I’m Amanda. I’ve got wide eyes, a smart mouth, and a MetroCard. And I’m not afraid to use them.
Alas, no inclusion of “waiting on line,” instead of “waiting in line,” but I say a lot of this.
If you’re still into “Shit ___________ Say,” check out my contribution, Shit Shiksas Say. It’s a joint project with a TV writer friend from L.A.
Can you tell which tweets are from a Jewish guy and which are from an actual shiksa?
I know it’s all over now, but in case you’re wondering… I still don’t like Christmas. I want to foreclose on gingerbread houses and silence the godawful music. (By the way, this song is about date rape, not holiday spirit.) I want to boycott shops with gaudy decorations. And yeah, I sort of want to tell kids the truth about Santa. Gently!
Instead, I spent most of December thinking about my second annual I-don’t-care-about-Christmas advent calendar. Here’s what I did:
But this makes me feel better about it.
Okay, I guess it’s not that bad.
I have a few terrible stories about renting in NYC.
Like the time the single light in my Central Park West studio kept burning out, and the super didn’t believe me and left me to live in the dark for days at a time.
Or the time a different pervy super tried to walk in on me in the shower and then implied that I had an incestuous relationship with my dad.
But Kelly, my friend/mentor/blog Samaritan, has the best horror stories. I mean that in general. If horror stories were apartments, she’d have a whole building somewhere in Brooklyn. And if apartment horror stories were contests, which Curbed has gone ahead and done, she’d be story number three.
Happy Halloween!
The scary news is that I haven’t really left my apartment in three days, due to bad weather and lots of work. It snowed slushy, nasty snow-like precipitation on Saturday. I loved it, because it made me feel better about skipping Halloween parties. Now it’s just cold. Well, it looks cold from inside, and my heater’s on.
The nostalgic news is that this was my best Halloween costume ever. My step-grandmother sewed it out of a highly synthetic material that gives me the itchies just thinking about it. You can tell what I was, right?
Which do you like better?
The Band of Horses original?
Is that first walk up to you, my face growing more familiar with each step. I look different, but not much. The circumstances and lighting are most of it.
It’s autumn now. It’s been months. How has it been months? What have I been doing?
And it’s always nothing. I was sad sometimes and crazy, chest-thumpingly happy other times. But mostly I was just normal. That sounds disappointing, but it wasn’t. I hardly noticed nothing amazing was happening to me.
Dorothy Parker said, “I hate writing. I love having written.”
I second that.
I recently read Steve Hely’s How I Became A Famous Novelist, a novel about a slacker who decides to get rich by writing a lowbrow novel that will appeal to the masses. I’ve joked about doing the same thing.
A few weeks ago, I went to a speaking event by the screenwriting team responsible for Night at the Museum, Taxi (with Jimmy Fallon - not to be confused with the Scorcese gem Taxi Driver), and Reno 911! The guys were really down-to-earth, honest, and funny about selling out. (Watch a mock infomercial for their book.)
