I’m going to resist the urge to write a prolonged introduction for this series, especially since I abandon projects so often that my introductions tend to eclipse the compiled content of the efforts they precede. All you need to know is that since I moved to Berkeley I have been blogging less and less. I blame this trend on many different factors in my life but the most important for my segue is that I simply haven’t been feeling excited about things. I’ve been nervous about very mundane real life things without enjoying the type of unhappiness that breeds artistic breakthroughs and necessitates innovation. Thanks a lot for believing in, reassuring, and supporting me Mom and Dad, you’re making this a real bitch you know.

I thought I wasn’t being excited by things in the same way I used to be and I was right. I am being excited by things in a different way. A smaller way. A link friendlier way. I only just realized it tonight during Lit Quake’s “Lit Crawl.” While I have not been unhappy, I have been having plenty of mostly fruitless days that rank somewhere in the range between bleary and vacant on my new scale of bright to Oedipal eyes. What keeps me from gouging out my eyes besides my glasses? What stops me from having “making a lasagna for one” eyes on the BART ride home? All sorts of tiny things that are generally so fleeting that I don’t remember to mention them to anyone. I’d like to try to assemble these little things that save my day here. As long as I have your attention, I wouldn’t mind seeing “STD” become the new “FTW.”

Obviously that’s a pretty drawn out introduction but it’s just as obvious that I’m leaving it. A published blog post is kind of like a time travel movie where the protagonist succeeds because they know they’ve already succeeded. I guess what I’m trying to say is that like time travel movies, blogs are stupid.

Actually, what I’m trying to say is that Lit Quake could have been awful but a number of things SAVED. THE. DAY. I love things like Lit Crawl but unfortunately I hate going to them. First, I generally end up going alone which means that I have to sit or stand awkwardly while everyone else socializes. When I’m not trying to unhear pretentious or inane chatter I am trying to suppress the urge to jump into someone’s interesting conversation, thus revealing that I am a creepy eavesdropper. I saw a number of great readers over the course of the evening but I’d like credit Matt Baume and especially Ramona Emerson with saving the day. This was the event that most interested me and the fact that I enjoyed it so much propelled me through the rest of the evening.

While Twitter allowed me to look occupied for a large portion of the half hour leading up to the reading, it wasn’t perfect and I ended up people watching. My wandering eye landed upon a girl with a ribbon in her hair, or did it. I spent most of my non Twittering time trying to figure out if that streak was a ribbon or a dyed plaited braid. This may sound weird but the fact that I couldn’t tell brought my eyes to “slightly wider” on my new system; which, I should say, is still in closed beta while we work on balancing it. It was just another sign that there’s still mystery in the world and brought home the idea that although there was a room full of people, ostensibly doing the same thing, for the same reason, none of us was having the same experience. How cool is that? I spent the remainder of my non Twittering time thinking about how to say, “I like your hair” without actually saying “I like your hair.” Because, while I think I’m a relatively fashion conscious person, I am certainly not a particularly hair conscious person. Sure, I’ve told my friend Lauren that she has great hair but that’s not weird, you’d have to be blind not to see that. I saw Charlie’s Angels once and there was that skinny guy who kept cutting off Drew Barrymore’s hair and I just couldn’t understand it. So I think by now we’ve established that I’m not keeping ziplocked bags full of hair in my room or anything and we can move on.

Ramona was already guaranteed a spot on this series before I even knew that she was going to read or that she was hilarious. Her selections from her blog were easily both the most innately funny and humorously delivered pieces I heard all night. Almost every speaker at the first event I attended devoted their time to talking about getting negative comments on their blog and how this was ultimately not a bad thing. Honestly, I was expecting a little something more than that from an event called “collisions on the information super highway.” Even if you have a blog where the main readership consists of your mother, chances are you’ve already been called anything from “a fukking idiot” to “a hemeroide on the eart’s asshole.” (Baume made the good point that it’s not the commenter’s responsibility to be coherent. I would like to add that they aren’t responsible for spelling either.) While I don’t think I have any comments on this blog, I certainly do on other pieces I’ve written. I think the most recent one I got said that I was writing like I wanted Robert Bowling’s balls on my tongue. The point is, every blogger still blogging has had negative comments and understood that they weren’t bad. They are what make me envious of the fact that people like Ramona are good at punctuating and they are what make me travel the four hundred miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco with my sixth grade grammar book taking up part of my limited luggage space.

I was appreciative of the fact that Ramona didn’t spend a lot of her time on that and instead talked about Facebook and introduced us to the idea of under cover bad ass, but where she really saved the day was on my way home. I hadn’t eaten dinner before Lit Quake and I didn’t want to buy anything so I was that special type of grumpy that comes when a person of privilege is hungry when I watched my train leave without me. I had sunk to the floor, back to the staircase, when a guy in fur anklets and sandals walked by me. If you haven’t taken a look at a SF edition tarot pack, the “Bear’s Ankle” card is a bad omen that indicates hipsters in your future. Sure enough I was soon overhearing an attempt to break the record for use of “bourgeoisie” in a conversation and there was a girl complaining that she didn’t find San Francisco’s public transportation to be “transcendent” the way Europe’s is. I pulled out my phone, brought up Not So Serious, and it all went away. I laughed, I smiled, I “hmmm”ed. Thanks for saving my day Not So Serious.

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I'm going to resist the urge to write a prolonged introduction for this series, especially since I abandon projects so often that my introductions tend to eclipse the compiled content of the efforts they precede. All you need to know is that since I moved to Berkeley I have been blogging less and ...