The other night I had a dream that my iPhone screen cracked in a million places, and I was super upset about it, and I realized (mid-dream) that it might be the modern equivalent of dental problem dreams?
Twenty-First Century Anxiety Dream
May 8, 2015Lottery Winnings
May 6, 2015A few years ago, we got lottery tickets at work as Christmas gifts, and I was really convinced for a bit there that I Was going to win the lottery. Herewith, what I planned to do with my earnings (and my former coworker’s list, because #2 is really funny):
1. Donate to the Help WOD Quit His Job fund.
2. Pay off my student loan –– in one fell swoop
3. Dry clean all my fancy clothes
4. Buy tickets for upcoming trips I would like to take –– to Utah in January and Miami in February (other locations tbd)
5. Get a cleaning lady to come to my house on the regs
6. Pay the $15 I owe to my roommate for spotting me for laundry one day
7. Buy a new apartment, maybe?
8. Take boyfriend to India or something –– on a trip to some place he’d like to go
9. Get all my random pictures framed
10. Buy this rug
WOD’s list:
1. Charitable donation to ID, obvi.
2. Quit my job and buy 2 bulldogs, named Steve McQueen and Ted, and hang out with them like all goddamn day.
3. Buy a sweet-ass house in some place that isn’t NY. Maybe Cali or Texas. Said house will have a pool and a bowling alley and a movie theater. Unless that gets too expensive. So maybe it won’t have all that stuff.
4. A metric shit-ton of records.
A Project That Almost Certainly Wouldn’t Be Worth It
April 29, 2015So you guys know I’m moving to England, right? It’s true––beginning early May, Itinerant Daughter will be… well, really fucking itinerant for a quite a while. Oh, backing up: that’s because I’m traveling a bit before moving, to, among other places, Charleston, Ohio, Los Angeles, Rhode Island, Italy, and then the big move happens in mid-August. So I’ve been thinking a lot about what to do with my books––not surprisingly, I have about four thousand of them––and am wondering if now is the time to make good on that idea I had, which was to bar myself from buying new books until I had read all the ones in my library I haven’t read. I probably won’t make good on this idea because whenever I think about it, I immediately frown and consider all the books that I have that I legit don’t want to read (my fiance’s legal books––do my fiance’s books count?––as well as The Flamethrowers, because my interest just waned over time, Clarice Lispector’s An Apple in the Dark, Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You, Henry James’s Daisy Miller, My Lunches With Orson and countless reference texts––do those count?) as well as those I should want to read but don’t (The Magus by John Fowles, Last Last Chance by Fiona Maazel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Rosie Schaap’s Drinking With Men, Anthropology of an American Girl, which I almost immediately regretted buying as if I foresaw this very issue.) Then I think about all the books I’ve read pieces of––select essays in an anthology, maybe, or a few stories by Vladimir Nabokov and Kafka out of their collections, and very occasionally books I began but didn’t warm to, like John Gregory Dunne’s Vegas––and whether I would have to read the entire text over again or parse out which sections I had read and which ones I hadn’t. And then finally, I consider the fact that this would probably take me any number of days and result in a piece that I could sell only to The Paris Review and be paid $200 for, which if you calculated it out would mean I had made something like ten cents an hour. So I guess I’ve decided not to do it.
If I had time (which I don’t, because I’m actually making headway on some books so GOSH leave me alone) I’d write an essay called “The Fascinating Religious Themes in the Bruce Jenner Interview.” Did anyone else notice how many times they used the word “soul?”
Letters of Resignation
April 20, 2015I do not even want to tell you how many times I’ve tried to make my own “letter of resignation” and failed miserably. At least fifteen. Based on the drawing, you’d think it would be kind of easy, no? You’re totally wrong. Go on, try it.
I quit!
And WHY DID JOHN WATERS NEVER WRITE ME BACK?
There is Something Strange Happening Here
April 16, 2015April 26th, 1889: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s birthday
April 29th, 1916: Wittgenstein is shot at while fighting in World War I
April 28th, 1951: Wittgenstein loses consciousness, and tells friend “Tell them I’ve had a good life”
April 29th, 1951: Wittgenstein dies
April 28th, 1984: I am born
Texts from Writer Friends
April 12, 2015KM: I just invented the perfect metaphor for doing these line edits. It feels like having eyebrows plucked, but IN YOUR SOUL.
Transcription
April 8, 2015Years ago, I transcribed some notes for a quirky PhD in architecture who sent me, as a gift, a teeny tiny collage. (I got paid, too.) For some reason he added me today on Google Plus, so I headed over to his bio page to check out what he’s been up to. Interesting stuff, for sure:
Trained as a cultural anthropologist for living in foreign communities, conducting ethnography, and then writing up the experience, he recently spent four years studying his shampoo. He wrote on the subject and published a paper entitled “Active Ingredients.”
I hope he reaches out to me or something!
A List, by Ludwig Wittgenstein
April 6, 2015“What do I know about God and the purpose of life?”
I know that this world exists.
That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.
That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it.
That life is the world.
That my will penetrates the world
That my will is good or evil.
Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.
The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.
And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.
To pray is to think about the meaning of life.
I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless.
I can only make myself independent of the world––and so in a certain sense master it–-by renouncing any influence on happenings.
Genius Idea THWARTED
March 31, 2015From: ID
To: Improve Everywhere
Dear Improv Everywhere,
For quite a while now, I’ve had this obsession with staging the famous “Day-O (Banana Boat)” scene from Beetlejuice in a restaurant, unbeknownst to the customers of course. I’m a writer and generally funny person, but I frankly have no idea how to organize something of this nature. My vision is for it to be in the basement dining area of the Mercer Kitchen, because it has a similar aesthetic. Despite the above caveat about knowing nothing about this, I’d love to be as involved as possible, particularly in casting. Oh, it could be so fun! In case you need a reminder of what the scene is (I highly doubt you do) here is the clip:
I love you!
From: Improv Everywhere
To: ID
Fun idea. Thanks for writing! Unfortunately since Day-O is a copyrighted song, it wouldn’t be a fit for Improv Everywhere to produce (legal issues on YouTube.)
***
But Harry Belafonte seems like a fun guy, I think he’d want me to do it!
Snail Mail Letters I’ve Written and Sent in the Past Month
March 30, 20151. To Fran Lebowitz, via her speaking agency, asking if she’d consider chaffeuring me and my husband from our wedding ceremony to the reception in her vintage checkered cab
2. Suzanne Lipschutz, to see if she’d be willing to sell one of her armadillo lamps now that she is downsizing.
3. Shannon Conley, a convert to Islam who was arrested trying to go to Syria to join ISIS, to see if she’d let me interview her
4. Netflix, to apologize for sending a movie back so late (because I lost it)
5. Annie Dillard’s agent, in hopes that he will inform me when she has a new book coming out
6. Author Joanne Greenberg, just to say ‘sup
In other news, I’m having this problem in which the cover of this biography I’m reading of Wittgenstein looks a lot (to me) like Catherine Keener’s portrait of Kramer from Seinfeld. And so I giggle whenever I open the book, but Wittgenstein is NO LAUGHING MATTER.
THE KRAMER
