don't quit. don't even quit.

throughadoor @ 2013-07-03T12:56:00

2013-07-03T16:42:15Z

Hi Livejournal friends,

As you know, I like to get in on trends on the ~~ground~~ 51st floor, so please feel free to subscribe to throughadoor dot dreamwidth dot org. I apparently squatted on this username and imported my Livejournal content like ... four years ago? But then got distracted because I post so infrequently anymore that it just never seemed worth it to make the switch. However, dafnagreer recently pointed out that I'm the ONLY person she cross-posts to LJ for anymore, so, what the hell.

Anyway, if you would like to continue reading my biannual excuses for disappearing from online journaling for so long or if you would like me to be able to read your own entries, let's find each other on Dreamwidth. Honestly, I will probably only read/post over there because it seems easier. Is that inconvenient? Is this thing on?

xoxo,
throughadoor

we named our apartment's wireless network Olivia Pope and Associates

2013-04-29T13:13:11Z

This will not make sense unless you've been watching the current seasons of Scandal, RuPaul's Drag Race and Project Runway. [*]

sparkymonster: [texts to say we should watch Project Runway when she gets home]
throughadoor: Spoilers, Huck won Project Runway.
sparkymonster: I thought Olivia did.
throughadoor: Olivia won RuPaul's Drag Race. Jinx is the mole.
sparkymonster: Hello. Roxxxy is the mole underneath the other mole.
throughadoor: Roxxxy is painting a textile under another textile.

[*] And if you're not watching Scandal and RuPaul's Drag Race? [**] No tea, no shade, but look at your life. Look at your choices. I want to say "Scandal is a great nightime soap" or "Scandal is a Shonda Rimes show, but--" but, hahah, sorry, can't do it, Scandal is the best show on television, the end. Also, RuPaul's Drag Race is one of the most racially and socio-economically diverse reality shows on television, and has crowned a person of color three out of the first four seasons.

[**] If you've figured out how to effectively break up with Project Runway, please send me detailed instructions.

drive-by yuletide reveal

2013-01-01T21:42:34Z

Patrilineage
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell / gen / 5427 words

Contains exegesis, the trouble with translating Godfather quotes, seven lines of intentionally bad porn movie dialogue and women playing Major League Baseball. It turns out that this is both the second time this year I've written a story that required reading up on the New Testament and my second Yuletide story in a row with a Star Wars homage. And, if I'd focused on a different part of this story's canon, I could have had the dubious honor of writing two Yuletide stories that required rape/non-con warnings. So ... yeah. Thanks a million to paintedmaypole for the beta!

You guys, I'm getting so old. I didn't even get drunk and write the majority of my Yuletide story on a cocktail napkin while flying from Boston to San Francisco like, I don't know, every year since 2004. MATURITY!

fic: Nocturne of the Brooklyn Bridge (China Mountain Zhang)

2012-05-18T13:09:14Z

Nocturne of the Brooklyn Bridge
China Mountain Zhang, all audiences, 6000 words.
I am Teresa Luis but also Comrade Li Taiming, because my great-great grandfather Rafael José Luis y Iglesias was born in the old United States, became a founding member of the Reformed American Communist Party and died defending the Brooklyn Bridge at the start of the Second Civil War.

Posted on AO3 so it can be with the only other two China Mountain Zhang fan works in known existence. For moireach on the impending occasion of her nuptials. Thanks to paintedmaypole for beta action & also to annakovsky, because we're always in the same place when we're from the internet.

***

On Tuesday I saw The Avengers with smartlikejustin and imogenics and when we were getting tipsy on frozen sangria (wine slurpees!) I said: "So, I did something today I haven't done in a really long time." And they indulgently asked me what I did, even though they probably thought I was just going to tell some boring story about my job. But the answer was that I finished and posted a story for a purpose other than Yuletide. How long has it been since I finished and posted a story for a purpose other than Yuletide? APPARENTLY IT'S BEEN SIX YEARS. The occasion of M's marriage? Pretty much a big deal.

The sad thing is that I still write all the time. Ostensibly I write for a living, or at least part of my living. But it's all grant writing, which creates monetary benefit and promotes social justice, but it's not as much fun as making up stories about Justin Timberlake. Adulthood, I guess? I'm dubious.

it's like ... she's one of my limbs.

2012-03-16T16:24:45Z

A couple weeks ago, I saw the trailer for Friends With Kids and thought "hahah, that looks like the classic two-dudes-end-up-co-parenting-a-kid-and-fall-in-love fan fiction plot device" and when I saw the movie (with my DAD, zomg) last night, this was only more self-evident. It was so self-evident that I kind of expect someone to comment and say, "Yeah, this has already been discussed ad naseum, welcome to the internet, throughadoor."

Anyway -- Jason and Julie self-represent as so not attracted to each other that it might as well be a matter of sexual orientation, they decide to be non-romantic life partners in raising a kid together (although we are missing the part where aliens make them do it or a piece of advanced technology produces a kid for them in a pod, et cetera), then there is kid raising and feelings and misunderstandings and then they fall in love.

What's interesting to me is that putting a straight couple through the paces of inverting "love, then marriage, then the baby in the baby carriage" is an accepted rom com trope, and it's even been done several times recently (Knocked Up, obviously, and that movie I didn't see but had that Passion Pit song I like in the trailer, where the two single friends of the married couple get custody of the kid when the married couple dies). The part where the two characters choose to raise the kid as platonic friends and are so confident that it'll work is so funny to me because so many classic slash fan fiction plot devices are about mining and repurposing romance novel and romantic comedy tropes and now here's one that's been mined and repurposed and been made to work as a way to bring together two people who didn't know they could be gay for each other and now it's re-re-repurposed to get together two people who don't think they can be straight for each other.

[Somewhat tangentially -- I rarely find the "we're not gay, we just love each other" slash fan fiction plot device to be as offensive or sub-textually homophobic as some do (and this is more of a 10-years-ago argument that was sort of having its last gasps when I first got into fandom, I think? I don't know if that's a comment on the evolution of acceptance of sexual fluidity or because no one's writing Sentinel smarm anymore). I've always read "we're not gay, we just love each other" as a repurposed romance novel plot. Because romance novel plots are about sociological obstacles, right? "He's a wealthy landowner and she's a servant but they just love each other!" "He's a small-town lawyer and she's a new girl in town with a mysterious and possibly criminal past but they just love each other!" "She's engaged to be married to the prince and he's the prince's younger brother, but ... et cetera." For me, "He thinks he's straight! And HE thinks HE'S straight! But they just love each other!" just seems like a repurposing of the class barriers that dominate romance novels.]

So I found Friends With Kids very charming, because it didn't seem to know it was slash kidfic, and I am apparently now hardwired to enjoy narratives where the two main characters have to stumble around unaware of their own obvious sexual preference while also trying to raise a child. What's funny is that I kind of hated Kissing Jessica Stein and felt like Jennifer Westfeldt was trying to co-opt queerness to tell a straight rom com story, so I'm glad she's figured out a better way to go about it.

And that song's still playing from the car radio, on a never-fucking ending loop from hell.

2012-01-01T15:53:24Z

Yuletide reveal!

The F**cking Movie Never Motherf**cking Ends
@MayorEmanuel, for norah, 7400 words

* Beta action thank yous to katienyc and xica_s (Chicago residents extraordinaire) and sparkymonster (long-suffering roommate).

* Thank you also to norah for her request, and I hope I ended up somewhere she enjoyed.

* When I was writing this story, I thought to myself "I have never written something that is more likely to accidentally find its way to the attention of the source creator. It has never been more likely that the source creator will already have a general understanding of the concept of fan fiction. I have never been more embarrassed at the prospect of this happening." I VASTLY underestimated how embarrassed I would be when Dan Sinker tweeted about being alerted to the @MayorEmanuel Yuletide stories.

* That being said, if you were a fan of the original @MayorEmanuel Twitter feed, I highly recommend reading Dan Sinker's The Epic F**cking Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel, because he does a DVD commentary style running narrative on the entire saga and after reading it I appreciated the obscure Chicago insider politics about six times as much as I did before. In the spirit of Dan Sinker's book, I did my own DVD commentary on this story, mostly to explain all the obscure Chicago sports references (Beef Wennington!) and point-and-laugh at all the things I forgot to include (WE HAVE TO GO BACK). If you're inclined, you can read it behind the cut.

Fuck this shit. 9/25/11 6:31:40 PM

All the infinite Chicagos in all the infinite fucking universes and I had to end up here watching the Bears lose to FUCKING GREEN BAY AGAIN. 9/25/11 6:39:22 PM

In retrospect, a lot of teams lost to the Packers this season (like ... all of them except the Chiefs) so maybe @MayorEmanuel shouldn't have taken this one so hard.

Soldier Field, you are a fucking factory of sadness. 9/25/11 6:47:10 PM

"Factory of sadness" is stolen from A Browns Fan's Reaction to Today's Game Against Houston by Mike Polk Jr., who was also involved in the hastily made Cleveland tourism videos. (Our economy's based on Lebron James! Our main export is crippling depression!)

There goes three fucking hours of my life I'll never get back. Might as well just aimlessly ride around on the Orange Line with my cock out. 9/25/11 6:59:34 PM

Seven months stuck over here. Every week I kill a few hours on the L, going nowhere, in and out, just back fucking and forth to Midway. 9/25/11 7:06:43 PM

Now that I don't have to hand-shake and dick-palm all over the place, hanging out at CTA stations is a lot less fucking painful. 9/25/11 7:10:56 PM

But, no matter what the destination sign says, that fucking Orange Line never takes me all the way to Ford City, not even in this dimension. 9/25/11 7:14:23 PM

I have been to Chicago once in my life, for a weekend, and my primary objective was to catch up with old friends and see a baseball game. (And not even at Wrigley! A White Sox game! I know, the horror.) The only personal experience I can lend to the accuracy of this story is that the part of town that surrounds the Cell is really ugly.

But, I've lived in Boston (another city enamored with its own folklore) for seven years, so I wanted to do right by Chicago, even though @MayorEmanuel could fit everything I know about Chicago in his finger stump. A lot of the references in this story are things I read about and thought "if something like ____ happened in Boston, I think the reaction would be ____."

This Orange Line to Ford City gimmick is the best example of that. The destination blinds on the CTA Orange Line trains include "Ford City," a stop that does not exist on the Orange Line route. Apparently the Orange Line was supposed to go all the way to Ford City (a mall in West Lawn) but the project ran out of money and the line was terminated at Midway Airport.

I love this, because it reminds me of the phantom MBTA Green Line extension to Somerville. (Which even found its own way into Yuletide when kyrafic wrote me a China Mountain Zhang story set in a dystopic future Boston still waiting for that Green Line extension.) I read a Tribune article that mentioned people occasionally see Orange Line trains with the destination sign flipped on accident to Ford City and thought it would make a great metaphorical portal through the time vortex. It's possible this works, it's possible that anyone from Chicago is reading this and saying, "Um, yeah, I don't know what the hell you're talking about, but okay."

*

Expected a lot more shit to be more fucked in the alternate universe. You know, mirror Axelrod with an evil goatee instead of his mustache. 9/25/11 8:53:02 PM

It felt like Axelrod with a Mirror!Spock goatee instead of his mustache could either be its own 10,000 word story or a single throw-away line, but nothing in between.

At least I've got some money. That last day, Daley told me the real secret of the fucking parking meter deal. Called it the Mayor's Code. 9/25/11 9:02:45 PM

Write "03/04/1837" on a scrap of paper and slide it in the credit card slot. Turns the pay box into a sweet fucking riverboat slot machine. 9/25/11 9:05:26 PM

I mostly ignored the practical concerns of being stranded in an alternate universe. (How is @MayorEmanuel tweeting all of this? Did he make it through the vortex with his phone?) I tried to address a few of them, like how he has money so he doesn't starve to death. March 4, 1837 is the date Chicago was incorporated as a city. I wanted @MayorEmanuel to be able to punch the date into a keypad, but then I looked at a picture of one of the infamous pay boxes and they have credit card slots but no keypads. I couldn't think of a way around this; my solution was not terribly elegant. Oh well.

Just make sure you have an empty fuck-it bucket of chicken to catch all the quarters. 9/25/11 9:07:21 PM

No fucking idea who ended up mayor over here. I fucking pray it isn't Chico. City hasn't burned to the ground again, so probably not. 9/25/11 9:09:25 PM

Walked by City Hall a few times. When I'm close, all I can hear is this roaring buzz saw. Won't fucking stop until I get to South La Salle. 9/25/11 9:14:17 PM

I miss my goddamn friends. That part chokes balls. It helps to think of them happy, on the other side of the fucking time vortex. 9/25/11 9:19:08 PM

A sweet crony appointment for Quaxelrod to the Park District Board of Commissioners. Carl the Intern sneaking Hambone into Bulls games. 9/25/11 9:27:40 PM

Axelrod's mustache already writing the shit out of Barack's second inaugural. 9/25/11 9:35:06 PM

Hopefully this is the first indication that all is not as @MayorEmanuel believes. Back in our universe, Carl the Intern will not be able to sneak Hambone into any Bulls games before Christmas, and Barack Obama is not exactly cruising to re-election.

As long as they're happy there, it doesn't matter so much that I'm fucking stuck here. Shit fuck, I'm turning into a fucking Hallmark card. 9/25/11 9:38:01 PM

Chico better not be the fucking mayor. I would rather castrate myself with safety scissors than live in a universe with Mayor Dong Choke. 9/25/11 9:42:51 PM

*

I still want to fuck Chris Spencer in his face mask, but I leave the train at Washington/Wells and cross over to exit onto Madison. 9/25/11 11:47:38 PM

Chris Spencer is a Bears player who committed a holding penalty at the end of the game, hampering the Bears' chances of making any kind of comeback. Here's something amazing: Dan Sinker writes in his book that he isn't a football fan and never watched Bears games; for most of the season he relied on Twitter to give him material for @MayorEmanuel. I watch a lot of NFL, but not a lot of the Bears, so I mostly relied on ESPN game recaps and my morning gym hour of Sports Center.

Let me tell you a secret: there's a glitch in the time vortex. On the corner of La Salle and Madison. It's a fucking fax machine at Kinko's. 9/25/11 11:56:25 PM

Taped to the fax machine is a sign that says OUT OF ORDER - SERVICE REQUESTED 11/5/02. But some of Plouffe's faxes manage to get through. 9/25/11 11:58:52 PM

There isn't a Kinko's on the corner of LaSalle and Madison, there's a FedEx Office. But hasn't Kino's become the Kleenex brand facial tissue of print and copy stores? Nobody actually says they're going to FedEx Office, right? Also, November 5, 2002 was the date of the 2002 mid-term election, which was the term Rahm Emanuel was elected to the House of Representatives. I was going to do something with November 5, 2002 being the date that @MayorEmanuel unknowingly switched universes, but that got lost in the shuffle.

Fax from Plouffe: "Need to talk NATO/G8 plans, less than 9 months to go." Hope the other me faxed back a cock shot with double birds. 9/26/11 12:05:18 AM

Here's a theory: the time vortex was caused by an implosion of infinite Plouffes constantly time traveling from 1991 to send fucking FAXES. 9/26/11 12:11:27 AM

Fucking seriously, sometimes I miss my fucking friends so much it feels like I slammed my cock in the door of the Civic. 9/26/11 12:29:43 AM

***

MGD and an entire fucking plate of hash browns at Schaller's, just all that's fucking left for me at this point. 9/26/11 11:33:46 PM

Schaller's Pump is the oldest bar in Chicago. It's one of the few bars that can believably be called "near" Cellular Field (which is what I was looking for) and it was also apparently known for being the second office of both Mayor Daleys. One of the two Chicago residents who graciously betaed this story for me pointed out that Rahm Emanuel is all North Side and would never go to Schaller's. My thoughts were that he's melancholy and wants to go somewhere where he can pretend to feel like the mayor, and also that no one will recognize him anyway, but that would have been a tangent of introspection. Also, I know that @MayorEmanuel has historically favored obscure Chicago microbrews, but my impression of Schaller's is that they have MGD on tap and … not much else. Yelp reviews reveal the food to be either authentic or terrible (it's probably both) but many mentioned the hash browns.

Axelrod used to say Daley once tried to fuck a Schaller's butt steak sandwich. I always called bullshit. Now I just wish Axelrod was here. 9/26/11 11:47:03 PM

Next table over, guy says, "I don't fucking know, what's on tap for someone who shitcanned himself on TV tonight?" Hey, it's Ozzie Guillen. 9/26/11 11:49:27 PM

Ozzie takes my advice. Hash browns and MGD: The "My Life's in the Shitcan" Special. His goatee's trembling, guy looks fucking miserable. 9/26/11 11:58:01 PM

Ozzie Guillen was the manager of the White Sox from 2004 to 2011. Throughout the 2011 season, he publicly agitated with White Sox ownership about a new contract. With two games left in the season, he asked to be released from his contract, and effectively fired himself. If you don't follow baseball: managers occasionally get fired throughout the season (regardless of many years are left on their contracts) and very occasionally a manager will quit, but pseudo-quitting with only two games left in the season? That doesn't happen. If anyone was going to do it, though, it would be Ozzie, he's fucking crazy.

So, look, I could give a shit about baseball, but Barack fucking loved those fucking White Sox. 9/27/11 12:01:56 AM

The whole first week of April, if you wanted to get his attention you had to start all your sentences with "Mark Buehrle's fastball ..." 9/27/11 12:03:47 AM

Mark Buehrle's fastball has more velocity than this G-20 summit itinerary. Mark Buehrle's fastball wants to talk nuclear disarmament. 9/27/11 12:06:21 AM

Mark Buehrle's fastball has been up in the zone but not like these fucking 8.5% unemployment numbers, don't you agree? 9/27/11 12:08:44 AM

So I tell Ozzie that Mark Buehrle's fastball, we should fucking jam it up Kenny Williams' uretha. Ozzie finally cracks a smile. 9/27/11 12:11:25 AM

We're doing shots of Johhnie Walker and Ozzie's teaching me how to swear in Venezuelan! 9/27/11 12:47:38 AM

Hey Jerry Reinsdorf: ¡Coño de la madre! Pa el chivo que más mea, tienes güevo pequeñito. Also motherfuck you in your motherfucking facehole. 9/27/11 12:59:58 AM

Ozzie Guillen is from Venezuela. Colloquial translation: "Oh my fucking God! For the big boss in charge, you have a really small dick." Literal translation: "Mother's cunt! For the goat who pisses the most, you have a really small egg." Kenny Williams and Jerry Reinsdorf are the general manager and owner of the White Sox, respectively.

*

Got kicked out of Schaller's, but Ozzie took the bottle of Johnny Walker and we're sitting next to the Dan Ryan, passing it back and forth. 9/27/11 2:52:29 AM

Like I said before, two very kind Chicago residents betaed this story with very short turnaround time and were incredibly helpful, and they both said "Uh, you can't sit UNDER the Dan Ryan." When I wrote this part, I looked on Google Maps to see what freeways were nearby but didn't bother to figure out whether they were ground-level or not (this was before I fell down the rabbit hole of research-as-writing-avoidance-technique and read an entire CTA Orange Line Extension Power Point presentation to figure out whether the hypothetical Ford City stop would cross 63rd Street). One of them told me I could get away with saying "next to the Dan Ryan" (in a ditch!) so I did.

Listening to Ozzie just fucking go off on the White Sox is like listening to Mozart compose Symphony No. 40: a motherfucking master at work. 9/27/11 3:26:11 AM

"Fuck them, fuck their mothers, fuck their sisters, fuck their mothers' sisters. I hope they get fucked by their mothers' sisters' dogs." 9/27/11 3:34:29 AM

"Fuck 'em in their mother-fucked faces, and then fuck 'em again in the motherfucking ear." Sing it, Ozzie, you fucking beautiful bastard. 9/27/11 3:42:31 AM

Oh, fuck no, now Ozzie's crying. "They shit on you, do you get to shit back? No, you say, 'Thank you, thank you for this shit sandwich.'" 9/27/11 4:00:02 AM

"They love you, then they fuck you. Get fucked for a living but it's not about the money? That is some fucking Pretty Woman bullshit." 9/27/11 4:02:24 AM

Ozzie makes @MayorEmanuel look like your Sunday School teacher.

Holy shit, Ozzie's got a Bic lighter and his World Series ring. Says he's going to melt it down for gold and sell it like a tooth filling. 9/27/11 4:05:19 AM

"Go to Miami. Buy a fucking boat. Those assholes, they'll shit on me, too. But I'll have fucking four million dollars and a fucking boat." 9/27/11 4:10:44 AM

The next day, Ozzie was announced as the new manager of the (then-Florida-soon-to-be-known-as-Miami) Marlins. In a newspaper interview, he was very honest and came off kind of a dick (depending on whether or not you think people who play and coach sports for a living are allowed admit that they care about money), basically saying: I wanted more money, I want to buy a boat.

Ozzie grabs me by the chin so we're eye to eye. There's a red-hot half-melted World Series ring dangerously close to my fucking eye socket. 9/27/11 4:12:35 AM

"Fuck this city. Chicago wants to fuck you? Don't fucking take it, get the fuck out of town. Fuck Chicago." 9/27/11 4:15:56 AM

And it's hard to believe he means it. With our faces smashed together, I can see his eyes are wet. But one more "fuck it" and Ozzie's gone. 9/27/11 4:18:05 AM

*

Mark Buehrle's fastball, it breaks your heart. It is designed to break your motherfucking heart. 9/27/11 5:31:00 AM

You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive. 9/27/11 5:34:48 AM

Then just when the days are all twilight, when you fucking need it most, it stops. And you're alone next to the Dan Ryan with the rats. 9/27/11 5:37:23 AM

From the opening paragraph of the essay "Green Fields of the Mind" by A. Bartlett Giamatti, oft-quoted but originally published in the Yale Alumi Magazine in 1977: It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

And, yeah, sometimes I think about leaving Chicago, but what the fuck am I going to do? Crawl back into the shit-smeared sewer system of DC? 9/27/11 5:39:11 AM

Buena suerte, Ozzie. Chicago may be a shitfest, but it's my fucking shitfest. There just isn't anywhere else for me. 9/27/11 5:58:42 AM

Make no mistake, though, I will burn this entire fucking shitfest to the ground if I don't get some coffee right this fucking minute. 9/27/11 6:31:47 AM

***

Looks like that fucking douche canoe Blago put his house on the market. 10/4/11 4:49:45 PM

Who needs a house in Ravenswood Manor when you're locking down a ten-year lease on a fucking federal prison cell in Terra Haute, right? 10/4/11 5:01:34 PM

It was reported that Rod Blagojevich's house was on the market on October 3 in anticipation that he was finally going to receive a prison sentence; his sentencing still somehow managed to drag on until December of this year. Raise your hand if you live outside the state of Illinois and you had ANY idea the Blago trial was still dragging on in late 2011. I definitely did not.

New theory: the time vortex was caused by Blago trying to shake down an alternate version of himself, imploding the fucking multiverse. 10/4/11 5:03:11 PM

Fuck these Dan Ryan rats, I'm going to crash at Blago's empty house for a couple days. Not like that shithouse rat doesn't fucking owe me. 10/4/11 5:46:23 PM

Pat Quinn should have used that one: "Elect me and every resident of Illinois will get to take a free shit on Rod Blagojevich's house." 10/4/11 6:13:33 PM

*

Every stupid fucker in Ravenswood Manor thinks it's safe to leave the back door unlocked, like high property values are a magic force field. 10/4/11 7:37:38 PM

This place is about as fucking creepy as you'd expect. There's a triptych of those knock-off Warhol portraits over the mantle. 10/4/11 7:49:54 PM

Of course the knock-off Warhol portraits are all Blago. Who'd you fucking expect, fucking Phil Jackson? Shit is going to give me nightmares. 10/4/11 7:52:58 PM

Before he took the triangle offense to Los Angeles, Phil Jackson was the coach of the 90s era Bulls, which will be important in a second.

*

I'm so hungry I could eat a bowl of dicks, but there's no food in the cupboards, the pantry's empty, just fucking nothing. 10/4/11 8:36:24 PM

The only thing in the fridge is a Waterford crystal cake stand. Under the dome, there's a single unwrapped Beef Wennington. 10/4/11 8:38:04 PM

Bill Wennington was the center for the Chicago Bulls between 1993 and 1999. During the spring of 1998, the Chicago-area McDonalds restaurants sold a "Beef Wennington" burger. Why? Because the Chicago Bulls. Thanks here goes to The Basketball Jones for mentioning the legend of the Beef Wennington when its namesake was the guest at their Chicago stop on their No Season Required tour.

Either that's a 13-year-old burger or Blago has a racket on discontinued McDonald's menu items. I'm fucking starving, so I'm about find out. 10/4/11 8:40:31 PM

Pickles, onions, mustard, barbecue sauce. American cheese, sweet fucking Canadian bacon. Damn, they don't make 'em like this anymore. 10/4/11 9:00:52 PM

Foreshadowing Kanye West lyric! The Beef Wennington had Canadian bacon because Bill Wennington was Canadian.

Fucking delicious, but I'd bet the other half of my finger stump this ground beef is from the second term of the Clinton administration. 10/4/11 9:17:56 PM

I wanted to make a better "Rahm Emanuel lost half his middle finger in a meat grinder accident at Arby's" joke here, but I couldn't quite get the bat off my shoulder.

The Blago portraits are smirking at me like dong-stomping Playboy Bunny triplets, with massive domes of hair in DayGlo neon. 10/4/11 9:22:38 PM

Okay, I might have food poisoning, but that's just how they fucking look. Pop art is such a shit smear on the history of postmodernism. 10/4/11 9:40:29 PM

*

Wake up on the couch and I feel like I got fucked in the colon. The room is dark except for the soft glow of the television. 10/5/11 12:46:29 AM

I don't remember turning on the TV, but I know exactly what I'm watching. It's the 1998 NBA Finals. Game 6 in fucking Salt Lake. 10/5/11 12:49:14 AM

I try to sit up. My colon tries to shit itself. Start of the fourth, Jazz are up five. The picture is fuzzy, Costas' voice is like AM radio. 10/5/11 12:59:55 AM

The rotten beef sinks like a brick in my stomach. What if this is the parallel dimension where Stockton makes that fucking three? 10/5/11 1:06:45 AM

Then, there's a voice in the darkness. "Stockton never makes that fucking three. Not ever. Some things are fucking universal constants." 10/5/11 1:17:44 AM

HOLY FUCKING THREE-PEAT, IT'S MICHAEL FUCKING JORDAN. 10/5/11 1:23:23 AM

All the time stamps in this story are completely random, except for this one. (Michael Jordan's jersey number was 23.)

MJ sits down on the couch. He's wearing a sweat-soaked jersey and Hanes jockey shorts. He points at the TV. "This was the perfect ending." 10/5/11 1:25:47 AM

Re-reading this, I'm realizing how many parts of it probably seem bizarre and random if you don't have at least a casual interest in professional sports. Anyway: MJ is a longtime Hanes spokesperson.

"This is how they want to remember me. If this was a movie, you'd roll the fucking credits right here." MJ stops talking and we both watch. 10/5/11 1:28:21 AM

On the screen, it's all just like I remember: the steal, the cross-over, that beautiful fucking wide-open jumper, slow-mo even in real time. 10/5/11 1:31:56 AM

The whole sequence is pretty amazing. You've probably seen the post-game celebration grand jeté in a shoe commercial about 800 times in your life.

I've got chills. MJ shakes his head. "There's no such thing as a perfect ending. If something was perfect, why the fuck would it ever end?" 10/5/11 1:33:01 AM

On the screen, Michael's celebrating, and when he jumps in the air it's as good as any grand jeté you'd ever see at the Joffrey Ballet. 10/5/11 1:37:12 AM

"Fade to black is just a way to close your eyes and pretend. I came back and played two more seasons with the Wizards. So fucking what?" 10/5/11 1:39:22 AM

"Little bitches who say they went out on a high note are kidding themselves. I went out kicking and screaming. I didn't fucking want to go." 10/5/11 1:42:37 AM

I turn on the couch to look at MJ. I look right at him and he fucking looks right back at me and we both know exactly what I want to ask. 10/5/11 1:45:32 AM

"Of course the push-off on Russell was a foul. I told you, this isn't a fucking movie." The TV goes snowy, and then it just goes dark. 10/5/11 1:47:58 AM

Jordan stole the ball, crossed over on his defender and possibly fouled him but it wasn't called because mid-nineties NBA referees had a separate set of rules for Michael Jordan.

A couple years ago, Joe Posnanski wrote an amazing essay about Brett Favre and whether it's possible to ruin a sports legacy. Posnanski believed all the things that make transcendently memorable and competitive athletes great (and, hah, I see now that he included Wizards-era Michael Jordan in his list of supporting examples) are all the same things that will make those athletes want to play too long and refuse to make a graceful exit. It's one of my favorite insights about professional athletes, and it shaped the role the Michael Jordan character plays in this story.

*

Sweet motherfucking fuck do I need some fucking coffee right the motherfuck now. 10/5/11 8:38:27 AM

I know last night was just a dream but then why is there barbecue sauce all over my shirt? Only the three Blagos know. 10/5/11 9:20:43 AM

I can't stay here. This house smells like a Vegas all-you-can-eat buffet: hustled money and fucking loneliness. 10/5/11 10:35:56 AM

***

Beloved fucking coffee, it is not even motherfucking hyperbole to say you are the only fucking friend I have in this world. 10/11/11 10:11:47 AM

WAIT, THE FIRST TWO WEEKS OF THE BASKETBALL SEASON ARE ALREADY FUCKING CANCELLED? 10/11/11 12:41:23 PM

David Stern, you are such a fucking incompetent cockhole I can't believe I never had to run against you in a mayoral election. 10/11/11 12:50:22 PM

Oh yeah, Stern's already the mayor of New Fucking Ruining Everything City. Probably a fucking residency conflict. 10/11/11 12:58:43 PM

David Stern, the long-suffering commissioner of the NBA. The NBA season was scheduled to start on November 1. The lockout eventually ended on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and the first games were played on Christmas Day. I tried to use @MayorEmanuel's awareness of the lockout as a bench march throughout the story, but this may not have worked if the reader was not aware of the lockout when it was happening in real life.

Fax from Plouffe at Kinko's: Other me is "studying the water tax"? Fucking sweet, finally turning Michigan Ave into a giant water slide. 10/11/11 1:09:56 PM

Probably needs the water slide for the Bulls championship parade route in June. Double birds to this universe. This entire fucking UNIVERSE. 10/11/11 1:17:28 PM

*

Been camping out in Grant Park since I left Blago's house. Your fucking tax dollars at work, bitches. 10/11/11 6:26:10 PM

Got a satellite TV so I can flip back and forth between the Republican debate and WWE Raw re-runs on cable. Basically the same fucking show. 10/11/11 6:30:19 PM

Confession: this was my biggest reality cheat. The debate was on Wednesday, WWE Raw is on Tuesdays. I fudged it by saying it was a re-run but I have absolutely no idea if WWE Raw re-runs. Probably not. I wouldn't feel bad about it, except Dan Sinker wants you to know that when @MayorEmanuel was flipping back and forth between the State of the Union address and a "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant" marathon, there was ACTUALLY AN I DIDN'T KNOW I WAS PREGNANT MARATHON ON TV THAT NIGHT. That man is some kind of mad fucking genius.

Let me get this straight: Cain's fucking serious about this 9-9-9 bullshit but fucking ROMNEY's unelectable because he's in a cult? 10/11/11 7:02:45 PM

Triple H in his fucking undies says he'll wrestle a broomstick to get a decent match. Mitt, you try this. Bachmann's basically a broomstick. 10/11/11 7:15:16 PM

Huntsman says "Washington DC is the gas capital of the country." You crazy beautiful bastard, what are you doing with these morons? 10/11/11 7:21:56 PM

Huntsman fucking confuses me, because he keeps saying things that aren't batshit crazy. When does Vince McMahon make him switch sides? 10/11/11 7:26:33 PM

Bachmann's pretty fucking concerned about health care rationing for someone who was clearly born during a fucking brains rationing. 10/11/11 7:39:09 PM

I could debate these fuck faces with my cock hanging out. Clothesline Mitt, sleeper hold for Cain, folding chair Perry the fuck out of here. 10/11/11 7:49:10 PM

SUPRISE! 9-9-9 isn't the price of a pizza, it's not 666 upside down, it's the number of reasons fucking none of you are electable. 10/11/11 7:58:23 PM

That was fun, but everyone knows that shit's staged. It LOOKS like Bachmann's a presidential candidate on TV, but it's totally fake. Right? 10/11/11 9:02:13 PM

***

I'd say instant coffee is worse than no coffee at all, but I'd be lying, because absolutely fucking nothing is worse than no coffee at all. 10/15/11 10:02:33 AM

*

Where are all these people and their fucking tents coming from? Don't these assclowns realize the marathon was last week? What the hell? 10/15/11 7:32:47 PM

This fucking guy starts setting up my tent crammed in close so he's halfway up my fucking colon. 10/15/11 7:45:12 PM

"Hi, I'm Hayden! I'm here because I'm really concerned about accountability and the federal bank bailouts." 10/15/11 7:46:02 PM

Hi Hayden, I'm Decatur Staley, I like long walks on the beach, piña coladas, and fucking the eye sockets of my motherfucking enemies. 10/15/11 7:51:34 PM

Hayden is named after Tom Hayden of the Chicago Eight. The Decatur Staleys football team was established by the Decatur-based A.E. Staley food starch company in 1919; in 1921 they relocated to Chicago and renamed themselves the Bears.

Hayden also supports: net neutrality, Monsanto divestment, justice for Bradley Manning. Dumb fucker didn't bring enough tent stakes. 10/15/11 8:14:12 PM

I fucking agonized over this part of the story (leading me to add the over-compensatory disclaimer at the beginning). Basically, I wanted to involve @MayorEmanuel in the Occupy Chicago movement, but I didn't know how to reconcile 1) How the character @MayorEmanuel would react and what would make for a funny story, 2) How that reaction would conflict with the reaction that we know actual Mayor Emanuel had in real life, and 3) How neither of those reactions are the same as my own personal reaction.

One of my favorite parts of the @MayorEmanuel narrative was when @MayorEmanuel and Axelrod went to Rockford to party with the Wisconsin state senators. Do I think @MayorEmanuel would support the Occupy movement? Yes. Do I know in reality that Mayor Rahm Emanuel was at odds with the Occupy movement? Also yes. (For what it's worth, I don't totally blame him for this: Boston's own beloved Democratic mayor-for-life Mumbles Menino also handled the Occupy movement badly, at one point saying "civil disobedience doesn't work in Boston." No municipal official anywhere came out of that one looking great.) So I think @MayorEmanuel would take some soft shots at Occupy (net neutrality, Monsanto divestment, justice for Bradley Manning) but embrace its spirit. I'm still not sure I got this quite right.

Hayden didn't realize about the stakes because he bought his tent on Craigslist. The story is about as fucking fascinating as it sounds. 10/15/11 8:23:41 PM

Now Hayden's got a Sharpie and he's trying to write his fucking phone number on my arm. Shit is awkward. Sorry, Hayden, I'm not bipartisan. 10/15/11 8:47:12 PM

We'll learn later that Hayden is in some type of communication with Carl the Intern, but he's obviously Carl the Intern's boyfriend.

"It's the ACLU phone number for when we get arrested." Why the fuck would we get arrested? I haven't keyed Dart's car ONCE in this universe. 10/15/11 8:59:12 PM

*

Hayden and his friends are explaining the reasons why camping out in Grant Park is occupying Wall Street. 10/15/11 9:11:09 PM

Top three reasons: 1) the mayor 2) the fucking mayor 3) the motherfucking mayor. 10/15/11 9:20:57 PM

Whenever they talk about the mayor it's never by name, always "Mayor 1%", so I still don't know who's in charge of this fucking shit show. 10/15/11 9:44:39 PM

Chicago never had a permanent Occupy encampment the way New York, Boston or other cities did, for a bunch of reasons including that the natural spot for an encampment was a public sidewalk. The Occupy activists do call him "Mayor 1% Emanuel" and I … can't really blame them. Yuck.

A sea of people is filling Grant Park, singing and chanting and waving their signs, and I can feel the pulsing bloody heart of democracy. 10/15/11 10:08:24 PM

I see all fucking kinds of people: college kids, union members, grandmothers. They're bigger than themselves and I want to be one of them. 10/15/11 10:09:35 PM

Maybe I raked in a swimming pool of money on the board at Freddy Mac. Maybe my campaign war chest was bigger than the GDP of Slovakia. 10/15/11 10:11:33 PM

But those are the problems of a me who's actually the mayor, in some other fucking parallel dimension. OCCUPY ALL STREETS, MOTHERFUCKERS! 10/15/11 10:13:45 PM

WE! ARE! THE NINETY-NINE PERCENT! WE! ARE! THE NINETY-NINE PERCENT! WE! ARE! THE MOTHERFUCKING NINETY-NINE PERCENT! 10/15/11 11:45:12 PM

The cops are here, but we are fucking unstoppable. We stand together, arms linked, and we are one. 10/16/11 12:40:37 AM

Occupy Chicago activists led a march of about 2,000 people through the streets on October 16. The march ended in Grant Park where they attempted to set up tents to create a permanent encampment. The Chicago police showed up after the park officially closed at 11 o'clock and arrested about 175 people by 1 o'clock in the morning. They did the exact same thing with the same results about a week later.

***

What the fuck do you mean no fucking coffee in the holding cell? You might as well take a fucking shit on the Geneva Convention. 10/16/11 10:03:45 AM

Got caught in a pepper spray bukkake when CPD was hustling us into the wagons last night so I can't see a fucking thing. 10/16/11 10:09:17 AM

I get my one phone call. I don't know who to call, so I dial Ari's number, just in case this has all been a bad fucking dream. 10/16/11 10:11:23 AM

But the person who picks up on the other end of the line says "Mr. Gold's office" so I just fucking disconnect. 10/16/11 10:13:41 AM

Ari Gold being the character from Entourage based on Ari Emanuel. At one point I thought about putting @MayorEmanuel in a universe where all the fictional characters from our universe were real, and he interacted with Ari Gold and Josh Lyman (the West Wing character Rahm supposedly inspired, although I don't really see it) and characters from well-known movies and TV shows set in Chicago, but that would have been … a lot of work.

I got separated from Hayden last night when we got zip-tied. All the guys in this cell are batshit LaRouchers, which is fucking awkward. 10/16/11 11:45:06 AM

Stand up for the 99 percent! But get the entire fuck out of here with that poster of Obama with a Hitler mustache. No one wants to see that. 10/16/11 11:56:25 AM

Lyndon LaRouche is like a ten-times-more-extreme Ralph Nader. He gets lumped in with liberal extremists, but he's just kind of … extreme (and possibly racist and anti-Semitic). The omnipresent LaRouche canvassers in Downtown Boston went straight from "Indict George W. Bush for war crimes" to "Obama with a Hitler mustache" without missing a beat. I'm totally not kidding about this Obama with a Hitler mustache sign! I see it everywhere.

*

I hear a guard's voice: "Hey, Decatur Staley, it's your lucky day, some asshole's here to bail you out." I still can't see a fucking thing. 10/16/11 2:34:49 PM

The guard takes me to processing. I hear a sound like heavy jewelry hitting a counter. "This should cover bail." I swear I know that voice. 10/16/11 2:41:39 PM

A hand on my arm guides me out of the station. At my ear, the voice says, "You look like shit, let's get you some green bean casserole." 10/16/11 3:01:56 PM

KANYE? KANYE, IS THAT YOU? KANYE, WAIT. I CAN'T SEE, PAL. WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON? 10/16/11 3:04:22 PM

Kanye knows me. Who I am. Where I'm from. Why Kanye West is the only person in this universe who recognizes me, I don't have a fucking clue. 10/16/11 3:13:40 PM

New theory: the time vortex was caused by infinite fucking universes but only one Yeezy. That makes sense. It would actually explain a lot. 10/16/11 3:22:47 PM

Kanye says that Carl the Intern sent him. "He's going to rescue you. He taught me those crazy ass Jedi mind tricks to use on the cops." 3:27:03 PM

Carl? Carl's crazy, he can't even take care of himself, much less rescue anybody. A fucking Jedi Knight? 10/16/11 3:28:56 PM

I'm out of it for a little while, my friends re-watch too many fucking Star Wars movies and everybody gets delusions of fucking grandeur. 10/16/11 3:31:22 PM

So these are, obviously, Han Solo's lines in his conversation with Chewbacca when they're reunited at Jabba the Hutt's palace in Return of the Jedi. After the original @MayorEmanuel narrative reenacted a scene from The Empire Strikes Back, I had to go Return of the Jedi.

Kanye takes me back to his place. "Sorry, I need to stay close to home, I've got these leopard print ottomans I'm selling on Craigslist." 10/16/11 4:01:43 PM

*

Pounding Hennessy with Kanye, just fucking laying it down. He's letting me take Jay-Z's verses. Fucking glorious bastard. 10/16/11 10:12:46 PM

"I'm losing myself / I'm stuck in the moment / I look in the mirror / my only opponent ..." 10/16/11 11:02:44 PM

From the Kanye West/Jay Z collaboration Watch the Throne. There's a running theme involving My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in the @MayorEmanuel narrative that I wanted to riff on, not totally sure how well this worked. What kills me is that Jay Z has a line on this record that name-checks Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals, but it's one of those that works really well as a rhyme but not quoted in print ("I'm liable to go Michael / take your pick / Jackson, Tyson, Jordan, Game 6").

Hayden just showed up at Kanye's penthouse! Hayden's here to buy Kanye's leopard print ottomans? That's a crazy fucking coincidence. 10/17/11 12:08:42 AM

Apologize to Hayden about getting split up when we got arrested, but he says it's cool, his friend's stepmother bailed him out this morning. 10/17/11 12:12:03 AM

Kanye has to go. I'm pretty out of it and I still can't really see, but I hear Hayden say, "Hurry. The Alliance should be assembled by now." 10/17/11 1:46:38 AM

Hey, Kanye, thanks. Thanks for fucking coming after me. Now I owe you one. 10/17/11 1:51:22 AM

Leia and Han's lines from when they split up with Luke after escaping from Tantooine.

***

Oh my God, continued here because it's too fucking long for one LJ post.

FUCK YOU, YOU MOTHERFUCKING TIME VORTEX. I FUCKING LOVE DANCING WITH MY FRIENDS.

2012-01-01T15:53:13Z

The F**cking Movie Never Motherf**cking Ends: now overly verbose with commentary. [go back to part one]

Wandering the city with Hayden all week. I even showed him how to slot machine the fucking parking meters. "It's wealth redistribution!" 10/21/11 4:20:09 PM

Hayden's still really fucking upset about this fucking tent thing. Look, Hayden, for you, a few days ago, this tent thing came to an end. 10/21/11 4:34:47 PM

For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never fucking die. 10/21/11 4:38:06 PM

The closing lines from Ted Kennedy's speech to the Democratic National Convention in 1980. Excuse me, I'll just be over here crying for days.

Hayden says, "That was fucking beautiful, man" and I say, "Now let's go occupy Blago's house, I think he might have a fucking French press." 10/21/11 4:43:12 PM

Cheer the fuck up, Hayden, it's Friday fucking night. 10/21/11 5:02:13 PM

***

Hayden and I are watching the debate show on Blago's big screen. Mitt Romney's pores are fucking terrifying in HD. 11/9/11 7:55:12 PM

It's like Cain TRIES to make it through a two-hour stretch without sexually harassing some poor woman, but he just fucking can't. 11/9/11 8:02:33 PM

Fucking seriously, Cain, go fuck yourself. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, go directly to fuck yourself. 11/9/11 8:04:06 PM

I want to make one thing clear: I can't fucking stand Bachmann, but I hope she has a panic button, or some mace or something, just in case. 11/9/11 8:05:24 PM

To be fair to Cain, Pelosi does prefer to be called "Princess Nancy Organa of the Rebel Alliance." You want to fucking make something of it? 11/9/11 8:07:22 PM

Holy fucking mother of God. I thought my assfuck mayoral opponents were the dumbest fucking boxes of rocks ever assembled for one election. 11/9/11 8:30:43 PM

This was the debate where Cain said "Princess Nancy" wouldn't let a bill get out of committee and Perry couldn't remember the names of the three departments he'd eliminate. Good times.

Seriously, Gingrich, Cain and Bachmann make Chico, Braun and De Valle look like fucking Newton, Edison and Einstein. For fucking real. 11/9/11 8:33:12 PM

But, Rick Perry? You win the golden fucking sombrero of motherfucking dumb. 11/9/11 8:34:55 PM

YOU ARE SO FUCKING DUMB YOU MAKE NFL COACHES WHO PUNT KICK TO DEVIN HESTER LOOK LIKE GEORGE FUCKING HALAS. 11/9/11 8:36:10 PM

Devin Hester plays for the Chicago Bears and broke the all-time record for most punt kicks returned for touchdowns in a game this past October. As football pundits everywhere love to ask, "WHY DO TEAMS KEEP KICKING TO DEVIN HESTER?"

Hayden: "Rewind it again! Again!" I'm laughing so hard I'm fucking crying, but I'm crying because this dumb fuck might end up president. 11/9/11 8:37:02 PM

The night takes a fucking depressing turn. Hayden tries to cheer me up by raiding Blago's bribe closet. "Want a solid gold back scratcher?" 11/9/11 8:56:28 PM

I want back into a fucking universe where the fucks running for president can find the Department of Energy with two hands and a flashlight. 11/9/11 9:00:08 PM

But yeah, what the fuck, give me the solid gold ball scratcher. 11/9/11 9:03:46 PM

*

Also, Hayden's growing a mustache. Says it's for something called Movember? Fuck that, show some respect and call it Axelfuckingrodvember. 11/9/11 10:40:57 PM

Hayden says I should grow one, too. "For charity, man!" I say no. "For personal reasons." Truth is, my facial hair looks like fucking pubes. 11/9/11 10:57:25 PM

And I just fucking miss Axelrod's mustache. Fucking shit, man. Pretenders, leave it alone. Don't throw rocks at the mustache throne. 11/9/11 11:14:39 PM

Older Jay-Z, from "Takeover" off The Blueprint. Original lyric is "Please leave it alone / don't throw rocks at the throne."

***

It's so cute that Newt Gingrich is trying to wave his pinky-size dick around this fucking national security debate like he fucking matters. 11/12/11 7:15:29 PM

Watch Newt turn the Patriot Act into a Patriot Contract With America: A commitment to be vigilant against undocumented terrorist janitors. 11/12/11 7:20:36 PM

Sure, Perry, the Obama administration is a complete intelligence failure. I hope you get a Merry fucking Christmas visit from Seal Team Six. 11/12/11 7:28:10 PM

Hayden and I are watching the shit games in Blago's home office. "Who needs four industrial paper shredders?" Hah-fucking-hah. Now beer me. 11/12/11 7:33:48 PM

Here's a funny story about Gingrich. Back in '95, during the government shutdown, Clinton had me follow Newt to his high school reunion. 11/12/11 7:34:18 PM

I tracked him down at this shithole small town diner, and I went there in double birds blazing, my cock hanging out in a paper bag. 11/12/11 7:36:29 PM

Newt acted like he was gonna fucking start some shit, and I said, "Easy there, chief. I don't see hollow point wound care on the menu." 11/12/11 7:39:27 PM

I ordered some fucking eggs, and I said we weren't gonna let Newt pass his little budget. Cause we were gonna pass it for him. 11/12/11 7:41:32 PM

And then I told him that after we passed the budget, we were gonna do another little job. And that dumbfuck Newt said, "Like what?" 11/12/11 7:42:44 PM

"Like I'm gonna put a bullet hole in your fucking forehead and I'm gonna fuck the brain hole." So that ended Newt's government shitdown. 11/12/11 7:50:57 PM

Lines from Mr. Grocer (Dan Aykroyd), the union-organizing hitman in Gross Pointe Blank. I wanted an homage to a John Cusack movie and I had the hardest time picking one. High Fidelity would have been great because it's set in Chicago, Being John Malkovich would have been awesome because it's about, you know, a portal into the alternate universe of John Malkovich's head. But nothing worked quite right and Mr. Grocer said "fuck" a lot.

Hayden has beer, a whole head of iceberg lettuce, a block of Monterey Jack cheese and a fucking rotisserie chicken. "Do you want a taco?" 11/12/11 8:10:21 PM

Now Newt says he likes the Chilean model for Social Security reform. I sure fucking hope it involves sending old people down a mine shaft. 11/12/11 8:21:49 PM

Holy fuck, Hayden's shredding the lettuce with Blago's shredder! This is some fucking ninja Julia Child shit here! 11/12/11 8:28:45 PM

I am totally stealing this from an episode of The Office, I think. Kevin shredded lettuce with a paper shredder in a episode tag once, didn't he?

Blago's shredder destroyed that fucking block of cheese like it was the phone records of an unidentified senate candidate. 11/12/11 8:34:57 PM

We're making bets on whether the shredder can take the whole goddamn rotisserie chicken, bones and all. Loser has to prank call Bachmann. 11/12/11 8:37:05 PM

Hayden's fixing me a taco, I have to call Bachmann and ask her if her refrigerator's getting ex-gay therapy. Totally fucking worth it. 11/12/11 8:40:21 PM

Wolf is finishing off the fuck fest by asking everyone to name their favorite threat to national security like it's a fucking dating show. 11/12/11 8:59:34 PM

Very fucking funny, Wolf. Trick question, the eight biggest threats to national security are standing at podiums up on the fucking stage. 11/12/11 9:01:27 PM

The shit Hayden finds in the bribe closet is getting ridiculous. He just came in wearing a fucking full-length black leather trench coat. 11/12/11 9:22:18 PM

"It's not a trench coat, it's a duster." He looks like Axelrod standing in line to get disappointed by the fucking Matrix sequels. 11/12/11 9:25:56 PM

This is supposed to be Harry Dresden's magical leather duster from The Dreseden Files. I have never read these books, never watched the television show, but Norah mentioned a Dresden Files crossover in her Dear Yuletide letter and when I read a synopsis of the books, I was like, "Yeah, actually, that makes a lot of sense." This was the best I could do based on knowledge cribbed from a Wikipedia article. I just couldn't imagine @MayorEmanuel saying "duster," though, hence the lame "trench coat" joke.

***

I am so fucking all about this fucking cup of coffee in my hand, I want to set up a casual encounter with it on Craigslist. 11/14/11 9:45:06 AM

Hayden split last night. He didn't leave a note, but he took that fucking trench coat. 11/14/11 11:12:37 AM

Think he got bored sitting around in bathrobes, scratching our asses with solid gold back scratchers and crying at the Republican debates. 11/14/11 11:23:37 AM

This universe continues to suck balls: Mayor 1% shitting all over Occupy, the fucking Republican horror show, the NBA lockout clusterfuck. 11/14/11 2:14:56 PM

David Stern, you fucking cockhole. I've got your nuclear winter right here. It's called February in fucking Chicago without the Bulls on TV. 11/14/11 8:20:13 PM

The NBA Players Union broke off negotiations and moved toward taking the labor dispute to court, which drama queen David Stern declared the "nuclear winter of the NBA." Hyperbolic considering the whole thing would get settled less than two weeks later, but for about a week there it really looked like the whole season would be cancelled.

Also: the most challenging part of writing this story is that I prefer to write longhand, and I jot a lot of notes to myself when I'm commuting on the train. Because it was not worth trying to count characters every time I wanted to scrawl something down, I set up al locked dummy Twitter account so I could text things to myself and know they were less than 140 characters. This was the first tweet I sent.

***

Stopped by the Kinkos on LaSalle for the first time in a couple weeks and one of Plouffe's faxes is jamming up the piece-of-shit machine. 11/16/11 8:33:43 PM

Fax from Plouffe: List of stuff the other me isn't allowed to say during a budget speech to City Council. The more things fucking change ... 11/16/11 9:01:54 PM

"1. Don't say you're going to make all those sick CTA employees get second jobs on their fake sick days." Well, why fucking not? 11/16/11 9:07:12 PM

Around this time, a report on the CTA's budget troubles was released that showed drivers took an improbably disproportionate number of sick days on Mondays and Fridays.

"2. Don't say 'Who's afraid of a few fucking nuns?' if they ask about water tax increase." Still sad I never got to hang out with other me. 11/16/11 9:12:31 PM

One of the ways that real-life Mayor Emanuel closed the budget deficit was to discontinue a city policy of not charging schools, churches and charities for their water.

"3. Your notes say 'And then I wave around my cock and tell them this is the sword that slew the $636M budget deficit.' Don't do that." 11/16/11 9:20:42 PM

"4. Don't talk about the police overtime budget. Those Occupy assholes hate you enough as it is." 11/16/11 9:35:55 PM

"5. 'David Stern Nut the Fuck Up Fund' is not a line item on the approved final version of your budget." Wait a fucking second ... 11/16/11 9:42:49 PM

Back in the other universe, the budget's still fucked, I'M fucking Mayor 1% and the NBA is still in a fucking lockout? 11/16/11 9:44:06 PM

New theory: the time vortex was caused by WHO FUCKING KNOWS BUT IT WAS SUPPOSED TO MEAN SHIT WAS BETTER OVER THERE, WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED? 11/16/11 9:47:20 PM

I crash out of the Kinko's into the street, and I see strangers waiting, up and down the boulevard, their shadows searching in the night. 11/16/11 10:03:00 PM

Streetlights. People living just to find some fucking emotion, hiding somewhere in the night. 11/16/11 10:06:35 PM

There's an asshole standing right behind me, humming under his breath. It sounds so fucking familiar. I turn around to see who's there. 11/16/11 10:09:10 PM

"Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey. A major cliché at this point, but Dan Sinker opened the door by ending the @MayorEmanuel narrative with repeated reference to "Separate Ways." That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Then the taste of celery salt bursts on my tongue and I can still hear the humming, but everything just fucking goes black. 11/16/11 10:10:13 PM

*

New theory: the time vortex was caused by the MULTIPLE FUCKING HEAD INJURIES inflected on me by Mayor Richard M. Motherfucking Daley. 11/17/11 12:01:59 AM

The "new theory" gag was supposed to echo the @MayorEmanuel "new slogan" running gag.

So you can guess that we're standing on the roof of City Hall. And for the first time since I ended up here, there's no buzz saw in my ears. 11/17/11 12:03:17 AM

The charcoal grill waits for us, and I already know what's inside. Daley smoothes his hand over the lid. "You still don't understand." 11/17/11 12:07:29 AM

I step up to the grill and put my hand next to Daley's. It looks like a fucking little kid's hand. The lid's warm under my palm. 11/17/11 12:10:23 AM

Daley reaches for the handle. "It's a portal through infinite dimensions. That doesn't mean there's no law of entropy." He lifts the lid. 11/17/11 12:11:55 AM

I see them again, the million fucking tiny Chicagos in their million parallel universes. But this time I look closer. 11/17/11 12:12:34 AM

Daley points at a pinhead speck. "There's one where Oprah's the mayor of Chicago and she fixed the deficit by selling unicorn shit." 11/17/11 12:14:09 AM

Daley waves his giant sausage of a finger. "There's no Chicago to even be mayor of in that one. It was never rebuilt after the Great Fire." 11/17/11 12:16:47 AM

Daley sighs. "This one's my favorite. 2003 Cubs won the World Series and Kerry Wood's the mayor. City Hall softball league is incredible." 11/17/11 12:17:59 AM

"There's a zombie universe where a zombie version of Dad is still mayor. There's even a universe where Chico's the mayor. It's called Hell." 11/17/11 12:19:03 AM

I can see them, but only because Daley points them out. They're the exception, not the rule. Most of the universes are basically the same. 11/17/11 12:23:32 AM

There's an infinite number of great stories that could have been written about what happened after @MayorEmanuel went through the vortex. A universe where Barack Obama was never elected, a post-apocalyptic universe where Richard J. Daley is a zombie, anything you can imagine. But, for me, the one loophole in Dan Sinker's @MayorEmanuel narrative is this: Why didn't @MayorEmanuel notice when he passed from his own universe to ours? One possible answer: he didn't notice because his universe is basically identical to ours.

I'm the mayor, sure, but the city is still fucking broke and still fucking stuck with the fucking parking meter deal. 11/17/11 12:25:47 AM

The economy is still in the shithole and ordinary people feel so angry and powerless they set up tents in Grant Park just to get arrested. 11/17/11 12:27:14 AM

David Stern is a spineless asshat. Michelle fucking Bachmann is a presidential candidate. Two and a Half Men hasn't been cancelled. 11/17/11 12:28:15 AM

Daley watches across the grill. He says what I already know. "There's a million fucking universes, but most of them are the same old shit." 11/17/11 12:29:53 AM

"For a minute, that universe got to be great because it had two of you. Now you're both back where you belong and it's all just ordinary." 11/17/11 12:31:28 AM

This is my favorite part because it's sort of a meta-commentary on why I loved the @MayorEmanuel story so much. The @MayorEmanuel Twitter phenomenon elevated my awareness of Rahm Emanuel's mayoral election and also marked the last hurrah of a brief golden period of Democratic politics (starting with the 2006 mid-terms and the election of Deval Patrick, peaking with the Obama election and ending with the Emanuel mayoral race, which was already overshadowed by the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives during the 2010 midterms). If you're like me, and you're looking around wondering where the good times between 2006 and 2010 went, it seems possible that they only existed when our universe benefited from the awesome power of two Rahm Emanuels.

There's no smoke coming off the grill, but my eyes still sting. What am I supposed to do? Why is Daley showing me? WHAT'S THE FUCKING POINT? 11/17/11 12:34:19 AM

Daley looks sad, like he wants to say more but he knows he can't. "Roll the dice one more time," he tells me. He starts humming again. 11/17/11 12:35:08 AM

"The movie never ends." And Daley's massive fucking frame towers over me like the skyline, going on and on until all the lights go out. 11/17/11 12:36:57 AM

Again with the Journey lyrics. All popular complaints about how "Don't Stop Believin'" is terrible, I find "the movie never ends" to be a really poignant sentiment of a pop ballad lyric and I've always loved it.

***

Up before the fucking sun and I want to fucking keg stand this fucking cup of coffee. 11/21/11 04:32:26 AM

Slot machining the parking meters on State Street by the library. Still can't believe it, five fucking bucks an hour to park in the Loop. 11/21/11 04:49:41 AM

Seriously, three pay boxes and I've already filled two fuck-it size chicken buckets. $644.75 in quarters, bitches. 11/21/11 04:52:08 AM

*

The Craigslist posting is the fucking same as all the others I saw this weekend: 1994 HONDA CIVIC - $1450 (West Lawn). 11/21/11 9:16:09 AM

Originally @MayorEmanuel was going to drive all these different used Civics the same way that Jack kept taking different Oceanic flights in the Lost episode "Through the Looking Glass" (the one that you find out is a flash-forward and not a flash-back) and the story was going to end with @MayorEmanuel shouting "WE HAVE TO GO BACK!" But the "Through the Looking Glass" homage is kind of the like the "Mirror, Mirror" evil goatee homage. It's either its own 10,000 word cracked-out crossover or nothing.

I'm getting sick of this shit. I'd rather dry fuck a tail pipe than meet any more fucking weirdos who sell their crap on the internet. 11/21/11 9:34:55 AM

Saturday, in Hyde Park, I'm pretty fucking sure Braun in Groucho Marx glasses was trying to sell me a Civic with no back seat for two grand. 11/21/11 9:49:14 AM

Hey Braun, you've got $315,000 in unaccounted campaign funds, replace the back seat in your fucking Civic. 11/21/11 10:05:27 AM

Someone from the Illinois Board of Elections told the Sun-Times that Carol Mosley Braun's documentation was the "worst example" he'd ever seen.

Emailing the poster in West Lawn while I watch a thousand fucking replays of Jay Cutler breaking his thumb. 11/21/11 11/21/11 10:11:26 AM

For fucking serious, Cutler throws an interception and then breaks his thumb tackling like he thinks he's a goddamn free safety. Fuck. 11/21/11 10:23:37 AM

Throw an interception, then break your thumb on the tackle? Why not just set a house on fire and drown the fucking cat putting the fire out? 11/21/11 10:34:45 AM

If your level of interest in football rivals Dan Sinker's: when the quarterback throws an interception, the offensive players go on defense to bring down the intercepting player. Because football teams have a whole line of players whose job it is to make sure the quarterback never gets touched and because the other 10 offensive players are generally going to be further down the field than the quarterback, the quarterback should really be the LAST player to tackle the defender who made the interception, both based on job responsibilities and field placement. So being a quarterback and breaking your thumb on tackling a defender is pretty fucking dumb.

Or, in more fandom-friendly terms: you may recall this was how Jason Street ended up paralyzed on Friday Night Lights.

Hey, Cutlerfucker: In an alternate universe, I'm the FUCKING MAYOR with nine and a half fingers. You can't quarterback the Bears with nine? 11/21/11 10:46:02 AM

Text from West Lawn: "Can only show car before 3pm today, take Orange Line to Ford City, movie theater parking lot." 11/21/11 11:39:04 AM

The fucking Orange Line doesn't go to fucking Ford City. And that's what makes me think this might be the fucking Civic I'm looking for. 11/21/11 11:45:26 AM

*

When the train pulls into Midway station, I can see the planes landing in the distance, swooping low like pot-bellied lazy birds. 11/21/11 1:40:04 PM

The doors close and I'm alone in the car. I don't know what the fuck is happening, but this train is going somewhere I've never been before. 11/21/11 1:52:33 PM

New theory: the time vortex was caused by the paradoxical existence of a fucking Ford City L stop. 11/21/11 2:11:48 PM

As paradoxical non-existent L stops go, this Ford City one is pretty fucking nice. Really clean. I would've shaken a shitload of hands here. 11/21/11 2:17:36 PM

I walk up to the movie theater. The marquee is all show times for some kind of fucking Michael J. Fox retrospective. 11/21/11 2:21:06 PM

So many missed opportunities to do a more extended Back to the Future riff, so few working brain cells left at this point.

The parking lot's empty, except for one beautiful heap of a Civic and fucking Hayden, wearing that fucking trench coat and holding the keys. 11/21/11 2:32:57 PM

Hayden fumbles with the key ring. "Oh, hey, man. Wow, weird coincidence. You saw in the ad that the radio's broken, right?" 11/21/11 2:34:09 PM

I'm not fucking crying. It's just been raining. On my face. I put my hand on the dent in the bumper. I think I can feel the car's heartbeat. 11/21/11 2:37:16 PM

"I'm selling it for a friend who split town, that's why it's so dirty." Every window is covered in a fucking inch of grime except one. 11/21/11 2:39:54 PM

The glass is so clean I could wipe my ass with it. "Yeah, I was trying to just sell it as-is, but no one would buy it with a broken window." 11/21/11 2:41:36 PM

Hayden tosses me the keys. "Well, if you want to buy the car, let's do this. I'm going be late for mathlete practice." 11/21/11 2:44:16 PM

And I want to ask Hayden where he came from and what this all means and what the fuck I should do next. And really, whose car is this? 11/21/11 2:50:28 PM

Hayden finally looks me in the eye. I know he wants to tell me the work begins anew. The hope rises again. The fucking dream lives on. 11/21/11 2:53:28 PM

And Hayden echoes back the closing lines from Ted Kennedy's speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Excuse me, I'll just be over here crying for WEEKS.

But I need to get somewhere Hayden can't follow. I don't fucking know if I'll make it, but I do know it's time to go now. 11/21/11 2:54:19 PM

So Hayden just takes my $1450 in quarters. "It's your car now, man," he says. "Don't stop believing. Don't fuck it up." 11/21/11 2:55:17 PM

New theory: the time vortex was caused by it doesn't fucking matter, because I am going to fuck that time vortex until it slot machines. 11/21/11 2:57:01 PM

I start humming under my breath. Hayden walks away and I watch him disappear into the distance as I slide into the driver's seat. 11/21/11 2:59:30 PM

The music swells up behind me like the soundtrack to a fucking movie that never motherfucking ends. 11/21/11 3:01:48 PM

I put the key in the fucking ignition and everything starts again. 11/21/11 3:05:37 PM

I wanted to end this story with a trailed off ellipsis the same as the ending of the original narrative. But it felt too much like cheating. What's kind of embarrassing is that when I was wringing my hands over how to end this story I ended up thinking about the end of the original @MayorEmanuel narrative reminds me of the last few lines of Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker: "There is a roar as if the world cracked open and I flew inside. I am no more. And satisfied." This isn't either of those things, but ... it does contain an inadvertent R. Kelly reference?

we've got another thing coming undone

2011-12-31T23:14:37Z

1. What did you do in 2011 that you’d never done before?
Traveled alone in Europe. Successfully executed a surprise cross-country birthday visit.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
My resolution for 2011 was to eat more vegetables at breakfast and I failed as this, as I always do with breakfast-related resolutions. I keep saying I'm going to start eating breakfast like a human person and then it's 6:08am and I'm drinking orange juice from the carton with one hand and pouring my coffee into a thermos with the other. So let's just go ahead and pencil in a "eat breakfast like a human person" resolution to fail at for 2012 as well.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
One former and two current co-workers. Somehow I ended up covering on maternity leave for all three of them (yeah, even the one I don't even work with anymore, that was awesome).

4. Did anyone close to you die?
After the dead grandmother theater that was 2010, no close relations, no. One of my parents' close friends passed away and so did the father of one of my close friends, and in some ways this was stranger, figuring out what to write in a condolence card, what charity donation to send in lieu of flowers.

But, oh, here is a story about how Facebook is ruining the fabric of society: When I was in California in October, I woke up to a voicemail message from my friend N, who had called earlier, not realizing I wasn't on the east coast. His message was: hey, I'm just trying to call all my closest friends, because people are starting to post about it on Facebook and I don't want you to have to find out from Facebook. My father passed away.

Dear N, I love you, but I would not have been mad if I found out your father died via Facebook. You probably had more important things to worry about.

5. What countries did you visit?
Switzerland and Spain. Switzerland for a wedding, Spain on the way to Switzerland because I was already flying all the way to Europe and it was extremely nominal to add a stop along the way to somewhere I actually wanted to visit. (No offense, Switzerland.)

6. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
The time to take a lunch hour more than once every two weeks.

7. What dates from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Probably October 1, the date of the aforementioned Swiss wedding of doom. (Chinese American childhood best friend from growing up in California, currently living in China with her German-born now-husband, got married in Switzerland because ... I'm still not really sure.) Money, work-related shenanigans and my complete lack of German language skills made it seem impossible that I would get myself on a bus, train, bus, plane, plane, train and then another train to a small tourist trap town an hour outside of Zurich near the Swiss/German border. But I made it! That Swiss railway system, man, they do not fuck around.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Started getting dry haircuts. You laugh, but it's been a shitty year. Dry haircuts are a curly hair game changer. My life kind of sucks but my hair looks awesome.

9. What was your biggest failure?
I wanted to keep something a secret and I failed. You could argue that I must have wanted to fail all along, and that keeping secrets is bad and pointless, but fuck that. Keeping that secret was stressful and awful in its own way, but my day-to-day life would still be better right now if I wasn't such an overwrought drunk.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Ugh, dental work. I don't have dental insurance, so I endured the comedy of errors that is getting a root canal at a dental school. (Spoilers: it ended with the tooth getting straight-up extracted. Good times.)

11. What was the best thing you bought?
Duo boots. You can order them by calf size! They're a little pricy and they have to be shipped from the UK, but I fucking love them, totally one of those lady magazine "worth the investment!" bullshit cliches. (It's also possible that you will not think $200 is pricy for shoes. But I'm a fucking cheapskate, so.)

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
Progressive protest movements across the world (from the Wisconsin state senators to Arab Spring uprisers), fucking-finally-but-I-still-love-you closet exiters (Zachary Quinto, I'm looking at you).

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Democratic mayors who failed to work with their cities' Occupy movements (thanks a lot, Rahm Emanuel and Mumbles Menino). Dudes who sit spread eagle and take up three seats on the train.

14. Where did most of your money go?
Aforementioned motherfucking plane ticket to Switzerland. Farmer's markets. Pitchers of PBR.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
I was really excited to visit Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. The last time I was in Barcelona was in 1998 and Sagrada Familia was still in the early stages of this current push toward completion and you couldn't even go inside. Going back more than 10 years later and seeing how much progress has been made (and how much more Barcelona has changed in those additional ten years since the death of Franco) was really amazing.

16. What song will always remind you of 2011?
The National -- "Runaway"

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
(a) happier or sadder? Sadder. A lot of the intangible things I wanted and didn't have this time last year coalesced into a specific thing that I wanted and didn't get this year.

(b) thinner or fatter? Thinner. An ocean of mixed feelings about this one. I'm not someone who keeps an aspirational wardrobe in the back of the closet. I buy clothes that fit, and I like the clothes I have, and they're a carefully culled collection of sale rack items and clothing swap treasures and this summer none of them fit and I spent the whole time feeling unkempt because I looked like a little kid wearing her mother's nightgown. Ugh. Whatever.

(c) richer or poorer? I broke even; enough of a victory for me.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Writing. Learning to say more than two or three token phrases in German. Going out dancing.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Walking home from Porter Square at two in the morning after missing the last 96 bus.

20. How did you spend Christmas?
Watching football, basketball and S1 Alias DVDs with my brother and my parents. On Christmas Day we saw Young Adult because we saw Juno and Up In the Air as a family on Christmas and I said we should keep the Jason Reitman streak alive. And, well -- look, I actually loved Young Adult, but if I thought Up In the Air was an iffy choice for a feel-good family Christmas movie, I really had no idea.

21. Did you fall in love in 2011?
I think I did. Someone told me this year that you can't really fall in love with someone if your regard is unrequited, and that felt harsh at the time but I wonder more and more if it's true. I plunged to pathetic depths of being enamored and angst-ridden and preoccupied, but to call that love? I don't know if that was really love. It felt so terrible.

22. What was your favorite TV program?
All the TV critics are cheating and putting down Friday Night Lights as a TV program that aired in 2011, so I will do the same, because the finale of that show made me so fucking happy I seriously can't even talk about it. I also caught the last seat on the Community/Parks & Rec bandwagon and devoured those in a crazed marathon this spring. At the end of the year I fell in love with Homeland.

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
Dormant simmering hate for certain people definitely amped up this year. (Newt Gingrich, die in a fire.)

24. What was the best book you read?
Zone One by Colson Whitehead. Did you know that if you mention you are reading one of Colson Whitehead's books on Twitter, he will @reply you, like, 30 seconds later? He's so dreamy.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Bad Rabbits! This is a funny story: Bad Rabbits is originally a local band, and smartlikejustin wanted to go see them when they came through town opening for ... The Black Cards. We left before The Black Cards even came on.

26. What did you want and get?
Thick wool socks for Christmas. Seriously not kidding, I probably wouldn't even own any socks if my parents didn't buy me socks for Christmas every year.

27. What did you want and not get?
Grant funding. I wrote a lot of fucking grants that did not get funded.

28. What was your favorite film of this year?
Probably The Skin I'm In? I really didn't see very many movies this year. Honorable mention to Breaking Dawn because I've been watching the Twighlight movies for the lolz with a civilian friend who wasn't spoiled for the werewolf imprinting and the jaw-dropping face he made in the theater when [UH, SPOILERS] Jacob imprinted on the baby was Oscar-worthy. Seriously. Cinematic highlight of my year.

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 29. I had to work. Last year on my birthday, I found out I had to lay someone off, so when my staff came into my office to sing happy birthday, I kind of flipped out with mortification and now they erroneously think I'm someone who hates their birthday. So I spent all day stewing about how I bake cupcakes for all their stupid birthdays and nobody did anything for mine, but I guess it's my own fault.

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Time machine.

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2010?
Surprise! This dress used to fit and it now hangs like a tent. What will make it look wearable: a safety pin? a belt? a staple gun?

32. What kept you sane?
V8 Fusion and Kashi Go Lean bars as all-purpose $4 meal replacement: available at a CVS near you! Also, maintaining a pre-work gym routine. I really love leaving the house when it's still dark outside and how peaceful the morning commute is at 6:30am.

33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
I know Michael Schur is barely a public figure, but hahah, oh my god, I love him. I love his geek-out mutual admiration society podcasts with Joe Posnanski so much, I can't even.

34. What political issue stirred you the most?
Economic inequality, but perhaps on a more micro level than most. I have no beef at all with the Occupy movement. The Occupy Boston encampment was just a couple blocks from my office in the same square where I picked up my farm share all this fall. I used to call Occupy Boston my "Dewey Square neighbors" in both a geographical and philosophical sense. I think that type of social justice community organizing is important, but it's not how I chose to contribute to the movement. Running programs that provide direct services to low-income populations during this recession has been an incredibly depressing and demoralizing experience. I'm honestly scared to see how much worse things are going to get for the lowest 10% in 2012.

35. Who did you miss?
Co-workers who actually know me. A couple specific people who I once worked with and whose faces I wish I still got to see every day, but also just that general swarm of people I don't even like that much but with whom I've worked with long enough that I don't feel like I constantly have to pretend like I have it all together when I don't. I also missed all my Boston ex-pats, although I got to see each of them at least once this year and even got one of them (imogenics) back.

36. Who was the best new person you met?
Carles, the complete stranger who said, oh, hey, you used to work with my girlfriend four years ago? Sure, come stay in our beautiful apartment in Barcelona, no problem! Let me tell you amazing stories about how rooting for the Barcelona futbol team during the dictatorship was a revolutionary act.

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011.
No matter how overwhelming and inconceivable it all seems, you have an inherit ability to figure problems out, and it will eventually kick in. You will be surprised how long it will take, but it will happen. Eventually.

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
"What makes you think I'm enjoying being led to the flood?"

i can see a thousand fucking skylines

2011-11-17T22:23:23Z

Dear Livejournal,

I need to make a confession, and I feel like only y'all will understand the deep, ridiculous hypocrisy at work here. For the last 18 months, I have been relentlessly shit-talking a colleague because she sends all of her professional email correspondence and renders her full electronic email signature in lower-case text.

[...]

To be fair, no matter how committed I was to lower-case text for, like, FIFTEEN YEARS of my obnoxious life, I never pulled that shit at work. Anyway, I noticed today that she finally stopped, and I felt older than I did when I realized I was probably too old for that to be cute anymore.

Someone on my friends list did the "what's in your purse/bag" meme! I love this one. As a non-car-owning urban commuter, I lovingly refer to my bag as my car trunk. Because ... it's basically the same size as a car trunk.

Every day, I give myself a future history of back problems by hauling around a Timbu2 messenger bag, size large:

It's one of the custom-designed options, because when I was in junior high I saw Four Weddings and a Funeral and thought the orange bridesmaid dress with the purple sash was the most bitchin' thing I'd ever seen and I have loved orange and purple together ever since.

Every Sunday night, I unpack and re-pack my bag and try to figure out if I can get rid of any of the fuck-ton of shit I'm hauling around, and the answer is always no. Contents as follows:

Top row: glasses case, both the book I'm currently reading (The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung) and the book I'm taking to book club tonight (Zone One by Colson Whitehead, which was fucking AMAZING and if you mention that you are reading his book on Twitter, he will reply within 9 seconds and say "Cool-io!" or "Thanks, sister!" which is adorable), now empty oilcloth lunch bag and thermos.

Middle row: Printed out copy of the recipe for Rick Bayless' Braised Turkey in Red Mole, which I am making this year for the the sixth annual Wretch Thanksgiving for Wretches, wallet, headphones, coveted Flair felt-tip pens, padlock for gym locker, the dozen bobby pins that are littered on my person at any given time, toiletry bag and make-up bag (with my current gym-in-the-morning regimen I realized that I'm only showering at my house once a week), my Vapur bottle (fucking amazing, swear by them), this morning's dirty gym attire, carefully folded to conceal my dirty underwear but not so carefully folded that you can't tell that I was wearing an Empires t-shirt.

Bottom row: Oh God. Floss? Random pill case? A brooch I packed to wear with some outfit earlier this week and then forgot about? FOUR DIFFERENT TYPES OF BURT'S BEES PRODUCT, APPARENTLY. And, of course, two carefully folded reusable shopping bags because I might stop for groceries or something and need a way to carry around MORE shit and there's obviously no room in my bag.

Not pictured: my phone, which is taking the picture.

Proof that it really all does fit:

Anyway, hi, hello. Today I signed up for Yuletide and some crazy beautiful bastard had nominated @mayoremanuel as a fandom and I was reminded that I really love you all.

woke up i had the same clothes on i had on last night

2011-03-21T18:06:58Z

wretches who
So ... this happened. Also, M was a lovely and charming host, although I'm pretty sure that having out-of-town guests who live in Boston and Cleveland come visit you in Atlanta in the middle of March is a lot like babysitting patients at a methadone clinic. For ex: "No, seriously, we can take a scenic tour of the local garbage dumpsters AS LONG AS IT STAYS THIS WARM."

Although we did manage to start developing the pilot for a half-hour comedy that takes place at the Boise Aquarium, so be on the lookout for that.

three very important things I have been meaning to tell you about the film Battle: Los Angeles
1. This movie is amazeballs. If you have ever said to yourself, "I want to watch Independence Day, but I also want to watch Speed. I could put two televisions side-by-side and watch them simultaneously, but that seems like a lot of work," A MOVIE HAS NOW BEEN MADE THAT WILL SOLVE THIS VERY IMPORTANT PROBLEM.

2. No seriously, wrt: #1 I think Aaron Eckhart took lessons in making his face look more like Bill Pullman's, which was very thoughtful of him.

3. Most of the main characters are a platoon of Marines based out of Camp Pendleton, which made me really, really want to find-and-replace for the cast of Generation Kill. There was even a fresh-out-of-OTS lieutenant and a seasoned, cold-blooded staff sergeant. Seriously.

your name on my cereal box

2011-01-24T22:05:51Z

So ... this happened.

from: smartlikejustin
to: throughadoor
subject: carter family fuck up updates

I think the saddest part of the entire article is that despite having a relatively successful pop music career, he's now know primarily as a "former dancing with the stars contestant." no wonder he's in rehab.

from: throughadoor
to: smartlikejustin
subject: Re: carter family fuck up updates

--I actually think the saddest part is that I read that article and was like "Wow, Johnny Wright is still his manager?"

from: smartlikejustin
to: throughadoor
subject: Re: carter family fuck up updates

OH MY GOD, I missed that part. I can't deal that is so strange why is johnny wright still anyone's manager?

from: throughadoor
to: smartlikejustin
subject: Re: carter family fuck up updates

Trace does an exaggerated imitation of Justin's "people aren't supposed to look at me" walk as he enters the store, his shoulders hunched up and his hat pulled down low in his face. All Target stores everywhere look exactly the same, so he can shuffle straight to the mens department. In his head, he's updating the all-time Pyramid of Douche. The base of the Pyramid of Douche includes: bartenders who serve watered-down drinks to patrons who don't have tits and people who only like foreign films. The middle levels are reserved for waiters who make a face when you order your burger with American cheese and guys who like to talk about how much they can bench press. The top level of the Pyramid of Douche is dedicated forever and ever amen to Wade fucking Robsen.

What Trace is trying to figure out is which level of the Pyramid of Douche is reserved for the guy who goes to Target on a Friday night so he can buy a pair of his own clothing company's jeans. Because this is some pretty fucking douchey behavior he is about to engage in right here. But Justin is kind of OCD about being on-brand and if Trace shows up at this thing tomorrow wearing some other jeans and not William Rast jeans, Justin will go all cross-eyed. Which is always hilarious, but Trace really wants to get this promo thing over and get the fuck out of Floria.

So, he's a mid-level douche with his head down and he accidentally bumps into some guy in the aisle between snacks and shoes.

"Uh, sorry, man."

"Trace?"

"Um--"

"Hey, man, it's good to see you, how've you been?"

"Uh, hey, Johnny."

Johnny's wearing flip flops and he turns the handshake into a lean-in-and-backslap combo like they've ever been friends and Johnny didn't look at Trace like he was a piece of luggage when he used to run into him on the bus. Trace kind of tries to grimace in a friendly way. "So, yeah, uh, long time no see," he says.

"Looks like you've been busy," Johnny says, nodding toward the William Rast display across the aisle.

"Uh, yeah, yeah," Trace says, and fuck, shit, motherfucker, how is he supposed to go over there and buy a pair of jeans now, he's totally gonna have to drive to another fucking Target.

"Tell Justin I said hey." Johnny is apparently still talking. "He should text me when he's thinking about going back in the studio, I know he's got his guys for his movie stuff, but--"

"Yeah," Trace says again. If Trace had a charitable heart, he would think that maybe if Johnny was still calling the shots, Johnny would have talked Justin out of doing that gay-ass Facebook movie. But Trace does not have a charitable bone in his body and Johnny once put Justin's face on packages of little girl lip gloss.

"So, yeah," Johnny says. "Everything's good down here. I'm about to get AC back in the studio, actually, gonna square away some personal issues, you know how it is, but after that he's gonna lay down some tracks, should be really good stuff."

"Who's AC?" Trace asks, and then wants to kick his own ass for asking because he doesn't actually care.

"You know, Aaron? Aaron Carter."

"Isn't he in rehab?" Trace thinks he saw that in an US Weekly he bought last week to torture Justin on an airplane.

Johnny grins like he just had to tell the sound check guys that Justin's going to be a little late because of a vocal chord exam, which was code for "Justin had a little bitch tantrum screaming himself hoarse because the writer from GQ asked him why *NSYNC broke up and now he's sulking in the bus bathroom." Johnny says, "Well, you know how it is, when you grow up in the business, it's stressful, he's just got some personal stuff to square away, and--"

"Oh, wait," Trace says. "Sorry, you said AC and I thought you meant AJ."

Johnny sighs. "Yeah," he says.

"So, um," says Trace. "I gotta--" he jerks his head in the direction of the exit. "I'll tell Justin you said hi."

So, Trace leaves Johnny standing in the aisle at Target. He's thinking that he's hungry and could go for a burger right now, and about whether he cares enough to find another Target in suburban Orlando and how he totally forgot that Pyramid of Douche Level 6 is called "People Who Are Related to Nick Carter."

lovers, fuggers, thieves, et cetera

2011-01-23T21:55:04Z

Okay, presupposing:

1. The most annoying thing in the world is when someone rolls into a fandom two years after its heyday and acts like they have original opinions.

2. ~~Feelings~~ Facts are boring, kissing is awesome.

3. I am sure I have done before the exact thing I am going to mock now.

Presupposing ALL of that -- I have spent the last couple weeks of mornings at the gym working my way through Generation Kill (yes, hello, thank you for your warm welcome to the year 2008) and I spent this past Friday's snow day investigating its fan fiction items. So, there are a lot of stories that take place in Boston while Nate is at Harvard. And this the thing: Nate's apartment.

Nate's fictional apartment is a magical place in walking distance to Harvard Square and convenient to a morning run along the Charles River. It is hard to explain why this is distractingly hilarious unless you have ever lived in an urban metropolitan area with a shitballs insane housing market. (If so, I'm sure you can find-and-replace for "place where it would be convenient to live, sure, if it was possible to exchange your first born child for a lease.") Anyway, I really want to read a story where Nate lives in Dial-a-Pizza Square. Or, even better, because the Kennedy School is over on Memorial Drive, he lives in BRIGHTON and rides his bike over the Larz Anderson Bridge [*] except when it gets too icy and then he has to take THE SIXTY-SIX BUS ZOOOOOOOOOOOOMG.

Ahem.

Actually, while I'm being an urbanite jerk-off, can we please talk about Fringe? I love this show, it is great, I don't care that it's a half-assed Vancouver-as-Boston, it would be fine if the show's writers weren't so SPECIFIC.

Like, I don't know, there was some episode where they were in an underground subway station, and Olivia very specifically and somewhat unnecessarily says "WE'RE AT ST. MARY'S STATION" which is fine except that St. Mary's is an above-ground stop on the Green Line. And on this week's episode ~~Pacey~~ Peter was like, "We're in Porter Square!" and then five seconds later, "Okay, we're on State Street!" Seriously, show, stop going out of your way to tell me where on a map of the Boston metro area you happen to be at this given moment, and I will stop laughing at you for creating a wormhole between Somerville and the Financial District.

* In the interest of full disclosure, I just wrote a whole post about Boston metro area inaccuracies and I did not know that the bridge that turns into JFK Street is called the Larz Anderson Bridge until I googled it. But sparkymonster didn't know either. "It's the one that's not the BU Bridge." "Yeah, the 66 bus bridge." "...that's probably not what it's actually called."

if buzzkill wants to be in a band, buzzkill's gonna be in a band

2011-01-02T19:51:03Z

Yuletide stories!

my assignment story:
low-hanging fruit of the poisonous tree
The Good Wife, Kalinda Sharma, 5300 words

When I got my assignment, I was like, "Okay, a story about Kalinda, awesome, let me just find a wiki for this show so I can refresh on what we've been told about her in canon. What, no show wiki? No recaps longer than three sentences? What kind of fandom is this? Oh ... right."

So I re-watched the ENTIRE first season and, hahah, a first season network drama is not terribly concerned with its character continuity. At one point, Kalinda, Carey and Alicia roll up to a private high school and Carey says, "This looks like my old high school" and Kalinda says, "This looks like schools I used to vandalize." And then, like, three episodes later Kalinda tells Alicia that she went K-12 to private Catholic school. Um, okay?

When I was finally done re-watching the first season I realized that ANOTHER episode of the second season had just aired. At that point my story was 85% done and the whole time I was watching it I was like, "Please do not be the episode that reveals Kalinda's secret past, pleaaaaaaaaase do not be the episode that reveals Kalinda's secret past." And it wasn't. But seriously, no more offering to write currently-airing network dramas.

Ultimately I was pretty happy with this story, even though I couldn't be stopped from giving it a bad pun Wheel of Fortune before-and-after title. Thanks to paintedmaypole and cathexys for the beta.

pinch-hit story I started writing at, like, 10:30ET on Christmas Eve:
the things we think and do not say
Friday Night Lights, Jason Street meets JD McCoy, 1600 words

In the thread of request prompts from pinch-hit writers, someone asked for a Friday Night Lights story that threw together one of the first season characters with one of the new kids. I loved this idea, FNL's ability to mash-up its characters in a way that feels like a crossover from within the show (best example ever: Tyra and Matt's grandma end up in the back of Landry's car together at the end of season one) is one of my favorite things.

So with 90 minutes to the story deadline, my thought process was: 1) Jason? Jason and ... JD? Jason and JD! 2) This morning I read an article in ESPN the Magazine about the difference between a good college player and a good college player who will also be good in the NFL 3) Two days ago I was going on at dinner about how the movie Jerry Maguire was briefly incredibly overrated and so now it's actually underrated.

And so from that point the story pretty much wrote itself. I am a football coach's daughter, and I love Friday Night Lights so much I can barely talk about it, let alone write chicken scratch in its universe. But I'm glad I finally managed something.

the awesome story I received:
get me away from here I'm dying
China Mountain Zhang, by kyrafic

Holy shit oh my God. Not only is this story a beautifully-written missing chapter from one of my favorite books, it was also written by one of my favorite people. It contains so many things I love (literally things that only someone who used to sit around and talk about dystopic fiction with me at work every day for two years would know) that I started laughing out loud when I was reading it. When I got to the part about the Green Line to Medford I almost fell out of the bed.

if the music ain't good well that's just too bad

2010-08-25T15:29:49Z

Rocks fall. Everyone dies.

[...]

I feel like the best way to explain the Hunger Games trilogy is to compare it to that grand old genre trilogy in the sky: Hunger Games is like Star Wars if every single movie was The Empire Strikes Back. I want to say that I was disappointed by the end of Mockingjay, but that's not entirely fair. Each of the first two books ended on a things-are-about-to-get-even-more-fucked note. The sentimental sap in me might have secretly hoped for a all-singing all-Ewok ending, but these books were always going to end with someone barely hanging on at Cloud City.

So, okay. War is hell. Even when you're fighting to defeat an oppressive dictatorship, this does not guarantee that the motives of your leaders are pure, and you may still have to do evil things (WARNING: WAR ON TERROR ANVIL ALERT). War destroys soldiers, even the ones who survive, and sends them home broken psychologically pretty much forever (SECONDARY ANVIL ALERT). I am both impressed that Suzanne Collins hammered this home so unilaterally in a young adult book and sad because my secret wretched fourteen-year-old self wanted the improbable plucky hero uplifting ending.

However, I do take issue with the resolution of the love triangle and the part that it played in Katniss' character resolution. One of the things I loved most about the first two books was the very deft way the love triangle was played. I liked that, most of the time, Katniss didn't really know how she felt about either Gale or Peeta, and I loved the quasi-meta moments where romantic interest would get raised and she would be like "UM SERIOUSLY WHAT DOES IT MATTER I'M JUST DOING WHAT I CAN TO KEEP EVERYONE ALIVE." On Monday night, I was trying to explain to Julia why I loved these books so much, and I compared it to the Twilight series, and how fans of those books have Team Edward and Team Jacob, but in the Hunger Games books, there's only one team and it's Team Katniss.

And in Mockingjay ... not so much. Peeta's hijacking is an interesting idea plot-wise, but it does crappy things to both characters. Peeta as a character in the first two books is kind of a blank slate. Everything that you know about Peeta is actually just something you know about how he feels about Katniss. I'm willing to let this slide because it's a twist from the usual formula, to have the male character be the reflective surface (to return to the metaphor of the previous paragraph: what do you know about Bella Swan besides the fact that she loves Edward Cullen). So to send Peeta back hijacked and then muddle the line between what memories are fear-brainwashing and what memories are him finally seeing Katniss' nature without love-sick goggles. Which again, is interesting, but since we're in her POV, it all gets very internalized as a) 100% accurate and b) completely deserving.

And that part just sucks. Katniss is a compelling character because she's obviously flawed and not entirely redeemable, and the brief moments where her internal-POV "oh I'm so unlikeable" are mirrored with external-POV (usually Haymitch) "yeah, you really are completely unlikeable" are killer because they're sparse. But Peeta sniping at her about their nights on the train in front of everyone just feels like this awful heavy-handed hammer of character assassination. And so the silver lining of the book is supposed to be that they confine her to District 12 instead of executing her for assassinating Coin but Peeta moves back to be with her and they learn to love each other on their own fucked-up terms and 15 years later Peeta CONVINCES HER THEY SHOULD HAVE KIDS?

I'm sorry. Madge dies, Finnick dies, pretty much every character introduced in the third book dies, the President of District 13 is just as evil as President Snow, Prim dies, Katniss' contribution to the actual defeat of the Capitol is watching Prim die and then waking up in a hospital bed (AGAIN), Katniss' mother deserts her because of her long-running weakness and grief, Gale's indirect contribution to Prim's death poisons their relationship forever, Katniss kills Coin but is redeemed because they decide she's too fucking broken and fucked up and crazy to be held accountable for her actions, but the silver lining is that she has nightmares for the rest of her life but eventually Peeta convinces her that she should GET OVER HER FEAR OF HAVING BABIES.

Ugh. Motherhood = happiness is ugh enough, but it's 1000% worse because it's not even her own decision, she makes a point of clarifying that Peeta had to talk her into it.

I guess that was ultimately my problem with this book, was Katniss' total loss of agency. Throughout the first first book and midway through the second, Katniss is presented as having no agency (life in District 12), attempts to assert control by trading a fucked-up situation for a more fucked-up situation (takes Prim's place in the reaping), realizes that she's traded one cage for another (the arena), decides again that self-determination is preferable even if it means certain death (the berries) and realizes again that she's traded one cage for another (from the arena to Snow's scrutiny). Her attempts to assert agency and her realization that there is no freedom as long as she still lives in Panem are a powerful narrative. Once she goes into the arena a second time, this all starts to fall apart a little bit. From halfway through Catching Fire, she is being manipulated by the Capitol, by the district rebels and by the District 13 military. That's a powerful narrative too, and there are similar moments of cages-within-cages (go off the sanctioned military mission to save people, great, you just made us another fantastic commercial!) that are true to the original narrative.

And so, the decision to shoot Coin can be interpreted as the ultimate assertion of agency, the realization that the biggest cage is bigger than the dictatorship of Panem, its power and what human beings are willing to do to each other to seize it. And if the book had ended with Katniss being executed, or Katniss in forever in solitary confinement, it would have depressing as all get the fuck out, but it would have been true to the story. The clumsy attempt to tack on a happy ending ("Peeta saw how terrible a person I really am but he still loves me, also I realized that I loved him best all along because Gale is too much like me, and I am bad and Peeta is good") and have the hazy sunshine epilogue of the happy ending be YAY BABIES sells those characters short.

Dear Internet:

Sorry we haven't talked in a while. I have a new job (Fancy title! Embarrassingly huge office! Staff of thirteen direct reports!) which is eating my face with its overwhelming new jobness, and some days I come home from work so exhausted I just sit on my bed and eat arugula directly from the bag for dinner.

Before I started this job at the end of July, I went on vacation and tried to remember how to write fan fiction, and have written 16,000 words of a Star Trek reboot story (yeah, I know, 18 months late to the party, awesome) which may or may not be terrible gibberish. Last week when I was eating at my desk instead of taking a lunch, I spent some time at Wikipedia University teaching myself astronomical spectroscopy, so there's ... that?

I saw and liked the movie Inception, but my only commentary was "Hahah, isn't it funny how you could show a blind person who doesn't speak English thirty seconds from Memento, The Prestige and Inception and they'd know that Christopher Nolan made all three movies?" But I saw the movie with my dad and his response was "I didn't get it. When were they dreaming?"

xoxo,
lj user equals throughadoor

"where are you mailing that ugly bunny?" "it's not a bunny, it's a bear in a bunny costume."

2010-04-06T15:49:44Z

Here is mostly what I've been doing since we last talked a couple months ago:

Last Wednesday morning, I was having an epic flounce fit about something too embarrassing to be reproduced in this space. When I finally flounced out the door to go to work, I tripped over a wet umbrella and fell down the stairs leading from our second floor apartment to our first floor entryway, smacking the SHIT out of my tailbone. [*] This hurts like a motherfucker and I have been hobbling around with an awkward old man gait. Which meant that on Saturday, when J & I were shoveling the two cubic feet of compost we had delivered to our house, I was ripe to fall down the cement stairs at the foot of our porch, accumulating assorted bumps, bruises and a six square inch gash on my shin that J and I have decided to name "Nester." [**] And despite these twin whine-inducing agonies, I actually called out sick on Monday because of a death in the family. [***]

[*] I'm assuming it's just a bruised tailbone. I didn't go to the doctor, utilizing the (possibly slightly faulty) rationale that J fell down the SAME SET OF STAIRS at Christmas and she was totally fine. Right? Right.

[**] The worst part about Nester is that his appearance coincided with the sudden onset of spring and made it really difficult to shave my legs. Which is much more problematic than it sounds, because I don't shave my legs in the winter unless I'm trying to make a girl like me. [****]

[***] I know it seems like I kind of buried the lede here, or possibly that I'm an asshole, but I swear, it's fine. It's more of a logistical nightmare than anything else.

[****] So I shaved my legs once this past winter and it worked as well as it always does, which is to say: NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT. The story of the last five years of my romantic history: Girls, not worth the leg stubble.

So nobody's missed much in my absence, is what I'm saying. Here, have three slightly topical but possibly somewhat dated opinions:

I am really enjoying The Good Wife. But not because of Josh Charles. I mean, I'm not not enjoying Josh Charles, but he is not actively driving my enjoyment of the show. I can't watch things with Josh Charles and just enjoy that Josh Charles is on my TV, because the whole time I'm like, "DANNY, WHAT ARE YOU DOING. GO BACK TO CSC. CASEY MISSES YOU, HE NEEDS YOU."

But seriously, The Good Wife is a really interesting show. The first season has been very ballsy with its pacing, holding certain emotional revelations and plot twists back for a lot longer than I would have expected on a show in its first season that didn't know it was going to get picked up. It has a slow, organic emotional reveal of the family drama that you usually only see on pay-cable shows anymore.

The show skirts a weird line when it comes to The Bechdel Test. The premise is basically the anti-Bechdel, because everything that happens to Alicia, everything anyone wants from Alicia, everything Alicia is able to achieve professionally, it's all inherently about Peter. It's not just that every conversation Alicia has is about Peter, every piece of jewelry she wears is about Peter. But I also think that we're supposed to question that. Additionally, the two other main female ensemble characters (a senior partner and a woman of color (!) in-house investigator) have conversations about pay equity and racism and gun control and other things that have nothing to do with boys.

Like most other first-world humans with eyeballs, I saw Lady Gaga's "Telephone" music video. I think it is ironic (and not this kind of "ironic") that so many people are complaining about the blatant nature of the video's product placement when 99% of them are probably watching the video for free on YouTube. Music videos used to exist as commercials-in-disguise to sell albums, that's why record companies paid to make them. Now that the way that music is bought (and not bought) has completely changed and MTV would rather show a 24 hour Jersey Shore marathon than a music video, do you think a record company is willing to shell out $10 million dollars to make a music video anymore? Yeah, probably not. You couldn't make that video today without sponsorship. So if you take advantage of the current climate of music distribution (eg -- you watch videos on YouTube), you have to be willing to accept the full package.

I am very concerned about a pressing mystery on Lost that will not be answered by the series finale. WHAT IS ~~THE DEAL WITH THE NUMBERS~~ ~~THE REASON WHY WOMEN CAN'T HAVE BABIES~~ WRONG WITH KATE'S PANTS? Prior to leaving the island, the set designers did a good job of making sure everyone wore the same few pieces of grubby clothing. Kate had one pair of jeans, and the longer the show was on the air, the more they went from looking "bootleg cut" to "comically wide flared bell bottom like something out of a musical theater performance of "Hair." I assumed this was just perception, fashion zeigist shifting toward skinnier and skinnier jeans between 2004 and now. But then Kate left the island, presumably was able to re-stock her wardrobe, and now she is back this season with that exact same ridiculously wide flare-legged pair of jeans. WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

february is self-portrait dedicated to leon trotsky month

2010-02-01T20:22:11Z

A couple weeks ago I fell completely down the rabbit hole listening to Jeffrey R. Derego's Union Dues short stories on the Escape Pod sci-fi short fiction podcast. Amazing, gritty, dystopic super hero stories. More superlatives and a list of all stories published to date here.

*

I'm doing some consulting for a farm cooperative in Haiti, so one of the phrases I've been writing over and over and has subsequently been rattling around in my head is "sustainable food economy." This weekend, I made chili to bring for this week's lunches and the hodge-podge of ingredients made me feel really pleased with a) my ability to throw together a week's worth of meals using pantry and freezer staples and b) my contribution to the sustainable food economy:

- frozen ground beef sparkymonster buys as part of a local farm share
- frozen homemade chicken stock
- pumpkin puree, roasted and frozen from the excess of last year's farm share
- parsnips from the dregs of this week's local farm box
- tomatoes roasted with pomegranate molasses, canned by J & I this past summer (tomatoes were sourced from our garden, our farm share and also from boxes of tomato seconds bought at the farmer's market)
- soaked dried beans from Rancho Gordo, a company that specializes in selling heirloom bean varieties.

I've also been making my own cornbread mix by blending coarse corn meal, wheat bran and flax seeds and it's really good, a lot lighter that you'd expect.

*

I have a new employee (so I now have a staff of FIVE JESUS CHRIST OMG) and she super-earnest and non-ironically says "tight" when another person might just say "yeah, okay." I'm really worried I'm going to pick up this verbal tic. I don't think I can pull it off the way she can.

*

I saw Empires at the Middle East last week! They were very charming. I stood in line for the bathroom being Sean Van Vleet but didn't realize who he was until he went onstage. smartlikejustin came with me, and it felt like it was 2003.

my mom saw me reading the handmaid's tale in 7th grade & confiscated it because it was "too adult"

2010-01-01T18:37:27Z

I wrote a Yuletide story!

Sisters of Bilhah
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

Several things:

1. It was physically painful for me to write this story in the first person. But the book was written in the first person, so it seemed like the only thing that made sense. But, ugh. Never again.

2. I loved doing all the ridiculous obscure research, like figuring out what part of China was a bone of contention in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Also: Theodora is the name of an age-appropriate, currently unmarried princess of Greece and Denmark, which I thought would make monarchistic incestuous sense because William's paternal grandfather was born into Greek and Danish royalty.

3. The fingerprints of Children of Men are all over this thing. For what it's worth, I came up with the undocumented refugee plot and then decided to re-watch the movie, not the other way around. In the epilogue, Professor Pieixoto mentions that only a very small number of women actually escaped to the UK. And since that didn't work for what I was writing, I thought it would be neat if only a very small number of women were legal residents of the UK, and there were a larger number of undocumented women.

4. Several people left really nice comments about how they enjoyed that the social work profession was given a less than rosy depiction. Which, hahah, that's what happens when someone who works in social services writes their Yuletide story while also working 11 hour days, taking round-the-clock phone calls from her staff while allegedly on vacation and generally thinking about lighting her office on fire.

5. There's like 75 things I wish I had been able to make space for in this story. I really wanted to write about the possibility of male Gilead refugees, and about the pre-coup relationship between the Sons of Jacob and Iran, and I feel like I completely dropped the ball when it came to considering the activities of Latin America. At one point I was walking around with a bunch of envelopes with the names of various countries and a list of things I decided were going on in that country.

6. I'm still not crazy about the title. I really wanted to have the title be an allusion to the biblical story of Hagar, which can be seen as a parallel to the story of Rachel and Bilhah. But I couldn't say, think, read or write the name "Hagar" without thinking of HAGAR the HORRIBLE, so.

7. Thank you, nozenfordaddy, for requesting a story about the suppressed relationships between women. I'm sorry I completely dropped the ball on the theocracy-as-government part of your request. I hope you still liked it.

in which it is no longer enough that 600 kids marched out to cut weeds

2009-12-31T20:11:36Z

I thought about it a lot this month and I've come to the conclusion that I just can't do it this year.

The Philip Baldwin Year in Review philosophy has always been about looking back on everything that's happened in the last year, good and bad, and believing that even the bad things were part of something good. When I look back on 2009 (a year that really seems to have been wretched by general consensus), even the good things were bad. Writing about wraparound prevention and stabilization services in the back of the room at Diesel, sending text messages from a strawberry festival in Dayton, Ohio, trying to put on mascara in the bathroom of a bus on the way to New York, Springfield finally calling me back. It all seemed good at the time but I can't even think about it now without being overwhelmed by embarrassment and humiliation.

In Interflux parlance: Wendy, Nathan's movie, Antiflux, the Vishnik prize. I tried for them all and I didn't even end up with a Volkswagen bug and a half-acre of Long Island woods. I got lucky exactly once this year, when I decided to get a tattoo in a spur-of-the-moment fit of self-involved existential temper tantrum and ended up with something I love. It says: I know you cannot live on hope alone. That pretty much sums it up. Now I just have to figure out what to do next.

*

On a less melodramatic note, these were my four favorite songs of 2009:

Glass // Bat for Lashes The PM sold me on Natasha Khan by describing her as the love child of Tori Amos, Kate Bush and Karen O, which is so, so, so true. This entire album feels like something that was made so 27-year-old me could listen to 15-year-old me's CD collection without the dying of embarrassment part.

Pete Wentz is the Only Reason We're Famous // Cobra Starship I keep trying to sell the album Hot Mess to people who wouldn't understand the punch line of this song's title by telling them that it was my favorite summer pop album since the Scissor Sisters' self-titled debut. Unfortunately, my friends are lame and this band is still called Cobra Starship.

Paparazzi // Lady Gaga Two things about Lady Gaga: (1) She actually reminds of Tori Amos even more than Natasha Khan. Tori Amos put out that awful late-eighties album Y Kant Tori Read, and after it flopped, she went around promoting it by singing its over-produced ballads solo on the piano. So Lady Gaga's solo piano renditions of her own songs always remind me of that. (2) No matter what else, "baby you'll be famous / I'll follow you until you love me" is one of the most nakedly honest and brutal lines I've ever heard in a pop song.

Hard Times // Patrick Wolf This album is weird. I read somewhere in 2008 that Patrick Wolf was trying to release an independently funded album called Battle. But then it was randomly released early in 2009 and now instead called The Bachelor. When I listen to it, and especially when I saw him in concert earlier this year, I feel like this was supposed to be one of those mid-decade political protest concept albums, but it came out too late.

*

Happy New Year.

ice age coming, ice age coming

2009-12-06T20:44:18Z

This pretty much sums up the tail end of 2009:

HER: "I just miss the way things used to be."
ME: "Yes, but--"
HER: "You don't even have to say it."
ME: "Say what?"
HER: "What I know you were about to say. What doesn't have to be said."
ME: [Distracted from what I was about to say, because what I am now thinking but not saying is "We don't have the kind of relationship where you know what I'm about to say."]

(This was not even some kind of non-con rom com scenario; the conversation was actually about bagels.)

i'm not street but i do what i gotta do

2009-09-09T14:50:38Z

Today is 09-09-09. It's also my birthday. I'm turning twenty-seven, which is 9 times 3. Some things:

! I feel like this day should be tremendously numerologically fortuitous, but so far I'm at work, the weather is crappy and my e-mail is broken. The only fortuitous thing I have done is wake up and decide to yank out the eyebrow ring I've had since 2002 because, hey, what the hell, I'm old now.

@ smartlikejustin: "Remember when I turned twenty-seven and you started telling me I was almost thirty?" throughadoor: "Mistakes were made."

# The only thing I know about being 27 is that, according to Jamesian sabermetrics, if I was a Major League Baseball player, I would be entering the prime of my offensive production. Instead, I am going to be forced to watch the Red Sox throw the slop that is Paul Byrd on the mound tonight against the Orioles.

Some other things:

$ My summer of vacationing like a Democratic candidate for president (New York, a multi-city trip through Ohio, California, Illinois) is over. I had a lot of fun (my last campaign stop was a Little Red Apartment mini-reunion with smartlikejustin, imogenics and paintedmaypole in Chicago), but I have not been in my apartment in three straight weekends and it is a wreck and the furthest I am traveling prior to Christmas is across the river to Allston for football games.

% When I was in California I was sick the whole ten days (I am like 47 percent certain that I actually had H1N1) and I saw a lot of movies. 1) The Time Traveler's Wife (this review sums it up best, although it does not fully prepare you for how much Eric Bana's ass is the uncredited third co-star of that movie) 2) Inglourious Basterds (I saw this with my father, and afterward I said "I liked it except for the part with the stereotypical "everyone dies, but the women manage to die in a manner of particularly blatant sexualized violence" Tarantino movie problem" and my Dad said, "...") and 3)

^ While traveling I read The Sparrow and Children of God by Mary Doria Russell, which are books about Jesuit Priests in Space (!!!) and are oh-my-God-so-amazing and also two of the most depressing books I've ever read. I'm currently finishing up The Battle for America 2008 which is very engrossing in a "this is how to properly prepare a campaign strategy to succeed in states with complicated caucus rules" kind of way but I think I still preferred Newsweek's book-length embedded coverage of the election, which had more stories about the epic bromance of John McCain and Lindsey Graham and has actually been published as an actual book.

& Even if you have trained yourself to ignore anything even remotely related to bandom, I strongly recommend Cobra Starship's new album "Hot Mess," which is the best summer pop album to come out in five years, at least.

* If you think that hating Orson Scott Card should be a sanctioned national pastime, you will enjoy this blog post.

when white people fuck up, a continuing series

2009-07-31T16:18:43Z

I wanted have something profound or thought-provoking or interesting to say on the occasion of International Blog Against Racism Week (ibarw). That never quite came together, so I'm retreating to familiar territory: When White People Fuck Up.

I hope that I am a good anti-racist ally. Julia likes to joke that I "came trained out of the box" because my line of work has afforded me the opportunity to attend a lot of formal anti-racism workshops and trainings. But I still fuck up. Unintentionally, but I still fuck up all the time. One thing that's come up this week is that many people of color only feel comfortable having discussions about internalized racism in private spaces, which is completely understandable. On the flip side of that, though, I think that white people have an obligation to discuss their racism-related fuck-ups in public spaces, so here's one I made this week:

My boss is black. She's worked at this organization for about a year, and worked in Boston for about four years. Because of where our office is located, this is the first job she's had in Boston where it makes the most sense for her to take the train to work. I complain about the MBTA like it's my job, but I love taking the train to work, I love not having to commute by car, you couldn't pay me to start driving to work again. She hates it, complains about it all the time, says she can't wait until our office moves and she can start driving again. Every time she complains about how much she hates taking the T to work, I have a moment of feeling morally superior, because public transportation is better for the environment, it's less expensive, it forces you to get more exercise, blah blah blah etcetera.

This morning she told me about how some guy was harassing her on the train and the conductor eventually had to stop the car and get transit police involved. And then I thought, "Huh. This isn't the first time she's told me a story like this. She tells a story about getting hassled on the train at least once every other week." And then, well, duh -- maybe I should have considered that she hates riding the T because she's a young black woman traveling alone and she's more likely to get hassled.

Is that the truth? I don't know. Maybe she hates riding the T because she's agoraphobic or because, well, it's the MBTA, it sucks. But the point is that I was reminded that I interpret EVERYTHING through the perspective of a middle-class white girl, and every assumption I make based on that perspective is an opportunity for me to check my privilege.

So I did. Was it earth-shattering? No. Am I asking for a pat on the back? Seriously, no. What I'm trying to say is this: it's really, really easy to assume that the white experience is the default experience. But it's nearly almost as easy to catch yourself doing it and say "yeah, no, stop doing that." Admit to yourself that you fucked up, and stop doing it. Admit that you fucked up in public, so other people see how easy it is. Lather, rinse, repeat.

thought i was over the bridge now

2009-07-14T15:33:15Z

What's new is the text on the left arm, although she also basically completely re-inked the circle on the right arm, which healed funny when I first got it two years ago. She asked me where I got my work done and, it's weird, even though I've lived in Boston for five years, I've never been tattooed here before. The star on the right arm was done in Portland, Oregon, the circle in Washington, DC and the star on the left arm in Burlington, Vermont.

close-up:

The quote is Harvey Milk, the full text of which is: I know you cannot live on hope alone, but without it life is not worth living. And you, and you, and you. You gotta give 'em hope. A less cynical person probably would have gotten the more recognizable money shot ("you gotta give 'em hope"), but, well, you know how I do. I feel a little funny getting it so soon after the movie because I don't want people to be like, "Oh yeah, I liked that movie, too!" I mean, I did like that movie, but Harvey has been my queer/personal/political avatar since I checked The Mayor of Castro Street out of the Sonoma County Public Library when I was in the 10th grade and he's the only person whose words I can't imagine being embarrassed by ten or twenty years from now.

The font is, if it's not obvious, not a font at all but my handwriting. The artist did a really nice job, I think, she didn't just photocopy it but actually traced the outline of each word, so it really does look like I wrote on my arm with a Sharpie, if I could get my hand to bend that way.

said i was a nerd but i ain't a punk

2009-06-29T15:12:38Z

movies: I saw Moon this weekend and it was really charming and excellent.

television: I weirdly really loved the Virtuality orphaned pilot/movie thing, thus 110% ensuring that it will not get picked up.

Obviously it's problematic that the heterosexual couple was having hot sex and leaving g-string panties all over the greenhouse and the gay couple was being told by the reality tv producers that they needed to be more queeny and campy and trying to turn that into a meta-commentary doesn't make it okay, you fuck faces. But! I really loved the moment when the gay couple was in the confessional after the commander died because they had such genuine body language, which was almost more stomach-punching than sexing in the greenhouse would have been.

This is a little tangential, but it reminded me of Dan Savage's book about adopting his son -- he and his boyfriend decide to do an open adoption, and the process involves the birth mother getting a binder of profiles of prospective adoptive couples and the profile includes a picture. They're looking at one of the binders and they see that all the couples (who are all heterosexual) are draped all over each other in their pictures. They somehow know that they can't do that in their picture, so they end up taking a picture of themselves sitting side-by-side with their shoulders barely touching.

Anyway, I'm glad the cute little gay couple did not have to sit side-by-side in the confessional with their shoulders barely touching. And I think I would have really liked this show. Seriously, does anyone else ever wonder if there is a studio exec at Fox that has some secret life-long grudge against the science fiction genre so they order that the network buy up all sci-fi related pilots in order to then swoop in and cancel them? I'm starting to get that feeling.

music: Here are three songs that were my summer anthems in summers past, because apparently summer 2009 is never going to bust through this perpetual monsoon and make an appearance already:

Scissor Sisters // Laura
N.E.R.D. // Things Are Getting Better
Nelly // Work It (Back in Black remix)

you were my husband, my wife, my heroine

2009-06-22T17:18:07Z

So it's late June, and for most of the five years I have lived in Boston, this has meant three things:

1. Trying to figure out if it has ever in the history of time been this cold and rainy this late into June (Katie's birthday is helpful for this, I just remember all the years that her birthday party was threatened by a monsoon and conclude the world is probably not coming to an end).
2. Feeling cautiously cocky about the Red Sox chances. (Three games up with this crappy, uneven pitching & Papi still coming out of his slump, and before whatever blockbuster trade I'm sure Theo is masterminding? Yes, please.)
3. OH MY GOD I HAVE TO START PACKING SOON I CAN'T BELIEVE I'M MOVING SEPTEMBER FIRST.

Except, hooray, for the first time in three years, I am NOT moving in September, J & I will be staying right in the magical bosom of Medford. To celebrate, have some DIY porn, things about my apartment that are currently making me really happy:

adventures in apartment gardening:

Most of the action is here in the raised bed. The front is all herbs (basil, parsley, basil, sage, rosemary, cilantro, basil, basil, basil -- we, uh, really like basil), and in the back there are three kinds of lettuce and along the left-hand side there are various types of peppers.

(The raised bed is just plywood I purchased at Home Depot, assembled into a frame with an electric screw driver. When I was buying the lumber, the dude employee came up to me with "must help confused girl" face and I was like "Yeah, I see you have 2 by 10 by 8s, I'm actually looking for 2 by 10 by 10s," which is to say, bitch, I got dragged along as a child to Home Depot more often than most kids get taken grocery shopping, I know my way around plywood.)

This is, like, 1/4th of our tomato plants. These are just the ones that are on the balcony off my room, there's a bunch more scattered around downstairs. (Although the balcony hosts the only classily-repurposed kitty litter container planters.) All these tomato plants are ones that we started growing from seed in a tray under a grow light when there was still snow on the ground in March.

Like I said, sometimes you just have to have a ... lot of tomatoes. And you run out of planters. And empty kitty litter containers. So you start planting your tomatoes in recycle bins. (Hey, they already have built-in drainage!)

the much-discussed salvaged wood tv stand:

Before I visited my parents in March, I mentioned to my dad that I really wished I could build a tv stand because our current one was made of wretched particle board and also had a dangerous tendency to sway from side to side. My dad being, well, my dad, was like, "Oh, we can build one here, and disassemble it, and mail it to you!" So that's what we did. Except it's even more awesome than that: at one point during the last five or ten years, my dad built his business partner a television stand, and he built one for our old house, the one where I grew up. When both my dad and his business partner bought televisions that were too big for their current tv stands (of course they did), my dad did not put the stand on the curb or sell it on Craigslist like a normal person, he dismantled each stand and kept the wood around the garage just, you know, in case he ever needed it. So we built the whole thing using salvaged wood from the two old stands, and the only new material we had to buy was some L-shaped brackets.

So then it took my parents three months to get around to mailing it to me, and then I was out of town for three straight weekends, but then furniture assembling super-hero kirbybits came over and we drank a six-pack and she worked her magic. Seriously, this stupid piece of furniture makes me so happy, it's embarrassing. Growing up, the house was full of stuff my dad built (including, uh, the house itself). When I left home I took the wood bedframe he built me when I was in junior high. But it wasn't meant to be disassembled and I lived in progressively narrow-stairwelled Boston apartments and eventually I had to abandon it and I was weirdly sad that there was nothing in my house that my dad had built. But now there is.

ETA: The real reason why we can never leave this apartment.

love is best an allusion

2009-06-04T05:25:32Z

Oh, livejournal.com, I am full of confusing feelings (and perhaps a little bit too much wine).

1. On the one hand, tonight I made delicious fish tacos with cilantro pesto. On the other hand, the occasion of the dinner was that I was saying goodbye ~~forever~~ to annakovsky & moireach. I am told that the suspiciously southern states to which they are both relocating are possible to visit, but I'll believe it when I see it.

2. Additionally, tomorrow I am going on VACATION for seven days, which is good because things have been so tardgames at work that today I almost lost lost my entire god damn mind when one of my co-workers ate my yogurt. On the other hand, this is a vacation to meet up with my parents in Dayton, Ohio to visit my 95-year-old grandmother (who I like just fine) and various other step-family members (who I loathe with varying degrees, ranging from mild to "my mortal enemy in the wilderness, the person I hate more in this world than anybody"). On the non-existent proverbial third hand, I am going to be spending the second half of my week in Cleveland where I will be able to lay eyes on imogenics who I have not seen since last November, which is made of yay, even if it is going to require a five-hour Greyhound bus trip across, you know, Ohio.

3. Also, I have somewhat recently managed to start dating this girl, but last weekend I was in New York and then she was in Florida and now I'm going to be in Ohio and the bad timing is such that we aren't going to see each other for, like, two weeks and it's giving me feelings, incredibly wretched feeeeeeeelings. I guess that's how it's supposed to work, but, ugh.

Here, please download some music:

1. Hard Times // Patrick Wolf (From his new album! Does anyone want to go see him at the Middle East downstairs on June 21? ... anybody?)
2. Prophets // A.C. Newman (The song playing over the last scene of the How I Met Your Mother finale)
3. Running Up That Hill // Patrick Wolf (Kate Bush cover)
4. Spit the Dark // Empires (Acoustic version snagged from their myspace page. If anyone has a version with a higher bitrate, let me know?)
5. I'm On Fire // Bat For Lashes (Bruce Springsteen cover)
6. Is It Love? // Todd Thibaud (live)
7. Merry Happy // Kate Nash