Category Archives: Life

I’m in the Target catalog!

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I’m in this year’s Target back-to-school catalog (as is my friend/coblogger Laura). I’m on the back, next to the legitimately kinda funny copy, “Keep your friends closer. Keep your family closer… ish.” (It’s advertising cell phones with which one can presumably screen one’s calls.) My head is right above the cell phone which I actually use and heartily recommend, if you’re going to be on Virgin Mobile. An editor at Target contacted me and Laura about the gig several months ago, so it’s awesome to finally see it in print.

Multiple people have been very sweet and posted copies of this on Facebook, which is very nice of them and makes me realize that folks actually read some of the stuff I put out, so that’s pretty neat! I managed to totally freak out my lab partner by stealing her copy of the catalog, since she didn’t know that my last name is what it is.

In other me-related news, I changed the background for my writing portfolio, which makes me feel pretty silly (it is a very large picture of my face), but whatever. Many thanks to Alesha, who took the photo in exchange for a bike/helped me set off fireworks in a pool last weekend.

Book Review: Daytripper

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A secene from the novel. (Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá)

I spent this last weekend in Athens, GA. In between drinking and setting off fireworks in a pool (fun and awesome!), I made my way down to Bizarro Wuxtry, the comics shop/general haven of weirdness that lives above regular Wuxtry, the music store where REM got its start. (I can’t hear well, and I don’t own a record player, so I prefer the bookstore.) I bought American Born Chinese but had to return it because a page was torn. Not wanting to disappoint the comic store clerk, I picked up Daytripper.

The graphic novel, written by two twin brothers, is set in São Paulo, Brazil. It tracks the life of a man named Brás de Olivia Domingos, who wants to be a novelist but writes obituaries for a living. Each chapter of the book follows him through an important life event, tracking what his obituary would read like if he died after it. The events span most of his life, and are united thematically rather than chronologically. Some of the events are real and some are imaginary; the distinction isn’t clear.

By the end of the book you have a pretty complete picture of his life, including Brás’ long-term and complicated relationships with his best friend Jorge, various women, and his father, a famous novelist in whose shadow he lives. Though not the most compelling narrative in the world (it’s a dreamy sort of book), the stories are interesting and allow you to see a bunch of different snapshots of Brazil.

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Monkey Jesus Loves Me

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MONKEY / Sriram Ramasamy / CC BY 2.0

In the last week, I have noticed that I’ve been running into a lot of monkeys in my out-of-school time. In-school, it’s less weird–my adviser literally runs a lab that studies monkey poop–but there’s usually not that much bleed-over into the real world. However, in the past week:

  • A monkey escaped from my school. The authorities are happy to report that it doesn’t have Herpes B, which can apparently kill people. So that’s exciting.
  • Monkeys stole some guy’s camera and took possibly-photoshopped pictures of themselves. My favorite part is the Boing Boing commenter discussion. I wrote that sentence before actually going to read the Boing Boing comments, because secret hint: my favorite part is always the Boing Boing comments.
  • I came across an adorable video of monkeys that appear to have handlebar mustaches. HANDLE BAR MUSTACHES.
  • I applied for a job at Mail Chimp*, which does not–contrary to what you might think of the name–actually mail chimps. Which is a relief, because chimps can and will rip your face off and/or eat babies.

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There is no Venn diagram here, because I am broken.

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I had this whole amusing thing planned for today, with a Venn diagram of my brokenness. ‘Cause, see, I went on a date this weekend (yay!), and it went well (yay!), which was great because if it hadn’t I would have had to banish this dude from my favorite coffee place, and that’s never fun. But instead I ate a cookie and talked, and those are pretty much my two favorite activities ever so All Was Well.

But the thing I was going to make the Venn diagram about was something I realized halfway through, which is that I am Bad At Date Conversation. I mean, normally this takes the path of me not shutting up while talking about the excitement of freelance writing (it is not exciting), but on this particular day that didn’t happen, because I had the good sense to not talk about work. Which was good! It’s like I’m an AI that learns from its previous social failures, except actually I think that just makes me a person.

So we talked for several hours, which was pretty great. Except that about halfway through I realized that I still have not quite mastered talking, because here are in no particular order the things that this person and I discussed:

  • The failures of Atlanta’s mass transit system, complete with art projects to commemorate them.
  • Thermite.
  • The fact that I know how to make knives out of rocks. (Not well, but still.) Continue reading →

Decorating Back Home

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I moved back home a little over six weeks ago. Since then, however, I’ve been feeling on edge. Because so much of my stuff is still in boxes until I move into my apartment next fall, it hardly feels like I actually live in my old room. It’s the sort of feeling I hate (and why I will probably never be a Paul Carr-style nomad). I really like having a space that I have control over. It’s part of why I’m that weird kid who reads Apartment Therapy even though I live in school housing.

So, last night, I finally figured out what about the arrangement was bugging me so much. I had no art on the walls. As anyone who’s seen my dorm can tell you, I pack it full of things: postcards, drawings, weird Chinese calendars from middle school, whatever. I have pretty minimal aesthetic sense when it comes to arranging things coherently, but I like pictures and compensate by just having a lot of them. My dorm art of choice has been sitting in a box since I moved back home. Last night I finally fished it out and–using tape and the excitingly-taboo push pins–hooked everything back up to my wall. Then I just kind of sat on my bed and looked at the art. It was the dweebiest thing ever, but I could just feel how much less stressed out I was. It’s awesome.

So, if you too are living at home, I highly recommend taping postcards to your wall. It’s an awesome way to distract yourself from the fact that you’re the sort of person who sits around and organizes paper into boxes on her wall at 11pm on a Friday. Plus: art!

Squirrel bag has made me a travel ninja.

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I have finally found my perfect airline travel bag. As anyone who flies with me can tell you, I’m insane, so this is very exciting for me.

I start with my bigass canvas bag from Portland, into which goes all of my clothing and non-liquid toiletries and anything else I won’t need on the plane or which I’m not worried about losing. Liquids, my netbook, my Kindle, and my travel pillow (along with the usual purse stuff—chapstick and my wallet and phone) go in a tote along with my belt. I had been using a very large canvas tote my aunt sewed for me years ago, but it was getting pretty bedraggled from years of use and had an annoying tendency to flop over while I was carrying a lot of things in it.

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Why YA Matters

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Yesterday, the WSJ published a (lazy, badly-written) article on how young adult fiction (YA), by virtue of addressing topics such as rape, incest, violence directed towards gay people, and swearing is gratuitous and bad. Why, asks the pearl-clutching author, should we be allowing kids to read this? Why do librarians celebrate banned books?

Amy Freeman, a 46-year-old mother of three, stood recently in the young-adult section of her local Barnes & Noble, in Bethesda, Md., feeling thwarted and disheartened.

She had popped into the bookstore to pick up a welcome-home gift for her 13-year-old, who had been away. Hundreds of lurid and dramatic covers stood on the racks before her, and there was, she felt, “nothing, not a thing, that I could imagine giving my daughter. It was all vampires and suicide and self-mutilation, this dark, dark stuff.” She left the store empty-handed.

How dark is contemporary fiction for teens? Darker than when you were a child, my dear: So dark that kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things in novels directed, broadly speaking, at children from the ages of 12 to 18.

Librarians celebrate banned books, and teens read things that are violent or sexual, because parents like the woman who was apparently so stupefied that that she could not flag down a sales associate to help her and authors so pearl-clutchy and condescending that they address their (presumably adult) audience as “dear” exist.

Because those people? Those people are not helping their children when their friends start cutting or they are sexually assaulted and have no one to talk to because their parents are judgmental or because they don’t know how to deal with their friends who are coming out or having sex or being mean to them.

Those people are the reason that their kids are unable to talk to adults about these sorts of things, and I know that because I was the sort of kid who these peoples’ kids came to when that shit happened. I got to read.

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High School on the TV

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I’m pretty sure there’s uranium in the water in this show, to be fair.

High school as interpreted by screenwriters is a fascinating place. There’s a lot more booze, a lot less parental supervision, and everyone’s 26. It’s fabulous. But all of that is presented with a wink and a nod–we know that the folks on Glee are nearly 30, and we agree to ago along with it. What’s much weirder are the glaring errors which any teenager can pick up on and which simply do not seem to matter for television executives. Chief among these is age.

Age doesn’t matter nearly so much once you graduate high school, but when you’re in there, what grade someone’s in means a lot. It changes what their experience is going to be that year. Though TV folks tend to ignore it, sophomores don’t go to prom (unless, of course, they have an upperclassman date). Seniors are probably the only students with parking passes. Juniors are in the middle of taking the SAT. Freshmen look like they’re 12, and sophomores are super, super focused on who can and can’t drive. Continue reading →

Hipster Muumuu

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Summer is a weird time for me, sartorially speaking. I live in Atlanta, the city so unbearably hot that it worked that into its nickname, but I am spending a lot of time in Emory’s incredibly-cold chemistry building. In addition, I spend two afternoons a week in lab, where legs and feet must be covered, and I walk a mile and change to school and back every day. In an attempt to simplify my life, I’ve come up with a summer uniform: a slightly-oversized cotton button-up shirt and denim leggings or a pencil skirt. I wear red flats with the skirt and chucks with the pants. Everything is in the same green-white-brown color scheme. It’s perfect. Here’s why:

Sweat stains – Even just walking across campus, I get disgustingly sweaty. There’s pretty much no getting around it. However, I would really not like to acquire the label of freaky chick with pit stains. Enter the button-up shirt. The fact that it is slightly-to-way-too-big means that it doesn’t gap at the chest and that it doesn’t stick to my skin–this allows me to avoid showing sweat stains (as do the patterns on the shirts). It also disguises the fact that I put on 15 pounds in college and haven’t bought new clothes. You can even belt it if you want to look like you’re trying. Hipster muumuu! Continue reading →

I am exceptionally targetable!

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I’m watching the American Idol finale with my parents. I haven’t seen the last six seasons of this show, so I am less-than-invested in it. However, some observations about the show:

  • You know the swaying hands at the front row? Pretend that they’re robotic arms in a vat of liquid being controlled by hydraulics. You can’t un-see that, now, can you? You’re welcome.
  • Go find a picture of Randy Jackson’s lapels. Seriously, what the goddamn hell? They are the size of my foot.
  • J. Lo looks like she’s wearing a mermaid outfit.
  • That girl is a strong argument for why 16-year-olds should be kept the hell away from glitter. Girl looks like she robbed a Claire’s. She has a bird ring that is the size of a deck of cards.
  • That boy has mastered vacantly looking into the distance. He is so ready for senior pictures.
  • What the Christ was with the latex robot halftime show?
  • This is probably the only place on TV where you have a man in a 1980’s NFL coach’s suit, a woman in a mermaid costume, a midwestern hobo, and an impeccably-groomed man in a tuxedo on screen at the same time. USA! USA!

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