The girl I sit next to while waiting for the nine thirty subway has yellow hair and an iPod set on maximum volume. I stick close to her while the place fills and swells. She’s got a good taste in music. … I research, type, print, scan. When I’m done I click through relevant Wikipedia [...]
He has a good head on his shoulders – a cloudy, uncrisp one, but a decent one nonetheless. His conversations are like stepping into cold lakes. Sharp, he coerces you into a fight and pins you down with bitter sarcasm. When you’re walking down the stairs or reading a newspaper a witty comeback will show [...]
He is a thirtysomething with unremarkable features. When he shakes your hand, however, there is a sincerity you cannot ignore. He wears shirts almost identical to those of the construction workers excavating under the street outside. During my lunch break I can see them sprawled on the ground, sleeping, grumbling, smoking cheap cigarettes. It’s during [...]
The thing is, Herostratus knows the system. He wakes up in a mush of hungover wobbleupdown vomit, slicks back hair clothes propriety and sneaks into a city whose intensity he neither mimics nor understands. This is Ephesus, where he is nothing but part of the crackle and bark of this condensed human mass. Ephesus, a [...]
While watching the Discovery Channel’s In The Womb series, I was completely and totally struck by the fact that human beings develop gills and a tail while in utero. Gills! Tails! TAILS! There’s a bone at the base of our vertebral column from which a tail once extended. Like wisdom teeth and goosebumps, tails are [...]
Everyone has had someone speak badly about them behind their back. Everyone has felt that sick, swimmy, gurgling suspicion in the tips of their fingers and in their gut when they walk into a room, a hall, a street and see that particular look on some one’s face. Sometimes the perpetrators are so close together it’s almost [...]
One of my instructors at camp back in San Francisco (let’s call him Bernie) spent the better part of half an hour explaining the use of the word “ironic” and how it is frequently used incorrectly in daily speech. The word “ironic” means something completely unexpected – like being stuck in traffic while attempting to [...]
Cecily is telling me a story, some anecdote about how she once found a cockroach in a jar of peanut butter or how she kayaked around Maui last summer or how the guy in the ranch next to hers is so obviously (OBVIOUSLY! she smacks together pink lipsticky lips) in love with her. I nod [...]