Check out my second NYC neighborhood “erotica” on the NabeWise blog.
For those of you at work, the dirtiest thing in it is the word manbits.
For those of you not at work, please feel free to write your own slash based on the relationship between the Wall Street bull and the 1 train and submit it in the comments.
My friend Noel Cordle, a gloriously personal (but not nearly prolific enough) blogger, has a series of posts called Hot Dead Guys. This morning, as I turned off my Kindle on the train and the random author screensaver image appeared, I thought about how John Steinbeck could totally be one of her guys.
It also brought to mind this story:
In 10th grade, my honors English class read The Grapes of Wrath, and although I can’t really remember my feelings toward the book at the time, I now look back at it with this haze of sentimentality. What I do remember was that while tooling around on the Internet one night while we were reading it, I found a Rage Against the Machine song called “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and printed out the lyrics to read to the class. I didn’t know at the time that it was a remake of a Bruce Springsteen song, and I can only imagine what my teacher was listening to at the time, so no one mentioned it.
When my teacher asked what sort of music Rage Against the Machine was, I said, “Heavy metal rap?”, and immediately and simultaneously, my two best friends, whose respect and acceptance I craved more than anyone’s in the world, both looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “NO.”
I still carry that with me. And still think I’m right, of course.
Almost as a rule, I don’t read your blog unless you read mine. I don’t mean to be, like, overly sensitive about the importance of my blog, but I don’t have enough time to read all of the blogs of the people who do leave me comments, so I can’t afford to just go gallivanting around the Internet willy-nilly. If I find a blog I like, I usually add the RSS feed to my Google Reader, comment on the posts whenever the mood strikes me for the next few days, and hope to develop the kind of relationship I have with all of the people I’ve linked to in my sidebar.
I understand that not everyone replies to comments on their own blogs, so I don’t expect to check back on a blog I’m newly reading and see some gloriously personal reply, but I do expect the author to have made it clear in some way that she’s read me, too. If she doesn’t? BANISHED. I’m actually amazed at bloggers who don’t comment on other blogger’s posts. Do they think their stuff is so worth the time that some stranger would read every day without getting any sort of contact in return?
My Google Reader has an “Every Day” section that’s filled with the blogs of people I want to read the moment they post: Unapologetically Female, Bachelor Girl, Good Hair, Kim Luck, thickcrust, Serial Monogamist in her various forms, bluzdude, and lots more. I don’t always get to these people every day, but I get to them eventually no matter what. The rest of my feeds are divided up into food blogs, personal blogs, and fluff like Awkward Family Photos. I basically never look at these. So if I don’t comment on your blog regularly, it’s because you personally offended me and got shoved out of the Every Day section. Haha, just kidding. (Except not really.)
Then there’s the problem of the “important” blogs, like all of the food blogs that review all of the same restaurants I do but are twice as popular and half as good. Just kidding again! (Except not at all.) I used to feel like I had to read them just to see what they were saying about the restaurants I was going to, but then Tracey gave me the ingenious idea of shoving them into the sections I never read and using the search function if I ever want to find anything specific.
I know other bloggers who don’t think like this, though. Bachelor Girl, for instance, is forever posting articles on her very active and interesting Google Buzz account from big name tech blogs that I’m sure don’t pay any attention to anyone. And my best friend, Tracey, godblessher, reads all of the big feminist blogs but doesn’t comment on a single one of them, even though she has a feminist blog herself and should be trying to drive traffic to it.
So, what about you? Am I the only compulsive one here?
This morning, the bus came to a halt at the 2nd Avenue stop, the back doors opened, and through them, I spotted a girl with the cutest little French Bulldog at her side. Now, French Bulldogs are my very favorite kind of dog, and this one was blonde instead of the usual black, so I had to will myself not to bolt out the door to coo over it. When all of the other passengers had boarded, she picked up the dog, dropped it in a large tote bag, and got on the bus herself.
Now, I’m all about pets on public transportation. The sensitive part of me likes to ogle cuddly things, and the sadistic part of me likes to see them cower in the corners of their designer carriers whenever we hit a bump. But having a boyfriend who sneezes when he so much sees a picture of a cat has made me sensitive to being in close proximity to fur, so I was a little bit mad at her for having the gall to so flagrantly show off her dog. It was made all the worse when she began taking photos of it with her cellphone.
I checked on the MTA’s website, though, and it turns out that pets are allowed on NYC public transportation “when they are carried in kennels or similar containers that can be accommodated by you on your lap without annoyance to other passengers”. (Harnessed service animals are always permitted, of course.) This girl wasn’t following the rules by having her dog sticking out the top of a tote bag, obviously, but it’s interesting to know that pets are allowed on the subways and buses.
(Click here to see the article on Examiner.com and earn me a pretty penny (literally).)
I swear I don’t usually judge people for their clothing choices, but a woman on the bus this morning was pretty clearly wearing a shirt made of fabric showcasing teddy bears in various positions of merrymaking at the beach:
As someone who can’t handle Disney-related clothes on adults and can barely stomach ironic hipster t-shirts covered in nature scenes such as wolves howling at the moon, I’m sort of appalled by this. I wanted to believe it was scrubs, but then I noticed she was wearing really expensive-looking pants with them. Not that having to wear scrubs is an excuse to dress like a baby.
As a side note, the woman in the black dress walking past her shows off way too much leg for an old lady every day when she sits down. Sorry, I needed to get that off my chest.
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