Doings

So I hope you’ve been enjoying the Bilge show as much as we’ve been enjoying it, which is an obscene amount. I don’t think I’ve had this much fun working on a project since…ever. Working with Bill is incredible – he is an unstoppable comedy machine! – and the half hour I spent last week making a pennant that says “BOOBIES” was satisfying beyond belief. I can’t wait for the next political protest we attend – while everyone around us carries “SAVE DARFUR” signs, we can bear our “BOOBIES” pennant. Because really, what the world needs is more boobies.

It’s especially gratifying to work in the medium of web video because (segue alert) it feels like a culmination of the work I was doing in the late ‘90s at Pseudo.com, the famous dotcom flameout that’s now the subject of the Sundance-winning documentary We Live in Public. Pseudo’s founder, Josh Harris, was well ahead of his time in envisioning the kind of user-created content that’s come to define and dominate online society today, and the press attention that the film is getting makes me nostalgic for the years we spent in our mouse-riddled offices on Broadway and Houston, whipping up live video shows with interactive chat, while the five percent of Americans who were even online had 26.6K baud modems. By the time Pseudo collapsed under its own weight, the company had hundreds of employees, and had burned through millions of dollars. And now, a decade later, we can produce the same kind of low-quality homegrown entertainment from our living room, for the price of a piece of oak tag, a wooden dowel, and a Sharpie.

But this is all just an excuse to brag that I’ll be performing at a private screening of We Live in Public at the Museum of Modern Art on Sunday night, mere hours after I’m scheduled to read some poetry at the Polestar Poetry Series at Cakeshop (152 Ludlow St. between Stanton and Rivington, 4pm, free). And of course we’ll be putting up a new episode of Bilge this and every Friday morning, until we get tired of having more fun than married people should be allowed to have.

I KNOW, RIGHT?

Not-so-fresh Bilge

What comedy looks like when you've spent the day waiting through a friend's surgery. This week's less-than-hilarious show features commentary on Lost, Big Love, and I Love You, Man. And Bill goes all freaky and Silence of the Lambs on us! NOTE: NOT SAFE FOR ANYTHING AT ALL, ESPECIALLY WORK. PROTECT CHILDREN FROM EXPOSURE TO BILGE. Hope you'll enjoy it. We promise to suck less next week.

Fresh Bilge!

Featuring the trenchant cultural commentary upon which you've come to rely. This week we're talking about Kelly Clarkson, Mad Men, and who smells like asparagus pee. Not at all safe for work, or for anything else in life. Enjoy!

The worst blogger in the entire world

Want to hear my lame excuses for why I never update anymore?

1. "Writing about my personal life caused my window to fall open and smash on the floor during a blizzard."

Okay, none of us really believe this one, do we? I mean, it's a nice metaphor, but it's bullshit. The window blew open because it was unlocked. Writing about my personal life had nothing to do with it. If writing about my personal life caused household disasters, our entire building would be submerged in the Marianas Trench. And it would be on fire. And covered in bees. Cancer-causing bees. 

2. "I'm so busy! Uh, writing."

Well, this is kind of true. Lately, I’ve been working on a proposal for a technical book, a side project unrelated to my first two books, which I’d be writing under a pseudonym (Janice Scurry, maybe? Or…Janice Timberlake?); meanwhile, I continue to work on the incredibly painful and personal stuff I insist on writing and publishing under my own stupid name, because I never learn. I've also been volunteering again, serving on the Board of Directors for Girls Write Now, and lending a hand at GEMS (also helping to throw the GEMS tenth birthday party/reading on Friday, May 8 at 7pm at the Bowery Poetry Club – like how I worked that in there?). But I know plenty of people who are way busier than I am – with, like, day jobs and stuff – who manage to blog much more frequently than I do. These people are empirically better than me. 

3. I don’t have anything to write about.

Really? Nothing to write about? How about, you know, everything? How about the gift of life, in all of its miraculous complexity? How about social evils, and how they are bad? You know, I used to blog about feminist issues…until I got tired of having the same arguments again and again, and just decided to give up and agree that I am a feminist because I am an ugly frigid prude. (Side note: I read some reports from the SXSW conference, and it turns out that everyone on the feminist blogger panel has received death threats. Nice!) But I have not blogged about anything socially relevant in ages, which is unconscionable – I could have cured sexism by now, with the power of my blogging! But instead, I seem to write only about myself, and my upcoming readings (Sunday, April 5 at 4pm at Cakeshop – like how I worked that in there?).

Satia even wrote to me recently with a suggested topic, which had to do with giving and receiving feedback on writing, and how one can trust one’s own critical eye, not to mention others’, when tastes are so subjective. My answer: You kind of can’t, but you go with your gut anyway. Damn, I should have saved that for another post.

4. I am having an ongoing existential crisis, which manifests itself in a morbid preoccupation with death and suffering, feelings of hopelessness and meaninglessness, crippling anxiety, overbearing self-loathing, and persistent anomie (that is, “a feeling of disorientation and alienation from society caused by the perceived absence of a supporting social or moral framework”).

Awww, boo hoo! The world stinks, nature is indifferent, and I’m going to die, just like everybody else! And yet I still manage to vlog about American Idol. So it would seem that I could spare a few moments from obsessing over the unknowableness of the universe, and whether or not I should drop off the grid and start leading an ethically and ecologically sustainable life (quick answer: yes I should, and no I’m not going to) in order to update my fucking blog once every pink and purple moon.

5. I’m lazy.

Soooooo lazy. Is Idol on yet? I sure do like that Anoop Desai.

Bill + Janice = Bilge

 

Welcome to Bilge. This week, we're talking about American Idol, Bill Hader, and Orbit Positively Pomegranate Gum. 

Next week, the Sudan, and the meaninglessness of life. 

Enjoy.

God never closes a door

Sorry for the silence around here; it was a weird week and a half. I got sick, again, which makes four illnesses in four months – you’d think I had Munchausen’s, or something, what with all the sick-getting I’ve been doing lately, but I think it’s just the weather, the stress, the running around. The writing. It’s like, why don’t I investigate yet another horribly painful time in my life, and put it out there for everyone to stare at?  No wonder I keep getting sick; I keep exposing my guts.

But I had two really good shows in a row – the gay marriage benefit at Bluestockings was awesome, and I got to meet the guys who wrote the children’s book about the two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who adopted and hatched an egg together, a book that is now the most banned children’s book in the U.S. – congrats, guys! The Mixer series at Cakeshop was also terrific, with Rob Sheffield reading from his heartbreaking memoir Love is a Mix Tape; I also got a chance to read an advance copy of host Melissa Febos’ upcoming memoir, Whip Smart, which is just dazzling. For my part, I read a longer excerpt from “Terror Sex,” just written that morning, and the audience seemed to appreciate it – they kept laughing, which threw me a little, as I didn’t think the piece was especially funny, but I understand that audiences often show their support by laughing, and I guess, when you think about it, going to break into your ex’s apartment is pretty ridiculous. (As I said in the comments section below, I didn’t actually break into his place; I got off the train at 28th Street and bought a needlepoint instead. Not that “Mark” reads this blog, but if he did, I’d want him to breathe easy.)

And then it was all sickness and unhappiness for a few days; trying to get work done and appointments met, though I was aching and sniveling and miserable. We had some guests over on Saturday, which was an exhausting success; then, Sunday night around 5am, there was a stunning crash, and I was awakened from a not-so-deep sleep to find that one of the windows, improperly closed after the gathering, had been blown open and inward, and had shattered on the floor. Broken glass everywhere, freezing wind and snow blowing into the apartment, cats way more curious than they should have been – you’d think they’d avoid the cold and the danger; I know I would have, had I had a choice. Bill was roused, and we did our best to get rid of the glass without hurting ourselves; I jumped on the phone and started trying to find someone who could help board up or repair the window at 5 in the morning during a blizzard. By 6:30am, a guy came over and took the window and the rest of the broken glass away; by 7:30am, our super was there with some sheetrock to block the hole in the wall while we waited for the replacement window, which was installed at 6pm last night. At times like this, I am very grateful that we live in New York City, where stuff like this is routinely taken care of by experts available around the clock. (Experts who charge hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars.)

And you know, sometimes the metaphors just write themselves: A window blew inwards and smashed. I’d opened a portal to the outside world, and didn’t properly seal it, and it broke inside, leaving a hole and a mess and a blast of frost. The repair guy, a security specialist from Israel, was trying to tell me that it could have been an attempted break-in; that maybe one of our guests had left the window unlatched on purpose so they could come back later and rob us. “You shouldn’t be so, err, open,” he warned me.

And he’s probably right. Not about somebody breaking in – I highly doubt that my Aunt Rita left the window unlatched so she could come back later and steal the Nintendo Wii – but about being so open. I cringe when I read the post below this one; I cringed when I read it aloud, to laughs. But I’m not deleting it. Why bother? It’s true. Whether I write about it or not, it still happened. The feelings are there, whether they’re exposed or not.

It’s the eternal struggle of the memoirist: Why write about yourself, especially when it’s painful? Why not, you know, grow an imagination, make something up, maybe write about somebody else for a change? But once you’ve started writing about yourself, how can you stop? It’s what you do, it’s who you are, it’s how you put bread on the table (or, in my case, soy milk in the fridge).

I’m not answering this question anytime soon. Nor am I going to stop asking it.

But I am appearing live and in person a few times over the next two weeks! So if you want to break in and steal the Wii – well, you can’t, because the windows are all locked now, and will remain so FOREVER so as to avoid a repeat of last night’s mayhem. But these would be optimal Wii-stealing opportunities – or optimal opportunities to come by and say hi:

Sunday, March 8: Girls Write Now day! (Also International Women’s Day, and my friend Stephanie’s birthday.) I’ll be in the audience for another mentor-mentee reading from one of my favorite organizations, Girls Write Now, taking place this Sunday at 4pm at the New School’s Lang Student Center, 55 West 13th St., 2nd floor. 

Friday, March 13: Talkingstick storytelling series at the Rubin Museum, 17th Street and 7th Ave. in Manhattan. Starts at 8:30 in the lobby, and features guests Jen DeMeritt and The Fools.

More soon – or less, if I wise up. But, knowing me, probably more.