Leigh Alexander

There is a robot dinosaur asleep in my closet, with its eyes closed and a fine sheen of dust on its ridged back. I’m not even lying. I can hardly look at it because it makes me so sad.

Once when I was young I tied a bag around my head with a little string I knew I could break because I wanted to see how long I could stand it, the panicked clanging of oxygen-starved alarms throbbing inside my skull, knocking furiously at my chest as if some force was begging me, poor child, open the door to your lungs again. I didn’t want to die, I just wanted to see how close I dared walk to the threshold of actual death. Like it was just a country that I had never visited.

At some point, preferably in the evening when the desolation of night presses down on you — cars and the implacable noises of distant strangers, leftover smells of other people’s meals, the artificial tide of faraway cars ebbing and sighing — you will look around your place or residence and realize, dimly, that you’ll never be able to pull yourself together.

You can’t tell someone that you perused their Facebook profile, even though their profile was not private, i.e. clearly perfectly available to be perused by those curious about them [caveat: they’re dumb at the internet and don’t realize everyone can see everything they don’t designate behind privacy settings]…

Maybe we’re laughing about how are we going to get necessities like Bloody Mary drinks this weekend to veil, a little bit, our anxiety about what would we do if anything really bad happened. And do we know how to make those life or death calculations, and would we mean something a little bit more than we do if we had to?

Senior year. Everyone is turning eighteen. Everyone is applying to college. Everyone is very serious about their future adulthood. Everyone has bought Catcher in the Rye and it is changing their lives and then one day in English I say something like, “I think that book is pretty lame” and this one girl in soccer socks turns to me and she has the gall to go, “you’re so ignorant, Leigh.”

You experience a brief fugue: Picture one of the “eliminated” contestants returning home to their job as [something], meeting friends somewhere for a meal or coffee/tea beverage, picture them far away from a world that manicured them and plucked their brows, picture them exactly like you again, like… having had to go from being a Person on TV to being exactly like you except maybe a little more gorgeous, and that they have all these friends who were not chosen to go on TV.

Although the form of +1 has not yet been concretely established it looks likely that ‘plus-one-ing’ will be how people vocalize their expression of approval for things on Google+, e.g: “I don’t know really what there is to do on Google+ so I just go through my feed plus-one-ing everything.”

Last night I had a dream about my ex-boyfriend where we were using computers side by side. Toward the tail end of our relationship, which saw us cohabitating for some six years, all we ever did was use computers; relegated by yawning space to separate rooms in our little apartment, yards apart. We IMed rather than raise our voices, the din of the television swelling into the painful distance between us…

That a woman would somehow not like a man who was kind and treated her with respect is absurd on its face, and yet there is in fact a strain of female, that while much narrower than aggrieved supposed ‘nice guys’ believe, consistently prefers a man who treats her like crap.

Perhaps if you follow girls around doing only what they want to do and subverting your will in favor of theirs, you will think you are being nice, but others are liable to view you as a doormat, potentially lacking in will or direction, and/or bereft of substance to contribute to an ideally-equitable relationship. These are not desirable traits in a partner…

There are several gradients of drunk that are possible. Numerous individuals will enter and continue their adult lives acquainted with only one item on the following list, and will report said item occurs predictably on every occasion on which they drink. The experience of other individuals will be generally comprised of two or more, but not all items on the following list.

In fact, so many normal people and casual fans of video games have asked me, with an air of morbid curiosity, ‘what is E3 like,’ that I have decided to present this helpful primer about things that you do at a video game conference so that you will feel like you have been there. Except your feet won’t hurt and your blood will not be half-liquor and you will not be exhausted. Lucky you.

‘Melancholy’ is in and of itself a fascinating word. Visually, at least, it could be like a homophone of ‘symphony’, as in an assemblage of beautiful instruments, as it ends in the same sometimes-vowel and contains the same orchestra of consonant blends, the sort that migrate softly from the wet and rarely-used places of the tongue…

The culture around animated GIFs (‘Graphics Interchange Format’, or briefly-animated images) is exploding. For whatever reason, human beings appear to enjoy watching a few frames of something or anything at all repeat endlessly, and this urge is simultaneously driving and being driven by popular image-sharing services like Tumblr to where it’s hardly avoidable, even if you’re not interested.

A cursory glance at the internet and other fringes of public information over the past few weeks has informed us that some religious people think the world is going to end this weekend. No, wait, even better – they think that on May 21 Jesus is going to arrive and gather up everyone who believes in him and take them to Heaven.

I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is reach for my phone; I sift through the notifications; who ‘Likes’ my pictures? Who has replied to me, mentioned me? I am hooked on the feedback drip. Increasingly I feel less sure of myself in real conversations; I can’t read faces. Real people are a blank mirror. I clutch the cold glass brick of my hand in my palm to feel better.

Human beings are obsessed with the physiological act of crying to an extent so broad that our obsession has pervaded all of our media and language subliminally. Whether or not a given medium can induce tears is often, rationally or otherwise, the benchmark of that medium’s quality or its social relevance; for good or for ill tears are often used to define gender roles.