SuperMassiveBloghole

braiker: Jesus is with you always

Fri, 18 May 2012 11:02:09 -0700

braiker:

Jesus is with you always

Set it at 720P. Fullscreen it. If you don’t have the time...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 23:41:36 -0700

Set it at 720P. Fullscreen it. If you don’t have the time of your life watching this, I’ll kiss your ass.

April 2012. Greatest month ever. Job. Coachella. Caps. Nats....

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:21:07 -0700

April 2012. Greatest month ever. Job. Coachella. Caps. Nats. RGIII.

"I Don't Know What to Do With My Life"

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:58:00 -0700

No one ever tells you how to live life after college. Nobody tells you just how boring a well-paying job is and how depressing it is to wait for Friday COB 50 weeks out of the year. No one mentions how much time is actually wasted even in the most intense work environments and how the nagging sense that you’re wasting the prime years of your life never goes away. Nothing can prepare you for this reality.

The ones who are really lost are the creative ones. The free and lost souls. The ones who pity friends in med school or dent school or just grad school in general. The ones who have big dreams but are afraid to admit they have them. The ones who want to create and bullshit for a living but can’t find a practical way to do so. They are the ones who really feel lost - doubly so when 80% of their friends will have a comma and some combination of letter “D” in their initials soon.

These are the ones that email me. Little lost souls in their early twenties. Maybe I whine so much they see a kindred spirit. Maybe they just need some hybrid uncle-friend who pretends to listen. I tell them all the same thing:

Don’t be scared and don’t compromise. Not yet, anyway. From a bird’s eye view of time, a few weeks, months, even years of searching is a small price to pay for finding contentment. The only real mistake you can make right now is to be scared and settle. Contentment is life’s great puzzle. Jigsawed pieces made of money, and independence and security and creativity and love and whatever else matters to you. It’s all a delicate balance, you obsess over one and it’s at the expense of the others. Find what really fulfills you and chase it, even if it scares you. What is it that gives you a sense of accomplishment? What makes the time fly by? The only real mistake you can make right now is to ignore those things.

Maybe it’s writing a song. Maybe it’s snowboarding. Maybe it’s digging ditches. These don’t have to be hobbies. A true dream job isn’t vacation; that’s vacation. A great job is about improvement: making life better for yourself and whoever else cares. That’s it. Pursue those things without fear, chase contentment. Do work that drives you crazy when someone else is better at it than you. Do work that makes you proud. That’s how we improve.

Just don’t be scared. You are smart, honest, and kind. You’ll be fine. Go ahead and fail. Get used to it (P.S. you never get used to it, but you get real good at getting back up). It’s ok to suck now. You’ve gotta start somewhere. Just start. Shut up and start.

And please remember me when you’re happy and rich.

Photo

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:33:39 -0700

"Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work."

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:28:07 -0700

“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.”

- Chuck Close

"What kind of unpredictable results?"

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 11:14:44 -0700

““What kind of unpredictable results?””

- (via clientsfromhell)

Is there another word for this other than “OMG SO...

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:16:06 -0700

Is there another word for this other than “OMG SO CUTE!!!!!!!”?

Photo

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 21:12:51 -0700

Advertising and the Joy of Naivete

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:52:00 -0700

Gawker published a great point-counterpoint-counter counterpoint today on working in advertising. A few quick excerpts and my response:

Hamilton Nolan:
Do not go into advertising. Your creativity, as trite as it sounds, is worth more than that corporation will ever pay you. We all need jobs. There is nothing wrong with doing something that is not your dream job, out of necessity. But it doesn’t have to be advertising. If you are young, you have time to try a lot of things. Try to be a writer. Try to make it with your band. Try to be a working artist. If it doesn’t work out financially, at least you gave it a shot. And you never have to stop making art, regardless of your circumstances. Unless you agree to sell your creativity to that machine.

Drew Magary:
Yeah no, that’s wrong. Your creativity isn’t worth anything. In fact, you probably already have a terribly overinflated sense of just how awesome all of your ideas are. “Why do I have to be slave to corporate America, man? Why can’t people appreciate, like, the purity of my art?! MY PRECIOUS ART!” It never hurts to work inside a system that knocks you and your bullshit pretension down a peg. You can try to make it with your band or be a novelist in your free time. But during the day, you may as well learn about how to work creatively with other people, and how to accept rejection and outright failure, even if you still think that Verizon catalog copy you wrote was a masterpiece. God forbid you work to please someone other than yourself

Fine points all around, but it’s never so black and white. Advertising, as an industry, has always been viewed as this freak nasty beast shoving products down our throats and raping our poor, innocent eyes with pictures of hot women eating cheeseburgers, but there’s more to it than that. I’m 29, married, and I work as a management consultant. For the past two years, the majority of my projects have involved me writing literature reviews for the Department of Defense. I have clients paying for my ability to read and write and they can be just as asshole-ish as any corporate stooge who shows up at meetings just to say something sucks. I write for a living, but I’m still doing it for someone else. I’ve learned to stop complaining about that. It helps that I get to work from home and walk my dog every afternoon. I even get my “contributing to society” rocks off knowing my work is going towards helping active duty service members and vets stay safe and healthy. But it’s not enough.

I want to work in advertising to learn how to communicate and inspire. This is ridiculously naive and idealistic, I know, but I can think of few other industries where I can learn to write in a way that motivates people to do something. It’s not sexy or glamorous to think about ways to get a middle-aged housewife to buy more laundry detergent, but the principles of writing to inspire action are invaluable. So many of society’s great ideas are lost in the weeds because they don’t know how to communicate. Potential solutions to complex problems like climate change or poverty or disease prevention often fail, not because they’re flawed ideas, but because they lack great advertising. Learning how to write and sell ideas that spur action, that’s pretty damn exciting to me; regardless of whether I’m selling shoes or federal fiscal policy changes. Every “Lost Puppy” poster and “[Your Favorite Band] Live!” flyer is advertising. It’s not always soulless and evil.

And the notion that advertising creatives are failed or surrendered “real artists?” That definitely rings true for me, but I’ve made peace with it. Trying “to make it with my band” or finishing my epic novel about sharks riding broomsticks to kill vampires will still be a beloved pursuit, but a man’s got a beautiful wife to support and a sweetass dog to feed too. The great lie of my generation is that we can all be special people whose bands will make it and paintings will sell and books will be read. That’s bullshit. Between the contented common folk and the artists we idolize sits advertising. It’s a fair mezzanine floor between the starving artist life we really don’t want and the A-list one we envy. That’s the way I see it, but then again, I’m still on the outside looking in.

For the past two years, I’ve been stalking the ad industry and hounding copywriters/creative directors for informational interviews. I can say without hesitation that advertising creatives are some of the best, most generous people I’ve ever met. Smart, often hilarious, people like Drew and Hamilton, seem to pop up at every creative agency in the U.S. and I’d like to join their ranks. See, I’ve got plenty of fucking heart.

world-shaker: How to Write a Manifesto

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 09:59:12 -0700

world-shaker:

How to Write a Manifesto

Photo

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:08:32 -0700

The King's Hands

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:56:33 -0700

One day B.B. King is going to die. I say this because everyone dies, eventually, and B.B. King is 86 years old. One day B.B. King is going to die and pages and pages of words will be written about him. College boys who insist they only love “real music” will write “RIP BB” on their Facebook walls and tell the girls in the quad how If You Love Me is the best love song they’ve never heard. Gangly white hipster baristas in LA will tweet about how much they loved Lucille and how BB was at his prime in 1970 before they added strings to The Thrill is Gone LP. Proper journalists will chronicle his illustrious career, his brutal touring schedule (200+ nights a year, even into his 70’s), and his rags-to-riches story as the son of a Mississippi Delta sharecropper. Rock critics will note his undeniable influence on early guitar gods (Clapton, Hendrix, Richards) and the staggering amount of soul in his left index finger. All of these tributes will sound like predictably reactionary “legendary old guy dies let’s all pretend he was the most important thing ever” media nonsense, but for me, all of it will be 100% true. No single musician has meant more to me than B.B. King.

When I was 15, I wanted to play guitar so I could serve God. I’m not joking. I knew who Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix were, but I also knew they were druggies who were probably headed for hell or in Jimi’s case, already there. I wanted to play guitar and sing songs about how much I loved Jesus; Jimi and Eric never did that. It wasn’t an electric guitar I wanted to play anyway. In church, we only used big fat acoustic Yamahas or Takamines and “soloing” was unnecessary for praise music. Just learn D, A, G, chords and maybe a Bm and you’d be set. Learn the E scale and bar chords and you’re a bona fide christian rock star. I was a quick study, learning chords from a book and picking up strumming patterns from my older cousins. I was dedicated enough to finally warrant a visit to the music store with my dad a few months later and he ponied up $299 for a brand new Washburn D12. It was nothing but church songs and major scales for me.

A few weeks later, I don’t remember how it happened or where, but someone saw me playing guitar and told me to listen to a song called The Thrill is Gone. I found it on Napster and it was the first secular (gasp!) song I ever illegally downloaded. As soon as I hit the Play button on WinAmp my memory goes blank. I only remember bliss. What the fuck was this? How can something sound so sad and sweet and pure and happy? That was it - whatever it was, that’s what I wanted in my ears all the time from then on.

I downloaded everything. Internet was so slow back then and downloading entire albums was out of the question, so I double-clicked the most innocuous sounding song titles: Sweet Little Angel, Let the Good Times Roll, Why I Sing the Blues, Lucille, Paying the Cost to be the Boss, Blues Man. I listened and I listened and I had no idea how he was doing it. How can two notes sound like three and a half? How can one note sound so sad? Sometimes I swear I would KILL to have YouTube back in my room at 15 years old trying to figure out the notes BB was playing, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. The magic wasn’t in the notes, it was in the hands.

B.B. King was born Riley B. King. He was born on a plantation in 1925. A fucking plantation. He was given his first guitar around age 12 and he hasn’t put it down since. He moved away to Memphis in the 1940s, playing churches and street corners. Riley B. King eventually became known as the Beale Street Blues Boy and then just Blues Boy, that’s where the B.B. comes from. Somewhere between being raised on a fucking plantation and playing on the corner of Beale Street, whatever was inside BB came out through his guitar, Lucille. Lucille is big, black, and beautiful. Make of that what you will. She plugs straight into the amp - no pedals, no compressors, no overdrive, no nothin. Whatever you hear coming out of that loudspeaker is Lucille singing straight into the mic. No lip syncing, no auto tune. Shit, not even delay. Like BB says in his song Lucille, “I like the way Sammy sings and I like the way Frank sings, but I can get a little Frank, Sammy, a little Ray Charles, in fact all the people with soul in this. A little Mahalia Jackson in there.” Look out.

50 years later, the Beale Street Blues Boy is blaring from the stereo of an Electron Blue Pearl Honda Civic Si piloted by a 16 year old Korean boy living in rural Maryland. Sport Compact Car and B.B. King Live at the Regal defined my life from 1998-2000. The Washburn D12 was now collecting dust in the corner of the bedroom and a cheap Epiphone Les Paul was connected to a mini Crate practice amp beneath my desk. I bought a Les Paul because it looked close to what BB played, I bought a white one because I didn’t want to copy him too much. This is what passes for creativity in the mind of a 16 year old. Every day I sat and copied. A phrase here, a note there. Most nights I’d quickly become frustrated and give up, and instead of working it out, I’d make some pathetic scale runs in an attempt improvise my own way through a song. It was an awful, undisciplined, way to practice and retarded my musical development by about ten years. I wish I had known that it was all in the hands - there was really nothing to figure out because the actual notes were secondary.

B.B King taught me the beauty of soul. He taught me the power and sophistication of simplicity; how fucking hard it is to make it sound good. B.B. King is the first musician to make me feel something more than hearing it. He unlocked my awareness of feelings like melancholy and joy that I didn’t know were inside me. It all sounds trite now, but at sixteen, who else could teach me things like that? And to this day, in a world full of tools and gimmicks and gadgets, I’m reminded of the truth of B.B. King: you don’t need anything but a good pair of hands and a little soul to be whoever you want to be.

What I needed to know at sixteen, living as the yellow alien among white folk, was that emotions are universal. Soul translates in any language at any time in any place. Soul is colorblind and ageless. Even I, Kyoung Whan Choe, born in Seoul, South Korea, living in Frederick, MD could have both Seoul and Soul (sorry, couldn’t resist). If I wanted to love the blues, I could love the blues - I didn’t have to look like B.B. King to love B.B. King. Again, it sounds obvious now, but this is earth-shattering to a sixteen year old who sees the world in terms of Age, Sex, and Location (A/S/L, remember that?). My previous love of church music was fueled in part because it united us under the banner of Christianity, regardless of race or gender or age. BB taught me that soulful music is the same way. Soul is truth and truth is universal. In hindsight, that’s the truth that really set me free.

All of this truth flowing from the hands of a Beale Street Blues Boy who would become a King. The truth is in the King’s hands. Long live the King.

(photo: Mike McGregor for Esquire)

madden’s other family

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 20:09:21 -0700

madden’s other family

Scotty Mcreery and the Savages

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 10:24:00 -0800

During the Season 10 auditions for American Idol, I fell in love. It was a special kind of love. Not the kind of love worth singing or crying about. It wasn’t homo or hetero - it wasn’t sexual at all. It was a different breed of love. Not like “I Will Always Love You” love or even “The Greatest Love of All” love (that would be inside of me). It was more akin to the love one feels for a child or a puppy. A proud, nurturing love. A caretaker’s love. A father’s love. I loved a boy, an Angelboy as a matter of fact. His name was Jacee Badeaux. He was 15, from Lafayette, Louisiana.

For his audition, Angelboy sang Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.” His voice, so pure and pristine, rang like heaven’s handbells on christmas morning. His fat little cheeks pinched his eyes puffy and his tousled hair was what happens when Mom tries the Bieber Cut at home. He breathed much too heavy for a 15 year old, but then again, all that soul don’t come easy. Angelboy.

Oh Angelboy. He was a shoo in for Hollywood Week, but it was only a matter of time before the darkness would corrupt him there.

A few episodes after Angelboy, another young singer was showcased. Scotty, a gangly country bumpkin, 16 years old, from Garner, North Carolina. He described himself as an All-American Kid, singing since before the age of one, retelling his doctor’s tale about coming out of the womb humming “Bye, Baby Bunting.” It was apocryphal. He played baseball and had smirk lines tattooed on his face.

His voice was deep, in tone only. He sang Josh Turner’s “Your Man.” Admittedly, it was the right choice of song. It showcased his style: overtly hick with a tinge of rapist, and he got to do his George Strait head bobs at the end of every phrase. Scotty made it through to Hollywood and oh yes, he went on to win Season 10 of American Idol.

As far as reality TV competitions go, Idol’s Hollywood Week is right up there with eating a donkey shit covered cockroach while amazing racing through Sri Lanka with a Kardashian sister and 8 kids. It breaks people. And the absolute nadir of human existence is broadcast on network TV as the hotel lobby at 4 AM during the Group Stage of Hollywood Week. Nineteen year old demi-divas with their weaves a mess and voices hoarse, singing motown, acapella, while the white girl struggles with leaning right on the “1 and 3 and 1 and 3 and” choreography.

It is in this world where our two contestants meet. Angelboy, the beloved, so pure and so rare, joins a group called the Guaps. As they begin to assemble, we hear the faint echoes of carnage in the background. It soon becomes an incessant 3 second stream of noise: “baby lock them doors and turn the lights down low… baby lock them doors and turn the lights down low… baby lock them doors and turn the lights down low…” It’s Scotty. He’s singing the opening line of the Josh Turner song, on repeat. Robotically. Like some kind of twisted singing cowboy machine used to tell redneck fortunes in Alabama. Scotty couldn’t find a group and was now whoring himself to anyone who’d listen. He finds his way to the Guaps, gazes off into nothing and shows em what he can do, “baby lock them doors and turn the lights down low…” It is Angelboy, the merciful, inviting him to join their ranks. Angelboy the Merciful.

There they stood, side by side, until Sabatoge! The Guaps have mysteriously decided to reduce their quintet by one. Such a sudden change. Why? What demonry of black magic and destruction, Mcreery? Scotty Saboteur! Saboteur! I hiss at the screen. Young Angelboy is asked to leave the group. Abandoned by the ones he came to save. The cold shoulder from some unimportant dipshit named Clint with obnoxious white glasses. Angelboy’s beauty replaced by a rival who looks like the slow-witted younger brother of the MAD magazine coverboy. It is hard to watch. Hard to fathom. Angelboy is fighting back tears, but pain comes so flush in the face of one so pure.

“It’s ok. Y’all have fun, ok? It’s ok. It’s ok,” Angelboy says to the ones who spurn him. He means it. His kindness knows not irony. He walks idly through the lobby. Lost and bewildered. And then he begins to weep.

What happens after this no longer matters to me. What’s lost is lost forever.

Angelboy, 15, from Lafayette, Louisiana has learned of betrayal. Pain. Pain of the heart. Is this who we are now? A group of savages ripping apart the innocent boy? All for what? For Hollywood Week? For sport? For making it through to the Top 13 and holding the microphone like some god damned one-handed piccolo while you awkwardly bobblehead your way through ruining another country classic? How fitting you’ve become the American Idol, Scotty Mcreery. Savage. This is who we are now - savages. And for that, I will never forgive you.

-Epilogue-

I still think of him often, Angelboy. Our Angelboy, 15, from Lafayette, Louisiana. I’m reminded of him when I see betrayal. I’m reminded when I see kindness. I’m reminded whenever I see a fat white kid with maple colored hair. And every time I witness pain of the heart, I think of him, how purity is lost, not at the hands of time, but by the cruelty of others. All it takes is a little singing competition.

Me Too OftenToo often I wait for permission, needlessly.Too...

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 23:01:00 -0800

Me Too Often
Too often I wait for permission, needlessly.
Too often I ignore the freedom around me; only to obsess over restrictions.
Too often I observe meticulously, but from the outside.
Too often I climb inside and regret it immediately.
Too often I put my hands behind my back, voluntarily.
Too often I exercise restraint.
Too often I stand so close to the door that only I can open it.
Too often I stay tight lipped.
Too often I choose to stay put.
I love hoodies.

and I creep!

Bertrand Russell approves.

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 13:44:45 -0800

Bertrand Russell approves.

thedailywhat: On Kony 2012: I honestly wanted to stay as far...

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:12:57 -0800

thedailywhat:

On Kony 2012: I honestly wanted to stay as far away as possible from KONY 2012, the latest fauxtivist fad sweeping the web (remember “change your Facebook profile pic to stop child abuse”?), but you clearly won’t stop sending me that damn video until I say something about it, so here goes:

Stop sending me that video.

The organization behind Kony 2012 — Invisible Children Inc. — is an extremely shady nonprofit that has been called ”misleading,” “naive,” and “dangerous” by a Yale political science professor, and has been accused by Foreign Affairs of “manipulat[ing] facts for strategic purposes.” They have also been criticized by the Better Business Bureau for refusing to provide information necessary to determine if IC meets the Bureau’s standards.

Additionally, IC has a low two-star rating in accountability from Charity Navigator because they won’t let their financials be independently audited. That’s not a good thing. In fact, it’s a very bad thing, and should make you immediately pause and reflect on where the money you’re sending them is going.

By IC’s own admission, only 31% of all the funds they receive go toward actually helping anyone [pdf]. The rest go to line the pockets of the three people in charge of the organization, to pay for their travel expenses (over $1 million in the last year alone) and to fund their filmmaking business (also over a million) — which is quite an effective way to make more money, as clearly illustrated by the fact that so many can’t seem to stop forwarding their well-engineered emotional blackmail to everyone they’ve ever known.

And as far as what they do with that money:

The group is in favour of direct military intervention, and their money supports the Ugandan government’s army and various other military forces. Here’s a photo of the founders of Invisible Children posing with weapons and personnel of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Both the Ugandan army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army are riddled with accusations of rape and looting, but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries”, although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006 by their own admission. These books each refer to the rape and sexual assault that are perennial issues with the UPDF, the military group Invisible Children is defending.

Let’s not get our lines crossed: The Lord’s Resistance Army is bad news. And Joseph Kony is a very bad man, and needs to be stopped. But propping up Uganda’s decades-old dictatorship and its military arm, which has been accused by the UN of committing unspeakable atrocities and itself facilitated the recruitment of child soldiers, is not the way to go about it.

The United States is already plenty involved in helping rout Kony and his band of psycho sycophants. Kony is on the run, having been pushed out of Uganda, and it’s likely he will soon be caught, if he isn’t already dead. But killing Kony won’t fix anything, just as killing Osama bin Laden didn’t end terrorism. The LRA might collapse, but, as Foreign Affairs points out, it is “a relatively small player in all of this — as much a symptom as a cause of the endemic violence.”

Myopically placing the blame for all of central Africa’s woes on Kony — even as a starting point — will only imperil many more people than are already in danger.

Sending money to a nonprofit that wants to muck things up by dousing the flames with fuel is not helping. Want to help? Really want to help? Send your money to nonprofits that are putting more than 31% toward rebuilding the region’s medical and educational infrastructure, so that former child soldiers have something worth coming home to.

Here are just a few of those charities. They all have a sparkling four-star rating from Charity Navigator, and, more importantly, no interest in airdropping American troops armed to the teeth into the middle of a multi-nation tribal war to help one madman catch another.

The bottom line is, research your causes thoroughly. Don’t just forward a random video to a stranger because a mass murderer makes a five-year-old “sad.” Learn a little bit about the complexities of the region’s ongoing strife before advocating for direct military intervention.

There is no black and white in the world. And going about solving important problems like there is just serves to make all those equally troubling shades of gray invisible.

Oh and don’t forget about Ambassadors for Sustained Health!

29

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 23:51:56 -0800

will be the year my life changed. just watch.

Feeling Write

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 03:03:39 -0800

It dawned on me the other night that I actually don’t know how to write. I only feel. This is a strange realization for someone who thinks himself a writer and hopes to earn a living writing someday. But the reality is, I don’t really write; I feel.

A few weeks ago, I watched “Page One: Inside the New York Times” and walked away thoroughly impressed and grateful for all the true journalists in the world. Journalists full of integrity and talent and complete badass grit. Journalists who wrestle with deadlines and grind at a merciless pace that would certainly kill any mortal man. Above all, it was their unrelenting need to get the truth that struck me most. They want to get it right. They have to. They put their feelings and prejudice aside [as best they can] and they dig and dig until they get it right. They write on command about anything, really, and they’re able to translate mountains of data from head to print with such ease and balance. That is real writing. That’s not what I do.

I watch or read or experience and something inside needs to come out. I just feel it. Usually I don’t know what it is and so I force myself in front of a white screen and a blinking cursor and just let shit out. I have no recorded interviews or notebooks filled with research, I only have my feelings. And even if I did have all that other stuff, it would still take me weeks to put it together in a cogent way unless I had some strong feelings about it. This lack of skill and logos makes me feel incredibly inadequate at times, but feelings are all I’ve got. It’s who I am. So, maybe I’ve been wrong to consider myself a writer all this time. I only feel. I consume and consume and consume and then write down what I feel. What do you call someone like that?

Well, “amateur” comes to mind. Or how about “raw” or “unpolished”? That would be a fair assessment of my character. It’s pretty spot on, as a matter of fact. It explains a lot; my taste in music, for one. I like things that sound honest, whether it’s a warbling poet or a drunken, hot mess diva, certain songs and singers and tunes just sound more honest than others. I’m all about shit that comes from the gut (where else would shit come from?). I value honesty in art and everything else. I think I’m ok with that. I’d never want to write something I didn’t believe or just to appear contrarian. The people I love most are also this way. They may be utterly sweet or harmless pricks, but they are who they are. Honest to themselves and loyal to others. Keepin it real.

I’ll keep writing; probably forever. Because that’s how I stay honest. Whatever it is I can’t say for fear of hurt feelings or appall or ridicule, I can write. This is probably why I write so much about religion and parenthood and career and angst and other things that tend to get bottled up. It’s my way of staying honest - setting the record straight. However far that takes me, it’ll be enough to keep me satisfied - knowing that I did the best with what I had and held onto some integrity of self along the way. It may not get me onto Page One of the NY Times, but it’s all I’ve got. And I think I feel pretty good about that.*

*is it me or is all of this starting to get a little too “Sex and the City?”