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RICH PEOPLE LOL OMG OMG OMG!!!!

SPACE!

MOVIE SPACE!

I was at the Apple Store. Let’s not get into why. I saw the new Macbook and though the port situation is clearly a problem, that is one gorgeous, gorgeous machine and I want one real bad but I probably cannot get one without a bit of discord and I definitely should not get one. Anyway, it’s pretty. I can’t wait for the Macbook 2.0.

Goddamned Apple!

If you’re a typeface nerd, Helvetica has been redesigned. And speaking of typefaces… that Hillary Clinton 2016 logo continues to break my heart.

I love the idea of a thematic road trip. Maybe we should take one to see public art across the country. I bet that would be swell.

Like many other writers across the country, I attended the AWP conference. Vanessa Mártir writes about a deeply troubling situation she encountered where a black body was literally stepped over by countless people and draws some painful but necessary conclusions about race in America.

I didn’t understand what I was seeing at first. I’d just come out of a panel on writing about violence where Roger Reeves said, “Violence is the American version of love.” (I can’t get that fuckin’ line out of my head.) So much sage shit was said at that panel, so much rattled me and made me choke up and cry, that I had to go outside and feel the air, the blue sky over me. It happened when I walked back in. I was still raw.

There are no more mysteries.

Real Dolls… well, I guess, we all have our sex toy preferences.

It’s a beautiful morning in Huntington, West Virginia, but David Mills wants to drink beer in the same ramshackle house where he has lived since birth. In the other bedroom is his ailing, nonagenarian father. Mills the younger is best known for writing Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person’s Answer to Christian Fundamentalism. In the foreword, Carl Sagan’s son Dorion praised Mills’s “impeccable logic, intellectual bravery, and professional clarity.” Richard Dawkins gave the book a blurb—“an admirable work”—and mentioned it two times in his best-seller The God Delusion.

In his introduction to a new edition, in 2006, Mills gleefully informed readers that he has been publicly condemned as a spokesman for Satan, a disgrace to human dignity, a moron, a shrimphead, and, his favorite, a “pitiful middle-aged man, embarrassed by his lifelong unemployment, and frozen, emotionally and intellectually, in early adolescence.”

I want a real doll that will wash silverware, drive and let me sit in the passenger seat day dreaming, and pump gas.

Stacia Brown is a talented writer who needs some help getting to a modern media writing workshop to which she has been accepted at Yale. Maybe you can hook her up with a ducat or two.

Daniel Finney, a newspaper columnist from Des Moines is chronicling his weight loss journey and I am going to follow his story.

LAW ENFORCEMENT!

Though I am generally loathe to link to my own writing here, I did write about street harassment for the May issue of Glamour and really, this is an issue that affects us all.

There I was, standing outside a salon in downtown Los Angeles where I had just gotten my hair cut. A man, a stranger, suddenly stopped and said, “You have such a pretty face. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re fat.” Then he tried to hug me. I felt a brief rush of fear, stepped away, and made a karate move with my arms. The man went on his way and I went on mine, though the more I thought about the encounter, the more my irritation grew. It was clear he thought he was flattering me, but let me be clear: I wasn’t flattered. The best thing I can say is that I was grateful this particular incident of unsolicited attention was mild. It was not that bad.

It also wasn’t surprising: 96 percent of American women 40 years of age and under experienced street harassment in the past year, according to a landmark survey—the largest ever of its kind—conducted by Cornell University for Hollaback, an organization fighting to end sexual harassment in public; at least one fifth of women were harassed 21 or more times. “In the past, we’ve known what street harassment looks like based on the stories people have shared with us,” says Debjani Roy, deputy director of Hollaback. “But these numbers prove: This is real and it’s prevalent.”

A real doll would never street harass anyone.

Listen to your heart.

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