welcome to the animal house (I'm now a college freshman)

Living in Los Angeles is unlike living in any other place, though I've only ever known New York. Los Angeles is seedy: you can see the desolation in photoshoots, but you figure it to be deliberate for the sake of the photograph; no, when you take to the streets you see in the pictures you realize that most of Los Angeles looks like this. (Where were the sun-dappled streets promised you by Paris Hilton's paparazzi photographs? They're about two blocks long, and they're only in Beverly Hills.) Los Angeles is lonely;--then again, it would be folly to expect otherwise from a city intended for cars sooner than for people.

Los Angeles is all right; it's just different. It's cool how fucking intrepid you feel for taking the subway, especially when to do so back home was a matter of survival: you took public transport or you never left your neighborhood.

In any event, I'm back, for better or for worse. I'm not interested in writing as quaintly as possible (ever-so-delicate paragraphs about coffee with milk, about lilac flowers, about the prettiest dress so-and-so just bought off of Etsy)--just about documenting my thoughts, my life, my work as I see fit.

I was about to detail my intentions of buying a Moleskine tomorrow, of actually filling it with observations for once. I then remembered the four LEFTY notebooks I recently bought for my classes: almost as soon as I walked into Genesis Of The Screenplay I began using the green pad not for notes but for sketching out side projects, so I might as well commit myself fully to its reappropriation, yeah? I was never a diarist. But I'm a writer, and every scrap of human interaction I file away can be used later: Facebook foibles, moments of sacrilege, of comic discrepancy in real time. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I am a writer; it's high time I started behaving like it.

I just found out that my favorite song is about a fatal car crash

Mike Bailey Gates took this photograph.


I want to pay Wai Lin Tse to design my room and photograph me in it.

I feel like makeup can turn you into a fictional character

I'd like to incorporate style and beautiful styling into Good Prattle magazine but the unfortunate truth of things is that Good Prattle is not a fashion publication; it's a culture publication, and our DIY aesthetic (forcibly imposed by our $0 budget) doesn't allow us to play around with styling as much as I would like.

The first issue bears the theme of Youth in Revolt. I wonder what the theme of the second issue is going to be.

I'd like to have a big fucking Mardi Gras party with lots of glorious French Horn music.

If I could design my office, it would include loads of posters.

I have loads of posters in my bedroom, actually, including a Persepolis movie poster; a signed print of a Norton Wisdom painting; a NaNoWriMo poster; and a handmade Good Prattle poster that reads "The only way to make a magazine better for the advertiser is to make it better for the reader." In my closet there's a Breakfast At Tiffany's movie poster; a poster from an Andy Warhol exhibit; one from an Art Spiegelman exhibit; and at least one or two posters that I bought from a Parisian street vendor. These I am saving for... I'm not sure. College or something.

I'm a second semester high school senior now and I'm sick of schoolwork. Let's have an enormous house party for Mardi Gras with lots of beads and costumes and fantastic music. Mardi Gras is on February 16th this year. We ought to make this happen; it'll be fabulous.

Jack Kerouac

I'd like to live the sort of life about which you feel compelled to keep a diary that (once the events it chronicles have long since occurred) you then feel compelled to publish into the sort of novel (after, of course, changing the names of your easily-offended friends) that college students around the world obsessively dog-ear and highlight in coffeehouses in their spare time. Isn't that a good goal?

Ignore me. I apologize. I'll retreat to my Anais Nin erotica.

I'm about to eat a cupcake, I think.

My favorite movie this decade was Pride & Prejudice: A Latter-Day Comedy. This gem of a modernized Mormon Jane Austen film is very pink and enjoyable; in my soul of souls, after seeing this film, I wished I were a Mormon student at Brigham Young University. I nursed this secret for several long years, but I didn't give up coffee, which I eventually realized I liked too much to relinquish (as a proper Mormon would be obligated to do). After this realization, I started looking for a different secret to nurse. Like the mama of a suckling pig. The secret being the suckling pig itself. I had to find a new suckling pig after I gave the old one up for adoption. In that I abandoned my furtive dreams of Mormonism.

This is 2010: let's welcome the new decade by revisiting our old daydreams about life as a Latter-Day Saint.

I like old men.

No, silly, I don't mean to imply that I engage in sexual relations with such people in the context of questionable circumstances. I mean that I love Jim Haynes and that I met a 65-year-old English gent named Peter in a cafe this weekend with whom I then proceeded to converse for almost two hours.

Peter and I discussed the novel Bright Lights, Big City; the advantages of the English schooling system over the American schooling system (as well as the reverse); the suckage of the NYC public transportation system in comparison to that of every other major city in the world; and a variety of other worthwhile topics.

Older individuals are fascinating people and they are far more likely to have seen the world than a twenty-year-old. Who am I kidding? At 17 years old I'm a novice!