depth in frivolity
Rachael Hodder is a graduate of Michigan State University and holds a Bachelor of Arts in American Studies. Don't be fooled by the ambiguous degree! Rachael is a skilled writer, voracious web researcher, social media whiz, and pop culture junkie. These are all totally useful skills that make her extremely functional in the world and overall, an asset to humanity. To see Rachael's skills in action, please see her academic portfolio which includes some of her best design and writing projects.

Can I skip to the next grade?

It hit me. Hard in the face.

It hit me as I left the restaurant with my friends tonight that I am so bored with everything. The only reason I stayed out so long is because I wanted to see a band that had been setting up since shortly after I got there. Their set started as my friends decided it was time to leave.

Whatever, I guess. All I wanted was my bed by then.

I departed from my friends hurriedly.

——

It frustrates me when what I say is met with “Yeah” or “Mhmm” or “I know” or some other affirmative, but disinterested, dismissive answer.

It frustrates me more when I resign myself to those pithy little words. But it’s a pre-emptive resignation: why try if no one else will?

Does conversation exist? What has happened to those skills? Are we all so vapid that we don’t even make an effort to challenge ourselves with the task of understanding someone else?

Am I so self-centered and elitist that I can’t have a conversation with anyone who doesn’t ~get~ what I mean? Maybe. Is there anything really to ~get~ in what I say? Sometimes.

——

“One Step at a Time” by Jordin Sparks was on the radio.

You wanna show the world, but no one knows your name yetWonder when and where and how you’re gonna make it
You know you can if you get the chance
In your face as the door keeps slamming
Now you’re feeling more and more frustrated
And you’re getting all kind of impatient waiting

Relevant.

——

I’m like that kid in first grade who already knows how to read and has decided to see what glue tastes like for fun.

Ready for something new and something good.

YOU GUYS I HAD THIS ISSUE OF TEEN PEOPLE juliasegal: Aaliyah and Justin Timberlake (via glitteringcloud9)

YOU GUYS

I HAD THIS ISSUE OF TEEN PEOPLE

juliasegal:

Aaliyah and Justin Timberlake (via glitteringcloud9)

~CAN’T GET U OUTTA MY HEAD~

~CAN’T GET U OUTTA MY HEAD~

First thought: MONTAUK MONSTER. thedailywhat: Sad, Hairless Bear Is Sad of the Day: Leipzig Zoo vets have been unable to determine what caused Dolores (above) and all other female Spectacled Bears in captivity to suddenly go bald. From the Daily Mail: Some experts believe it could be due to a genetic defect though the animals do not seem to be suffering from any other affliction.The bears, which originate from South America,  normally have fluffy dark brown fur and would now be growing a thicker fur coat to keep warm during the winter.

First thought: MONTAUK MONSTER.

thedailywhat:

Sad, Hairless Bear Is Sad of the Day: Leipzig Zoo vets have been unable to determine what caused Dolores (above) and all other female Spectacled Bears in captivity to suddenly go bald.

From the Daily Mail:

Some experts believe it could be due to a genetic defect though the animals do not seem to be suffering from any other affliction.

The bears, which originate from South America,  normally have fluffy dark brown fur and would now be growing a thicker fur coat to keep warm during the winter.

Pitchfork on Weezer's Raditude

the record’s teen-boy empowerment message doesn’t have much to offer anyone over 13 years old. Perhaps the proper fictional character to reference isn’t Peter Pan, but Matthew McConaughey’s Wooderson from Dazed and Confused—we all get older, Rivers Cuomo stays the same age.
For once I actually liked an album review from Pitchfork!

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
  • 39 Plays

icanseenewyorkcityfrommyhouse:

Deer Tick - Beautiful Girls

Swoon. Yes, that “Beautiful Girls.”

oh daaaaaaaang.

truth be told, i love the original too.

but this cover brings it home right to where it needs to be.

The pros and cons of ketchup

pros

-decent dipping agent for french fries at the bar

-best in tiny packets from fast food retaurants

-second best from pneumatic ketchup dispensers seen only at McDonald’s

cons

-slimy

-red; stains

-condensation in the bottle collects and then gets everything wet and slightly ketchup flavored

-tastes bad

-why do people like it?

-seriously inappropriate on eggs, pasta, sausage, chicken (I KNOW)

-IT IS SLIMY GLOP.

-how long has it been since those squeeze bottles at the bar have been washed?

-cap crust

-people who DROWN things in it

-i want to puke

My response to this email that I didn’t send involves nostalgia and an audible “aaawwwww.” When I was a student, I would only pick shifts to sub with supervisors I liked. If that one guy who was a dick was the sup or the dude who always brought his scary GF were sup’ing then I was not so interested in the extra cash. By this time in the semester, the student staff at my current job has figured out who is cool and who is not (aka who will let them stay on the clock even though they’re basically done working, who will let them leave early, who is on a powertrip, who smells bad, etc) and it’s funny to remember that dynamic of my old student jobs. I have no idea if the supervisor listed is “cool” or not (he might be; he is usually happy to help me by posting things), but it made me laugh.

My response to this email that I didn’t send involves nostalgia and an audible “aaawwwww.”

When I was a student, I would only pick shifts to sub with supervisors I liked. If that one guy who was a dick was the sup or the dude who always brought his scary GF were sup’ing then I was not so interested in the extra cash.

By this time in the semester, the student staff at my current job has figured out who is cool and who is not (aka who will let them stay on the clock even though they’re basically done working, who will let them leave early, who is on a powertrip, who smells bad, etc) and it’s funny to remember that dynamic of my old student jobs. I have no idea if the supervisor listed is “cool” or not (he might be; he is usually happy to help me by posting things), but it made me laugh.

HOW DID I GET HERE

Pancake and bacon strip.

I watched How I Met Your Mother last night with my roommate. She’d never seen it before and I watch religiously.

All was going well for the first 15 minutes. I laughed, roommate laughed.

And then “Pancake and bacon strip” happened.

As soon as Marshall exclaimed that was all Lily made for Sunday breakfast, I burst out laughing hysterically. This was not just a good solid “HA!” This was kind of a scary giggle that involved spastic movement and ended with a trailing “Haha haaaa…”

My roommate did not laugh. Not one peep.

I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m crazy now, but it’s entirely possible that she’s just not as awesome as me.

[For the record, I really like word humor. Current favorite word is naps because the only thing better than nap is plural nap, naps! Pancakes and bacon strips are a good breakfast, but pancake and bacon strip are bleak and sad and pathetic.]

I am clearly more awesome.

I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion…. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined…. Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.
Benedict Anderson on the nation as an “imagined community”

Monday mornings

My Monday morning routine has taken shape so that I have developed a Monday morning routine. I’ve never had a routine for any particular, so this is a new development in my life.

I wake up at 8am which is shortly after my roommate leaves for work. This is convenient mostly because it means I don’t have to find pants to put on before I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth. Sometime between brushing my teeth and making coffee, the chill that creeps into the house overnight coerces me into putting on pants.

When the coffee finishes brewing, I settle in on our always-cold-to-the-touch leather couch and dig into the DVR for last night’s episode of Mad Men. I do enjoy watching it in the evenings when it airs, but I find that I become impatient with the show’s slow-as-molasses storytelling and by the second half, I have stopped paying attention and then I usually miss any revelations in the story or key foreshadowings. Unpleasant, because then I have to deal with online viewing and that terrible 70 minutes business on MegaVideo.

Rather than taking in the show while I am fending off sleep, I prefer now to gradually wake up to the haunting theme music and let my wheels start turning while I put the meaning of all of this together in my head. This week’s episode featured Roger’s daughter’s highly anticipated wedding taking place the day after John Kennedy was assassinated.

Titled “The Grown-Ups,” this episode was highly satisfying for the meaning junkie within… and the history buff and the postmodernist and the drama queen, et cetera, et cetera!

The televisions! Everywhere! It’s like they’re watching us watching them and damn, that’s so postmodern it hurts! It felt like looking into a mirror. I have worn those same expressions while watching this show. I have worn those expressions while watching all kinds of soap-y television shows! Just last week when Betty confronted Don about his tiny drawer of big, fat secrets my eyes widened and I drew my hand over gaping jaw, my stomach turning. And who could forget when Lauren cried about her crumbling friendship with Audrina?! I fidgeted with the collar of my shirt and stared at the TV, eyebrows furrowed wondering if they would ever work it out and save their friendship. Poor LC! I hope she pulls through!

We saw the TV become an altar in this episode of Mad Men. We saw heartbroken Americans mourn for the Kennedy family at the foot of their televisions.

All day, I haven’t been able to get that image out of my head: people crowded around a TV, concerned, for the moment at least, about what’s on. People have always been crowded around something—a guy on a podium, a kid with newspapers, radios, buffets, kitchen tables, whatever—but this episode showed the dawn of a powerful cultural institution, the standing authority on all that is holy in America: The Television.

What is the experience of watching TV? It serves as a stand-in for experience often. See: the Travel Channel, et al. An experience of an experience. Experience is condensed to an essence and output in colors and sounds and electromagnetic waves.

The experience of watching the Kennedy story unfold on TV must have been kind of like what watching 9/11 on TV was for my generation. It seems so cliche the way we heard. I was in Advanced Algebra and we had just finished a test and were goofing off. A kid from a neighboring classroom ran in and said that a plane hit the World Trade Center. My teacher instantly turned on CNN. Minutes later in homeroom, I watched the second plane crash. We watched TV all day.

I don’t remember what I did when I got home or what my mom said. The image of people suffocating in rubble haunted me for some time. There is also a distinct memory of being annoyed that every TV channel had been taken over by the news. Even though he is a year younger than me, then 14, I was afraid that my brother would be drafted and would die. That whole time is a blur. We watched TV everywhere.

9/11 became a universally shared moment and so was the Kennedy assassination. The death of Michael Jackson is a big one from this year and the election of Barack Obama last year. The TV makes us feel like we’ve all got the same memory, but what “The Grown-Ups” showed us is that the experience is different around the table. These events mean a lot of different things to everyone and while we’re all seeing the same pictures and hearing the same words, the experience of the experience is a mosaic. Fractured and multitudinous.

As I watched the secretaries and suits watch Walter Cronkite announce the president’s death, I couldn’t help but feel some of the horror and shock of that moment with them. How terrible to see the president’s slumped body and hysterical wife on television. The moment was punctuated by Don Draper walking into an empty office floor and the multitude of ringing phones.

Do you think that’s what the inside of Don’s head sounds like?

[So tired. Revisit this later this week, maybe.]

Looking up (via r4chael) I am sort of in love with my ceiling. It is just plain white, but the texture is really soothing to look at. Also, it’s done by hand—each swoop is different. Love. It.

Looking up (via r4chael)

I am sort of in love with my ceiling. It is just plain white, but the texture is really soothing to look at. Also, it’s done by hand—each swoop is different. Love. It.

My thoughts on this weeks Mad Men episode are coming later today. While watching it this morning, it reminded me of a line out of Take the Cannoli, which is the last book I read. Vowell wrote, in a piece about Disneyland, “I’m a meaning junkie, but lately the whole country’s been on symbolism alert.” The context of the line is irrelevant—what I mean to say is that I’m a meaning junkie too. I like to draw connections and speculate and see if I can figure what might’ve been meant by something. Even though I know—believe—that meaning is constructed by a reader, I still get some satisfaction from trying to figure out what the writer meant. It gives me a feeling of being in on the joke or you know… like, smart.

My thoughts on this weeks Mad Men episode are coming later today.

While watching it this morning, it reminded me of a line out of Take the Cannoli, which is the last book I read. Vowell wrote, in a piece about Disneyland, “I’m a meaning junkie, but lately the whole country’s been on symbolism alert.” The context of the line is irrelevant—what I mean to say is that I’m a meaning junkie too. I like to draw connections and speculate and see if I can figure what might’ve been meant by something. Even though I know—believe—that meaning is constructed by a reader, I still get some satisfaction from trying to figure out what the writer meant. It gives me a feeling of being in on the joke or you know… like, smart.

This is probably one of the most un-subtle playlists I have ever made. Like, I’m not sure if anyone I know would even get it, but listening to this today, I felt kind of embarrassed by how much it said to me about who I was when I made it and the person I had in mind that I’d hoped would listen to it. Maybe these songs seem sort of arbitrary, but to me, each one is super meaningfulish (even such frat-y choices like Mr. Jones and Hey Jealousy) and they all express something that I didn’t want to actually say to someone, but I wanted them to know about me. … Sometimes I think the “mixtape” is such an innocuous thing. To me, this is a message about a moment, but to someone else it’s all just songs. No matter how painstakingly you assemble the thing, there is always the possibility (or plain reality) that someone just won’t get it. So lame. I think I do better with just words.

This is probably one of the most un-subtle playlists I have ever made. Like, I’m not sure if anyone I know would even get it, but listening to this today, I felt kind of embarrassed by how much it said to me about who I was when I made it and the person I had in mind that I’d hoped would listen to it.

Maybe these songs seem sort of arbitrary, but to me, each one is super meaningfulish (even such frat-y choices like Mr. Jones and Hey Jealousy) and they all express something that I didn’t want to actually say to someone, but I wanted them to know about me.

…

Sometimes I think the “mixtape” is such an innocuous thing. To me, this is a message about a moment, but to someone else it’s all just songs. No matter how painstakingly you assemble the thing, there is always the possibility (or plain reality) that someone just won’t get it.

So lame.

I think I do better with just words.