The Never-Ending Past
9:05 pm | Internerd | Places | 0
Travel often brings about feelings of inadequacy. You feel that you’re doing the same ol’ thing as everyone else, experiencing the same things, following a predetermined path set out by the gods of Lonely Planet, and so on. And you meet people half your age doing the same things and having identical reactions to their surroundings. Or people twice your age. Travel is sort of ageless that way. The 19-year-olds are indistinguishable from the 45-year-olds. All your life experiences and wisdom, all those years of paying your dues in the real world, don’t seem to matter very much.
The Seoul of Houston
6:34 pm | Internerd | Houston | 0
…It seems that many of the Korean-owned businesses aim at Spanish-speakers more than Anglos. (Someone should open a restaurant out here called Jose Cho’s TaKorea.)
John Lomax and David Beebe explore Houston’s Long Point neighborhood. I’m not missing kimchi or gamjatang enough yet.
“CD-ROM disk”
7:47 am | Internerd | Writing | 0
Common errors in the English language.
It’s a little late, but…
12:25 am | Internerd | Reading | 0
Your guide to 2008. Thank me later.
The solid gold turd
9:44 pm | Internerd | Houston | 1
Part of me understands why people say ‘Fuck Houston’ in their heads, and move to New York or LA. Houston can be ugly, unromantic, and like Seth said, make “every other place seem exotic.” But the bigger part of me, the part of me strapped to rap music and the Orange Show, says fuck you for not giving Houston respect for what it is. Houston may be a city wrapped in cold urban banality and hot shitty weather, but the culture and artists that exist in this town are not irrelevant or deserving of marginalization. This city is like a solid gold turd at the bottom of an outhouse — you may feel awkward or disgusting picking it up out of the pot, but you’re an asshole if you let it just sit there. — Gene Morgan on art, hometowns and Wes Anderson
When you’re all dressed up like The Cure
To add to my obsession with the dark side of fame, I was extremely fascinated by this list of famous people who’ve considered suicide.
Frankentoys
5:05 pm | Internerd | El Perro | 1
We gave up a long time ago on buying Gus stuffed animal toys with squeakers inside. He eviscerates them at an alarmingly lightening-like speed in order to get at the stuffing, and that gets to be an expensive hobby.
My friend Alice buys already-loved stuffed toys for her chocolate lab by the bagful at the thrift store.
If I didn’t have four hundred other sewing projects awaiting attention, frankentoys might be a good alternative.
Then, panic set in
9:49 am | Internerd | Girly | 1
Even though the archives of this site only go back to January 2005, I have actually been blogging since July 2004. My first blog was started much like this one — under the guise that I would use it to hone my writing skills — but it ended up being filled mostly with photos of vacations I’d taken with Christopher and little else. My life got pretty busy and I abandoned the blog for a while and then I felt like I needed a fresh start so I decided to delete everything, because the internet is forever, right? Best to get rid of all the evidence.
In the time since then I’ve often regretted deleting that site. I still have all the pictures I posted there and I didn’t really lose any significant writing, so I think the real reason I wish I still had those archives is because I read things like the interviews on LeahPeah and all those bloggers have been writing online for half a decade. There’s some sort of imagined authenticity in my head about that — like, they were there first, before it was a fad, before Technorati started reporting that 75,000 new blogs are created each day.
In 1997, I was an analog blogger. I made paper zines, staying late at night at my Dad’s office to use his photocopier covertly and then passing them out at punk rock shows. I kept notebooks full of writing that are still stashed in a hatbox in the closet of my old bedroom at my Mom’s house. I wanted, for a long time, to go online, but I knew nothing about html or how easy it could be. In fact, the first time I remember even hearing the word “blog” it was being made fun of in a 2003 article in The Onion, and it didn’t sound like the type of website I was thinking of starting.
Sometimes this wistfulness passes over me and I wish I still had that old site, just for posterity’s sake, and when this feeling hit me last night I got it into my head that I could recreate the old site with the help of Blogger, a Google cache and the Wayback Machine. No such luck. There is no proof anywhere that my site ever existed in the first place.
I guess maybe the Internet isn’t forever.
Fun with numbers!
12:18 pm | Internerd | Ha! | 2
Last time I looked up my site stats, I found that half of my hits were from people looking up “fast cars” on Google. I can just imagine the disappointed look on the pimply face of the 15-year-old boy that came to my site hoping to find information about a souped-up 1998 Honda Civic with spinning rims, wide wheels and extra tweeters.
Eight hits were searches for either Tina or Piper Rountree, including one especially ambitious searcher who entered the words “piper murder virginia blonde wig.”
On a related note, someone also searched for “exasperated housewife,” which took them not to my post about the Rountrees but instead to this post, where there are no naked pictures of Nicolette Sheridan or Eva Longoria. (Oops! That phrase alone is going to generate several more false searches!)
But my most disappointed visitor — someone whom I sincerely owe my apologies too, because I’m sure they didn’t find what they were looking for here — must have been the person who came upon my site by entering the phrase “huge stretch-marked tits.”
Silent but deadly
4:30 pm | Internerd | Friends | 2
It has recently been brought to my attention that several lurkers have been visiting this site without making their presence known — namely James, my own fiancé and a couple of others.
Um, HELLO!? How’m I supposed to know you’re here if you don’t comment?