February 2010
25 posts
33rd & 8th
“Now boarding on track two, the 12:14 New Jersey Transit Northeast Corridor express,” she announces, “making station stops in Secaucus Junction, Newark Penn Station, Newark International Airport, Metropark, New Brunswick, Princeton Junction, Hamilton, and Trenton.”
I didn’t write that down. Nobody who’s spent enough time in Penn Station would ever need to....
An excerpt from Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York which had me grinning from ear to ear as I read it.
I’m here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don’t know about you. Maybe you’re from here, too, and sooner or later it will come out that we used to live a block away from each other and didn’t even know it. Or maybe you moved...
Something I've noticed:
When you’re young they say it’s ok to work all the time because you’re young.
When you’re a little older they say it’s ok to work all the time because you don’t have a wife and kids and a dog and a mortgage and responsibilities.
When you’re thirty and you still don’t have a wife or kids or a dog or a mortgage or any responsibilities you realize...
2 tags
Writing a Bad Romance
Meeting someone over the internet is a distinctly modern phenomenon, this symptom of spending so many months—years, even—following someone’s blog, their pictures, their videos, seeing their face on your Tumblr dashboard over and over again, their face framed ever so gracefully in that 64-pixel rounded corner box, wondering the whole time how actually meeting this person will...
“This morning, a famous person held a press conference, in which he talked about...”
– Choire Sicha
“My landlord is Korean and speaks fluent Spanish and decent English, but as the...”
– Molly McAleer, via nvc.
Read. This.
Declaring Idea Bankruptcy
A couple of items from my long inventory of projects that will never get out of the larval phase. Like spring cleaning for the overwhelmed to-do list.
an external USB device—branded the LOLMeter™—featuring a complex system of atmospheric, motion, seismic, and audio sensors which enables IM users to be informed as to whether or not their chat buddy is legitimately LOLing or merely...
Jace and I just spent five minutes on our fourth floor fire escape watching two kids hurl snowballs at passing cars. They were taking cover behind a few trees separating Driggs Ave. from McCarren Park, pelting drivers as they rolled through the traffic light at N. 12th.
We laughed and we cheered as we watched these two mischievous little twelve-year-olds, probably unaware they had an audience. I...
½ sibling rivalry
I have a half-brother I’m not very fond of.
We are a case study in nature v. nurture: I was raised in the liberal enclave of Princeton, NJ, he in the heart of revivalist northern Florida; my macho sensibilities were defined by taking up computer programming at nine; his by joining the Marines. I am dapper and handsome; he has atrocious facial hair. I begrudgingly voted for Obama (not enough...
In the same way that all these self-important club...
3 tags
%!@$%!#!%!@#%!
In my weaker moments I fancy myself a “writer” (read: “bro with a blog”) but it feels like I haven’t written anything for months now because of this thing that kind of feels like writer’s block but just might be a misdiagnosis because I’m not sure it’s still writer’s block if you’re not actually staring down a deadline or working on...
Eric Spiegelman just won the internet. →
hereharehere:
Vivid memory that will never go away. Jan 28, 1986 was my 12th birthday and we were watching the launch on tv in Mrs Treat’s social studies class.
I’m often taken by the universality of this memory, by how many of us—in my generation, at least—have such similar stories, stories that vary only in the small details (I was in kindergarten; Mrs. Wilson’s...
