Leigh Alexander

But normal is an impossible, undefined ideal. While it feels decadent, possibly destructive, to only worry about being happy with yourself or at least happy with the ways you are unhappy, you can’t exactly go around comparing yourself to all the people who have no better idea of the holy-normal than you do.

I mean, really, I’m not usually the only non-child in the room, but I still picture myself turning to someone’s mother and explaining, with an abashed expression, “it’s for work.” She would look at me with the dawn of understanding in her eyes, and say, “oh, what do you do,” and I would say, “I am a video game journalist,” and she would nod in total comprehension, even admiration.

In the case of the PS3, users understand the idea of punishing a hardware giant for trying to interfere in its users’ sense of individual ownership, and while they may not support organized crime, while they might feel super totally bad about people’s credit cards being compromised, they can assume that identity theft is only a side effect of the reckoning to which Sony is now being called.

But survival and great success are born from the refusal to accept boundaries, though it may be strange to conceive of our greatest creative endeavors as direct responses to the fact that life sucks. Or to think that the most impressive thing any individual will ever accomplish is born out of the friction between what we want to be and what we are. 

Thank goodness we came along, though. We, with our black nails, our strange hair, and our luscious mouths, the ones you had admired guiltily in our pictures without wanting your girlfriends, your wives, to know. We are the women that tended and inspired you. We were ‘there.’ When you could talk to no-one else, we were ‘there.’ You didn’t know what you would have done otherwise.

Here are some ideal and field-tested tactics by which to engender procrastination yourself, to improve  the quality of various modular elements comprising your life, or to aid the curious interested in experiencing that singular last-minute ‘fuck fuck fuck I’m fucked.’

In the current gaming climate, people might mean any number of things when they say ‘I play computer games.’ They could be playing World of Warcraft or like Starcraft 2 or something, they could be playing independent Flash games on some media hub, they could be playing FarmVille on Facebook, or stuff like that. Or they could own a sweet high end PC and be playing stuff like Crysis or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or something.

However, a significant portion of the time, users leave comments that are purposeless, annoying, inexplicable or destructive in a way that makes all readers of a given article feel that their collective intelligence is being somehow demeaned. To exacerbate the problem, these useless comments are fairly predictable and formulaic, a fact that seems to escape their militant deliverers.

Brian Krakow. Hesitantly dated a mostly unsatisfying high school senior post-graduation and lost his virginity, but had to break up with her to pursue his rigorous and immediate program of higher education. During school he wrote numerous letters to Angela that he didn’t send.

All I caught at the time before my parents took me home post-dinner was the part where Sarah has to cross the Bog of Eternal Stench and nearly falls in – and I was properly terrified. Like, kept up at night terrified, a wide-eyed and sheet-clutching adverse reaction. Which meant, of course, I had to see the whole thing.

Arrive alone at a party that you ‘just kind of heard of’ even though no attendee specifically invited you. This way, when people welcoming you make casual conversation to the effect of ‘so who do you know here tonight’ in an attempt to determine their own potential connection to you, you can respond evasively or turn the question back around on the asker.

In the 21st century, the popular social networking site Facebook has made a verb of the term ‘friend’, and it is now common to ‘friend’ people on Facebook/field numerous ‘friend’ requests on a regular basis.

It is 11 AM and a program where people from Middle America enter a television courtroom to hash out embarrassing problems before a stern but compassionate judge is on. Sonic The Hedgehog does not appear to be engaged, but Tails knows it is preferable to primetime, when Sonic The Hedgehog would have been privy to a number of advertisements for Microsoft Kinect that show people running in place, very fast, in front of their TVs as a method of playing a video game.

How could someone with whom she once sat up all night talking “til morning came, pale as a pearl” have rendered her like this, pacing aimless and struggling to process the relationship’s course until she feels paranoid, “calling out, ‘who is there?’” and wondering whether he ever loved her at all.

You know when it’s not working, and it’s not because you don’t want it to work, but because it just won’t? And so you separate, you go on a ‘break’ so you can figure things out, you realize you need to be alone so that you can think, rediscover the self that has been so completely “sunk in this shunt” in all the mess of an intense relationship?

Yeah yeah, I totally know this album came out last year, so if you feel like asking why we are still talking about it or you only listen to things that are very current, go and find the Robin Pecknold/Ed Droste collab [no srsly go find it though, it’s good]

In the late 1930s ‘Depression’ like, meant something, not the way we casually use it today [as an excuse for why we don’t do things, as an excuse to sell prescriptions, and occasionally as a valid psychiatric diagnosis]. I looked at the photos and except for the institutional racism I thought that it might be pretty sweet to live there.

The primary issue is that it is impossible, even for the most ruthlessly honest and skillful online communicators, to represent themselves online in a way that will accurately reflect the way they actually appear in person. The ‘connection’ that occurs while browsing someone’s pictures or while exchanging messages and/or emails can never, no matter how casually or comfortable it is executed, translate into a real world meeting.