Granfalloon

"Hell-ooooo?" "Heellll-ooohhh?" "... Yes?" "You almost home?" "Uh, yeah. Uh, sort of. Not really." "'S'about to start pourin'." "Is it?" "It looks like it. It's all cloudy and ominous-looking. You want me to come get you?" "No I think it's fine. It's kind of windy but not raining yet." "You sure?" "Yeah. I'll uh, I'll be fine. I'll call you if you should come get me or something." "OK." "Alllrriiiiight?" "ALRRIIIGGHT?" "OK, bye." Cut to two or three minutes later as I'm checking out my item at a darling little record/CD store in Manayunk, and the cashier all but begs me to put my shabby record in a plastic bag because he can see out the window behind me and he's noticed that it has just started pouring. In that case… Cut to like ten minutes prior when I arrive inside the record/CD store, after d...

Do you ever get partway through a book and realize that you seem to have missed a crucial detail or set of details from the beginning of the story? If yes, do you:     A. continue reading anyway and assume that you will catch on to what you’ve missed?     B. skim through the earlier pages of the book and hope to find whatever detail(s) you had missed?     C. completely start the book over again from the beginning? I’ve found that I most frequently go with option A, because I figure that if the book is good I will end up enjoying it even if I’ve missed some details about the plot. Spoiler alert: I read  Infinite Jest,  completely misunderstood a good portion of the plot, and actually thought that a character had died when he really didn’t. I still loved the book, and I give myself a pass for that one considering what  Infinite Jest  is. Any time that I have tried option B I’m pretty sure I have failed to find the exact deta...

When I learned that the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) houses over 21 million unique materials I really didn’t believe it--I thought maybe their website had been mistaken. The number loses its meaning to me when I try to imagine a building that can hold that many things. But taking a walk through the building’s numerous vaults containing shelf after shelf of boxes upon boxes of manuscripts, books, paintings, photographs, maps, etc. etc. helps one to grasp the reality behind that number. And then you may ask yourself: what do you do with all that stuff? The first thing to do is, well, keep it there. And keep the room cool and dark and somewhat dry and for the most part, all the stuff should stay pretty much intact. But then what? I think most would agree that keeping all that stuff intact is pretty pointless if all it does is sit there in obscurity. And here we arrive at one of the many challenges of being an archivist: the balance between wanting to share archival materials ...

This might sound dorky or cheesy, but a small portion of why I love The Preston and Steve Show is because the hosts and guests often make me feel good about getting older. All of the show’s members are at least a little older than I am, but they wake up before dawn and get on that show every morning and sound like they are just having the best time, and they talk about all their different hobbies and adventures, and perhaps most importantly they continue to learn new things every day even though they frequently revisit the same topics and use pretty much the same formula for every show. Listening to them feels familiar and casual but there is usually at least one moment per show when I hear something I had never before considered, or when one of the show members relates a story about something simple but new that they tried and then I want to try it (like making an edible charcuterie board), and then the cast continues making fart jokes and laughing about goofy nonsense and I remind m...

Video games, and more specifically PC games, hold a special place in my childhood memories. I don’t play games nearly as much now as I did when I was a kid, but I still enjoy learning about and maybe trying out some newer games--usually through my boyfriend who is much more adventurous in his gaming habits than I ever was. When I do attempt to play a game on my own I’ve found that I’m most interested in revisiting the oldies that I played as a kid, if only for the nostalgia.  My PC-gaming habit probably reached its peak around 1998, when my dad plopped a big, loud Dell in his home office and started bringing me along on his trips to CompUSA. Around the same time, I was really into horses and so I developed a strong interest in any game that involved horseback riding. As it turns out, though, most horseback riding PC games of that time were not great, and a blog post I read from The Mane Quest  provides some reasons why. The reason that most deeply resonated with me is the fac...

Here's something I learned yesterday: If your cat captures a bird you should never release it back into the wild, even if it appears completely fine, because the bird will most likely have been infected by bacteria in your cat's saliva and will end up dying from infection within a day or so anyway. My cat captured a bird in the yard yesterday. As far as I know this is only the third thing he’s ever captured in his life. When he was probably only about six months old I saw him in my West Chester front yard with something gray and fuzzy in his mouth, but he ran off into the bushes so I never found out what it was or what became of it. At my old Wissahickon studio he caught a cicada and brought it inside. And now, we’ve reached bird status. My cat immediately ran into the house with the bird as I chased after him, probably shouting like a crazy person. I then grabbed his neck and tried to pry the poor thing, which I thought was surely either dead or horrifically injured, out of th...

My friend recently asked a relatively simple question in a group chat that I have going with a few women I’ve known since middle school. Her question: Anyone ever have anything professionally framed? She followed the question with, “Holy shit it’s expensive.” In an instant I was mentally transported to my college days as an art student, specifically the final month-ish when I was preparing for the senior show. Most of my memories of that time are fond ones, like the endless hours spent in the art building with my friends, drinking coffee and eating pizza and listening to The Who. Oh yeah, and feverishly painting/drawing/carving/sculpting/wanting to die like our lives depended on it.  So I’ll never forget the moment that our professors announced, fairly last minute, that we would need to have all of our work properly framed (assuming the work was two-dimensional, like a painting or drawing). Everything that I planned to show was oil-pastel-on-paper and therefore would need to be fra...