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Some words I feel like are used improperly (and too often)

disaster. (Used to describe things that often are not disastrous at all. Disaster is a hurricane that kills a thousand people and leaves a million homeless. Disaster is not when the top bread of your sandwich falls off or you spill something on your shirt.)

pandemic and epidemic. (Please look them up. They mean different things.)

awesome. incredible. phenomenal. (Really? That good, eh? I doubt it. I admit I’m a recovering addict from all of these words.)

rage, rant and rave. (More things that aren’t interchangeable.)

passionate. (Blech. So overused. Just means intense feelings, not necessarily sexual.)

dream. (OK when you mean the hallucination you have at night. Not OK when you mean “goal.”)

goal. (OK when it’s something someone is working for. Not OK when it’s just something someone wants or would like. My goal is to be a writer. I’d like to be a Rockette.)

synergy. (Deemed meaningless by constant use in the mid-to-late 1990s.)

beautiful. (Try “pretty,” or “nice-looking.” Beautiful sounds like you’re a crazy Karl Lagerfield.)

exponentially. (Proper when you mean the mathematical way something can grow exponentially. Improper when you mean fast.)

serious/seriously. (Did I assume you were joking?)

literally. (Again, did I assume you were speaking figuratively?)

Misusing words makes them meaningless. Show a little more respect in your diction, please.

muxtapes

mine: iloveredrobot
bsmiff: bsmiff
chase: goodhabits
colin: bringnobombs

add yours in comments.

this is probably my favorite thing ever on the whole internet. maybe even better than wikipedia.

$3.16

Today, at the Dollar Tree, I bought the following three amazing things:

1. Big box of Mike and Ike
2. Big box of Junior Mints
3. Untamed Earth: Ferocious Floods DVD

It’s 78 minutes of flood footage and people talking about floods. Narrated by MARK HAMILL.

And all this for $3.16. It’s like magic, you know.

midpoint

It’s the fifth week of school. I have five chapters left to draft on my thesis, then revisions. I have 39 days left. i still have:

• no idea what to do this summer

• no idea what to do next fall

• no idea what to do with the rest of my life

that pretty much sums it up.

from the greek: hē apóstrophos

I am now going to uncontrollably rant about proper apostrophe use. Please be patient. This is a personal vendetta of epically negligible proportions. Nobody cares about this stuff but me, I know, and I’m fighting an uphill, losing, pathetic battle. I just want to state for the record, how to use an apostrophe.

Use them to indicate possession by adding an apostrophe and an s: Bill’s teeth. For plural possessives, omit the added s if the plural form of a word already ends in s: the students’ decision. For joint possession, use an apostrophe only once: Joe and Helen’s books.

For names and proper nouns ending in s, AP style says to leave off the added s in a possessive: James’ underwear. Other stylebooks say to keep it: James’s underwear. Pick a style; either is correct.

Use them in place of omitted letters in a contraction: I’m, they’re, don’t. Also use them for omitted figures, as in years: the summer of ’69, the ’50s. (Take special note here of the direction the apostrophe curves. Note that it is not a single-quote mark.)

Use them to indicate plurals of single letters (but not multiple letters or multiple or single figures): mind your p’s and q’s, make A’s and B’s, but not recite your ABC’s (use ABCs, with no apostrophe).

NOTE: Eeew. Yeah, what is that comma doing there?

affirmation

three things:

“As I look back over a misspent life, I find myself more and more convinced that I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It is really the life of kings.” -H.L. Mencken

And this, by David Simon.

And the positively dreamy class discussion I had today about em dashes.

This is almost enough to remind me of what I like the best, the feeling of listening to somebody talk, and taking notes, and the little voice in your head going ‘This is going to be so much fun to write’ and the feeling that yeah, it will be. So maybe I’ll never get a ph.d. And maybe I’ll never be a Radio City Music Hall Rockette. But I could move to any small town in the country, I could move to Fayetteville, Arkansas or Hendersonville, North Carolina, or Sonora, California and be a newspaper reporter. I could do respectable work and live a respectable life doing a respectable craft. (That’s right, a craft, like carpentry or welding.) I could do something worthy of self-respect. I feel like myself when I’m reporting. I feel like myself when I’m editing, when I’m sitting there with my stylebook and my blue pen and my coffee and really reading and making things better. I could do this and be happy.

And that’s reassuring.

barf

Sisters in Idiosyncracy

Breaking news from the NYT: Hipsters love Brooklyn and San Francisco!  Still the most expensive places to live in the country, still the most popular for the new class of young, urban professional. Why can’t this kind of gentrification go to cities where it’d actually make a difference? Camden, N.J.; Compton, Ca.;  Detroit—places where it’d actually mean something to be different.

head above water

i’ve officially been rejected from every phd program and writers’ residency i’ve applied to for next year. i’m crashing and burning on my thesis and i can’t sleep more than 2 hours at a time (i have a bird situation outside my house). i’ve tried sleeping medicine, makers’ mark and deep breathing. everything is just getting out of hand lately. i can’t maintain. i cannot go on like this for much longer.

i just keep thinking about hunter, and how for fourteen years of my life i wanted to be him because i felt like being a journalist, in that way, in the way of chronicling a time so comprehensively, was important and valuable and meant something. maybe it did then, but i don’t think it means the same thing now. i don’t think it’s even possible.

i feel like i was born in the wrong time, as the wrong person. why couldn’t i have been a 19th century typesetter, or a 1970s newspaper reporter, back when writing mattered and people read. what’s the point anymore? nobody reads and it doesn’t matter if you can write or not, because nobody cares. can’t use a  semicolon? so what. try to say something is “very unique,” people let it by (unique means one-of-a-kind, therefore, nothing can be “very unique”). i’m sick to death.

proof of this: last week, in las vegas, i called the Tropicana to tell them good job on their billboard for the Bodies Exhibition. Instead of the typical misused-verb “Exhibit,” they’d used the noun, “Exhibition.” I called to say thanks, and congratulations, and i couldn’t get anybody on the phone that didn’t want to refer me to a manager to take my complaint. i don’t have a complaint, for once, i said. it didn’t matter.

born in the wrong time, probably. born in the wrong place, probably. born as the wrong person, 100%.

“Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits.”  -Hunter Thompson,  1971

dewar’s profile

(wrote this in advertising copywriting class today. clever way to do a get-to-know you exercise AND have it have to do with advertising)

Name: Jessica Clary

Age: Stopped counting at 19

Home: the newsroom

Profession: dilettante grammarian, punctuation aficionado, student newspaper adviser

Hobbies: listening to wfmu, reading magazines

Last book I read: “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen. I’m now qualified to have dinner-party conversation in 2001.

Last movie seen: “Something’s Gotta Give” (under duress, on an airplane, i had no choice)

Latest accomplishment: I wrote 10,424 words of my mfa thesis in a 4-day binge in Las Vegas last week. only 84,756 to go.

Why I do what I do: Failed at  my childhood dream of being a Radio City Music Hall Rockette

Quote: Any joke by Henny Youngman, any movie line by David Mamet, anything my mother says after “I told you this a thousand times”

Profile: People call me a snob, but I’m really just detail oriented.

Favorite drink: absolut mandarin and tonic. it’s like a little bit of summer every day.

brendan benson

A few days ago I saw a television commercial for an Apple product featuring a song by Brendan Benson. The song is called “What I’m Looking For,” and was a single in 2005. (That’s right, three years ago.) It’s off his third solo album, The Alternative to Love. I’ve been listening to this album since before it came out (one of the many, many perks of working with college radio). I have his first two albums (Lapalco and One Mississippi) at home, but I wanted to listen to them at work today, instead of Alternative to Love, over and over, like I listened to yesterday, so I went searching through the B racks in the station.

This anecdote is the background for two separate musings below:

1. WTF, Apple? At least when you used that Feist song, you used it in the year it came out, not three years later. Why didn’t you use the Brendan Benson song back in ‘05, maybe to promote the iPod nano, or something else you made back then. People would have bought the album back then and then everybody would love Brendan Benson now.

2. One day I’m going to have a mental breakdown and re-shelve every single CD in the radio station. While looking for Brendan Benson (should be filed under “Benson”) I found Ben Kweller (in the B section, should be filed in the K section under “Kweller”) and Ben Folds (F, “Folds”). Of course, I didn’t find Brendan under “Benson” or under “Brendan.” I searched through L, thinking maybe it could be filed under “Lapalco,” but it wasn’t. I did find Ben Lee there, correctly filed under L (indicating the filing problem is not specific to artists named Ben, or whose names contain “Ben”).

These bring me to my actual point: Do other people just not care about anything anymore? Can Apple use something timely, instead of dredging up my favorite records from years ago to sell stuff (namely stuff I already own)? Can things be properly alphabetized? It’s not like I’m asking you to learn the Dewey Decimal System or anything—it’s just the alphabet. I mean, I know by now that nobody learns in school anymore how to correctly use punctuation, but letters, right, don’t you learn those in kindergarten or something? Am I a total nutbar for thinking people should know the alphabet? God forbid someone use a semicolon correctly—I might just have a stroke.

supposed to be

So, earlier today, I had a conversation with my mother where she said I needed to take some time and think about what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. Not what I want to do. Not what I can do. But what I’m supposed to be doing. What does that mean?

I know some things I don’t want. I don’t want to go back to school, at least not for a while. I don’t want to give up on writing or editing. But this isn’t about what I want/don’t want. It’s about what I’m supposed to be doing.

What is one supposed to do? What am I supposed to be doing? How do you even start to think about what you’re supposed to be doing?

Is this sounding like some Dr. Phil/Oprah talk?

an extremely worthy cause

so, even though i don’t make a lot of money, or have a lot of money, i still like to give it away. i donate to charities, i donate to the college i work at’s scholarship fund, i donate to my old college’s alumni association, i donate to political campaigns and nonprofit organizations that lobby for things i believe in.

and i believe in WFMU.

cause yeah, you can donate money to cure diseases and to save people’s lives, but then, after you do that, you can donate money to make radio better, and so those people whose lives you saved will have something to listen to.

lucky girl

this wasn’t written about me.

pending

i’m alive. just really busy. updates soon, i promise.

adult content alert

I found that book. In my office. At work. Which proves I am:

a) responsible

b) work-y

c) a grown-up

d) pathetic

Colin decided the other day that since I was such an adult, I wasn’t allowed to listen to NOFX anymore. Not that I’ve probably listened to NOFX since 1995, but still, to be not allowed is harsh.  It’s like saying those forty-something hipsters downtown need to turn in their jean jackets.

losing things

I currently cannot find my copy of Al Burian’s “Burn Collector.” This angers me for many reasons.  First, I hate losing things. It proves my parents right, that I’m irresponsible. Second, I want to read it right now before I go to Chapel Hill in February for a weekend. Third, I’d buy a new copy, but this one has sentimental value. Fourth, I just reread it a few months ago. I just had it. And now it’s gone. It’s just so frustrating.

But probably it angers me the most because I just wasted about an hour looking for it and procrastinating doing my real work and didn’t find it and therefore have nothing to show for my efforts. This is so frustrating.

hearing the bell ring

In a boxing match, at the end of a round, they ring a bell. It’s not a long thing, like a bell at school, just a simple clink-ding. It signifies the round is over, and the fighters retreat to their corners to clean up and get ready for the next round.

Sometimes in everyday life, I want a bell like that I can ring when a round has ended. A round of a fight. A round of a crush. A round of a conversation. A round of work. A round of discussion or debate. A round of personal politics. A round of drinks. Ding. Ding. Ding.

It’d be helpful in situations where you’re unsure of where you stand with someone. You ask someone out, they say no, but they don’t ring the bell, and you know you’re free to ask again until that bell rings. You are offered something and you don’t take up on it right away, but the offerer doesn’t ring the bell, you know you can take it later. You think you’ve made up your mind, but you don’t ring the bell, so you know you can change it later once you think some more.

I feel like not only would ringing the bell serve as a nice punctuation, it’d also serve as a cleansing ritual, symbolizing finishing something not only for the finisher/ringer, but also for the finished/ringee.

Done. Over it. Gone. See-ya-wouldn’t-wanna-be-ya. Adios. So long. Bye-bye. Ding.

beats workin’

Even on the hardest days of my job, the days where I’m there for fourteen hours on a day after being there for twelve hours, the days where people yell and cry and fight for what they believe in and the days where I go toe-to-toe with everyone in sight, those hard days are still better than the very best day at any other job I’ve ever had.

And that’s something.

wfmu

So, lately, in a kind of rude departure from listening to the internet radio station I actually work at, I’ve been listening to a lot of wfmu. The station is 100% listener supported free-form radio broadcast in Jersey City, New Jersey on 91.1 and in Hudson Valley, New York on 90.1, and all over on their web site. But if you just want to get a taste, check out their most recent archived shows. I hold off until Monday and listen to the newest Downtown Soulville and Fool’s Paradise every week. I’m constantly astonished by the fact that this station is on the air. Seriously. How, in this world of iPods and satellite radio and this and that can a regular, terrestrial staion, playing weird cult 45s and mambo records survive?

Probably because the music is good and the DJs are interesting and they know what they’re talking about. They know how to put a show together and keep it good.

But there’s something about it that makes me really sad. Because I know it can’t last forever. I’m sitting here in my office, listening to the latest Fool’s Paradise and I hear the unmistakable sound of dust on a record. Which means that Rex, the host, is playing an actual record that he brought with him to the studio that has a few specks of dust on it. And that dust went out over the air on Saturday afternoon, and then was archived in mp3 format on the web site and I’m  listening to that dust. A digital file including analog dust. Something about that makes me sad and nostalgic and heartbroken over and over.

France continues to let me down

So, I just read this, and for some reason, it really depresses me. I always imagine France, especially Paris, as this weird anachronistic place where people smoke like people smoked in the states in the 50s and 60s. When I went to Paris, nothing seemed more natural than the literally hundreds of people sitting in cafés, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and reading the daily newspaper. It was as natural as elderly women in all black and high heels. It was as natural as being kind of almost a little bit felt up by a stranger on the Metro. It was so Paris-y.

But here’s what really bugs me. In the article, about seventeen graphs in, a curator from the French Museum of Smoking explains that he’s concerned that if not allowed to smoke, there may be fewer brilliant French writers. I understand this. When you write every day for a living, it’s difficult to do it without some sense of stability. Sitting in a specific chair, or eating a specific snack, or doing it at a specific time, or having a specific thing on your desk to fiddle with, or drinking coffee, or juice, or something. For me, it’s specific music, desk set-up and hot tea for serious writing (hot tea not coffee, because I get jittery if I have too much coffee). Non-serious writing I can just have the laptop anywhere, but still, the way I open up a text file and write in it, and the way the files on my computer are arranged are all part of the method. And none of these little idiosyncrasies are chemically addictive (maybe the tea, a little). So yes, I do feel like writers in France who write best in cafés with a cigarette in their hands will suffer. And yes, I feel sorry for them. I always felt like as a writer, France would be a great place to expatriate to, but now I’m not so sure.

holiday hours

how did people appear busy at work on the day before a big holiday break before computers? seriously, i’m having a hard time appearing busy and i’ve got a computer and an iphone to “play” with.

all my friends left earlier this week. it’s weird to be alone now. after spending almost three straight weeks with these people every day they just vanish. they call, but it’s not the same. plus, i don’t think any of them know how much i hate to talk on the phone. living in savannah has spoiled me. if i really want to talk to someone, i can just walk to their house or office and knock on the door. which i much prefer to the telephone.

is it bizarre that i’m at once technoholic and technophobe? i love my typewriter, but i also love my powerbook. i have a rotary dial phone and an iphone. and yeah, i love being able to wirelessly internet from my pocket, but sometimes, it’s just nice to talk to people in real life. or type a letter on a typewriter, complete with mistakes and misalignments. i still write hand-written thank you notes for everything. i just bought a fountain pen i plan on hanging on to for a long time. i paint for pete’s sake; an art form with no major technological advancements since Lascaux. i guess it’s good to be well-rounded. that’s what i’ll keep telling myself.

listening to otis redding at home during christmas

I submitted grades from teaching yesterday. It felt really anticlimactic. Teachering is done. The past three weeks have been so fun I almost forgot I got older. I had a great birthday, except for the part where my house flooded. Hanging out on the porch with friends and neighbors, eating pies and lowcountry boil and new people and everything. It’s like I forgot I was capable of having fun and being sociable. It’s nice to have that back.

I do wish I was going home for Christmas for an extended period of time. Just because of the reading time. At home, my family will cordon ourselves off into different corners of the house for hours reading. I get to do that at my grandparents’ house too, and it’s probably my favorite thing about holidays: quiet.

Instead, I’ll be on a whirlwind tour of Greenville-Spartanburg-Atlanta in as many days.

college radio

The other day, my mom called me to ask me if Hannah Montana was Billy Ray Cyrus’s daughter. I told her I had absolutley no idea, but I could google it for her if she was really that curious.

“But don’t you work in college radio?” she said. “I mean, you know about all the bands.”

“Exactly, Mom.”

Seriously. I mean, I know my job is difficult to explain, but some things should be obvious enough.

In other news, this year’s Grammy Nominees are the best I’ve ever seen. Kanye, Lupe Fiasco, UGK featuring Outkast (if you doubt this song’s epicness for one second, just go here and watch the video), Feist, Alice Smith, Jay-Z … it’s like a who’s-who of what Jessica likes. Let’s just hope the Grammy voters keep thinking like me.

give us your best writing

In the spirit of open options, I’m applying to a few Ph.D. programs. The application process has changed a bit since I applied to MFA programs in 2002. Most everything is online, and the forms are all pretty confusing. Sometimes there’s one set of forms. Sometimes there’s separate sets for the college and the specific program. Sometimes you can’t even get to the writing prompts for the essays until you fill out a ton of the online form. Yesterday I worked on 3 apps and it took most of the day.

And now I’m writing an essay. This is the prompt:

Essay A: Autobiographical Essay. Give us your best writing. Tell us about yourself. You can include information on your family, significant persons, places and events in your life, what interests you, etc. You have some leeway with the writing format however overly dramatic or comedic writing including poetry or writing in the 3rd person is not encouraged. After reading your “feature” the reader should be both informed and hopefully want to find out more — about you. (750-word limit)

I mean, how vague can you get? They could have just said hey, write something. Go. After staring at a blank page for about 2 hours yesterday, I gave up and graded essays for the class I teach and worked on my thesis for a while. Today, though, is the day I will write it. It will happen.

Help me.

christmas list

1. this

black friday

as much as i’m frustrated by adbusters , i am a fan of their ‘buy nothing’ day. today, i successfully bought only one thing: a barbecue sandwich. i was driving through south carolina and it was a must-have. except for that, i didn’t buy anything else. i didn’t even look at stuff to buy people for upcoming holidays. i resist the urge to purchase.

in other news, yesterday my mom grabbed  my head and asked if i’d been painting. apparently, the gray hair that has been attacking my head since i was nineteen is now attacking in clumps. and one of the clumps in the front does look a lot like titanium white. i guess it’s time to dye my hair. i really thought i could make it to twenty-six without having to become one of those women that dyes her hair every six weeks. apparently that’s not in the cards for me. apparently i’m going to be one of those hair-dye women. it’s just a few steps away from pancake foundation makeup and false eyelashes and acrylic nails and breast implants and liposuction. the end is near.

update

1. friday was a good day.

2. yesterday was a crazy day. me and B. went to mutation, then to an estate sale, then to the flea market. things bought: 1 nightstand, 2 lemonades, 1 funnel cake. then back to the porch for cards and beers and hideous skrawberry cigars and rap music and icicle lights and folding furniture and belgium waffle candle and mariokart and guts and mythbusters and killer ants.

3. today, there’s a giant bug on the house next to me. epic giant bug. all my friends are gone for thanksgiving. i have a ton of work to do. instead, i’m doing as little as possible and it feels really, really good.

endings

So, I missed posting yesterday, but it was the last day of school and I had to celebrate. Our whole class went to Moon River, and Kristine gave us the grand tour of upstairs. We all talked and hung out and had fun, and then I turned around and it was late. But finding new friends is always worth it.

And I think I got straight As.

statistically speaking

best thing ever

autumn

Today in my office, I was eating a Werther’s and my jacket slipped off my chair and I realized it was finally autumn-ish.