I didn't want to laugh at this silly thing this attention-seeking guy tried

But I really did. I also would not ever have the balls to try it myself.

This very short story took me 3 minutes to read and 3 days later I'm still thinking about it

"He finds himself sitting in the neighborhood bar drinking a beer at about the same time that he began to think about going there for one. In fact, he has finished it. Perhaps he’ll have a second one, he thinks, as he downs it and asks for a third."

I'm also pretty embarrassed not to have heard of Robert Coover. You can and should read the whole thing (it is shoooooort) here. 

Somehow I stumbled onto this...

... while looking up something for work and now I would like to please burn the phrase "panty moistener" from my brain.

Hack the Planet

Yeah great fucking work, guys:

On social news site Reddit, one user claimed he was a gay man now living in Saudi Arabia who had used the service under his own name to meet men in the US. He titled his post: “I May Get Stoned to Death for Gay Sex (Gay Man from Saudi Arabia Who Used Ashley Madison for Hookups.)”
“I am from a country where homosexuality carries the death penalty,” he wrote. “I BEG you all to spread this message. Perhaps the hackers will take notice of it, and then, I can tell them to (at the very least) exercise discretion in their information dump (i.e. leave the single gay arab guy out of it). As of now, I plan on leaving the Kingdom and never returning once I have the $ for a plane ticket. Though I have no place to go, no real friends, and no job.”

Things I did today

Misread the news headline QLD SCHOOL GIRL MISSING as OLD SCHOOL GIRL MISSING and had some jokes ready in my head about that and then took a long hard look at myself and did not mention this to anyone.

Things my Body Pump Instructor says after Body Pump that make me want to drop my weights on her foot:

"Now go home and have a sensible breakfast."

On self respect

Until I read Joan Didion's terrific Vogue essay on the subject (which you really should read in its entirety here) it truly never occurred to me that a lack of self respect could be at the heart of my (mostly historic) bouts of insomnia. Now it... makes a lot of sense. Plus fuuuuck she is good. I mean:

"To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we post- pone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves."

and:

"Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment,of being named corespondent. If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank."

and finally:

"It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower."

No seriously just read the whole thing right here.

If you don't understand why I'm excited about this movie you don't understand me at all.

My new at-work playlist...

... is somehow now restricted to songs played in the closing credits of Silicon Valley. That is... not a complaint.

I have a bad feeling about this.

I can't imagine why.

A Thing I Have Been Doing Lately

1. Getting home from work at a reasonable hour on a night when I have the house to myself.

2. Changing into my pajamas.

3. Making my dinner and putting it on a little tray.

4. Making a pot of tea and putting that on the tray too, plus a little jug for my milk.

5. Climbing into bed with my dinner-and-tea tray and either a book or Downton Abbey on Netflix, depending on my mood.

6. Wallowing in pure Dinner Bed happiness.


Note: Obviously that is a generic pic above and not me pictured because, ew, meat yuck.

Mark Hamill autographs

Classic Hamill...

Lessons from rewatching the Jet Li classic(?) Romeo Must Die:

1. All black people can dance and have great rhythm.

2. All Chinese people know martial arts.

3. You can openly murder a bunch of dudes with no consequences sometimes.


(And yeah sure I'm ragging on it but Jet Li in that backwards cap and doing his hip-hop strut is pretty much everything)