blue girl

A Working Lunch with the Odd Couple

I was at Borders today for lunch. For awhile I would escape to Borders around noon and curl up in one of their leather chairs towards the back of the store and read a little Vonnegut. I got hooked on one of the books and went back everyday to get 20 or 30 more pages in. One day I went in and the book was gone. Someone bought it? I don't think so. I think the staff at Borders was onto me.

Today I grabbed a seat in the cafe next to two men at work.

They were very serious about the business they were doing. But they were like the Odd Couple. They were both in their early 20s. One looked like he'd made a quick stop between Grateful Dead concerts. Scruffly beard, worn out jeans, grey wool hat pulled down tight over his head, wrinkled white t-shirt hanging out of the bottom of a washed-out blue sweatshirt. He looked like he could use a bath. The other guy looked like he'd just stepped out of 1962. Very John Kennedy Hyannis Port. Good looking, square jaw, squared shoulders, short black hair with just enough gel in it to keep it just so. Baby blue cotton button down shirt, both sleeves rolled up mid-forearm, khakis, black loafers.

Couldn't figure out what their business was though.

They both had their Macs open and they were doodling ideas on sketch paper for each other, discussing angles.

Architecture?

Engineering?

I heard them talking about "moving the trees and bushes."

Landscape design!

Then they were talking about "moving the smaller building."

Architecture!

They shook hands to leave but started talking and doodling again. Too excited and determined to leave. 1962 was explaining something to the Grateful Dead. They both chuckled and 1962 kept right on explaining, pointing to his laptop.

And then I had to close up mine. It was time for me to get back to work.

Marketing!

Advertising!

And it was finally time for the Odd Couple to leave, too. They stood and said their so-longs, but not before promising to meet each other again tomorrow. Same place. Same time.

I think they're going to be successful at whatever it is they're working on and toward. I'm onto them.

Love, Reign o'er Us All

I drove from Columbus to Cleveland this morning in the pouring rain, the rain drenching the air, my view, everything around me as the navy blue-black night before me turned slowly to morning.

I looked up and caught a glimpse of her ambling across the bridge, holding an umbrella snugly above her head, a stark, black silhouette against the brilliant golden star fire on the horizon, streaked with red.

I turned up the radio and let up on the gas.

I wanted to slow down time. I wanted to watch her make her way.

But I needed to get where I was going and so did she.

And so we did.

For Melissa & Maud, those two goddamn broads

Reduced and Owned

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.

From Zadie Smith's critique of The Social Network.

h/t Andrew Sullivan