Titles of Less Interesting Books

1. Sense and Stability

2. Elizabeth Urello’s Diary

3. Infinite Pun

4. A Visit From the Pep Squad

5. To the Outhouse

6. The Daily Routine of Kavalier & Clay

7. Eat Pray Sleep

8. The Phantom of the Office

9. The Sound and the Comprehension of That Sound

10. The Long Well-Adjusted Life of Oscar Wao

11. Let Me Go Immediately

12. Calvin & Susie

13. Tender Is the Chicken

14. The Mortgaging of Hill House

15. The Bearable Lightness of Being With Jesus

What do you guys think of Twitter? Are you long-form or short-form interneters?

But look:

On Wings, the main characters are a pair of brothers, Joe and Brian Hackett.

Joe Hackett is the responsible Hackett brother. He is sort of uptight. He often argues with Brian, who is an irresponsible man-child who is always making jokes and playing pranks. Brian often wears Hawaiian shirts to better emphasize his personality, whereas Joe usually wears a bomber jacket. Here are the two of them, in representative attire:

(via)

Can you think of another pair of brothers, one responsible and one a joker, who wear, respectively, a bomber jacket and a Hawaiian shirt?

(via)

On Wings, we also have Helen Chapel, and on CNDRR, we have Gadget. Now, Helen is a waitress/cellist and Gadget is a mechanic, but the main thing is, they both have long blond hair that comes to a point in the back, and they’re both women, who often express frustration with the bickering brothers in their lives.

Here’s Helen standing by a plane holding coffees:

(via)

And here’s Gadget standing by a plane holding tools:

(via)

I mean, come on! Right?

Finally, on Wings, we have Roy Biggins, a big, fat grump with a little mustache who everyone alternately hates and feels sorry for. And on CNDRR? Monterey Jack! Big fat mouse with a moustache! Okay, okay, granted, the two characters are really nothing alike, but just look at them:

(via)

(via)

Right? I think I’ve made my point. And yeah, I know, there are a bunch of Wings characters that don’t have obvious parallels in CNDRR. I guess you can argue that Zipper is similar to Tony Shaloub or something. But my point is, there are a lot of parallels, don’t you agree?

Say you agree. Just give me this one. I really care about it, for some reason.

Following up on my earlier post about Morocco, I am still going, and in fact, am leaving within the week. Turned out the cheapest, easiest option was to fly through London, so my friend R and I are flying out this Saturday night, then flying to Fes Sunday evening, then flying back to London on the 3rd, then home on Saturday the 5th. This trip marks a number of travel firsts for me: it’s the first time I’ve ever traveled anywhere (out of the country) for so short a time (previously, I was in Italy for 2 months and in Asia for 3½); it’s the first time I’ve traveled in winter; and it’s the first time I’ve traveled with anyone. For the first thing, I’m really trying not to be such an American about traveling – I haven’t been out of the country since I got back from Asia in 2006, because I’ve been waiting until the next time I move cities, but now I have decided that I should really try to take a short trip every year, even if I don’t have any money.

I’m mostly worried about the middle of those three concerns – I have no idea at all what to bring. I’m carrying my old pack (which my Dad very sweetly washed for me), but it’s pretty small and can’t hold two weeks worth of clothes, much less two weeks worth of winter clothes. Every other time I’ve traveled, I’ve brought a giant wad of tissue-weight sundresses and a pair of flip-flops.

As to traveling with someone, I think that R and I will travel well together, as we both have the same general philosophy, which is to just buy plane tickets and figure out everything else when we get there. Both of us like to wander around alone, and neither of us are particularly pressured about cramming things in (this weekend, some friends were saying that we have to ride a camel through the desert because it will be our only chance to do that, and both R and I were like, ‘Why would this be our only chance to do that?’). R has expressed some concern about the fact that I am constitutionally unable to speak up if I disagree with something or don’t want to do something, so she’s worried that I’ll tag along with her politely doing things I’m not really interested in. Which, you know, I probably will, but I’ve been doing that since birth, so I don’t see the issue.

I’m mostly just worried about leaving Thomasina for two weeks by herself – she’s going to be so lonely! What if she turns feral? She’s always just on the brink, as it is. My wonderful roommate has agreed to feed her, but I doubt she will spend 30 minutes a night petting Thomasina’s face, like I do. Partly because she actually has a life, and partly because if she gets anywhere near Thomasina, Thomasina will surely bite her. Our impending separation particularly concerns me just now, as we haven’t spent much time together over the past few weeks – I have, very uncharacteristically, been a right social butterfly lately, as it’s January and I’m attempting to combat my seasonal depression the natural way, by faking a manic episode, and meanwhile, Thomasina has been absolutely consumed by her latest project. She has tasked herself with entirely chewing through a 5’x7’ jute rug, which is quite the undertaking for a 2 pound rabbit, and she is pursuing her goal with a dedication and single-mindedness that any of us might envy (above is a photo of Thomasina under my bed, surrounded by the many, many things with which I have provided her for chewing, other than the rug; still, she prefers the rug and I have to respect that). So, we’ve both been busy and a little distant, and I worry she won’t even remember me when I get back.

Anyway!

Naturally, I will blog about my trip here and post photos and everything, so those of you who followed my travel blog but don’t read this one, this is where it will be. But here’s the thing, y’all – I’m not going to post in real-time, because I’m only going for two weeks and I’m not going to spend several hours every other night sitting in an internet cafe, so I’ll post it all when I get back. Sorry, I know that’s not as much fun, but it will be nice to have ready-made content for this blog for awhile. Check back on the 7th or 8th (or, well, 9th).

Speaking of content and the blog, I’ve never done any sort of metapost about this blog, and this seems like as good a time as any. Remember when this blog was consistently funny? Good times. That was back when I started this here thing, in March 2007, which was about a month after I first moved to NYC. So, it’s been up almost four years, but that also includes the several months during which I took the whole blog down entirely because someone I really admire said something mean to me and it made me sad. To date, the blog has nearly 47,000 views, which isn’t that many, and it consistently gets around 30-40 views a day, sometimes more, sometimes less.

At first, I posted something funny about once a week; then, for a long time, I posted something funny twice a week and something topical three times a week; then, I posted nothing for months; then, I posted a lot of very boring short posts about nonsense because I felt like it; and now I post anywhere from weekly to daily about whatever happens to occur to me.

On July 3, 2007, I posted this about the igoogle teahouse fox theme page. The igoogle team found it and emailed it around, which bumped me up in the google rankings, and to date, this is my most viewed post and most of my traffic comes from searches related to the teahouse fox theme.

On August 18, 2010, I posted this poem, and I made WordPress’s Freshly Pressed page, resulting in my highest viewed day (2,408 views) and my most commented post (96 comments). This is my second most-viewed post on the blog.

My third top post is this one, which is not one of my funnier posts by a long shot, but which is the source of a lot of my traffic, because people overwhelmingly come to this blog after searching for various iterations of “how to meet my dream man,” which is a constant source of amusement to me every time I look at my stats. In fact, the very top search that brings people to my blog, ahead of even ‘accismus’ or anything to do with teahouse fox, is “how to meet the man of your dreams.” Which, all I can say about that is, I am so sorry. I have no expertise on this subject at all, and never claimed to. The only thing I might say? Very gently, here in your ear, just us girls together? Is that if this dream man is so very elusive…perhaps he does not really want to be found. Just saying.

My fourth most-viewed post is this one, which people find by googling the Columbia J-school application test. I wrote this post because Columbia used to have this very multiple-choice test up on their site as a sample of what you would have to take as part of your application, but they removed it not long after I posted this and from what I can tell, they no longer require such a thing, probably because they realized how moronic it was.

My fifth top post is this one, because, YOU GUYS, I cannot even TELL you how many people out there are searching for “Kaley Cuoco diet and exercise routine.” Seriously, people, what is the deal? Get yourselves a hobby!

The sixth is this MySpace Quiz bit, which I only mention because, ha, MySpace, what? People still google that?

So, there you have it. When I first started this blog, I would never have believed that I would one day be the top source on the web for finding the man of your dreams, and for information on Kaley Cuoco’s diet and exercise routine, but life takes you places you don’t expect.

I don’t have any grand insights into blogging or anything. To have a successful blog, you need a topic, and obviously, this blog has no topic at all. I didn’t start it to have a successful blog, though – I just wanted to be entertaining on a small scale, and to have something to do with bits I thought up that didn’t really work in a play or a sketch. When I used to blog really regularly and I had a regular following, I used to freak out when I’d post something and get no positive feedback on it. That made me feel really lonely, and was a constant source of stress. But now that I don’t necessarily have a regular following, the occasional random post that gets a lot of compliments is just a happy accident, but I don’t sit around being all, “Oh, God, why can’t I think of anything funny? What if I can’t ever think of anything funny again?” Which is what I used to do when I was actually pursuing comedy out in the real world, and that’s understandable, but that type of stress for a tiny little blog I write for free is just not worth it, and that’s the answer to why this blog doesn’t feature as many humor pieces as it used to: because there’s nothing in it for ME, you ungrateful little shits!

Finally, looking back over my entries, here are some of my favorites over the years that don’t get that many views, and a few I’d forgotten about, but still made me laugh:

• Community Rules for Separate Commons, Communal Living Experiment for Introverts
• Further Excerpts from Susan Sontag’s Journals and Notebooks
• Don’t Give Up On Your Dreams
• At Home with the Woolfs, Part One (If you think you’re missing something on this post, you’re not.  I have no idea why the hell I wrote it, or what it’s about, or why it’s “part one,” but for whatever reason, I still think it’s funny.)
• Elizabeth Bennett’s Missed Connections
• All My Friends Are Turtles:  The Unpublished Journals of April O’Neil
• While I’m At Work, and You Are Home Alone This Summer
• The Inexplicably Furious Mannequins of Macy’s (This actually does get a number of views – strangely, a lot of people Google Macy’s mannequins.)
• I’m a Sucker for Arts
• Norton Recommends Some Updates
• Spring Wardrobe Purge (This post gets some hits, too, mostly from people searching for “how to pee in wrap pants.” Also, wow, how thin am I in these pictures? My face looks huge! This was when I was eating nothing but Clif bars because I was trying to finish a play and the only way I could make myself finish it was by quitting eating altogether, because otherwise, I would spend all the time I was supposed to be writing thinking about what I might have for lunch, so finally, I was like, ‘Well, you’re never having lunch AGAIN, how about that? Now finish your damn work!’ That play turned out to be really awesome, and everyone loved it, but it was never produced because I suddenly decided that I hated the theater and abruptly quit everything and stopped speaking to everyone. It’s possible that I sometimes self-sabotage just the teensiest bit.)
• Am I a Poor Listener, or Should You Just Shut Up:  A Primer for Party Conversation
• Proposed Renovations
• I’b Sig

Anyway, it’s been a great four years, everyone! Thanks for reading!

Well, everyone knows whose fault it is. It’s their fault:

And so powerful is this lobby that even those of us not directly connected with or affected by their interests are still caught up in all this hoopla.

Luckily, a long time ago, I figured out how to reduce the stress and expense of the holidays by nearly 100% – in fact, I’m SO over the stress and pressure of the holiday season that I’m getting this post up a whole week-and-a-half after it would have been relevant! – and I am going to share my secrets with you (for next year, I guess):

1.      Problem: Decorating! We must get a tree and hang little bulbs from it. We must wrap tinsel around the banisters and string lights across the front of the house!

Solution: Don’t decorate! Do not buy a tree. Do not put up any tinsel or lights.

2.     Problem: Shopping! We must buy gifts for friends, relatives and coworkers. We must put careful thought into what each person would like, budget accordingly even though we have little to spend, and make many exhausting trips into throngs of shoppers to wait in long lines to attain these things. Then, we must wrap and distribute them.

Solution: Do not buy gifts! Establish yourself as the person who doesn’t buy gifts and tell everyone this. The first year, people will give you gifts anyway, but STAND FIRM! Do not give a gift in return. The following year and every subsequent year, things will be as they should, and everyone will secretly adore you for forcibly removing yourself from their list of eternal obligation.

3.      Problem: Holiday cards! We must write and mail holiday cards and make sure we have everyone’s up-to-date addresses and not leave anyone out.

Solution: Do not send holiday cards! (See how this is working out?)

4.      Problem: Cooking! We must bake cookies. We must bring a covered dish to parties and a loaf cake to the office. We must prepare Christmas dinner.

Solution: Don’t cook! Ever. Make sure everyone knows that you do not cook and cannot cook and will never cook, full stop. Bring an $8.99 bottle of wine to every party. On Christmas, order out. You will spend a little more money this way, but if you count time as money, the savings are infinite.

5.      Problem: Too many social obligations! We must go to Jim and Carol’s party, and Bob and Lisa’s, and Gary’s, and Sue and Janet’s, and we must go to your work party and my work party and my Mom’s house and my Dad’s house and your Mom’s house and your Dad’s house and your ex-Stepdad’s house, and your boss’s special small dinner. I’d rather kill myself than go to any of these things!

Solution: Quit your job and disown your family!

Yeah, this is a tougher problem to solve. Weaseling out of social obligations successfully is a complex skill that takes many years to hone. Not many people are adept at it. At its core is the ability to be truly ok with not being very well-liked by most people. You either have that ability or you don’t, and if you have it, this is probably not a problem for you in the first place. But one thing you can do is play these obligations against each other — go to the cocktail party, have one drink, then tell everyone that you have three parties that night and run out. They’ll think you’re social, outgoing and involved in the community. Rather than feel snubbed by your early departure, they’ll be flattered you made an appearance at their shindig even when you were so busy.

Go to the family dinner, but let everyone know your wife’s lonely step-cousin’s thing is the same night. Wait exactly fifteen minutes after the plates are cleared, then make your excuses. Your goal is to become one of those genial, sober, busy people who are always everywhere, but always with one foot out the door. If you have kids, they have colds. If you have a sitter, she’s unreliable. If you have a pet, it has cancer. Use everything available to you for an excuse, and don’t worry about repeats – kids can have colds over and over and over again, and if anyone acts like your kid having a cold is not a big deal, they look like a dick. It’s the perfect excuse – I wish I had a kid, so it could be sick all the time and get me out of things.

Do all this and do it well, and you can be home by 10 to celebrate the way Jesus would have wanted: drinking $8.99 wine alone while buying yourself a bunch of stuff you actually want on Amazon, and then watching Battlestar Galactica on your laptop until you pass out. Ho ho ho!

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Image via.

(Also, I linked to that blog through Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews, which is also really good, if you don’t already read it.)

‘Oh, I really would, but I can’t on Monday! I have a—’

‘—Yeah, okay, fine. Never mind.’

–

 ‘What’d you think of the new Harry Potter movie?’

 ‘I haven’t seen it yet.’

 ‘Okay, I get the hint, I won’t bother you anymore.’

 –

‘Could I get you a drink?’

‘I just have a full one here, but thank you.  My name’s–’

‘–Hell, I tried. Good night.’

–

 ‘I’m Bill. What’s your name?’

 ‘Anna.’

 ‘Okay, I’ll leave you alone, Anna.’

 –

 ‘Do you live around here?’

 ‘No, I live in—’

 ‘—Fine. Sorry I asked.’

 –

 ‘Would you want to grab a bite sometime?’

 ‘I—’

 ‘—You know what, never mind! I don’t need this shit. I’m a great guy.’

–

  ‘I appreciate our friendship, but I like you as more than just a friend.’

 ‘I feel the same way.’

 ‘And that’s okay – we can still be friends.’

 –

‘Do you follow basketball at all?’

‘Not really.’

‘Well, I’m actually kind of seeing someone already, so.’

–

‘Are you single?’

 ‘Yes.’

 ‘Oh. I guess you’re unavailable, then.’

My hair grows thick and lustrous red,
Most everywhere but on my head.

My eyes are wide and clearest blue,
And ooze the most entrancing goo.

My laugh is like a birdie’s tweet
When it’s been crushed ‘neath someone’s feet.

My chest is pert, my tummy flat
Beneath three hundred pounds of fat.

My breath smells sweet as breeze in May
In New York on trash pick-up day.

I know about the birds and bees –
I have a dozen STDs,

And am as skilled and fun in bed
As any corpse that lies there, dead.

My sense of humor is a wonder,
The cause of many a social blunder.

Kind and patient, loyal and true…
These words don’t describe me! How about you?

I am as talented and smart
As is a football player’s fart.

Guys say I could be thought pretty
If the last girl in the city.

My date last night did not even retch -
So message me quick, for I am a catch!

–

Why am I still single?  Thoughts?

1. Always respect a closed door. We renounce private property, not personal privacy. 




2. Everyone must take their turn selling our soaps, veggies and textiles at the farmers’ market on Sundays. Everyone is equally averse to working the booth, so no excuses for shirking work duty will be accepted. “Writing” is no excuse for missing work duty. We all have ample hours for “writing.”




3. When using the kitchen, library, bathroom, stables, gardens, workrooms and other common spaces, your wish to remain undisturbed can be indicated by donning your “invisible hat.” Anyone not wearing an invisible hat will be assumed to be open to an exchange of greetings and possible small talk. If everyone but you is wearing an invisible hat, find a good book. 
   Special note due to recent issues::  being under the influence of a substance is no excuse for ignoring someone’s invisible hat. If you feel you must communicate something immediately, write a note, set it down in an obvious place, and walk away.




4. All communications are to be made via community corkboard. Please check the corkboard frequently for relevant messages, but that said, please do not approach if someone is already reading the corkboard. No one likes a hoverer. If you do receive a message, you are encouraged to go to your room and think about it for a couple of days before responding.




5. When using the communal bathroom, if you get the sense that someone is attempting to defecate, please do your business and move along; don’t stand around brushing your teeth and staring at your skin in the mirror.




6. Please use headphones for all music, movies, etc., and please chew with your mouth closed. Excessive coughing, muttered expressions of disgust or delight, laughing, weeping or other vocalizations will not be tolerated. Please do not wear heeled shoes or flip-flops. Please make every effort to be as generally unobtrusive as you would have others be.




7. Unfortunately, we here at Separate Commons have come to realize that we must enforce one mandatory social gathering per month, so that members of the community can recognize each other by sight. Rest assured, all social events will have clearly pre-determined start and finish times, as well as a definite, stated activity and objective. You will not find yourself mingling. We will consider special exemptions for those who would ordinarily attend, but who just really, really do not want to right now.




8. Separate Commons is a community for introverts, not for hermits or misanthropists. If anyone is deemed to be behaving in an hostile or antisocial manner, they will be asked to leave. Please check the corkboard frequently for notices to vacate.

__

(Thanks to my clever, clever roommate for thinking this up and making us do it, even though we were all tired and whiny!  See also:  this Improv Everywhere stunt.  I don’t know if this is where S got the idea or if the subway just suggests such activities!)

The Faker, in which Mrs. Miyagi explores and instructs in the fine art of faking it till you make it (or until people leave you alone); and

Nurse Factory, in which an amazing artist and bird-mom posts her projects, street art, and adventures with the chickens.

Check them out!