Loading and Unloading

Thank God none of the remaining furniture is worth all that much. Posting some of the remainders as free is going GREAT. The place should be empty by the end of tomorrow.

Hired!

I knew my tireless enthusiasm for popular culture would come in handy. It's time to pack my bags-I just found out I got the job I interviewed for yesterday.

Is Big Fun big in Korea right now?

This article reads like a summary of Suicide Club, except without the weird interlude with the Japanese David Cassidy lookalike stomping on puppies in a bowling alley.

Yes, that really happens in the movie.

Word on the Street

A few things I heard today while walking around Brooklyn:

1. No, YOU'RE the bitch I'm talking to right now(said into a cell phone).
2. How you doin', pretty toes(said to me)?
3. There are mushrooms growing in the bathroom.

Things I learned today:

1. A lot of work goes into showing people that stars are just like us.
2. You can tell the truth and still be sued for defamation.
3. If I don't pick an official "moving" date I'll probably never get a job.
4. I'm too old to function on two hours of sleep.

Too Much Sun

It is officially summer in my universe: after a lovely day spent with family and friends, parts of my arms and chest now match the dress I'm wearing. This would be less embarrassing if the dress were sleeveless and weren't a V-neck. As it is I have lobster colored decolletage.

Graduation Day

It's sunny, the temperature is in the mid-70s, the hammock is up in the shade, and my sister, the Greatest Classics Scholar on Earth(tm), is officially a college graduate. It seems like only yesterday you were crammed into University of Iowa "temporary housing" with eleven girls from West Des Moines, and today you're skipping your ceremony to drink champagne on the back porch with me. I don't think I've ever been so proud.

Congratuations, Dana. I love you. You're the best.

A Textbook Case

An article I wrote a few years ago has been published in a composition textbook. I get to call something I did a textbook example of good writing. I never thought that would happen.

The best part? The Nation paid me more for the permission than they did for publishing it the first time.

If only the piece could also clean up the atrocious mess I'm staring at in my soon to be ex-apartment.

Brooklyn Time Warp

I spent most of today drinking with an old friend from the long ago days of Nation interning(2005 seems so far away!), but it has been the time I've had to walk alone that have been my favorite. I got off the subway yesterday and found myself more than halfway to my old aparment(where I am staying) before I realized what I was doing. I don't think I've ever felt more at home anywhere, even at my parents' house. I have to remind myself continually that I haven't been living in New York for the past two years, I have been living in Minneapolis, because it just doesn't feel like any time has passed. I feel as happy and as right here as I did when I first moved, and it seems just as navigable as the town I grew up in.

Maybe that isn't such a good thing, what with growing up in a town of 5,000 people. Maybe Brooklyn is just an overgrown suburb now, filled with people too big for the Midwest but not big enough for Shanghai, or some such nonsense. I don't care. I still love the feeling of being one negligible part of one huge metropolitan unit.

And now I have to present my friend with her birthday present: a handbag sewed from vintage early 90s highlighter bright Beverly Hills 90210 fabric.