Becca Jane Approximately

When your mother sends back your invitations
And your father to your sister he explains
That you're tired of yourself and all your creations
Won't you come and see me, Queen Jane?

May 9, 2009 10:49am

The Reminder

Grape nuts

Plain yogurt

Green apples

Mango

Cabbages and kings

Let your smile be your umbrella.

Something like that.

Mar 20, 2009 6:22pm

Permanent collection

Maybe you can keep her in your Collection of Twee Objects; Subcategory: People?

magicmolly:

Occasionally you catch sight of a person so intact, so egglike in his or her self-containment, that you can stare with impunity (the person will never notice). Here’s an illustration:

This raspberry of a woman was at a play last night that we attended. She was around 73 years old and wore a chenille top and matching pants with bright white sneakers. Nobody accompanied her, and she wore an expression of patience so eternal that it seemed carved or painted onto her face.

During intermissions, as you can see, she occupied herself with examining and organizing items from her bag. Her frame was one common to older women: toothpick legs and a large, soft torso that looks as if it were designed to protect the squishy organs within. Composure and vulnerability don’t often find such proportions in a person, and it is always a lucky thing to witness.

Mar 19, 2009 8:38pm

Go Anthropology! I wonder how similar this would be to Smith…I get the feeling neuroscience would not be as low down on the list, most of the people I knew in neurosci were more intense than, say, the PoliSci majors.

noraleah:

Virginity rates by college major at Wellesley (via Smitten). Artists are freakin’ promiscuous — no surprise there — but who knew neuroscientists get down?

And oh god — eighty-three percent of Math majors are virgins? That is dire.

Mar 14, 2009 2:39pm

Someone once said I reminded them of Lily Allen. Compliment? Maybe.

Mar 14, 2009 2:37pm

The most tender place in my heart is for strangers, I know it sounds cruel but my own love is just too dangerous…in the end I was the mean girl, or somebody’s in-between girl, now it’s the devil that I love.

Watch out! It could happen to you! I wish I could concentrate hard enough to read the not-about-Lily Allen parts of the New Yorker and then discuss them in my intelligent blog, but I cannot. Coming up: Lily Allen. That echo chorus lied to me with its hold on, hold on, hold on.

Mar 3, 2009 4:31pm

“ Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain, because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from. ” -

Imagine some sort of wolf-pack howl of recognition upon reading this. I don’t want to write about my own life too much in here, both because it is tedious and because it is my life, but I have been going through a Fall-On-Your-Knees moment, and it’s exquisitely difficult. I keep coming back to the idea of being a writer, as though that is something that will ultimately fulfill me, when…well, David Foster Wallace was 41 or around that age, and it certainly wasn’t enough for him. This is a successful writer, too.

The fact that he had a relationship with Mary Karr is delightful, however, as is the fact that he signed his letters to her “Young Werther.” But only to me. I suppose to them it was less amusing.

Feb 28, 2009 5:49pm

Where Does It End?

Options for the Next Few Years:

Law school

Americorps (City Year in Seattle or summer in Portland)

University of Washington College of Forest Resources

Living at home and being unemployed forever!

I’m sure there are a few other options, like getting a terrible terrible job I hate and going even crazier, but that looks like it for now.

Feb 22, 2009 1:16pm

Unfashionable

There is nothing like a book about a group of modern women in their mid-40s who don’t call themselves feminists and have decided to give up work to raise kids in Manhattan to cement two notions:

1. Never live in Manhattan (there are too many books about that area, no? Anyway).

2. Have creative life. Make stuff. Do not work in an office, even if I have to risk itinerant poverty and eternal debt. We’ll all be living in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road soon, thus why worry about being substantial and important.

Feb 20, 2009 4:45pm

Sudden Memory, Why I Could Never Live on the East Coast

A girl I once knew once had a thing with a guy who, besides being sardonically surprised that I knew who Walter Benjamin was (I am not sure why) once said to her in this teasing, irritating tone of voice “I bet I’ll get published before you.”

Like a mini Gore Vidal. Yuck. He was good looking, though, and had that “Oh I’m quiet and good looking so I must be that sensitive brilliant type, draw me out, fair maiden” thing going on.

Feb 20, 2009 4:38pm

We are slacking

Which don’t we have? I suppose people don’t hibernate but, Extensive personality reconstruction, check, see internet and astounding numbers of mood disorders. Memory-editing, check, we have lobotomies and shit, as well as ECT. You got me on the artificial placenta. Prolongation of youthful vigor (CHECK!!) Man-animal chimeras, check check checkity check. Anyone’s who’s ever had a non-human transplant is a human-animal chimera, hence the title of my autobiography The Pig-Man: A Daughter’s Tale. If, on the other hand, one hundred years pass and the Singularity is NOT here, I’m going to be furious.