a skeleton running from the closet.

(via dearoldlove)

You told me you’d stay if I’d eat a can of Spam, but relationships aren’t supposed to feel like Fear Factor.

Now hold your breath for twelve minutes.

Brangelina’s moving into the neighborhood. I seriously hope they consider adopting me.

Nope, I did not sit with Blake Lively. Though I hear she looked lovely.

Andrew Bird was amazing live. He took off his shoes, played tons off the new album (which luckily I know), a few classics, and two encores. The band was great, the place was beautiful, etc. There were no shirts, but that’s okay. (Insert sad face here.) Eh, he more than made up for that. We sat in the tier just above the orchestra, behind a big, hairy couple that came late and left early (phew); that was just fine by us. The last song he played (the second encore) was “Fake Palindromes” and that’s a good note to have left on. I was touching the velvety railing then, so close to the people below, and the sound echoed so intensely that you’d have thought he was playing just for me.

In other news: My ex called and told me that he’s getting engaged… or something. I’m one of the select few that gets the privilege (questionable) of knowing this half-information. He’s just twenty and they’ve been dating for a whopping three months or so. It threw me for a loop, to say the least. But it’s not him or his behavior that gets me, it’s the idea of everybody moving so far ahead (and if not ahead, then away) and changing how we’re connected, how we first learned to connect with each other. At least it seems that way for me, in my life. How do you know if you’ve found “the one”? Or if you’ve lost him or her or if there are several others out there? And how do you feel after attaching a name and a place and a time to your love? Is it any emptier with a label than it might have been otherwise? Does it make you as happy as you’d hoped? I’m all for marriage and love and commitment and all that, I just don’t always understand its full effect. Or maybe it’s not something to be understood, but believed in. Like marriage is the adult version of Santa. You make your wishes, you wait a few seasons… maybe more, and eventually you might find what you never knew you always wanted in your living room. But if it turns out to be coal, then… well then the process just begins again.

(via havent-got-a-prayer)

“Eight rules for writing fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999), 9-10. (via ariah) (via davidmaddox)