December 2010
48 posts
Woe is me
I’m on a five hour bus ride to DC without headphones. I’ve already flipped through most of “Lost and Found: Stories from New York” trying to figure out which story is located closest to my current or previous apartments or schools (and only read the one set at Bergdorf Goodman) and now I’m out of activities because I don’t actually want to read anything.
Help me Ronda, help me get her out of my heart.
need a hobby
I just read the NYTimes’ City Blog has your street been plowed yet comment roll.
The answer: if you live in an outer borough or any non-tourist drag a resounding no.
Good thing I’m not there, but I do actually want to see it in person.
“I think the media story of the year, in 2010, was the New York Times’ discovery...”
– NBC’s Brian Williams on “Morning Joe,” via The Atlantic Wire. (via langer)
I’ve already posted the video, but these words bear repeating.
(via kateoplis)
Blackout
We just lost power for a few hours (as I’m writing this now it’s obviously returned). We is me, my mother, her sister/my aunt, her kid/my cousin (age 6), my sister (age 14), my grandmother and my grandfather. We’re at my grandmother’s house in upstate New York where we spend a fair amount of time, but it’s very big and there are five televisions and the computers...
Disclaimer
Recent holiday shopping has made it clear that my snobbish and obnoxious Brooklyn/New York pride is not my own fault but a product of the infinite number of t-shirts/sweatshirts/coffee mugs/etc emblazoned with sentiments of locational superiority.
So, sorry about that.
Well, I just watched the entire season of Weeds. I guess I know what I’ll be doing this break.
This American version of top gear is horrible. Who made this decision? I need some healing British accent right now.
“I like your facebook tweeting”
– Mom
No trip to jail required in Orleans pot arrests →
19, or the year of inner monologues
I woke up to the sound of my mother inflating balloons. A measured exhale, and the expansion of latex and then a short inhale, repeated until the tail, (nub? What do you call that part of the balloon?) is pulled over two fingers and knotted. Learning how to blow up balloons was hard, but learning how to knot them was even worse. For years I could blow up a balloon but then had to pass it...
ARE YOU SERIOUS →
wrenslastlaugh:
Tulane University
Police
Department
OFF CAMPUS THEFT
DATE & TIME OF OCCURRENCE: December 10, 2010, at approximately 5:41 a.m.
LOCATION: 7400 Block of Hampson, near Cherokee.
REPORTED OFFENSE: The student was approached at the intersection by a subject on foot with his hands in…
(Will Grayson)^2
At my younger sister’s behest I just read Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan. Super fast, it’s a young adult novel about 2 Will Graysons who meet by chance in a porn store. They narrate alternating chapters in first person, and one of the will graysons really hates capitalization. So I’m sure I have read other young adult fiction set in the real world...
“What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to...”
– Susan Sontag
Against Interpretation
1 tag
“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”
– Susan Sontag
“Against Interpretation”
The gifting of books.
I cannot possibly read all the books I want to read. I believe that this is a pretty common feeling among most borderline intelligent and/or interesting people I know/exist in the world. So rather than feel infinitely inferior every time I have to admit that I still have not read David Foster Wallace, or Othello, or about half of the books I own, I really like to give people books. In general I...
Right now I’m flying over the clouds. In general I dislike flying but I love looking out the window and seeing a total cloud coverage below me. It looks like the arctic because it’s just straight white until the horizon and then you have this pristine blue.
I also enjoy flying through clouds.
Maybe I like it because it reminds me of snow and I love the snow.
Prompted
“Explain how European expansion into the New World influenced the internal political and economic life of Western European States in the early modern period.”
So in thinking about this question I started thinking about what it was like to live through the period when Africa and Asia came into the conscious of the average European. Not like, “those poor people we should help...
Watchnassmerder:
HOUSEHOLD
(ella show this to mom)
Dear Fellow Tulane Student
Please don’t kick the printer.
I understand that you’re upset it’s not working, we’re all upset. It’s finals and the printers should work, however kicking it is not the answer. A printer is not a vending machine (vending machines should be physically abused for their misbehavior) and so kicking it will not beget benefits. No, rather, by kicking the printer you...
Stupid frat boys in library, don’t you know the third floor is for silent study. If you have to talk about how to properly wear your douchey hats* can you please do it somewhere else?
*or whatever it is that frat boys discuss
Social Network Withdrawal
How come tumblr has to go down when I’ve deactivated my facebook? In the middle of finals? When I have to study and really want a distraction? Not to mention the lack of internet fuckery didn’t gain me any points on my Spanish or Russian History finals. However, good news, I did really well on my papers!!!! (yes, I’m that happy). Nothing says “here’s something to...
Taking a Spanish grammar class really makes me wish someone had bothered to teach me grammar when I was younger. Why did I not know what a “participle” was? And thank you wikipedia for explaining it.
I wrote this views piece for my school newspaper*.
I didn’t really expect any response or praise for doing so (except for from my mom). Tulane’s feminist contingent is pretty small and not very vocal (although there is a fantastic gender studies department). In line with this analysis, the first email I got back was from someone who basically said “women get paid less because...
“In doing some research for my review of “Made in Deganham,” the movie about the...”
– An affront to the eyes of God - Roger Ebert’s Journal
Roger Ebert is a national treasure.
(via southpol)
Schooled
So, for like a month now I’ve been trying to figure out how everyone expected to pass our Russian history class if they never show up. As it turns out, the professor has been putting all the Power Points online. It’s not that I would have skipped class if I had known they were online, (I actually believe that one of the reasons I pay tuition is to go to class, but whatever) but it...
Reasons to like Russian history
I’m not sure how it happened but so much of Russian history is oddly poetic:
Avvakum declared that “the winter of heresy is at the door.”
People had to pay “soul taxes.”
There were the “Zealots of Piety.”
The Ministry of spiritual affairs and popular enlightenment was dubbed “ministry of religious-utopian propaganda”
Baahhh
The New Pornographers are playing in New York on Monday night. (Link) I want to go! I want to go! But I don’t get home till a week later.
I just called my professor a deluminator
Well he said he sucked all the brightness out of students
So maybe a dementor would have been appropriate too
