I Bet You Wish This Was Actually a New Blog Post

It probably seems like I've completely abandoned this blog which is actually not true! People abandon blogs a lot, I realize, and a 6-7 month absence from one's blog (save one night a few months ago when I put up a blog post, went to sleep, woke up and saw that nobody had commented, had a crisis of confidence, and took it down immediately) would suggest that one has abandoned one's blog forever and ever. I haven't. I don't know when exactly I'm going to write something again but I haven't forgotten. Definitely I will write something this year, I promise you that. And I don't make promises I can't keep. It's not like one day I'll delete this blog. So as long as I am alive, the possibility exists that I will begin writing in it every day or every six months or whatever. You never know! The future is a long time, and it's allegedly quite bright.

I wrote a thing on Autostraddle recently that is kinda like things I've written here that you might like. Anyhow I love you all, how are you? I hope you are well. I am well! My work-life (Autostraddle) is insane and hard but also very rewarding spiritually or something. It is just as busy as always but I go to sleep a little after midnight and wake up at 7:30 AM every day, like a real person. Autostraddle is enough insanity for one life so the rest of the parts of my life are much calmer than that otherwise I would explode and die.

I feel like I've lost touch with a lot of people and I realize I don't know how to keep in touch with people I can't touch. I need you here, those I've loved, HERE, in front of me, I need to see you, and when I do we will pick up right where we left off. I think I've lived too many lives. There are all these lists of people I know from different lives.

Anyhow, I just wanted you to know that I love you, autowinners.

Also a few people asked me about the first paragraph of my aforementioned deleted blog -- like the little bit of it that came up on google reader? The tease? 'Cause when you clicked on it, it went nowhere, because I'd already deleted the post?


"I want to read the story of the sweet girl named riese," they said. So I think I can give you that. It's from last summer when I think I was talking to Marni on the internet about how I felt really scared about moving to California and that maybe it was all a huge mistake. Then before I went to bed I asked her to tell me a goodnight story, and so she did, and I copy-pasted it onto my desktop stickies thing, and now here it is:

marni: once upon a time there was a sweet girl named riese who lived in a big big city for many years. and she laughed and cried and did lots of writing and some drugs. but one day riese's heart said 'but riese, i miss the trees. and the water.' and riese said, 'me too, little heart.' and so riese decided it was time to take her heart allllll the way to a new, sunny placed called c-a-l-i-f-o-r-n-i-a. while she was getting ready to leave, riese said to her heart, 'but heart, what if this is a mistake? what about all of the things that are here. what about the things that i love.' and riese's heart said, 'the things that are here will remain, and so will your love. and that love will go with you, and i will keep it safe. and we will keep on loving, because i want to keep growing.' 'okay, little heart,' said riese. 'i'm ready.'‬

The First Question Will Be: What Were You Thinking?

Dear [You],

Last week I was walking back from The Y, it was getting colder like it was about to rain and I was listening to depressing music because happy music is so you know, fundamentally dishonest. I was thinking about how it was looking like I’d probably end up spending Christmas alone this year (I did) and how last year I’d planned to spend it alone but Alex made me spend it with her family and I’m glad she did that. I’ve always said ‘I prefer to be alone’ but I realize now I’ve been lying about that. I just don’t mind being alone, but good company could be better than none.

I could be alone forever. Maybe that was a thing we could've done forever, together.

I don’t think you realize how much I miss you. But that’s what happens in arguments like these when everybody’s right/wrong and nobody makes sense and at the end of the day it’s me being me and you being you.

Last year I spent Thanksgiving alone but this year Haviland and her friend Ashley came up from LA -- it’s my fourth Thanksgiving with Haviland. You and me weren’t talking much then. I wondered what you were making and if I’d ruined it.

When Haviland & Ashley arrived the night before Thanksgiving, I was still in the hospital. Not a big deal but when you don’t have health insurance, everything’s an emergency, like having a pager in the 90s. After bcw/m. got off work, she met me there and I drank Dr. Pepper and we did a crossword puzzle and about a billion hours later, I was called back.

I’d been sitting on a bed back there for an hour when Haviland marched in and extracted me. It was very cinematic. I'd been in a screaming match with the senile World War II veteran who’d been yelling about the Chinese & the Jews and calling the nurses the n-word and then said something about my ‘tits.’

It’s sad when a person’s dying / sick / drunk and you learn how they really feel.

You don’t want to know how anyone really feels.

++

++

We left the hospital in Ashley’s Prius and it felt like a spaceship. I felt like everything was gonna be okay. I leaned -- or burrowed, really -- into m.’s shoulder, in that space between collarbone and chest and I felt so safe in there, in that car, with those people. Everything felt easy and peaceful in a way things haven’t felt in a while. Old love, new love, the future.

I’d moved into my apartment two weeks before Thanksgiving, after spending ~6 weeks on Taylor & Kelsey’s couch where every morning Taylor would make coffee or I would and Kelsey always woke up last, look who just got born. Most afternoons I’d be in m.’s living room -- smoking, writing, editing, talking to you on g-chat. I know you say I never talked to you then but I did.

Kids kept killing themselves in October. I feel like I’m working the suicide beat, I said.

Or m. would arrive at TK's looking defeated from the endless interrogation that'd been unleashed upon her after being brave enough to say to her now-ex, This is how I feel, and how I feel is that this is over.

You don’t want to know how anyone really feels. Honesty was never the point, we just need to believe that it is in order to do anything at all.

The key was to avoid eye contact. Maybe then we could avoid seeing eye-to-eye or looking too long but people are animals and animals are magnets w/hearts sometimes.

This was when I was still allowed to go there; to the apartment m. & her ex still shared while she looked for somewhere new/the future. But things happen and you can’t just go everywhere anymore. Things happen and people cry and your boxes are in the street.

People tell each other how they really feel, and then everybody’s crying.

You don’t want to know how anyone really feels.

That’s how life is. It’s fair. A person gets what a person deserves or sometimes gets what someone else deserves by proxy which is also your fault.

If life was all open doors and purple sunsets then it wouldn’t mean as much when the sunset would be so beautiful that you actually stop to kiss on the sidewalk. Even assholes like me can do that, I know that now. I can see the sun rise and set every day in California and usually it would set while we were taking our daily walk like old people needing a stretch. To Safeway, Berkeley, Piedmont, the city. Or just around. Sometimes we’d just walk around.

What if trees and sky were all I needed and I was just afraid to be a thing worthy of light? What then.

By the end of the month most of the walks were to look at apartments. First for me, then later for her.

I feel like everything is about to change for everyone, including you.

The thing that's blown my mind for the past few months is how people will hang on to a thing that's completely stopped working, if it ever did -- that is, the ex-girlfriends of many of my friends; the ex-girlfriends who fought to keep a tired thing or fought just to make sure everyone felt equally attacked. It's savage. It just feels so savage to me and I can't shake it.

Why spend your life sitting in a car on the side of the road, hazards blinking like a wolf crying.

All I really want in life is to never want a thing that doesn't want me back. Maybe that's even worse. I don't know how to fight for a person. I'm learning with you, even though it's not like 'that.'

No. I'm not learning.

But I'm studying.

++

On Thanksgiving m. moved into her new place and Haviland was here and everything felt easy except you, and we'd tried so long to run in opposite directions and still ended up where we ended up so I knew by then there wasn't any way to fix it. And that's the worst part. Someone on formspring asked me why isn't love enough? And I think I said, it is. Gotta give 'em hope, you know.

m. & Ashley made Vegan Thanksgiving ‘cause Hav only eats twigs now. Then m. played guitar and they all sang while I watched. It was super gay/perfect.

I love how I took Emily’s part and you took Amy’s, Haviland said to m., like we didn’t even have to discuss it.

The next night we played frisbee on the quiet street and I was wearing tights but can’t remember why. Later on we got stoned and I was talking about feeling psychic and Ashley asked me if I felt like I might have had wings in another life. Like that I could’ve been an angel or something.

You know better than that, though, don’t you. You know I’m not an angel.

Haviland has a lot of feelings about light now. Maybe I would’ve laughed at them in August but now it’s December and I like them. This is a thing she said to me:

Haviland: “You are choosing light now and I cannot explain the massive difference I see. You can’t control [people], you can only wish for them to make the light choice and keep doing it yourself. And surround yourself with other lightworkers.”

thanksgiving 2010

[I was lying before when I told you I liked the darkness. It was a defense mechanism, for when the other kids would be splashing away the goldenest years of their brilliant athletic youths and I’d be sulking inside with a book.]

[I didn’t know the darkness was a thing I could change.]

[I couldn't. Not in New York. In New York I loved the darkness. But I'm almost 30 so I have to stop that.]

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Anyhow I was talking about Christmas, how I was walking back from the Y and thinking what if I bought a ticket to where you are. What if I just showed up. What would you do then. I thought about your hands over your face going no-no-no and pushing the door away and I almost cried for a second but didn’t.

I don’t cry much lately but I did the night I sent you that terrible email. It was lots of things: a fruitless day at the health clinic, my family losing interest it seeing me for the holidays and doing so too late for me to make other plans (but that’s unfair, probably, like “will you buy me a plane ticket ‘cause i can’t afford one myself” isn’t necessarily the best barometer of love). But mostly I was crying about you.

I do cry about you, I have cried about you. In the afternoon with pre-sunset whiskey, on my bed in child's pose at night, scrunched up like a baby dinosaur (my spirit animal).

I want you to like me again. I want you to admit that you still love me. I want you to admit that you know we still love you but that would be admitting that we’re not bad people and then you’d have to like me again.

What if me and you were just two people who met somewhere else at some other time. Like we were astronauts who spent too much time eating astronaut ice cream and not enough time shooting valiantly to the stars. What if we were waitresses together, smoking cigarettes and waiting for our rides after a dinner shift, blowing smoke valiantly towards the stars above us.

What if we were those people instead of who we are.

What if we were infinite? What if we were infinite and I showed up on your doorstep and said I know you don’t want to be fixed, but I heard from a friend who heard from a friend that you said you felt broken.

What then.

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You deserve/need a giant girl with a heart bigger than your whole body -- I'm not just talking about you now but also you and you and you. You’d sleep cradled in the scoop of her enormous ribcage, which’d be larger than a significant tropical body of water like the Gulf of Mexico. Lake Huron. Swan Lake. What you need is a heart bigger than a jet plane. Higher and faster and bigger.

Not just you, all of you.

What if my little heart’s more like a motel where you can sleep for a while but someone else might need the room tomorrow and I’ve gotta clean it first. It’s on a little brown raft crawling out to sea/see. What if I kept you there though.

Do you remember last October when everyone was partying in the room after the Equality March and I was sitting in the hotel hallway talking to you on the phone. I’m obsessed with how socks feel on hotel hallway carpet, dashing to see friends in the next room. For ice or something. What’s funny is earlier that day we’d been on the National Mall and m. and julia were both there too but I didn’t know them yet. I could hear Tess talking and Katrina loud-talking and Alex laughing because Alex has the best laugh in the whole world. She was/is/willalwaysbe my little lightworker, and the lightest thing I ever held in New York.

Do you remember that?

I’ve got rooms & rooms and my socks on the carpet and they’re filled with you all of you and I wanna live in every room forever but that would mean believing I'd ever been invited.

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Everyone tells me you just need time but I miss you all the time. How long is time. I don’t think we’re meant to understand these things.

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I can’t explain why it’s true that I love you in this/that way but can’t always be the thing you want. Nobody’s made me want to be everything as much as you have. I tried to do everything from here which is so far away from a place where I could touch your face and I ended up doing the worst thing of all the things.

It's a thing.

So many things can be true at the same time. Different feelings at the same time.

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I never expected more than one (now dead) person could ever love me. I thought you were all lying. Now I don’t know what to do with all the people who probably really do love me but who I know, i KNOW, would not really like me if they met me, even if they’ve already met me. Every time someone tells me they love me, it feels like a surprise party.

I’m sorry I didn’t believe any of you who said you loved me. I’m sorry I just don’t know why you would, it just doesn’t make sense like why anyone would love Love Actually or beef jerky.

I realize I'm comparing myself to a bad romantic comedy and a piece of meat but maybe that's actually the most perfect metaphor I've ever pulled on you.

I was lying when I said I hate everyone. I love everyone. Everyone I've ever loved; I love forever. It's a long list.

I was lying when I said I hate everyone. I love everyone.

That’s the problem, Sid.

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++

Sometime in October, my little heart slipped out on its own. I wasn’t unhappy. I think I was just outside. You weren’t the only one who complained and still even now I don’t know what happened because I don’t remember changing. Everything seemed perfectly natural and I loved you and everyone just the same.

It’d been so long since the world promised up oxygen I was semi-interested in breathing. I wasn’t writing things down because when you write a thing down it starts to exist. Sometimes i need to keep my stories in my head, close to me where nobody else can see them.

What if I tell you a thing and then I lose track of the meat of it, like a pen or my sanity.

What if I showed up on your doorstep.

My little heart was dashing around in slow motion or slipping into patches of darkness with m. where nobody could see us and we could forget about the rest of it -- an overhanging tree, some ambitious cross-fence foliage -- on Oakland’s night-time sidewalks. Corners. The damp, lukewarm California night. Fingertips. Her palms. My bones were on fire.

One night all four of us got kicked out of the hot tub, when only moments earlier there we were being sparkly wet and unemployed and fucked up in California at night in a tub of hot water with our shirts off? Stumbling home later, like sparkly wet animals? It was a Saturday night, it was a good night.

The feeling of being young. Not in the sense that I’m younger in years, but that feeling children have of life being totally infinite and incomprehensible.

++

Signing for my apartment in my apartment when it was still somebody else’s apartment

So now my life is pretty simple. I wake up and do Autostraddle and sometimes go to The Y, or take a walk alone, and at some point later, m. gets off work and at some point she comes here or I go there. Then I burrow like a thing. Like I'm a thing who laughs and smiles and everything.

I didn’t consider the possibility of this.

I don’t consider possibilities, good or bad, that I don’t have control over. My problem is expectations, my boyfriend said to me in high school on the dock of Green Lake, I just need to stop expecting anything, and then I won’t be disappointed.
I thought good point.

So I don’t. But now it’s become everything: I literally cannot see tomorrow. Tomorrow does not exist. I can’t even write to-do lists anymore. I can't warn you of anything. Maybe her and I have the same problem, that way.

Expectations are too much for a writer/psychic -- give me a possibility and I’ve got the next five chapters and they’re so gorgeous I can hardly believe the pages are mine to turn. I used to want things. Ages ago. I remember being on the bunkbed in my Dad’s apartment, underneath my brother, where I learned how to cry hysterically silently so he wouldn’t hear me.

That’s what growing up is, or was. You learn how to cry silently. How to throw up silently. How to walk silently. How to feel silently. How to break silently.

Things happened that we didn’t want/expect/predict.

I mean since I’ve gotten to California.

Things like the purest most unexpected happiness ever.

I'm sorry I couldn't warn you.

I did not consider this possibility.

Because it’s not what I do, and because there were so many reasons not to.

++

The point of this is that I love you. The point of this is that I’m sorry. The point of this is that I don’t have a giant heart after all. I’m just me on this fucking raft.

I want to be a lighthouse but I’m only a flashlight. You know what I mean?

I love you though. I'm not what you asked for, but I'm still what you have. I can't touch you but you're a thing I am keeping and nothing can change that.

Not even silence.

I will fight for you forever even if you never let me win.

++

While unpacking I found a letter Carl had sent me a year or two after I moved to NYC. Not a letter really. A note.

A piece of paper he’d cut in a heart shape and colored red with a marker. And a note with it that said, be careful. It’s the only one I have.

We haven’t talked in ages, me and Carl. I put it on the wall on my bulletin board to remind myself of that -- that sometimes being careful with a heart isn’t the thing you thought it might be.

On Thanksgiving I gave thanks for my friends but I called them “my family.”

++

I'm glad Haviland was here, I told m. when they left. I'm glad she was in this space after I moved into it. Like someone from before.

Like she blessed it?

Yeah, yeah. Like she gave it her blessing.

A thing to be thankful for.

++

Did I ever tell you that I picked Berkeley for you and what I knew you’d need. It doesn’t matter anymore.

Things tend to matter more when you can’t say them.

I guess that’s the thing about us.

I could just tell you everything and anything and you’d get it and you’d tell me something and we could go like that forever.

I just wish I could still tell you everything and anything.

I wish my life hadn’t become a blog post you don’t want to read.

When for so long; you were the first one I told.

and the heart says write a fucking post in autowin, like now!

I've spent most of the weekend reading. Not books or anything important like that really. Well, I did read an essay from Zadie Smith's book Changing my Mind called "The New Direction of the Novel" and I did re-read Emily Gould's And the Heart Says Whatever; or at least my favorite pieces of it.

It comes out May 4th but she sent me a galley in January (I think) so I ate it in January. Since the first reading I have been reading bits and pieces of it again, here and there. And I did another formal re-read about two weeks ago to prepare to write about it.

I spend a lot of time preparing to write about things, but then I never have time to do said things until the last minute, because every minute is the last minute for something else! I'm not sure if there's a way to describe in words how fucking busy I am, and how much shit I could/should be doing at all times, and how I have invented a totally rewarding but also completely logistically impossible life for myself, which is strange, how it just happened and all of a sudden here I am in my life, where all the minutes fly away from me like blackbirds. Like bye bye birdie, It's exactly like Bye Bye Fucking Birdie!

It's difficult to figure out exactly what to write about And the Heart Says Whatever on my cutting-edge relatively-literary-minded immensely popular website Autostraddle.com because my number one feeling about the book is "omg me too" which I think, given the nature of the book and the inevitably bitter criticism it's going to get (Emily Gould makes people violent or whatever) (she's a lady, writes about herself without apologizing for writing about herself, is pretty etc) (yeah i don't know either) is redundant and maybe irrelevant. But it's also the most relevant thing I ever could say about the book, particularly because if you're the kind of person that might be interested in reading about all the ways my life has been similar to Emily's or my feelings have been like Emily's feelings, then you're definitely the kind of person that will like the book, and should get it.

So I decided to work on two pieces about it; a relatively straightforward review for Autostraddle (which'll be, clearly, so "autostraddley" that it's actually unlikely to be straightforward at all), and the same for this blog but with more of the incoherent rambling that I've convinced myself you all must enjoy if you're still reading this space after all this time.

I was also writing something else for this blog, totally unrelated, which I'm confident I'll finish on some yet-to-be-seen night in the future when I magically have free time. I actually haven't had free time since... I dunno. It's hard to remember what life was like before this. Well, it's not. It's just hard to figure out how to let my life evolve, rather than frantically darting about like my life is clay comets I must catch and mold consciously, each one further away from the last.

I've been really fucking busy. Like really fucking busy you guys. This thing that I do? This thing that I do is fucking hard. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, it will eat you alive! I have been eaten alive. I am currently running Autostraddle from the inside of its stomach. It's funny that people don't realize that I write most of the website myself. I'm trying to stop doing that. There's been a lot of general behind-the-scenes stress as well lately, which is exhausting and in my opinion really unnecessary.

In any event, I'm very proud of us. Of our amazing team.

Alex too. Is everyone proud of Alex? Let's all be proud of Alex. Due to her amazing infographics, she's going to be on a panel at BlogHer as an EXPERT on how to use visuals to make blogs interesting or something.

Don't worry Emily Choo, I love you most of all (I link to that quote b/c that's how I imagine saying it out loud, not b/c the situation or emotions are similar, so really I should link to a video clip, but who has the time).

I'm also really proud of me and everyone who I work with and talk to every day and everyone who's still involved with the project and still giving as much if not more energy to it now. I'm proud of our consistent quality, our community, our growth rate, the important things we talk about and how we refuse to play stupid SEO games, as The Awl said they attempt to do when reflecting on the spirit they were founded in. I'm trying to own my feelings like Sady Fucking Doyle right now btw, is it working? I'M PROUD OF MYSELF AND ALSO OF YOU. please donate $$.

[Also, if you haven't started watching Julie & Brandy in Your Box Office, which is the show that I'm editing for Autostraddle, starring Julie Goldman and Brandy Howard, then you really should because I'm proud of that too. I KNOW IT'S VIDEO AND YOU'RE SO FUCKING LITERARY. Try it! Also we're doing this Queer Feminist Roundtable thing this week, maybe you will like that too.]

I'm still scared & sad a lot of the time, when I'm alone, because I think that humans are generally supposed to become more financially stable as they get older, but I was much better off at 18 than I am at 28 (so much debt you guys! so much debt! and no income!), and, and basically things have gotten progressively worse since about 2004, with the exception of the first few months of 2007 before my life fell apart and started getting worse again. Then as soon as I had money I gave it away anyhow, so there you go.

This weekend a lot of my surprisingly popular tumblr followers have probs wondered where are the photos of Kristen Stewart, what's with all this fucking text. Because of all this online reading that I've been doing that I mentioned in the beginning of the blog post. So I quoted some things.

I think I've been reading a lot this weekend b/c I've been thinking (because of Emily's book) a lot about writing on the internet and discourse around cyberculture, the future of publishing et al. Also I've been sort of trying to like, change some things about how I live my life, or something, and I think I needed time for reflection. I was hoping this "reflection" time I imagined having this weekend because I can't afford to leave my apartment would be "writing time," but instead it has been reading time. Reading BLOGS, honestly, mostly, when I haven't been doing Autostraddle work. Which I felt guilty about (whaaat?) and therefore wrote/am writing this post, to feel better.

These are some things I read this afternoon that I liked, in addition to The Economist's special section about the future of television and online television, which is not available online, dangit:

• Metacriticism; or, olds vs. youngs by matt langer
• [BONERS], For Fun and Profit: The Extent To Which You Don’t Care About [BONERS], Revealed!, by Sady Doyle.
• That post partially inspired this post at Shapely Prose, called I'm Kate Fucking Harding. I'd already read Sady Doyle's piece when I came upon Kate Fucking Harding's piece, which made me feel very prepared for class when I was lead to Kate Harding's piece by the very excellent blog Heather & Rachel Have Feelings. Rachel was an Autostraddle Intern but now she's an "editorial assistant" and basically we are attempting to promote her as high in the ranks of Autostraddle's Unpaid Leadership Club as she can go without not liking me anymore, so we'll see how that works out for everyone/her.
• The Intellectual Situation at n+1. This one is especially long, but you must read it. Even if you aren't into the story parts, the parts of analysis/essay/WHATEVER are important; "Addled" and "The Internet as Social Medium" etc.
• Alienated Confusions: The Black Girl's Mainfesto: The Basic Rights of Femininity
  
• I read other stuff too but now my time is up and I have to go!
  

Is that okay? Are you still here? Are we still in love? I'm still broken on the inside, but you'll have to keep that between you and me for now, because I have to act "as if" right now. Just right now though. You know one day I'll tell you everything, right? I never did, really, because I couldn't. There are only two or three things I know for sure and that is one of those things; one day.

We Went to the National Equality March and Brought You a Video

Hi! I do this website Autostraddle? And we had a pretty amazing redesign, it went up a few weeks ago and though we're still ironing it out, you should go check it out! I AM SHOWING YOU MY SOUL GO LOOK AT IT!

Also I come bearing video! Haviland & I did a vlog which I haven't had time to edit yet, but we also made a National Equality March Video and a National Equality March PRE-Video. So you should watch them.

xoxo
tinkerbell

I Want Directions, Helpful HInts and Also. Also. Also I have a Tumblr now.

What should I write a blog post about? Write a comment and ask me a question. Then I will answer your questions in 'another blog post.' I realize by 'asking you to ask me questions' I am acting like 'someone who thinks they are important' or 'someone who has 'answers.'' I'm not, I'm just 'someone who isn't sure about stuff' but 'doesn't want to feel bad for' 'never blogging.'

Hopefully someone will ask me "what is symbolic annihilation?" which I love to talk about. "What shampoo do you use?" Maybe it will be silence, like in the song by Simon & Garfunkel, which will be affirming. I want to write something that people will want to read. Maybe no-one wants to read anything anymore! For example this paragraph - not particularly entertaining.

Also guess what, I have a tumblr now!! It's sort of silly but it's nice for me to say and post little things I see and like and think and that stuff.

Relief Next to Me or "Sorry I’m just revisiting this now."

I am not sure if all of these sentences have periods at the end of them or if the words are correct but maybe an intern could copyedit it for me jk no but srsly.

I just had a really incredible weekend. And I was excited for it. I'm still excited & charmed by the web of cyber-intern-love we've woven. The context was ideal because the point -- really, truly the point -- of autowin -- was to get to autostraddle. I couldn't -- can't -- keep on like I was on here forever.

I should tell you that the point of my life was to get to the writing, the point of the writing was never to get to my life.

But the point of the work -- the knowledge, the community, the material itself, and the conversations -- the point of the work was to get to the magazine. And here it is.

See back then it was exactly like being naked. Perhaps you also felt naked but really at best you were like a censored movie on teevee -- all blur and suggestion and hope -- you were just the idea of nakedness and I was open and cold like a pitted grapefruit.

When we were 15 my friend Andrew wrote a poem about heartbreak and it opened like this and employed alternative lifestyle formatting: You have dug me out / with grapefruit spoons / and I am left as only the shell of me, / like a rotten peanut / salty and compromised.

You knew things about me and then there we'd be at a party or a restaurant, like the worst places on earth to talk to anyone about anything real, like we were people from the middle ages transported into Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. And on top of that, we were generally people all too aware of that particular obstacle but somehow braving it just the same.

And I felt like you wouldn't like me if you met me.

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See there's two memememees: let's say one of them is Riese and the other is autowin. Autowin is the writer part. It's weird to give that part the name "autowin" because autowin is a new/knew name and the writer-part of me is the oldest part of me. But whatever. I'm writing this so I make the rules.

Autowin is scared a lot and doesn't want anyone else around. She writes this blog but doesn't talk to people. She's somewhat incapable of interacting with normal society because she finds strip malls fundamentally ridiculous and organized professional sports somewhat baffling and nuclear families hopelessly boring and outdoor barbecues where straight people hold drinks close to their waists and talk about rooms or decorations they're planning to add on to their house to be sort of embarrassing and sad even though everyone at the barbecue is smiling and happy and full of confident, flowy energy.

She is openly convinced that everyone she knows may undergo a metamorphosis and become Old Navy overnight, and so she does not depend on them to ever join her revolution, which is a disorganized revolution anyhow and often drunk.

She has trouble with phone calls and friendship and employers. She likes to smoke just about anything and doesn't think anyone gets her and there's very little anyone could do to prove otherwise but if you can convince her that you do get her, she sometimes falls straight lickity-split in fucking love with you.

Her sexuality is not incredibly relevant, it's just another kind of nakedness or aggression, depending.

There's been a handful of people who knew the "autowin" personality as she exists in normal everyday life. None of them are people I see or speak to regularly right now. I don't know if that's good or bad, it just ... is.

+

So I'm used to being separate from the writer person, it's what I've always done. Well ... I think when you're talking about your feelings and I'm talking to you about your feelings, or about my life, maybe there are flashes of autowin there. But generally she is not a person who talks to people, she is a person dependent on privacy or total understanding, which comes with time, because autowin is scared!

+

And even though this weekend I knew I'd be hanging out with people who knew autowin's writing (including some people who primarily knew me through autowin), it was in this other context of Autostraddle -- and THE TEAM!, who you should defo like more than me because they are cooler -- which made me feel safe, and happy, and like everything had come together perfectly ... like I wouldn't be a total weirdo ... like either I'm totally a weirdo who scares people like I scared people when I was younger because I was intense and they had Barbies, or I'm a normal social person which secretly I am totally fine at too.

... not nervous at all, but excited. And in the weeks leading up to it I was wondering why I felt so excited whereas when I knew I'd be meeting people via autowin in the past, I would feel mostly awkward and scared, but ever since Autostraddle started I've loved meeting people. Like I want to talk to people about the future! Maybe because I have one and I am not constantly attempting to obliterate myself or die or tell a really funny joke or something.

Maybe because Autostraddle has a greater purpose, and because it is a business, and so there's something solid to hold on to as human beings. A starting point. We don't have to begin with the meaning of life.

And there was a purpose, and there was a team, and that's one of the reasons why this weekend managed to combine all the things I love about people who love autowin with all the things I love about people and FUN FUN FUN in general.

'Cause sometimes you don't have to talk face to face about how you GET IT to have fun, but you can have fun face-to-face because you GET IT.

So anyhow. It was so beautiful! I have never felt such overwhelming positivity about a group of people before in my life. Seriously it was almost transcendent and in a strange way totally incomparable to any feeling I've ever felt before.

So thank you intern army who came to NYC this weekend and risked getting gay grounded and slept on couches or on top of each other and who fliered madly and walked in the sunshine and said lovely things, thank you alexandra, ashley, daphne, elizabeth, emily, heidi, jessica, katrina, laura, lola, nicole and tirna and to the team for an awesome weekend.

I mean I spent like 50% of the weekend feeling totally sick in one physical way or another and still think it was one of the best weekends of my life, so that says a lot for the power of X's secret stash everyone!

I am proud of everyone, happy to work with these people and be associated with them; alex, brooke, carly, robin, nata, stef -- and also laneia, crystal and tess even though they couldn't be there physically.

I want Autostraddle to be really successful so we can afford to have another party that's longer where we can play Truth or Dare like I suggested ten THOUSAND BAJILLION TIMES as well as strip poker, but what no one knew is I wasn't talking about your clothes, I was talking about your feelings! JK, I'm not a lesbian, I'm a bisexual like T2 (that's my bro-name for Tila Tequila), so all I want in life is for everyone to make out on television with microphones on their butts. I was talking about your clothes! Where was I. Waiting for the parade. Yes!

this photo is called "interns" and it's by robin roemer, obvs

Once we had this idea to take the interns upstate to Alex's cabin and blindfold them and leave them in the woods and whomever came out alive got to transcribe an interview with charlene from "gimme sugar."

Right about that anyhow: I felt safe and not scared or heavy and open and cold like a pitted pit. Like it wasn't just about me and my secrets. It was about all these people together. It was about all the things we actually don't need to lie about when we're around the right people, which are also beautiful things. So I wasn't even nervous like I was to meet people I'd met before via autowin, but excited and already totally comfortable. Which is a good place to start from, especially if one will ever get to autowin.

What I mean is that doesn't mean that like everything is on the table, but everything is DANCING on the table. Make out and wait for the next joke etc. And I had these other people -- which is a technique I've entertained since the start (here, look at my BFF, she's pretty!!! read my words, but dream of her!), only now it has a very concrete form & structure & purpose.

We had a party! We marched in a parade! It was a ridiculously short period of time doing weird things!

I have some things I should say to you, some disappointing things: I don't always remember exactly. I want to have the time to remember, or the capacity to remember. I do get a lot of emails -- not THAT many -- but like, a good 3 or 4 a week, and they are always really full of feelings. I have a hard time responding because I have a hard time feeling important. I don't have a vocabulary for it. I don't want to let you down. I love the emails and I wonder if just saying "thank you" is enough. Like this paragraph already feels weird so

and it's hard to say "your emails make me feel better about my existence" ... and then I feel I cheat you if I don't address, you know, your existence ... or mention that like ... my existence was compromised by this blog in SO MANY WAYS that i didn't/can't talk about. It hasn't been easy. Mostly though i can't talk about it 'cause I can't diminish the positive things it brought! Such things!!! ... and where we are ... and I've tried to fucking structure this goddamn post and I can't. Oh well. Maybe TInkerbell will comment! !!!!! this isa blogtherearenorules look ican write whatever i want POTATO!

Also, it's hard to feel important when everyone around you thinks you should give it up and make some fucking money for once. Money matters, it matters all the time. I want it! 'Cause it's fun and you can give it to other people when they need it too. But I'd rather die than temp 9 hours a day 5 days a week for a paycheck that just barely covers my basic living expenses because if I have no time to write or create things than I might as well be dead. You know? I'm convinced by something greater than all of this that we'll find a way.

Anyhow, those are my feelings. The whole truth is like the story of a wave unfurled, ET-effin'-CETERA.

Are You There Blog? It's Me, Autowin!

+ We had a team meeting tonight. Like a real one where real things happened!

+ For most of last year I'd wake up and for the first hour of every morning it'd be this game of detective trying to figure out what I'd done the last hour of the night before. What I'd written (the typos! what a laugh! how silly I was!) and to whom. Glasses and ashes and lots of open tabs.

It was like the opposite of laying your clothes out the night before school. I talked a lot about purpose but I felt powerless as a concubine; still but swimming furiously. I think those were all things I needed to go through but I'm still not sure exactly what I was doing. You start doing something and then you just keep doing it. Suddenly; then constantly. It kept me safe in a way because I had secrets I had to keep, there was no question.

+ Sometimes I caught myself mattering

+ Sometimes it comes back. One thing will feel wrong and the darkness unfurls enthusiastically from my chest and stomach, like an airy familiar evil pressing out against my skin and brain. It's a fear of losing things that I truly like and love and things that I feel are good for me, which is a different kind of fear than the fear of losing something you love desperately and absolutely despite how clearly rotten it is most of the time.

+ That happens less and less now but when it happens it's not just the fear, but the fear of more fear.

+ I don't want to be the girl who cried let's change the world but I feel whole right now, and solid. No one is crying here, no lies, just love, I mean it, I love it. I love life so much that I want you all to love it too, for all your right reasons.

+ Besides that fear I mentioned before, the crippling panic demanding attention like a child crying in public. Then it passes, like everything does. Sometimes I have fear about money and that's a new panic, like an itchy panic. I try to push it out of my brain.

+ We have this little temporary castle in the sky for another week or so where we can have meetings for Team Autostraddle. It was sweet tonight to talk to Laneia on the speakerphone and talk in real human voices. We talked to our programmer Tess on the phone a few weeks ago which was also awesome. It's been sweet to do things like eat pizza and talk about our dreams. We have like twelve interns which is awesome, and two came over tonight, so it was me, A;ex, Stef, Brooke, Robin, Carlytron, Tinkerbell who I put in the washing machine so now she is really clean and fresh-smelling, and Haviland!! and Intern X and Intern Jessica. If Crystal had been there/in our time zone that would've been perfect obvs.


+ A few weeks ago we had an interview rescheduled but Robin was already in the city and wanted to shoot something and so she was like, let's go to Brooke's, and so I was like, okay, and then A;ex and Carly came too, and it was fun! I look super serious! See:

+

+ Anyhow then we got to interview Julie Goldman last Sunday which was awesome awesome -- Robin took photos and Alex video'ed and I asked questions. Also two weeks ago Laneia and I started a feature we're doing about lesbian YA novels which I really love a lot. Also we did a Hot 100 and it was funny.

+ That's all. Just checking in! Hi guys! I just wrote "High guys!" I'm not high. If I was high I'd have a lot more metaphors.

Autofun 5.6 - But This is How the Revolution Begins

Wow, so. Life! Geez! What a trip! I mean it! Every minute is so much! Well, in any event, I wanted to touch base. I used to hate that phrase and I told my Mom she wasn't allowed to use it. I also hated it when she referred to my female friends as my "girlfriends." In retrospect, tht may've been partially due to my secret yearnings to make these ladies into my girlfriends, but actually no, it wasn't, though that would've made me unnaturally clever for my age.


Quote:

"But this is how the revolution begins: a few of us start chasing our dreams, breaking our old patterns, embracing what we love (and in the process discovering what we hate), daydreaming, questioning, acting outside the boundaries of routine and regularity. Others see us doing this, see people daring to be more creative and more adventurous, more generous and more ambitious than they had imagined possible, and join us one by one. Once enough people embrace this new way of living, a point of critical mass is finally reached, and society itself begins to change. From that moment, the world will start to undergo a transformation: from the frightening, alien place that it is, into a place ripe with possibility, where our lives are in our own hands and any dream can come true." (crime-think ex-workers collective: "there is a difference between life and survival. ")

---

Links:
+ What a bizarrely interesting question: I'm a Harvard Grad who can't hold a fast food job (and that's not all). The intriguing answer includes the following: "When I set out in my 20s I understood very little but I understood this much: Any educated white person in America is privileged, and no one is going to allow us to starve. We can't even starve if we want to. People keep inviting us to dinner to talk about Robert Lowell." (@salon)

+ I think I'm gonna do a Top Ten on this topic very soon: At The Morning News, "Devotees of periodicals refuse to give up on their first love. Our READERS AND WRITERS extol their favorite ink-based publications."

+ I have SO MANY FEELINGS about this article: Creative Minds - The Links Between Mental Illness and Creativity (it also goes into comedians w/r/t depression). One of them is "Am I crazy?" and another one is "Were they NOT crazy?" and another one is "reading this makes me feel like everyone and everything is crazy" and another one is "Tinkerbell, eat your pudding."

"It can be difficult for people to reconcile mental illness with the idea that traits may not be disabling. While people accept that there are health benefits to anxiety, they are more wary of schizophrenia and manic depression. There is now a feeling that these traits have survived because they have some adaptive value. To be mildly manic depressive or mildly schizophrenic brings a flexibility of thought, an openness, and risk-taking behaviour, which does have some adaptive value in creativity. The price paid for having those traits is that some will have mental illness."

+ Emily Gould reminds me of me a lot, and so this is from a few weeks ago, I guess that's how long I've been waiting to share it with you: Spring Rude Awakening (@emily magazine)

+ Me & Green read some YA Lesbian Novels and talked about them on Autostraddle you should read it it's really good, we're gonna read more and talk about more too

+ The Future Is Wow (@good)

+ The Glory Days of Online Sex : "I went to chat rooms looking for sex, which is what everyone seemed to be looking for. And the anonymous nature of chat rooms allowed people to completely blow off any pretense of reality. Why tell people you’re 40 when you can tell them you’re 38?" (@the blowfish blog)

+ I put in a request with John Moon at Achtung Baby! to do Night Truths by Stephen Dunn and he did it (@achtung baby)

+ Lady Gaga's Looks: A Retrospective (@missbehave)

+ Why are we always the ones having conspiracies and agendas ? Are we too evil for straightforward smear campaigns, like the one the world consistently wages upon us?

+ It's Get Me Off This Rock Week at Gizmodo! "So get ready for the present and the future of space trips, the design and the function, the science and the fiction, the technology genius and the courage, the quest for intergalactic neighbours, and all the spectacular views ..."

+ Our moral judgement: not so good after all. We all have stumbling blocks on the road to self-righteousness. (@nytimes)

+ Ten Porn Stars gone legit .(@nymag)

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Pirates vs. Ninjas: An Insomnia Poem
-dedicated to team autostraddle interns, who are all autowinners-

our minds buzz like bees minds
is a line from a poem by jim harrison
that i can't get out of my head
this is why i can't get into bed
my shoulder's lead

it's dreams vs. dreams, no game
my dog is silent and it's a shame
i'd wanted to bring her
fame

the first time i wrote an insomnia poem
it was about candy
i wanted it to be really bad
and make my puppy very sad
and inspire my mom to wrap some food using glad.
(that's a brand of saran wrap
wrap it up, rap it out.)

we come demanding
cultural clout

I have a million unmarked dreams in a briefcase
I'll meet you on the corner, bring the girl and

if the internet was someone's boyfriend
i feel like sometimes he'd be a pretty shitty boyfriend

I was trying to remember the first time I said it
and if I meant it,
about changing the world
and i remembered that i did

Sunday Funday Happy Day! Monday Tuesday Happy Day!

Look! Auto-Fun! One of you told me it was better than nothing and I'm hoping at least 3-4 of you agree with that. also your responses to my last post made me feel totally better about life and everything srsly.

I started writing this Sunday Top Ten last week about my Top Ten Non-Emotional Scars, inspired by last Friday night (March 20th), when got drunkity-drunk-drunk and banged my eye on the edge of a door which reminded me of the last time that happened in 2003. But then when I was writing it I started to think that might be gross. What do you think? Don't tell me about your own non-emotional scars, I will need you to save that feedback for the Top Ten if it ever happens. Sidenote; besides a post-H&R-Block-Incident glass o'wine, I haven't drank since the eye-bang, yet I continue to run into walls, doors, and other humans.

Option Two: this Wednesday, while most professional lesbians will be enjoying the sun & surf & drunk-girls-in-cargo shorts at Dinah Shore, I will be going to OHIO! with my dearest Natalie. She's from the fine suburbs of Cleveland. Why? Because I'm a good friend. Anyhow, I was also thinking I could do a Top Ten Most Amazing Things About Ohio. Then I remembered how Crystal thought Ohio was in Michigan and I don't want to alienate my international readers any more than I already do. But who doesn't want to talk about The Beast and The Raptor, you know? RAWR!!!

Q: What should I write a Tuesday Top Eight about?
1. Top Ten Non-Emotional Scars
2. Top Ten OH! OHIO!
3. Both
4. Neither.

The future is in your hands, grasshopper(s).

---

Soooooo Autostraddle !! FYI, here's what's been going on there this week:
1) Stef's interview with Hesta Prynn of Northern State on her new solo project, in which they start a riot grrrl band called Tyra Mail.
2) Weekly TV Time With Carlytron : Gossip Girl, Battlestar, How I Met Your Mother and MORE!
3) New Photoblogger Robin asks "Queers Shot Weddings Here, Don't They ?"
4) Crystal Loves Kangaroos ! Meet our resident Aussie!
5) Green-on-Meghan O'Malley - interview with the amazing lady behind Queering Domesticity !

Also we're working on making a more easily navigated L Word Recap/Info repository, check out the hottest coolest gallery of L Word cast photos on the entire interwebs (always in progress, obvs), and we now have a fan page on Facebook! Become a fan now !

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Quote: "And we will be ready, at the end of every day will be ready, will not say no to anything, will try to stay awake while everyone is sleeping, will not sleep, will make the shoes with the elves, will breathe deeply all the time, breathe in all the air full of glass and nails and blood, will breathe it and drink it, so rich, so when it comes we will not be angry, will be content, tired enough to go, gratefully, will shake hands with everyone, bye, bye, and then pack a bag, some snacks, and go to the volcano!" (Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)

---

Links:
1. The Celebrity Twitter Ecosystem: "It seems that — just like the rest of us — celebrities enjoy hearing about other celebrities, and Twitter lets them participate in a giant cross-disciplinary mash-up of a conversation." (@the new york times)
2. All My Heroes: fourfour's "mere administration" is our vacation. That rhymed, right? Yeah? Go team!
3. The Web at 20: Not Old Enough to Drink, Yet Drives Us to It: on the 20 worst things about the internet. Twitter and Julia Allison top the list. Oversharing ranks. I'd just say that it prevents sleep by making communication with other "humans" instantly possible at any time. (@gawker)
4. This guy explains why the claims that Internet addiction should be considered a mental disorder are stupid. (@psychology today)
5. These Books Won't Change Your Life: "The phrase implies some instant metamorphic shift in the essence of our character: not just a new opinion on whether something is right or wrong, but a shift in the very fundamentals of our being. The sort of change where you're forced to admit at parties: "Well, before I read Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I was just plain Steve. Afterwards I'm afraid I found myself to be Stevian, the Magician of the Night." (@the guardianuk)
6. An argument against Twilight, which I still haven't read, but decided it was misogynistic after reading an article in bitch magazine, which might not be the fairest way to judge. (@london review of books)
7. Mythbusting the MTA Fare Hikes (@east village idiot)
8. What a Girl Wants: Some Lesbians Enjoy Gay Male Porn (@jezebel)
9. What is narcissistic personality disorder, and why does everyone seem to have it? (@slate magazine)

and if you call, i will answer

ETA: New H&R Advice Column Vlog on Autostraddle!

Q: What are you doing? Why haven't you updated since Friday?
A: I've been working on Autostraddle ("girl-on-girl culture for weirdos") all day/weeks. It's a new website, probs eventually will be the best website of all time. I'm doing it with my team in preparation for the revolution/the factory/the dream. Right now it looks like an L Word shrine 'cause that show just ended and that's all the old autostraddle content. Pretty soon it'll look like an Awesome Shrine, and we'll do a dance around it, like they did in early 90's movies with lesbian & witchery undertones.

Driver: Watch out for the weirdos, girls.
Nancy: We are the weirdos, mister.

Anyhow I have lots more to say about that to y'all and recruitment to do, but I have to get it all on lockdown first. meemememememememe!

Q: When will you go back to being the most reliable blogger ever besides Lozo who doesn't even read his comments and often quits?
I'll be better at updating autowin starting next week, sorry I've neglected you just like your first wife and maybe even your mom. If your Mom neglected you, you should write a book. Some things will change like this blog will be more emo whereas vlogs will go on new Autostraddle but I'll tell you about it so you can read that too.

Q: What about Stuff I've Been Reading?
Soon! I'm gonna scare away all my readers except brooklyn boy. JK srsly hello I was not awarded best lesbian personal blogger for nothing. I mean I'm not even a lesbian.

Q: Do you ever think about things you're pretty positive you'll NEVER do?
A: Omg, all the time. Like I can't really ever imagine being seriously overweight, or becoming a Baptist, I guess. Do you ever think about that?

Q: Yeah. What are you really thinking about?
A: I've been trying to think differently.

Q: Is it weird?
A: Yeah it is weird, everything's weird. Sometimes it's weird how even though I am writing for everyone/no-one, I find I'm often really only writing to one or two people and just hoping it's interesting or compelling enough for other people to feel it could also be about them or interesting to them or I don't know, I guess everyone just wants to be something to someone. Then people disappear and I don't know who I'm writing letters to anymore.

I think what happened is the balance tipped into a spot where I missed all these "yous" so much, so intensely, so all-over-my-body like, that when just one more person I would have to miss like that was shot into that spot it just overflowed, and the power of that has made me too sad to be anything but totally alert and happy all the time. It's something, I mean, it works.

Q: Remember when you used to shut down your blog sometimes?
A: Ha, yeah, maybe like ten people know what I'm talking about. It would usually be for like 12-24 hours or something. My relationship to my MacBook Pro isn't as intimate as my relationship to my MacBook. MacBooks look like cute pets so I think you feel closer to them. This machine is a MACHINE. It kicks ass, like witchery.

This has happened before -- these little lapses. When Pekor and I had a three-day silent fight, when I lost B. When I lost "Olive." And again. When I lost track of time. When I lost my footing and changed my location, ultimately, from "Warlem" to "couch-hopping" and then back again. When I've been on the Rosie cruise, when I was in Malibu and right before I went to Malibu, maybe even when I was in Texas, I can't remember. When I was working 60 hours a week for a few days I lapsed.

Anyhow I just wanted to say this isn't like, the part where I slowly taper out and just vanish, that's something I've never wanted to do, and never will. So yeah, I'm just working on this website and super focused and we will be back to regularly scheduled programming more or less I hope next week. Okay? Okay! Yay! Hi! What's your favorite song right now?

Friday Autofunday 2-27-2009

Autoportrait 2.0 is in the works. Meanwhile, let's have some cheap sharp fun. What kind of fun? Auto-fun. Everyone likes fun, if you don't like fun then next time we wanna have massive amounts of kickass fun, we won't invite you. This isn't fun so far? Well I'm listening to the Classical Masterpieces Channel on Time Warner Cable. These channels are TW's hidden gift. What if I was like, bought out by someone you knew I hated and I had to promote them all the time. If one day I woke up and was like "Top Ten Ideas for Max's Baby Shower (so excitant for Season Six)!!!"

Firstly some bizness. I've decided to change the book club book because I realize I'll never read our current selection because it is too heavy to carry in my bag and I can't afford to give one away and I like to give one away and have a contest. So I picked another book. Because I want to read it and hopefully you will want to read it too? Susan Sontag's journals, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963. Okays. I'll give you lots of time 'cause I just started The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I'll talk more about Reborn in the next "Stuff I've Been Reading." Don't be mad promise.

---

Quote: "My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still." (from Frank O'Hara's "Meditations on an Emergency" from poetry magazine via achtung baby !)

---

Links:
[let me just say these are real gems.]
- I am so excited to bring you the auto-fun today, I'm doing it so I can make you read this article in The New York Times about living with monkeys !
- Tao Lin, my financial idol, shares his secrets at UrbanElitist . E.g., "I have had part-time jobs almost continuously since college (I am 25), I think, except for maybe one year when I shoplifted batteries and Moleskine journals to sell on eBay ... since [selling my next novel's royalties] my money has come from selling pre-orders and lifetime subscriptions to books ... Christmas and Chinese New Year’s money from my parents and brother; and selling drawings, drafts of things, and various “piles of shit” from my room on eBay."
- AM Homes has a new short story at The New Yorker: "Brother on Sunday. "
- Emily Gould has a dysfunctional relationship with her old laptop. MIT's Sherry Turkle has "spent several decades studying and writing about the way mechanical objects construct and complete the self." This is really interesting stuff, you must read it. It even quotes a Meghan Daum essay I once used to teach middle school kids in rural Northern Michigan to write personal essays. The Technology Review.
- Firstly - there is a magazine called Obit. Secondly, read this: Laughing Past the Grave .
- The Unrecognizable Internet of 1996 at Slate: "People still refer to the new medium by its full name—the World Wide Web—and although you sometimes find interesting stuff here, you're constantly struck by how little there is to do. You rarely linger on the Web; your computer takes about 30 seconds to load each page, and, hey, you're paying for the Internet by the hour. Plus, you're tying up the phone line. Ten minutes after you log in, you shut down your modem. You've got other things to do—after all, a new episode of Seinfeld is on."
- Leonardo da Vinci was a serious procrastinator too .
- NPR's intriguing essay on "the art of language, Obama style ."
- This is the part where it officially becomes cool. I think it's the counter-backlash. Yoko Ono's 25 Things .

---

Last week I became briefly addicted to hunting for celebrity photographs. I have no idea why, this has never been a thing that interested me before, nor could I refer to this compulsion as anything resembling "interesting." I was not being intellectually or creatively stimulated, I was not interacting with other people, I was not learning anything, or accomplishing any of my daily or life goals. Yet. One more page. One more ELLEN PAGE! Anyhow way too late in the game I discovered fanpop which incited a whole new round of gazing at celebrity photos when I had other things to do.

I've been off the sauce for four days now, I'm going to go back to Trivia Machine as my insomnia obsession. Like if I was advertising an insomnia obsession I'd say: "You know those things you do when your brain's too quick for sleep and too slow to be awake?" So. I have some holdovers from Autowin Surrenders week obsession that I will share with you, and therefore I'll feel accomplished and therefore not feel guilty anymore. See how we help each other?

"Here, let me help you, then you me, otherwise we'll die." (Stephen Dunn)

Shanyn Sossamon Good Tie Thursday
+

Shanyn Sossamon -Whoodie Wednesday
+

Nelly Furtado - Good Tie Thursday
++

Liv Tyler - Boyshorts Tuesday
+

Drew Barrymore - Finnneeee Friday
+

Ellen Page - Whoodie Wednesday
+

Angelina Jolie Saturday & Sunday
++

My favorite hoodie of all time - Shane for Whoodie Wednesday Wax
++

DJ Carlytron for Good Tie Tuesday
++

TTYS!

Monday Monday Auto-FunDay 2.9.2009

The next Top Ten will be related somewhat to Girl Scout Badges. Seriously. Natalie and I had a big talk about it, we have lots of big talks 'cause our heads are overstuffed with nonsense. So I ordered the book from ebay and now I'm waiting. Clearly I'm very comfortable at the edge of my seat. That's where everything good is always just about to happen.

This is your last day to nominate me for The Lezzies. Haven't I been so lovely and not aggressive about it? Yes, yes I have. So please do nominate Autowin and/or Autostraddle for Best Personal Blog (or humor? or culture and entertainment? or the best overall?) and be sure to verify your vote by email. Don't stress if you don't know who to nominate for every category, just do the ones you know.

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Quote: "I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith, and hope. I have allways believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed n these things without going arond making a dull middleclass philosophy out of it. I was suddeny left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars." (Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll)

---

Links:

• On "10 Days in the Life of a Tampon," et al -- Rebecca Traister investigates "Female writers getting graphic about the messiness of their bodies ," at Salon.

• Autostraddle:

- A Letter from Max to Ilene
- RECAP of The L Word Episode 604: Leaving Los Angeles .
- Sugar Rush: No Limits For Real

• "And so, when it finally happened, because it was bound to happen, we all knew it was only a matter of time, we felt, in the midst of our curiosity and terror, a certain calm, the calm of familiarity, we knew what was expected of us, at such a moment." - Steven Millhauser's "The Invasion from Outer Space " at The New Yorker.
• New York Magazine investigates How Tweet It Is: Are the Creators of Twitter Living in a dreamworld of possibilities ... and not making any money.
• Gawker points out that The Talking About the Talking about the 25 Things Thing is like so over for crying out loud.
• Will Obama's administration be more Sex-Positive: nerve.com looks at the future of teen pregnancy, abstinence education, HIV and STDs, Reproductive Rights and Queer Issues.
  
• Dorothy Snarker calls TV out in Hollywood to Lesbians: We're Just Not That Into You .
• Interview with Michael Robbins at my bff the village voice. He's the perfect poet who wrote 'Alien Vs. Predator ' which I linked to also in auto-fun not so long ago.
• The Daily Beast's Peter Beinart says "Ignore the Republicans " because "if the economy is better off in four years, they lose."
• n+1 does a Britney Spears Symposium .

i call automatic fun! when? today! okay! 11.20.2008.

[UPDATE! The Weblog Awards are actual awards that actually matter, I swear, and today Friday the 21st is the last day they're accepting nominations for Best LGBT blog. So gimme a nod, if you've got a minute. Thanks!!]

Remember when I said I'd be posting a lot this week? That was a neat idea! Unfortunately my actual (paid) workload for this week is growing like the hungry caterpillar and I haven't been able to deliver y'all my deliverables. Luckily I make my own rules so I can change them and if you don't like it then I hate you, I'm sorry, I just hate you!

Anyhow, when one cannot follow through fully one does follow through partially. For example, I've got the scoop on The L Word spinoff The Farm on Ausostraddle, the SON recap will be a double-header next week for eps 13 & 14 'cause I don't got no time this week to do 13 and I think it's mostly about Glen anyhow and Glen is not hot, not gay, and not Spashley, therefore he is not punk, not vegan, not hot, and not fun, and not cool, and not this week sorz. Also, Haviland and I made a vlog, I'll edit it some time. If you want me to work faster, give me your money, some Lean Pockets, a back massage, a pony or a lemon tree. (UPDATE: Lemon tree is taken care of, thank you autumn.) I have some screencaps to whet your appetite.

I'm listening to all your emo music, you weirdos. It's okay, luckily I'm a weirdo too, so it's just what the blogger ordered. No really it's totally fucking awesome. It's like mind control in a good way. I'm the one being controlled. You're the controllers. I like to switch roles sometimes. JK, usually I'm the M of S&M. I just made that up. I just flew in, boy are my arms tired!

Sometimes the search terms that bring people here depress me. Aside from the usual -- my name, the l word stuff, the blog names, etc -- we've got the search terms like the following ...

very depressing search terms from the autowin/autostraddle search referrals list

top 10 reasons not to drink alone
vaagina [i'm curious when i made that error, but not curious enough to click it]
i depend on you and it's making me weak
will he ever want to date me
what happened to chelsea and clays baby on south of nowhere?
what does "we hold these truths to be self evident" mean
this girl plugs everything into her vagina
taco bell floor plan
straddle bitches
real chance of love girls
rider strong interview BOP (I feel like stef is the only one who will know who rider strong is and what BOP is and therefore find this funny in a really sad way)
piano and nsa hookups
is staying up all night better than four hours sleep
inmyhole
if i want to write a girl something fun what would i say
i wear my old overalls to junior high school every day
how to wear a flannel shirt and look like a girl
haviland stillwell lesbian
best ideas for how to know and fuck a girl

Also anyone who wants to know about that last one, you should email sugarbutch.

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automatic fun! it's automatic, like winning, and air conditioning! I wish I'd had the foresight to name it Auto-Magic, but I didn't always know that I'd grow up and get special powers like a wizard.

quote: "I know I'm running away but my heart has become a sterile zone where nothing can grow. I don't want to face facts, shape up, snap out of it. In the pumped-out, dry bed of my heart, I'm learning to live without oxygen. I might get to like it in amaschochistic way. I've sunk too low to make decisions and that brings with it a certain lightheaded freedom. Walking on the moon there's no gravity. There are dead souls in uniform ranks, spacesuits too bulky for touch, helmets too heavy for speech. The miserable millions moving in time without hope. There are no clocks in Misery, just endless ticking." (JeanetteWinterson, Written on the Body)

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links:
1. I love it when this happens, it's like two of my most glorious worlds colliding, bookslut meets gender theory :Let's Talk About Sex (@the smart set)
2. Read this article about Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin and feminism please, thank you: How the Year of the Woman Actually Sent Women Back: The Bitch and The Ditz (@nymag)
3. Omg, Thomas Kinkaide. (@vanity fair)
4. Love in the time of Darwinsim. (@city)
5. Bullies Like Bullying: How did a nonstory on an iffy study end up in The New York Times? (maybe 'cause you keep firing journalists?) (@slate.com)
6. I love Sarah Vowell, I love things that are funny, I love "Stuff I've Been Reading," Nick Hornby's column in The Believer which I sometimes attempt to recreate here, therefore I love, la-la-la-love, Introduction to Nick Hornby's Shakespeare Wrote for Money by Sarah Vowell. There's even an Emily Dickinson namedrop! Come on PEOPLE come on. (@mcsweeny's)
7. Good job dudes, Equality California reports that California will hear the case against Prop 8 ! (@eqca)
8.The Girl I Brought Home Didn't Wake Up in the Morning (@nerve.com)
9. Nate Silver is my homegirl: An interview with John Zieglar on the Zogby "Push Poll" (@FiveThirtyEight.com)
10. Tragedy Tomorrow, Economic Woes Tonight: Broadway Braces for a Squeeze (@nytimes)

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leisha hailey dance
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