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things i got in the mail while i was gone for a week

magazines (esquire, the new yorker, entertainment weekly, cosmo)
phone bill
rejection letter from a literary agency
extensive instructions on how to get my paycheck from working at the hotel off this special card thing
a jury summons for somebody who doesn’t live here

also, while i was gone, my tivo filled up with Ace of Cakes episodes and some made-for-tv movie with Joshua Malina and John Stamos. totally awesome.

moving on

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

Please advise.

Dear TiVo,

Hi there. We’ve been together for seven months now and so far, I think our relationship is going pretty well. I love that sometimes you know me so well. I love that you remember I love “Wings” and Matthew Perry and “MythBusters.” And you record all the late-night talk shows so I can go to bed early if I want and not miss anything funny that Conan says.

It’s just that I feel like lately we’re not communicating very well.

I don’t need to see every episode of “Friends” or “Seinfeld.” I’ve already seen them. Thanks. I don’t like “That ’70s Show.” I know you think I need to see everything that Paul Rudd is in, but I don’t. Really. I know  you like to fill yourself up with the old re-runs of “Jeopardy!” from the Game Show channel, but really, I don’t care what were the final Jeopardy questions in 1992. I also am really, really tired of “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Everybody doesn’t love Raymond. Specifically, TiVo, I do not love Raymond. Please stop.

Don’t let this hurt your feelings, baby. I’m so happy with so many parts of our relationship so far. We’re just still getting to know each other, and I wanted to be honest and open with you. You’re so special to me, and I never want us to be apart.

Oh, and I know you’re trying to tell me something by recording all of the “Mad About You,” but I don’t really like it. I know you care about me, and I’m mad about you too cookie, but I can’t stomach the Paul Reiser.

Kisses,
-Jessica

reading books

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.

some stuff from the list

4. Visit every state.

12. Learn to make fondant frosting.

14. Coach someone learning to speak English.

23. Teach someone to drive.

28. Save someone from drowning.

30. Be a guest on a WFMU radio show.

31. Have something published in the NY Times.

36. Move somewhere alone where I don’t know anybody.

37. Drive the entire Pacific Coast Highway alone in a fast car.

dream sandwich

• 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.

more heroes

So, Ira Glass has this tremendous series of video advice on storytelling. The part on killing stuff that sucks and the part on closing the gap between your abilities and taste levels are especially rewarding. If I taught writing, this would be a class day for sure.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

fake sunday

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?

endless saturdays

So I went out of town early Saturday morning after my last day of work on Friday. I spent Saturday-yesterday cooking and running errands and helping out my mom at the beach, and then came back last night. Today, though, feels like a Saturday.

I got up kind of early, like I do on normal Saturdays, and went to get a coffee at the wacky independent place. I came home, took a shower, made a list of errands to run and then ran them. (Bought new hanging plants for my porch, ink cartridges for my fountain pen, got my alumni ID so I can still use the college library, bought stamps, got some groceries, did some laundry.) I made a list of stuff to do later, like rearrange the furniture in my office and maybe go look for a small bookshelf for my kitchen to keep all my small appliances on (coffee maker, rice cooker, blender, electric kettle, microwave, toaster oven, mixer).

But it still feels like I’m trying to do all this today or tomorrow, because it’s a Saturday, and I have to get my stuff together for the upcoming week of work. Maybe in a few days it’ll sink in.

more about this

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

last days

I haven’t wanted to write about this because I know people won’t understand it. Friday is my last day at work and I’m really sad about it. This is a place I’ve been coming pretty much daily for five years, and two years of that just because I wanted to. It’s not a sadness about not making the right decision or something like that, it’s just that this is a place I like coming, and come Monday, I won’t be able to come back.

Like when it’s sad on the last day of junior high school because you’d been there long enough to know exactly what to expect and finally figure out everything, and then you know you’re leaving for somewhere you don’t have any of the secrets for.

Plus, I’m scared it will be a little lonely. Sure, my friends still live in the same town, but they can’t just walk downstairs to my office and say hi anymore.

Anyway, I’m trying to do normal things this week. I’m trying not to do things I typically do when I’m sad (stay home, watch TiVo’d episodes of “Wings,” eat frozen yogurt), and trying to do things I don’t really 100% want to do, but know they’re something, and that’s better than doing what I’ll be doing all of next month: nothing.

best worst movies

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.

journalism is good

pandering is still bad.

Hear it from Dan Rather.

Anthony Lane = my hero

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.

honey mustard and onion pretzels

Are my new favorite food. Mmmmm.

graduation

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.

done

So my thesis is approved and submitted. I had the last meeting of my last class today. Tomorrow I work a half-day, then I’m off Friday and then Saturday, I graduate. Then I have my MFA. Master of Fine Arts. Terminal degree. Apparently a big deal.

But somehow, I don’t really feel like I accomplished something. I don’t know. I know I should feel this tremendous sense of accomplishment and stuff, but I really don’t feel anything. I somehow feel bad. Like next week when I go to work and really don’t have anything to do, I’ll just feel worthless and hate myself.

Five years is a long time to work on anything, I guess, but this isn’t what I thought finishing would be like. I just thought it would feel different. I guess I was wrong.

passed

!

defense

thesis defense in 11 hours and 37 minutes. then i promise i’ll come back to blogging.

dunning-kruger effect

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?

Some words I feel like are used improperly (and too often)

disaster. (Used to describe things that often are not disastrous at all. Disaster is a hurricane that kills a thousand people and leaves a million homeless. Disaster is not when the top bread of your sandwich falls off or you spill something on your shirt.)

pandemic and epidemic. (Please look them up. They mean different things.)

awesome. incredible. phenomenal. (Really? That good, eh? I doubt it. I admit I’m a recovering addict from all of these words.)

rage, rant and rave. (More things that aren’t interchangeable.)

passionate. (Blech. So overused. Just means intense feelings, not necessarily sexual.)

dream. (OK when you mean the hallucination you have at night. Not OK when you mean “goal.”)

goal. (OK when it’s something someone is working for. Not OK when it’s just something someone wants or would like. My goal is to be a writer. I’d like to be a Rockette.)

synergy. (Deemed meaningless by constant use in the mid-to-late 1990s.)

beautiful. (Try “pretty,” or “nice-looking.” Beautiful sounds like you’re a crazy Karl Lagerfield.)

exponentially. (Proper when you mean the mathematical way something can grow exponentially. Improper when you mean fast.)

serious/seriously. (Did I assume you were joking?)

literally. (Again, did I assume you were speaking figuratively?)

Misusing words makes them meaningless. Show a little more respect in your diction, please.

muxtapes

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.

$3.16

Today, at the Dollar Tree, I bought the following three amazing things:

1. Big box of Mike and Ike
2. Big box of Junior Mints
3. Untamed Earth: Ferocious Floods DVD

It’s 78 minutes of flood footage and people talking about floods. Narrated by MARK HAMILL.

And all this for $3.16. It’s like magic, you know.

midpoint

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.

from the greek: hē apóstrophos

I am now going to uncontrollably rant about proper apostrophe use. Please be patient. This is a personal vendetta of epically negligible proportions. Nobody cares about this stuff but me, I know, and I’m fighting an uphill, losing, pathetic battle. I just want to state for the record, how to use an apostrophe.

Use them to indicate possession by adding an apostrophe and an s: Bill’s teeth. For plural possessives, omit the added s if the plural form of a word already ends in s: the students’ decision. For joint possession, use an apostrophe only once: Joe and Helen’s books.

For names and proper nouns ending in s, AP style says to leave off the added s in a possessive: James’ underwear. Other stylebooks say to keep it: James’s underwear. Pick a style; either is correct.

Use them in place of omitted letters in a contraction: I’m, they’re, don’t. Also use them for omitted figures, as in years: the summer of ’69, the ’50s. (Take special note here of the direction the apostrophe curves. Note that it is not a single-quote mark.)

Use them to indicate plurals of single letters (but not multiple letters or multiple or single figures): mind your p’s and q’s, make A’s and B’s, but not recite your ABC’s (use ABCs, with no apostrophe).

NOTE: Eeew. Yeah, what is that comma doing there?

affirmation

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.

barf

Sisters in Idiosyncracy

Breaking news from the NYT: Hipsters love Brooklyn and San Francisco!  Still the most expensive places to live in the country, still the most popular for the new class of young, urban professional. Why can’t this kind of gentrification go to cities where it’d actually make a difference? Camden, N.J.; Compton, Ca.;  Detroit—places where it’d actually mean something to be different.

head above water

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

dewar’s profile

(wrote this in advertising copywriting class today. clever way to do a get-to-know you exercise AND have it have to do with advertising)

Name: Jessica Clary

Age: Stopped counting at 19

Home: the newsroom

Profession: dilettante grammarian, punctuation aficionado, student newspaper adviser

Hobbies: listening to wfmu, reading magazines

Last book I read: “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen. I’m now qualified to have dinner-party conversation in 2001.

Last movie seen: “Something’s Gotta Give” (under duress, on an airplane, i had no choice)

Latest accomplishment: I wrote 10,424 words of my mfa thesis in a 4-day binge in Las Vegas last week. only 84,756 to go.

Why I do what I do: Failed at  my childhood dream of being a Radio City Music Hall Rockette

Quote: Any joke by Henny Youngman, any movie line by David Mamet, anything my mother says after “I told you this a thousand times”

Profile: People call me a snob, but I’m really just detail oriented.

Favorite drink: absolut mandarin and tonic. it’s like a little bit of summer every day.

brendan benson

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.