New work from Miranda July: The Hallway. It’s weirdly immersive… I was looking at this piece on her website and there are a bunch of hilarious comments like, I knew her in high school and let me tell you she’s nothing special at all. Whew. I guess we know who hasn’t changed since high school.⁰¹ Thank goodness the rest of us were allowed to. Speaking of comments, I was watching the new Amy Pohler show on Hulu (no comment here) and for some reason stopped to read the comments there too. (I am on a comment and review reading binge. It’s odd. I will stop now. There are so many more interesting things to read.) There was one lengthy analysis of how making fun of Native Americans isn’t funny. Well, well. I guess not.

Douglas Coupland’s Canada House.

Keith Starky, Explaining Twitter, via everywhere on the whole internet. Who actually hasn’t linked to this yet? Still, viola! as they say in Texas.

I need hair help. My adorable little boy haircut has reached an awkward age and needs to be sent away to boarding school for a while. Must commission the interns to read Japanese hairstyle magazines for an Interim Solution.

I am also wondering about the mechanism whereby babies (And possibly the mechanism whereby I presume to extrapolate from my baby to all of baby-kind. Maybe I’ll save that for another day.) forget one thing in the process of learning something else. My peerless aurelian genius child is a chatterbox and has been since before he could even move about much. But when he started to crawl (actually he never crawled, he sort of dragged himself along on his ventral side for a few months, as though ascending a very steep slope) he stopped talking altogether for a while. When he began to walk, he seemed to temporarily lose a lot of his vocabulary, and lately as his fine motor skills are exploding, seems to have forgotten some of what he cared enough about even to discuss in his sleep a few months ago. He used to talk about colors nonstop, but now if I ask him what color anything is, he answers rojo offhandedly, gives a light laugh and changes the subject. Esponja? he’ll ask pointedly.

Sometimes when I look at the work of an artist I like or talk to friend or someone I worked with who has been more single-minded than I have over the last ten years, I get this momentary pain. They’ve built something so tangible now, while I’m still so short of that. For a panicky moment I wish I’d had more discipline, I wish I’d started earlier and stayed dedicated… But I really don’t. I like working this way, it doesn’t feel like work, while the other eats away at the edges of my mind until I feel all crumbly inside. Really the only thing I wish is that I’d realized long ago that the inability to concentrate (or the lack of interest in specializing?) might be an advantage. It might be a good thing to always be pursuing relationships that are invisible to other people. I wish I’d stopped trying to force myself to behave a long time ago. I’m sorry it took so long to learn.