Fearsome Foursome

I just got back from watching The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 with one of my best girlfriends (yes, she and I and two others have matching tattoos of lips on our left butt cheeks; we’re classy ladies, I know), and I got to thinking about girls and groups of four.  What is it about female groups of four friends?  Is it that we form foursomes because we so often see them in the media or is it that the media is simply saw these fabulous four-groups of women and saw huge potential?

In any case, it is an interesting kind of phenomenon.  Sure, groups of four lend themselves to drama.  Sex and the City, Little Women, even The View, have four women talking and not talking, agreeing and disagreeing, fighting and loving each other.  In every case the four women are significantly different, and yet they all turn out to be such good friends.  Sex and the City we all know and love, the pessimist (Miranda), the optimist (Charlotte), the writer (Carrie), and the slutty one (Samantha), who, throughout the course of the show realize that they each have a little bit of the other ones inside of each other.  

In fact, all the four girls movies carry this theme be it in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,Grease (before Sandy joins the Pink Ladies), Now and Then (if you’re my age you know it well),Designing Women or even Golden Girls, all the ladies couldn’t be more different, yet couldn’t love each other more.

It’s the same with my three best girlfriends.  We all come from different backgrounds, different places.  We all behave differently in different situations.  Sometimes we bug the crap out of each other, but we always love each other.  We call each other on our bullshit, we let each other believe the bullshit when we need to, and sometimes we know each other better than we know ourselves.  What is always fun to me is when we try to discover ourselves within our onscreen counterparts.

I was lucky enough to have lived with my three girls in college and in that time we made what can only be referred to as an urban family.  We were shoulders to cry on when boys broke our hearts, we poked fun when certain bodily fluids from certain gentlemen callers ended up on articles of clothing and whatnot, and we were there when we just needed to be crazy.  In fact, we’re still there for all of that.  We’ll still go see the Sisterhood, sneak in and drink a bottle of champagne on a Thursday afternoon, and come out talking about how much we all miss each other, how much we want to all be together when these kind of movies come out.  And it doesn’t feel like a socialized construct for the four of us to be friends, but is it?  Are we just a product of reading Louisa May Alcott or seeing Golden Girls, are we a product of watching Now and Then ad naseum as kids, are we products of numerous nights of Sex and the City and cosmopolitans?  Or is something older, something more primitive and primal at work?  Are we like the women of yore who hunted and gathered in groups of four (did they even hunt and gather in groups of four?  did they hunt and gather?)?

What’s the deal with the foursomes?  

Peace, Love, and Sisterhoods,

Julia

P.S. Perhaps I’ll have to write about threesomes (and not the naughty kind) someday where we will discuss Charlie’s Angels, Crossroads (starring Britney Spears), Clueless and Mean Girls, among others.  

Like an Old Friend, Come and See Me Again

The CW is finally capitalizing on the thing that made the WB and Fox successful networks, teens.  If you haven’t heard the good news, The CW is working on a companion for Gossip Girl and they made the original idea of a spin-off.  Okay, okay, spin-offs aren’t original, but a spinoff of a show that ended eight years ago, and was at its peak about five years before that, is somewhat unheard of.

So what exactly is The CW spinning off?  Only one of my all time favorite shows, Beverly Hills 90210.  Cue the theme song and the beautiful people.  Oh, and did I mention the clincher.  It’s being written by none other than the man who wrote Veronica Mars (another fav of mine), Rob Thomas.  Basically, this is my dream show.  

Teen Drama.  Check.

Possible cameos by 90210 alum.  Check.

Good Writing.  Check.

I must say, as much as I love the realistic high school shows, it sends my little heart atwitter when I get some good soapy unrealistic drama.  And, to top it all off, this version of 90210 isn’t all upper class white kids.  Apparently, there will be other races mixed in as well.  That means we don’t have to have a one off episode where a competing school newspaper editor, who happens to be black, teaches the Peach Pit crowd about race.  Oh no, we get week after week of racial tension, as well as the inevitable alcoholic/drug addict plotline, the pregnancy scares, the running to Mexico with your boyfriend, and the conspicuously absent parents.  

Yes, T.V. is hurting for viewers after the strike (apparently people discovered that there is life beyond T.V.), but with any luck, they’ll be reeled back in with gems like this.  I know I will.

Peace, Love, and Peach Pit After Dark,

Julia

Ages of Innocence

I’m sitting here watching Walk The Line for the 3 millionth time and I can’t help but thinking that the fifties aren’t as innocent as we all like to think of them as.  And I thought about it a little more and how did the fifties get this rap as a time of innocence?  I mean the major portrayals of the fifties in film are American Graffiti and Grease, and they aren’t exactly innocent little romps (lest we forget the ‘hickey from Kenickie’ line).  The major movies from the fifties include Rebel Without A Cause, Sunset Boulevard and Vertigo to name just a few.  Is it the poodle skirts and saddle shoes?  Maybe the clothes give off the air of innocence, but I am loathe to believe that it is just the clothes that have propagated this whole myth of the innocent fifties.  

So as I’m thinking this to myself, being the good history student I am, I wonder what the truly innocent time was.  And then I came to a stunning realization (or at least I thought it was stunning), there isn’t an innocent time.  If we go back to the forties we were in a devastating war, in the thirties no one had any money, in the twenties no one had any booze (and we had just ended another devastating war).  I spent four years studying how different groups of writers thought they were revolutionary and in ways they were, but they weren’t any more or less innocent than their predecessors or their successors.  I mean we still don’t know how things will turn out.  Will Iraq turn into another Vietnam?  Are we going to make ourselves extinct?  In 10,000 years will someone find some film of Deal or No Deal and come to the conclusion that our society was completely obsessed with humiliating themselves?  Will it be seen as some kind of self-flagellation to go on The Price is Right and act like a crazy person?  Will those societies look at us and say ‘what innocence they had.’  In 50 years, will our quaint cell phone technology and wireless internet look completely ridiculous?  Is any society ever innocent?

Peace, Love, and Walking the Line,

Julia

English Class

I’m sitting here, in my apartment, watching My So-Called Life for thefifty-millionth time and it dawns on me.  On T.V. shows, we rarely seeanything other than English class as an interesting and fun class.  Ican’t think of one T.V. show where characters are in class (be it HighSchool, College, Junior High, etc.) and enjoying it where the class isnot English.There is, of course, a very logical explanation for this.  Writerswrite television and writers loved at least one of their Englishclasses.  And yes, there is always room for parallels between a bookand the theme of a certain episode of a t.v. show.  It says a lotabout characters when they have a favorite book or when they arediscussing literature that correlates to their particular situation,but let’s think about this a little more.  Basically, according totelevision, the only class that anyone can ever have fun in isEnglish.  Now, I don’t know about you, but I had some bad Englishteachers in High School, I had some great ones too, especially inCollege and yes, I did major in Literature (UCSC’s equivalent tomajoring in English), but I remember for much of my youngereducational career English class was a complete nightmare.  Forced toread books I had no interest in…a few pop into mind.  And, though Ilove to do this now, when we were learning how to pick apart texts andget deeper meaning, I wanted to shoot myself.  I distinctly rememberbitching to my mom that we were having to pick apart a text so muchthat it lost all entertainment value.  ’Why can’t I just read it andenjoy it?’  I would plead to rather amused ears.  It wasn’t untillater, after learning how to pick apart writing, that I was able toenjoy it and pick it apart at the same time.Now, I always side with the characters on T.V. who have a greatEnglish class.  I know how great it feels to have amazing discussionsabout Chapter 3 of Bleak House by Dickens (thank you John Jordan).  Iknow how great it feels to argue about Brett and Jake and theirrelationship in The Sun Also Rises.  But for you that aren’t soEnglish-ly inclined (like that new word…Shakespeare invented words,so do I), I wonder how it feels to constantly have English beingportrayed as the best class when you’re not an English person.  Whatof those that are more mathematically inclined or biologicallyinclined?  I mean sure there’s usually the token, dissecting frogsbiology scene, but do you science people feel left out?  Do the mathpeople feel like Calculus doesn’t get its due?  I personally canrelate to the English scenes but is it Chemistry discrimination?Peace, Love, and Literature,Julia

Was God a Writer?

Wow.  That’s what I have to say about the response to my last piece ofwriting.  Wow.  You guys really came through and I think you answeredmy question.  Basically, like all things in history it’s a little ofboth, this decade is partially monumental change, as was theseventies, and partially feels like monumental change because I amchanging monumentally at the moment.  But there have been other thingson my mind as well.  I’m coming to find that being in your twentiesmeans you start making big decisions that may or may not effect therest of your life, and there’s really no way to know which decisionswill effect the rest of your life and which decisions just seem big atthe time and actually aren’t that big.  It’s all pretty confusing andfrustrating.It’s like, your whole life people say that being a teenager is hard,and you get there, and it is, but you expect it to get better and itturns out that being a teenager was just preparation for the realchallenge, which is actually being a person in the world.  My friendand I got in an argument today because I told him that I didn’t wantto be classified as ‘adult,’ I don’t think of myself as an adult, andI never want to be an adult.  I don’t want responsibility.  I don’twant kids or a husband.  I don’t want any of it.  I want to be able topack up and move to a different country with a moments notice.  I wantto decide to go to Seattle for the weekend, and three weeks later bein Seattle.  I want to decide that can survive on less money byworking less and actually do it.  I don’t want to be responsible foranyone but myself.But what happens when you start making decisions like that?  I madethe decision to try and be a writer.  But what does that mean?  Iwrite everyday.  When I feel satisfied with something I have written Iwill send it out and try to get it sold or published, but who knows ifthat will happen or not.  Have I doomed myself to a life of odd jobsbecause I cannot imagine a life behind a desk?  Have I doomed myselfto a life where I actually have conversations that revolve around thenotion that I actually may make little enough money to qualify forfood stamps?  The short answer is probably yes.  The thought ofsitting behind a desk makes me want to kill myself, and the thought ofdoing something completely uncreative makes me want to gouge my owneyes out, but what does that mean for the life I chose?  This is thepoint where I say ‘I guess we’ll see.’  Then I stop thinking about it.Truth be told, this is not what has been eating at me lately.  Truthbe told, my actual dilemma is a much more profound one.  What is therole of the artist in society?  So I’ve made this decision to write,because really it’s all I can do.  But does it matter?  In a worldwhere we face huge catastrophe due to Global Warming; in a world wheremen my age are dying in yet another mistake of a war;  in a worldwhere my best friend cannot get married (even if he wanted to) becauseof the fact that he is a man who happens to sleep with other men, whatis the purpose of the writer or artist?  Sure Rousseau changed thecourse of French history, but am I really that egotistical to thinkthat I have any sort of connection, that I could change anything withmy writing?  I would love to think this could be true, but it isn’t.In literature we often talk about the writer as god.  And many writersactually have a kind of a god complex.  I mean basically, as a writer,you spend your time creating a world and then making everybody in itdo exactly what you want them to.  You have complete control over awhole world of people.  It’s a very powerful and addicting feeling.You might write a situation that you yourself faced and change thedynamic or certain elements and reshape the outcome to something moreconducive to your own wants or needs.  So writers spend all this timeplaying God, but do they really change anything?On the flip side, I think about the books I read as a lost kid.  Bookslike Catcher in the Rye or On The Road; these books made me feel lessalone, less like I was the only person facing any of these moraldilemmas.  Same goes for Television writing: My So-Called Life made mefeel less like I was the only teenager that had problems with friendsODing on drugs or who couldn’t stand their parents, while trying tofiercely cling to them at the same time.In a world that needs so much help, that needs so much to have peoplenot just observe and critique, but act, is there room for writers?I have no idea, but I certainly hope so.Peace, Love, and Uncertainty,Julia

Full Circle

So storytelling has come full circle.  Finally.  Well, it’s come full circle since the 19th century.  How’s that?  I guess storytelling’s probably been around for a little while, but in the recent present the kind of storytelling I’ve spent the majority of my life studying has come full circle.  You see, I’ve always viewed Dickens and all those writers who wrote novels in Serial form to be the precursor to T.V.  Basically, they were the television shows of their day, their day just didn’t have T.V. technology yet.  I mean think about it, every month two chapters would come out and you had to wait until the next month until the next two chapters came out.  Now, every week, you wait patiently for your favorite show to unfold.  There are methods employed to get you to tune in for the next episode or to buy the next chapter, but really this way of having a story unfold little by little is a 19th Century construct, and, as I said, it has come full circle.  

How?  You might ask.  Well, there’s this weird phenomenon like thing of television shows that don’t do so great on t.v. getting relegated to the web.  It’s happened with a few shows when they got cancelled that they are allowed to play out their remaining episodes on the web, but there are a select few shows that actually are produced specifically for the web, and my new ‘T.V.’ obsession is one of these said shows.  (Big surprise seeing as it comes from the creative minds behind My So-Called Life…and Thirtysomething).  The show is called quarterlife and it’s just absolutely amazing. 

Let’s backtrack a big, shall we?  So psychologist have diagnosed a new sort of phase/ailment, much like a mid-life crisis.  It’s called the quarterlife crisis.  Basically, it’s where we, the twentysomethings realize that everything life was supposed to be it isn’t and we try to cope with that.  We’ve just spent four years in college being promised great things when we leave, only to be brutally slapped in the face when we get jobs that pay about $12/hour, don’t have benefits, and basically require us to sell our souls so we can pay rent.  Now, for adults who are used to this, you might say, ‘get the fuck over it whiners’ but when you are first confronted with this fact it’s a little bit bitter to swallow.  These are the defining traits of a quarterlife crisis according to wikipedia: feeling “not good enough” because one can’t find a job that is at one’s academic/intellectual level, frustration with relationships, the working world, and finding a suitable job or career, confusion of identity, insecurity regarding the near future, insecurity concerning long-term plans, life goals, insecurity regarding present accomplishments, re-evaluation of close interpersonal relationships, disappointment with one’s job, nostalgia for university, college, high school or elementary school life, tendency to hold stronger opinions, boredom with social interactions, loss of closeness to high school and college friends, financially-rooted stress (overwhelming college loans, unanticipatedly high cost of living, etc.), loneliness, desire to have children, a sense that everyone is, somehow, doing better than you.  Welcome to each and every one of my neuroses people.  Except for the children part, I’ve got no desire for one of those.  But this is my point.  Basically, psychologists have actually agreed that this is, much like a mid-life crisis, a very, I’m loathe to say important, part of many young people’s lives.  

So anyway, the show quarterlife, which airs twice a week on myspace, is about people who are in their mid-twenties and are having all these kinds of crises.  Perhaps that’s why I’m so hooked on it, because it feels like My So-Called Life for people my age.  It’s a little less whiny, and a little less genius, but it’s still pretty awesome.  I also kind of like that it’s in 8-15 minute segments.  Basically, any normal T.V. show is broken into acts.  A one hour show has 5 acts.  (you’ll note the act breaks by the fact that there is a commercial between acts).  For quarterlife, each act is a ‘webisode.’  It’s odd how time passing in your actual life can feel like time passing in character’s t.v. life.  So quarterlife feels like it’s been going on forever.  There are 33 ‘webisodes’ which means there have been like 6 episodes of an actual t.v. show.  I feel the exact opposite when watching t.v. on dvd: It feels like things move too fast when I’m watching an entire season in 2 days.  

Back to what I was saying at the beginning of this little email.  Dickens used to release two chapters a month, now we get two ‘webisodes’ a week.  In a weird way, by getting a little bit of a whole episode we are reverting back to Dickens and the serialization of the novel.  Now we have the serialization of the serialized t.v. show.  I love it.  

Peace, Love, and WebTV,

Julia

P.S. quarterlife is starting to actually air on T.V. Sundays at 9 on NBC.  Watch it if you’re interested.  It’s pretty cool

Elitism and the Kindle

I was reading the New Yorker the other day (that’s right, I’ve kept to that little resolution, thank you for the subscription Steve) and there was an article about school kids and how they are reading at an all time low.  Basically children are watching ‘educational’ DVDs and other interactive games instead of reading.  The New Yorker gave the statistic that these kids who are doing this stuff instead of reading have an exponentially lower vocabulary than kids who are reading.  The article doesn’t knock the DVDs and interactive games as a supplement to reading, but they definitely don’t replace reading. 

 

Basically the article went on to say that at the rate we’re going in the future (a somewhat closer future than we may imagine), if we haven’t caused the earth’s ecosystem to completely collapse and we’re still around, there will be an elite reading class of people, and the rest of people will be pretty much functionally illiterate.  The Others will be able to read things like email and they will be able to write, but they will not read books.  They simply won’t.  There will be a class of people that does read literature and everyone else will be basically Movie and TV watching, Blackberry text speaking drones. 

 

Needless to say I found this article to be beyond disturbing.  As long as education stays somewhat above water I am assuming that this will not be the case, but still.  The fact that many people don’t read for pleasure is an alarming fact.  I never really thought about it until I moved to L.A. and made friends out here…some of whom don’t read.  I’ve never had a friend that didn’t read for pleasure. Never.  And I guess I’m actually the weird one to have a pretty reader friendly family.  Even those of you (read dad) who read mostly crap still read.  And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to end up in some sort of uber-reader class of people.  Not to mention the fact that I don’t want to write anything that I can’t refer to other works of literature in; it would actually make it extremely hard to define certain things if you couldn’t call something that was Dickensian, Dickensian.  

So to coincide with this article, the Amazon Kindle has been making news waves as well.  If you don’t know what the Kindle is, it’s like an electronic reading machine.  You can download books to it, you can get a daily newspaper on it, you can order magazines on it.  It’s pretty cool in theory.  My problem is that I like my material books.  I love them in fact.  I like the satisfying feeling I get when I shut the last page of a book.  Also, as a good lit student, I write all over my books so that doesn’t really work on digital screens.  Right now it seems that the only books available on the Kindle are either recommended by Oprah Winfrey (you know how I feel about her) or on a Bestseller list.  Well, that’s all fine and dandy except for the fact that, generally speaking, books on bestseller lists in this country are crap.  I’m sorry, but David Baldacci and Patricia Cornwell are not books that I want to read.  By my logic, at the rate this Kindle book thing is going, we are not only going to have a non-reading group of people, but we will have a group of people that only read trash.  Yeah, I’m elitist when it comes to literature.  But I’m sorry, I have no respect for authors who write the same story with different characters in it over and over again.  That’s just a lack of imagination.  I can understand exploring the same themes from different angles, but the same story over and over, that’s no fun….it’s like CSI or Law and Order….BORING!!!

Sorry, got off topic there a little bit.  Anyway, the way I see it, the Kindle is trying to be like an iPod for books, but the great thing about books, unlike music, is that it actually is a material object with words on a page.  And let’s think about this for a second, when we’ve destroyed the planet and cockroaches are the only things left, and some other species of humanoid-like creatures, discovers books and a rosetta stone like key to decipher the different alphabets, they will be able to read what we’ve read.  That doesn’t work with the kindle if the battery has died after 6000 years.  And even duracell can’t claim that kind of life.

Peace, Love, and Elitism for All, 

Julia

San Francisco Intelligensia

So I’m sorry I’ve been incommunicado for a while.  I’ve decided to work less and oddly enough am not working any less.  Hmmm, thank you parents for instilling me with ridiculous work ethic.  Anyway, I believe when we left our heroine (that would be me) she was all hot and bothered about two lovely lady writers that she looked up to.  Yes, as I predicted Diablo Cody was nominated for that Oscar.  But more importantly I got to hang out with Beth Lisick after her event. 

Beth’s totally the kind of lady you want to go to a super divey bar with, and that’s just what we booksoupers did.  We went to a place called Little Joy in Echo Park, which you wouldn’t know by the sign since it’s been shot out (literally there was a shoot out and a stray bullet hit the sign).  But it was awesome and I got to hang out with a bunch of Bay Area homies who made me miss San Francisco even more. 

This outing and the conversations that ensued got me thinking about intelligensia for some reason.  I remember being in college and having to read about the Russian Intelligensia or the Algonquin Round Table or the Lost Generation of writers and I always thought, why don’t we have those around any more?  You know, even the Beat Generation hung out at divey bars and got drunk together and discussed literature.  What’s up with this generation of writers? 

So after doing a minute bit of research I realized that (as usual) I had simply come to a wrong assumption.  As it turns out a modern intelligensia was sitting right under my nose.  I just had yet to discover it. 

This actually dates back to my culture email a few weeks ago where I promised to start reading ‘The New Yorker’ and ‘Playboy’ to help culture myself further.  In an extension of that I decided that maybe McSweeney’s was the way to high culture.  For those of you who aren’t ridiculously pretentious, McSweeney’s is a publication of Dave Eggers.  It’s a quarterly pretentious lit mag thing and they dress it up all nice and sell it for $25 a pop.  I’m not a huge McSweeneys fan, but they do publish a monthly magazine that I love.  It’s called the Believer and it’s my pretentious lit mag that isn’t quite so high-brow because, let’s face it, I’m a low brow kind of girl.  Anyway, all these publications are located (conveniently enough) on Valencia St. in San Francisco. 

I realized that Dave Eggers, Beth Lisick and, as I soon remembered, Michael Chabon (author of my favorite book ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’ all live in or around San Francisco.  And, after looking on the Believer credits, I realized that authors I love like Vendela Vida and David Foster Wallace (don’t think he lives in the Bay Area) are also associated with what I’m going to term the Golden Gate Circle (I know it’s not original, I made it up right now).  

I have to say, growing up on the West Coast, I’ve always looked Eastward for the intelligensia.  New York, London, Paris, and Vienna always seemed to hold the greatest minds for art and literature, but it seems that smart people are cropping up in California too.  Go us!  For the very first time we have a circle of intellectuals who have congregated here on the ‘Left Coast.’  And I’m extending a message of gratitude to Eggers, Vida, Chabon, Lisick and everyone else for taking us out of the image of the hippie movement to an image of intellectual maturity and excellence.  The Golden Gate Circle is proving that California is more than just a place where wine and plastic surgery come from.  It’s a place where we have culture.  Culture beyond the San Fernando Valley, beyond Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian.  We finally done good.

Peace, Love, and Pretentious Literary Circles,

Julia 

Beth and Diablo Sitting in a Tree

So Diablo Cody just left Booksoup, and I have to admit, I’m a little shaky.   There’s nothing quite like meeting the people you respect and admire.  I guess it comes from having an ultra-feminist mother.  I have all these females that I look up to.  Next one on my list it Beth Lisick.  I’m totally freaking out about her.  She’s a Sunnydale native who went to UCSC and lives in Berkeley, but has lived in the city too.

For those of you who are unaware, I miss San Francisco like crazy.  I love Los Angeles and it is totally my home (in fact, when I went to Santa Cruz for Christmas this year it was the first time it really didn’t feel like home), but I have a major piece of my heart set firmly somewhere in City Lights Bookstore and Vesuvio Bar.  Yeah, that chunk of my heart is some sort of Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, drunken slob who splits it’s time between the coolest bar in the city and the coolest bookstore in the city.  It pretty much sticks to north beach, though sometimes it strays to fisherman’s wharf or Golden Gate Park or Clement St.  I know that someday I’ll move to San Francisco and become one of those pretentious writers who never leaves the city and spends every minute reading McSweeneys and talking about how much cooler the city used to be back in some unknown time when walking at sixth and mission was something you couldn’t even do during the day.

So I’ve been doing what any normal girl would do to cure that ache that inevitably comes from leaving one’s heart in San Francisco.  I read stories that take place there.  Now, I have seen Beth Lisick’s book ‘Everybody into the Pool’ in multiple bookstores and it’s always intrigued me.  The Golden Gate Bridge features prominently on the cover and thus it has piqued my interest multiple times.  But, I don’t want to be that girl who reads a book just because she likes the cover, though that’s usually what attracts me to books in the first place…oh well, I guess I am that girl.  Anyway, about two weeks ago I found out that Beth Lisick was going to be coming into Booksoup so I thought, what a great excuse to read that book I’ve been eyeing for months now.

And now it’s happened, I have yet another female writer who I’m totally freaking out about.  That’s right Beth has joined the ranks of Diablo in becoming a writer I really admire.  Forget the fact that she’s a Banana Slug, which automatically makes her awesome, but she’s a total San Francisco lady and I freaking love it.  She’s everything you could want from a Bay Area writer.  She sometimes works as a Banana passing out fruit on Embarcadero for her friends ‘The Fruit Guys.’   She has no money (something that makes me feel a little panicky as someone who wants to make a living writing), she has a house that’s messy and falling apart, and she’s pretty darn happy.  Basically, she’s me in 15 years.  And perhaps it’s my narcissistic tendencies that make me love her because I relate to her so well, but the thing is that I do relate.  It’s the first time since the Golden Girls that I’ve really related to a woman who is significantly older than me (Beth’s almost 40, not that that’s old, just significantly older than I am).  Basically, it’s the first time I’ve really really related to a character/figure that is not a 16 year old girl, which is actually kind of scary now that I stop and think about it.

Anyway, this random bit of drabble is all leading up to the fact that this week I got to meet Diablo Cody and I will be able to meet Beth Lisick on Thursday when she comes in.  It’s women like this that make it plausible that a woman like me can become a writer.  So thanks ladies for giving a little girl some hope.

Peace, Love, and Lady Writers,
Julia