“You don't know just how to start me up…”

I had a flashback to listening through on winamp with you to music and remembering how awesome a person you are and wanting to thank you for helping all the best parts of me be.

“…I don't ever want the beat to stop…”

I like the thing in the background that sounds like a fantastical jackpot game in the Putt-Putt game room.
Oh, similes we wish we could take home with us and put on our refrigerators. With magnets.

“…I'm not a robot but I feel like one…”

Have you ever had the problem where you’re not sure whether the Thai place you were going to go try out for dinner exists in reality or just your dreams? And after all that, the food is pretty ordinary. I was hoping for a little more surreal.

“…Wake me up or I will keep my head…”

“Every day, every night, is saved by something. That’s why I love it here. Either someone lets me down, and the city picks me up, or the city lets me down and someone picks me up.”

“…up, up, up, up, up, up…”

I may not know what to write, but at least I know to who: Someone who I don’t know, who won’t know me. Someone who won’t understand how they have let themself forget what they read, who will understand that a story can be saved for another day. Someone who goes with the flow. It’s what we do.

“Snails see the benefits / The beauty in every inch…”

Read “Accidental Billionaires” to compare. Mezrich is certainly no Sorkin, yet somehow the former’s non-brilliant prose doesn’t so weaken what seems to be the story’s strongest theme. For facebook seems not to be a story of a woman jilting a man; rather of adolescents given power to define themselves and their world. Facebook was born among an institution of chauvinistic houses who choose which males will be honored by having nameless females fawn over their elite influence; of venture capital angels who choose which endeavors shall be blessed; at a college that matters because it matters because it mattered. So the movie’s added conceit, of disputed legal accounts, misses the Homeric action, diluting a swift-footed race to establish one’s own identity with a tensionless struggle to define someone else’s. Certainly, there are echoes of the latter theme in, say, online privacy; but that is generally independent of the tragic flaws of Zuckerberg et al. His flaw in the book seems to be the need to control identity, and given the actual evolution of facebook that feels appropriate; so I don’t see why the movie, while mostly keeping the same narrative, instead choose his flaw to be an inability to deal with rejection.

Social Network is the story of a tragically flawed hero, the opposite of Good Will Hunting for the subsequent antithetical decade. Action matters more than thought; failings are insignificant next to successes. Education is a background for experience; a million users and a billion dollars are simply numbers. The film is more impressive as a biography than a history, for while there is certainly symbolism in the development of technology, there is just as much symbolism in doors. Facebook itself may as well be a MacGuffin, for the purpose of the narrative- it matters mostly to show how oblivious the characters are in realizing how the world they are building does and doesn’t match the world they live in.

“Hail to those who have come…”

Posters used to get hung when I realized I’m staying at a place. Now, it’s the realization that I can’t leave.

“…In the sunlight that surrounds you…”

When did the limit of fanciful thinking go from having a time machine to rewriting legislative code?

“…Pretend all the good things are for me, too…”

The day the world lost the environmental debate was the day it became an economic question.

“…And the weather changes not halfway between your house and mine…”

“I'm painfully logical / You're tragic and beautiful / And that's good enough for me…”

Cryptic subtext is my kryptonite.

“…I won't lie / I wish that I could be your Superman tonight…”

Found: compounded debt
Misplaced regret
Within pasts in which I forget
The people I forget.

In Chicago, it is easier to register to vote than to renew a driver’s license. The former requires two pieces of identification; the latter, five. One of which can be a court order legally changing your birthdate.

“What's my age again…”

“See your face every place that I walk in / Hear your voice every time I am talking…”

Sexting is a cross between underage drinking and suicide. It’s illegal if done by a minor, but not if an adult were to; and the perpetrator is the victim.

“…I would die for you…”

“Take me away from the norm / I got to tell you something…”

If this had been an actual non-emergency, I’d probably already be undead.

“…Don't give up your independence / Unless it feels so right…”

There should be a stop sign here.

“…Whoa, I got to tell you something…”

Do not want to understay my welcome.

I can see asking for the recipe to be polite, but putting seconds in your mouth? That means something.

“Where have all the flowers gone…”

Bach flowers: the gift that keeps on being something that should be given.

“…When will they ever learn…”

“Threw some chords together, the combination D-E-F / It’s who I am, it’s what I do…”

The difficulty with telling short stories is that stories are told to communicate, and context is required to understand.

“…These words are my own…”

Daredevils’ Hamlet transforms a play-within-a-play to a play-outside-a-play. The rest is thematically unchanged.

““You're so bitter,” your complaint…”

You know how you apologize because you're an awful human being? The reason why you're not is because you apologize.

“…I don’t know what I’m hungry for / I don’t know what I want anymore…”

If your life isn’t in balance, how can you expect it to be in balance with someone else?

There are good things and there are bad things in life.

Do you ever not qualify things, though? Like I'm wondering if you ever experience something and don't assign it a value judgment. I mean, I do this too. So I'm just sort of musing.
heh I assigned no value judgment to your asking that question.

There are things in life that just are.

Don’t compare your insides to somebody else’s outsides.

There are worse things in life than eating cake.

I’m over cupcakes. It’s the cream cheese frosting.
Who besides Mom does that?

The Two Ambiguous Fashionistas;
She’s Usually So Quiet On Flights; and her parents;
My Bag Is Staying Right Above Me;
This Is My First Time On A Plane But I’m Making Up For All Those Times I Never Got To Press The Page Attendant Button; and her husband, El Capitain Hook;
Officer I Swear I’m Not An Undercover Air Marshall;
Mr. & Mrs. Dermatologist Newlywed;
Guy In An Orange Shirt.

I sometimes get terrified that my plane will crash when I look around at what characters my fellow survivors would be.

Oh gmail spam filter, I am so disappointed in you. You didn’t flag “Shocking.Investigation.Report” from “News.10.Report@s27.l1u.n1kixq.kplavojr-8ft64b.ccqgsa6.nswl37.tapahoster.com”? Really?

I’m hoping to see A[]’s show tomorrow- any interest?
“Yes, but I have to say tentatively since I’ll be up at my parents’ house for Rosh Hashanah.”
np I’m being quite the bad Jew this year.
“I’m mostly interested in the free food as opposed to the theological and spiritual implications.”
As I said, bad Jew: I’m going home for Yom Kippur.

Famine has its feast.

Poor ducks, having to eat all our sins.
I think they’re okay with it. They’re probably just happy to have a holiday in which they get fed instead of eaten.

“They made up their minds, and they started packing…”

The tragedy of our time is that our satirist has become our voice of reason. Where is the Jefferson, the Adams, the Washington to our Franklin? Four and seven scores ago he died, and now we have his answer: no, we cannot keep a republic. We know the problems with our society, yet we choose to be part of them. We hear the problems with our society, yet the best we can do is merely hear them; and most of the time we don’t even do that much. Restore sanity? Our insanity is all that we have left; our ability to laugh at our absurdity is our only salvation.

“…Where were they going, without ever knowing the way…”