Today a guy sitting next to me was reading my crossword over my shoulder. I folded my paper over and shot him a death glare. He kind of jumped and pretended to be looking at something else, then decided it would be better to pretend to be asleep. Dude...

Anyway, I finished my puzzle in peace while he fake slept.

there were these stuffed animal dogs that kind of looked like pound puppies but weren't. they looked relatively nice but you could flip up their gums and they bared their teeth and looked much more aggressive.

WHAT WERE THESE CALLED?

i feel so old

edit: someone nice helped me find it - they're called pooch patrol! lookit

There is a free newspaper available every morning for New Yorkers called AM New York. This paper is good if it's raining (free umbrella), for its lolzy letters to the editor and for its Kenken and crossword puzzles. My train ride from Hoboken to the Xangaish part of NYC is about 15 minutes, which is enough time to finish the puzzle page.

This woman gets on the train this morning and sits next to me. She watches me do Kenken and I'm, like, whatever because nobody really does it or knows what it is so I don't care. I start the crossword and she is reading over my shoulder the entire time. I'm left handed, so my wrist ends up covering most of the clues naturally when I'm writing, and she was craning her neck to read said clues around my arm. HELLO?!

What is the best way to deal with this? I guess my options are...

-be the bigger person, chill out and ignore it
-waste a perfectly good puzzle by writing STOP BEING NOSY across the middle
-write a text to a friend that says "this really annoying woman is reading over my shoulder, help!"
-stand up and continue the puzzle
-ask her if she needs something

What would you do? I realize this is completely petty, but I get so annoyed by the human race sometimes...

edit: okay, look at what happened to my BF this morning. from his email to me:

I got on the B train and some guy and girl sitting next to me was watching me do the crossword, and when I finished, he tapped me on the shoulder and was like, "That's really impressive. I've never seen anyone finish one of those." I was like, ummmm...ARG

My dad and two of my sibs (Aleksander, 13 and Kat, 20) came to hang out this past weekend! They drove all the way from Ohio, listening to my brother play Ramblin' Man on his phone practically the entire time and finding funny names of towns on the GPS (the favorite was Manunka Chunk, NJ. if you live there, marry me).

I showed them the office, ran them all over town (we walked almost 7 miles on Saturday) and when there was downtime, we took funny pictures.


I made Aleksander try rugelach and black and whites, both of which he found delicious...but that meant he ended up eating the latter during what would otherwise have been a lovely family picture.


hello lovelies


I feel like I should shoop da whoop Aleksander in this picture


my dad hung out with Vincent at MoMA


Basically, Kat and I decided that we were going to ask the FAO Schwarz guy for a picture and then make disgusting faces in the picture so hilarity would ensue. But I chickened out and vaguely smiled so we have, L-R, me making a messed up smile, the soldier dude with his eyes shut and Kat making a weird face. THIS PICTURE IS SO FULL OF WIN.

oh families

The boyf and I were talking about Michael Jackson last night. I had experienced relative fits of incredulity as I sat on ONTD and TMZ and hit F5, F5, F5 as the reports on MJ's condition worsened and it seemed a very real possibility that the king of pop would be dead by the end of the day, if not the hour. And he was.

Last night, he brought up the question as to whether or not there would ever be another Michael Jackson and asserted that he didn't think it was possible to have a pop star of such international magnitude and intrigue. I maintain that there will be - wherever there are beats and pretty girls, pop will live forever - but one is hard-pressed to find someone, aside from Madonna (and he argued Radiohead; I cited Britney), that has been able to reach cult status, reinvent himself and land success all over the world.

Chuck Klosterman writes about shared experience in IV, his pop culture manifesto, and how because we have 600 channels and bootlegs and even the internet, where niche markets are so overserved but inevitably separated, he doesn't think we'll ever have a true experience that EVERYONE has seen. He says in his book that Johnny Carson's last episode was the last time we'd have something that everyone in the world has seen. Back then it was the radio and cassettes; now it's iPods and niche radios. It's so personalized that the chance of having everyone see one event simultaneously is slim to none.

That being said, the market is so segregated that it's nearly impossible to have someone conquer the charts once, let alone thirteen times like Michael did. Billboard charts everything from Top 40 to ringtone sales; how is anyone supposed to keep up with all of it? Half the time, when you read the list of Grammy nominations, you don't know who half the people are. Best Bossa Nova compilation? Huh? Having success in one particular category means nothing to the average person.

And that was who MJ appealed to - from today's pop stars to your neighbor down the street who whistled Beat It while he went out to get the paper from the end of the driveway. You could hang out in your kitchen with socks on and try to moonwalk or put on one mitten and you WERE him, even if for a brief second. His personal life made him even more bizarre; you wanted to figure him out, to see why he was the way he was. Maybe it was because he started in the Jackson 5 when he was eight - who's ready to be in the spotlight before hitting double digits? Nobody. Maybe it was because he had an odd affinity for chimpanzees and clinging to the childhood he never got to have. He was weird, but you always wanted to know more.

So while pop tarts and their respective hits come and go and celebrities express their love for vodka and Red Bull or eating pizza in bathtubs and posting it on Twitter, there will be a gaping hole where MJ was - keeping us confused, intrigued and dancing in our armchairs.