by Wendy
Tuesday, August 21: I’ll be at Funny Ha-Ha at the Hideout, 1354 Wabansia, Chicago. See me, Alpana Singh, Mark Bazer, and more! Starts at 7pm, $5 suggested donation (goes to charity!).
Thursday, August 23: I’ll be doing the Fixx Reading Series, hosted by Amy Guth. 7:30 pm at The Fixx Coffee Bar, 3053 N Sheffield, Chicago.
And hey! If you want map information and email or RSS notification of future readings (like the one I’ll be doing in October!), check out my author page at BookTour.com.
by Wendy
Tonight I will likely be drinking at May Fest. Additionally, Chris and I will surely be hitting the game booths there and trying to win some traditional German cardboard -framed-mirrors- with-the- Playboy-logo- on-them. We need to decorate this new apartment, you know.
Tomorrow, I’ll be at the Printer’s Row Book Fair, where I’m doing a joint event with Jen Lancaster at 4:00 pm at the Heartland Stage. (Which is where you’ll be if you’re going to see Augusten Burroughs at 2:30, so kindly stick around.) I believe Jen and I will be in “conversation,” answering questions about how we made our weblogs into books, and also discussing this book we’re totally going to write together, I’m Not Bitter Is the New Black Me.
And if you’re going to be at the fair but can’t catch me on Saturday, or don’t want to wait in the autograph line, you can stop by The Book Cellar booth on Polk Street, because I signed a bunch of copies of both my books, and Suzy and Carolyn will be selling them there.
On Sunday, you can read my latest True-Life Tale in the NY Times Magazine. (I mean, you can read it online now, but it’s in the Sunday paper.) You do not even know how excited I am that a picture of freaky glam-era Brian Eno is in the Sunday Times magazine. I know, it’s not like people tend to know him on sight and for just a fleeting moment it’s hard not think that’s a drawing of Eliza Dushku. But still!
(If you’re wondering what that Eno song sounds like, you can listen to brief samples here and here and here. You will find that it sounds quite lovely when played on your office computer in twenty-second intervals. It sounds different when played in a dive bar in sixty-one-minute intervals.)
In the meantime, I’ll continue to pack and go through the crap in my apartment. I am never buying anything ever again.
by Wendy
In a few weeks Chris and I are moving to Ravenswood Manor. Not Ravenswood Manor, the haunted Mansion at Paris Disneyland, as awesome as that would be. (Though it’s odd that it’s not occupied by French ghosts. Because wouldn’t you pay to be haunted by Serge Gainsbourg? I know I would.) No: the Ravenswood Manor we’re moving to is the exceedingly cute Chicago neighborhood a little west of where I live now. It’s a magical land with ground-level CTA tracks, rivers, and governors running through it, and if you don’t know where the hell you’re going when you drive around there, you will be caught in a dizzying mobius strip of bungalows and lilac bushes. And then eventually one of the streets will spit you out in Albany Park, where you never have to worry about finding someplace to buy an international phone card. We can’t wait.
So here are two orders of business for you local folks: First, if anyone is looking for a great place in Lincoln Square (SUNNY 1 BR: STEPS TO PRK, EL, JEWEL, ETC. HEAT INCL; H/W FL, LNDRY; COURTYD BLDG), let me know. Second, we’d love to hear moving company recommendations. We’ve looked online a little bit and have heard/read a whole range of things about That Company With the Green Trucks and we’re wondering about some of the other local professional movers. And the “get all your friends together and pay them with beer” option probably won’t work, because the amount of beer that would make the effort worthwhile is exactly the same amount of beer that makes boxes of expensive stuff extra slippery.
And if you haven’t noticed the sidebar lately, I have readings coming up soon. Oh, and go read my friend Jami’s story over at Nerve, and then pre-order her book. It’s only Tuesday, you know; you might need a good dirty story to get you through the week.
by Wendy
This weekend I have been up to my teeth in doing promotional stuff–stuff which of course I can’t discuss without further promoting the thing I’m promoting, even though I promised myself I wouldn’t just write about promotional stuff on this site.
So instead I will tell you about how I was on my way to this record fair on Saturday to visit Chris (who was selling records there, because he has a lot of records, and if he wanted to he could build himself a bunker out of records and sit inside it listening to more records while eating records, like that’s how many records) and see if he needed me to run and get change or a sandwich, because he doesn’t really eat records.
I passed a man on the sidewalk outside the building. He asked, “You going to the record fair?” Yes, I told him. Then he barked, “WELL, DON’T BOTHER. I BOUGHT ALL THE GOOD STUFF.”
And I rolled my eyes and I walked by and thought but I’m not buying records, you dunderdick and couldn’t help but feel a little indignant that he had to spit that little gob of hubris in my direction. Why couldn’t he keep his totally imaginary schadenfreude to himself? The only good response to a person like that is to travel twenty seconds backwards in time and tell him to shut up in advance.
I am glad it’s spring but I swear, this is the coldest time of the year for me, when the wind blows more and the building-controlled radiators run less, and the heady mix of bright sunlight and icy breeze makes me squinty and strangely exhausted. I’d tell you to wake me up in June, but I have so much to do between now and then, I’d better stay awake.
by Wendy
I have another essay in the NY Times Magazine Funny Pages this week. Read it and be glad you don’t live on my street.
by Wendy
The flight back on Monday night was delayed three hours, because I guess Newark is always like that. I like that it was long enough to justify spending seven bucks on aiport WiFi so I could upload the last batch of photos. I didn’t like getting in so late that Chris and I had to scrap our plans to watch The Warriors and pretend that we recognized the subway stops.
It was a good trip. We spent more on Metrocards than on cabs. We went to that place where that one guy makes pizzas all by himself and everyone stands around watching sadly until they get a slice. I got to make devious plans for the new book. (I’ll show you the cover soon.) I went to see the Girlbomb reading and I bought the book and read the whole thing (and you should, too, and then check out Janice’s old journal entries, which will quietly blow your mind). We went to the Museum of Television and Radio and watched many old things, though I was a little disappointed that they didn’t have the episode of Fantasy Island that scared the crap out of me when I was a kid (the one I described in paragraph 3 of this old TWoP recap). I suppose I was also a little relieved.
Two final questions about New York, both animal-related, one of them hypothetical: 1.) Are there really that many pugs in the West Village, or do people bring them from other parts of the city just to walk them there? 2.) Say you’re waiting on a mostly empty subway platform and you look over and see a rat across the tracks, skittering around happily on its own deserted stretch of platform, and then you see a very nicely dressed woman coming down the stairs and choosing not to stand at the busier end of the platform and instead striding over to the empty end, into rat territory. Do you try to shout across the tracks and warn her? (Okay, maybe this is not hypothetical.) (And no, I wasn’t on the rat side of the tracks.) (And yes, there are rats in Chicago, too, and they come with their own dramatic possibilties.)
And finally finally: come to the reading in Oakbrook on Thursday. Which, by the time you read this, will be tonight.
