"Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle." - James Russell Lowell


This is a positive little upper about blessings which rise from the ashes of what you had once fancied to be misfortunes.

Today I realized that there is absolutely no way I can get a 4.0 during this final semester of my life.

Back story: Why did I think I needed a 4.0?
- To prove to myself that I could work and get a 4.0 at the same time because apparently I'm not good enough for myself just the way I am
- To graduate with a 3.5 and be able to put Magna Cum Laude on my resume because I am absolutely TERRIFIED of not being able to find a job immediately after graduation

Back story: The rationality which I ignored.
- What a stupid low self-esteemed capricious goal which is susceptible to external factors of all sorts
- I'll get a job and Magna Cum Laude isn't that big of a deal. And even if I don't get a job and Magna Cum Laude actually is that big of a deal, I'm sure I can count that "misfortune" as a blessing also. Because then I'll grow some balls and leave the U.S. for a bit and flee to South America because there will have ceased to be anything "practical" to hold me back which I might have foolishly considered to be tempting.

Now I can't get a 4.0. So, I can stop killing myself for it. I can sleep, I can relax, I can half-ass everything and be content with Bs and maybe even a C or two.

I'm in love. I want to devote time to enjoying that.
I self-educate. I want to devote time to developing my understanding.
I have other things to deal with. I want to devote time to fixing them.

The blessing is that now I can do absolutely all of that.

Grades are just numbers. Paychecks are just numbers. It seems so simple to understand, but so difficult to accept.

And now that the unfortunate circumstances of having an awful professor has bestowed upon me this forced reality check, I can stop, reflect, appreciate, and move forward in the way that I should have been moving forward anyway.

Sometimes it's better when your tunnel caves in before you reach the light at the end of it because then you can dig yourself out of the rubble and stand on the top of that fucking tunnel rubble/rubbled tunnel and feel like you've conquered something more than just getting to the end.

What a stupid metaphor elaboration that was. I floor myself everyday.

Well, continuing to the end, I'm not going to tell you to always find the positive things when everything looks bleak and I'm not saying that this is going to be my mentality for everything from now on and maybe this entire appreciation is really just a defense mechanism for dealing with the fact that I have failed at my goal. However, if these kinds of feelings do happen upon you and all of a sudden you feel good instead of bad, embrace that. It doesn't matter why or for how long. The comprehensive point here is that there's absolutely nothing wrong with feeling awesome every once in awhile.

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Ryan Repp is a good best friend to have because you can text him about pee and he doesn't mind.


For lack of time and topic, here's a quick little post about how we came up with our beloved URL.

Ryan and I were sitting around in the library trying to come up with something intriguing. Hipsters will talk all day about how they don't try. It's a lie. Everyone tries. Everyone tries very hard. Well, we tried for 10 minutes. But it was 10 minutes of very hard trying. (We're not hipsters by the way. I was just calling them out because they think they're the personification of awesome and that irritates me.)

"Push It" by Salt-n-Pepa is a motherfucking classic. Ed and Ashley disagree and considering that I respect their opinions way more than most people's, perhaps I should listen. I want to believe them, but I just can't. I love it way too much. But all tangents aside... on that day that Ryan and I were giving birth to this humble creative outlet, I just happened to be obsessed with it. And the lines

Yeah, you come here, gimme a kiss
Better make it fast or else I'm gonna get pissed

were ringing through my brain. "BetterMakeItFast" just seemed to fit with our vision (or at least that's how I fallaciously justified it because we don't really actually have a vision) and after testing several other options so as not to make a rash desision, we selected the best one. I told you, we really only tried for 10 minutes. It seemed unnecessary to waste more time than that on something as stupid as a URL.

We could have made it http://www.prematurequarterlifecrisis.blogspot.com but we didn't. I'm not sure why. We just didn't. Probably because it sounds lame as hell so I'm happy we didn't. I wish I could say that it was some planned and intentional thing, but it wasn't. What's more PQLC than not having a plan and coming up with something quick to fill the void?


I wish I could embed the video here but the people who run Universal Music Group are assholes and don't allow it. The only thing I can offer is the link: Push It (1988) - Salt-n-Pepa

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Summer, throughout the history of civilization, has meant growth - at least, in the climates in which the word "Summer" can be said to apply at all. I'm not talking growth like the mantra of corporate culture - gross! I'm talking plants, yo.

Are you aware you can grow your own shit to eat? A shocking number of people aren't. It comes from the supermarket, and that's about as far as it goes. For how few nowadays eat meals for which they personally oversaw the cutting and cooking of the constituent fruits and vegetables, fewer still know what kind of a plant a pepper grows on, how to harvest a potato, or how to recognize delicious wild mint (I almost guarantee there's mint growing within a block of your house/apartment).

But how can we fix this, being the city slickers we are? Do we give up? People elsewhere in the world did not. Look at any high-rise in Spain, for instance. It's spotted with green fluff so perfectly, one almost wonders if it was designed that way. No, it's not part of the "green building" movement. Spaniards who had to make do with their limited space and take to vertical living simply refused to let that spoil their historical penchant for growing their own damn food. The lesson? Even if you live in an apartment, you can grow stuff to eat. Hell, even if you don't have a patio, there are still options (I hope you have a window).

The backyard of my beautiful Past-Boulevard home of 2 years is all brick. For this I hate the owner or whomever made that decision. The house down the street even has an all-concrete front yard, for "ease of maintainance" I'm sure. Eyesore yes, but also an egregious waste of land. So how did we get 15 pepper plants, a tomato, and 5 herbs growing outside? Built a planter out of wood. Found a discarded pot. Asked a bakery for its empty food-grade buckets. Saved and cut up our plastic liquor bottles. All you need is some containers. Got them? Good.
Next, get some holes in the bottom of that shit. If it's a pot, it should already have some. Home-build planters should be built with a little gap at the bottom. Otherwise, drill baby drill.

• Put about an inch of gravel at the bottom. This helps it drain properly without clogging. You don't want a clogged planter.
• Go to the nursery on Swineburne Street in South Oakland. Yes, we have a NURSERY (just like your parents used to drag you to) within walking distance. Fuck home depot. Get some potting soil, or find a recipe for it online and make your own using regular soil (which is cheaper or free). You'll also want compost, of which they have good stuff there. Bonus: I've started a worm composting bin in my basement recently, so I should have a ton of extra worm poop (the best fertilizer ever) by next season. Ask me!
• Finally, you'll likely want some plants. I love doing peppers, but that's because I use an absurd amount of them in cooking. Them, tomatos, zucchini, broccoli, cucumbers, whatever. Don't get your hopes up about fruit, as most of it needs trees, but berries (though their bushes can take some time to cultivate) can be great in a small space - even indoors! Salads can be grown indoors, so save your outdoor space for the really outdoor plants like peps and maters.
• Herbs are very forgiving. Grow them wherever the hell you want in whatever the hell you want.
• Are you growing stuff indoors, or even out for that matter? Build a self-watering container. They're not hard, they're super healthy for the plant (draw its roots nice and deep), and you only have to put water in them like once a week. Just google it; there are recipes everywhere.

Do you actually have a yard, and are wondering why I'm spending all this time talking about container gardening? You lucky bastard. Mulch that shit and plant, plant, plant. You have no idea how much food you can squeeze out of a little space. Pick your favourite veggies and read up on them. Grow a bean teepee. Stick carrots and radishes in every little between-plants spot you can find. If it's a grassed lawn, tear it up. How often do you use that lawn, honestly? How often would you, instead, eat some food from it? If it's bad soil or filled with "weeds," just stamp them down and cover them with a hearty, overlapping layer of cardboard or cotton sheets or something that will decompose. If you're going to put in rabbit or worm poop, do it under this cardboard. Then, put regular mulchy stuff (shredded pine or whatever) overtop of that. You can plant in this by poking X-shapes with a trowel.

Other fun ways to better understand what you eat and drink:

• Brewing your own beer (been doing this for years now and never had a bad batch, not even my first)
• Incubating your own yogurt (a self-sustaining endeavour: milk + yogurt = more yogurt!)
• Making your own jam and pickles, and other types of preserving
• Baking your own (basic) bread - you may never buy bread again
• Cheese!

Why should we want to do any of this stuff? All of this stuff is great practice for the apocalypse, when you'll have to do it for real. Why do you think I got so into it? Besides that, it really puts you in touch with nature, with your own body (through what you eat), and helps you to better understand the world around you.
In most cases, these things also save you money. Even if the potting soil seems really expensive at first, just stick with it (it should never need to be replaced - just put some worm or rabbit poop on it each season). Same goes for any other capital costs. Finally, you get to stick it to the sick, terrible American food industry by not buying their stuff. A great resource for why you should care about that bit is Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma. Highly recommend it.

Speaking of books, a great idea book for folks who want to do this kind of stuff in an urban environment is The Urban Homestead by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen. It's got some step-by-step guides, but it's strongest trait is its wealth of fantastic ideas - great for the urbanite who wants to grow her own food but doesn't think it's possible without two acres of land.

I hope that after reading this post, you feel you are out of excuses. I hope I have motivated you to at least give this a whack. I earnestly think that everyone, somewhere inside, has some urge to bring about their own food. This feeling is often, I feel, misinterpreted into the "bringing food to the table" idea. Though being able to earn money to feed yourself and your family is certainly not without merit, it's time to really bring some food to the table.

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Steph's blog is up!


For some people, ok well most people, summer is all about the outdoors, sports and general recreation! Yeah cool! For you!
For other part albinos, like me, summer is literally hell. Heat waves, bikinis, and unfortunate sweat stains make it all but impossible for us to enjoy the summer! So here's what I do and what I'm telling my other summer-haters to do:
Step 1. Become a Vampire. I don't mean that literally, you twi-tards. What I mean is stay inside and sleep during the day. Unless you want to self-combust (or sparkle according to the literary genius of Stephanie Meyers) wait until the sun is setting to venture outside. That's when the summer heat is perfect, everything's cooling down and all the parties are about to start. Plus this means no weird tan lines or bubbling "The Fly"-like skin! Be warned, you do stick out at aforementioned parties more often than not since you basically become fluorescent in contrast with all the orange surrounding you.
Step 2. Get thee to an interneterry! I'm serious about this one (despite the Hamlet reference) because you can experience all the fun of summer virtually! Play "Lemonade Stand" online or watch viral videos of human walruses flopping around a Slip-n-Slide! Read about how many ways you can die from too much heat and rejoice in your reclusiveness! Better yet, Skype with your friends who are too far away to hang out! That way you have a semi-legit reason to hold off going out with your friends to that awesome outdoor concert at high noon, because you have some catching up to do with your buddy. (Really it's the a/c but they don't need to know that)
Step 3. Discover the joys of Comcast OnDemand. Listen. There is a reason you live in a city where almost all of your friends have OnDemand. It's because it's fucking sweet. All your favorite shows come on at night when you're out socializing but OnDemand is there for you making sure that while you hide in your 64 degree room to nurse your killer hangover you can get up to speed with some of the best summer shows, like "Rescue Me", "Psych", "Being Human" or my favorite, "Mad Men". This way you can stay up-to-date with your shows and have something to fill the void that is daytime.
So I guess what I'm trying to do here is say it's ok to hate the summer, it's ok to be a hermit crab because for some of us the summer just isn't our thing and honestly it's better if you don't try to drag us outside with you to, I don't know, live or something. People like me look, feel and act better in the fall where the weather is warm but because of the crisp, bitter wind it always feels like room temp. Autumn, where you can still wear summer dresses and get away with scarf accessories and not be considered a hipster!
(WARNING: TANGENT) Now, I know some of you summer-lovers are dreading September the way junkies dread detox but Steph Shamp is here to end this submission on a happy note. My happy note is this: Halloween. H-A-double L-O-W-double E-N spells Halloween bitches! This holiday, at least, should leave you appreciating the "great frosting" ("Thumbelina" reference, anyone?) as much as us summer haters do.

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Mike's submission is series of photos he took of his Cadillac this summer! Absolutely beautiful.

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Our next submission is from Aaron!


If you talk to me for more than 10 minutes (admittedly, this can sometimes be difficult, as I'm a bit of a weird duck), it becomes quite apparent that I am startlingly fond of movies. I would use the word love, but this word has also been applied to breakfast food and watching that barefoot homeless guy obstruct traffic and then flip off cars that honk at him, and thus it feels as though it cannot convey the full enjoyment I get from cinema. I'm far from an expert, the whole of my film education being a french film class in undergrad, in which I got a B- (though in fairness to me, I did have to write my papers in french), but I have viewed and enjoyed a great many movies in my 26 years. From Jackie Chan before he got U.S. fame, to La Marie Etait en Noir (for the language stickler, I know I'm missing the accents, I don't care), to any of a dozen awesome and insane explosion fests, to various and sundry horror films of varying quality (but not the Saw films, or Hostel, because if you want to scare someone, use some goddamn subtlety, instead of strapping someone to a precision engineered death machine, or cutting off toes), I have absorbed them in particularly sponge like fashion. So, I am usually looking forward to summer with a level of excitement that makes me squeal with noises most commonly associated with excited school children who have forgotten their ritalin. This summer, however, has felt more like Hollywood felt like I needed an extended 2 month disappointment-and-punch-in-the-dick-athon.

For several summers now, my face has been consistently rocked off so hard I've spent a week finding the damn thing. 2005 gave me Batman Begins, Madagascar, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, War of the Worlds (I consider it high praise for the movie that it made me forget how completely shit-flingingly out there Tom Cruise is at the time when he initially snapped and started peddling his crazy to anyone who would stand still), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which I will say only that I greatly enjoyed it, as anyone who knows me knows I am overwhelmingly biased in favor of anything which Douglas Adams was in the least involved in), Madagascar, and even Fantastic Four (not brilliance, but it had fun moments).

2006 had Pirates of the Caribbean 2, Superman Returns (shut up, I liked it), Clerks II (which I found to be so good I almost completely forgot about nearly being run over on the southside by some jerk in an SUV, in a rare moment of me not jaywalking or otherwise daring the less than sane to run me down), Lady in the Water (again, I'm one of about 5 people who liked it, but it's my face being rocked off here) and myriad others which I've heard good things about, but haven't seen yet.

2007 had The Bourne Ultimatum (no other move has made as amazingly brutal use of Kali as a fighting art, and such utterly brilliant improvised weapons, and then there was actually a decent movie under all this Matt Damon death machine action), another Pirates of the Caribbean movie (not as good, but still awfully fun), and Harry Potter of the Order of the Phoenix.

Unfortunately, this was also a summer in which some atrocious piles came out. Spider-Man 3 landed during 2007, which I dearly hope Sam Raimi regrets, because there was a single redeeming moment in the entire film, Eddie Brock praying for God to kill Peter Parker. It was not enough to redeem the epic-fail otherwise contained in the film. Alvin and the Chipmunks and Transformers also came around at this time. This is to say nothing of whatever crap Uwe Boll may have been up to at this time (looking at his filmography, it doesn't seem anyone has trusted him with a summer release, in a glorious moment of uncharacteristic intelligence for Hollywood).

Summer 2008 landed. I had Iron Man to start it off, which immediately kicked my ass so hard it required medical intervention to remove the cheeks from around my ears. It had the Dark Knight, which proved that a comic book movie can succeed as an actual movie, not to mention gave everyone with a fear of clowns some of the most horrid nightmares imaginable. Wall-E was utterly fantastic, being cute, fun, and startlingly socially conscious, and poking some impressive fun at Bush the 2nd. Hancock came out of nowhere to surprise me, and be much better than I expected (I'm sorry, but the initial ad campaign felt like "we made a black superhero...and your very first image of him is in hobo clothes drinking liquor on a bench threatening children." Great work guys. But it did grow up as a film by the end, and I was quite happy with it. It had it's short comings, but all in all, I was blown away.

Summer 2009 came at last. Sadly, I can't count Watchmen in this, first for my overwhelming bias due to Alan Moore, and other obsessive reasons, but also that it wasn't in any way in the summer. That's really what screws it over. Because that alone could have made my summer. X-Men Origins: Wolverine had about 2 minutes total that made me not think of it as shiny crap, not to mention they took the cannon of Deadpool and completely trashed it. Star Trek was a notable exception, it was fucking brilliant, and JJ Abrams has once again made me the happiest girl in the world. I wasn't ever going within 50 feet of Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. Poor Rhona Mitra, constantly getting attached to/stuck in shitty films with vampires (or just shitty films. I'm looking at you Doomsday). Terminator Salvation made me hate the series. So far, you have made an endless run of convergent and divergent paradoxes (some which cause each other) to the point that an attempt to make a timeline for the terminator series would require you to make several mobius strips have some sort of bizarre mutant mobius strip child which defies any and all forms of logic and reason, and would probably give most people tension headaches if they looked at it to intently. Angels and Demons...I can't throw it down the proverbial stairs, but neither was it as awesome as it should have been for the overwhelming pile of great actors they had. Up was almost the highlight of my summer (like I said, Star Trek), proving once again that Pixar can make anything awesome, fun, believable, just utterly wonderful. Then came Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I personally feel we should be allowed, as a people, a nation, a collective victim, if you will, to roll up newspapers and smack Michael Bay like a naughty puppy that just pissed on every single carpet we own. Did we learn nothing from Jar Jar Binks? Honestly, the highlight of the entire film was the college girl robot seduction machine that goes all scorpion attack on Shia LaBeouf. But this did not break my summer. Until GI Joe. Thank you, Stephen Sommers, for clubbing my youth to death with a rock. You took one of my favorite actors (Christopher Eccleston) and somehow on screen you brought him across in such a way that he seems like a complete tool. Not as a character, but as an actor and person. You paid so little attention to the actual production of the film you managed to have, in the middle of a chase scene involving soldiers in robotic ninja super suits chasing a humvee with a cowcatcher on the front throwing cars down the streets of paris, exchanging gun and missile fire, and all this is happening on the streets of paris, which have enough trouble accomodating a Renault, and there are people in the street waiting for a bus with completely no reaction. You made a super advanced jet fighter capable of running down missiles that go at mach 5, but to use the weapons, you basically had to yell "BANG BANG BANG" like a 7 year old playing army, and not only that, but you put it in a foreign language, just to make it sound even dumber.

So this is my open invitation to Hollywood to stop making substance-free "he blowed up real good!" summer films. Star Trek, Iron Man, Dark Knight. Lots of stuff blew up, and I still managed to care about the characters. We're paying you enough, get it right.

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Let's start with the results of a totally unscientific poll that I conducted just now regarding the seasons:

• "I am a summer person": 213,000
• "I am a spring person": 10,900
• "I am a winter person": 127,000
• "I am a fall/autumn person": 23,660

(Source: Google)

Point being, if voluntary internet accounts are even close to representative, summer is a more popular season than every other season put together. So you have to ask: why? Well, in the words of our esteemed hostess, because "summer is crazy awesome in general." Insightful and succinct as always, but somewhat lacking in specifics, yes?

So, really: why? Allow me to present my theory: because summer, at least for those of us in the good ol' U.S. of A., is the season of independence and rebellion. Don't believe me? Ask Ashley, for whom "summer vacation first and foremost meant no school. What you did with your time instead of school, of course, was up to you." Even under the ostensibly watchful eye of camp counselors, babysitters, or other so-called authority figures, it was never hard to be, in the words of The National, a glowing young ruffian. But as high school and college and (guh) real life roll around, we start our long trudge up the corporate ladder, every rung removing us one step further from the adventurous and life-affirming freedom we feel is our summertime right. I guess for some people this journey isn't so bad: it's fulfilling enough to collect closets full of pastel-colored button-up dress shirts. But I suspect that that kind of person won't be reading this blog, so let me address the rest of you.

You want autonomy, the power to determine your own course (if not through life, at least through the day). That requires time. But you also have a strong sense of your own value, which means a life of easy freedoms will do more harm than good: it ain't hard to find the kind of part-time work that'll have you just scraping by, but who would want that life? So the kind of freedom you want requires both time and money, and quite possibly also a real job with real responsibility. But jobs, as we've learned from "Office Space" on, are the great freedom-slayers, malevolent, soul-crushing monstrosities that sustain our collective existence at the low, low cost of our individual lives. Which, then, do you give up? Do you sacrifice your potential to lead a life of relative liberty, or do you make the most of your adulthood and abandon your childhood?

The correct answer, obviously, is neither; the hard part is figuring out how. Here are some tricks that I've used to help allay the creeping unease that comes with a desk job in the suburbs, designed to work in all seasons*:

• Ignore posted closing times. Parks, trails, buildings, swimming pools, concert venues, outdoor ice rinks - all of these and more are only really closed when somebody kicks you out. You never know just what you'll find when you aren't being shepherded around.
• Make something. Whether it be practical or just cool, the experience of building something will leave you with (a) an item you didn't have before and (b) the knowledge of how to make an item that you didn't know how to make before. Who knows, you might even learn something.
  
• Lie for fun. People, surprisingly, are really credulous. If you're clever enough, you can get them to believe almost anything. My personal favorite is to tell people that "vacuum" is spelled that way because, when they first made up the word, they thought it was an element - y'know, as in "vack-you-um." You'll need some imagination, a good poker face, and a flagrant disregard for basic ethics, but it's a hell of a lot of fun when it works.
• Work on a non-work project at work. Learn magic tricks, write a novella, paint a mural on your sneakers, make a floor plan of your bedroom that's in accordance with feng shui principles - just do something not related to your job, with a defined endpoint, that you want to do but can never make yourself do in your free time. You're gonna waste the time anyway, you might as well put it to good use.
  
• Take a nap.
• Walk down the street and make eye contact with every single person you pass. Do your best not to be the one who looks away first - it takes some getting used to.

This list is only partial, of course, and you should feel free to use or tweak or add to or disregard any of the items thereon. But what you must remember is that the teenagers and twenty-somethings who couldn't fence you in as a kid are the same dull-eyed careerists who you think are in your way now. What's changed isn't anything fundamental to who you are - you're no less strong or creative or brave now than you were then, you're only taller and richer! The change is in how you've been taught to see the world: the teachers whose classes you dozed through are now the bosses in whose meetings you feel compelled to look attentive; your parents, whose rules you challenged at every step, have now been replaced by a million capital-lettered sans-serif signs that you obey without even thinking; and summer, rather than being the perfect opportunity to experiment, is a desperate rush to have all the fun you think you can't have in the other nine months.

Friends, I tell you that the solution is not to reclaim summer: one quarter of the year would be a paltry reward for any of us. The solution is to reclaim your life, all twelve months of it. Those bleak, imposing slabs you see all around you aren't walls, and they never were. They're dominoes, just waiting for the first push.

*Please note, though, that some or all of these may actually be illegal. In the case that any of these tricks might put you in legal jeopardy, I of course do not officially recommend it.

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