you’re gonna believe them

Despite having a slightly different view on what a normal life is–Taylor agrees that high school isn’t the real world.

into the sun

I like to ride in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window anymore when you’re married.

Yesterday, although word spread today, JD Salinger died in his home in nearby Cornish, New Hampshire. He was 91. Click here to read his obit in the New York Times. Find an article here discussing his legacy and the importance of Franny and Zooey. (For the record, I have a copy of The Way of a Pilgrim (french translation) that I bought when I was living in Paris in the Winter of 2006.)

“You take a look around your college campus, and the world, and politics, and one season of summer stock, and you listen to the conversation of a bunch of nitwit college students, and you decide that everything’s ego, ego, ego, and the only intelligent thing for a girl to do is to lie around and shave her head and say the Jesus prayer and beg God for little mystical experience that’ll maker her nice and happy.”

- J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” died yesterday as well. He was 87. Click here to read his obit in the New York Times.

-In other news, I’ve been unbearably sick since 3 am this morning. Here’s to hoping I can keep the 9 saltines I’ve eaten in the last 20 hours down.

best thing i’ve ever heard

“It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.”
-Dale Carnegie

Maybe someday I will ride in the back of a big Cadillac

Happy to be accepted.

Two weeks ago I took a flight to the southern town above, a place I’d never been before, and twenty three hours later I boarded another plane, to the northern island below, a city I currently call home. Despite being exhausted from an eight hour interview and a nervous, sleepless night on an uncomfortable hotel mattress, I had one of the best conversations of my life, from take off to landing, with a man who turned out to be the president of a very, very well known and very, very cool company. And there’s something kind of perfectly wonderful about swapping stories and crying to a stranger, thousands of miles above the ground, floating through the clouds in the middle of the night. A few months from now when my zip code changes again, he’ll be the only person I nearly know there.

harlem mornings and i am happy

My morning view.

when dreams shall prophesy your rescue,

January

At last the living room rolls back
from holy night to starless day, her
Christmas crèches packed away for
the lengthening months. Adios, tin cac-
tus, flip-up backdrop for our bladelike
sheet-tin Jesús, God’s little razor.
Au revoir, madame outside the manger
with two cats to bless bébé, one black,
one white. Arrivederci, paisan’,
dancing reverently with your bear.
Magi, Mary, Ox and Ass, go
up to the attic for hibernation,
when dreams shall prophesy your rescue,
a newborn life next shrunken year.

-Jay Rogoff

I live with them & then 1 more

live for the sounds

From Brooke Waggoner’s album Heal for Honey.

new york city lights so bright

The smell in the hallway literally makes me gag and I find myself pulling up my scarf over my nose or raising my hand up to my face to inhale something that isn’t weed or piss or burnt food. And the neighbors across the streets–well they’ve been blasting Michael Jackson and DMZ and Biggie Smalls from their busted windows all night but even so, I can hear them shouting code words out to one another above the beats.

Still, from the balcony it all looks really magical and I’m lucky to be living with friends, sleeping in a warm room and watching cable television again-for the first time in a year.