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.”
