adderall plans, adderall fans

Ok kids, there is a limited list of things in this world that I love.

In no particular order I present:

1) drugs
2) book marketing
3) clever strategies
4) winding down + all forms of release
5) watching 7/8/9 AM after a particularly satisfying night spent in filthy bathroom stalls with friends and strangers
6) steak tartare
7) twitter
8) productivity, output & innovation
9) clever easy afternoons in the sunshine with beer
10)excellent publicity hits
11) a very fine dirty martini (bonus round)

Some various combination of the above leads me to the celebration of the forthcoming memoir, The Adderall Diaries from Graywolf Press. Despite slacker surroundings and possible lifestyle I fucking love: productivity, finished products, and tangible results - the goal of any publicist I suppose - and this is why adderall has a coveted position. As much as we all like twitching quietly, or not so quietly after one (ok, maybe 5?) too many bumps what we really like is the shit that takes us back to nights of speed, midterms, finals, and above all else: self-medication for improvement. The real goal is always something real, something measurable: a 20 page term paper, a final, a senior thesis, passing the bar.

Drugs that raise the bar. Things that force us to get over over the hump of introspection and get something going - answer that nagging voice of What are you doing? What's the plan? Adderall is this. It's at least honest in that you ask, "ok, what the fuck next?" that is, if you're not already doing it.

So I really want to read this. Check it @ http://www.graywolfpress.org/component/page,shop.flypage/product_id,287/category_id,00904de4d45e7808b56a75acdc7c6a96/option,com_phpshop/

Complete with a very fine blurb from both Jerry Stahl - who claims this may be the memoir of a generation - and the classic Amy Tan, don't you want to peep this to?

summer of swine

So even with all the pretty weather that all you kids love so much (and OK, I will admit to basking in a nice PBR-in-the-backyard of my fave local bar on Sunday moment)I feel like the mood this spring is a bit grim. Or there's an undertone of it at least - old media is increasingly boned, our economy is fucked, and it seems like every other person is looking for a job.

Of course, given the name of this blog, we sympathize. I'm lucky for now, but believe me, I worry. All my skills are in a field considered a luxury (books). whee. I feel the gap growing larger between everyone with even minimal income to spend on things like books, tickets, nights out, and those not. In short, shit sucks. And it isn't going to change anytime soon. Maybe we'll all get the swine flu though, and at least then we'll get some bed rest.

Signs something might not be quite right with me:

- I've been cleaning my apartment regularly. I vacuumed myself into a sweat yesterday.
- I've cooked meals more than twice in the past month.
- I've been thinking over things.

On heart-ing Ira Glass before Showtime did.

Last month I got one of the new video nanos for myself. I must say, I first started listening to This American Life back in 6th grade - which was a year or two after the show started. It aired here on NYC NPR right after Selected Shorts, which I've also been rabidly downloading. I listened to these shows on that old timey device, the radio. I loved those damn shows, and I was also, needless to say, really fucking nerdy. And although I went off that track a bit, sometimes, I still would manage to catch both those shows over the years sometimes. But yeah, radio? So its been a while. This is a roundabout way of me saying that the soothing sounds of short stories and Ira Glass are both really helping me out these days. Probably in the same way that they transported my 12-year old egghead self back in the day. Which lately is pretty on par with myself now, aged 25. I holed up alone in my room, wishing I was in a P.G. Wodehouse story, or looking forward to when I would be clever, important and doing something like producing This American Life. Cut to now. Yeah.

I finally got myself a copy of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao this week. I was so excited for this book to come out. Sometime in high school, the short story of the same name, by this author appeared in the New Yorker. I loved it so much that I made a photo copy of it and managed to keep track of it all these years. I've lost important documents, some of my best academic papers, cute + touching letters, but I've kept this story safe. Whenever I moved in and out of dorms, crappy apartments, I always knew where those photocopied pages were. Junot Díaz moved me so much then, and to this day not for my own recognition of self, and references to New Brunswick, Rutgers, and all that other familiar turf, but because it was some of the best fiction I'd ever read. I'm a sucker for immigrant generational family conflict misfit stories with a good healthy dose of myth and history, what can I say?

Oh, everything else? Is pretty fucked, but I've got all my limbs, a book, an ipod, and I'm going to work on the rest.