favorite posts of the last 2 years

1/18/09

7/25/09

12/21/09

1/7/10

All the rest is pretty much crap. Political ramblings/rants are the worst. My blog before this was on Friendster, which is funny. What isn't funny is that I can't find any trace of that blog anymore. And I know there was some funny stuff there. I distinctly remember blogging about how I had netted negative 2 friends in one day. Yeah, that's mainly the one I wish I could find.

notes from a moleskine

(and also a few from a journal)

6/16/09, tues

Sometimes I can't believe the world I'm living in. Just driving, stopping, obeying red lights, thinking about how much I can't wait to obey green lights. Just life. Eating, crapping, not crapping. Sometimes I even get texts about crapping. And that's all normal. ...

7/10/09

Being in an airport makes me want to write. What else is there to do? Read. Later. You can only people watch so long. All we're doing is waiting. People watch people waiting. How do you spend your free time? It is actually an interesting question. ... I'm hungry but I don't really want to eat anything. Actually, maybe I don't feel like writing. Too little sleep. Stayed up finishing a silly book. Plot revolving around whether to stay with her husband or leave. She made the right choice in the end. It does seem like sometimes there's a right choice. Honesty is sometimes a good choice. Not always.

8/25/09

Why, at 26, have I only accomplished "not dying" while Roger Federer, at 28, has won 15 Grand Slams? Master of nothing. In fact, the last thing I was proud of was "cooking chicken soup from scratch." I told my mom. She was proud; I could tell.

8/26/09

"I am an American and a Catholic; I love my country and treasure my faith. But I do not assume that my conception of patriotism or policy is invariably correct, or that my convictions about religion should command any greater respect than any other faith in this pluralistic society." - Ted Kennedy

8/27/09

"We knew we had to just tell the damn truth. The truth may be plenty good or plenty bad, but believe me, it's always plenty." -William A. Emerson, Jr., former editor-in-chief of Sat. Evening Post, 2/28/23-8/27/09

8/31/09

Listen. I worry about more nonsense than it's worth. I worry about:

-bad weather

-serial killers

-bad tax policies

-other people worrying about things that they shouldn't worry about

-what to wear

-the Taliban

...

Listen. Can you blame someone for not knowing everything that is going on in the Middle East? in Africa? in Myanmar? In Israel and the Gaza Strip? In space?! How are you supposed to keep up?

9/14/09

"It never ceases to amaze me what people will address and things that they will allow to be put aside." -Rev. Kojo Nantambu, president of Charlotte NAACP

10/21/09

I hate how flight crews think it's really cool to be "the first to welcome you" to your destination city. Yeah, congrats.

11/10/09

"That which is impenetrable to us really exists. Behind the secrets of nature remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything we can comprehend is my religion." -Einstein

12/15/09

Why are groups so paradoxical? Somewhere we fit in, think alike. But then you all start to think alike. Humans - a grouping? Should we start sympathizing more w/monkeys? We should do more things that make us uncomfortable.

12/30/09

From the sky, under the snow, Detroit is a grid of white, a city that someone has laid a blanket over, ashamed to show what's beneath.

12/31/09

"If I had to live with my dark side all my life, I'd go insane." - Richard Avedon

2/10/10

People grasp onto what they believe are easy morals and cling to them, never seeing the wrong in it. "I love my country": Aren't I righteous? That should be enough. There are no exceptions. I am right. You are wrong.

2/16/10

Writing is one of the most personal, intimate things a human can do.

It is conversing with oneself. Letting things percolate, letting things, thoughts, theories, ideas, events, facts, opinions, ideas, events, facts, opinions, truths, lies flame up onto the page and quietly die down, smolder, and settle.

It is the transformation of light into ash. Of burning the earth, for what it is, whatever it is, and reducing it to something you can sweep up, hold in your hand, put in an urn. Its rawness, its ugly form is its beauty. You stand and live before fire. You lie down and meditate before ash.

2/18/10

apple cider is one of those things that I love to look forward to but never actually drink once it's in front of me. I am happy just knowing it is there.

3/11/10

I made a mushroom tart tonight. I tried to be one of those people who then takes a picture of it and posts it like in these food blogs that are everywhere now, but honestly my camera was dead, and joe's camera didn't have the card in it, and i didn't want to screw with that since my luck would be that mushroom juice would get into the card reader hole and corrode the camera with fungi ooze. so i took a camera phone picture and sent it to joe. but it did make me think of what life would be like if you couldn't ever take a picture of anything. would we miss it? would our lives go on? yes. but with a little less vibrancy? maybe so.

i just found two quotes, one from my mom: "Don't ever be afraid to apologize." -Mom, 5/31/05

and one from my dad: "Someday you will miss school. I didn't, but I hear a lot of people do." -Dad, 6/1/05

5/11/10

... There is no sense of immediacy. There is day by day. Which is fine for day by day. But we are humans. We are developed humans - of the two-thousand and tenth year of someone's lord. And we have time. This cursed thing called time, during which we agonize over what is the best way to use it, how to prolong it, how to slow it down, how to reverse it, how to fast forward it, how to even prove it as the 4th dimension.

Aug/Sept? 2010

"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong." -H.L. Mencken

10/4/10

"That's the great tension: We are better at understanding morality than we are at living it." -Elliot Spitzer

Nov. 2010

"(for what is life except activity?)" -Marx

Officially retiring this Moleskine today. 12/29/2010. On to the next.

shoulda woulda willa

just read back on some entries from last year. i should've written more this year. of course. i will write a nice, long entry before the end of the year. i also might try to clean up my act here.. maybe switch blog providers, etc. Make a resolution to write once a month next year, etc. Clean starts. Americans love clean starts, ends and beginnings, so they can muddy it all up and get another clean start. Blame it on Nintendo. Atari? Atarrrrrriiii.

you can be nostalgic about anything

from march 18th --

I took a stroll through uptown tonight. I have to say, I do love uptown. I love living in it; i love that i can walk downstairs and out the door and into the streets of uptown. It's no New York, no Chicago, no London. It's insulting to even list those cities here. But I still love this little urban playground, where feeling attached and detached all at once is the feeling you crave.

I walked up 6th street, which is always vaguely nostalgic of my walks to work at Hearst, proof that you can be nostalgic about anything if you've done it enough times. Cut over before the Holiday Inn parking garage past the Bobcats arena (i am still amazed that Jordan has decided to invest in charlotte hoops like he has. v. good news for charlotte.. or v. bad news for MJ. i have hope for the former..). Walked past the spattering of people waiting for the light rail -- mainly african americans, one white lady reading a hardcover. The smell of cigarette smoke made me laugh at the thought that i also get slightly nostalgic about the smell of cigarettes and day-old beer, a disturbing truth.

Walked up the ramp to the Epicentre. Surprised at the number of people eating outside at Libretto's. Caught a glimpse of the new Kazba place on the 2nd floor - stupid spelling.

ohh, watching Pulp Fiction (intermittently with bball), and travolta just took a sip of uma's milkshake.. "goddamn this is a pretty fucking good milkshake." ah, that has no effect in writing, but so much goodness on screen.

Walked past the Fudgery, wondering how they stay in business, then past the 'secret' back door to Blackfinn that Brett took me through one night (i think that is the last time i've been there.. might stay that way since RiRa is open again), and then past the little CBS studio - looks like they've doctored it up a little since I was last there.

Walked to the corner that still evokes bad memories of getting stuck at the crosswalk with jesus-freak dude yelling through a megaphone. Walked past Aria, peering down into the restaurant, watching innocuous people enjoy their dinner [added note - ate there about a week after writing this - and sat about 5 feet away from MJ himself. Needless to say, we became as giddy as a babies in jumperoos].

Up past the fountain - lots of pennies to look at and an excuse not to make eye contact with a homeless guy. Left at Trade and Tryon onto Tryon. Walked behind a guy that reminds me of an old boss. He stopped to watch the McDevitt video next to the Emerson barber shop place, which Joe and I have done before.

favorite part of pulp fiction on now - uma and john twisting in their socks. i love it.

Walked past the Wachovia Plaza, imagining the throes of yuppies there at old AA5s, the people watching, the boy spotting, the cover bands that were perfect for that type of event.

Walked to the Knight Theatre and said hello to my new favorite thing uptown - the Firebird,

-----

That's it. That's as far as I got. But if I were to add to it, the end of the sentence would be, "which Joe thinks is ugly." We went jogging through Uptown tonight, and it was just as nice as this walk a couple months ago (well, except that I would have rather been walking). Hotter. The trees are filled out, and the smell of cut grass is back. Not bad. I voted in the primary elections today and actually had a candidate picked for every race on my ballot. It'd be silly to deny that I have a stake in this place, and I can't imagine it underwater. So, I feel you, Nashvillians (?). There you go. I'm no CNN, but you got take it and run... you know, like Katrina victims after an incompetent FEMA response.

my city

so, a lot of things are going on in Charlotte.

Jimmy Clausen is going to be a resident here soon, a fact that, as Facebook knows, makes me want to hurl.

In two more months, the Levines will have given enough money to NFPs that all buildings in Charlotte will be called The Levine Somethingorother. Building names will start to become so indistinguishable that Anthony Foxx will decide to ban the name from buildings and change the city's name to Charlevine.

The Bobcats are in the playoffs for the first time ever. The city is honoring their accomplishment by lighting up some of Uptown's buildings orange, including the BofA tower. A true testament to how obsequious Charlotte is to its sports teams - the first day that BofA's tower broadcast that it could, in fact, be a color other than Panther blue, was yesterday. Yep, the Earth, on its Day, got totally snubbed for a basketball team. Michael Jordan had some input, so the tower actually looked red.

Wells Fargo's board, turns out, is incestuous.

Bank of America is still here, helping to keep thousands of bankers from crapping their pants.

Tiger is coming to Quail Hollow.

Tiger's ex-f-buddy porn star friend, Joslyn James, is concurrently coming to to the UC. I predict at least one police blotter story to come of it.

In NC news...

Obama is shacking up at the Grove Park Inn.

Early voting for NC's US Senate seat primaries is underway (no one much cares.. though if you want a good laugh, read the last four paragraphs of this article about Burr's 'competition').

Ends up that the dude who gave up the iPhone prototype went to NC State. Go Pack.

Good goings ons...

Along with Tiger, we're having an influx super-famous black people.. Oprah was here to interview Rielle Hunter (who reminds me of a contestant on the Bachelor); Condoleezza will be here to give Johnson C. Smith's commencement speech; Obama has come and gone, speaking at a company that no one had heard of. Even now, no one has heard of it.

Between tonight and tomorrow, The Light Factory is doing a cool City Block project; Charlotte's version of Amazing Race gets its second run; and hundreds of people will go get drunk in a field that happens to be adjacent to a horse race.

A new Farmer's Market concept will open in South End mid-May; there are bees on top of the Ritz Carlton Uptown, which is apparently a good thing for the environment; it's warm here now -- Alive After 5 is back; Pops in the Park is forthcoming, as is the Whitewater Center's River Jam; the mountains and the beach have beckoned; the lake is beckoning; a new sushi restaurant will be opening soon downstairs.

I guess I won't mention the county budget woes, which are threatening libraries, mental health programs, and middle school football in repeated succession. oh yeah, and the state has problems in that budget area, too. I'd like to see Bev and Erskine duke it out.

oh, charlotte. such a silly place. but you are mine... for now.

zing!

oh, so much to say, but no desire to sit in front of this computer any longer.

so, some links:

i read this article in the paper this weekend (yes, i know, i am the only person under 30 who reads a physical paper). Dionne describes moderates' "wins" rather morbidly and also brings up an argument that annoys me to no end:

"If a bill eventually becomes law -- as it must if the Democrats are not to look like a feckless, useless lot -- "

Annoying because now it's as if the democrats want (need) to pass health care reform just to do it - just to accomplish something. Yes, they're going to look like a bunch of idiotic pushover losers (kind of like the SEC... $150M is enough to get them wet, huh?) if they don't. But come on. Let's not let that become the impetus behind changing a nation's health care system.

Eh, who am i kidding? who am i to be so naive as to think that similar reasons haven't been the impetus behind hundreds of bills, tons of pork?

Anyway, I'd like to hope that, if we get health care reform, it's simply because we need (want) health care reform. A futile hope, perhaps.

In any case, i thought this musing in the article was pretty true, if not, amusing:

"...the conservatives relentlessly made a straightforward public case based on a syllogism: The economy is a mess. Obama and the Democrats are for big government. Big government is responsible for the mess. Therefore the mess is the fault of Obama and the Big Government Democrats.

Simplistic and misleading? Absolutely. But if liberals and Obama are so smart, how did they -- or, if you prefer, "we" -- allow conservatives to make this argument so effectively? Why do the mainstream media give it so much credence?"

Also, Newt and Jon, if you haven't seen it:

Wrong

Wrong Again

Favorite part:

when Gingrich acknowledged that part of his job is to reach out to the emotions of the American people, Stewart shot back, "I think that's wise. And don't let reality get in the way."

inside this life

was taking a tag off a piece of jewelry i bought at forever 21 today, and i thought back to the cashier girl (young, overdone, to no avail) saying by rote, "..but all jewelry sales are final." and it actually made me smile. oh, the freedom of knowing that i don't have the freedom to return something. i'm stuck with it! forever!! this $4.50 necklace - i made a decision, and now i have to live with it! for eternity!

oh, humanity, and your everlasting quest for freedom. don't you know that you are always undermined by a perpetual state of no freedom at all.

wait, did i just attempt to relate a XXI purchase with metaphysics?

hm, kind of, huh? interesting.

by the way, i am intrigued by jersey shore as much as the next slug, but why on earth did they get to go to the grammy's?? not fair. would have enjoyed hearing drake, eminem & lil wayne without the censor ax. ..not sure what the big deal about that is anyway. "i stuck my d-ck inside this life until that b-tch came." what's wrong with that? kind of clever. "you're such a f-cking loser." that's just an honest expression of emotion. (and, yes, i did look up the lyrics, and yes, Eminem can rap faster than i can read. i appreciate that.)

finally, in other random things I can come

up with to say, Roger Federer

continues to machete through Americans, Serbs, Argentines, Swedes, Spaniards, French, and - even - Englishmen without any hint of discrimination whatsoever in his conquest to take over the world with a tennis racquet and floppy hair. Off with your heads, measly plebes!

Ha. Ha.

all right, this is where my silly 26-year-old mind has wandered since the last post...

maybe all this is a good thing. i think the last thing we need in a national healthcare system is one in which (healthy) Republicans get to hold every single story of system missteps and shortcomings over (nauseous) Democrats' heads. I can already see Glenn and Rush and Sarah P. digging into it, and it makes me a little sick. So, you know, that would be a shortcoming in the healthcare system right there.

And, being a true Unaffiliated, i really think that something as broad as healthcare needs to be legislated on common ground. (I realize that there is none of that right now.)

But, being a true Unaffiliated introduces problems of its own. because i like this take on things - I like to think that everything can be debated and reduced (yes, like a balsamic reduction) to a common ground - that a common ground must always exist, and it's just a matter of finding it. However, i have come to realize that i occasionally agree with one side and truly do not agree with the other. For instance, i really, really believe that gay marriage should be legal. If you think i'm going to go into all the reasons why right here, then you're wrong. but let's just say that there's no reason it shouldn't be legal

. Period. Bam!

So... i don't know where that leaves me in my quest for diplomacy and bipartisanship, including when it relates to healthcare. I guess it comes back to: Argh. Because if you agree that insurance cos. shouldn't turn ppl away because of pre-existing conditions, and you wrote legislation to prevent it, then you'd have to account for all the schemers who wouldn't get insurance until they were sick. So you'd have to make having insurance mandatory. So then you'd have to subsidize those who couldn't afford it. Then you'd have to define who couldn't afford it. Then you'd have people right above that definition line who also probably couldn't really afford it. Then... you'd have government healthcare.

I mean, governing is like trying to raise teenagers. effing impossible. no wonder it doesn't work very well.

I will say that this graph from National Geographic was a bit... disconcerting (Click on graph to enlarge, i.e., to see U.S. costs).

finally, i hope there are people in Washington paying attn to this (does anyone else think the hyperlink icon in Blogger looks like a bull? ...??).

Excerpt:

"The conventional wisdom is you can't have back-to-back major financial crises. I think we're going to push that, we're going to have a look and see whether that's true. And the next 12 months could really be exciting. People could be very positive, but we are setting ourselves up for an enormous catastrophe."

ha ha! isn't that funny?? An enormous catastrophe. That's funny. Funny enough for me to stop thinking about healthcare while I laugh.

the aughts

so, my last blog post of the decade was about a 13-year-old girl who writes about fashion. hm, i definitely did not mean for that to happen. if i could think of a less appropriate way to round out my decade, ... well, i can't. don't get me wrong; i still think she's cool. and i do like fashion, but i certainly don't know fashion. i don't discriminate between YSL and XXI. heck, i know more about football than i do about fashion. maybe even basketball. definitely not hockey.

annywho, the decade of the aughts, huh? funny that i never really heard it being referred to as the aughts until the last month of the decade. but i like it. so i will most likely, from now on, refer to it as the 'aughts' even though that's not the way it happened. but it happened. and as i have marveled about it with friends, this is the first decade i truly remember. When the 90s started, i was 6. Don't remember much from 6. When the aughts (heh - by the way, what do you call this decade? the 10-to-12s-and-teens?) started, i was rounding out my senior year of high school. I don't remember a heck of a lot, but I certainly remember more than i did at 6.

i guess it's interesting to look back on a decade, but i'm not going to write about it. it deserves a quick trip down the proverbial memory lane for me, and that's about it. because really that's all it takes for me to realize how much i've changed in 10 years. the difference between 6 and 16 is infinity, and the difference between 16 and 26 is infinity. plus, if i tried to recap the decade it would go something like:

The Past Decade:
Spring 2000 - graduated high school
Sept. 11, 2001 - woke up to raj telling me and beth that the twin towers were falling
Spring 2004 - graduated college
Spring 2005 - graduated grad school
Fall 2009 - sometime between me leaving work and me arriving at AA5, MJ died

you know, pretty standard timeline-y things, plus stuff i remember from the past year, or two, tops. it's hard to fit a decade into, well, anything but a decade, I guess.

there are probably a few things about the past decade that i think are worth mentioning. How about .. ok, my personal opinion on worst new word of the decade: 'staycation.' w(ho)tf goes on a staycation? if you're seriously that overworked that you need to take time off to stay at home and clean your baseboards and watch DVRed episodes of How I Met Your Mother, then you need a new job. And if you seriously want to take a 'staycation', then that's just lame.

on a related note, a close second is 'mancation.' i think Brokeback Mountain might have ruined that one.

eh, that's all i can come up with about the decade for now (earlier, i tried to make a list of people i admire from the past decade, and i ended up with my father and tina fey and anthony bourdain all on the same list, and, well, that was embarrassing and is the last list i'll attempt for a while).

The new year has started out pretty well, i think. I didn't get in any car wrecks on new year's day, or wake up somewhere unfamiliar (in fact, i woke up at the same friend's house that i've woken up at for the last 3 new years' now (umm... where the fook do you put the apostrophe in a plural new year's?)), and i've already been to two pretty good concerts (RJD2's Ghostwriter is v. good live).


and, you know, Blagojevich still thinks he's black, and health care is still a headline rather than an actual working noun, and apparently not only is John Edwards crazy but so is Elizabeth, and Haiti's a sad horrible bloody mess, and Kiffin's in California, and Art Clokey died (who was, by the way, put in an orphanage when he was 10 because his mom's new boyfriend made her choose between him or the kid), and Conan is in network limbo, and the Neighborhood Theatre may close .... which is all good, right? because apparently being sad is good sometimes.

Well, also, the star Betelgeuse (shoulder star in Orion) is so big that if it were at the center of our solar system, it would extend out past Mars. So, you know, it's all relative.

And also, there's this. Again, relative. auld lang syne, y'all.