Elif Batuman wrote this great thing a while ago about the State Of The American Short Story. People love to do this, and obviously everything about it is completely the pits. It’s a pits that writers (or whoever, but it’s usually writers) feel that now is the time for yet another referendum on the novel, and Is Fiction On Life Support. It’s a further and more complicated pits that writers (or whoever, but it’s usually writers) see fit to write a Tersely Worded Rebuttal to the London Review Of Books where it is only a matter of time before they use the words “hand-wringing”, my worst, as in: “His hand-wringing inquisition into the state of the modern short story has, to my mind bewilderingly, managed to ignore what seems to be staring everyone else in the face” ETCETERA.
GROSS.
But still this Elif Batuman thing is great, and here it is:
http://nplusonemag.com/short-story
So she’s taken all these short stories and sort of scanned them for the terrible things that they have in common, and tarried especially long over the opening lines, and if I was writing a complimentary review I would say With Scalpel-Like Precision, Batuman Has Exposed The Flaw At The Heart Of The Contemporary Short Story. And it’s all pretty typical, if clever and great, but the bit about the animals’ names is the bit that is a real killer. She says that writers today can’t leave that sort of stuff alone, like there’s no way they would have not been able to name the little dog in the Chekhov story etc. Which I think is an excellent point, because the name of an animal is a way to be all quirks and revealing about your characters without actually doing anything. And obviously human names as well, but this is slightly less of an issue, because no clevs writers agonise too long over the people names because that is something you can sniff out from fucking MILES away. Like you can see straight away when a writer is just thrilled to bits over the perfect names of their characters, and it’s the worst.
The thing is though, when she was little, my mum used to have a cat called Pat Boone. Pat Boone! Never called Pat, or Boone, but only ever the whole thing. She would go out into the garden every night, she says, and shout "Pat BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE", so that it would come and eat its dinner. Once at John and Em’s house I saw a prescription from the vet written out for Tipsy Withers. Tipsy is the Witherses sheep-looking sad dog. My mum’s cat, according to that system, would be Pat Boone Van Schalkwyk. And the thing is with this is that what are you supposed to do? When a small girl in your story needs a cat for the purposes of the plot, and you could call it “the cat” or “my cat”, OR you could call it Pat Boone, what do you do? Restraint says “the cat”, but my heart says Pat Boone.

Lee is so obviously the greatest

He was just here, talking to me about how he wants to get a cat. I said he mustn't, because of Responsibility, but he says no. He says a pet will make him feel like he actually lives in Cape Town. But I said a cat is forbidden and so he must think of a more sort of low maintenance animal. The problem with this obviously is that the more low maintenance an animal is, the less likely it is to love you. Like reptiles and fish and that. Birds are probably fairly low maintenance but also they are completely terrible, and once you get a bird it is only a matter of time before you are strolling around Checkers with your terrible depressed cockatiel on your shoulder, and it probably has this weird infection on its beak, and you're walking around in a brown parachute material jacket just waiting to die.
Lee said: "If I get a bird you're going to post me an envelope full of poison hey?"
So no birds.
After he left, I saw the two tabs he had opened on my computer. This is them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090415132050AAajhSx

The wikipedia entry for "pet"! As if he is just checking to reassure himself that his idea of what a pet is conforms to the standard norm!
what a guy. What a seriously incredible person.

I got handed a Big Secret the other day

And actually it's not even very interesting or even really a secret, but anyway I was talking to someone about being sort of Trustworthy in general, and I said:
I am excellent at secrets. I am a Vault.
and THEN I said:
Vault Disney! Vault Whitman! Vaulter Sisulu!

and then I had to spend the next three days awkwardly channeling every conversation I had towards a direction where telling that "story" made sense. Naturally, I did this very badly and essentially just ended up going: "want to hear a funny thing?" like how a small kid does.

There was a thing a while ago

Where ridiculous entitled weirdos made a real Point of not asking for presents at their wedding. And then the fine print on the invitation was oh obviously we want presents, just not normal ones, we want some trees for the wood on our estate only a few starkly elegant and symbolic bajillion dollar trees we love the environment and do not care for material things.
and I always thought that was such garbage. In the same way that wedding registries are garbage. Can't just force people to buy you very specific things.
HOWEVER. now that I have MY OWN BALCONY, all I want to do is have a party where I force everyone to buy me pot plants. and of course I don't just want a million things of basil, AND NO CACTUSES PLEASE, so of course I would have to have a list of some kind, and this is obviously how it begins.

This whole 27 club thing is so boring and rubbish

I'm so TIRED OF IT.

27 is pretty old! I bet there is scientific evidence for my idea that 27 is the age when your body goes HEY NOW CUT IT OUT.
A year is a long time!
It's not that weird that like five HARDENED DRUG ADDICTS in the history of the world died at the same age!

It is sad she died though. Sad for her nice taxi driver dad.

We are moved in!

I love it I love it. We have a proper dining room table*, and a long balcony, and a washing machine, and a bathroom with an extraordinarily loud extractor fan. It goes DZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ and you only realise how loud it is when it comes to you that you have been humming along with it. I used to do that with vacuum cleaners as well when I was small.
We also have those bendy chairs with the white cushions that all up and coming moms had when I was in primary school. Those chairs that everyone who took an interest in Design thought were quite something about fifteen years ago.**

It already feels like a proper place to live, and I'm so happy.

* on the table there is a tablecloth which I bought the other day. It was sold to me by a woman who put me very badly on edge within about six seconds of clapping eyes on her, which is actually quite hard to do. Her shop sells things she bought at obviously exploitatively low prices in Madagascar. I picked up this teeny tiny little embroidered dress as I walked in, and her whole SWEATY FACE lit up and she said "YA DO YOU LIKE THAT I BOUGHT ONE FOR MY GRANDDAUGHTER BUT MY DAUGHTER IN LAW HASN'T SEEN IT FOR YONKS WE THINK THE MAID STOLE IT."

My mum was standing very close to me and I just faintly heard her go "uh oh" under her breath, in perfect time with the alarm bells just starting to go off in my head. Like oh PLEASE can we not go down this road called you saying racist things and me just standing there getting more and more irritated spit in my mouth oh pleeeeeeeeeease.

She left us alone for a bit, I think because of the very Charged way I must have been staring at her, but when she saw me pull out this tablecloth with lots of tiny little people on it, she could not hold herself back. Wild Horses could not hold her back. She said "IT'S NICE HEY DO YOU KNOW WHO MADE IT"
and I thought she was going to tell me like a small patronising story about the lovely little woman who makes them for her, but it was so much worse than that. It was so infinitely worse.
She said "CHILDREN MADE IT."
Like that was just a neutral observation, instead of a CRIME.
She said "THEY JUST COME HOME FROM SCHOOL AND THEY SEW AND SEW UNTIL THEY CAN'T SEE ANYMORE."
She was so triumphant when she said it as well. The really worst part of this story though is the bit where I am sitting smugly on the sofa and staring at my lovely new tablecloth, all covered in tiny little people.

** fifteen years ago. that's how long ago I was in primary school. I could not be older.

There is this allegedly very harrowing bit in King Lear

Where he says "The worst is not, So long as we can say 'This is the worst'."
it means that the real worst is when you are dead and can't say anything, obviously. Whenever I read it* or think about it** it ends up making me laugh a hundred times, because I go "The worst is not, so long as we can say 'This is my worst'."
I say "this is my worst" about a great many things. I say "this is my worst" approximately once every two days.
and so it's true! it is actually not the worst while you are walking around whingeing a bit and saying that this is your worst.So that's good then.

* not often
** daily