My Money’s On Alentejo Blue

This year’s Tournament of Books is still happening over at The Morning News. My favorite has already (predictably, by Jessa Crispin) been eliminated. But be sure to go over and catch up on all the standings, especially tomorrow/Wednesday, when Mark Sarvas (infamous in these parts for baiting Emily on the subject of cats) will be weighing in on Firmin vs. The Road.

 

Continued Coverage of 1 Year In Blogging

Much like the only child that celebrates not just a birthday, but a birthday week and a birthday month (Guess what’s in six weeks!), I’m still commemorating one year of NY/NZ. Today, some items of note related to one year of online diary-keeping:

1. My (conservative Christian) father recently found my blog. As luck would have it, this discovery almost perfectly coincided with my first and only use of the term “hate f*ck” on this site. Yay for making my parents proud! As I’ve been distant geographically and otherwise from my folks for about eight years now, my father’s outing as a NY/NZ reader was more troubling for me than, I think, for other participants in this tired online rite-of-passage. Regardless, welcome, Dad, to a corner of my head you probably aren’t too familiar with. I think you’ll find it more profane, opinionated, and ill-tempered than the parts of me you know well, but I hope you will accept–even like — it nonetheless.

2. A meme — I have been waiting for ONE YEAR (Guess what’s in six weeks?) for someone to tag me with a meme, since like most bloggers, I need little no excuse to natter away about myself. Alas, I’m still waiting. Perhaps this is because SOME PEOPLE think memes are only marginally less annoying and junior high-esque than chain letters. Anyway, junior high wasn’t all bad (OK, it totally was) but I took matters into my own hands and created my own meme, with which I am tagging Cordelia and Clinton, despite his stated problem with “being told what to do”.

The name of my meme is the Oprah-friendly Things I Know By Heart.

Two novels/plays/poems you know by heart: “The Second Coming” (Yeats) and “In an Artist’s Studio” (Christina Rossetti)
Two films/television shows you can quote from extensively: the only two movies I own, Annie Hall and The Big Lebowski
Two songs to which you know every word: “Turn It On” (Sleater-Kinney) and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” (Dylan). Committed to memory simultaneously under circumstances which are probably easily guessed. The version of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” that plays in my mental jukebox is always, always the live Before the Flood version.
Two dishes you can make without a recipe: I am a very recipe-reliant cook, but I can improvise lasagna and rice pudding if pressed.
Two cities you can navigate without a map: Manhattan, NY and Decatur, IL

What do you know by heart? Tell me in the comments.
Cordelia
Clinton

 

NY/NZ

About a year ago, I began NY/NZ to deal with the aftermath of leaving just about everything that was important to me behind and moving halfway around the world. I figured I could either start an online diary or go into therapy, and I think we can all agree I made the right call. So, yay! Fittingly, as I sit here writing this I am packed up for a trip to New York, making the past year’s journey a full circle. Ourabouros! In my end is my beginning! Quod me netrit me destruit!

Sorry, enough with the bad Angelina Jolie tattoos, and also, I am coming back to New Zealand. This trip is all about spending time with the people I’ve missed so much over the past nine months, good friends all, the people who have seen me cry and vomit and drunkenly hit on strangers and drive my car into non-moving objects. However, I imagine I won’t be posting a lot here in between re-living all those great moments and doing a couch tour of the finest neighborhoods in San Francisco and Brooklyn.

In the meantime, the sidebar is here for your entertainment. Also, over the last few months it’s come to my attention that a few other folks besides the above-mentioned witnesses of crying, vomiting, bad flirting, and worse driving are reading this blog. The below is for you, a sort of “Best of” the last year of NY/NZ. All your burning questions about me — answered! And congratulate yourself for your discerning taste, as you are part of a very select, very hush-hush group of sixty or so folk that read this blog when you have nothing better to do.

• Where are you from?
• New York City sounds awesome! Why did you decide to move to New Zealand?
• Why is there a label that says “Activity Fridays”?
• Oh, ok. Which one was the best?
• I thought you didn’t particularly like the outdoors. Was it fun to start hiking and climbing and all that?
• Didn’t I see your blog on Gawker once?
• What do you think about office small talk?
• How many jobs have you had, anyway?
• Chick lit: good or bad?
• Don’t you ever have second thoughts about leaving your career and moving so far away for a guy?
• Ok. . . what do you think about all that now?

All that’s missing is a meme. . . and I’m working on that.

 

Fake Nice

One of the reasons I’m pretty good at waitressing is that I am really good at being fake-nice. I am so good at being fake-nice, in fact, that many people think I am nice for real, and while they are not wrong, they’ve reached that conclusion through a flawed line of reasoning. However, my fake-niceness has its limits. By Sunday evening, when most people are refreshed and rested and in the best spirits they will be all week, I have been working double shifts for days on end and am exhausted and surly. My feet hurt; quite often my ass crack is chafed from walking quickly (and sweatily) for so many hours. If you’ve never had a chafed ass crack, then let me be the first to tell you, it is even worse than you might imagine. My face is tired from smiling so much and opening my eyes too widely. The sound of my own voice talking slowly and cheerfully in that dumbed-down tone one uses for asking people if they’d care for another coffee (similar to the “dealing with the crazy boss” tone of voice, as it turns out) makes me want to take a vow of silence. By Monday afternoon, I am fresh OUT of fake-nice, let alone nice-for-real. And that is why today, I am abandoning my normal nice-girl scruples and writing a mean-spirited blog post.
I figure if you are reading this, then you are either working on a national holiday (life is unfair!) or returning to work after a three-day weekend (life is cruel!). Either way, you can handle some vitriol.

Today’s subject is: Blogs You Hate Yet Can’t Stop Reading.

Continuing to frequent blogs you intrinsically can’t stand is the hate-fucking of the internet. You know you shouldn’t, you know it’s stupid, and it usually makes you feel worse afterwards. You don’t bookmark these blogs or add them to your RSS reader. But for some reason, you can’t stay away. For example: a friend confessed to reading the comments on Ultragrrl whenever she was having a bad day. She said it made her feel better about herself knowing there were so many utter idiots in the world. For similar reasons, I used to read Stephanie Klein. No matter how shitty I felt, it was comforting to realize that there was someone out there so completely self-absorbed, tasteless, and shallow that I looked like a fucking Nobel-prize winning supermodel by comparison. But now she has kids, and even my cold heart can’t summon up too much venom for someone who is taking care of preemies and is frankly really boring. So, for a while I’ve been looking for a blog to fill Greek Tragedy’s place.

I think I may have found it in The Elegant Variation. Sure, the books Mark Sarvas writes about are experimental, ground-breaking, high-quality, dripping with talent. But oh my god, the tone. Is it possible to be more condescending? Could you throw in a few additional obscure-yet-ostentatious markers of extremely good taste? Nothing too mainstream though; that wouldn’t do at all. And leave it to TEV to make a point of putting aside literary fiction in order to sing the praises of — wait for it — a coffee table book published by Princeton Architectural Press about Paris streetscapes. Yeah, real low-brow. Do I even need to mention that the author is working on a novel of his own? Of course, TEV is written in the horribly overused first-person plural. Nothing like tarting up your opinions in the royal “we” to make them seem grounded in something, somewhere. In short, everything I hate about the pretentious world of “literary” publishing is on full display in TEV. But, his reportage is accessible, thorough, and timely, so I keep reading. Sigh.

Which isn’t to say I’m not looking for a replacement. Leave the blogs you love to hate in the comments, and maybe I’ll find something I can feel good about loathing so much.