I Will Not Be Attached To Wackness

December 15th, 2009

Changed the theme on this blog to be this cheesy teenage girl obsessed with Amelie theme. I love it. I kind of fell off the “real blogging” radar, but that’s what happens when you get a J-O-B. It’s fine, my writing gets edited constantly at this job and it’s been nice for my blogger’s ego, where you essentially are never taken to task about anything, because even when you are, you just wave that “stop being a hater” flag and the commenter goes away.

So, 2009, you are almost over. I’m not the type to make resolutions. I’m not built for dissapointment, and I am already hard on myself. But I’ve learned a lot. Leaving San Francisco wasn’t the end of the world. Living at home the past 9 months has completely humbled me and I’m a better person for it. And again, moving back home and admitting you’re in a shitty spot isn’t the end of the world, either. Worst things have happened. Worst things will happen. Sex is not that important (until it is, but pursuing it is a complete waste of time and it just falls in your lap when you don’t think it will). Real success is hard to come by and everything is based on connections. I mean, you can say the latter and know it intellectually, but until you start paying attention and seeing it in action, you won’t realize how real it is.

I don’t feel as if I’ve had this great year, the way you feel at the end of a wonderful meal or a great night with friends. I feel restless and ready to move on. While living at home has been mostly positive, it’s also reminded me of why I left in the first place. This place is stagnant and no one wants to change, not even a little bit. That’s why I’m going West for New Year’s Eve, to start the new year in the same place so many others before me have started over and pursued their dreams. I also had a great Virgin America code, and an overwhelming need to take a vacation after months of non-stop work, but that big philosophical reason sounds nice, too right?

And oh yeah, about the non-stop work part. I am currently writing three blogs for b5media (and I treat BravoFan like a spoiled princess and give her a lot of attention) as well as working at my job 4 nights a week. I know I could be a generic pageview blogger and not put any care into my celebrity blogs, but all that shit has my name on it and like Real Housewife of Atlanta Kandi Burruss says, I will not be attached to wackness.
So, that’s why I’ve been absent from bitchbuzz and haven’t done anything fun like Ignite or In The Flesh recently. I just don’t have the mental energy right now to write anymore than I already do. I know writing is easy and that’s why we get paid pennies to do it, but my brain hurts.

This is my current favorite song:

So. You Guys. Tell me more about your 2009!

Tags: 2009, general public, writing is hard you guys
Posted in Writing | No Comments »

I hate self promotion

September 23rd, 2009

But, I guess part of this job is letting other people know what I’m doing. I barely know who reads this (leave a comment if you like, anonymous is fine, I’m genuinely curious if anyone is reading this beside the regulars + people I know IRL) and it is kind of embarassing to have the last post up be a semi-depressing review of a sad television show.

Anyway, let’s try to be “professonal” (LOL) and do that thing Real Internet Writers do when they write stuff. Besides all the gossiping I do over at BravoFan, I’m also writing a new b5media blog about celebrity kids called CelebTots. This is a strange blog for me to write, because I hate the whole “baby bump” nonsense, but I’m trying to give it a voice that is my own. I have no clue how to really do outreach for this particular blog, so I’ll figure that out. BravoFan’s built up a small community because I was able to really write in-depth about some stuff most of the blogs were just lightly glossing over.

What else? I’ve been offered a part-time job, also writing about television (kind of) but it’s with a major corporation and some of the red tape is taking a little bit of time. It’ll be a huge relief to have much more consistent income, and doing something that is relevant to all the other stuff I am doing. I love writing about the Internet, but writing about TV is my home. I’m sometimes conflicted about the things that I’m doing, that’s it not good enough, that it’s not important, especially in the face of so many other people I know who are doing so many cool, creative things. But I do need to remember that it’s all a process, and that this will lead to other things.

I wrote a review of SLC Punk for the blog Filmosophy. I went to the MTV Video Music Awards Red Carpet and interviewed some people for another b5media blog, popmusicscene. That was insane and surreal. I met a former TMZ paparazzi dude who was fascinating to talk to (he went on the up and up with one of the big image sites) and my spot on the carpet was smooshed between girls from a teenybopper mag and some guys doing video. That could be a whole other entry, so I’m not going to get derailed. I went to my very first fashion show and wrote about that for bitchbuzz.

Tomorrow night (or I guess tonight) I am doing an Ignite talk. It should be…interesting. I just hope people “get it.” It’s about the Real Housewives and the lessons I’ve learned from them. So you know, it is a big fucking joke. This Saturday I am going to the vegan cooking competition, Veggie Conquest, and will be covering them for Vegansaurus. I’m also writing the weekly Top Chef recaps over there.

That’s all the action I got for you today. Before I leave you again, I’ll give you this gift. I first saw this video last year, and it came back into my life when the woman in it, Beth Crosby, e-mailed me on BravoFan with a link to her Rachel Zoe Project parody video. I poked around her profile and found that same video again, of these two ridiculous Hollywood fauxsalites. I’d love to do something like this with the NYC fauxsalites. Time to go read a bunch of GuestofAGuest for character inspiration!

And now, I give you…Jessica and Hunter:

Tags: Ego-blogging
Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

Why I’m Totally Obsessed With Pulling

August 30th, 2009

I recently watched all of the BBC series, Pulling (which yes I read after the glowing posts on both Jezebel and The Awl, whatever, they usually have excellent taste) and if there was ever a Right Time and a Right Place for a TV show, this was it. If Sex and The City is meant to be idealized, a funny, it’ll all work out in the end, version of single life, Pulling is the total opposite. It is the grim reality. Things don’t always work out, and many things, maybe even most things don’t have a lesson or a neat little pun-filled sentence to wrap it all up.

I appreciated that most of all. Too often, stories about single people try to connect everything, as if every failed relationship was some kind of pieces of a puzzle. Most of the time, we fuck up and get involved in things we shouldn’t because we’re lonely, because we’re tired of trying to have fun, as every coupled person advises. Just go out and have fun, they always say. Oh, if only it was so easy. And I won’t deny, there’s still fun to be had, but fuck if sometimes I just want someone where you don’t have to try.

But, this isn’t about me. This is about Pulling and how the show does a brilliant job of showing that desperation, of wanting your life to be more, but not knowing what to do, or realizing that maybe your life will never be more. The main character Donna leaves her fiancee but spends most of the series two seasons relieved he wants her back or frustrated when he starts to move on. You don’t want her to get back with him, you know once she gets what she wants, she’ll just be bored again. When she temporarily dates someone else, she ruins it with her insecurity about his yuppie friends, preferring the comfort of sitting on the couch with her old boyfriend eating junk food and watching bad movies. She has a one night stand, calls him again and then forces herself to get drunk in her kitchen when she doesn’t want to have sex with him. It doesn’t frame the sex we have in terms of another notch as you get closer to the goal of Husband (that Sex and the City did) and it doesn’t frame it as “empowering.” It’s complicated; everyone has needs and everyone tries to get them met, to varying degrees. This is the appeal of the show, it doesn’t make its characters learn anything for the sake of the TV happy ending. It just is; it just exists.

Or rather, it used to exist. The BBC canceled Pulling last year and the show ended with a one-hour special that aired in May of this year. Its star, Sharon Horgan, who plays Donna appears just as funny in person. And its no wonder she can pull off portraying that slow drudgery: she attributes her success to starting late and wasting her 20s. Like some other late blooming writers you may know blew 6 years of their 20s on shitty office jobs and then proceeded to blow a bit more time not thinking things through. I’m trying to catch up, though. Maybe one day I’ll have my very own version of Pulling.

Tags: Pulling, Sex And The City, Sharon Horgan
Posted in tv | No Comments »

24 Hour Defcon Party People

August 9th, 2009

When we last left our sordid Vegas tale, I had an insane day which resulted me in me not actually arriving in Vegas until 11pm, knowing I would have to leave 24 hours later. Other, more rational people, would have turned around and returned home, but by the middle of the afternoon, and with the gate agents working hard at getting rid of the enormous standby list that had accumulated after they cancelled the second flight of the day, I decided to continue and put myself on list after list, along with all the other freeloaders. I finally made it on the 9:30 flight, which didn’t leave until a whole hour later because the pilots were flying in another plane and were late. I held my breath until the plane door was closed and they had no choice but to fly us all to Las Vegas. And fly us they did, eventually I found myself at the MGM Grand, reunited with my ladiez and in search of Red Bull on a drip.

Eventually, through some Facebook connections, we found ourselves at something called the “ninja party” (held in honor of Defcon, a hacker’s conference) in the garden of the truly amazing Artisan Hotel, which our host kept calling “The Artesian” and which our cab driver ended up almost not being able to find and turning her meter off when we drove too far and found ourselves by the Spearmint Rhino. In the “catacombs” of the ninja party, I made a friend. A friend who nervously gave me story ideas once he found out I was a writer but would later make me swear that I would keep his identity a secret.

I had no idea that previous writers covering Defcon had attempted to infiltrate and were then literally chased out of the con. But, having read 2600 in my teens and dabbled in some hacker-esque communities in the late 90s on IRC, I knew the drill and if there’s one group of people you don’t want to piss off, it’s anyone in the hacker community. I’ve been dabbling on the faux geek side of the Internet for a long time now, but I ain’t no fool.

I’m not working this, I explained. If I were working, I would have at least gone to a talk or two and not just crashed a party. He seemed genuinely interested in me getting my story, any story, though. When I came back from the ladies room, he asked me “Did you see anything in there? Was there anything interesting?” and I had to say no. Just a bunch of gothed out women, a sea of black t-shirts, a pissed off looking night auditor and an unplugged ATM. He let me know when security celebrity Dan Kaminsky had shown up and gave me all the dirt on how he had recently been hacked because of his ridiculously easy to figure out passwords. Later on, as we sat at the Riviera bar at 3 in the morning, I asked him to point out anyone else particularly high up or interesting. “Just a bunch of nobodies.” When his more well-connected friend showed up to take us to the Double Down Salloon, he said “Talk to him. He knows everyone.”

I mention all of these things because he was the perfect tour guide into this world, and what’s funny about this person being so hell-bent on me getting an article out of the evening we spent and of me keeping him anonymous is that now I can’t find him anywhere. And that is such a strange feeling from the usual aftermath of the usual conferences I go to, where I am able to piece together someone’s entire life with a simple Google search. Here, with my anonymous source, it’s as if I invented him and he has melted into the ether. Was I there? Was he there? I have the foursquare check in to prove that I was indeed at a bar at 5 am on Sunday August 2. I have the Riviera matches I stole. I can remember his website address ending with a .net. But I can’t find him anywhere, or any of the other people that were around us, the other friends I made, the guy who made fun of my pink iPhone cover, the other guy who was from New Jersey.

I’ve long been obsessed with the idea that nothing is anonymous and that nothing is private and that everything is being tracked somewhere. It’s strange and uncomfortable to not have a social media reminder of someone else’s existence. This is what life has become.

I’ll end with this, on an unrelated note: I loved my slice of defcon (and will probably go for real next year), feeling truly out of my league, and reminding us that Internet culture has not been completely taken over by marketers and cheerleaders, there is still room for fake names, and green text on black backgrounds.

Tags: defcon 17, Las Vegas, the riviera
Posted in Internet, Travel | No Comments »

I’m A Kid, That’s My Job

August 7th, 2009

I’m very sad about the passing of John Hughes. It makes me mad that this comes fresh off the tails of the Michael Jackson hysteria, because now everyone’s all cynical about talking celebrity death on the Internet and has already moved. John Hughes’ work meant so much more to me, in that way that you forget how much it impacted you until you really think about where something comes from and you realize it was a scene you saw in a movie or a line from one of his films. That’s how much it was a part of you, you just always assumed it was there.

And who will replace him? Who will capture that kind of normalcy, that innocence? Does it even exist anymore? I do know that his movies framed my ideas of what love was, of being an outsider, of what it felt like to yearn for something you couldn’t have, of staying friends with them anyway.

That being said, my favorite John Hughes movie, probably because of my age when the movie came out, is Uncle Buck with John Candy. I watched it over and over again, like kids do.

And my second favorite, which I know he only wrote, is Some Kind Of Wonderful. What’s great is even Lea Thompson’s “hot girl” character has layers to her. A similar movie made today would have just turned her into nothing but a sex object, of that I am sure. But, Watts! Watts was so cool. She was kind of an asshole, but we rooted for her, we wanted her to win, we knew she was the right one.

So, here’s to you, John Hughes. Here’s to teenage crushes, heartbreak, laughs, Chicago, high school outsiders, detention, forgotten birthdays, breakfast clubs, and hope that people continue watching your movies. I know I will be.

Tags: John Hughes, you break his heart i break your face
Posted in Me as A Teenager | 1 Comment »

From The Draft Folder: No Sleep Till Vegas

August 4th, 2009

Wrote this while in the Dallas Airport, on what ended up being a complete and utter clusterfuck of a day:

I’ve been awake so long that, while laying on the blue & brown carpeting of the A Terminal of Dallas Fort Worth Airport, while dozing off to the non-stop CNN, I thought the voice coming from the screen was gibberish. She just had a strong accent. And part of the show, a special on the Middle East, was in Arabic. I woke up 20 minutes later to hear a painstakingly detailed interview by a supposed protege of Michael Jackson.

still life with suitcase, DFW terminal A

The air conditioning at full blast and me in my typical complete incompetence at dressing with contingency plans, in a knee-length dress and no tights, was forced to take out my nightgown and wrap it around my legs, while I put both my arms inside my cardigan to stop from constantly shivering. I tried laying on the airport provided cots (too obsessed with falling and breaking a 27 year old hip), I tried putting my sunglasses on, I tried burying my head in the crook of my arm. And nothing, no sleep.

my sleeping bag solution/nightgown.

On the flight here, instead of napping, I listened to David Cross, Shut Up You Fucking Baby, which I’ve heard dozens of times and tried to dissect his tone. Because of my standby status, I was forced into the middle seat, which as an experienced traveler, I never, ever get, and spied on my neighbors: skinny Asian guy to my left who slept for most of the way, and then in the last hour, pulled out a big DSLR camera and meticulously looked at all his photos. It was obvious he was trying to hide what he was looking at at certain points in the roll, which of course made me crazy with curiousity. At one point, I glanced and he was watching what appeared to be a cock fighting video.

That was written at 4.18 am. I didn’t make it to Vegas until 11.00 pm the next night and didn’t get to sleep until (I’m guessing here) 7 or 8 am, fueled by Red Bull, whiskey/cokes & something called “Ass Juice.” More on all of those amazing things later.

don't forget your clothing, ladies! i know you sluts are always getting naked in the bathroom at airpors.

Tags: Las Vegas, Non-Rev Travel
Posted in Travel | No Comments »

Break It Down Again

July 28th, 2009

I have been obsessively listening to Tears for Fears Break It Down Again, the way I obsessively listen to anything when I am troubled. And right now, I am deeply troubled. But, when have I not been? Chronic depression means more wasted time than normal, more paralysis, more fear. I thought all my setbacks were making me stronger, but instead they are just doing the opposite: they’re making me cower and all the what-ifs that go through my head are becoming more and more elaborate.

Junot Diaz wrote a story in his first collection called Aguantando, which means putting up with it, which is a Dominican way of life if I’ve ever seen one. That’s what we do in my house: you put up with it, you live with it. In my family, this means hoarding medicines until you really “need” them and never expressing any displeasure because don’t you know how lucky you have it?

You, with your college education, lo aguanta in your own way: you repeat all the self-help maxims, follow all the new-age tricks: cut out sugar, cut out alcohol, relax, take a deep breath, make your fucking gratitude list, act like the chemical imbalance in your brain is something you can help and something you can fix. Pain is life, la vida es dura, life is full of suffering, in any language, in any religion, all this equals: put up or shut up.

And shut up I do, until it rises and curdles, like spoiled milk in coffee, till I can’t ignore it, till it’s all I can think about. At these moments, I think about my depression like someone I have to run off the road, knowing that at any point, it’s just going to re-start and chase me back down until it catches me again. It’s my lurker, ready to strike at any time.

Tags: emo
Posted in Depression | No Comments »

Potential Titles for MTV's True Life

July 26th, 2009

While Not Sleeping, I came across MTV’s page for True Life episodes they are currently casting. Here are my favorite real ones:

I Have Digital Drama (more tales of Revenge Porn!)
I’m A Racist
I’m Polyamorous (wolfshirts!)
I Don’t Like My Face
I’m Dating A Cougar
I Have A Hamptons Share (NYC Prep 2.0. Probably a bunch of people who work in PR. There will be some kind of commentary over who takes the Jitney or who drives. Whatever. Nothing will beat “I have a shore house“)

Ones I’d Like To See:

I’m A Spammer
I Work At The DMV
I used to have a real personality, now I post photos of my kid’s bowel movements on Facebook
I work at TMZ (possibly a combined paparazzi episode?)
I live in a residential hotel
I’m a drug dealer

I think I’d like True Life better if it were on HBO.

Tags: True Life
Posted in tv | No Comments »

Put on Duran Duran & U2

July 24th, 2009

Today, I’m thinking about mixes and compilations of music. I very rarely make them these days, except for people I actually like. Considering the amount of mixes I’ve made, I’ve received very few in return.

Here’s one I made for a boy in 2002:

1. the rapture — out of the races and onto the tracks
2. the vaselines — you think you’re a man
3. the magnetic fields — take ecstasy with me
4. ben lee — cigarretes will kill you
5. the dismemberment plan — the ice of boston
6. quasi — california
7. rufus wainwright — greek song
8. elliot smith — picture of me
9. built to spill — fling
10. jeff buckley — i want someone badly
11. james — laid
12. the get up kids — beer for breakfast
13. pavement — cut your hair
14. spoon — i didn’t come here to die
15. the pixies — where is my mind?
16. mazzy star — fade into you
17. velvet underground — pale blue eyes

for AA
April 9, 2002

here’s one i made for no apparent reason, probably around the same time:

this summer, i want to read foacualt

don’t change your plans — ben folds five
nashville — liz phair
viva anger, viva hate — rainer maria
valency — the spinanes
bang and blame — rem
rasberry rush — the promise ring
a dozen roses — braid
80 windows — nada surf
the company dime — the get up kids
that joke isn’t funny anymore — the smiths
seal my fate — belly
pictures in an exhbition — death cab for cutie
easy mark — nerf herder
canadian girlfriend — the dakota smith
what’s your take on cassavetes? — le tigre
lovesong — the cure
get the time — the descendents
monkey — counting crows
terrible/perfect — built to spill

and here’s one that i said was for the “uptown girl” but god knows if i remember who the hell “uptown girl” was:

tape that was SUPPOSED to be
for the uptown girl -

Side A :

cruel : tori amos
medieval people : helium
kiss off : violent femmes
i think i’m paranoid : garbage
how can i sing like a girl? : they might be giants
superman : glitterbox
wake me up before you go : wham!
one of these days: op ivy

Side B :
(ben folds five messiah megamix)

don’t change your plans
your redneck past
regrets
fair
kate
hospital song
army
lullaby

Tags: Mix Tapes
Posted in music | 2 Comments »

i'm not gaaaay anymore

July 22nd, 2009

1. Watch this:

2. Which turned into this and then morphed into this thing of amazing remix beauty:

Cheesy video that looks like a straight up Japanese karaoke video plus Internet nerdiness plus dance-y remix = everything I love and that makes me happy. You people in relationships have each other, I have YouTube.

[Via Psycho Letters From Men]

Tags: Ballad of Douche Quadbike
Posted in Internet Oddities | No Comments »

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