social networking.

Someone just tried to pick me up with the line: "Hey, are you on JDate? You look so familiar."

The Upper West Side is a truly amazing place. And no, I am not on JDate.

there will be lists.

I totally love lists (obviously). One of the few things I truly enjoy about the holiday season is all the "Best Of" lists floating around - I hunt them down like Elmer Fudd hunts wabbits - but in a purely non-OCD kind of way. Mostly I love lists because they provide so many opportunities to indulge in my favorite pastime: deriding the taste of others! And so in the spirit of giving, I made my own Best Of 2008 list. I chose categories according to whim, and ignored all publication/release dates. The space-time continuum means nothing to me - if I read/saw/heard it for the first time in 2008, it's eligible for awesomeness. Feel free to disdain as you please.

Best Essay: Up and Then Down, Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker - No surprises here; my love for Nick P. never wavers, and elevator rides have never been the same. Runner up: The Greatest Story Ever Told, Chris R., Yale Daily News - Men everywhere are still gasping and squirming; I almost peed my pants laughing.

Best Song: Someone Great, LCD Soundsystem - The only song of 2008, and I liked it way before I wanted James Murphy to be my friend. Runner up: N/A - I wasn't kidding about this being the only song of 2008.

Best Overall Musical Performance: Devendra Banhart - I hated Devendra Banhart, until I started to love him. I can supply no rational explanation for this; it was just his moment. Runner up: Amy Winehouse - Criminal overuse of liquid eyeliner aside, I honestly like the entire Back to Black album, and I am not ashamed to admit it.

Best Fiction: The End of the Affair and The Quiet American, Graham Greene - I didn't read all that much fiction this year, but I finished these books back to back and loved them equally, confirming yet again my strange love for dead white male quasi-imperialist British authors. Runner up: The last three stories in Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri - she is definitely getting repetitious, but sometimes the product is still really good.

Best Non-Fiction: Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt - Arendt took this one without really trying. No one is surprised, I'm sure. Runner up: It's got to be a tie between The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon Wood, and Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz.

Best Movie: Reprise - I'm sure I will regret loving this movie, kind of like I regret loving Garden State and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But some things are just too apt, and Reprise is just one of those things. Runner up: There Will Be Blood - Truly awesome, and I mean that in the biblical sense.

Best Actor: David Boreanaz - OMG, no I am not kidding, have you seen Bones?! Angel can act! Well, sort of...at least, he can act in a way that doesn't involve breathing heavily and brooding. It's a total relief. Runner up: Neil Patrick Harris - Historically surpasses all levels of amazing on How I Met Your Mother, and Dr. Horrible takes it to a whole other level. Angel may have won in the end, but you still have my heart, NPH.

Best TV Show: Wonderfalls - No contest, the talking animals win, don't even try. Runner up: How I Met Your Mother - See ode to NPH above.

And now I'm spent. List may be amended, as other random pointlessness occurs to me.

SFO

I am sitting in San Francisco airport right now, in front of a large window, at Gate 82. I have a great view of the runway, and some mountains. I can see my plane, which has just arrived, and is now pulling into the gate. It was 65 degrees and sunny today in the Bay Area. I spent no more than 3 minutes outside.

In my bag, I have about $3,126.67. In cash. I did not rob a bank; I sold a lot of books. This is my job. One of my customers paid me in change, too, so I have a lot of quarters. When I went through security, I realized that the TSA people could probably see that I was carrying quite a wad of cash. I am grateful to live in a country where bribery is rare, because it would be so easy to extort funds from me right now. You wouldn't even need to take me to an ATM.

My plane is boarding now. On my trip to San Francisco from New York, I sat next to an Israeli couple who fought the entire 6 hour and 6 minute flight. I don't speak Hebrew, but I could still tell. There were lots of hand gestures involved. But it could have definitely been worse; I could have been sitting next to a couple who fought in a language I do understand.

hipster fail.

Overheard on the corner of Canal & Lafayette:

Bearded hipster #1: "I lived in Brooklyn for, like, years..."

Bearded hipster #2: "Me too, man! Williamsburg..."

Bearded hipster #1: "Yeah, it was cool or whatever, but I spent so much money on fares. Like, 70 bucks a week on cabs. I used to get out of work, and my phone would be dead, and I'd have to go home and charge it, but I was too lazy to wait for the L, so I'd just take a cab."

Bearded hipster #2: "Yeah. Manhattan is way better."

mail ghosts.

My roommates and I receive a fantastic amount of junk mail. For every piece of legit mail we get, there are also 10 pieces of crap mail. We can't get rid of the stuff fast enough; there are boxes of it piled in our living room. The couple who lived in our apartment before us, Dennis and Olga, must have bought all their stuff through catalogs, and let me tell you, they had some weird taste. Need hunting supplies? Books from the University of Pittsburgh Press? A vast array of scented candles? I have probably have a magazine for you!

According to this article, mailpeople are even more sick of junk mail than I am. I really don't understand why, though; how is delivering a Scented Living catalog to my apartment any worse than delivering a copy of The New Yorker? I hate junk mail because it's boring and I have to dispose of it, but mailpeople are hoarding this crap! Perhaps it's not junk mail in particular that's the problem, but the never ending stream of mail itself. A truly Sisyphean task, if ever there was one.

Sometimes legit mail comes for Dennis and Olga too -- large envelopes marked "URGENT" and "CONFIDENTIAL." We never know what to do with this stuff, because we have no idea what happened to Dennis and Olga, and our landlords don't know either. Personally, I think they're dead. Either that, or they're in rehab trying to kick their addition to mail-order shopping. My artsy roommates briefly considered making some kind of installation piece out of all the junk mail we get, but I thought that would be super creepy, and I'm glad they didn't. After all, what if Olga and Dennis really are dead? Having their mail all over my walls would be like one huge creepy consumer séance. Not good for the karmic balance.

I have a history with junk mail for dead people, too. Karen Carpenter, lead singer of The Carpenters, who was sadly famous for dying of anorexia, used to live in the house I grew up in, in Park Slope. We used to get mail for her all the time, and I always thought it was super creepy. Or at least that's what my Mom told me. Now that I think about it, though, Karen Carpenter is probably a very common name, and the house I grew up in really isn't somewhere a moderately famous person would live. Oh my God, did my Mom make that up!? Mean!

sickness...and resurrection!

I have come down with some kind of mutant super cold, and for the last five days I have been pretty much confined to my couch/bed. If you talked to me on Friday, you would have heard (or not) that I lost my voice. If you talked to me today, I probably interrupted the conversation to sneeze all over you. I did manage to finally make it back to work today, but I was so focused on not falling asleep at my computer that I got nothing done.

The resurrection I refer to in the title of the post has nothing to do with the state of my sinuses, however. It is my apartment blog from college that has been reborn! We have a new format, but the same (witty and intelligent) contributors. Kappa Alpha Sigma (Nu) lives on.

conversations with newt.

Confession: I have this weird thing for Newt Gingrich.

A couple of months ago, I saw him on George Stephanopoulos, and he was surprisingly interesting and cuddly. Since then, against all of my better judgment, I've started to like him. First of all, his name is Newt, which is objectively awesome, but did you know he also has a PhD in history, and that he writes geeky historical fiction (none of which I have read, because it looks horrible)? I know, he isn't perfect: he was instrumental in get Bill Clinton impeached, and he was generally crappy at being Speaker of the House, and he's a Republican, but none of this seems to have stopped me from liking him.

And if we had lunch today, my buddy Newt and I would definitely have talked about his attempt to destroy adolescence. Here is how I imagine our conversation would go:

Me: "WTF, Newt? I like your ideas about responsibility and achievement, but this is not the 18th Century, and none of us are John Quincy Adams."

Newty G: "Julia, you have clearly been coddled all your life. Your parents should have shipped you to Rwanda to work as a peace keeper when you were 13. You have no idea what responsibility means."

Me: "You know, Mr. Newt, there is this great show on MTV these days called Exiled. You should watch it. The whole premise is that they send spoiled children (previously featured on another superb MTV show, My Super Sweet Sixteen) to go live in "horrible" places, like Panama or Africa, where they live with tribes and stuff. The kids cry and whine, but in the end they are transformed! Do you think all 13 year olds should be shipped to Burma?

Newty G: "Actually, I think MTV should be terminated. It is just another example of the pernicious influence of the culture of adolescence. I mean, have you seen The Real World recently? In fact, I think high schoolers should be paid minimum wage not to watch TV."

Me: "But wouldn't that just lead to a culture of bribery? Do you really believe that payment can induce someone to become responsible? And is it civically healthy to equate responsibility with monetary gain? Wouldn't that be like paying people to vote, or rewarding them for not committing a crime? Also: do we really have to 'end adolescence' in order to be good at science? Oh, and one more question: you refer to adolescence as a failed 'social experiment' and indicate that we should 'move on.' It seems to me that you think someone is running this 'experiment,' and that they can simply shut it off. If so, who exactly is in charge?"

Newty G: "You voted for Obama, didn't you?"