Tacos will grow on Christmas trees before I learn to carry a tune. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter. In karaoke, talent means nada; enthusiasm is everything. What I lack in talent, I make up for in pass...
Renée and I met at a bar called the Eastern Standard in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just moved there to study English in grad school. Renée was a fiction writer in the MFA program. I was sitting...
If the girls keep dancing, everybody's happy. If the girls don't dance, nobody's happy.
I was helpless in trying to return people's kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that's for sure. Cruelty isn't that hard to understand. I had no trouble...
I knew I would have to relearn how to listen to music, and that some of the music we'd loved together I'd never be able to hear again.
Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don’t live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous.
So you get less shy about how hard you have to try. And you don't bother hiding your Kotter tapes. Sure, they expose some of my appalling deficiencies. But my appalling deficiencies are all I have to...
Prince, While My Guitar Gently Weeps (2004)
Last fall, I was sitting at the kitchen table of two friends who have been together since 1972. They tell me a story about how they got together. She couldn't decide between two suitors, so she left N...
Just more of that endless, useless knowledge you absorb when you're in a relationship, with no meaning or relevance outside of that relationship. When the relationship's gone, you're stuck knowing all...
If you freak out over trivial everyday grievances, how are you going to handle *real* problems?
Dandelion is easily the best faux-McCartney song of the Sixties.
The songs were all either fast or sad. Because all songs should be either fast or sad.
She also told me about the night one of her astrophysics friends went to a bar trivia contest where the final question was What does Kelvin measure? The winning answer was heat, but her friend explain...
Nothing connects to the moment like music.
My ancestors spent centuries in the hills of County Kerry, waist-deep in sheep shit, getting shot at by English soldiers, and my grandparents crossed the ocean in coffin ships to come to America, just...
But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy, human bodies.
Movies for adults sucked in the 1980s, and music for adults sucked even worse whether we're talking about Kathleen Turner flicks or Sting albums, the decade's non-teen culture has no staying power at...
It's kind of amazing how popular 'Grey's Anatomy' is. What other show can boast such an annoyingly sincere cast of doctors, sniveling through such perfunctory love triangles?
The Stones suggested that if you dabble in decadence, you could turn into a devil-worshipping junkie. Paul McCartney suggested that if you mess around with girl worship, you could turn into a husband....