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So, I’ve narrowed down the whole “Where I’m Moving” to two viable options: New York City or Washington D.C.

Please advise.

Until last month, I had a stack of 10 or 15 books on my bedside table. I also have a bookshelf in my bedroom, and bookshelves in my living room and office. I have a book collection problem. This is part of why I hate moving. But these books would accumulate on the nightstand because I’d start one, start another, finish one, finish another, etc. Sometimes I’d have four or five going at a time. Like right now.

Right now there are only twelve books on the bedside table (which is actually an old flip-top school desk I bought at a salvage store). Some I’ve finished (No Country For Old Men, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Vinyl Junkies, Gone Baby Gone), some I haven’t started (All Over But The Shouting (The Replacements oral history), What is the What, Miss Misery), and some that are in various phases of completion (The Corrections, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Maps and Legends, City of Thieves, Beautiful Children). Some of them I’m reading slowly because I can’t get into them (Beautiful Children, I mean, I’m into it enough to keep it on the table, just not enough to get exclusive with it), and some I’m reading slowly because I want them to last forever (Maps and Legends), but these are not really excuses. My goal is to finish one of these per day until they’re all finished, and then start and finish one book at a time. This will be tough, you see, since I am clearly not a book monogamist. I’m a book polygamist, for sure. I want to have all the options at my disposal. If I want to read dreamboat nonfiction or a crime novel or a mystery, I can. I’m not a one-book kind of girl.

However, I’m also traveling a lot. That means lately, I’ve been packing a duffel bag of clothes, another bag of the requisite pens and notebooks and notes I travel with, and a third bag stuffed with books and DVDs and Yahtzee. Like tomorrow, I’m going to North Carolina again. My clothes are packed (duffel bag into washer, out of washer, back into duffel bag), but this book situation is so frustrating. At least I’m in my car, though, and not schlepping all these books around an airport.

And yes, I’ve seriously considered purchasing the Kindle, but I have a serious habit of writing in my books—taking notes, underlining stuff, doodling—all things that would be Kindle-impossible. Oh well. Guess I’ll just maintain the schlepping. Maybe I could put them in a box or something.

And I updated my muxtape, finally.

• Sourdough bread (a crusty end piece) from Back in the Day Bakery (bottom)
• 2 slices colby-jack cheese (layer one)
• 2 slices oven roasted rosemary turkey
• 2 slices organic hothouse tomato
• radicchio and endive tossed in little bit of Italian salad dressing
• 2 slices almost-burned bacon, blotted dry and very crispy
• two poached eggs with salt and pepper
• Sourdough again, a soft middle piece this time, but toasted

So, making this sandwich took no more than 10 minutes, and is basically my dream meal for the rest of my life. It’s suitable for breakfasts, lunches or dinners, or whatever meal you eat at 8:45 p.m. after reading the new issues of both Esquire and the New Yorker and spending the rest of the day working aggressively on a list of things to do before you die. At least it was suitable for that for me today.

I woke up this morning and immediately thought “I should go get some coffee and a New York Times because it’s Sunday.” I guess Endless Saturdays isn’t going to happen. Wonder what tomorrow will feel like?

Copy editors are important, just not museum-y enough.

I love action movies. I love bad action movies. I love movies with gratuitous violence and carnage and cliché dialogue and car chases and explosions and useless, throwaway plots.

I will probably like this movie.

Please everybody go read Mr. Lane’s intensely sharp and brilliant review of the Sex and the City movie. It’s right here. Make sure you read both pages, because the last line is brilliant.

So many things he writes I read and go “Damn, it must have felt so good to write that.” He’s a writer’s writer, for sure.

So, today, I walked across a stage in an arena in front of people and was pronounced graduated. But really, my final transcript and grades and stuff won’t process for a week or so. So, there’s a distinct possibility I may not have graduated. To celebrate this limbo, though, I’ve had two (soon to be three) straight nights of excessive eating and drinking with members of my family. Everyone practically begged me to have an official party, but I think I’m doing quite well having several unofficial parties. It’s a lot more fun that way.

When you’re graduating, people say congratulations and then always, always ask what you’re going to do next. I don’t know. I was in class 72 hours ago; I’m still mentally in school mode so I can’t really start thinking of concrete things yet. Relatives joke that now I’ll have to get a job and I (sometimes not so politely) remind them that I do have a job, plus I freelance, plus I could always start teaching again and then have three jobs like I did last fall. But I guess people think this is the g0-to joke for new graduates.

A lot of people have been asking to read my thesis, and I’m hesitant to let them, since I still consider it a work in progress. My thesis chair called it a “miracle” in my defense meeting, which is quite flattering. But, ever the perfectionist, I want to keep working on it.  I just feel like it could be so much better, and that people would really appreciate reading it more if it was something I felt like was finished. There are only a few places in it that are good enough I don’t want to moan when reading them.  I want to at least get a 50/50 split of tolerable and intolerable before I set this thing loose on people that call themselves my friends.

!

I stumbled upon a Wikipedia entry today on the Dunning-Kruger effect. Basically, these two Cornell researchers determined that people with a lot of knowledge assume they know very little, and people with little knowledge assume they know a lot. They basically hypothesized and proved that incompetent people think they’re competent and don’t recognize competence in others, while competent people tend to assume they’re incompetent. Interesting.

But what is more interesting is if you drop “Dunning-Kruger effect” into Google, you come up with lots of articles and essays about how to deal with these incompetent people that think they’re competent, especially if you work for them or they work for you. There are, however, very few (I haven’t found one yet, but I don’t want to rule out the possibility) articles about how to deal with people that assume they’re idiots and aren’t.

And what does this mean for people like me, that think they know very little, and actually, probably do know very little? If you think about the world, in historical, geologic, far-reaching, universal-type ideas, there’s a vast amount of knowledge out there. Probably so vast nobody, even the people we tout as geniuses, has access to even a fraction of a percentage of it. I’m young(ish), I didn’t go to an Ivy League school, I’m not a scientist or anything, so yeah, I don’t know very much. But does that mean I’m one of the intelligencia that assumes they’re idiots? Or am I just actually an idiot?

mine: iloveredrobot
bsmiff: bsmiff
chase: goodhabits
colin: bringnobombs

add yours in comments.

this is probably my favorite thing ever on the whole internet. maybe even better than wikipedia.

It’s the fifth week of school. I have five chapters left to draft on my thesis, then revisions. I have 39 days left. i still have:

• no idea what to do this summer

• no idea what to do next fall

• no idea what to do with the rest of my life

that pretty much sums it up.

three things:

“As I look back over a misspent life, I find myself more and more convinced that I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It is really the life of kings.” -H.L. Mencken

And this, by David Simon.

And the positively dreamy class discussion I had today about em dashes.

This is almost enough to remind me of what I like the best, the feeling of listening to somebody talk, and taking notes, and the little voice in your head going ‘This is going to be so much fun to write’ and the feeling that yeah, it will be. So maybe I’ll never get a ph.d. And maybe I’ll never be a Radio City Music Hall Rockette. But I could move to any small town in the country, I could move to Fayetteville, Arkansas or Hendersonville, North Carolina, or Sonora, California and be a newspaper reporter. I could do respectable work and live a respectable life doing a respectable craft. (That’s right, a craft, like carpentry or welding.) I could do something worthy of self-respect. I feel like myself when I’m reporting. I feel like myself when I’m editing, when I’m sitting there with my stylebook and my blue pen and my coffee and really reading and making things better. I could do this and be happy.

And that’s reassuring.

i’ve officially been rejected from every phd program and writers’ residency i’ve applied to for next year. i’m crashing and burning on my thesis and i can’t sleep more than 2 hours at a time (i have a bird situation outside my house). i’ve tried sleeping medicine, makers’ mark and deep breathing. everything is just getting out of hand lately. i can’t maintain. i cannot go on like this for much longer.

i just keep thinking about hunter, and how for fourteen years of my life i wanted to be him because i felt like being a journalist, in that way, in the way of chronicling a time so comprehensively, was important and valuable and meant something. maybe it did then, but i don’t think it means the same thing now. i don’t think it’s even possible.

i feel like i was born in the wrong time, as the wrong person. why couldn’t i have been a 19th century typesetter, or a 1970s newspaper reporter, back when writing mattered and people read. what’s the point anymore? nobody reads and it doesn’t matter if you can write or not, because nobody cares. can’t use a  semicolon? so what. try to say something is “very unique,” people let it by (unique means one-of-a-kind, therefore, nothing can be “very unique”). i’m sick to death.

proof of this: last week, in las vegas, i called the Tropicana to tell them good job on their billboard for the Bodies Exhibition. Instead of the typical misused-verb “Exhibit,” they’d used the noun, “Exhibition.” I called to say thanks, and congratulations, and i couldn’t get anybody on the phone that didn’t want to refer me to a manager to take my complaint. i don’t have a complaint, for once, i said. it didn’t matter.

born in the wrong time, probably. born in the wrong place, probably. born as the wrong person, 100%.

“Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits.”  -Hunter Thompson,  1971

A few days ago I saw a television commercial for an Apple product featuring a song by Brendan Benson. The song is called “What I’m Looking For,” and was a single in 2005. (That’s right, three years ago.) It’s off his third solo album, The Alternative to Love. I’ve been listening to this album since before it came out (one of the many, many perks of working with college radio). I have his first two albums (Lapalco and One Mississippi) at home, but I wanted to listen to them at work today, instead of Alternative to Love, over and over, like I listened to yesterday, so I went searching through the B racks in the station.

This anecdote is the background for two separate musings below:

1. WTF, Apple? At least when you used that Feist song, you used it in the year it came out, not three years later. Why didn’t you use the Brendan Benson song back in ‘05, maybe to promote the iPod nano, or something else you made back then. People would have bought the album back then and then everybody would love Brendan Benson now.

2. One day I’m going to have a mental breakdown and re-shelve every single CD in the radio station. While looking for Brendan Benson (should be filed under “Benson”) I found Ben Kweller (in the B section, should be filed in the K section under “Kweller”) and Ben Folds (F, “Folds”). Of course, I didn’t find Brendan under “Benson” or under “Brendan.” I searched through L, thinking maybe it could be filed under “Lapalco,” but it wasn’t. I did find Ben Lee there, correctly filed under L (indicating the filing problem is not specific to artists named Ben, or whose names contain “Ben”).

These bring me to my actual point: Do other people just not care about anything anymore? Can Apple use something timely, instead of dredging up my favorite records from years ago to sell stuff (namely stuff I already own)? Can things be properly alphabetized? It’s not like I’m asking you to learn the Dewey Decimal System or anything—it’s just the alphabet. I mean, I know by now that nobody learns in school anymore how to correctly use punctuation, but letters, right, don’t you learn those in kindergarten or something? Am I a total nutbar for thinking people should know the alphabet? God forbid someone use a semicolon correctly—I might just have a stroke.