There are more of you than I ever really expected, and I think that’s awesome.  I know most of you found me through the now-defunct LOLSecretz, or were sent here chasing a phantom Planned Parenthood post, or googled America’s Next Top Model and found my various amusements with Wikipedia.  But now… all that is about to change.

I started this blog in April 2007 with a friend of mine who I maybe thought was fated to be a great, great friend, but instead we slowly slipped out of each other’s lives.  We created superhero names and an entire concept for this blog that never really came to fruition – we each wrote a few posts in those personae, but then the pressure of creating and maintaining an alternate identity became too much for me, and I ended up writing in my own voice, but under the name Stella Kevlar.  And he stopped writing altogether, meaning that our would-be collaboration de facto became my personal blog.

I’ve always been enamored of the idea of having a blog, or before the age of the online diary, of writing regularly, every day, with or without an audience (but really, with an audience because come on.)  By now, it’s gotten to the point where I feel funny about writing as myself behind this sort of arbitrary identity — I don’t feel like a superhero, and I’m tripped up by being one-half of what this project was once meant to be.

So, I quit!  As of today, there will be no more new posts here, at Superhero Sewing Circle.  I will let the domain name lapse when it expires in April, but I guess the large graveyard that is the internet will forever hold my early writings at superherosewingcircle.wordpress.com.

But, good news!  I’m actually making good on my promise to myself to write as myself, and more regularly.  Starting now, please migrate with me to silentj.wordpress.com, a slightly less elaborate blog where I use my real name (Arija, pronounced like ‘aria’) and adopt a slightly less defensively snarky authorial voice (only slightly).  I’ve really, really loved having a little cabal of readers, and I hope that doesn’t fade away.  Update your RSS feeds, yo!

So!  Thanks for reading thus far, and don’t be afraid to click right through… starting…… now.

This is obviously beautiful and amazing and sheer jubilation shines through, and it is currently my desktop background.  Even better, though, is the final third of the mural:

The red X and “Good Bye” were the only things added post-election.  McCain was depicted as crazy earth-eating monster for months before.  I love New York!

1. Who the fuck are the Jonas Brothers and why does everyone care so damn much?  I read something about one of them giving a promise ring to his girlfriend and threw up all over my computer.  I hate America.

2. Seriously, does anyone else notice that “Twilight,” which is apparently some series of books about Mormon vampires and now the number one movie in the universe forever, came out of FUCKING NOWHERE?  One minute I was enjoying my life, and the next Cedric Diggory is sitting on his giant pile of cash and monopolizing my issues of “Entertainment Weekly.”  I worked in publishing for three years – 1.5 of those years in children’s publishing – and I hadn’t heard of this ridiculous nonsense until about 2 months ago.

3. Blerg!  When I was your age, we had underaged Mouseketeers gyrating in a high school hallway wearing only a cardigan and a maxi pad!  I guess now that Britney (who is my age) has had two kids, I’m officially decrepit.  Now where’s my Metamucil?

Now, my feelings on audiobooks are complicated.  On the one hand, I have fond memories of my dad (an extremely avid Book-on-Tape purveyor) listening to them on long car trips, figuring that since each of his three children were choosing the world inside their individual CD player headphones over forced family interaction, he may as well monopolize the car stereo to listen to a voice actor read him Clive Cussler novels.  Okay, that’s maybe a bit heavy-handed on the sarcasm — I actually do have fond memories of those car trips, emerging from my angsty Tori Amos haze to listen to the end of a particular riveting chapter when we were wending through Pennsylvania backroads, still an interminable hour from my grandmother’s house.  Furthermore, I have a wealth of extremely positive memories surrounding the act of being read to.  My parents read to us as children, of course, but my dad and I actually read books together until I was almost twelve (i.e. too cool).  He first read me what were to become some of my favorite books of all time (Watership Down, The Chronicles of Narnia).  We read every single Hardy Boys book (a task, by the way, that proves that my dad loves me – have you ever read two of those books?  One is exactly the same as the next, thrilling for an eight-year-old, torture for her post-doctorate-holding father.)  And my family still gets a big kick out of the fact that he introduced me to some pretty heavy theology and philosophy before the idea that humans were fallible and corrupt was even a twinkle in my young sinner’s eye: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength (C.S. Lewis); Enchantress From the Stars (Sylvia Engdahl); and other religious and existential allegory disguised as sci-fi (my entire personality is starting to make sense now, you see.)  I hope to share chapter books with my children the way they were shared with me, and I do believe that some stories are meant to be experienced as part of an oral tradition.

However, on the other hand, I love books.  I say “books” and not “reading” because it’s more accurate – I love the visceral experience of reading a book: the choice of font, the weight of the paper, the kerning and spacing on the page; the smell of a new book, and how that smell is distinct from that of a decades-old library book; the weight of a book in my purse; the act of underlining and notating in margins (something I don’t do anymore but did regularly in high school.)  Most of all, I love the act of choosing to read over any other activity.  It’s such a luxury that I basically abandoned once I started college (though I’d read hungrily over the summers) and completely did away with once I started working full time – the only time I’d ever read was on the subway to and from work, and once I started working at a literary agency and reading for a living…forget it.

So in a way, listening to books on tape is kind of the ultimate “fuck you” to books: not only am I forgoing the tangible joys of the experience of reading, looking at and feeling the physical book, but I’m also going to divorce myself from the personal aspect of listening to a story told by someone I love; that is, I’m going to be read to by a nameless, faceless stranger, a disembodied voice, someone hired to read to me, if by me you mean anyone at all.  Still, when I moved back home, I promised myself that I’d read more, and it’s a promise that I’ve largely failed to keep: I read in 30-minute spurts when I have downtime at the hospital and occasionally right before falling asleep.  But — and this is one of the things I hate most about living in the suburbs again — my day-to-day life is largely spent in the car, commuting along the southern Connecticut shoreline (and into NYC on weekends).  I want to take in more books, and this is a lot of time that I’m not doing anything else particularly valuable.  I’m not so principled about the way in which I absorb this material not to at least try it out…so thus begins this little experiment!

The book I got, by the way, is Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, not because I’ve been dying to read (listen to?) it, but because it was literally the best option (aside from the novelization of The Phantom Menace, and Everything Nelson DeMille Has Ever Written, of course.  I briefly considered getting the Harry Potter books read by Jim Dale, which I’ve heard are marvelous, actually, but I wanted to get something I hadn’t yet read [listened to?]).  I’ve listened to disc 1 so far, and it’s been…weird, mostly to have to accept this voice actor’s interpretation of the text.  I hated it through the whole first chapter, but now I’m settling into this particular speech act, and I’m actually enjoying myself.  We’ll see how long this keeps up.

[Oh, and... as my brackets and parentheses indicate, am I still allowed to claim that I've "read" these books once I'm done listening to them?  Is the act of reading -- sensory input through the eyes -- essential to the meaning of reading?  And is that term, "reading," the same as listening to the book be read, or am I missing out on the authenticity of the book experience?  Paging Walter Benjamin.]

Friends’ facebook statuses.  (the protest posterboards of today).

This is the first time I’ve ever cared about something so fiercely that’s not immediately related to my own life, my own corporeal being.

I told Ryan on the phone tonight, my brain has no preconceived module for this kind of emotion.   I keep thinking, “This is how I felt when Yale beat Harvard in football my freshman year!”  That is literally the closest I can get to understanding my current exhilaration.

I’ve never been a “I’m moving to Canada” type person.  I’ve always known that I would disagree with much of this country, or at least much of this country’s electorate.  I’m wired to tend towards socialism (not that I believe that system could ever be viable in this country in this day and age.)  But now I am excited to represent America.  I feel, in my own unique idiom, how staunch conservatives must have felt eight years ago: elation, joy, hope.  I don’t believe that God ordained Barack Obama to be president; I believe I helped make him that, and that means infinitely more to me than anything else.

I don’t have any interest in gloating.  Look, country!  We have a lot of work to do!  Obama is not the Messiah, he is not the answer to all our problems, but he is a start, a real real real real real start.  I lent my faith to the Democratic party this year, writing my name into their party ranks, believing that they could rise above their rigid barriers.  Democratic Party, you do not operate outside of your ordinary constituents.  WE are your engine, WE made you who you are today, we of hope, tempered by pragmatism, but circularly informed by hope.

I am so lucky to have experienced today, and I wish my sister could have been here to see it too (this is her first presidential election, and she lives in France.)  On my first Presidential election, I was so excited to be an active part of the electoral process, and in return, I learned how little my vote (the popular vote) mattered.  This is not redemption, this is not comeuppance.  This is balance, this is the yang to eight years’ tragic yin.  Remember the image of the 1984 electoral map — Mondale, the closest thing we’ve seen to Obama, running 25 years too early, carrying only his home state and D.C. — how our parents laughed at it, went to bed early, never gave him a second look, is the really the best the Democratic Party could do?  Obama’s victory tonight is not a victory for the Democratic party, not really.  It is a sign that the two-party system is changing, that our political communities and borders are not only imagined but ultimately detrimental, without the elevation of our very souls’ desires — hope, love, change we need.

Obama has been our muse.  It’s our duty now not to deify him, but to hold him to every promise he has bestowed upon us.  I cried tonight not because I feel we had been saved, but because someone like me is in the White House – ambitious, outspoken, complex, nuanced, difficult, torn.  I love this country so much that I literally do not have the words to express it.  Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for proving me wrong.

Stella is gwen: “glad you both hate fags, let’s talk about something important, like killing people”.

Stella wonders if they make you sign a statement when you join the Republican party, swearing to pronounce it “nucular.”

Stella CANNOT FUCKING BELIEVE SARAH PALIN JUST REFERENCED WOMEN’S RIGHTS.

Stella is in charge of more people than Derek Beaton.

Stella Joe Biden spends a lot of time in Home Depot.  Best VP EVER!

Stella “maverick”: that word… i do not think it means what you think it means…

Stella is Delaware?  Dela-here!

“We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin.  Our homes are covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrated in the hands of capitalists.” — Ignatius Donnelley, 1892 (calling into order the first meeting of what was to become the Populist Party, an eventually-doomed rare third party in American politics.)

It’s comforting to know that literally a century can go by and these sad, dark statement can still be chillingly applicable today.  Just replace “land” with “wealth.”  Any idea what’s gonna happen next, America?

I do.  As soon as this is all over, we’ll forget again.  Just like every other time.

Two rejections so far!  One interview scheduled so far!

Now to the good stuff.  This picture shows a selection from my office’s deli:

(Underline added by me)

First of all, I want to comment on the very strange word choice here.  If in fact they do mean “discrete,” I’m impressed at the detail to craftsmanship.  Curious as to whether they actually would lay the sprouts, lettuce, tomato, etc, one at a time, separately, I ordered this sandwich.  As I watched them make it, I realized, duh, OF COURSE they put the ingredients on one at a time.  This is not only a dumb, ill-fitting word choice, but it’s one of those instances where fancy words dress up something that’s totally status quo.  “We make the best sandwiches, you guys!  Seriously!  Unlike all those other sandwich places, we do not grab handfuls of vegetables and attempt to lay them on your sandwich all at the same time.  We’re professional, not like those jerkoffs at Sandwich Depot.”

More amusing, and what I’m choosing to assume they meant, is if this is a spelling mistake.  In which case, this is now my favorite sandwich place ever.  “Hey guys, tired of your friends calling you a fag because you eat sprouts on your meat sandwich?  We’ll put all that healthy bullshit on for you, but no one has to know.  Unlike those assholes at Sandwich Depot, who fucking televise every goddamn grain of salt they put on your panini.” 

(The owners of this deli have anger management issues.)