i just watched my brother graduate online. congratulations, jeffrey.
it looks hot in nashville

Brodo.

dear blog friends,
i’ve come to the conclusion, not all that recently, that i am a terrible blogger. i’m no good at this, but you know who is? the girl from the Blow. that girl can really write a blog. she’s a musician, semi-famous, living in i think Portland, and her life couldn’t be further from mine. i don’t even know her last name, nor how to properly pronounce her first. but she writes this blog, updated rarely, and talks about moving into a new apartment and not wanting to unpack or stay the night there, but building a nest out of a ficus tree and other tiny houses instead, and reading it i feel like i’m kind of looking down on her from above although i don’t know what she looks like or the apartment, really, other than that it has a ficus tree, or had one until it died.

with that in mind, and since, inconceivably, i haven’t made it at all clear to you after a year of going on and on about studying, or trying to, and living in italy, (the country of inefficiency masquerading as charm, a phrase i read recently and the most accurate description of anything i’ve ever heard), i would like to tell you that my apartment smells constantly like a mixture of parmesan cheese and coffee grounds. usually in the morning it smells like sticky red wine in the bottom of glasses, too.

lately i’ve become strangely domestic, cleaning my house all the time and lining up my shoes. i even bought a mop, and some lemon-scented stuff to mop with.

i’d also like to mention that american architects really failed when they decided to eliminate the courtyard from the center of apartment buildings. i say that because when i walk out onto my balcony and stare blurrily at the trees and the gravel, probably 20 or so times a day, i always know that there are at least three other people out on theirs staring just like me, and probably a few more peeking at me through their blinds or watching me, like one woman, the one who has the pulley system, with her hands cupped around her eyes pressed to the glass door. in my apartment in new york i watched the office people wheel around on their wheelie chairs all day, but they never knew i was there, and i never woke up to them yelling at each other balcony to balcony, like my grandpa used to do with ernie when they’d listen to the baseball game on the radio. this week, my great aunt josie died. she was the one who baked the nutcups, and i don’t think we ever met. she was 86. the last thing, i guess, that i have to say tonight (it’s wednesday, and i should probably be out standing in a piazza instead of eating burnt popcorn and watching late night tv reruns online) is that mitch albom was on the colbert report recently and i still can’t get over it. the writing, and by that i mean the published, world has come to be dominated by special interest groups in a way that i find more than disconcerting. tormenting, maybe. i also read an article in the new york times saying that while people read considerably less today than they used to, the percentage of people writing and being published, or writing blogs perhaps more terrible than this one, is higher than ever. higher than ever but i can’t seem to find any true and great work that has come out of this verbose generation. besides this girl’s blog, anyway. i entirely hate the word verbose, do you know? it sounds snootier than it is. i’ll keep looking though. william james austin is certainly more than a start. thank you, by the way
i can’t stand being this long-winded.

goodnight, from a very clean room,
j