Gawker linked to my recent post on holiday tipping, with the helpful comment:
Furthermore, you live in a building with six fucking doormen. You SHOULD tip those guys for keeping out the crazies. It’s not like you can’t afford it. Asshole.
To which I say, since when is the editorial staff of Gawker reading my blog?
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
– Aristotle
Friends who read this site often ask: “what the hell is wrong with you?”
Or, more specifically, “why would you possibly want to post random details about yourself online?”
And, indeed, that’s a question I ocassionally ask myself as well. But, in stacking up the few reasons to self-aggrandize against the many sensible reasons to not, I inevitably remember that this site, more than anything else, is meant to shame me into regular writing.
Knowing that, somewhere out there in the ether, several thousands of you are inexplicably checking self-aggrandizement every day, I feel compelled to sit down and write something. Which, as every writing teacher I’ve ever had loved to remind, is more than half the battle, the writerly part of your brain, like a muscle, strengthening with exercise or atrophying from disuse.
So, as we careen towards January 1st, and I begin my standard obsessive process of taking stock of the year past and charting the one ahead, I’ve been considering the easily undervalued importance of doing things – like writing for this site – regularly, the power of habits in chipping away, day in and day out, at the things I most want out of life.
Still, I realize that some habits are more easily stuck to than others. Which leaves me glad that, if nothing else, I can probably retain at least one lauded by the Great Emancipator himself: getting rip-roaring drunk.
“I believe, if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class. There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice.”
– Abraham Lincoln
Let us drink to that. And let us do so, like clockwork, each and every day.
From the New Yorker, courtesy of Jess
While I’ve read at Cringe in the past, next week I’m returning for a special quasi-Cringe roadshow, being held here in Manhattan (rather than out in Brooklyn, Manhattan’s waiting room), in conjunction with the WYSIWYG reading series.
From the producer:
The WYSIWYG Talent Show, NYC’s first and only all-blogger reading and performance series, teams up with the diary-readin’, poetry-spoutin’, full-on adolescent angst of Brooklyn’s Cringe reading series for the first time ever at 8 p.m. on October 18, 2006 with CringeyWYG!
Every month The WYSIWYG TALENT SHOW brings you readings and performances from some of the blogosphere’s best and funniest writers, musicians, comedians and performance artists. And every month Cringe brings readings of teenage diaries, journals, notes, letters, poems, abandoned rock operas, and other general representations of the crushing misery of their humiliating adolescence. Together, they fight crime! Okay, not really, but it WILL be funny.
The WYSIWYG Talent Show’s “CringeyWYG” performs Wednesday, October 18 at Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery between Bleecker and Houston). Doors open at 7:30 p.m., show at 8 p.m. Tickets are $7 at the door. For more information visit wysiwygtalentshow.org, queserasera.org/cringe.html, www.bowerypoetry.com, or call (212) 614-0505.
With performances by:
* Sarah Brown
* Lindsay Robertson
* Marc Balgavy
* Joshua Newman
* Jason Boog
* Chris Hampton
About the performers:
Sarah Brown is the host of the Cringe Reading Series, the editor of the upcoming Cringe book, the executive co-producer of the upcoming Cringe television show, and the 1933 Oklahoma State Ladies’ Trickshoot Champion. She is equal parts eight-year-old girl, 16-year-old boy, and 70-year-old man, so in the movie of her life she will be played by Liza Minelli. You can find her online at queserasera.org.
Lindsay Robertson writes a blog called lindsayism.com. She’s written for GQ, MTV, ComedyCentral.com and Jane, among others. Until she discovered comedy in her late teens, she was planning to be the next Sylvia Plath.
During his final year of college, Marc Balgavy (http://balgavy.com/blog) created business cards for himself. Beyond listing his likes (Hal Hartley and graham crackers) and dislikes (dirty dishes and word searches), they listed his parents’ phone number. The cards also featured a black and white photo of him wearing a bleached blonde goatee. In the intervening years he’s realized those cards were the turning point where “filled with potential” met “easily distracted by go-nowhere projects.”
Though it was for other, equally dorky, reasons that Forbes called him “a veritable Doogie Howser,” Joshua Newman has been keeping a computer diary since the age of ten. He currently posts his entries online at www.self-aggrandizement.com, and spends the rest of his day running indie film studio Cyan Pictures and drinking heavily.
After spending two years on top of a mountain in Peace Corps Guatemala, Jason Boog chased the dream of every skinny Midwestern writer boy with glasses: to starve to death in New York City. He completed the graduate journalism program at NYU in 2004, and now works as a staff writer at the Institute for Judicial Studies (judicialreports.com). He writes the blog The Publishing Spot (thepublishingspot.com).
WYSIWYG creator and curator Chris Hampton has been blogging at Uffish Thoughts (uffish.com) since blogging wasn’t cool. By day, she works at a Big Gay Nonprofit and in her spare time she knits, pimps WYSIWYG at every possible opportunity, and obsesses over Project Runway and punctuation. She grew up in Arkansas but has since fully recovered.
About WYSIWYG:
“Urban Storytelling for the Internet Age” ‚Äì Now in its third year, the WYSIWYG Talent Show is a monthly series of readings and performances by bloggers living in or visiting NYC. Every month WYSIWYG showcases a variety of themed evenings featuring topics on everything from bad bosses and drugs to extreme gayness and summer camp. Each installment is an evening of funny and touching stories, songs, and performances from some of the best writers and most interesting personalities on the Web. More information can be found at wysiwygtalentshow.org.
About Cringe:
Cringe is a monthly reading series hosted by Sarah Brown at Freddy’s Bar & Backroom in Brooklyn. On the first Wednesday of each month, brave souls come forward and read aloud from their teenage diaries, journals, notes, letters, poems, abandoned rock operas, and other general representations of the crushing misery of their humiliating adolescence. It’s better and cheaper than therapy. More information can be found at
queserasera.org/cringe.html.
Quick post to point out
the new side-blog addition:
a daily haiku
This is a travesty. Less than ten posts in two months?
How hard is it to write this crap? I’ll tell you how hard: not very. Not very at all.
But, somehow, I still managed to fall completely out of the blogging habit. Now, the good old days, when this site was a regularly updated compendium of smarm and self-obsession in the City, are just distant memories.
For the past week or two, I was ready to admit defeat, to put this site out to pasture.
But then, I re-read some of the archives, and it reminded me, by God, I am a fucking genius.
So, I’m back. With a vengeance. To quote the post that kick-started me out of my last serious blogging breakdown, three years back:
“Yes, boys and girls, like a veritable phoenix rising from its digital ashes, the daily dose of vitriol returns.
“Sorry mom, but it’s cheaper than therapy.”
You see what I’m doing here? I’m making it seem like I’m jumping whole-hog back into self-aggrandizing by putting up a lot of little postings, which will clutter the front page and at least look vaguely like content until you read them and figure out, holy crap, he’s just writing long, long run-on sentences without an actual point which is like the cheapest blogging trick in the entire world.
Maybe this whole shaving thing will make my writing worse, because now what am I going to do instead of thoughtfully stroking my beard as I try and compose sentences and paragraphs?
1. I am alive.
2. The completely empty front page was not the first sign of impending apocalypse.
3. It was, however, a sign that I’ve completely fallen off the blogging wagon.
4. So, to remedy that, to kick myself back into routine writing, I shaved off my beard this morning.
5. I’m not sure how that’s going to help either, but I figure, at this point, it probably can’t make my blogging schedule any worse.
As threatened, I’m pulling together category pages, and generally dealing with the unwieldy mess the back end of this site has become over the years.
I’m also playing around with a new look, mainly because I no longer wanted to look at my own site’s prior design. Plus, ‘everything lower case’ is so 2004.