Leigh Alexander

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.

Pad of thumb and then thumb to palm, until we were tracing the lines inside the cradles of each other’s hands with the softest, the most careful touch. I couldn’t hear for the humming at the roof of my mouth where my tongue cleaved like a loaded weapon. I couldn’t breathe. To this day I have never felt like that while touching a man.

But perhaps the most useful and exciting consequence of the rise of connected, text-based communication is the fact that it has allowed people to at last eradicate the horrible and terrifying prospect of ‘talking on the phone to people’.

As a child, as soon as I reached public school age I began to demonstrate behaviors associated with a highly intelligent child who is bored in an insufficiently challenging environment, or indicative of a highly sensitive and willful child who was unlikely to get along well/’adjust’ given only normal tactics for socializing/motivating/disciplining children in a school setting…

This is also why ‘mobile social games’ and things like that don’t work. Things like FourSquare that are designed to make people ‘be more social’ are inefficient – you could ‘check in’ someplace and then check your Twitter to see who else has checked in there and wait for your friends to reply via social networking. Or you could just, like. Text them.

When one is highly intoxicated and in the presence, privately, of a computer connected to the internet, there are several activities in which one can commonly engage. The following guide will prescribe the top five most useful common behaviors for transforming the act of being drunk at home alone into a wildly social activity.

You will go to the mall every day. This is your religion. You should steal some jewelry from ‘Claire’s’ or a place like it. You should do this even if you’re a boy, because then people will think you’re funny for wearing a heart charm, or smooth if you give it to a girl later. Don’t say anything, just kind of drop it in her hand or in her lap, wrapped in a piece of notebook paper haphazardly…