sweetheart redux

I present you with Sweetheart #6, originally put out in May 1995.

Phew, that is a long blog nap I've been taking since the new year started. While I've been asleep I've turned 32 and gotten a couple new cavities. I'll started blogging again soon. I plan to post good old Sweetheart Issue #6 up here tonight or tomorrow.

“I’m dying for some action/I’m sick of sitting ‘round here trying to write this book” – the boss Blaaaaaah. Blah blah blah! Hell damn shit! Fuck! Stupid! Bunny! Puppy! Kitties! Lalalalalala! Okay I got that out of my system. My grandpa moans in his sleep (well actually it’s up for debate whether he’s actually asleep or just sleepy when he says his trademark lament) “I’m old, I’m fat, I’m tired,” in a huge loud voice, practically every night, and if I were only a tiny bit less considerate, I would be bellowing this at night too these days. I have the post-Holiday doldrums in a big way. What I would like to do as a cure for these bore-blues is to start writing a third novel, a really long one this time, maybe even historical fiction (that’d be so cool! I’d really get to use my intelligence and my interest in history), but I have such writer’s block. It’s moved on to imagination block; I usually fantasize little stories all day long, like little scenarios of me telling someo...

Living in Los Angeles, and Hollywood in particular, gives me a surreal feeling and sometimes an almost disbelief in my actual life versus various fictional lives I come across in movies and novels. I am a native Angeleno and I glamorized Hollywood with a purposeful naivete when I was a teenager – I knew that the corner of Hollywood and Vine was just a street corner with a heavy metal shop (or a liquor store or something – my memory fails me) and some poor people waiting for their bus on it, yet I loved that street corner anyway, and loved books and movies and songs and photos that built on the mythology of Hollywood, and I went there every weekend for awhile, a feeling of excitement on the bus ride there and usually a vague feeling of depression on the bus ride back but always wanting to live there when I grew up. I could go on forever on this part of my teens (Hollywood, Nirvana, Courtney Love, a book called Weetzie Bat, Guns N’ Roses and Riot Grrrl are the main themes that dominate...

One of my favorite books I've read in the past year is Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, who also wrote the amazing novels Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans . I became anxious a few months ago when I heard that a film was being made of the novel, but I just learned that the film has already come and gone (in limited release), and while that information released me from the anxiety I feel at having someone ruin something I love for public consumption, I was also disappointed. here are a few pretty film stills. xoxo robin

I wrote a children’s story about a little boy whose cat dies, and for two months it was the best-selling book for children ages 5-7. Almost unanimously, the book critics who wrote about the book focused on the originality and bravery of the scene in which my protagonist, little Christopher, kneels beside his bed to say a prayer the night his cat Velvet has had to be put down, and finds he doesn’t know what to say. “Thank you my God for the day you have given me,” he begins, as his nightly prayers always begin, the way he was taught at Sunday School. But then he doesn’t know how to continue. “I feel very sad,” the prayer concludes. The book itself concludes with an illustration of Christopher smiling, sitting between his parents on an imprecise green watercolor brush-stroke of a couch. His mother and father each have an arm around his shoulder, and with their free hand, each parent holds the hand of Christopher that is closest to them. The words on this last page say: “They expl...

Looks like I’m going to have to use this blog as a rant forum again this entry. Here goes: both at the last office I worked in and in my current one, I’ve noticed a trend of people who don’t like someone else assuming that the person they don't like is bipolar. “Bipolar” really seems to have made it into the lexicon of well-known words. A person will say something like, “God she drives me crazy. She’s totally bipolar, I can tell.” At my last office, I wasn’t overly fond of much of the staff, so it was hard for me to not say something like “better bipolar than sub-intelligent.” But now I like my co-workers, yet I still overhear all these assumptions that their enemies must be bipolar, to describe said enemy’s unfathomable jerkiness. It really makes me feel like shit every single time I hear something like this. Bipolar people are a pain in the ass to deal with, okay, I get it. I believe that, at best, psychiatry is a misogynist pseudoscience fueled by kickbacks from the dr...