This is my religion, the religion of "Holy shit, that's so awesome!"

Lots of people struggle every day to find a purpose to their lives, a person or a thing or a place that's going to make it all worth while. Lots of people are very unhappy and disappointed and depressed. They turn to religion, to community, to righteousness to make them feel better.

I struggle too, with love and money, weight, ennui, regret, meaning.
But when I'm feeling down, I turn to the one thing guaranteed to lift my soul out of the steelyards and into beauty...

Microbe Computers made of DNA

Hello again, Thursday nights! I missed you!

Right now, this minute, all across America, keys are snapping, little fingers are tapping away furiously, sprawling the same communal thought, a new national prayer, a societal sigh of relief and regret, as we all say in one huge voice

What the FUCK, Lost?

Seriously. What the fuck.

Oh, and another thing...

In my company's annual Employee Report this past year, the theme was diversity. I don't even know what the theme was before that....diversify? Anyway, they had lots of little snippets about all the things that make us a unique and multicultural place to work, stories about people's families and religious holidays and all that crap. But they also had this page about the best ways to reward people in different generations.

Turns out that if you're over 45, you prefer to be recognized with tangible awards, like watches and plaques.

If you're between 25-45 , you prefer to get time off with pay.

And if you're under 25, you just like being able to get time off, pay or not.

I might be biased, but it seems like my generation is really getting the best deal here. After all, we're the educated ones the company needs to keep around. Fuck the old people, give them a picture frame. Am I right? Right.

So here's something I don't do very often, which is push a video that my sister pushed on me. Aren't we pushy?



Carrie and I argue about a lot of things related to feminism, but the things we disagree about are not (usually) matters of fact, but degrees of intensity. For instance, she posted this video as something that would make you really really angry. But I hand this to you as something that will make you really really sad.

I'm not a Hillary supporter. I'm not even an Obama supporter right now, except that I will always vote Democrat. The two of them are interchangeable policywise, and when that happens it comes down to personality, of which Obama has the more affable one.

So I didn't necessarily want to see Hillary win. HOWEVER (and we'll see if I have to eat this words in November) what was nice about this election was that race, for many voters, was not an issue. And it certainly wasn't the big issue everyone thought it would be. Many people, including myself, see this to be a great sign of the times, that racism is finally starting to fade into the backgrounds of voters' cultural consciousness.

Sexism was an issue though, it was a big one. Members of the media, the republican and democratic national parties, and people on the street were openly sexist about Hillary.
It made it chillingly obvious that America is more okay with sexism than racism. That in many cases, America saw nothing wrong with it. Women saw nothing wrong with it. Their brothers and fathers and boyfriends and sons saw nothing wrong with it.

I mean, awesome for black people. But half those black people are women too. Is it because everyone is, or knows a woman that sexism is so much harder to fight? That no matter what color your skin is, you've been inoculated with whatever your culture's particular problem with women is?

So my point is that yeah, real equality means sometimes the woman is going to lose. Real equality means you get judged on your merits and your experience, that everybody has an equal chance to prove themselves a saint or a douchebag. But I would have been really happy with this election if people could have not voted for Hillary because of her personal flaws, not her makeup.

Why does America love her blacks more than her women? Why does cultural identity invoke stronger feelings of outrage than the organs of your body? Maybe the fight is more recent and violent there. Maybe because men used violence to get their skin acknowledged, but women don't even shout when they are degraded. Do men actually have this innate fear of being controlled by their wife or mother, and therefore overcompensate by refusing to be afraid of offending any woman? Or haven't we done enough to make them afraid?

No, I don't think we should take to arms. I also don't think everyone is sexist, and I think slowly but surely things do become more equal as generations die out. It just amazes me that people who were less than three hundred years ago slaves have managed to win more respect than half our population. We should be taking lessons.

Of course, the other scenario is that America just found itself unable to spout racism for fear of uprising and violence, so it doubled up on the sexism just to make sure it got all its kicks in, got to work out all its fear and insecurity. Because it knew it wouldn't lose the woman vote by doing that. But it sure as hell would have lost the black vote and half of the white vote too.

Happy Wedding Mordicai!

Будем здоровы!

In honor of my soon to be adjusting car claims in NY role...

Angry Craiglist poster calls Gawker and threatens to punch someone in the face

Also check out all the ads for Denise Richard's new reality show. The copy reads : "Gold Digger? Husband Stealer? Bad Mother?"

I have never really associated Denise Richards with any of those things, but I will definitely make sure I start now. Can't be behind the celebrity gossip curve. Poor Charlie Sheen, he's so PUT UPON.

Also every time I close a post, I come upon something even more AWESOME than the last thing...

The Goth Dating Website

Wait Wait, this one's better!

Waning Moon Gothic Personals

"Don't be fooled by those big services who change their background black so they can feed off the scene!"

I was also going to post some ads from NewScientist.com, but when your personal ad combines the phrases "Let me take you into orbit" and "Hair's grey, but mine!", I'm not sure if I want to make fun of you or marry you.

Thank God for GetGo

So Giant Eagle wins because while at Giant Eagle buying lots of alcohol to drink alone, I looked at my receipt and saw that I had .80 cents off a gallon. Which is how I got to fill up my tank at 3.15 a gallon, yay me!

I wonder if the cable people can look at the OnDemand movies I bought this week and pass judgment. Waitress, Goodbye Girl, Anchors Aweigh, Enchanted, There Will Be Blood. It's the five stages of a breakup - Bitterness/Random Sex, Acceptance/Suspicion, Tendency to hang out with gay guys, Possible hope for the future, Cemented desire to take over the world and make more money than anyone else ever.

You know who Daniel Day Lewis reminds me of in that movie? The Brain.



Also, I got an 88% on my NY adjusters license, which they say is pretty freakin good, but makes me think I should have watched more cartoons as a child.



I don't really have anything to say here, I just figured if I didn't post something, certain people might get worried. So here, have a Weezer video...

To answer your question...

I'm very disappointed.
(heartbroken, miserable, hurt, apathetic, cold, sick sick sick)

Home of the second longest run on sentence ever

Sean and I are done.

See, when you spend all week telling a person you love them and miss them, and that you can't go on the weekend trip you had planned because you are absolutely totally incapacitated by your depression over them,
and no, even though said person really wants to go and you really want to go with them, you still can't do it because you're so depressed your life is over, and even when said person suggests you go alone then?
You can't because the guilt of not going with them will kill you.
When you spend all week building this mythology up, then disappear for the weekend, and come back as if nothing is wrong, only to get angry that said person is so upset
(even though they actually thought you were just horribly depressed and wouldn't leave the house because of them, since you spent all week telling them that and said person never believed for a minute you would do something like this because she believed you were a good guy who really loved her, and that she was the bitch for breaking up with you, even though the reason she broke up with you was because you told her the only thing making you miserable in your life was your relationship with her but you couldn't break up with her for whatever unknown reason),
and then it has to be wrung out of you that in fact you made plans with the other girl a week ago? And you had 10 important phone conversations and 3 hours of drinks with said person but you completely failed to mention it?

To be fair, I broke up with him last weekend, so he has no responsibility to not hurt me. But if you desperately want to stay in my life, and you spend all week trying to convince me of that, isn't this the worst possible thing to do? Sure, you're free of committment to me, but why do I want someone who feels no responsibility to my feelings in my life? Why would I want to be your friend after this? He knew if he did this, I would not speak to him again, and he chose to do it, so obviously he had no interest in continuing to interact with me, or he's an idiot. To which I say, "fine."

And that is the last thing you will hear about this relationship ever. From me at least. If I ever talk to Sean again, it will in secret, and it will be shameful, and I will hide it from the world. I don't talk to you about my zits, I won't talk to you about my ex boyfriend.

Moving on...Southland Tales was an AWESOME movie, and I insist that everyone who didn't listen to M. last week or wasn't at Marty's house Saturday night go see it immediately.

Also, the new Chronicles of Narnia is possibly better than the first one. I liked it a lot. I also liked Juno and The Goodbye Girl, which I also watched this weekend. I watched a lot of movies :)

I don't know why I'm so sentimental. Wait, scratch that. I know exactly why I'm so sentimental, but I'm trying like a banshee to stop, and I don't know why that isn't working.

I want desperately to go visit my sister, however I had to blow more cash than I have on clothes for the new job, and my severance pack...I mean my economic stimulus package hasn't come yet, so we're waiting on that. I really want it to get here before the middle of June, because then I go to working every Saturday and I won't be able to see her for a long time:(

This morning I cried in the car listening to a story about the gay marriage thing in California that had sound clips of all the activists listening to the first announcement of it.

This afternoon I cried listening to a story about a man buried in Chinese rubble for 100 hours, and then pulled out alive.

I'm watching 27 dresses tonight, and I will try to hold off crying at that, because the other three things I cried about today were much more worthy, and crying at a Katherine Heigel movie will cheapen my righteousness.

In good news, I got a 94% on my Texas State Adjusters Exam. I'm the smartest kid not in school.

I wish to be exonerated from my past mistakes, my future mistakes, my present mistakes.
I wish to lay down and sleep without the principles sitting on my chest, the stone weights laying against my lungs, my legs.
I wish to wake up slowly and purposefully, with expectation.
I wish to not have to be excited all the time.
I wish to pick my responsibilities.
I wish to walk inside my house and love each inch of the floor, and want to clean it.
I wish to love doing my dishes.
I wish to love drinking juice, not wine.
I wish to feel good outside, all the time, whether walking into work or walking to my car.
I wish to know how to drive without risk of crashing, or scaring myself.
I wish to pay every debt to everyone, person or thing.
I wish to talk to everyone I have ever talked to, many more times, whenever I like.
I wish to fly to Australia, New York, Seattle, Chicago, everywhere people I know are.
I wish to read books without feeling inadequate and unborn.
I wish to live enough to never get or feel old.
I wish to be powerful enough to influence masses without having to try.
I wish to see something wonderful every day without having to think about it.
I wish to be loved.
I wish to not have to think about loving back.
I wish to be made whole.



Also I wish my cat would stop chewing on electrical cords.

Top Chef thoughts having nothing to do with Top Chef

See, look at this! I all of a sudden have to wake up at six every morning, and that means I have to stay home and go to bed early and not go out and watch Andrew get kicked off with all my friends (Andrew! WTF Andrew? A sushi roll with parsnips? For cops? I seriously don't feel bad for you at all. I feel bad for myself for overestimating you. You did too much man, too much. ).

So I'm watching this show, and flipping over to "In Her Shoes" during commercials. By the way, Toni Collette can officially make me cry in anything. I don't know why. Maybe it's her teeth, but I would rather believe its the way she flips between lovable homely and seriously handsome. I think all somewhat homely girls would like to think they have that talent as well. It's like grown up Molly Ringwald syndrome.

There's a Dairy Queen commercial on lately, perhaps you've seen it...



In it, if you can't be bothered to waste your time downloading something I think would enrich our conversation here, a young girl (like 11?10?) goes in with her mother to buy sundaes. At the counter, she catches the eye of a young man across the room, and waves flirtatiously at him. She tells her mother to only buy one sundae. When her mother expresses surprise at her willingness to share (congratulations little girl on recognizing how to cut down on calories!), she says flippantly that she doesn't want to share, and then the waiter (waiters? at dairy queen?) comes over with ANOTHER sundae and says "Compliments of the gentleman in the donkey shirt".

Little Miss Blonde Ambition says "It's like shooting fish in a barrel". Her mother makes a face that says "I'm going to pretend to be shocked, but I'm really just impressed with what a precocious young woman you are."

And we're arguing about Miley Cyrus?

It occurred to me while watching this that maybe our problem with the sexualization of children in this country is not that we are all sweaty mouthbreathing pedophiles, but rather that we are just continuing the sick tradition of forcing our children to live up to our own past aspirations. We all wanted to be pretty popular young beauty queens, so we groom our daughters to be what we couldn't in high school. We groom our sons to be the strong macho salesman we couldn't be, the kind that tell the woman when the date is rather than asking if she would like to.

Mothers and fathers have always done this, some to more extent than others. But those past generations were much more, you know, "nuclear" and straightlaced and bound to moral conventions. Willing to be shamed by their neighbors. In short, this kind of show-offy social behavior, the kind of behavior we risked in high school and college, it's been getting more and more risque. Our parents did it, only a little less than we did. Their parents did it too, only a little bit less than mom and dad. Each generation has attempted to be a little bit more sexual, more open, less prudish than the last. And if the accompanying lesson isn't that with more sexuality, comes more responsibility to yourself and others, then of course the kids will be whores.

Do you think the mom is proud of her daughter? Proud of her ability to manipulate boys, and get what she wants by flirting? I think she is. I think Mom wishes she was a bit more like her daughter.

I'm going to bed to dream of distances between stars being pushed apart. Bye.

Ohio Is Really Lovely This Time of Year

You know, I got so indignant about Rent, I totally forgot to mention what we did on Saturday, which was to stumble upon the birthplace of General George Armstrong Custer, in New Rumley, OH.

We were actually looking for a bathroom for me, having spent the last three hours driving around Carroll County, which looks like West Virginia. We drove past a sign for the memorial, which unfortunately I cannot find a picture of, because it is the biggest yellow and blue billboard, and Sean swears that the caricature of Custer on it looks like Duane Allman. The nearest fast food restaurants were in Cadiz, and I really wanted to see the memorial, so I justified that since it was a national park thing, there would be bathrooms of some sort.

There were two signs on the way to it, in case you got lost. The first was big and yellow again, saying "Welcome to Custer Country!"

The next one said "Ralph Nader for President!"

The one after that said, in the same handwriting, "No trespassing, day or night! Shut Hell Up!"

For the record, there was no bathroom, only a statue and a picnic table and one of those park sign stands you see that are big informational posters encased in thick dirty plastic. Lots of stuff about all his different nicknames, his family, where he went to school. The lovely little anecdote about how when he was nine, he was sitting in church against a window. Some boy who wasn't allowed in church pressed his face up against the glass, and Custer punched the kid in the face, through the glass. And another little sentence about how he tried to court his future wife Libby for two years, but she wouldn't see him cause he kept getting into drunken fights at her house. She only agreed to marry him once he quit drinking (and probably once her father insisted).
Then they also had a section about how the government sent all the Indians to this reservation, then discovered gold underneath it, so they manufactured the war to have an excuse for getting rid of all them. There were some very sad ink drawings by a surviving chief, depicting the battle.

When we left, we tried the only bar in downtown Rumley for a bathroom and a drink. They had no liquor and the only beers we could get were in cans. Bud, Bud Light, Coors Light, Miller, Miller Lite, Pabst. The bar was in fact pretty busy for a Saturday afternoon.
On the way back we passed the high school, in the middle of barren farm hills, with a sign proclaiming tonight was prom night, but Sean didn't want to stick around and look for arriving couples :(

What the Hell was Wrong With That Girl?

525,600 minutes, 525,000 moments so dear.
525,600 minutes - how do you measure, measure a year?
In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee.
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.
In 525,600 minutes - how do you measure a year in the life?
How about love? How about love? How about love? Measure in love.
Seasons of love.

So...a lot of people like Rent. Last night, flipping between the Daily Show and Law Order (which has a lifelong contract with some demon so that they never go out of syndication), I happened upon the movie version of Rent, starring Rosario Dawson and Taye Diggs. Whose real name is Scott Diggs by the way. It shows you how out of touch the world of musical theater is from, say, everything else in the universe, that Taye actually has a very long very successful Broadway career I knew nothing about. I just thought he was the man candy from Stella Got Her Groove Back, turns out he's the man candy from Wicked too.

Anyway

I turned it on because I was all like "hey, I know nothing about it and have never heard it, maybe people like it for a reason.". That got me through about the first song and a half, then I couldn't stand it anymore. I know, how does a girl like me, who did community theater and hung out with all the angsty theater chicks in high school not know anything about Rent? Well, when I was fifteen I pretty much decided I hated it, and refused to listen to it all, based solely on the horrible logo and the fact that everyone who loved it was also the sort of person who liked Phantom of the Opera, another musical I do not know and hate unconditionally. That one I have heard songs to, of course. I hate them.

Turns out all my suspicions about Rent were confirmed and validated and strengthened. It's fucking terrible. Even the wikipedia synopsis of the musical (rock opera my ass) is terrible.
This person has AIDS, and also this person, and this person, and look we have no money and we waste our time trying to write bad songs but we still find time to save homeless old ladies because we're so damn angelic and artsy and lets do some heroin and mooch off some drag queens and if you come to visit us you will get beaten to death in the street. But it's worth it, because we are the spirit of America. Fuck you. You are exactly the sort of people who think they are the spirit of America, and really you are just a bunch of not very nice worthless fucks.

I don't hate musicals. In fact I love some musicals. I love Man of La Mancha for instance, and Jesus Christ Superstar, and Hair. Those are all about some pretentious worthless fucks too, except for Man of La Mancha, which I think is a classic. I like Guys and Dolls, and Into The Woods, and the Sound of Music, Bye Bye Birdie, and Evita, and the Music Man. I fucking love Gilbert and Sullivan, but I guess thats "light opera", though I don't see the difference.

So see, I come from a very dorky musical loving background. But Rent is one of the lamest, most unmoving, unsympathetic things ever written. It's like watching a movie your friend is debuting at a library that rips off the plastic bag in American Beauty for ten minutes, and spends the other 60 doing fuzzy closeups of the lead actress saying things meant to convey how troubled and deep she is, but we all know she's just the girl the director has had a crush on since grade school who would never sleep with him because he's a geeky little worm.

There was a girl who used to hang outside the Phoenix Coffeeshop on Archwood, Shannon. She would sit on the bed of her truck, blasting Rent from the speakers, with the collectors anniversary silver book whatever edition of CDs and lyrics book, and SING along with it. Like every night for a whole summer. She was SO LAME, and this coming from me, a girl who spent many days herself sitting on my friends car singing Indigo Girls songs.

I don't really have a point to this, except that I don't understand this fascination with bad bohemia. Real bohemia is dirty, unattractive, broke, and usually not that interesting because they are so dumb they call themselves bohemian. I guess the point of this is I hate fake bohemians. I know where the "movement" comes from, and I'll tell you, voluntary poverty is dumb unless you are making a lot of money but giving it away. To poor people, not corner stores.

But I love Belgians. When I was little, I would get Bohemia and Belgium mixed up all the time. I thought Hercule Poirot was a Bohemian. I thought I would love to live in Bohemia (it's Czech/Chic). I love the idea of a country named Moravia, and the fact that they have the Ore Mountains. They gave us the Luxembourgs, and the Habsburgs, two absolutely outstanding genetic pools. There's probably beets there too. I like beets.

Also, since Wiki is being good to me tonight, let me also point out that the word DIET actually means a legislative assembly, and that Japan still has a Diet of Japan, and that's awesome. How did that word evolution happen, pray tell.

I'm gonna go forget I ever saw that awful movie, and watch some Law and Order, which I'm sure is on.

Tom Waits Press Conference



Song of the Day



Here's a song that's great because she uses the line "I might as well take a gun and put it to his head".
It's also great because Rhianna was obviously born with some birth defect that makes her unable to stand up too long without falling over backwards.



Where is this going, you ask?
Why, it's only natural conclusion guys.
Michael Jackson and Britney Spears doing a duet



I think Britney's problem may be that she never learned to properly walk in heels. She looks like a weird bird. And of course, I thought in the beginning it was Britney dressed up as Michael, and thought "wow, that's a pretty good impression".

Also the best part about youtube is that people still commented on that video as if they were giving Brit and Mike construction criticism. "Hey Mike, not such a good interpretation bro. Yeah, not your best interpretation Brit. " Interpretation? "Brit, you really let yourself go!"

Good night everybody, we'll be here all week.

This may very well mean nothing to any of you, but seeing Nikki get kicked off Top Chef was the CROWNING MOMENT OF MY EVERYTHING.

Goodbye Crack Whore Face. We have actively hated you since the beginning. The only person who has ever garnered more hate from us was that weird black girl who got kicked off in the first episode. You are not the only person in the world who can cook Italian food. In fact, here's a tip. Italian food is like one of the easiest foods in the world to cook. Second only to Mexican. Also, you don't have to tell everyone you meet the story of how you roasted a chicken by yourself when you were twelve because no one was around. If no one was around, then how did your grandmother teach you to make lasagna? Did she communicate it from the grave, or maybe from the corner where she was working? Did she telegraph it in Morse code from the old country? Did the two of you use recipes as a code language to leak the diplomatic secrets of the men in black suits you would whore yourself out to, using your dehydrated starved frail body fed only by roast chicken to save up enough money to buy one single small truffle you kept in a shoebox under your bed?

When they said your name, the room I was in exploded in glee. We all raised our fists/beers in the air and shouted with happiness. I felt the burden of disappointment lift from my chest, my expectations were once again raised. I look now forward to the future, to a season without your nasally voice and lazy eyes, your crabbed cheek and uninspired cuisine. To a fresh start!

Well, I did finally go to the bar last night. We went to Brothers Lounge, which is that place we all know as the creepy boarded up storefront across from My Friends, but now its back to being a beautiful jazz lounge with padded bar stools. I ran into a girl there that I used to work with, and I know I really hated her for a while, but now I can't remember why at all. Probably I was just being very judgemental and bitchy, probably I was pushing my bitterness at the workplace onto her. Either way, I decided to act like normal, since I couldn't remember. But it put Sean in an awkward position, cause he thought he had to snub her because of me.

See, I'm the girl that insists her boyfriend snub people she doesn't like, or more accurately, people who have done me wrong. Though I can't remember what it was.....damnit.

So Sean says "It makes me look bad, cause I snub them and then you talk to them like nothing happened." And it's true, I do. And this girl did too. Talk to me normally I mean. I don't know if we both decided to let bygones be bygones, or if she talked horribly about me behind my back once she left. Either way I deserved it.

So I have to learn to shed the final shreds of my bitchy girldom. Or keep my mouth shut. Or not care when I get discovered as an obvious hypocrite.

I guess I already don't care about that last one.

Today at work I was assaulted by the Perfume Lady. This is a middle aged woman who sits in the back of the floor, and everytime she walks through the cubicle valley, she leaves a lasting trail of cheap awful perfume in her wake. I mean, I think she spritzes the hall as she walks, like her shoes have little machines in her heels to distribute the stuff. And worse, it lasts forever. She can walk by once and the area is poisoned for at least 30 minutes. I have to hold my hand over my mouth to not get sick, and its so bad I don't even try to hide the fact that that's what I'm doing. She must be afraid that she will get lost and not know how to find her way home. Or that some other old lady will take possession of her flowered picture frames and daily spiritual sayings if she doesn't mark her territory. You know, there are other old ladies there who show their dominance by always making elaborate jello desserts. I much prefer that expression of power. This scent thing is a physical attack. She is killing me one poor gland at a time.

So today she was meeting with her coach for like an HOUR, and her coach sits RIGHT NEXT TO Me. It was unbearable. I actually took my lunch early to get out of the area, and it still reeked when I came back.

Now I know I've been guilty of wearing too much perfume, which is why I don't wear it anymore, cause smoking has killed all my powers of discernment. But how does anyone walk out of the house smelling like this and not know? More importantly, how does anybody in the back of the floor sit next to her while working? I mean, at least five people sit next to that woman for 8 hours a day. I get a migraine from five minutes of exposure. They must all have developed secret nasal mutations from coping with it. Maybe there's a light fixture back there thats giving off nose mangling radiation, and nobody can smell anything anymore, and that's how she exists.

Have you ever walked into a room where a cat JUST peed on a wooden floor? It smells like that. It gets into your pores and nosehairs and eyes, and makes you never want to breath again.

Then I get out of work and it turns out today is City Manure Day.
Awesome.

WHILE WAITING TO GO TO THE BAR, I READ TOO MUCH OF JEREMIAH'S JOURNAL AND BECAUSE I'M STILL WAITING, HERE IS SOME DUMB SHIT I STOLE FROM IT. BAR!

"What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. (How the heck can you make a list like that? Line up all the phony intellectual douchebags and ask?) Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. I'm putting a star next to the ones I actually own."

I am NOT underlining the ones I read for school, because there are no books on this list that I read for school that I am not incredibly glad I did so, and I love them, and they occupy a space in my life much like sex. Except for Ayn Rand, having to read her in school was like having to go to chemistry class. Stoned. See, I went to a really beautiful school, with great big windows in all the classrooms, and especially the science labs. So if I had chemistry class after after break, then I'd be sitting in there, and it would be beautiful outside, and my teacher would start talking. And you'd think it would be crazy fun to listen to chemistry stuff, but then he would start talking about his coco cola collection or something like that, something else I didn't care about. Reading you, Ayn Rand, is like being stuck in a classroom with all the lacrosse field spread outside like groundhogs heaven, and the shadow of clouds moving across it, and the sunny leaves of old trees waving in the distance...and somebody forcing you to listen to their story of collecting the really mini coke cans that they don't make in the U.S.

On the other hand, reading Watership Down is like being given a really cool bike over and over and over again.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
*Anna Karenina
*Crime and Punishment
*Catch-22
*One Hundred Years of Solitude
*Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
*Don Quixote
*Moby Dick
*Ulysses
*Madame Bovary
*The Odyssey
*Pride and Prejudice
*Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
*The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
*War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
*The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
*Great Expectations
American Gods
*A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged (I hate you Ayn Rand, I hate you like I hate people who laugh at the commercials where the polar bear is stuck on the ice all alone)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
*Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
*The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
*A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
*Brave New World
The Fountainhead (I hate you Ayn Rand, I hate you like I hate when my cat knocks over her litter box, you knock over my litter box Ayn Rand)
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
*Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
*A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
*The Once and Future King
*The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
*1984
Angels & Demons
*The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
*Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
*One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
*Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
*A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
*A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
*Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
*Beloved
*Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
*The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
*The Catcher in the Rye
*On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
*Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

You'd think at some point you would get over yourselves

“The photograph is a simple, classic portrait, shot with very little makeup, and I think it is very beautiful."- Annie Leibowitz

Here's somebody's 15 yr old daughter...



And here's somebody's 15 yr old daughter...





And here is somebody's 15 yr old daughter...




Guess which picture I would rather have of my daughter?

You know, I've read the arguments for and against the picture, and on both sides the problem is that all of you people seem to think this picture is sexy. This picture is not sexy. This picture is beautiful. It's probably one of the few pictures taken of her where she can actually look at it 30 years from now and not be ashamed of it. The saddening fact to emerge from this barnfire is that America's adults are no longer capable of looking at 15 yr old girls without thinking about sex. All of you, feminists and chauvinists alike. This is a classical pose, and because of that, because of the purity of the image, its not fucking masturbation material. And I think the people who masturbate would agree. All the people I know who would normally find teenage girls hot agree with me. It's not hot. It's not trampy. It makes her look fifteen.

Here's an editorial I agree with
Trash Talkin Miley...

"At least Cyrus isn't trussed up in Bratz-like skankwear, the kind so many little girls want to wear on Halloween."

Your real battle here is with Disney, and American parents. Don't extend that to art, that path leads to censorship and book burning and all kinds of things you're so outraged about when it involves Catcher In The Rye and Lady Chatterly's Lover.

Lastly, let me say this. Annie Leibowitz is an American genius, and she is an artist. The idea that we can no longer accept our pop icons being made into actual art, but instead insist on artifice, is really gross. So leave this one alone too, you assholes.