Though his letter writing shows a facility with language, his speeches were not always well received. He turned to the speechwriter Peggy Noonan for help with his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans in 1988. He gave her a staccato list of his traits and what he hoped to do:
I’m just me!
Know where I want to go — Have the experience to get there:
Jobs, peace, education
I know what drives me-comforts me: family, faith, friends.
She [co-creator and cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt] has also been obsessed with horses since she was a kid, and rides them whenever she can. When I ask what she loves about horses, she says, “Oh, if only I could answer that question. I don’t know! They’re so intrinsically good. It’s like asking why someone likes ice cream. It makes me feel good to look at them. I wish I didn’t like them because they’re, like, very dangerous and unpredictable. Like, I was riding a horse the other day, and she’s a really solid horse, like, she thinks about things before she reacts. And she saw a bucket, someone had left a bucket where there’s not supposed to be a bucket, and she found that to be terrifying. I had to get off her, because I was, like, I’m gonna fall if I keep trying to ride near this bucket.”
PS CLEARLY AVOIDING MY TWO FINALS FOR SCHOOL, DUE THIS THURSDAY AND SUNDAY, RESPECTIVELY
PS 2 HOW AMAZING IS IT GOING TO BE WHEN I FINISH SCHOOL (IN TWO YEARS)?! IT WILL BE LIKE HAVING CLIMBED THE LONGEST, COOLEST, BUT STILL QUITE GRUELING, SEMI- EXPENSIVE MOUNTAIN, AND LIKE IF I WERE CLIMBING SAID MOUNTAIN WHILE ALSO FAXING PEOPLE AND CARRYING CARDBOARD AND TRYING TO ORGANIZE PAPERS
first — aretha franklin is my queen, i used “chain of fools” in a video for school and listen, we’ve all heard that song one billion times but i heard it ANEW this project. i listened to it over and over again and it made me feel hella energetic and joyful every time it started. the guitar strums at the beginning, oh daddy. let’s test it.
“For five long years I thought you were my man But I found out I’m just a link in your chain”
AND WHAT KIND OF AMAZING VERSE IS THIS?!??!!??!
“You told me to leave you alone My father said, ‘Come on home’ My doctor said, ‘Take it easy’ Oh but your lovin’ is much too strong I’m added to your…Chain, chain, chain”
OH SNAP ARETHA GOING TO STICK AROUND WITH THAT CHEATER!!!!!!
second — something weird happening with my eating. didn’t eat today till 2pm. LISTEN I AM NOT A PERSON WHO DOESN’T THINK ABOUT FOOD, I AM A PERSON WHO THINKS ABOUT FOOD CONSTANTLY. but weirdly…no food sounds good, except cake. literally, just cake, pasta, oh and eggnog. related — have had a cold for 4+ weeks. clearly body has been wiped of all minerals/vitamins due to eating habits and honestly i see no way of replenishing.
third — is there a third? i made this book trailer about radiant child, which is an incredible children’s picture book biography of jean-michel basquiat, and a) every young person i know will be getting a copy of this book and there’s no b.
fourth — am i alone in my hatred of the iphone podcasts app?
fifth — continuing rein of terror on body by drinking a sugar-free red bull at 8:30pm.
we read the aeneid my senior year of high school, i don’t have 100% clear memories of it, besides thinking it a bit tedious, with devastating parts (like when aeneas leaves dido and she throws herself on a funeral pyre, OMG). anyway, this article, “Is the Aeneid a Celebration of Empire—or a Critique?”, is surprisingly great (a slow-starter with fire ending):
Months later, when I was back home teaching Greek and Roman classics again, it occurred to me that the difficulties we have with Aeneas and his epic cease to be difficulties once you think of him not as a hero but as a type we’re all too familiar with: a survivor, a person so fractured by the horrors of the past that he can hold himself together only by an unnatural effort of will, someone who has so little of his history left that the only thing that gets him through the present is a numbed sense of duty to a barely discernible future that can justify every kind of deprivation. It would be hard to think of a more modern figure.
The night the show premiered, [Priyanka] Chopra calmed her nerves the way she often does: She sat by the pool of her Los Angeles hotel in a bikini, with a Bellini in hand. “Bikini Bellinis make me calm,” she says. “It’s my happy place.”
just started doing shaun t’s hip hop abs again and it is sort of weirdly making my day. like i’m exercising and smiling? yoga on pause while i revisit my fitness routine from 2008.
honestly kind of mad at yoga right now
don’t worry, i will come back to yoga, but first: CIZE (bought on DVD from ebay for a cool $5.95) (single-handedly keeping the used fitness DVD market alive since 2010) (TM)
been a bit of a tough week, dreams are not easy and remain not easy (TM). but trying to figure out a plan — applying for scholarships, might apply for loans, but also might apply for a position at el cosmico?
gonna delete my instagram account because been finding it gives me more malaise than joy. i’ll miss the baby pix and stories and honestly a little bit scared to delete the account (how will anyone find me when they want to give me praise and awesome jobs?) but what’s the point, REALLY
again, saipua is speaking my exact language. i’m sorry this is long but it captures just about everything that i’m feeling:
Look, I’m a child of the 80’s — I grew up in a shopping mall — the Jefferson Valley Mall in Yorktown Heights, NY. I love to shop. Like really love it. I love clothes. I love jewelry, perfume, dishes, groceries, etc. And I’ve devised clever ways to rationalize my own consumption over the years — only buying handmade things or things that are natural fibers or things that are consumable, etc, etc.
But with all the damning news about climate change I really feel that all of us with means (which is to say people with enough privilege to consider their consumption and influence others through our businesses) must to make an effort to consider the ways which we consume and encourage and support each other in consuming less. A simple practice; one that I’ve adopted recently is to only buy used clothing and housewares and the occasional aspirational item…in the spirit of the honesty that you have come to expect here, I’ll tell you that I spent my last dollars two weeks ago on a pair of manolos for Bryony’s wedding. Wearing these pumps at Thanksgiving gave me a lot of pleasure. Granted I had to switch out of them periodically into snow boots throughout the evening in order to prepare our meal on the fire outside. Part of my ethos around farming is this; the hardest tasks are simple when you allow for some bit of ridiculous pleasure. Arguably, I could afford to renovate the farmhouse and put in a proper kitchen with an inside stove if I didn’t buy fancy pumps, but what fun would that be?
I can’t find a link to it, but years ago I read an article about brain function, and how vision and memory work together. When you look at something—particularly a face, but this can apply to anything, really—what registers in your brain is only partly informed by the visual details your eyes are taking in. Memory fills in most of the gaps. The percentage was astounding—what you think you’re seeing is actually something like 15% new info and 85% memories. Which means that a stranger looking at you sees something totally different than, say, your friend of 10 years, who sees a composite of the now-you and past-you. I think about this article every day. When I meet a new person, and when I look at someone I’ve loved for years.
was somehow on kelsey grammer’s wikipedia (hmm) (he’s a republican?!) where i discovered this amazing oral history of cheers:
Grammer’s partying was getting out of control; there were a couple of arrests—one of which ended with Grammer pleading no contest to cocaine possession—in 1988 and 1990. An unsuccessful on-set intervention was held by the show’s producers and cast.
Glen Charles: Kelsey was going through a divorce and child-custody issues. He had some problems.
Dan O’Shannon (writer/producer; executive producer on Modern Family): He would ooze into the studio, his life all out of sorts. Jimmy would say “Action,” and he would snap into Frasier and expound in this very erudite dialogue and be pitch-perfect. And Jimmy would yell “Cut!” and he would ooze back into Kelsey—glazed-over eyes, half asleep, going through whatever he was going through. It was the most amazing transformation I’d ever seen.
just watched this master class at NYU’s clive davis institute (old person recon), where pharrell williams first hears maggie rogers’s “alaska.” how awesome are his facial expressions:
