Well, it’s been 7 months. Might as well let you know what I’ve been up to.

• I grew a beard, then shaved it off, then grew it again, over and over and over again.
• I moved from my apartment in Cleveland Park to an apartment I’m sharing with my friend, Drew, in The Center of Cool DC (i.e., the 14th St. Corridor between Logan Circle and U St.).
• I obsessed over Foursquare and Twitter and Google Reader (and, related to these things, Fojol Brothers, ChurchKey, Google Wave, and Android). These obsessions have yet to wane, and indeed I have managed to infect many other people (but not enough!) with them.
• I went to Spain and ate all of that country’s pork and foie gras.
• I listened to the same music as ever–Daft Punk, Kanye West, Chromeo, Ratatat, the Old 97’s, Lily Allen, Lil Wayne, and Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”–on a continuously rotating basis.
• I relished the most recent seasons of Lost and Mad Men, and have so far found the current season of Top Chef to be a very enjoyable return to form. Dollhouse was as good as it could possibly be, but that actually wasn’t very good at all–it was a fundamentally flawed show that richly deserves cancellation.
• The Redskins went 2-6 against the easiest first-half schedule in the history of the NFL, because the owner refuses to hire professionals to manage the team and let them make football decisions. But then they won one game, and now everyone loves them again!
• Obviously, I completely lost the habit of posting anything on my blog. This may be permanent, although I would like to get back to it (even though, as I may explain in a forthcoming blog post, Twitter + Google Reader have essentially replaced whatever meager benefits I used to get out of having a blog).

And… that’s all, folks. See you again in 2010!

I don’t really know what to say, any more than anyone else does, but I think I’ve got to say something.

I was lucky enough to take a couple of classes with David Wallace at Pomona. I had already read Infinite Jest and a bunch of his non-fiction by then, and I fought for a place in his literature and writing classes. I’m glad I did, because he was as thoughtful, diligent, and smart as a teacher as he was as a writer. I learned a lot from him about writing (among other things, I learned that I should probably let other people handle the writing), but I learned at least as much about kindness, honesty, and humility. Writing is hard work, but so is literary criticism–and teaching a litter of undergrads either one is surely harder than both combined. I came out of that lucky year with at least as much admiration for Wallace the man as for Wallace the auteur.

In the wake of his death, I’ve been in touch with a few of my classmates from those courses, and we’re all simply shocked–by the death itself, and by the manner in which it occurred. Wallace seemed like a man whose darkest days were behind him; he had stared down many demons, and we all thought he had come out on top. But I guess he taught us better than to accept the superficial without probing deeper.

It’s a terrible loss for the literary world, of course, but for many people it’s much more than that. Through his writing, through his teaching, and through his character, Dave touched a lot of people in a way that belies his (ill-considered) reputation as an ironist. We’ll miss him very much.

After three years in New England, I’m back living in Washington, DC. And I will have lots of free time for a few weeks, at least. So who wants to go to a Nationals game sometime? Or to watch football at a bar? Or just go to a bar?

Also, does anyone want to buy my futon?

One of the reasons I’m so busy right now is that I’m trying to find a place to live in Washington DC. Finding a place is annoying enough generally, but it’s especially aggravating this time because I’m not in DC, and can’t actually see these places in person. So I’m spending a lot of time trolling craigslist, trying to sift the useful listings from the ugly, overpriced, desolate, and creepy ones. Not to mention the thinly-veiled ads.

Which is all to say that I’m getting really sick of seeing listings claiming that apartments are three blocks from the metro when anyone who knows the city (or, um, has ever been to the apartment) knows that it’s at least seven blocks away. And that’s a generous calculation. It’s not three blocks, it’s never been three blocks, and unless they pave over Willard, Swann, Riggs, and Corcoran streets, it will never be three blocks. So we’re talking about brazen deceit here, not “putting yourself in the best light” or however we characterize the piddling inaccuracies that riddle our resumes and facebook profiles.

Now, in the bad old days, this kind of thing might have been more effective. But we’re a bit better equipped to assess these claims. Why bother lying, when the truth is so easy to suss out? I Guess We’ll Never Know.

Okay. Here are the dates I will be in these places. Please let me know if you want to hang out with me in these places, and if you want to give me a place to sleep in these places (except Seattle, Boston, and DC, where I already have a place to stay).

July 31-August 1:
I will be in the Los Angeles area. I don’t know whether I will be able to get into the city, but it is a possibility.

August 1-August 4:
Oakland/Berkeley/San Francisco

August 4-August 7:
Vancouver, Canada (WHAT IS THERE TO DO IN VANCOUVER?)

August 7-August 10:
Seattle

August 10-August 20:
Detroit and other parts of Michigan (also, possibly, Windsor or other parts of Canada)

August 20-August 31:
Boston (putting everything I own in a box)

September 1-forever:
Washington, DC

I just read a really good piece in Slate: Is This Tantrum on the Record? The ground rules for writing about your kids. Emily Bazelon describes her qualms about writing about her son:

What are the ground rules for writing about your kids, especially on the Internet, with its freewheeling meanness and permanent archive? Will my kids be embarrassed by these pieces at a certain point? Will a bully or (perhaps less plausibly) a college admissions office one day use the foibles I’ve revealed against them? Or will the kids just decide they’d have preferred to speak for themselves? Is there a point at which any good parent should stop?

When I write about my kids, I’m not only thinking as their mother. I’m also thinking as a professional writer. Those two identities don’t always align—they just don’t. I like to think that when there’s tension, I err on the side of protecting my kids’ interests, steering clear of any material that’s too embarrassing or private.

The article/column explores these issues adroitly, and touches on a lot of points worth discussing. Can kids even understand this stuff well enough to make an informed decision? Is it exploitative to use your children’s lives as source material?

But I’m going to digress a bit from the topic of writing about one’s children and talk instead about Facebook and the First Amendment.

Well, not fishin’, exactly. More like… studying for an incredibly important test that I really don’t want to fail. So I’m going to take a little time off of blogging to focus on preparing for the bar exam. Knowing me, I’ll end up posting occasionally over the next couple of months, but for the most part I’m going to try to keep my nose to the grindstone. Wish me luck. I’ll be back at 100% in August.

A little less than three years ago, I was in the last few months of a job that I knew I’d be leaving. I didn’t have a lot to do (it was quiet–the doldrums of summer–and since I was on my way out, I hadn’t been given much work), and I spent a fair amount of my time starting at my computer waiting for the day to be over. The result of that time was this post about Minesweeper on my livejournal.

Now that I’m a month and a half away from graduating, I find myself unmotivated. It’s not that I don’t have much to do (quite the contrary, actually–I have a ton of work to get done), but I’ve been spending a lot of time screwing around on my computer–keeping up with my RSS feeds, playing solitaire, and, germane to this post, getting reacquainted with my old friend, Minesweeper.

Which is all a long way of saying, rather than write anything new today, I think I’ll just recycle that post. Enjoy this look back at July of 2005, and forgive my younger self’s ornate, doofy prose!