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I'll list them in order of how happy they make me:
1. Molly and I just got a brand new dining room table, which has finally made our dining room usable. We immediately began decorating the room and hanging stuff up all over the apartment. Posted cleanly, neatly, and all alone in the middle of a vast red wall is a beautiful and funny black and white photo of the Beatles holding umbrellas. I stare at it every morning when I eat breakfast.
2. On my way back from Chipotle, I always spot this billboard inside a store featuring a gaggle of chipperly dressed British men, standing around a golf course. Lots of plaid pants and caps. I always stop for a few seconds and smile. Hard.
3. Brian Klinzing has recently been singing my name every time I approach him. His voice is decidedly awful. I hear this almost every day.
4. How fucking great is the Allerton Hotel's giant TIP TOP TAP neon sign? How can you not feel like you've stepped into a bustling, dapper, 1950's metropolis every time you look up and see that thing?
5. My girlfriend and I love Great Wall, this really shitty Chinese takeout place in our neighborhood. We're especially enamored of this one really handsome guy who always takes our orders over the phone and when we stop by the joint. He's sweet and shy and has really soft features. We make up stories about him and wonder if he has an adorable little wife at home in our neighborhood. Recently we ordered delivery from them for the first time ever, and half an hour later, there he was, standing in OUR doorway! It was so cute—we always go to his place, but now he was inside our apartment! I can't even explain how badly we wanted to invite him in.
6. Lately I've been eating this truly terrible cereal for breakfast. It's called Blueberry Muffin Tops, and it's a really rancid and sugary blueberry flavored knockoff of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It costs 99¢ for an 11oz bag at our local grocery store. I may as well be dousing my entire jaw with cane sugar. I hope to eat it nearly every day for the rest of my life.
7. I've been reading Andrew Sullivan's blog, in its entirety, every day (give or take a few) for the past seven years. He's the most brilliant and furiously imaginative political writer of our era. Not to mention addictive.
8. Lately, Craig Ferguson has become a huge part of Molly's and my nightly routine. He manages to take the simple premise of a late night talk show and turn it into something absurd and surreal every single time. It's really great to turn on the TV and get a healthy dose of unadulterated sweetness, honesty, and cleverness every single night.
9. I live right across the street from the Chicago Waldorf School, a spunky and radically different educational institution right behind a massive church. When I'm heading toward work in the afternoons, I always end up walking by a crowd of kids throwing snowballs and telling fart jokes. There's this kid who frequently stands on the side of the street and plays the trumpet. His name is Chris.
10. I see you a lot. We mostly make fun of each other. -
I've only saved a handful of letters from friends and ex-girlfriends. Mostly scraps, cards, single pages of longer letters. Notes from friends at camp feature prominently, but there's almost nothing of any substance. I do love reading collections of correspondence, though—especially the letters from Simone de Beauvoir to Jean-Paul Sartre and Nelson Algren.
I did recently discover a trove of letters I wrote to famous people when I was a kid. Here's the instant classic I wrote to Paul Simon:
Singer/Songwriter Paul Simon
c/o Warner Bros. Records Inc.
75 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10019
Dear Paul Simon,
I am 5 years old. I know how to write, but my daddy is helping me write this letter anyway.
I listen to your music in my own Walkman. For my birthday I got a tape of "Bridge Over Troubled Water." My favorite song is "The Boxer." I can sing most of it myself.
I also like to listen to "Graceland." I saw you on TV and daddy taped it for me. I love "You Can Call Me Al" the best, but I really like all the songs. I have a guitar and I like to play like you. Sometimes I wear a T-shirt just like you.
I want to be a musician and play guitar like you and piano like Billy Joel. Art Garfunkel is nice too.
Do you play your guitar at home when you get up in the morning? I do. My guitar didn't have a strap so my mommy made one for me.
Would you send me your picture to hang on my wall? My other pictures are John Kennedy, Benjamin Franklin, Michael Jordan, and John Adams. They are all my favorite people. And the Orioles bird, but he's a bird.
Sincerely,
Eitan Benjamin Freedenberg -
I think there's something to be said about the simple genius of the catapult. It's nothing short of amazing that a single device can be used to hurl anything from flaming feces to flaming human beings at brick walls and topple entire empires in the process. Sure, old-school torture devices like the Iron Maiden and old-school personal weapons like crossbows have shock value going for them. But for sheer wall-crushing perfection, nothing really beats the catapult.
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If there's anything even remotely cool about me, it probably didn't come from Washington. My hometown is full of morally bankrupt bureaucrats who have had their souls surgically removed by the government. Also, a lot of smelly, rich anarchists who think that the world's problems can all be solved by them stealing food from Panera's dumpsters.
My method for success is reading a lot of Richard Feynman lectures, trying to listen exclusively to banjo-based music, becoming well-versed in the physics involved in the Kennedy assassination, watching a lot of Kung Fu reruns, eating an above-average portion of chocolate covered pretzels on a weekly basis, and generally trying to be a dick to everyone and failing miserably at it. But thanks for noticing.
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