Tell people your only marketable skill is writing, they tell you to write a book.
No.
You tell one of those insane people who suggests you write a book that the only book you're going to write is going to be about not writing.
He says, "I'd read that."
Others agree.
You think back over your non-illustrious career, how others have not asked your advice, and you think...
Step 1: Begin your day giving into any whim that strikes you, as long as it's not writing. You want to scrub your floors, tell off telemarketers, watch a season's worth of "Dr. Phil"? As long as it doesn't involve pen touching paper, go on with your bad self.
Back in the day, I had a lot of flashes of brilliance for magazines that I could start. One night, perhaps aided by a case of beer or well vodka, Boris and I founded Weak magazine--for the nebbish and malnourished. Because I'm crazy and take notes even in altered states, I still have a pretty good outline of the magazine: we envisioned it as an anti-lad's mag, sort of the response to Maxim and the like (remember, this was the late nineties), but the title was also a nod (or maybe a chin thrust, who knows?) to Dave Eggers' Might. All of this, in the spirit of our proud lack of self-esteem, added up to a magazine that stood up for the little guy, with a healthy dose of intellectualism and the literary spirit that had made Esquire and the like hot spots for fiction in the fifties and sixties.
We came up with slugs: the FOB would be So Low. There'd be a Cooking for One recipe. Sports coverage would go under Losing Streak. Entertainment Coverage? Entertainment--Weakly. We envisioned a crush page on someone almost-attainable that we'd call Weak-Kneed. We actually had too many great names for a porn roundup: Hand Solo? Talk to the Hand? Aloha, Mr. Hand? The backpage, we thought, should focus on good moments for the weak, ergo: The Weak Shall Inherit the Earth.
We had a running list of "weak people" to interview, though looking over that list now, some of them are disqualified, like, um, Screech.
Anyway. I wonder if maybe we'd been just a few years younger, with blogging templates made readily available, would we have gone home that night and thrown our ideas up online instead of talking about them? Or would Weak still exist as an imaginary magazine, one complete with t-shirts and potential writers, never to take shape?
Travel back with me, friends, to New York in the early '90s. The internet was used for emailing and alt.something newsgroups. (OK, maybe not for you, Al Gore, you were blogging or creating Amazon. Me, I was posting to the Pavement fan list and emailing. That's all.)
Record and comic book and zine stores: a handful. In other words, to stay up on non-mainstream media, you could take a walk around lower Manhattan for a few hours, have a couple conversations, flip through your preferred publications and feel pretty secure in your awareness of what was happening via CD, seven inch, etc.
(Also, shouldn't Kim Gordon like, I don't know, send me a letter when she puts books out? I'm just saying.)
I made this split pea and parsnip soup last night that was so vile-looking. Luckily, Ryan thought the same thing I did and when I said, "You know what this reminds me of?" he said, "The sludge in Better Off Dead?"
I thought for sure that had to be on YouTube but no dice. YouTubers with a copy of the movie, bring the sludge to the people!
You know who is on the 'Tube, though? Our new friend Gilad. I am a woman without a gym membership, in a land of snow and ice and laziness, yet I have discovered the world of televised fitness shows and...I am a convert. I know it sounds terribly dorky, but I totally got my Denise Austin on yesterday and then Ryan came home for some Gilad action and I don't know if we stuck it out because we enjoyed the workout or because we liked how we bossed us around. He says "NICE" in his tough-stuff voice a lot, yet he remains very supportive. I think we're in love.
Inspired by this post at Shelterrific, I just baked four dozen cookies. But mine are really weird!
In the top photo you'll notice that my cookies look partially raw. Which is what the recipe says might happen. Still, it goes against all my baking intuition.
In the second photo, note that I have three different degrees of cookies. The ones in the back are nearly inedible now that they've cooled, while the middle ones seem a tad underdone. The cookies in the foreground are a little too crunchy for my taste. None of them are just right, though, and for a baker who feels that chocolate and peanut butter are the building blocks for, well, just about anything, this will not do!
What's something you bought, knowing it was a total waste of money?
I have owned some remarkably adorable-but-impractical shoes. The most egregious examples have been sold on ebay, but only after having been worn a handful of times--and getting tons of compliments.
