naps. Oddly this has not happened to me since Freshman year.

2)Forming back-row coalitions of sarcasm. It's difficult to find the right mix of disaffected youth and slacker in the back-row, because there's no fun in forming a coalition of suffering with someone who never shows up. In fact, the only thing that is worse is forming a coalition with someone who always shows up but never wants to shoot the shit. A good unit of measurement is to try to locate someone who always looks around incredulously whenever that kook in the front-row who looks like Uncle Joey from Full House opens his mouth to bring up 24 again. Disdain for active participators is a serious plus.

3)Doodling. I started with boxes, moved on to cubes and finally settled on drawing circles and shading them to look like Easter eggs. For awhile I was daily re-drawing a reindeer with wings on this particular desk in my totally bitchin' Manifest Destiny class, because on the desk in front of me the words "Beer Run" had smeared to look like "Deer Run." I had high hopes that someone in another class who sat in my seat might respond to the weirdness of the Deer Run phenomenon, but the only thing that ever happened was some jerkwad inked in a joint for the deer to smoke, adding some tacky subtext to my flying friend.

4) Struggling to conquer the crossword. This very well might be the ideal lecture leisure activity. Firstly, it is deceptive, because your look of confusion and your furious scribbling suggests that you are zealously taking notes. Secondly it embodies the perfect level of lecture socializing. It doesn't require chatting and the exchanging of phone numbers to set up study groups, but there is an unspoken solidarity between crossworders. You know that if you are working on the crossword beside a fellow crossworder that there will be some healthy peaking going on, and perhaps even some collaboration. Nothing brings people together more solidly than the realization that "A Flower from Holland" is a tulip.

A series of unfortunate facts.

A. Safeway is no longer serving its generic Safeway Select brand of soda in flats.

I have never bought a flat of soda, but I appreciate the concept. If you wanted to mix and match 6-packs of blackberry, "cola," and grapefruit flavors, the flat was the only unit of purchase where you could do so with relative ease. The cardboard rim encompassed an infinite realm of sugartastic possibilities. Now the sodas are only available in dreary uniform 12 packs adorned with the new "arty" flavor differentiations [a picture of the fruit surrounded by parenthesis]. I'm going to think twice before I go on my next grapefruit soda run, because although I'm okay with the cashier knowing that I'm the sort of person who drinks a 6 pack of grapefruit soda while reading a novel with the word "mage" in the title, I don't know if I can handle the stigma of being the sort of person who drinks a 12 pack of grapefruit soda while pursuing the same activity.

B. 1652 is the estimated date of the first coffee house opening in England.

Gee, thanks 1652.

C. My school steals my money to buy water-wings for drunk chicks.

It has so happened lately, with graduation swiftly swooping down upon me, that the value/meaning of a college education has been under discussion at many gatherings. In these debates I usually take a very moderate stance: college is good for some people, but for others (America Studies?) it is simply a method of prolonging the inevitable job-having lifestyle. But in general I have defended the University system, pounding my UC Davis nalgene like a gavel against the table-top. How wrong I have been.

This morning I was reading the newspaper and on the front page there was this article about the tradition of Davis students taking houseboats out on Shasta Lake for Memorial Day weekend. This is no surprise to me, as I'm well aware of this floating keg-fest having had several friends attend in the past and with my own roommate preparing to leave tomorrow. What did surprise me was to learn that the student government (ASUCD) this year sanctioned 3,500 dollars to ensure that there will be a Safeboat with a host of medical supplies and personnel and 2,000 condoms available to the students at this recreational event unaffiliated with the school. This after the school called and solicited me for 20.08 (get it?) dollars in donations to commemorate my graduation. Pssh, I'm not going to donate money so that some damn kids can make a raft out of inflated free condoms held together by free Scooby Doo bandaids so they can row after a can of Keystone Light that floated away down the river.

On a re-read it would appear that I am stalwartly anti-fun. This is usually not the case.

Free Stuff...Fair.

I know that it's almost summer, but I feel that this level of sunny, muggy tomfoolery is utterly uncalled for. I am determined to respond to the next person who tells me about the perfect weather of California by pulling out a metal seatbelt clasp (prepared by constant sunning and polishing) and give them a good scalding.

Also, today I was sitting behind this guy in my sociology class and his shirt said "A Global Revolution, ddr_freak.com" and I was entirely contented despite the glaring sun.

I have to dash off very shortly to this exposition of local businesses where my job-people have a booth that I must justly man. I suspect to spend the majority of my time passing out free Blow-Pops with little "Get an X Ray" ribbons tied around the stem...that is when I am not whining about the heat. However, I wanted to note a small thought that I was having today, as I ran out the door with slight deodorant markings on my shirt (more heat = more deodorant, and I'm serious about my deodorant).

Presumably when I graduate from college next month, I will be freed from the oppressive clasp of homework and lowered into the yawning jaws of full-time gainful employment, which I feel yields a good deal more leisure time. This begs the question: what will I be doing with myself when I'm not always cursing at my ugly footnotes and rushing through The Beggar's Opera? I may seem well rounded, but my only hobby is sticking my tongues out at children in the supermarket in hopes that their parents will whack them for being rowdy. I'm not overly motivated, so I'm probably not going to start my own business (learn paper mache, make tons of Sponge Bob pinatas and sell them out of my car?) or go to the gym (my school as a gym megaplex, I have never been inside except for the time I went in to watch a drunken dodge ball game).

Other things that you might suspect that I would want to do as a young professional type, but would be horribly wrong in doing so:
-caring about politics, discussing it at length
-directing middle school musicals in my hometown
-learning to drink wine, discussing it at length, making art with corks
-getting one of those hard-to-maintain haircuts where your side-bangs just barely skirt your glasses
-washing out my nalgene more than once a month

El Fin

Because I should be writing a paper...

Last week in my sociology class (how I abhor you, G.E. left until my last quarter, full of freshman sporting their ID cards in lanyard pouches about their necks) we watched this documentary called Merchants of Cool. The documentary wasn't really shocking, it simply detailed that the entertainment industry is ruled by giant conglomerates who are busy You-Got-Mailing their way into our brain-cases. It also described how these empires employ special baby-faced professionals (Andy Milonakis?!) who seek out "cool" kids and infiltrate their sub-cultures with the intent of popularizing it for evil capitalist gains. Now, I know I'm being trite, but I thought that the concept of cool deserved a little meditation.


My interest in the documentary was focused almost entirely on the choice of wording. The phrase "cool" seems to have become vaguely immortal. It transcends the harsh realities that ground up trends like "savage" and "sweet" (yes, sweet is over). Parental types utter it all the time when figuring out how to play BeJeweled on their Blackberry. Although my personal tastes tend more toward "bitchin," I am not immune to saying cool when confronted with say, someone doing a kickflip on their skateboard in a halfpipe built of boxes behind the Safeway. I looked it up on Urban Dictionary [Long aside: Not a usual reference point for me, but some guy I know IM-ed me yesterday and said that he was "sprung" and then followed up with a link to the word on Urban Dictionary. After clicking around for awhile I learned that the meaning of the phrase "drink champagne on a beer bottle budget" and advice on how to leave your girl if she is acting "klingy"]. Anyway, the entry on Urban Dictionary for "cool" implies that it is relaxed and never goes out of style and (most importantly) no one will ever laugh at you for saying it. Apparently cool is the safest verbal road away from embarrassment.


So, in the spirit of the immortality of the phrase, and because my boyfriend said that my blog needed more lists, what follows is a list of the things that come to my head immediately as being cool.

1) Melodramatic and poorly edited literary magazines full of melodramatic poetry and thinly concealed politics.

2) Professors who write their lecture outlines on the board.

3) Soothing prose about early America. [I never eat pancakes without thinking: "Then sit down he did, as they urged him, and lifting the blanket cake on the untouched pile, he slipped from under it a section of the stack of hot, syrupy pancakes. Royal forked a brown slice of ham from the frying pan...and Alamanzo filled up his coffee cup."]*

4) Zealous internet fan communities.

5) Hour-long teen dramas from the late-nineties.

6) High school newspapers.

7)Boring BBC adaptations of boring British novels.

8)Unpopular eateries.

9) N. Baker's The Mezzanine. [I'm going through a revival phase. After gifting it to someone last week I re-read it, and am re-enamored. People are lucky that I don't block-quote the hell out of that thing all over the interweb.]


*That's The Long Winter; I don't want the internet police knocking on my cyber-door with their virtual mag-lites.