sweetheart redux

A young Lesley Arfin (some time in the 90's) In the 1990’s, before the internet was a thing, first and second generation Riot Grrrls read reviews of zines written by other Riot Grrrls who lived on the other side of the country (or sometimes even in England or Canada), and would sent their $1.25 + 2 stamps price to order these zines, and 9 times out of 10, this (losing) business transaction led to a penpal relationship.  It was amazing.  A lot of the RG rhetoric at the time waxed poetic on the concept of a “girl army”, and while these penpal relationships may not have been a tool of some militant action towards gender equality, it was a very wonderful and amazing network that could not have existed without Riot Grrrl.  I still remember how exciting it was to get the mail everyday (I did a zine with a fairly large readership, called Sweetheart, from around 1993-1997), just how special it felt to have my dad hand me all these wildly decorated envelopes from arou...

Good morning.  If you're new to this blog, it just occurred to me that it is unfortunate that, if you were to want to follow the adventurous/oversentimental tale of Yesteryou, a novella I wrote, the first chapter you'd be seeing (mixed in w/ my musings, photos of my crafts, film reviews, etc) right now is chapter 17.  So just a note on that:  I'm serializing the chapters (like I did last year with my novel Planes of Sunday) so if you wanted to start at the beginning, you just have to click in the lower right hand corner of "older posts" til you got to chapter 1, and then voila.  or perhaps you could also type "yesteryou" in the search bar to bring up all the chapters.  Anyway, it's minorly inconvenient but I don't think it's so bad.  in the olden days people would wait with  baited breath for issues of periodicals to come out that'd contain the next installment of a story by oh I don't know charles dickens or mark twain (i think ...

Despite his well-documented personality flaws, I have been quite partial to Oliver Stone films since I was a pre-teen.  I found The Doors (1991) to be absolutely thrilling to watch, there’s so much exciting partying in that movie and frenetic artistic and self-destructive energy, I thought (whenever I watched it, which was A LOT):  “I want to be like Jim Morrison when I grow up!”  That’s sort of a joke, but truly, I thought his character was very well-developed, and the occasional ‘trippy’ camera work wasn’t overdone and it was just an engrossing, thrilling film.  As a side note, I was too young to see any of the movies that I’m writing about, but that’s beside the point.  In my underdeveloped way, I was able to appreciate them.  Less fun to watch but also a really engrossing film, where you’ll feel strong, strong empathy for the protagonist, even though he’s been turned into a self-defeating, powerless asshole because of the war, is Born on the F...

16.   "Hi, it's me, the girl from the carnival, did I wake you?"  "Nope.  Hi.  How are you?”               “Okay I guess.  Sounds like you found your way back home.”               “Ha, yeah, it was a total surprise, too.  I was just walking around, actually I’d started trying to visit some of the sites from the Rocky movies, and I found my apartment building on accident.  I just moved there and I totally forgot the street name and the number, but from now on my landmark is going to be an Ethiopian grocery store on the corner that’s always closed and smells like cum for some reason.  Wanna come over and pick up your pot.”               “Um, I don’t know.  When I was walking back to the hotel I'm staying at it occurred to me we might as wel...

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My son is the most amazing being I've ever witnessed.  He is so curious, and preternaturally kind and sensitive, and funny, too.  Just this morning when I was holding him against me, chest to chest, as we took the elevator up to day care, he kept pointing (a new skill) at the little flower on my locket, and looking up at me inquisitively.  Then I opened the locket for him, and he just about lost his mind in happiness and amazement to see the two tiny photos inside my locket:  one of him, and one of me with my husband.  this moment, him discovering himself inside my locket -- it just stands outside of any temporal boundary as being something too precious, like to precious to exist terrestrially, you know? The past few years, I'd taken to calling myself a secular humanist, mostly because I've been going through a hardcore Vonnegut obsession since at least 2006, and that's what he considered himself. before that, i was just an athiest who took comfort in the th...