Like nights spent figuring all the ways we came to this place.
December 2011
75 posts
Twelve Facts About Me To Ring In Twenty-Twelve
12. My favorite book is Fight Club. I read it after I saw the film.
11. I think of clever, charming things to say when I talk to my crush, but I hold back on saying them out of fear of looking like a dick.
10. I miss being in a pop-punk band.
9. I typically fall for girls based on these three features before anything else: eyes, eye brows, cheekbones.
8. I really want to ask a girl to eat at Caracas in the East Village with me.
7. My favorite show growing up was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I remember wearing TMNT briefs backwards so that I could see the graphic as a young child.
6. I saw Spice World on the day it came out.
5. I wanted to marry Posh Spice when I was younger, now I’m more attracted to Scary.
4. I pooped my pants at Epcot when I was about 14.
3. I have sent multiple emails to girls in my past confessing my love to them; unsurprisingly, I never got any replies.
2. The shortest relationship I’ve ever been in lasted for ten minutes. The girl confessed to me and the rest of my seventh grade class that she was joking when she said that she’d be my girlfriend.
1. I’m in a constant fear that I’m going to get in trouble or get yelled at because I got yelled at a lot as a child. Usually for lying or bad grades, which I guess is why I’m all about honesty and intelligence now a days.
nate dern: Shit Girls Say →
natedern.tumblr.com
Have you seen those Shit Girls Say videos that are floating around? Watch it here if you haven’t.
What would a normal human response be to seeing those videos? To laugh and share the link with a friend? To smile politely and move on with one’s life? To find them vaguely offensive but mostly…
Echo
Incubus
S.O.T.D.
Echo. Incubus.
‘
If you are going to go to improv shows and consider yourself a part of the improv community, don’t be rude during sets consisting of your peers and your ‘friends’ or any set for that matter. Don’t scoff and moan when moves are made, whether they are good or bad. Don’t act entitled. I’ve witnessed this stuff being done by some people lately and it irks me. Improv is supposed to be this great, supportive, team based thing where everyone is happy and excited for everyone doing it, and you’re just shitting on people, destroying the self-confidence they’re working hard on building.
Easily My Favorite Thing I've Ever Written
The smell of waffles, eggs, coffee and grease fill your nostrils as you open the doors. You’re at this quaint place on the corner of Houston and Norfolk and a guy wearing a nice shirt and tie and slacks and shoes comes up and asks, “how many?”
She’s telling you that she went to City University and majored in English Literature. She was loving it, but she had to drop out due to cost. Now she’s working as much as possible at a Duane Reade. She says it’s okay, but she really wants to write a novel some day.
“What’s stopping you from writing one right now?” You ask her. “I mean, I’m not trying to intrude, but I feel like if your dream is to write a novel, why don’t you just write one?”
“It’s not that easy. I need motivation. I need inspiration.”
“Yeah, I mean, I get that. But, instead of just waiting for inspiration and motivation to fall from heaven and into your lap, why don’t you just open up a word processing document and stare at it until something happens? Better yet, why don’t you just type and delete paragraphs until something that you like pops up on the screen? Just type until something happens.”
The waiter, the same guy who sat you, comes over and tells you that they have a nice breakfast platter called the Lumberjack. It comes with two eggs, sausage, bacon, ham and pancakes. You ask if you can trade the pancakes for a waffle to which he replies with a firm ‘yes’. You order that and the novelist orders an omelette stuffed with spinach, tomatoes, mushrooms and feta. You ask her what her name is.
“Lucia.”
Lucia was beautiful, she had this sort of look about her that brought you back to recent dreams you’ve had. You think it’s impossible since you are only capable of dreaming about faces you’ve seen, but you swear she’s the romantic interest in almost all of your dreams. She’s got long brown hair, cheek bones that’d make even Kate Moss look average, and big blue eyes. When she talks she stresses only the most important of syllables.
Lucia is easily the girl you’ve been wanting to date your whole life and here she is, right in front of you, sipping a bloody mary.
“I guess you’re right. Fuck. I always do this, I always get in my own way and make excuses. I tell myself, you aren’t smart enough to write a novel. You’re boring. You’re dumb. You don’t have the life experiences required to write something that is capable of grabbing somebody’s attention. I make excuses as to why I am not writing but refuse to look at the absolute truth which is that I’m just lazy.” She takes another sip from her red drink, “I just need to write. That’s the simple solution. The only solution, really. Thanks, Detective James Lawrence, NYPD.”
“You can just call me, James,” you joke. You fear that you light up because of how proud you are of that. It felt like a scripted line in a noir detective movie. Your face begins to burn as your cheeks turn a slight rose color as you blush. You try to be silly and cute and you fear that you actually look like a jerk.
Your hands are fiddling with the silverware roll on the table top and her smooth palm grazes the top of your left hand and she tells you that that was cute. She’s playing Devil’s advocate, assuring you that it’s okay to pursue her. You’ve never met her before, but it feels right. The electricity of her hand touching yours is enough to start one of those new electric cars. The kind you have to plug in to charge. Your face burns hotter and she quickly removes her palm, realizing she’s let it linger.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to weird you out or anything,” she pleads, begging for forgiveness.
“It’s alright. To be honest, I hadn’t noticed.”
Bullshit. You noticed. That was one of the best moments of your life. Unfortunately, you can’t tell her that because that’d just be weird and horrible and she’d probably just throw water in your face and leave. You’d never see her again.
Play
“If you only write when you’re inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count and those words aren’t going to wait for whether you’re inspired or not. So, you have to write when you’re not inspired and you have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you. And, the weird thing is, that six months later, a year later, you’ll look back on them and you won’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you just wrote because they had to be written next. The process of writing can be magical. There are times when you step out from an upper floor window and you just walk across thin air and it’s absolute and utter happiness. Mostly, it’s a process of putting one word after another. It’s like, out in the peak district in England and up in Scotland, there’re people who make drystone walls and they’ve been making drystone walls for generations and the way they make these drystone walls is they have lots and lots of rocks and they put one down and they put another one down that fits and they put another one down that fits and they know how to do it. And somehow they create these walls that are absolutely stable. Just by putting one rock down after another and eventually you have a wall and that’s how you make a novel. You put one word after another and then you repeat. So when people come to me and they say I want to be a writer, what should I do, I say you have to write. Sometimes they say, well I’m already doing that what else should I do, and I say you have to finish things because that’s where you learn from. You learn by finishing things.”
—Neil Gaiman on The Nerdist.
Dancing in the Dark
Bruce Springsteen
One day, I’ll be half the man that Bruce is.
