From Don't Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff




"By early November of 2001, there is no need to look to the past for our daily dose of tawdry. While the rest of the country has wrapped itself in the flag and emerged newly patriotic and bellicose, New York scarcely two months after September 11 has tempered the jingoism by rising like a drunken, horny phoenix from its ashes. The city is electric with the renewed crackle of filth. Chalk it up to that old market-theory chestnut about the rising hemline in the plummeting economy, or that people simply don't want to spend their nights alone. The media have coined a term for the transitory love-in-wartime clutches they claim are happening everywhere: Terror Sex."

- On Penis Puppetry
"Even though the temple on stage has a Latin designation, it feels quite Greek in here. I mean Greek in that binge-drinky, Daliesque-arcs-of-airborne-vomit, ripe-with-incipient-danger-of-date-rape, college fraternity sense of the word, as opposed to the Aegean birthplace of democracy."

- On crowds standing outside a Today Show taping
"The contact sought with 'HI GRANDMA AND GRANDPA I MISS YOU. LOVE PRINCESS GABBY' is intimate. Watching [the] Today [show], even in public, is a very personal pursuit. The members of the crowd are not doing this for what could be characterized as the typical reality-television kind of attention: that disinhibited, oversexualized, bereft-of-pride behavior that makes people - whose parents are presumably still alive - allow themselves to be filmed having catfights while wearing thongs, or tucking into heaping plates of beef rectums (while wearing thongs). The simple act of standing, clothed, in the street with naught but a homemade sign seems almost Louisa May Alcott-sweet by comparison."

- On The Log Cabin, a gay Republican group:
"As someone who can still barely comprehend the concept of Jewish conservatives, despite their shaming and undeniable existence, I know I am a naive throwback to a time when both visible and invisible minorities largely allied themselves with progressive politics. Having only arrived in D.C. on an overcast day in October 2003 for my first direct encounter with gay Republicans, I am a veritable Darwin in the Galapagos, slack-jawed in the presence of this confounding genus, a creature that seems to invite its own devouring; the cow helpfully outlining its tastiest cuts on its side with chalk, while happily pouring the A-1 sauce over its own head."


"To briefly rant about The Swan, the television show that takes depressed female contestants - all of whom seem to need little more than to change out of their sweat suits and get some therapy - and makes them all over to look like the same trannie hooker: what makes The Swan truly vile is that for the months that these women are being carved up like so much processed poultry, all the mirrors in their lives are covered over. Such willing abrogation of any say or agency in how they will be transformed BY DEFINITION means that in the real world, they would not be candidates for surgery. It is the very sleaziest of all the plastic surgery makeover shows - quite a distinction, that; like being voted the Osbourne child with the fewest interests."


"It can be hard to remember what one's anticipatory image of something was once you're on the other side. I'm no longer sure exactly what it was I was waiting for, but I do know that it was something wholly unfamiliar and thrilling. Like a new color. Not a mixture, no trace of blue or yellow or red. What would that look like? I have some basic understanding about light - how it can only be broken down and refracted into its seven constituent hues - and even though I know that the physical world makes the existence of such a thing basically impossible, I'd still really like to see that."

too much, too soon

School started on the 14th. Syllabi always seem so long in the beginning - so many things to do before May. By the time March or April comes, there's just too little time to get it all finished.

I will never advise someone to have a long distance relationship.

I hate moving.




That is all

From Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver

"What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, 'What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not runs off screaming into the woods?'"


"...the very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That's about it. Right now I'm living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides."


"That's the great American disease, we forget. We watch the disasters parade by on TV, and every time we say: ' Forget it. This is somebody else's problem.'"


"Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity after their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it's the same amount of infinity, rolling out in all directions from where we stand."

I'm not really surprised I got sick a couple of days in to my new routine. That's just my luck. It's been really hard to avoid things like broccoli and cheese soup with a huge chunk of thick, crusty bread - all I want to do is curl up in bed and eat soup all day. Not to mention it's rather difficult to motivate yourself to exercise when you can only half-breathe out of one nostril. Rather than throw out the routine all-together and pick it up once this cold passes, I've been running on a half-routine. Still eating healthier, but allowing myself to give in to a cookie every once in a while.

My biggest challenge, so far, has been portion control. Rather than just eating until I am full, I am forcing myself to make a conscious decision as to when I am finished eating. It's weird sitting down to a meal and not feeling totally stuffed. Well, it's weird, yet it's nice. I can eat a meal and not feel like I need to lay down for a couple hours afterwards while my body digests the ball of pasta rolling around in my stomach.

At first I still felt hungry after my designated portion. I've found, however, that if I give myself 20 minutes and then decide whether I'd like to eat something else. Most of the time, I am not.

I've also started writing everything down that I eat. It helps to give you a more visceral image of what you are putting into your body every day. This little freeware is awesome. Just another little way to give myself a better idea as to just exactly what I am eating every day.

I'm dying.

It's true. I can only breathe out of one nostril, and my eyeballs feel hot. I'm pretty sure I have a fever.

At the actual stroke of midnight, we were dancing to "Billie Jean"