I think I identify as "hilarious" more than anything else.

It's been a little over a month since I came out to my parents through email, and we haven't exactly talked about it since. Which, honestly, is fine with me since I like avoid that kind of interaction with my parents in the first place. (Gossip and cancer-talk can happen over the phone, but I prefer to update them about my love life strictly through electronic forms of communication, if at all.)

Last night, however, I got a call from my mother as soon as I got home. I had sent her the link to my post at This Recording, and she wanted to tell me she liked it, and that I seemed to not completely make fun of her, which she appreciated. Of course, I had an idea that she was calling because, in that article, I had written the following sentences:

"Once a girl I had a crush on pressured me into eating a strawberry, but I haven’t had one since."

"It wasn’t until last year, when my first serious boyfriend listed it as one of the reasons for breaking up with me, did I begin to think that there might be something wrong and it was affecting other people more than it was affecting me."

Of course that invoked the first conversation of many, probs, about my sexual preferences. She asked the same question that most people I've known in the last four to six years have asked: Did you really have crushes on girls in college? Are you bisexual? Et cetera, et cetera.

It's a difficult question to answer because, if you didn't know me well in college, I was very head-over-heels with someone I went to school with, feelings with lasted for about two years. Obviously, those feelings were unrequited, but they existed nonetheless. And I did date Megan for a few months my junior year, although it admittedly wasn't a very serious relationship. Perhaps my attraction to girls really stemmed from emotion and what I thought I was supposed to feel. I've certainly found men attractive, too, but I think I never developed feelings for a guy until after college because, frankly, I never had male friends. (Even my mother said, "I never really thought of you being attracted to men, as you seemed to hate most of the ones you knew." Which is true; I never had many male friends (aside from my childhood best friend, with whom I'm no longer friends), even in college.

But, like I told my mother last night, this is an issue I honestly don't think about much. Sure, people ask the question, and I try to give an answer, but it's not easy to produce when I haven't exactly figured it out for myself and, really, don't feel like I have to. I am who I am: I like dudes, and I'm fine with that. I don't think it's really the most important aspect of my life, or the only (or even the most important) way to identify myself. In fact, I've never actually found that I can come up with an identity for myself, and I think the reason for that is I'm from a family and a cultural background that can't trace back its roots to another foreign culture. When you grow up not thinking about that sort of thing, and then suddenly are hounded with ideas of multi-culturalism and "hyphenation" in college, it's a lot to take in. I suppose you could say I'm "Southern" or, simply, "American," but those are silly labels that, ironically, no one (especially in our dear, liberal city of Chicago) takes very seriously. At the same time, however, I'm not going to put "Gay" in front of anything, either.

Take a walk through the garden.

Last night's series finale of The Wire was, as I expected, one of the best endings to a television series I have ever seen. In an effort to not give anything away, for I still have hopes that the people I know who have been reading this blog will eventually heed my advice that they need to watch this show will actually do so. (Mark put it really well: "I suppose its like saying, 'What? You haven’t read War and Peace yet??' Yes, watching all five seasons of The Wire seems rather daunting, but then again, its not like you have to fucking read War and Peace.")

I'm not going to write much about it anymore, as I don't think I have the time or the space here to really dig very deep into the series. But I think it must be said that it was an extremely satisfying experience to dive into the live of Baltimore residents for the past few months. It was pretty insane how much I devoured since I started season one last August, and I'm pretty amazed that I was able to catch up in time for the ending last night. I'm especially surprised that I didn't tear up, although during the last thirty minutes, I had the feeling I might.

Behold again, Wire fans, one of the best six minutes of television:

"I have never eaten a banana."

I have a post up on This Recording about my eating habits. It's pretty well-worn territory if you know me or follow the blog, as I've written about it here, but I'm pretty happy with it if only because of the picture I used at the top of the post, which I will provide for you here because it kills me.


That is my life, you guys.

Television as dissent

"If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional." (via BG5000)

The Wire will end on Sunday, but, in my opinion, it will forever be the most socially relevant and under-appreciated series ever on television.

This is the best way to describe my disdain for Christian and Project Runway:

I completely agree with Jackie who said, "I want to gay-bash him."

I am in an abusive relationship with the man who makes my sandwiches at Au Bon Pain.

Okay, I know. White people like paying a lot of money for sandwiches.

Well, I don't necessarily like it, but I do it. A lot. I don't know why, exactly. I think mostly because there's an Au Bon Pain in the building next to mine, and it's connected by a bridge, which means I can go to lunch without walking outside in the cold. And we all know how lazy I am. I am so lazy, in fact, that I will willingly and repeatedly make the same mistake of getting my lunch from Au Bon Pain.

I've written about this place before - remember when Megan went on a crusade against their soup choices? Well, now I want to enlist.

I go there a couple of times a week and the same guy makes my sandwich. It's always a disappointing sandwich, considering that it costs seven dollars and forty-two cents (with a Pepsi and a bag of Baked Lays, which we all know really means half a bag of Baked Lays). I think the sandwich-maker is becoming increasingly fed up with his place of employment as much as I am. On Monday, he forgot to put lettuce on my sandwich, which is pretty unforgivable since the only thing I order for my sandwich is chicken, mozzarella, and lettuce. So, in essence, he gave me a chicken and cheese sandwich.

Today, however, he did not forget the lettuce. To wit:


The man gave me more lettuce than sandwich.

He has clearly given up on me and Au Bon Pain. Unfortunately, I have a feeling I'll go back before the end of the week. After all, it's the only place in the vicinity where I can buy Baked Lays.

My Untapped Potential

Molly Young, a fellow contributor from This Recording and a person I'd like to know, even just through teh internets, has a really fine essay in the most recent issue of N+1 about taking Adderall in college.

Sometimes I wonder how my life would be different if I was diagnosed and medicated for ADD. For some reason, I feel like it would have enabled me to recognize my potential early in high school and prevented my general apathy about schoolwork (which, I think, is to blame for being called a nerd in middle school, or just the general unhappiness I felt throughout school that made me, at fourteen, think there wasn't much point to it all) and made me at least focus on the work that I should have been doing. And maybe I would have gotten into William and Mary! And put forth some effort and graduated with honors, or something!

After reading Molly's essay, I thought to myself, "Man, I should have taken more Adderall in college." Sure, it's possible that the Attention Deficit Disorder that I self-diagnosed was possibly (and probably) just laziness, but I do think that if I was on drugs I could have at least gotten a better GPA. Like, I probably wouldn't have dropped statistics after a month because I changed my major from political science to English and didn't need the hard math class. Maybe I would have actually studied some, which would have prevented that C- in psychology, or that D in GSCI 103 (the name of the class escapes me, natch, but the course had something to do with rocks).

I was talking to Megan this morning about it, and she disagreed with me, of course.

Megan: that's a terrible way to think
Megan: ANYONE on adderall would have gotten more done
me: well, it's true
me: i was lazy and unfocused
Megan: why do you need drugs to be focused?
Megan: i don't understand that
me: of course, the one time i did take adderall, i played snood for four hours.

I agree that people rely too much on medications to fix the things about themselves that they don't like, and ADD and ADHD are both over-diagnosed and, like depression, are sometimes blown out of proportion. It's so easy these days for a patient to go to a physician and leave with a few prescriptions for psychological medications and, while it's not really a good thing, it does kind of make me feel dumb for never taking advantage of that.

Two Internet moments I will never forget.

About a month ago, this happened:


It kind of blew my mind. When I told Christina, she said, "You did it! You win!"

No one other than us really understands or even cares, but it was exciting none the less. And I figured, "Hey, that's cool. I've peaked! Nothing else, Internet wise, will be as exciting."

Then, a little while ago:


That's even more hilarious.

Thanks for the memories, you guys!

A Gawker Thought

I've been reading the blogs of Choire, Emily, Balk, and Doree with much more frequency than Gawker, and I especially love it when they bitch about the current Denton regime over there. It's like complaining about the new people in charge of your college radio station: they're all the same, but in your eyes, they'll always be lesser than.

I'd rather be writing about The Wire.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to get up on Monday mornings. Today it took me a few extra smacks at the snooze button, as I was busy dreaming about working a criminal investigation with Catherine Deneuve, and who would want to wake up and not know how that turned out?

In an effort to not bore the Internet with the details of my weekend, I'll share that I spent $50 at BabyGap (buying baby clothes, by the way, will go down as one of the most awkward moments of my life because I didn't know how to pick out baby clothes), then bought three more DVDs (and, by the way, I only watched one of the 13 I had planned to this weekend, which was The Darjeeling Limited, and it was really boring), and then bought this:



I still don't know how I feel about it, honestly, but I am going to keep wearing it until I make jersey-knit turtlenecks happen.

Today is Casimir Pulaski Day, which is only exciting if you're Polish, go to a public school in Chicago, or are still obsessed with Sufjan Stevens. The rest of us can go on not giving a shit.