The internet makes strangers feel like friends.  At yoga, Tito was telling me that he was watching a new show called Archer.  I said “Oh my friends work on that!” but no, they don’t, I simply read a blog of a girl who is actually friends with them, and so it felt as if they were my friends.

With you in that dress, my thoughts I confess, are dirty. Come on, Eileen.

Did a little housecleaning today on my laptop, found a bunch of pictures I had forgotten about as well as a few stories. Here’s a snippet for you, from two different ones actually.

“[She] took notes on the ones she liked and found herself drifting off to sleep in the rest.  For a time it became a joke, how often she would fall asleep as soon as she sat down, waking up like magic as soon as the end credits began to roll.  She also wrote down ideas for movies that she had in the back of the notebook, and if she saw a movie that was the same as one of the ideas, she crossed it out as soon as she got home.”

and

“Within a few months he became an expert at diagnosing sound design problems, he would walk into a friend’s home and hear the kitchen from the living room, and the basement noises filtering through the floor.”

Exterminator: So do you just teach now?

Me: No, I just work. And do grad school, it’s online though.

Exterminator: Oh yeah? That’s amazing, everyone does it online now. What in?

Me: Librarian stuff.

Exterminator: Oh you look more like a teacher to me.

[insert strange story about how he did David Beckham's house, which is all made of glass. Even his stairs. Apparently Beckham's house guests were throwing garbage around and it attracted flies.]

volley. folly. windpipe crusher.

A children’s poem somewhere in that.

Over the course of the twentieth century, weddings—and honeymoons—evolved from practical, family-based events into commodified products for the mass market. Everyone went to the same places and did the same things. You might expect a revolt against this sameness, and indeed there was one. But instead of taking back the right to live—rather than buy—life experiences, consumers turned weddings and honeymoons into the lavish orgies of conspicuous consumption that now drive the multibillion-dollar wedding industry. Today, you can distinguish your wedding by how much you spend on it, and your honeymoon by how exotic and distant your destination. And it’s important to do so, because your honeymoon tells the world—and maybe you—who you are. Honeymoons are not even talked about in terms of “getting to know” each other or spending time together; they are, in the words of one popular contemporary guide, “a well-deserved break from the stresses of getting married.” Having just spent an entire book telling you how to assemble a huge, overblown affair, the authors tell you with no irony that another expensive purchase is required to help you recover from it. (via Believer)

We’re making faces about the jerk in the corner, but we take his cigarettes anyway.   I’m shaking relentlessly from how cold it is, and I have no idea what time it is anymore.  First I make a joke, some lazy wordplay in the midst of conversation directed at no one, and he’s the only one who laughs. This is his house, and so he apologizes for the jerk with that sort of hapless shrug that makes jerks seem less important. I like that, and so we share knowing glances about the jerk until he leaves. More cigarettes are purloined, lit, and passed, and as the hours go on the stories unfold. The cold pleather sofa is sticking to my legs.   For a joke, or what passes for a joke at 3 a.m., he calls me Miss Neapolitan – because my dress is pink, cream and brown.  At first I don’t get it, but then I do, and point out how my shoes match. He already noticed.

Eventually we’re standing in his kitchen, a little delirious from the lack of sleep and the frequent beers, I stake out a spot beside the fridge and we’re waiting the other out, seeing who will cave to exhaustion first.  I know I have to go home soon, it’s already light outside. He punches my arm lightly and I’m feeling really good so I think about kissing him for a split second, maybe that’d be faster than asking if I can see him sometime.  Instead, we hug. Every step I take away from the door I think about turning around and going back. My heart is pounding. As I get in my car and drive away I circle the block once, thinking of going back.  I do not go back.

Trying to change the synaptic pathways in my brain, so that when someone I don’t trust says:

“I saw this great Kieslowski movie.”

I can smile encouragingly, wholly lacking arrogance or derision, and ask how they liked it, instead of a go-to response which involves my stomach acid churning. 

I want the things that are worthy to be loved and admired.  This is a good thing.

(Alternatively, I want the things that exist because they are cultural whipping-boys to go away. [The principle of just don't look applies here.] I want people to be smart and interesting and make lots of smart interesting things because they want to show their friends and because there exists that kind of a place where you can put your paintings on the wall. I want the feeling of reverence that I feel towards the endless hours of writing and careful direction that Kieslowski put into his work to be honored. I don’t want it to become common and taken for granted. They are beyond masterful and moving.)

I don’t need to be the expert on anything anymore. I wasn’t trying to be in the first place.

To my favourite bass-playing cheese idiot,

Happy damn Birthday you magnificent creature you.  I raise my glass of champagne and toast to poet’s haircuts, finding the perfect guitar for a lady, magnets, mars, a perfect gooey cheese, diggers, grooving a good groove, and all the other things you love.

A friend recently fanned the flames of my obsession with figuring out what would happen if an actor in a movie could rent a movie and see themselves in it. Or is it that I wonder if each movie is simply set in an earth-like place, but obviously one where certain films don’t exist?

Bill Murray and Woody Harrelson were both in the 1996 film Kingpin.

In the movie Zombieland, Woody Harrelson plays a character named Tallahassee, but Bill Murray plays himself. Tallahassee tells Bill Murray that he’s seen every film he’s ever been in. It then follows that he would have seen Kingpin, in which he stars, alongside Bill Murray.

ALL I’M SAYING is that this is impossible. Kingpin must not exist in that world.