if you love maya angelou, do not read further

My friend Monica dislikes Maya Angelou and has this contest where she says she will give a prize to the person who writes the best Maya Angelou lookalike poem. This is David's entry:

Maya Angelou Sets Down Her Harp to Strangle a Passing Gazelle

“Philosophers should be the kings I perchance to think,”
Aristotle said when he was not yet dead yet
hardly bated the fate of States or startled the status quo, mate

Poets samewise should be the cover models
Their wisened visages gracing the covers of even Vogue and Vanity Fair
sans the vanity
The sans of time through hourglass-less bodies
Ill-filled Bikinis beckoning not lustful stares but varicose stairclimbs of knowledge
and unequivocable equality
Wrinkles welcome (but for a wrinkle in time!)

O Woman I shall regard and desire you
You with your supple words
Your buxom line breaks
That sweet untapped assonance
Your punctuated pique-through titling, breasts heaving
truth.

- David Drury

i'd like to know where jeff tweedy lives that he can spend just $3.63 on diet coca-cola and unlit cigarettes

I want to write about my therapy session this morning but as therapy is wont to do it made me think about why I proffer so much of myself when I'm so fragile. I think it's because I didn't used to be this fragile until said therapy, and now I'm becoming more aware of my sarcastic shell that kept me safe or at least made things not hurt as much (because then I could put the bad feelings back on the people who hurt mine or, even better!, beat them to the punch). Doing that protected me when I was younger but now I want to be more aware of why I do what I do and what's underneath it and as a result I'm super vulnerable. I've never been this way before. I was talking to my therapist today about what triggers these responses in me and I'm realizing that I have some serious problems with men who are abrasive, peremptory, dismissive of people's feelings (especially when they rationalize away emotions because emotions are not logical), and most especially when a man does these things in the name of God. I have an extremely strong emotional response to it. It hurts me somewhere in my heart like a physical pain and I collapse. I break just like a little girl, I guess. I'm doing a lot of work to figure out where this stems from, and part of the process is heightened sensitivity. When people tell me not to be sad that makes me sadder, because I'm doing a lot of work to get my sadness back. It was shut off for so long and I was more numb. Now I can be happier because I can be sadder. Weird how that works.

Maybe that's all I better write about therapy today.

I really love this Steve Martin MJ tribute.

i don't enjoy the hipster plaid scarf phenomenon

Get away from me, gross scarves. You are like Crocs mixed with goatees mixed with velour sweats that say Juicy on the butt!

for some reason every 4th of july i think of what ms. stroud said in dazed and confused

"Okay guys, one more thing, this summer when you're being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha, don't forget what you're celebrating, and that's the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic white males didn't want to pay their taxes."

a confederacy of dunces

I'm reading A Confederacy of Dunces for the second time and it's even better than the first time. Almost every day I snort-laugh while reading it on the bus and can't stop shaking the seat and the big besuited businessperson I'm squeezed into the seat with looks at me sideways. A few times I've been reading an amazing part and I realize my mouth has been hanging open for awhile. The story behind the book is crazy too, the guy who wrote it committed suicide in 1969 when he was 32 and his mother found the manuscript afterwards. She started calling Walker Percy and telling him about this book her dead son had written which he did not want to read obviously and the way he tells the story in the foreward is delightsome. Then he read it and couldn't put it down and published it and it won the Pulitzer Prize. Every character reminds you of someone you know. The main character (Ignatius J. Reilly) reminds me of about a dozen people I've known and it's kind of eerie. Has anyone else read it? What did you think?

video thursday

Beatbox world champion, and she kind of rules.




Hot Rats cover The Cure's "The Lovecats" at Glastonbury last week: (audio only)




This guy is really excited about offering.

101 things: the facebook version

Since I've been asked to tone it down on a friend's Facebook page, I thought we could think of other things that have happened to us on Facebook and make a 101 things. Simone, David, and Ryan collaborated with me to make this list. Bold the ones that apply to you.

Have you ever:

Been pleasantly surprised by someone's delightful status updates when you didn't know they had it in them

Had a Facebook-centric nightmare

Had someone tell you he was un-friending you on Facebook because his wife wanted him to

Farted in fb's general direction

Flipped off someone's status update

Entertained the idea of just deleting your Facebook account

Rekindled a friendship with a high school person you'd written off because you thought they were judgemental and found out on Facebook that wasn't the case

Accepted everyone who requests you as a friend

Had someone tell you they abhor your "flagrant touting of an evil man" (Obama) on Facebook?

Unfriended someone you already had a strained relationship with because their annoying profile picture was the last straw?

Unfriended someone because their status messages were too boring?

Made a passive-aggressive status message with the intent of catching the attention of one particular person, but not admitting it

Had people talk to you in person about your status updates (because they are awesome)

Unfriended someone because they posted thing supporting "Yes on 8"

Unfriended a-sort-of-friend you'd already accepted as a friend because they became a "fan" of Old Navy

Added people that you later forgot why you added them ("Who is that again?")

Witnessed nasty replies to you that were taken back down within 5 minutes

Tried to add people who shockingly never confirm you, which is baffling and raises distress levels over what you might have done to them

Been told by your spouse that your replies to everyone elses posts are abundant and hilarious (your A material) but that your replies to their posts are non-existent

Been witness to picture posts which greatly undermine your admiration for your friends

Been witness to picture posts which greatly bolster your admiration for your friends

Felt exactly like you were in junior high again because of something that went wrong on Facebook