bite-sized and bittersweet.

youreacigarette @ 2008-10-28T00:44:00

2008-10-28T04:54:05Z

...Many of the people we knew in New York think this a curious aberration, and in fact tell us so. There is no possible, no adequate answer to that, and so we give certain stock answers, the answers everyone gives. I talk about how difficult it would be for us to “afford” to live in New York right now, about how much “space” we need. All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore.

--joan didion, goodbye to all that

youreacigarette @ 2008-10-05T13:02:00

2008-10-05T17:04:41Z

late last night, sachi started panting and shaking and howling. around 5am she basically went into a coma. the vet said even if they could diagnose her problem, there was no guarantee they could help her or that she'd survive the procedures.

she was thirteen and she was a great dog.

youreacigarette @ 2008-10-01T00:00:00

2008-10-01T04:08:23Z

rabbit rabbit

i ate apples and honey today because hey, why not, i could go for a sweet year too.

youreacigarette @ 2008-09-13T10:20:00

2008-09-13T14:21:21Z

last night i had a dream that i moved to another city and made a bunch of friends and we went out to do interesting things and my life was going to be so cool

fucking shit goddammit

we hate your politics we hate your prose we hate the way you smell 1 2 3

2008-09-04T04:27:30Z

my mom says i'm acidic but really i'm just not into bullshit

youreacigarette @ 2008-08-29T00:17:00

2008-08-29T04:18:35Z

really the only thing of note recently is that they're bringing hydrox cookies back for a limited time because it's their somethingth anniversary and i'm way too busy planning how to buy a roomful of cookies to look up the article so do it for yourself and stay out of any grocery store within a one-hour radius of my house for the next month or so okay bye

youreacigarette @ 2008-08-16T21:55:00

2008-08-17T01:55:58Z

having reassured myself that the ocean is still blue and there is still a great quantity of it, and that it still roars and roars...

(clickclick)

...today i realized i'm ready for fall, looking for the ends of things as always.
more kerouac, more fitzgerald, and finally on to bukowski.
same old sad bastard music, though for no real reason anymore.

my window will stay open for as long as the weather allows.

now we are twenty-six

2008-08-05T04:26:25Z

youreacigarette @ 2008-07-26T01:25:00

2008-07-26T05:26:53Z

i haven't had internets, and still don't (computer died, waiting for my laptop). it doesn't really matter. sometimes i put things on my flickr from work, so look at that if you really need to know what i've been up to. mostly i just look at apartments i can't afford and whine at pat. i don't know. whatever. in the next month: pittsburgh, fire island, chicago. yes.

whoa oh oh oh oh

2008-06-23T02:51:46Z

pat is great and bought tickets this morning for us and jody, just to the saturday show so we have enough time to drive. i want to go to the shedd aquarium while we're in chicago, maybe the world's fair park if there's time. this summer is getting better and better. baltimore on thursday; i'm mostly excited but also a little anxious that my nagging suspicion will be confirmed, that i'm not really friends anymore with most of the people who used to make up my world. but there will also be hugs from some people i've genuinely missed. last night i got a surprising "coming through on tour soon, let's hang out" text, which was nice.

youreacigarette @ 2008-06-11T23:00:00

2008-06-12T03:04:37Z

clickclick, i went to see tom petty and nature has been doing some stuff.

at work yesterday morning i found out i spent a month working on a course for a commission that won't let their licensees take it online. they did not think to mention this to me anytime i talked to them about it, apparently. then i told everyone in my meeting that our department's move to the third floor just means i'm closer to the roof.

nothing else really. i'm reading library books, listening to records and thinking about planting some plants. the other day we made lasagna and i used the first of the basil i've been growing, it was delicious.

youreacigarette @ 2008-05-27T23:36:00

2008-05-28T03:52:47Z

so these days i'm having a hard time remembering who i am, and reading old journal entries (not all of them mine) is not particularly helpful. confusion and subtext. don't delete what's almost forgotten, though, because how else can any of this be explained?

i still have strange dreams. i still listen to too much sad music. i still sense something important about frantic sweaty basements and streetlit corners and the atlantic ocean and - maybe most important now - the last bus from the port authority.

such phenomenal luck.

youreacigarette @ 2008-05-13T14:42:00

2008-05-13T18:46:55Z

clickclick, i said i'd go back when it was skirt weather again.

youreacigarette @ 2008-05-05T18:29:00

2008-05-05T22:34:04Z

clickclick, buffalo

on friday i'm going to new jersey for the first time since october, which was kind of a depressing/crappy trip, there are some good things planned this time but sometimes people turn out to be shitty so who knows how it'll go. fingers crossed.

other than that, i'm still working. paying off bills and saving money to move, hopefully in the fall. doing some little sewing projects, reading, playing with the fishtanks, keeping to the house when i'm in town, nothing really. not losing my mind, though, and not missing my life as much as i used to. there's a lot to look forward to.

youreacigarette @ 2008-04-28T19:47:00

2008-04-28T23:50:51Z

clickclick, delicious

it's raining and i'd rather be sitting on a third-floor balcony drinking newcastles

youreacigarette @ 2008-04-19T21:47:00

2008-04-20T01:47:31Z

clickclick, i harassed nature and ate baked goods, what else is new

also i have needed so many naps recently wtf

youreacigarette @ 2008-04-13T19:25:00

2008-04-13T23:25:47Z

DEAR A&E

STOP SHOWING THE GODFATHER EVERY TIME I FLIP TO YOU

GO BACK TO SHOWING CSI EVERY TIME I FLIP TO YOU

THANKS

ME

could you read my fortune in the bottom of this coffee cup

2008-04-12T23:06:16Z

i do not like spending an entire saturday not bothering to change out of my pajamas because it's cold and rainy and grey and lying on my bedroom floor listening to tom waits and drive by truckers is all i can work up the willpower to do.

but i do it anyway.

youreacigarette @ 2008-04-08T01:03:00

2008-04-08T05:03:00Z

clickclick, i think i'm in love

youreacigarette @ 2008-04-03T21:34:00

2008-04-04T01:38:11Z

certain of my friends on here have had the discussion on whether it matters if the people you date like the same music you do.

so, does this sound a bit familiar?

It’s Not You, It’s Your Books
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: March 30, 2008

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about ... their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”

Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.” (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.)

Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences” are a “tedious conversational topic at best.”

Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.” Jessa Crispin, a blogger at the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. “Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”

Still, to some reading men, literary taste does matter. “I’ve broken up with girls saying, ‘She doesn’t read, we had nothing to talk about,’” said Christian Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s. Lorentzen recalls giving one girlfriend Nabokov’s “Ada” — since it’s “funny and long and very heterosexual, even though I guess incest is at its core.” The relationship didn’t last, but now, he added, “I think it’s on her Friendster profile as her favorite book.”

James Collins, whose new novel, “Beginner’s Greek,” is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading “The Magic Mountain” on a plane, recalled that after college, he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” on her bedside table. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat,’ and I never did think about the person the same way (and nothing ever happened),” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I know there were occasions when I just wrote people off completely because of what they were reading long before it ever got near the point of falling in or out of love: Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf).” Come to think of it, Collins added, “I do know people who almost broke up” over “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen: “‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’ ‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’”

Naming a favorite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore — or a phony. “Manhattan dating is a highly competitive, ruthlessly selective sport,” Augusten Burroughs, the author of “Running With Scissors” and other vivid memoirs, said. “Generally, if a guy had read a book in the last year, or ever, that was good enough.” The author recalled a date with one Michael, a “robust blond from Germany.” As he walked to meet him outside Dean & DeLuca, “I saw, to my horror, an artfully worn, older-than-me copy of ‘Proust’ by Samuel Beckett.” That, Burroughs claims, was a deal breaker. “If there existed a more hackneyed, achingly obvious method of telegraphing one’s education, literary standards and general intelligence, I couldn’t imagine it.”

But how much of all this agonizing is really about the books? Often, divergent literary taste is a shorthand for other problems or defenses. “I had a boyfriend I was crazy about, and it didn’t work out,” Nora Ephron said. “Twenty-five years later he accused me of not having laughed while reading ‘Candy’ by Terry Southern. This was not the reason it didn’t work out, I promise you.” Sloane Crosley, a publicist at Vintage/Anchor Books and the author of “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” essays about single life in New York, put it this way: “If you’re a person who loves Alice Munro and you’re going out with someone whose favorite book is ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal.”

Some people just prefer to compartmentalize. “As a writer, the last thing I want in my personal life is somebody who is overly focused on the whole literary world in general,” said Ariel Levy, the author of “Female Chauvinist Pigs” and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her partner, a green-building consultant, “doesn’t like to read,” Levy said. When she wants to talk about books, she goes to her book group. Compatibility in reading taste is a “luxury” and kind of irrelevant, Levy said. The goal, she added, is “to find somebody where your perversions match and who you can stand.”

Marco Roth, an editor at the magazine n+1, said: “I think sometimes it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level.” Besides, he added, “sometimes people can end up liking the same things for vastly different reasons, and they build up these whole private fantasy lives around the meaning of these supposedly shared books, only to discover, too late, that the other person had a different fantasy completely.” After all, a couple may love “The Portrait of a Lady,” but if one half identifies with Gilbert Osmond and the other with Isabel Archer, they may have radically different ideas about the relationship.

For most people, love conquers literary taste. “Most of my friends are indeed quite shallow, but not so shallow as to break up with someone over a literary difference,” said Ben Karlin, a former executive producer of “The Daily Show” and the editor of the new anthology “Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me.” “If that person slept with the novelist in question, that would probably be a deal breaker — more than, ‘I don’t like Don DeLillo, therefore we’re not dating anymore.’”

Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.

youreacigarette @ 2008-03-25T22:03:00

2008-03-26T02:18:31Z

today at work i was full of stimulants (pills and coffee baby coffee and pills) on an empty stomach, desperately in need of a nap, and my brain would not stop harping on the idea that I HAVE LOST SIGHT OF MY GOALS OH GOD MY IDEALS MY LIFE WHERE HAS IT ALL GONE but the rational bit underneath is perfectly aware that i haven't had any goals in a long time, and i've never really had ideals.

i've maintained various social groups, and some of those connections still exist, if in name only. but it's true that everything is going on just fine without me, that the people who say they miss me only mean that in the vaguest terms. and that's fine, because i don't particularly need the burden of care. i can't go back to this time last year, which i mark as the very bottom of my falling-apart, eating ice cream for breakfast and sleeping all day and kissing boys i don't remember.

now my body, my brain and my bank account are all healthier, and my dreams aren't as strange. i've found someone who genuinely cares about me - and that isn't frightening for once. on the other hand, my job is unrewarding, i do very little in my free time, and my creativity is almost nil. living at home is constrictive, living in warren is a lingering death. i'll need to go somewhere new soon. i have to decide what i want to do. build another nest, make another circle of friends, establish another routine of basements and bars, if i'm lucky.

this still isn't everything i've been thinking about. but now that it's getting warm, i guess i'm ready to start talking again.

another, even smaller rant

2008-03-24T01:42:15Z

okay i'm sorry because i'm sure many of you have made this joke recently, but 99% of the time "zombie jesus" is not that funny. nothing to do with christianity, just with repetitive internets humor. same probably goes for raptor jesus, except that i'm way more into dinosaurs than zombies.

a very small rant

2008-03-23T15:44:50Z

my mom and my aunt are really into obama/against hillary and i wish they would stop telling me to switch to democratic just so i can vote for him in the primaries. a lot of people seem to be doing that and it seems somehow unethical to me. anyhow we don't have the same opinions on everything, and i'll figure my politics out for myself, and i don't really like to talk about it a whole lot because it doesn't accomplish anything to get into stupid arguments with people you love. the end!

youreacigarette @ 2008-03-20T20:25:00

2008-03-21T00:34:32Z

clickclick, di that one's for you.

seeing drive-by truckers was fucking amazing, my head exploded.

ps happy spring, can it please stop snowing now.

youreacigarette @ 2008-03-15T22:07:00

2008-03-16T02:12:41Z

if i could pray to move, prayers would move me
but i am constant as the northern star