the ch!cktionary

"That woman looks like Yoko Ono."

Mon, 21 May 2012 17:39:38 -0400

Chances the woman actually looks a little like Yoko Ono: .1%

Chances the woman just happens to be Asian with long, thick hair: 70%

Chances the woman is just Asian, sharing no other personal appearance traits with Yoko: 29.9%

Can you imagine if every thin white blonde woman “looked like Gwyneth Paltrow”?

I think I’ll start pointing to random white dudes with gray hair and saying “Wow, he looks just like George Clooney.”

Replace “Yoko Ono” with “Lucy Liu” and that is the story of my life.

Wish I could put up an electronic version of a Gone...

Thu, 17 May 2012 09:58:39 -0400

Wish I could put up an electronic version of a Gone Fishin’ sign. (Well, I guess that would be a vacation auto-responder ….) Anyhow, I am spending the week in Manchester, Vermont with the roommate and the dog. We’re doing some post-dissertation hiking before his entire German family descends upon Boston for commencement festivities.

I can’t believe half the year is already over and I am still not done with this damn novel. Bostonians: any good recommendations for cafes where I can jab at my keyboard for hours undisrupted? Wifi totally not a must.

My friends and I do this thing where we celebrate all major...

Mon, 07 May 2012 15:46:41 -0400

My friends and I do this thing where we celebrate all major events/reunions by making pies. Mostly, this is because we have an expert baker in our group who single-handedly produces pie spreads like this one. I, on the other hand, can only make one type - key lime! - which I argue is the best kind, though some people dispute its status as a pie given its short baking time (blasphemy, I say!). I have produced key lime pie for a myriad of special occasions, including my dog’s birthday and finals period. Given that it is also Kennedy’s favorite, it seemed appropriate for the festivities :)

P.S. I use the Pioneer Woman key lime recipe and top off the pie with no whipped cream and a ton of lime zest.

In DC visiting one of my besties from college. Folks came from...

Mon, 07 May 2012 13:55:00 -0400

In DC visiting one of my besties from college. Folks came from six different states to surprise the birthday girl :) I’m in town until tomorrow and then headed back to Boston where I need to get many life things in order.

(Yes, Kennedy is wearing an 80s prom dress. This is because she is awesome.)

Above was my in-flight reading today :) I just got to DC a...

Sat, 05 May 2012 15:42:12 -0400

Above was my in-flight reading today :)

I just got to DC a couple hours ago. I’m here until Tuesday to see my friend Kennedy. (A bunch of us flew in to surprise her for her 25th birthday!). I’m meeting up with tons of people (who I might not see for a long time when I move) and in between, trying to write write write as much as possible.

I promise I will cease posting book covers in lieu of actual photos as soon as I get a chance to go through my pictures from Provincetown ;)

So! The above was filmed two years ago when I was a college...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:41:17 -0400

So! The above was filmed two years ago when I was a college senior. I had just met filmmaker Therese Shechter who was working on the documentary HOW TO LOSE YOUR VIRGINITY, and we were both attending an abstinence conference being held at Harvard. It was the first spark of inspiration for the Rethinking Virginity conference I planned later that spring. My 22-year-old self’s camera presence aside, Therese’s awesome project is now so close to being completed but we need your help! In her words:

Our goal for How To Lose Your Virginity is to undo centuries of myths and contradictions around virginity, and to encourage an honest conversation with people navigating the confusing process of deciding when and why to become sexual. What do a rock violinist, an Ivy League blogger and an Ohio engineer have in common? They’re all subverting the virginity narrative in our film.

We’re excited to be back with a second Kickstarter campaign to raise money to finish up the film this fall, hire our composer and animator and license our footage. We are so close to being done, but we can’t finish without a successful fundraiser. BUT - If we don’t reach our funding goal by May 9th, we don’t get anything.

She has 9 days to raise an additional $10,000 on Kickstarter to reach their $35,000 goal (otherwise, they get none of it at all). I’ve been discussing the above topics with Therese for years, and this conversation is sadly STILL as relevant today as ever:

Since we debuted the film’s first trailer on Vimeo, we’ve had over 60,000 views, hundreds of blog posts and an overwhelming number of people speaking to each other through our online crowd-sourced First Person story series. Demand for this kind of information is so high, the trailer is already being used in university Human Sexuality classes across North America.

That said, independent films are notoriously difficult to finance and Therese can’t do it alone! I’m not in the habit of asking for readers for money, but having followed the evolution of the film, I can attest that Therese is the real deal and the stories she’s uncovered in her research represent such a diverse array of sexualities and experiences. They deserve to be shared with young Americans today! If you can make a pledge (even a dollar helps!), head over to the fundraising page on Kickstarter and check out some of the awesome rewards for donating. And please, please, please help get the word out about this important project by doing the following:

Tell your friends, your feminist group, your peer educators, your teachers, etc. about this film and the fundraising campaign!
Support Therese’s other great work (I Was A Teenage Feminist, the animated short-short Womanly Perfection, How I Learned to Speak Turkish)
Check out HOW TO LOSE YOUR VIRGINITY’s blog, Facebook, or Twitter and reblog this post on Tumblr!

Thanks a ton, folks :)

"Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future."

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:01:06 -0400

“Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”

- Oscar Wilde

Had to get the Roomie out of town after the dissertation was...

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 15:11:39 -0400

Had to get the Roomie out of town after the dissertation was turned in, so we drove to Provincetown to spend some beach time with the pup and mentally regroup before summer.

Photo credit: Patrick Hamm

Another book haul, because I am impulsive when presented with...

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 22:09:00 -0400

Another book haul, because I am impulsive when presented with options. This time, I picked up:

Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, Joseph Heller
Memoir, A History, Ben Yagoda
Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood
Moral Disorder, And Other Stories, Margaret Atwood
Don’t Look Now: Selected Short Stories, Daphne du Maurier

Because my novel involves exploring the writing anxieties I experienced after I ended Sex And The Ivy, I’m reading a lot of works featuring artists/writers who are dealing with creative blocks. (The last two books listed aren’t, strictly speaking, topical - but I couldn’t resist grabbing them while I’m still on American soil and have access to English-language used bookstores.) As requested, I’ll post some thoughts on each book after I’m done. Seems like a good reinforcement mechanism anyway and will force me to do all my self-assigned reading!

Speaking of which, I finished Fight Club, which was just as much of a mindfuck as the film. I hate watching a movie before reading the book on which it’s based, because text is clearly my preferred medium and I always end up wondering how I would have interpreted the work if I approached it first in its original format. I actually haven’t really read Chuck Palahniuk (never made it through Choke, so someone tell me if it’s worth it), but I specifically wanted to get into the head of a character disenchanted with his work and the monotony of his white-collar life. So many of my friends have had similarly jarring post-grad experiences and the characters I’ve based on them share these frustrations. The unnamed unreliable narrator of Fight Club was the perfect fictional case study.

I’ll probably start on The Rum Diary this week. Patrick and I don’t share much overlap in terms of literary preferences, but Hunter S. Thompson (as well as dystopian fiction) is a mutual interest of ours. (Mostly, though, the Roomie seems to prefer the Russians.) Haven’t watched The Rum Diary movie, but I’ve seen Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas and Where The Buffalo Roam. Still can’t decide if I prefer Johnny Depp or Bill Murray as Thompson, though of course, there’s no way of knowing who came closer to depicting the real man. And it’s a strange thought experiment, because I am, after all, in the process of creating a character based on myself - a caricature of sorts - and how does one make an editorial decision on which features to exaggerate or omit?

You might be wondering about my impulse to fictionalize myself at all but the version of Lena that appears in my novel lives in an alternate reality, so while she shares certain aspects of my personality, her behavior and reactions are really more like predictions of how I imagine I would behave. And I think it actually makes for a truer story, in a certain sense. As J.M. Coetzee notes in Doubling The Point:

In a larger sense all writing is autobiography: everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it. The real question is: this massive autobiographical writing-enterprise that fills a life, this enterprise of self-construction (shades of Tristram Shandy!) - does it yield only fictions? Or rather, among the fictions of the self, the versions of the self, that it yields, are there any that are truer than others? How do I know when I have the truth about myself? My first response is that we should distinguish two kinds of truth, the first truth to fact, the second something beyond that; and that, in the present context, we should take truth to fact for granted and concentrate on the more vexing question of a “higher” truth.

Let me know if you’ve got an opinion on some of the above books or any interesting essays to forward along! I’m super appreciative of all the recommendations and encouraging messages :)

Hindsight

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 18:35:00 -0400

The person I am today is exactly who I wanted to be when I was 19, and I can’t decide if it’s a blessing or a curse that I wish I were someone else.

"Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to..."

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 21:25:02 -0400

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”

- Natalie Goldberg

I found a used hardcover copy of Amsterdam at The Raven Book...

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:14:36 -0400

I found a used hardcover copy of Amsterdam at The Raven Book Store just a couple hours before Ian McEwan’s talk yesterday and he graciously signed it. (Victorious snapshot above.) His talk, which was about the tension between fact and the fictionalized reality of novels, was surprisingly funny and he was really approachable in person. I’m so glad I made time for the event in the middle of this busy week (Patrick’s dissertation deadline is Friday!).

Though I have a lot of signed books at home, most are from writer friends or from impulse purchases at random readings. Most of the novels that inspire my own work, however, are written by people who are either dead or not doing the North American book tour thing. This is the first time I’ve met an author who I read semi-religiously, and I have to say that I definitely felt like a bit of a fangirl. There’s an odd kind of one-sided intimacy to the experience. I’ve read so many of this man’s words, but obviously, I don’t personally know him and I can’t say for certain that my interpretation of his novels necessarily reflects his intent.

I first read Atonement in 2007 and then reread it for a post-war fiction class during my junior year of college. The protagonist, Briony Tallis, was so striking, oddly familiar, and more than a little close to home. Atonement was the reason I took the aforementioned class, and it was the reason why over the course of the semester, I went through the entire McEwan bibliography instead of doing the assigned reading. I think that I had some vain hope of replicating what Briony made me feel the first time I read Atonement. Ironically, I haven’t picked up the novel in years (my old copy has been long lost and only just got replaced), and there are other books from McEwan that I’d rather reread these days. Nonetheless, Briony has always haunted me, and so has the character’s assessment of her life and career, which appear in the last pages of the book:

“The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.”

The most unexpected aspect of the entire novel-writing process is just how solitary this endeavor can be. Briony made me feel less alone because I could understand her plight. I never felt completely at ease with writing a memoir, because I don’t trust my own memory, my own self-perception. I’m glad I chose fiction, that I’m rewriting college in a way that puts me in control, the one thing that eluded me at Harvard. It doesn’t feel confessional but it does kind of feel like therapy.

Out of all the worlds and characters and relationships McEwan’s introduced to my imagination over the years, Briony (and her relationship to her own writing) is the one with whom I most identify. While he signed my book, I couldn’t help myself from asking McEwan a question I’ve been pondering ever since Atonement. Was there a character in his novels who he felt represented him?

He said Briony is probably the closest he’s come to identifying with a character. And I don’t know what it was, but something about hearing that from the man himself made me feel reassured about my own novel and my own protagonist.

“College Students Opening Up Conversations About...

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 21:37:06 -0400

“College Students Opening Up Conversations About Sex”, The New York Times

Abby and Sam are the future. Never ever ever could I have imagined a Sex Week At Harvard during my undergrad. I have a ton of respect for their tenacity in securing administrative backing and student support (which does not come easily at a place where everyone is overscheduled/committed), but most of all, I’m impressed by their ambitious inaugural program, which reflected the type of diversity that often only gets lip service in the sex-positive community. Their genuine commitment to inclusivity is no doubt responsible for the incredible changes Sex Week has made to the campus dialogue in the span of a few short months.

I’m so happy to count these two as friends and allies!

"It’s awful! If I want realism, life is sitting right there. Why would I watch something just as rife..."

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 16:59:00 -0400

“

It’s awful! If I want realism, life is sitting right there. Why would I watch something just as rife with awkwardness as my day-to-day existence, featuring people of normal attractiveness and problems that resemble my own? It’s like they think art is supposed to hold the mirror up to life. That is the last thing I want art to do. Who are all these three-dimensional female characters with problems that do not revolve around shoes? Don’t they realize they’re on television?

You don’t realize how common your experience is until someone else goes and makes an HBO series about it.

One of the undergirding principles of Millennial life is that we are all unique and special. That is why we all go to great effort to purchase Studiously Whimsical ensembles at unheard-of thrift stores and all wind up in functionally identical Variations on Sweaters-and-Opaque-Tights. In the effort to Say Something Different and Be Someone Unique, we all wind up looking and sounding about the same.

”

- Alexandra Petri, HBO’s ‘Girls’ is so zeitgeisty it hurts to watch

Petri’s take on “Girls” is pretty priceless. Though I haven’t watched the show (my single guilty TV pleasure is “Revenge”), it seems relevant to my book project! I’m currently obsessed with consuming pretty much anything having to do with the coming-of-age experience, because I’m not really sure what defines that experience for my generation today. Is it turning 18? Graduating from college? First job? Marriage? I have no idea at which point people become “adults”, and given the number of my older friends who haven’t entered the workforce and who don’t intend to marry or procreate (whether because they’re gay or just not interested), I wonder if the entire social construct of adulthood will collapse in on itself.

Wouldn’t be a terrible thing, in my opinion.

Ian McEwan on "The Lever: Where Novelists Stand to Move the World"

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 18:03:00 -0400

Ian McEwan on "The Lever: Where Novelists Stand to Move the World":

The Roomie picked up two tickets for this event for me! I am so excited to finally see in the flesh one of my favorite living writers. I’ve pretty much read everything McEwan’s written, including his short stories and that libretto… am hoping there’s a chance this Tuesday to get him to sign a book? Maybe it’s time to get a hardcover copy of Amsterdam. Paperbacks travel better, but I need something for memory-keeping this time :)

I’ve been assigning myself reading for book research and...

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:29:41 -0400

I’ve been assigning myself reading for book research and inspiration. Above is some much-awaited loot, which just arrived today. I have a list of 20 or so works that I have to get through over the next couple of months (maybe concurrently as I write?)

Novel writing has been put on hold until after the Roomie finishes his dissertation (ten days to the deadline, eep!). In the meantime, I’m trying to keep him from losing his mind. What does one offer a stressed-out graduate student at the eleventh hour? (Besides lots of food, massages, and sex.)

To All The Guys Who Have Ever Fallen For "Elle"

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 16:35:29 -0400

You don’t know me. I don’t know you.

I do not want to help you find yourself.

I am not your Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

I am not the answer to your discontent.

Dear Inbox: Can I take a rain check?

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 02:28:46 -0400

Oof.

My emotional bandwidth (as well as my physical strength) is quickly approaching zero. My amazing yoga teacher, Mary, had hip surgery at the start of the month. Yoga was my only savior during the Great Writer’s Block of 2010-2011, and as a result, I’ve been kind of out of it since she went on hiatus. Plus, both the Roomie (whose dissertation deadline is in three weeks) and the Bestie (who needs to pass the bar in a couple months) are stressed as fuck - and I love these boys, but I have been traveling every week. It’s been really hard to keep in touch with them while also being mentally present at conferences and events. I was in four different states over the past month, and I was trying to take it easy.

As you might have surmised, my book writing has been very sporadic. A plane ride here, an iPhone note there, it’s incredibly frustrating to not be able to stay settled for a few weeks. Every time I get my bearings again, it’s already time to hit the road. And the thing is, I have this great idea that I am invested in and inspired by, I know exactly what I want to write, and I already have over 100 pages of (admittedly disorganized) text. All I need is to shut myself off for a little while and this thing will get finished. I have full faith in that.

In the meantime, I’m ending my spring travel with an awesome event that I’m so excited for I don’t even mind the red-eye flight that awaits me on Friday night! Tomorrow, I’ll be at Pomona College doing a discussion called “Writing Sex Positively”. This is the talk I’ve been waiting to do pretty much all spring, and I’ll be doing a similar version of it later in the month at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts (super local, thank goodness).

I get back to Boston at some ungodly hour on Saturday morning and have a lot of personal items on the to do list, such as: doing my taxes, doing my hot boyfriend, finding a new yoga studio, arranging flowers for the apartment (crucial to my aesthetic pleasure and peace of mind), learning how to drive, and completing my goal of hitting up every decent brunch option within a four-mile radius of my home before I depart said home for the Old World.

On the bright side, I can’t wait to see my neglected pooch.

"Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves - regret for the past and fear of the future."

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 18:09:05 -0400

“Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves - regret for the past and fear of the future.”

- Fulton Oursler

In the latest episode of Sexy Times, I give advice to girls who...

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 14:00:06 -0400

In the latest episode of Sexy Times, I give advice to girls who aren’t quite ready to come out yet. Do you have an obligation to tell your friends and family about your sexual orientation? What happens if you aren’t ready yet? Watch the above video and check out the past editions of the Sexy Times series over at gURL.com.