The house of smoke and mirrors

Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

...Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

-Alice, the Duchess, and the Cat [Lewis Carroll]

Follow feet in sidestep

January's not for blogging. It's for digging your feet into the snow and staying put in gridlock. Not going with the green lit new year, laying low instead in last year's sins and stories. Let the shadows draw on walls and floor of your single space apartment. Watch too much television, accomplish nothing. Be miserable, and let it make you happy.

From old Fitzgerald's freshman prose take new lessons learned in teen soaps. Be your own Emma Stone with wisdom: the books you read in school always reflect what's going on in your life.

Pull then the reading list from first year Cultures of the Modern, hidden back the mind. Crack open Tender is the Night. See Seoul in lieu of the French Riviera. Let Rosemary speak:

After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travelers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamor of Empire, they felt that life was not continuing here.

Let the last days of the month die.

About as real as Bravo
*Photo: Terry Richardson for Rolling Stone

The quote of the moment:

"...we're smack in the middle of an era where not only is truth stranger than fiction, but the two are so closely interwoven that we half expect to wake up tomorrow and find out that Chuck Bass is real and dating Tinsley Mortimer."

-the Fug Girls for New York magazine online

And I'm all, "Yeah man, but that's just a beard. Chuck's gay, like Anderson Cooper. Everyone knows that."