Monday, March 12, 2012
A prickly porcupine, arched with quills at the ready to greet a prowling leopard took top honors in the 2012 BP World Ice Art Championships Multi Block Classic competition at the George Horner Ice Park.
The work, titled “Prickly Reception,” is the masterpiece of a four-member Japanese team led by Junichi Nakamara, a master ice artist who also placed first with a partner in the single block competition judged last week.
The Saturday night awards ceremony culminated the 132-hour competition, which ended Friday evening.
For six days, 19 teams of two to four sculptors, using chain saws, chisels, drills, hairdryers, irons and handmade tools, hewed fantastical, artistic forms and figures from 4-feet-by-6-feet-by-3-feet blocks of solid ice, some sculpting around the clock.
by Mary Beth Smetzer, Fairbanks Daily News Miner | Read more:
Image: Sam Harrel
Last Fling of an Octogenarian
Where I grew up, there lived a man named David. He drove a Jaguar, spoke with a BBC accent and dressed only ever in a suit and tie. His air was patrician, which disguised — perhaps this was the point — the fact that as a child he was sent to England from South Africa by a wayward mother and brought up, modestly, by strangers.
Forty years my senior, David at some point turned numerically old, but his energy never dimmed. His business engagements continued, and he jogged barechested in the rain. His beloved wife, however, developed Alzheimer’s. Over time, the disease sealed her world from his and relegated her to a nursing home, where David visited her often, convinced that something still passed between them.
And then, not so long ago, David developed prostate cancer.
Disdainful of impediments, David did not take his condition seriously, and it eventually became certain it would kill him. He continued to live as before, but the physical decline began, at length, to unfold.
Last July I went to visit David at his home with my partner, Monica. He answered the door gaily in his suit and tie; he kissed Monica gallantly and led us to glasses of Champagne. We talked about the state of the world. David was enjoying himself, and still did not look his 81 years.
Finally I said, “I hear things aren’t going so well for you.”
“Not so well as they used to, Rana. I have all this external plumbing now under my suit, which makes life a bit harder. But I’m still working, still getting about. When you get to my age, you know you’re crawling toward the thin end of the branch. At some point it has to break.”
A few weeks after this, my father called me, agitated.
David had telephoned him at 6 o’clock that morning. He rushed across the road to discover David prostrate on the kitchen floor, where he had been lying for six hours, waiting for a decent time to call.
David was a full head taller than my father, who, 73 himself, could not lift him. My mother came to help and, over the next hour, they heaved David up the stairs. David himself could offer nothing: he was physically spent, his limbs shook violently and his eyes were wide with horror. All his sacks burst open during the climb, covering the stairs in urine and feces.
“He’s such a proud man,” wept my father on the phone. “I think his heart broke today.”
It was true. David went into a nursing home the next day, became rapidly delirious, and soon after, he died.
When I think of him now, I cannot forget a story he told during that final encounter.
David frequently hosted meetings in a particular hotel. Over time he became friendly with the hotel receptionist, and one day, in the February before his death, he invited her out to lunch. She was 37.
by Rana Dasgupta, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Holly Wales
Forty years my senior, David at some point turned numerically old, but his energy never dimmed. His business engagements continued, and he jogged barechested in the rain. His beloved wife, however, developed Alzheimer’s. Over time, the disease sealed her world from his and relegated her to a nursing home, where David visited her often, convinced that something still passed between them.And then, not so long ago, David developed prostate cancer.
Disdainful of impediments, David did not take his condition seriously, and it eventually became certain it would kill him. He continued to live as before, but the physical decline began, at length, to unfold.
Last July I went to visit David at his home with my partner, Monica. He answered the door gaily in his suit and tie; he kissed Monica gallantly and led us to glasses of Champagne. We talked about the state of the world. David was enjoying himself, and still did not look his 81 years.
Finally I said, “I hear things aren’t going so well for you.”
“Not so well as they used to, Rana. I have all this external plumbing now under my suit, which makes life a bit harder. But I’m still working, still getting about. When you get to my age, you know you’re crawling toward the thin end of the branch. At some point it has to break.”
A few weeks after this, my father called me, agitated.
David had telephoned him at 6 o’clock that morning. He rushed across the road to discover David prostrate on the kitchen floor, where he had been lying for six hours, waiting for a decent time to call.
David was a full head taller than my father, who, 73 himself, could not lift him. My mother came to help and, over the next hour, they heaved David up the stairs. David himself could offer nothing: he was physically spent, his limbs shook violently and his eyes were wide with horror. All his sacks burst open during the climb, covering the stairs in urine and feces.
“He’s such a proud man,” wept my father on the phone. “I think his heart broke today.”
It was true. David went into a nursing home the next day, became rapidly delirious, and soon after, he died.
When I think of him now, I cannot forget a story he told during that final encounter.
David frequently hosted meetings in a particular hotel. Over time he became friendly with the hotel receptionist, and one day, in the February before his death, he invited her out to lunch. She was 37.
by Rana Dasgupta, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Holly Wales
Is This How to Start a New Chapter in Your Love Life?
You are sitting on a train, and across the aisle someone is reading one of your favourite books.
This person (clearly of taste) happens to be a tall, handsome man. As you stare he looks up, catches your eye and smiles – he asks for your number... Browsing in a bookshop you reach out to pick up a book; so does the person standing next to you. The person happens to be a tall, handsome man. He catches your eye and smiles – he asks if you would like to go for coffee... So run the fantasies of many a book-lover.
Which is why Literary speed-dating is such an exciting prospect for a bookish single. The conceit is that, rather than talk about yourself, you talk about a book you have brought along. It's run of the mill speed-dating made intellectual – more Granta than Hello!. The idea has already taken off across America and Canada, with speed-dating events held at such cultish venues as the Rare Book Room in New York's famous Strand bookstore (which holds an immensely popular literary speed-date every Valentine's Day). Inexplicably, though, literary speed-dating has yet to become commonplace here.
Anxious to try out this 21st-century method of merging reading and romance, I gate-crashed a literary speed-dating event hosted by the London School of Economics' Student Union Literary Society as part of the LSE's Literary Festival. I spent the whole of the week before in the throes of a delightful dilemma – not over what to wear, but over which book to take. "By what book ye bring, ye shall be judged" could be the motto of literary speed-dating. Do not look pretentious, or lightweight, beware a cynical choice and beware a book which takes itself too seriously. A children's book could make you appear immature and an electronic text is a no-no. (I chose Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love and crossed fingers that it wouldn't frighten off potential suitors).
On the night itself a group of about 30 met in a room of the LSE's New Academic Buildings. As we milled prior to the speed-dating kick-off, I asked if anyone had been on a conventional speed-dating night. If they had, no one admitted to it. It was that extra-literary twist which for them, as for me, had proved an irresistible combination. Somewhat predictably the women marginally outnumbered the men (the event's organiser had been inundated with women wanting to take part but had struggled to drum up the same enthusiasm from men).
In spite of the unfavourable odds, I refused to be discouraged and began the evening with high hopes. The men I met brandished books by authors from Franz Kafka to George Friedman, from Aldous Huxley to Richard Bach and from Jonathan Swift to Evelyn Waugh. A few showed off their feminine side by making the case for Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Caitlin Moran's blockbuster How to be a Woman. Three nervous-looking undergrads, attending as a result of a dare, found comfort in the free wine (in fact so unstinted were the quantities that my dates grew increasingly slurred as the evening went on).
by Miranda Kiek, The Independent | Read more:
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Pulp Shakespeare
Did Shakespeare write Pulp Fiction? No, but if he did, it might sound like this.
Imagine a high school class on the Great Works of Western Civilization, circa 2400. The teacher shows the students a selection of films by Quentin Tarantino, that exalted late-20th- and early-21st-century dramatist who worked in the medium then known as film. The series culminates in Pulp Fiction, perhaps, for modern audiences, the most enduring and accessible example of the master’s art. Yet most of the kids in the room falter on the edge of comprehension, and one eventually explodes in frustration. “Why do they all dress like that?” the student demands, in whatever the English language has evolved into. “And seriously, why do they talk that way? Why do we even have to watch this, anyway?” Then the teacher, returning to his drying well of patience, his face settling into the creases worn by decades of stoically borne disappointment, explains to his despondent charge that Tarantino’s all about the language. “He used English in ways nobody had before,” he says, for nothing close to the first nor last time, “and if you put in just a little more study time, you’d understand that.”
Her Majesty’s Secret Players do seem to understand that, bring as they will a production called Pulp Shakespeare (or, A Slurry Tale) to its West Coast premiere at this summer’s Hollywood Fringe Festival. To view the clip of the show above is to feel at least two senses of odd familiarity at once: don’t I know this scene and these characters from somewhere, and don’t I know these words from somewhere? Were you to watch it without context, you’d probably guess that the dialogue sounded Shakespearean, and in the first few minutes, that guess might even take you as far as wondering which of the lesser-known plays this might be. But Pulp Shakespeare offers not Shakespeare’s words but a pastiche of Shakespeare through which to watch Pulp Fiction, effectively bringing that 25th-century classroom scenario into the present. Rendering Tarantino’s dialogue in Shakespearean dramatic poetry both familiarizes Shakespeare’s style and de-familiarizes Tarantino’s, giving strong hints to anyone looking to understand Shakespeare’s appeal in his day, how history might treat Tarantino, and how the two have more in common than we’d have assumed.
(Note to 21st-century teachers: we nonetheless do not suggest you introduce Shakespeare as “sort of the Quentin Tarantino of his day.”)
via: Open Culture
Imagine a high school class on the Great Works of Western Civilization, circa 2400. The teacher shows the students a selection of films by Quentin Tarantino, that exalted late-20th- and early-21st-century dramatist who worked in the medium then known as film. The series culminates in Pulp Fiction, perhaps, for modern audiences, the most enduring and accessible example of the master’s art. Yet most of the kids in the room falter on the edge of comprehension, and one eventually explodes in frustration. “Why do they all dress like that?” the student demands, in whatever the English language has evolved into. “And seriously, why do they talk that way? Why do we even have to watch this, anyway?” Then the teacher, returning to his drying well of patience, his face settling into the creases worn by decades of stoically borne disappointment, explains to his despondent charge that Tarantino’s all about the language. “He used English in ways nobody had before,” he says, for nothing close to the first nor last time, “and if you put in just a little more study time, you’d understand that.”
Her Majesty’s Secret Players do seem to understand that, bring as they will a production called Pulp Shakespeare (or, A Slurry Tale) to its West Coast premiere at this summer’s Hollywood Fringe Festival. To view the clip of the show above is to feel at least two senses of odd familiarity at once: don’t I know this scene and these characters from somewhere, and don’t I know these words from somewhere? Were you to watch it without context, you’d probably guess that the dialogue sounded Shakespearean, and in the first few minutes, that guess might even take you as far as wondering which of the lesser-known plays this might be. But Pulp Shakespeare offers not Shakespeare’s words but a pastiche of Shakespeare through which to watch Pulp Fiction, effectively bringing that 25th-century classroom scenario into the present. Rendering Tarantino’s dialogue in Shakespearean dramatic poetry both familiarizes Shakespeare’s style and de-familiarizes Tarantino’s, giving strong hints to anyone looking to understand Shakespeare’s appeal in his day, how history might treat Tarantino, and how the two have more in common than we’d have assumed.
(Note to 21st-century teachers: we nonetheless do not suggest you introduce Shakespeare as “sort of the Quentin Tarantino of his day.”)
via: Open Culture
PSA: Clevercat litter box
Mike Ramberg saw this photo on my G+ feed and pointed out a bonus feature of the litterbox: "We had one of those. Often they'd be using it with their head sticking out of the hole. Looked like they were piloting a spacecraft."
by Mark Frauenfelder, Boing Boing
I Think, Therefore I Choke
It was a chip shot. With just 15 seconds left in the AFC championship game against the Patriots in January, the Ravens' Billy Cundiff faced a 32-yarder to send the game into overtime. Like all NFL kickers, Cundiff uses the scoreboard to keep track of downs and where he should be in his prekick routine. As the Ravens stalled at the Pats' 14-yard line, the Gillette Stadium scoreboard showed third down. Problem was, it was wrong, the Ravens say. Unprepared and probably a bit confused, Cundiff was rushed onto the field by screaming coaches. He hadn't missed a fourth-quarter kick all season. But he got a mediocre snap; the laces weren't quite out. His kick came low off of his foot and hooked left. With his teammates looking on in horror and disbelief, Cundiff had just choked -- badly.
In 2010, Cundiff had booted the football as far as anyone in history, with a record 40 touchbacks, earning a spot in the Pro Bowl. Of the 66 field goals he'd attempted in the past two seasons, he'd missed only 12. Considering that Cundiff had played for eight different teams in the previous seven years, with only 11 touchbacks combined, he'd seemed nothing short of a new kicker.
What very few people outside out of Cundiff's inner circle knew was that he'd become a guinea pig for the new science of clutch. For decades, sports psychologists have been trying to keep athletes from cracking under pressure, with no measurable sign of success. But now a breed of scientists is putting new technology to work for athletes like Cundiff under game conditions. They have a much clearer grasp on why athletes choke and are at least in the ballpark when it comes to preventing it.
If you'd been watching Cundiff on the sideline this past season, you'd have seen him toying with a silver gizmo the size of an iPod. Given to him the previous year by psychologist Louis Csoka, one of his mental trainers, it's known as an emWave, and it measures heart rate variability (HRV). Not beats per minute -- that's old-school. Designed by the research company HeartMath, the emWave examines in real time how athletes are responding to old sports psychology tricks like visualization and meditative breathing. It's the same gizmo used by military elite tactical teams to regulate stress levels before deployment.
Cundiff had been using the HeartMath methods since 2007. A green light on the gizmo meant Cundiff felt confident and prepared, his heartbeats evenly spaced. When Cundiff was nervous or even panicked, however, the emWave flashed red and he knew to focus on his breathing as he'd been trained.
Historically, anyone who dares to give pro athletes mental advice -- be they M.D.s, psychologists or shamans -- often gets the eye roll or the pat on the back. But in an email, Cundiff told HeartMath trainer John White that his hocus-pocus was making all the difference. "Not only were my mental skills continually improving," he wrote, "but they were working in game conditions, not just practice ... I was killing the ball and having a great time doing it. People, in general, don't deal with stress. Moving forward, stress will be the least of my worries."
by Jaimal Yogis, ESPN | Read more:
Photo: Dan Winters
Why I Pirate - An Open Letter To Content Creators
I once rented a car for work and had an unpleasant experience. When I returned the car, I thought to myself, "I'm never renting from them again." After sitting on it for a day, I realized conducting my own silent protest wasn't going to help me or the rental agency. So later that day, I called their corporate headquarters and told my story to the VP of customer relations. More importantly, I told him what they did wrong and what kind of experience I expect as a customer if he wants my future business.I would like all the content creators reading this to view this post as though you are the car rental agency. I am a dissatisfied customer who may never buy from you again unless you get your act together. I normally wouldn't waste my time explaining all this, but the content creators on Step2 certainly seem to be going in the right direction so I'm hoping this information will help.
This post isn't my attempt at a debate. You won't hear any mention of theft versus copying, exposure versus lost sales or right versus wrong. All I want to do is give you real-life insight from the file-sharing world. I want to hold your hand and show you how I decide what to buy and what my motivation is to pirate. I will use the terms pirate, download and file-sharing interchangeably throughout this post but they all mean the same thing: to download your content for free.
Some people will read this and think, "I don't care what this guy says, internet piracy is damaging." For those people, I ask you to skip the rest of this post and jump to the bottom section titled, 'In Closing.'
Some of you won't read this entire post and it won't hurt my feelings. You won't understand your customers and we won't buy your content. And don't read this hoping to find out why people download your content in the hopes that you can stop it in the future. You cannot stop file-sharing. It would be like trying to stop people from using electricity. People who have already paid for your content will also be some of the ones who download it. And they'll share it with others.
by Bobbi Smith, Step2 Insight Community | Read more:
Illustration via: Salon
How To Be Creative
Creativity can seem like magic. We look at people like Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan, and we conclude that they must possess supernatural powers denied to mere mortals like us, gifts that allow them to imagine what has never existed before. They're "creative types." We're not.
But creativity is not magic, and there's no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It's a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it. New research is shedding light on what allows people to develop world-changing products and to solve the toughest problems. A surprisingly concrete set of lessons has emerged about what creativity is and how to spark it in ourselves and our work.
The science of creativity is relatively new. Until the Enlightenment, acts of imagination were always equated with higher powers. Being creative meant channeling the muses, giving voice to the gods. ("Inspiration" literally means "breathed upon.") Even in modern times, scientists have paid little attention to the sources of creativity.
But over the past decade, that has begun to change. Imagination was once thought to be a single thing, separate from other kinds of cognition. The latest research suggests that this assumption is false. It turns out that we use "creativity" as a catchall term for a variety of cognitive tools, each of which applies to particular sorts of problems and is coaxed to action in a particular way.
It isn't a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed on us by the angels. It's a skill that anyone can learn and work to improve.
Does the challenge that we're facing require a moment of insight, a sudden leap in consciousness? Or can it be solved gradually, one piece at a time? The answer often determines whether we should drink a beer to relax or hop ourselves up on Red Bull, whether we take a long shower or stay late at the office.
The new research also suggests how best to approach the thorniest problems. We tend to assume that experts are the creative geniuses in their own fields. But big breakthroughs often depend on the naive daring of outsiders. For prompting creativity, few things are as important as time devoted to cross-pollination with fields outside our areas of expertise.
by Jonah Lehrer, WSJ | Read more:
Illustrations by Serge Bloch
Saturday, March 10, 2012
And So It Goes
In the spring of 1945, three weeks after VE Day, Private First Class Kurt Vonnegut, Jr wrote a letter home to inform his family that he was alive. His infantry unit had been smashed by Panzer divisions in the Ardennes; his unmarked POW train attacked by the RAF; miraculously, he and a handful of fellow prisoners escaped incineration by American and British bombers. “Their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden – possibly the world’s most beautiful city”, Vonnegut wrote. “But not me.” Already we are privy to the early stirrings of Vonnegut’s prose – the cool sarcasm (“combined labors”), the ostentatious airing of factoids, and the signature smirk of the absurd (“But not me”). How that last phrase, which recurs throughout the letter, got reprised as the faux-stoic refrain of Slaughterhouse-Five (“So it goes”) is the story of Vonnegut’s style. As Charles Shields tells us in his wonderfully shaggy biography, the demands of Slaughterhouse-Five consumed Vonnegut for twenty-five years, and nearly broke him. With justice, it was the book that made him into more than a cult figure.
For Vonnegut has a strangely central place in American fiction despite his occasional insistence on his own marginality. He owes his position to two extraordinary, and related, achievements. First, as a novelist forged by the war, he adopted an ironic approach to his great subject that was a strong counterpoint to the mawkishness of the Vietnam novels that appeared in the wake of Slaughterhouse-Five. Second, Vonnegut continues to be a writer embraced by teenagers; his novels somehow perform successful reconnaissance missions behind the lines of each new generation. Far from symptomatic, this teen appeal gets at the very essence of Vonnegut: the way his gallows humour and sentimentality depend on each other. His heartfelt adages (“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be”) and earnest declarations (“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind”) come encased in a hard, sardonic shell. Consume enough of it and you can simulate hard-boiledness that you haven’t earned but Vonnegut certainly did. A story that never failed to draw a wheeze of laughter from the author in later years was of breaking the news of Pearl Harbor to his college fraternity brother in the shower, who promptly slipped and died. (...)
Vonnegut’s send-up of the Greatest Generation’s self-satisfaction blindsided the critics when Slaughterhouse-Five first appeared. “There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre”, the narrator says towards the end of the novel, but early reviewers expected something clever. “Vonnegut deprecates any attempt to see tragedy that day in Dresden”, Alfred Kazin wrote in an obtuse review, condemning the author’s “arch fatalism”. “His work is full of gobbets of raw, unassimilated pain”, another reviewer complained. But it does not require hindsight to see that the “unassimilated” nature of the pain was the point for Vonnegut. What else is the refrain “So it goes”, if not the interior trauma loop of a damaged man trying to recount his experience in the age of acceptable civilian losses? Vonnegut accentuated his fatalism to the point of breathtaking casualness in part to undermine it.
by Thomas Meaney, Times Literary Supplement | Read more:
Buying This Thing Will Make Me Happy
I know what you’re thinking, so don’t even say it. Buying that thing won’t make you happy, is what you’re thinking. Buying things never makes you happy, so why would you buy this thing? It won’t make you happy.
But you haven’t seen this thing.
It’s really cool. They just started making it and not many people have one yet. It does all sorts of stuff and can fit in my pocket, but it can also get bigger than that if I want it to. Plus it’s made by a company I trust to put out things that will make me happy.
(Not that I wouldn’t consider buying this thing even if it weren’t made by a familiar company—that’s how cool this thing is—but the fact that I know and trust the company makes it even better.)
It comes in both black and white, but I can also buy an affordable cover for it in a different color if I want. For example, if I buy it in black but decide I want it to be red today, I just buy the red cover and slide it on. Now it’s red—until I want it to be black again, that is. (I can do that for any other color too, not just red.)
This thing will make me happier during my commute. Whether I take the train or ride my bike, it will be there for me, and since it’s waterproof, I don’t even need to worry if it’s raining out. Making my commute stress-free will go a long way towards making me happy.
Other people will look up to me because I own this thing and use it frequently, which will make me very happy. When I’m at a party, for instance, I can wait for a moment when people start talking about how cool it looks from the latest advertisement. Then I can stroll over and take it out and start using it, pretending that I hadn’t heard their conversation, and I can look up casually and wink at them. They’re sure to be impressed. Only I haven’t decided about the wink yet, because maybe it would make it obvious that I had heard their conversation. The wink may have to be something I decide in the moment.
Some of my favorite TV and movie personalities already own this thing and they are all happy.
I haven’t spoken to my mother or father in over a year. It’s not that we had a big falling-out or anything; I guess we just drifted apart since I moved farther away. Plus I’ve been pretty busy at work lately. It’s the same reason I don’t talk to my sister much. Also, stuff has been a little weird between us ever since she confessed to not liking Anna, even though things didn’t work out between me and her. I ought to exercise more. Not that I hate how I look—it’s more just that I need to make some lifestyle changes. But I don’t know how. I wonder what Craig is up to. Sometimes I miss having friends. Boy, work has been a real bear lately—I remember when my sister and I were closer and we’d laugh together, just about nothing, it was such a good feeling. I should really call Mom. Or Craig. Does he still have the same number? But I know Mom would ask if I’m seeing anyone, and while I have been trying to put myself out there more, I still haven’t met the right person since Anna, and sometimes it gets discouraging. Poor Mom, I know she just wants me to relax and for everything to be okay.
I don’t know who I am anymore.
Another way this thing will make me happy is that it comes with a durable carrying case.
by River Clegg, McSweeney's
But you haven’t seen this thing.
It’s really cool. They just started making it and not many people have one yet. It does all sorts of stuff and can fit in my pocket, but it can also get bigger than that if I want it to. Plus it’s made by a company I trust to put out things that will make me happy.
(Not that I wouldn’t consider buying this thing even if it weren’t made by a familiar company—that’s how cool this thing is—but the fact that I know and trust the company makes it even better.)
It comes in both black and white, but I can also buy an affordable cover for it in a different color if I want. For example, if I buy it in black but decide I want it to be red today, I just buy the red cover and slide it on. Now it’s red—until I want it to be black again, that is. (I can do that for any other color too, not just red.)
This thing will make me happier during my commute. Whether I take the train or ride my bike, it will be there for me, and since it’s waterproof, I don’t even need to worry if it’s raining out. Making my commute stress-free will go a long way towards making me happy.
Other people will look up to me because I own this thing and use it frequently, which will make me very happy. When I’m at a party, for instance, I can wait for a moment when people start talking about how cool it looks from the latest advertisement. Then I can stroll over and take it out and start using it, pretending that I hadn’t heard their conversation, and I can look up casually and wink at them. They’re sure to be impressed. Only I haven’t decided about the wink yet, because maybe it would make it obvious that I had heard their conversation. The wink may have to be something I decide in the moment.
Some of my favorite TV and movie personalities already own this thing and they are all happy.
I haven’t spoken to my mother or father in over a year. It’s not that we had a big falling-out or anything; I guess we just drifted apart since I moved farther away. Plus I’ve been pretty busy at work lately. It’s the same reason I don’t talk to my sister much. Also, stuff has been a little weird between us ever since she confessed to not liking Anna, even though things didn’t work out between me and her. I ought to exercise more. Not that I hate how I look—it’s more just that I need to make some lifestyle changes. But I don’t know how. I wonder what Craig is up to. Sometimes I miss having friends. Boy, work has been a real bear lately—I remember when my sister and I were closer and we’d laugh together, just about nothing, it was such a good feeling. I should really call Mom. Or Craig. Does he still have the same number? But I know Mom would ask if I’m seeing anyone, and while I have been trying to put myself out there more, I still haven’t met the right person since Anna, and sometimes it gets discouraging. Poor Mom, I know she just wants me to relax and for everything to be okay.
I don’t know who I am anymore.
Another way this thing will make me happy is that it comes with a durable carrying case.
by River Clegg, McSweeney's
h/t YMFY
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