February 2012
4 posts
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“Get a Life.” “I Have a Life.” “Yeah, I Know All...
It wasn’t too long ago, when bored and inebriated, I decided to buy Beverly Hills, 90210, the complete season 4. Say what you will about Amazon, but they do enable purchases of this sort.
Some background: Season 4 was the last of the Brenda years, and the gang’s first year at California University, and where, among other things, Brandon joins the Task Force and has an affair with...
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January 2012
9 posts
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Calling Ben McGrath
This #Yale #football #Rhodesscholarship #rape story is amazing. It’s got all the things that make for good upper middle class journalism: higher education, sexual politics, the discretion of campus authorities and the discretion of the press, all over a college football rivalry.
It’s like the JoePa story for the effete class.
Related: At Yale, the Collapse of a Rhodes Scholar...
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Some Things About Seeing Wilco on the First Night...
I could trace my entire adult life around Wilco albums. And seeing them on Thursday—my first big show in Denver, which I attended with my no longer new Denver friends—was like seeing an old pal.
(Sadly, it was like seeing an old pal for a quick coffee. There was some catching up on the new material, but not enough time to reminisce on all the old memories, that is, all of Wilco’s b-sides from 15...
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What Happens Every Morning.
I wake up at 6:04, which is about 5:59, since my iTouch’s clock is fast. It’s still dark out, but I get out of bed and feel very proud of myself.
I check the internet for about three 15 minutes before reminding myself that the reason I’m up early is to write, so I set Freedom (without a doubt, the best $10 I spent in 2011) to 60 minutes.
And then I try to write. But I also stare out the window...
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How Visit From The Goon Squad Is This? →
Sadly, a recurring feature.
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Denver has one of everything. Except for Grateful Dead bars. It has two of those.
-Jordan, on what she knows about Denver.
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On How To Spend Free Time
You confuse being weird and spending time alone … But anyone who’s really interested in anything spends time alone …If you want to be good at something, you have to practice, and usually you practice by yourself.
-Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld
December 2011
9 posts
Year in Read, 2011
This was the year I left New York. It was also the year I learned it’s possible to read without riding the subway. Looking over the list, in 2011, I especially enjoyed being in the middle of a big book. I guess I like to spend time in a world someone else made. There are also a lot of books on this list that I didn’t really enjoy, just read. But I like reading, and when you like a verb, you do it...
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Nondenominational holiday music on repeat.
Nearing the End
I find end of year lists released in early December a little offensive. Offensive is too strong a word, but you know, culture is still coming out in these final days. So I will wait until December 31 to release my year in read list. That said, since finishing 1Q84, I’ve had a lot of trouble getting into another book. After all these years of reading on my own, I still can never figure out the...
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Sweet Talk
Two days before we left Fort Niagara, we took the dog, Duke, to Charlie Battery, fourteen miles from the post, and left him with the mess sergeant. We were leaving him for only six weeks, until we could settle in Oklahoma and send for him. He had stayed at Charlie Battery before, when we visited our relatives in Ohio at Christmastime. He knew there were big meaty bones at Charlie Battery, and...
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Other Realities
So there’s this piece on Slate about a writer who lost her computer in a cab, and after a bout of self-loathing, she bought a new computer. This was a story because a year after she got a new computer, she checked her Facebook Other Messages and learned that someone had found her computer soon after she lost it and wanted to return it.
And what are Facebook Other Messages? Something no one...
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On Brand
I’ve been a fan of the Christos since Calvin Tompkins 2004 profile of the couple and their efforts to bring the Gates to Central Park. Actually seeing the Gates was one of those experiences where forming a new opinion was impossible. I had been looking forward to the project for a year. I loved it.
So when friends of Over the River emailed (I’m on their email list, of course I’m on their email...
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A Conversation Between Girls
Girl 1: Do you like looking at strangers' wedding web sites?
Girl 2: Obviously.
November 2011
7 posts
Toggle Time
I’ve been toggling between a lot of projects lately, but let’s face it: I’m mainly toggling between Facebook and Twitter. This makes me sad as I see myself as part of a media future I don’t want to live in. I haven’t even been following the links and tweets on hard news lately. I can’t pretend that Herman Cain, Rick Perry, or Michele Bachmann will be anything more than a footnote in history, so...
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How About This For A Reality TV Show?
Successful, divorced Upper West Side single mothers vie to date Mark Bittman, food columnist for the New York Times.
I’m just saying, I would watch.
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I Had A Nightmare About IQ84 Last Night and Other...
Being in the middle of a good novel is not unlike being in love. Since I started with IQ84, it has been my date to every occasion. It is there in the morning and it is there at night. The companionship feels so natural, like an extension of myself, that it is easy to forget how rare that feeling is. And while a good short story can fill my heart, it won’t hold my hand for a whole plane ride. At...
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and I felt no fear/I felt no fear
October 2011
9 posts
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Favorite Denver Ride
No hands cruising west on the north side of Cheesman Park. There are barely any cars, there’s a view of the mountains, there’s a view of the city, and there’s Cheesman Park.
Spirits from Prospect Hill Cemetery may haunt the place, but there’s no better spot for grass in all of Denver. And with all the irrigation, the park has the smell of water drying on cement, which even in the fall, smells...
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It Can Be As Simple As Reading, Music, and Cats
I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I love cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved. Those three things haven’t changed from my childhood. I know what I love, still, now. That’s a confidence. If you don’t know what you love, you are lost.
-Haruki Murakami
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Edith Wharton on What Led to Occupy Wall Street
But perhaps the New Yorkers of that day were unconsciously trying to atone for their culpable neglect of state and national politics, from which they had long disdainfully held aloof, by upholding the sternest principles of business probity, and inflicting the severest social penalties on whoever lapsed from them.
I’m reading Edith Wharton’s autobiography right now, and...
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Freedom Speaking
Like If You’re Feeling Sinister, the Belle & Sebastian album that played behind my sophomore year of college, Freedom brings back a very specific, if not too distant, time.
It’s not the details of my life I remember, but the feeling that there was a writer on the cover of Time Magazine. Everywhere I went, people were talking about a book. That New Years, I went to a party with a lot graduates...
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I’ve Been Spending A Lot of Time Meeting Strangers...
About a year and a half ago, in Brooklyn, I decided it was time for me to own a couch. My apartment didn’t need a new couch, but I needed one, as a commitment to my space. I’ve never been into fashion retail therapy, but decorating therapy made sense to me. Along with the usual endorphins that come with consumption, there is also a clear result: the new couch did make my apartment feel more like a...
September 2011
15 posts
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A song to listen to on your way to buy a bed/The...
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Garrison Junction
I’m still obsessed with this Maile Meloy story, “Garrison Junction,” so obsessed that I read it aloud to Truman on the roadtrip and ordered a copy of Half in Love for my friend Jordan. But I can’t get this story to every stranger who googles me, so I decided to type it up. Copyright Maile Meloy. After the jump, the story, and after the story, my take on why it’s so great.
It had been snowing...
Pro Tip for Sleeping
Whenever I have trouble falling back asleep after waking up to go to the bathroom, I remind myself that however long I spend tossing and turning, it will feel like only a brief intermission in the morning. And so while I’m up at 2 or 2:30 or 3, I imagine my morning myself, barely remembering the trip to the bathroom or the fear that sleep will elude me for the rest of the night.
And when I wake...
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Affordable Real Estate
Sometimes means people are willing to trade rent for an awkward, semi-sexual living arrangement for a month:
$5 Roomie / house share / arrangement (Denver)
Date: 2011-09-07, 8:49PM MDTReply to: hous-he3bs-2587623880@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]
Seeking very special roommate situation. You — please be a liberated and open minded female (college student, struggling artist,...
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