Just thought I’d mention. I get to add to it every once in a while, which one of the bright spots in my work day. Most recently I wrote about finding out that Kurt Vonnegut had died, and a little thingy about Margaret Atwood, who I sometimes forget is an amazing writer. That second one should be posted soon.
(Also I just found out I can publish this as an “aside,” which means it isn’t featured as a full post. Cool, WordPress.)
I’m disturbed to announce that it is the ninth of September. It was weird enough realizing August was over but I thought that was a day or two ago. I’m kind of afraid that the speed with which time moved this last month and a half is something that will become the norm, because I’m not ready for that. My senior year of college felt very much like I was stumbling forward or running unstably downhill and I would not be pleased if that continues any longer.
Anyway, I’ve been meaning to write out something for over a week now and I have to stop putting it off. So, a while back I found this article about Cecily Kellogg, a prominent blogger and a good friend of my mother’s back in the day. The gist of it is that Cecily’s daughter was booted from her preschool because Cecily complained about the director of the school on her blog, without naming the school or the director. It’s not unheard of, of course, for there to be real life consequences of social media. There was that student teacher fired for have a picture of her at a bar on her facebook, and other shit like that.
With this in mind, I made a little mental catalogue of things I’ve written about in the few short months I’ve been blogging that could potentially get me in trouble. Not that I’m in any position to be fired for anything, nor that I have the incredible readership Cecily does (something like 40,000 Twitter followers. Damn!) but, and here’s where it gets a little conceited/ridiculous, one of my vague future thoughts is of someday writing for a politician, and if anyone gets their pasts plumbed it’s politicians and their staffs. So I have written about drunkenness and marijuana, used incredibly vulgar language to describe policy and made ad hominem attacks on politicians, and at one point during the recent London riots advocated violent uprising: #burnsomething. I even doubled down and put it on Twitter.
People have been warned consistently to watch what they put online, because it never goes away. This never sat well with me; rather than watch what you put online why not just stand by your shit? I’ll start: when London teens were out in the streets causing a ruckus I felt a distinct sense of comraderie with them, because of the rage that a horrible world economy and painful austerity measures provoked. I felt at that time and on that day that violent uprising was a completely reasonable or at least understandable action. Today I’m in more of a peaceful uprising kind of mood, and I imagine as time goes on my rage will be tempered by age or I’ll just become jaded, but I think those aged and jaded dismiss youthful anger too quickly.
I’m loosing conhesion in my thoughts, having just polished off my morning pot of coffee — I really do mean pot — and I’m coming up on the 500 word attention span, so I’ll finish with this: If anything I write on this blog, anything I publish in papers/magazines, or anything I’m ever quoted as saying comes back to bite me in the ass I will refuse to learn my lesson.
I was going to call this post “Somebody’s Got a Case of the Tuesdays,” but I thought it might be derivative.
Slowly but surely over the last month and a half I’ve been adding links to the that list on the right, and every once in a while someone does click on one of them (thanks!) but I realized I put the links there for a reason and they deserve a little more than to just sit there quietly. So bear with me, it’s worth it.
Awesome People Hanging Out Together is a completely literal title. It’s a Tumblr full of pictures of two or more famous people, sometimes posed but better when in their natural environment. My most recent favorite: Diddy, Pharrell, and Oprah.
Caitlyn Christensen just started a blog, but the two entries already there include such sage advice as: keep a book with you at all times, and learn how to read it while walking. Caitlyn writes for the Original, which is how I came to know her, and I’ve always been a fan of her voice. I feel like I’m getting in on the ground floor of this one, and I recommend it.
Christen DiClaudio and Shane Martin are two of the nicest people I’ve met. They also happen to be that really, really irritating type of people who are good at everything, or at least a lot more things than I am. Shane played (or plays) for the University of Pittsburgh’s hockey team, but is also a very talented photographer and writer. Christen was a managing editor with me at the Original, but has as much talent in the world of fashion as writing. This blog combines the photography and fashion primarily, but is in general a good link to keep n your back pocket.
Emmett Drueding was a good friend of mine in Philadelphia, after we both started at the High School for Creative and Performing Arts at the same time. His music — my favorite song is called 40 Smash — is abrasive in ways that I love. Not for the faint of ears.
Katie Capri is one of this year’s managing editors, again at the Original — the magazine was one of the only things I put effort into at school, so it makes sense that many of my closest artsy-fuck friends came from there. Katie was in New York City this summer working for Ralph Lauren and some other equally absurd internship, and I can’t help but feeling everything just going to get more interesting from now on out. Katie’s the person you go to not when you need something done, but when you need it fucking destroyed.
Molly Burkett, incoming photography editor of the Original. Her Tumblr involves plenty of resharing, which I guess it was Tumblr’s about, but what makes me really dig this blog, and the same reason I’ve thought highly of her since I met her, is that her thought processes, the filtering methods she has for the input-output on her brain, is vastly different from my own, but completely understandable and wonderful. And if you think you don’t need regular infusion of different thought processes than your own, you’re wrong. And probably an asshole.
Ohad Cadji was the photo editor for the Original for the last two years, and has just embarked on a nascent photography career. His photographs are of high quality, at least in my layman’s view, but I think what makes him a great photographer is first his choice of subject matter, and second what he does with a subject that doesn’t jump out as photogenic. Hire him: even if you’re the latter, he’ll make it look like the former.
Finally, the Original. If you still need prompting to go there, after what I’ve written above, there’s nothing more I can say.
Next, I’m going to talk about genre fiction, and a job I applied for last week.
