This is a real romance. Albeit one with a sucker-punch-you-in-the-gut twist.
Archive for March, 2012
Til death…
Saturday, March 31st, 2012Bacchanalian babies?
Friday, March 30th, 2012The single best description of parenthood, ever. From an In Memoriam of art critic Hilton Kramer:
He and his wife, Esta, whom he adored, didn’t have children and he confessed that he had no wish for a baby. “I imagine caring for a baby would be like having a drunken house guest,” he said.
Oregon dreaming
Thursday, March 29th, 2012I suppose if your city is lodged somewhere in the space-time continuum, there are worst places to be stuck than Portland. While I’m fond of neither coffee shops nor tattoos, I’m fully supportive of a locale where all the hot girls wear glasses.
One more thought: Seattle must be rending its flannel shirts and stomping on its Nirvana CDs over this.
Sugar & vice
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012I get strange pitches at my Real Job, but this one is a real headscratcher:
I am writing to you today because I am releasing a statistical study about Sugar Daddies in America based on 5 years worth of data collected on my website. The study highlights some very interesting facts and observations about the habits of wealthy men in your specific metropolitan area. (Note: a PDF copy of the study has been attached with this email.)
Most relevant to you is the fact that the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan area is Number 6 on the list of cities with the most Sugar Daddies per capita.
In the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan area, approximately 2.24 out of every 1000 adult men are Sugar Daddies. A typical D.C. sugar daddy has an average income of $233,457, is worth about $4.33 million, and spends approximately $3,913 a month on his sugar addiction. Approximately 47.9% of them are married (one of the highest percentage of philanders in the country).
If you would like additional Washington D.C. specific sugar daddy information (e.g., age, occupation breakdown, etc.)…
If you are wondering, I do not cover the vice beat.
Blossoming
Monday, March 26th, 2012I like things that grow. Trees. My old garden. Arboretums. That’s not to say I’m always good at growing things. I like to think that I’ve overcome the black-thumb gene I inherited from my mother who once infamously occupied a neighbourhood full of kids for a summer picking stones from her “garden.” A sisyphean task in a place that was all rock and no loam.
Perhaps that’s why a spring bud or a stretching root, the insistent shoot, each bring a small joy. There’s this one plant that I’ve had for years, somewhat generic, notable, when I got it, only for its profusion of ovate leaves. Two moves ago, though, the movers left it and some other plants in a supposedly heated warehouse; the chill killed almost all of them. This plant survived, but barely; it looked like a sad seedling in its vast pot, a shadow of its old robust self. And I could see people who came to visit looking skeptically at it, and at me — “You say you garden. You say you plant trees. But you can barely keep a houseplant going.”
The other day that struggling little plant, while nowhere near as full as it once was, blossomed for the first time, a triumphant, stick-straight, elegant bloom. You’ll forgive my sentimentality, but I was proud, of both of us, for pulling through.
Fixating on the trees
Saturday, March 24th, 2012From brilliant Jhumpa Lahiri:
Sentences are the bricks as well as the mortar, the motor as well as the fuel. They are the cells, the individual stitches. Their nature is at once solitary and social. … All the revision I do — and this process begins immediately, accompanying the gestation — occurs on a sentence level. It is by fussing with sentences that a character becomes clear to me, that a plot unfolds. To work on them so compulsively, perhaps prematurely, is to see the trees before the forest. And yet I am incapable of conceiving the forest any other way.
De-stress D.C.
Friday, March 23rd, 2012Did you know, D.C. is one of the nation’s least-stressed-out cities?
I suspect this news comes as something as a surprise to a number of our residents, such as, you know, the Leader of the Free World, the justices of the Supreme Court, and the blackberrying masses that serve them. But apparently, if you calculate stress levels based on four factors — commute, crime, divorce, and unemployment — D.C. is like some kind of nirvana. An incredibly uptight one, but there you go.
Understandably, it would be difficult to fashion a survey that takes into account D.C.-specific stressors, like tensions related to high-stakes news competition, bare-knuckle political brawling, or having your finger on the nuclear button. But seriously, commute, crime, divorce, and unemployment?!! Are people in the rest of the country not stressed out about other stuff, too, like horrible bosses, high-debt loads, and the families they do have?
Get outta my car
Thursday, March 22nd, 2012Gosh, I’m like the fount of (conventional) wisdom this week: Skirts are cool. So are ladies who like stiff drinks. But cars? Lame.
Someone should just bottle this brain.
Besotted, beskirted
Thursday, March 22nd, 2012The Times has been reading my mind. Or my blog. Fashion writer Ruth La Ferla weighs in on the hot trend for spring, skirts, and the mixed emotions that raises in those of us who were showing a little leg back when everyone else was in pantsuits. Or, actually, when everyone else was wearing pegged acid-wash jeans.
However. This. Is. Hilarious.
The sway of those early adopters has thrust skirts from fashion’s wings back to center stage, the flared minis, knife-pleated midis, below-the-knee pencil shapes, and A-line each representing, their partisans say, a lively way to recharge a wardrobe and give a vigorous kick-start to spring.*
Early adopters? Come on, we’re talking skirts, not some outre fashion turned commonplace! Wouldn’t the Greeks, in their togas, be early adopters? Or, you know, Eve, when she had to scramble to find something to wear?
*Italics mine