Posts tagged #new york city
A collection of Things That Make Us Good Adults from the Adulting launch party at Housing Works Bookstore.
The book is Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps by Kelly Williams Brown, yet another Tumblr-blog-to-book-deal, and it’s available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, as well as your local independent bookseller.
Spring Check-in
So, it’s been a little while since I last spoke with all of you. Consider this the quarterly presentation to the board.
I’m dating now, with mixed success. Which is more success than the previous, uh, decade of my life. A couple of dates under my belt, set up through literary speed dating and OK Cupid. Nothing particularly lasting yet, but early days still, and it’s not as big a deal as I thought. You go on dates, some are fun, some aren’t, no one holds it against you. And it’s fodder for writing. Which I haven’t been doing enough of. (Let’s come back to that.)
Related to the dating: why did no one point out to me that I have been wearing clothes that straight-up did not fit me? I mean, christ, I’m just swimming in some of the shirts in my closet, and it’s not like I’ve changed size since my freshman year of college. Why did people let me dress like someone who’d just lost half their body mass in a freak liposuction accident? Combine this with the weird effect that moving to New York has had no me actually sort of discovering what’s fashionable through osmotic processes (or that insane Buzz Bissinger essay) and I end up with an excuse to both buy some new shirts with actual colors and donate the rest to Housing Works.
That discovery — that I actually had no idea how to dress myself in the morning — might be tried to the overall campaign of self-esteem building I’ve been undertaking. That sounds a lot more New-Age-bullshitty than it is. It’s not any mantra or The Secret or anything like that — just a conscious decision to remember that everyone isn’t annoyed by my presence, that I’m good at what I do, and that people enjoy having me as a friend.
That I have plentiful amounts of evidence of these assertions around me is certainly helping in that regard.
Writing is where I’m letting myself down. I promised Nick a thing for his website and let that moment pass without taking advantage of it; I’ve been talking big talk about being a writer without putting in the effort needed to actually, you know, write.
It was easier with the artificiality of school to impose topics, deadlines, a sense of structure and reason to the process. Without that, I’m somewhat lost without an audience or built-in feedback mechanisms. Tied in with that is the drop-off in my already fitful reading habits because I don’t work at a bookstore anymore and I’m feeling my least literary in years.
(I’m not alazyreader on twitter for nothing.)
So, in order to try and force myself to actually write more, I’m launching a fiction email newsletter through TinyLetter. Really simple: you sign up, and I mail you something I wrote on the first of every month.
It’s called A Lazy Writer.
I would appreciate it if you signed up for it and told your friends about it. First issue goes out Wednesday.
Posters commemorating the Regime of the Colonels appeared in Astoria this week. Likely the work of the local chapter of the Golden Dawn. (My previous encounter with their work; they also yelled at me on twitter around that time.)
The Regime of the Colonels was a right-wing military dictatorship in 1967 that was marked by its staunch anti-communism and social repression. It eventually collapsed after an ineffectual counter-coup exposed the weaknesses in the military’s united front in 1974, at which point democracy was restored.
They tell jokes about the Shake Shack line. It’s all true.
Current status.
I could have sat and watched the whole thing. Strangely compelling. It feels like it presages Vine, in a way.
st patricks day in new york
The snow took its time getting here, but it certainly is here.
An aside: New Yorkians, stop taking your umbrellas out in the snow. You look ridiculous.
“Scabby is a symbol of confrontation. The suggestion that capital will treat workers better if unions just become less confrontational couldn’t be more wrong,” Scabby the Rat said. “The weekend, the eight-hour day, and worker safety were all won over the kicking and screaming (and bullets and truncheons) of the ownership class, not because labor leaders and capitalists attended the same seminars on management. Union leadership, and confrontation-shy liberals more generally, would do well to take a history lesson here and take a step to the left, because that’s the only place worker protection calls home.” (via The History of Scabby the Rat | VICE United States)
A foggy evening.
In SimCity 2000, selecting the “Ruminate” option in the information box for Library buildings would get you this special essay by Neil Gaiman.
pith:
I Like Your Glasses, a literary speed dating event at Housing Works.
I was the cute boy taking photos all night.
The gentleman in the front is a volunteer barista at the bookstore, in fact! He was in the cafe this morning. HERO all around.
Thanks so much to Jesse for capturing the magic that was I Like Your Glasses.
Oh, look, there I am, laughing my ass off!
One of the most interesting parts of last night was the girl I ended up talking with who was drunkenly explaining how smart boys turned her on so bad and how her ex-boyfriend and her current fuck buddy weren’t on speaking terms
She also mentioned she had a thing for Aspergers-y guys and once took off all her clothes while lying on top of the smartest boy she knew in college and he “didn’t understand what I was getting at”.
