"Because tepid is everywhere."

This month, I've been so so so happy to have dinners and coffees and drinks with a lot of great old friends passing through town. And, somehow, inevitably, my (currently inexplicably active) dating life comes into question.
As I've fielded all the questions, it occurs to me that there are two articles I've read over the last 5 years that have specifically informed my point of view regarding dating/marriage/whatever.

Here is one of them - if you are curious. Read read read it all. It is hilarious and wise and there is a rambling Kanye West metaphor throughout that I don't quite follow ... but love nonetheless. I want to send it to all of my ever-single lady friends.

ASK POLLY: HOW DO I FIND TRUE LOVE AND STOP DATING HALF-ASSED MEN by Heather Havrilesky.

Also related: This song:

Personally in love

This may as well be the mission statement of my rickety little blog-that-I-call-a-journal-because-I'm-pretentious:

I want us to only publish stuff that really speaks to me. And I say to me because, in the end, you can only consult your own heart as a reader. And I don't believe in editing by committee or worrying too much about what our readers might like. I think it's more respectful to show readers something that you personally are in love with. So, even when I get panicky about what's going to go in the next issue, I try not to let that worry affect my reading. I won't include something unless I really believe in it. And my faith is that if it matters to me, and the rest of us here, it will matter to another reader.

(From this GQ interview of Lorin Stein, Editor of The Paris Review)

I don't know about the publishing sphere, but this kind of attitude is rare in advertising. Advertising is a lot of deep self-contiousness disguised as self-assuredness. But all anyone wants is to connect with something genuinely genuine. That's why we love the Maira Kalmans and Pete Seegers and Bob Dylans.

... Or at least that's why I love them.

Amazon 'Review'

I have been thinking about buying a book I found at the bookstore a few weeks ago - a study of primitive art by E. H. Gombrich - and thought I'd check to see if there were any helpful amazon reviews.

And so I found this gem:

WHAT??

Anyway, I don't think I'll buy the book.

Help, head. Help Heart.

Illuminated by Maira Kalman (excerpt from My Favorite Things)

Colorado Visit

“This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”

John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir