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.