times two:

crossing the street:

my new motif

may I not-so-proudly present:

RED FIRE-HYDRANT IN A SNOW-BANK



a journey begins...

future thoughts

I need to work on being more attractive so that I can seduce a wealthy man into marrying me, and then spend my days doing what I enjoy - namely, looking at shit on the internet.

My nights, however...


Typical conversation in my future life:

"What do you do for a living?"

"Oh, I have sex."

"So, you're... a prostitute?"

"No, I'm married."

things that are "my life":

-Sweden
-Herman Melville
-plain ramen
-sledding
-purchasing children's VHS tapes at Half Price Books

I am the next Masaoka Shiki

CATSCATSCATSCATSCATS
CATSCATSCATSCATSCATSCATSCATS
CATSCATSCATS: meow!

- a haiku

REVIEW: Full Metal Jacket -- I freakin' love this movie.

Yeah, yeah, I know -- this is the sort of movie you're supposed to watch in eighth grade and then fall madly in love with it. And yeah, yeah, if I had been enough of a cinephile to have seen it the first time when I was fourteen, then I probably would have watched it about forty subsequent times that year.

But I didn't. I'm lame, and only just watched the film for the first time recently, but I freakin' love Full Metal Jacket. I know, I know, it's Kubrick, it's so cliché to praise his work, but Full Metal Jacket is part self-reflexive Vietnam flick, part chillingly stark military-school fare, and 100% kick-ass. There's a reason why it's in the IMDb top 250.



Sure the "duality" of this film does not "gel" completely. There's potential for a ten-page analytical essay on that issue. We go from bleak, suicide-inducing cruelty in suburban America, to the wisecracking adventures of some ragtag marines, shooting VCs and calling each other "turd." If you like jokes making fun of racists that are also, you know, kind of racist, then you'll like this. But that's what makes Full Metal Jacket so awesome -- it's a war film that makes fun of war films. And all kinds of war films -- the ones about hard life at boot camp, those covering tough times in combat, and a little bit, even, of those stories of that supposed veteran sagacity that comes with having experienced battle, through Joker's sporadic, retrospective voice-over. There's even a whole section devoted to camera crews interviewing soldiers and "shooting" some action. Full Metal Jacket is a war movie that is in no way trying to fool you into thinking it isn't one. And come on, guys... it's Kubrick, and it's from 1987. If you haven't seen it yet, then get your ass in gear, man.

it's time to go grocery shopping when:

-you don't even have any ramen left

-you've resorted to eating condiments

-Kool-Aid powder is starting to sound like a good second course

Dear Iowa,

Why are you so cold?


Love,

Erin


P.S. Do you know where a person could find some good winter boots?

hilarious quotes, made even more hilarious by attributing them to the wrong people

"She's sensitive about her head because of the grease." - Maya Angelou, on Maya Rudolph


"Spending time with you is like having writer's block while filling out a madlib." - Mahatma Gandhi, to Gandalf


"It's my mother's birthday, I bought her a rug!" - Lindsay Lohan


"I don't know if I want to dance to a film about incest." - Ryan Seacrest


"If I ever find another Leprechaun in a bottle, he's going straight to the recycling bin!" - Leonard Nimoy

oh, the places we'll go

For my screenwriting class/workshop, we had an assignment for which we had to describe -- in maybe more concise prose than I ended up doing -- this room on the first floor of the building where the class is held. So I did that.



The room faces its exit. It hums with the sound of the unseen soda machines next door, with the voices from the bank of nine televisions that nobody's really watching.

The room faces outward, like a non-room, like a non-place, like transience.

The bank of televisions, near the exit, near the clean, pristine recycling bins, near the unseen soda machines next door, broadcasts politics, the news, and commercial breaks. It broadcasts big, scary things. Things disconnected from the people in this room, sitting on the couches or at the tables facing the televisions discussing these things that they aren't really watching, anyway. The bank of televisions televises things upon which the people in this room can't really have an impact. Things outside of this place.

The bank of televisions says: Let me see if I can tell you something about osteoporosis you don't already know.

The people in this clean, pristine, ephemeral sort of place sit on synthetic furniture with spindly legs. Everything is on wheels. Nothing is stationary. This whole room could easily, effortlessly, no big deal just wheel out of the exit that it faces, but no one in it would bother. That's not what they're there for.

The television says: You could be wealthy, wealthy! It only takes a split second!

The people, seated with a certain uncomfortableness on these smooth, sculpted, plastic surfaces, do not wheel the furniture, or watch the televisions, or listen to the hum of the unseen soda machines next door. The people, they read or eat or go on their computers. And they carry out these actions like they have somewhere else to go. This is not a permanent place. People do not take off their shoes here.

Angled, modern windows sneak up corners and walls of this fleeting, transitory room, to a skylight, not hidden but unseen nonetheless by the people below. Balconies peak into this place, from each floor above, but no one is in them. No one looks at this room whether in or outside it. One head can be seen in an office window on a floor above, but it does not turn. It just rests on its neck, unmoving, a potted plant beside it; a coat hanging off the edge of a cubicle.

The television says: It slides, it toasts, it sees, it calls—it's perfect for you and you!

This room -- this is a place for passing through. This is a place on the way to other places. People walk by its doors and windows, but no one stops to gaze in or out. No one leans over its balconies. No one converses, or relaxes, or has a laugh. People cough quietly and then neatly, systematically pack up their things when they are ready to leave.

I only feel inspired to blog when I read other people's blogs, and only then because I feel guilty because I probably have more time and are doing less creative things than those incredibly prolific people, and I can't even set aside a few minutes a day to type up some paragraphs that nobody's going to ever read anyway.

Here is a short film that I wrote/co-directed as a senior in high school:



I thought it was really bad at the time, but now I'm not so sure. Now I just want to get out there and shoot every little tiny script that I write, because it's better to have shot something not-very-good than to... not have, and spent your time reading about what much more motivated people have done.

I wonder if I could take out student loans to buy a camera...

songs that are inherently funny to me

-"Private Eyes" by Hall & Oates
-"D.A.N.C.E." by Justice
-"Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult
-"End of the Road" by Boyz II Men
-"Just Can't Get Enough" by Depeche Mode
-"The Final Countdown" by Europe
-"Dust in the Wind" by Kansas
-"Two Princes" by Spin Doctors
-"Peg" by Steely Dan
-"Come Sail Away" by Styx

in the morning, in the bathroom, you will find me "Tao Lin" off

I don't like going to American Apparel. It makes me feel poor and un-"trendy." Their mannequins fill the glass window-displays next to the bus stop across the street from the used bookstore that has the cats in it and instead of doing the whole awkwardly-shuffle-wait-and-feign-checking-my-cellphone-and-pretend-to-read-my-book sometimes I'll (regretfully) go inside until the metro comes. This is always a mistake. There is so much spandex and neon, and they always put the nicest stuff upstairs so you have to stay longer; have to make the trek up there and in an unhurried-enough, time-consuming way so as to look "casual." There'll always be, like, one shirt I'm interested in, but it's always $40 or more. I'm not a "career-woman;" I don't have that big of (or rather: any) disposable income and so I'll say, "Fuck this shit, Goodwill works for me," and go back outside and resume not-making-eye-contact.

But I can see why Tao Lin would title a book Shoplifting from American Apparel. I can see why a person would do that. If I had the skills, I'd do it. Clearly I don't because I am constantly running out of money from not having it in the first place and from spending all that I do have on goods that could otherwise be stolen. Obviously, I am not a master in the art of petty theft because I am writing this instead of going to the nearest Barnes & Noble and slipping Tao Lin's novella into the secret-inside-pocket of my "dad jacket" that makes me kind of look like Daria. I regret having started-to-read Les Misérables at so young an age, as I fear it has instilled in me a great terror of getting caught wrong-doing by the authorities, and this makes the ability to truly shoplift a personal impossibility.

One time while at Barnes & Noble I wanted to buy Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You. I asked the info-desk man about it because none were on the shelf. He looked it up on his computer-monitor from the early-aughts and said that there were some in stock and led me back to where I had just come from. But I know my alphabet, and I know my way around a bookshelf, and even when this khaki-slack-donning man knelt down and scanned spine-to-spine, there were still no copies physically there. Apparently, going by what the man told me, a lot of Miranda July books went missing this way. I wonder about that sometimes, about what kind of "status" goes with being an author hip to the type of demographic that wants to read your work but doesn't want to pay for it; whether those "sales" still make the publisher money; whether this practice discourages book stores from carrying the kinds of books that I like to read.

I like Tao Lin a lot, though, so I pay for his books. But I still buy them used from amazon because I am cheap.

ghosts

There are probably ghosts at my university. I don't believe in ghosts, per se, but the evidence stacks too highly in their ethereal favor for me not to at least make a note about it.

For one thing, Patrick Swayze dies of pancreatic cancer and then the same week Shwayze comes to Iowa City. Coincidence? Yeah, coincidence like "accidentally" renting both Ghost and Dirty Dancing on the same night.

There's also the fact that there's a bookstore called "The Haunted Bookstore" in Iowa City. In that phantom-friendly establishment, there's a desk with a drawer labeled "for ghost use only." There's also a piano. I played part of "Downtown" by Petula Clark on that piano. In one of my classes today, the professor played a clip from 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould that had the song "Downtown" in it. I told the guy I was sitting next to about how I can play "Downtown" on the piano. That guy interviewed Shwayze when they visited. I shit you not.

I can see what you're trying to pull, Universe, and I don't like it one bit.

But this shit gets realer. It gets eerie. It gets creepy as fuck.

Late at night, like when it starts approaching three, four in the morning, we've been hearing sounds. People running. They don't talk; they don't speak; they don't make a noise but that of feet connecting with floorboards. They just run. I thought I was imaging this. I thought I was probably making it up. I thought I was delusional but then my roommate asked me, nonchalantly, when we were both quietly hunched over computers at our respective desks in the study area:

"You know those people at night?" she asked.

"What?" I responded, taking off my headphones.

"Those people... what do you think they're running from?"

That was the first and only time my roommate has come close to truly astounding me. Ghosts can do that to a relationship.