I Need a Meme

A quote I like

“The only way to write is well, and how you do it is your own damn business.” A.J. Liebling

A book I like

Read several good ones lately:

• Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven by Susan Jane Gilman: Awesome story about a disastrous trip through China just after it opened to tourism in the late 1980′s. Bonus: One of the travelers cracks the fuck up. Great story.
• State of Wonder by Ann Patchett: Ohhh I loved this so very much. It’s like Poisonwood Bible meets Atul Gawande with a dash of Oryx and Crake and a twisty ending that punches you right in the throat. (If that sentence made perfect sense to you–and better yet, if it made you really happy–please email me immediately so that we can begin our journey towards becoming America’s Next Top Best Friends.)
• The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall: I have kind of a “thing” for all things Mormon. If you meet me, do not get me started on this topic or you will leave my presence with an extensive reading list and a cocktail napkin rendering of Mormon temple garments, or sacred underwear, with which I am obsessed. And even more than Mormons, I love polygamists.  It’s a natural extension of my passionate adoration of those crazy families with 15 kids. My dad was one of eight and I have always been deeply jealous that I only have one sister.

Speaking of my sister

Do you or someone you love know a single, tall, skinny man in his 30s who is not an asshole (or only a little bit of an asshole)?  Would you like to see that man dating a beautiful, fit, well-traveled, home-owning brunette with a wild head of curls and a dog?  Maybe your friend enjoys frequent school-night shows at such venues at the 9:30 Club and Rock and Roll Hotel but is not a “scenester”, and maybe he is a little too enamored of Capital Bikeshare and you would love it if he would please, please, for the love of God talk to someone else about these things.  My sister is that someone else!  Email me or comment and let’s make them go on a date that I solemnly swear not to blog about as long as he is not a dick.

Books I would like to read

I want to read a book about a person who hunts viruses in Africa or South/Central America or the South Pacific, so it has scary shit in it about potential biological disasters and descriptions of outbreaks, but also travelogue-y type details about the places this person goes and the things s/he sees.  Something pop-science-ish.  I know this is very specific, but it’s what I want.

Alternately, I would like to read something else like State of Wonder (mentioned above) or just really good travel writing. Please give me suggestions.

School

Ugh. Had to write a passionately outraged letter to the head of student life this week.  It covered several topics, some more serious than others (a professor borrowing money from his students so he can pay his rent, and repaying the debt with a check postdated two months hence, for example) but what put me over the edge was my advisor’s refusal to communicate with me if I don’t use the clunky, horrible university email system.  If I contact her through Gmail, like any normal person would, she replies with, “Please re-send this request through the university portal, as we have discussed.”

Let’s just say that dealing with petty bureaucracy is not my strong suit. City government employees being paid by my tax dollars to be sullen and inefficient is bad enough, but I am giving SO much money and time to this university that the idea that they would refuse to answer my emails over something like this enrages me.  I PAY them.  I am their client. They are not acting in loco parentis where I am concerned, nor are they the boss of me.

It was right after I considered typing, I pay your salary, so you’d better take care how you talk to me that I realized I am slowly turning into my grandfather. To both celebrate this fact and dull my lacerating self-hatred at its emergence, I bought some cheap pink wine and drank it over ice while mulling over the conspiracy theories that landed OJ Simpson in jail. Rest in peace, Grandpa Floyd!

Speaking of conspiracy theories

There used to be this really amazing site about how powerful black entertainers and businesspeople conspired to drive Dave Chappelle crazy and ruin his career.  I just Googled it for you, but it no longer exists, sadly.  It was supposedly written by a PR exec with insider knowledge who laid the whole thing out in meticulous detail, and unlike most such wingnut enterprises, it had a lovely user interface as well.  Lucky you, though, excerpts such as this are still out there:

I was in bed next to my wife when I got woken up by a heavy pressure on my chest.

I opened my eyes to find one of the three men — that appeared in my bathroom days before — perched on top of my stomach, wielding a Colt 45 handgun with an enormous silencer. The other two men were holding me down. It seemed like my wife had been drugged, as she laid motionless but breathing next to me.

Oprah Winfrey leaned forward and whispered in my ear “you better watch your step — we’re representing interests more powerful than you can imagine. You do remember that Farrakhan killed Malcom, and that Cosby, Johnson and I have more money than God — we can keep this harassment up forever. Is this what you want your life to be like Dave?”

The last thing I remember, someone knocked me out.

I woke up with my wife the next morning and I thought it might have been a dream, but I still have a bruise on my head and I really think this all happened, despite the fact that my wife shows no signs of anything having ever happened.

The stuff you really care about

If I had boy drama to report, I would. I am entirely too superstitious and fearful to tell you directly whether or not things with Lieu seem to be going pretty amazingly well.  So I just won’t say anything.

If you don’t have anything angsty to say

Related: I have serious writer’s block. Feel free to make requests.

Websites people should invent

• A site where people post college syllabi for prospective students to preview before they register.
• I’ve said it before, but a dating site where people with expiring Groupons (et al) get together to plan incongruous blind dates. This is SO genius.
• A place where you can easily search for good restaurants along a particular route, like, oh, I don’t know, I-95 North between DC and Philly.

Related: Waffles

I thought that Waffle House was like a Cracker Barrel, but more authentic and with better food. Why did I think this, you ask? I have no idea, but I believed it wholeheartedly.  Thus it was with a sense of pleasurable anticipation that I made my first Waffle House foray somewhere in Maryland recently.  I don’t know how to accurately describe the despair that pervaded that miserable hellhole, but I think I can give you a taste by telling you that my pregnant, tattooed teenage waitress looked at me blankly when I asked for real butter to accompany my (terrible) waffle.  THEY DO NOT STOCK REAL BUTTER AT A PLACE THAT SPECIALIZES IN WAFFLES.  Indeed, I’m not sure Destynee even knew that there was such a thing as real butter.  She did, however, offer to babysit my kids if I ever needed her to because she loooved children.  Then she asked me if I had a light she could borrow.

Relationship advice from my mother…

…who has been married (or as good as) three times and was single for approximately five minutes in between each venture.  Her sisters are the same way.  Even my grandmother was engaged within a year of her husband’s death, and they were married for 55 years.

“You don’t need a man in your life.  You and your sister want babies and a family–skip the man and just get to the good stuff.  A man is just another thing you have to take care of; taking care of yourself and your kids is hard enough.  You get much more value from kids than you do from a man, believe me.”

In conclusion, I think I have a much higher sex drive than my mother, and also she has never been to a restaurant, movie, or resort as a single person, nor has she been asked to sleep on the couch so that some douchebag couple can have the bedroom and expected to acquiesce graciously.  Also, I think she is getting itchy for grandkids.  I don’t know why I think that, just a gut feeling. (She has been sending threatening pictures of herself dandling my cousins’ babies, too.)