Attn: Monmouth College

What is going on up there?

Signed,
A Concerned Alumna

(I saw Mulholland Dr. for the first time the other night but I can't talk about it right now because I'm home alone and I'll start picturing that scary dreadlocky caveman guy who lives behind the diner if I dwell on it too long AHHH TOO LATE ALREADY NOOO)

CURB: "You May Be Right' followed closely by "It's Still Rock N' Roll to Me" me: ok, ok, i can respect that4:00 PM CURB: uh....YEAH, you CAN  cause those are the two best BJ tunes EVER  (and by BJ i mean, Billy Joel) 4:03 PM me: haha i know, i almost abbreviated just now   personally i think you need to listen to "big shot" a few times over and get back to me CURB: i love "big shot" - but it's not greater than the two i listed - only the hook me: you may be right is pretty lame sauce  it's still rock and roll is good  acceptable  acceptable votes CURB: lame sauce?

I posted the following as my Facebook status yesterday:

best billy joel song! go!

and your basic brand of chaos ensued. Nobody really gives a rip about Billy Joel, seriously, but everyone has a favorite song of his and people come into this argument with gloves OFF. I got 53 comments on that status, voting for everything from "Pressure" (blargggcallanambulanceblarghgh) to "Big Shot," which is right.  

Some things to notice about the above "Big Shot" video (uh, I use "video" loosely):

• The mustache on that opening riff! Oh mustache, my mustache!
• Billy Joel is wearing a letterman's jacket with "Billy Joel" written on the back
• Drummer unnecessarily standing from :40-:59 (to hit one cymbal with one drumstick)
• Billy's two dance moves, "Act out the Lyrics" and "Weakly Imitate Mick Jagger"
• "You had to be a BEEG shot, DEENTCHA" at 2:33 (best part, obviouslyyyy)
• 2:57: finally, a use for the piano
• (Also, for C-U natives: Billy's uncanny resemblance to Dave King.) WHAT THE.

Usually I close my eyes and I try to re-remember the details of my car wreck, all the heat and the glass and the noise at once.

in the first two weeks of august:

we moved to urbana, into a two-story house of our very (rented) own
i left the world of part-time receptionisting behind
and leapt forward into a career as a copyeditor (which i love)
i had two big writing deadlines for school
OH, and i started watching pushing daisies on netflix

so that's why i haven't been around much.

life is really, really, really great and i am feeling very happy and fulfilled and thankful to be alive.

(via Jessamyn, who took a class with David Foster Wallace in 1987. I saw it on The Rumpus.)

Having a professor or mentor who gives your work careful, optimistic attention is an incredible motivator. It's humbling enough just to have a writer I admire take a practiced look at something I invented, some flimsy people I made up in my head.

1. Marshmallows

and 2. Louis C.K. (you're watching Louie, right?) (P.S. Hey both of these videos are probably NSFW and contain "strong" language!)

***

Larry's birthday was on Tuesday, and to celebrate we went to dinner at Boltini and stuck around for our first-ever trivia night.

Spoiler alert: We got second place. Don't bother double-checking, you read that right: second place at our first-ever trivia night. Our team consisted of my parents, Larry, me, Josh, Niccole, and Brandon T. Washington, all of us sitting impractically in a line of tall stools pushed up to the bar where our dinner plates had just been cleared. Between rounds, people stopped to say hi, wish a happy birthday to Larry,  tip a drink or hug a hug, and then agonize over the year the Berlin Wall was built, or about the name of a 2004 Stephen King miniseries.

I'd planned for Larry's three best friends to let themselves in at our place and be well settled into our couch with several boozes and a record on by the time we got home from dinner, when dinner was the only plan, but halfway through the day, Larry suggested we go out for trivia night, and so I e-mailed the boys, frantically capital: DUDES. CHANGE OF PLANS and within one hour all three of them, all with families at home and a stack of plates always spinning, confirmed: Roger that. Boltini. Trivia.

Larry, this familiar face. People talk to him everywhere we go.

I got an email from Lulu (the company that prints my book of feminist-leaning advice for girls) yesterday that said they'd recently fixed a bug that was causing a delay in the search results for my book. As penance, they're offering a coupon code for 15% off (spoiler alert: the book is only $7.99 to begin with, so that makes it pretty damn cheap!):

 This is quite an opportune time to recommend the book to that girl you know who could use some encouragement, or to pick up a copy for yourself and see what it's all about...

The thing that no one tells you about posing nude for money is the gratefulness you inspire in people, the generosity. Not everyone is willing to take her clothes off in front of strangers, and the thought of accepting money for doing so alienates us more from the possibility. This is the Midwest. Most people get naked only under obligation, and only in front of certain people--doctors and lovers. Never people we pass on the sidewalk in the mornings, squinting into the sun and tossing our keys to avoid making eye contact. Not our bosses, who can measure our skirts for decency, or grocery store clerks or waiters, whose names we forget as soon as they're given, hustled by the dinner order moving up to bat. We shrink back from seeing the average stranger naked. Strangers wear flannel. Strangers float in slow circles at the noisy public pool and sweat into the water fountain at the park. Strangers' scalps get oily; they rub their palms on their slacks and put ointment on their blisters. We only think of ourselves as  the ones who get routinely naked, without comment, who scrub ourselves in the same hypnotized pattern in every morning shower, who spend tv commercials absentmindedly fingering scabs and pinching pouches of thinning skin.

Not only did I live alone, but I lived in a basement. You passed through two echoing metal doors before standing in the crooked doorway of my underground apartment, the floor leading to the laundry room stained with grease and rock salt. My two rooms were tiled and clean and collected heat like cupped hands, so in the summer, I splayed out in an blue upholstered chair in the kitchen, naked with the blinds pulled closed, holding a book open with one hand and picking at the bumps of ingrown hairs with the other. I would put on clothes to check the mail, or to ride my bike, even pulling on a pair of miniscule khaki shorts under my dress in order to avoid getting leered at by any passing motorists. One day a man did speak to me--an older man with a short grey beard wired tight like steel wool. We met on our bikes where two gray paved streets collide in a questionable area of town and he said, "This day is for you, darlin! A beautiful day for a beautiful girl!" and I couldn't argue with him that it was a beautiful day, the kind so blue and promising that it makes me believe in fate, and true love. I was almost twenty-three.

I'd anticipated an intensive job interview. That had been my first mistake, which turned into my first clue: I think you go see Shirley for that, said the first secretary I introduced myself to, turning to a woman next to her, isn't it Shirley who takes care of the models? And then Shirley, two floors down, had me fill out the form right there at her desk, without even handing me a clipboard, and all she wanted to know about me was my name and my social security number, for tax purposes. I'd be making $12 an hour, she said, and I should show up in two days, fifteen minutes early for the 1 p.m. advanced art class. I should probably bring a bathrobe.

(Next...my tube of Rolaids, my first art class, and the bruises I got from the tuba.)

Somewhere in another universe, John Waters and I are super-best friends and we live together in a mansion and eat eggs together every morning and smoke cigarettes and go-go dance all afternoon. It pains me that this universe is not that one. I want to write him a letter and beg for an audition or something, insist it's high time he wrote a play.