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

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

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

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

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

And now, I give you...Jessica and Hunter:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

still life with suitcase, DFW terminal A

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

my sleeping bag solution/nightgown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ones I'd Like To See:

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

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

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

Here's one I made for a boy in 2002:

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

for AA
April 9, 2002

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

this summer, i want to read foacualt

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

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

tape that was SUPPOSED to be
for the uptown girl -

Side A :

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

Side B :
(ben folds five messiah megamix)

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

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

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

[Via Psycho Letters From Men]

My headline today reads like a dieting thing. I will blog-diet my way to a more... readable Internet persona? What does Internet fame even get you these days? Besides a blog that analyzes your every move and has dozens of people calling a normal sized woman fat for not having visible ankle bones? Speaking of cankles (as someone who has a pair), I was SO HORRIFIED when I learned that term. Great, one more thing to be judged on. Trust me, I do not care about that at this point, but I do admit that I don't ever wear shoes with ankle straps.

Anyway. What did I come here to talk about again? Oh, here, a few interesting things of note:

1. Why We Keep Dying.
I'm not cool enough to know who Dash Snow was, but apparently he died and a lot of people have things to say about it. This is an interesting blog post on how drugs keep killing people off in "the scene" and how angry the writer was at Dash for leaving a daughter behind.

2. Mixtapes for Hookers celebrates Mary Magdalene, one of my favorite ladies to study.

3. Amazon bought Zappos. I'm only telling you this because apparently everyone on Twitter feels it is their duty as an Internet Citizen to tell you this. Now I'm also telling you.

My favorite, favorite thing today is something I did post over at BravoFan. It's Padma Lashkmi in Glitter, the Mariah Carey movie! The movie so bad that even watching it in college, WITH A FORTY (yes, you were there too once) wasn't enough to salvage it. It was turned off in about 30 minutes. Anyway, here it is. I love the "80s" music at the beginning: