But Call Me Betsy

I have free HBO until the end of May b/c my cable provider wants me to get hooked on it and then spend another $50 to have access to movies like Thor and 50 First Dates until the end of time, even though I'm already doling out like $100 to have what amounts to just two signals directed toward my house and then another $100 to access a phone. So, thanks, Company, for this free bonus. I mostly forget that I have it, because with taking two classes this semester and going to shows and things for the one class, I don't spend a lot of time on the couch, and then there's the thing where I'm getting old and now go to bed around 10 PM to read. Boring! But I have managed to catch a few episodes of Girls , the controversial (is it?) show written by Lena Dunham.  I watched just one episode last night and it was like a horror movie in so many ways. Like, there were two parts where I had to actually shield my eyes from the screen--I couldn't take the painfulness of the scen...

For class last night, we went to the Kelly Writer's House and heard from three readers--two guys reading queer work and the third, a woman name Erin Markey (have to look her up) and all of them were like just 30 years old and super hipster and visiting from Brooklyn. I can't say I was in love with the one guy's project, though some of it might be jealousy--he has a book called Thirtynothing , and it's about his thirtieth birthday falling on the same anniversary as the birth of AIDs, or something like that. I'm not entirely sure that there is a birthday designated to AIDS, but you get the gist. The second guy read what he characterized as sci fi post industrial punk rock pornography, and it was this noir-ish piece about a guy going undercover to seduce another man and possibly kill him (unclear), but then, when he's in the middle of having sex with the man, the guy tells him that he was the one who actually hired him, not the other guy. It was a somewhat funn...

This is from a writing assignment we had for this arts & entrepreneurship class at Penn.  Math and Baseball             Beyond basic algebra, I’ve never excelled at math; have always been more of a reader than a calculator.   Words make sense to me and numbers do not. In math class, I did well only when we worked on logic problems.   In my junior year in high school, I had to take Algebra II with Coach Nichols, so called because he also coached junior and varsity baseball. I happened to also be a bat girl for the baseball team because I had a crush on Marc Dunbar, one of the players who bore a striking resemblance to Michael J. Fox.             Though I studied for the mid-term exam for Algebra II, when I got into class and looked down at the equations, any and all the necessary formulas fled my brain.   I glanced at the girl sitting next to...