Lindsayism.com

Pretty Much Everything You Need To Know: My Life As a Political Activist

In January of 2001, I took a bus to DC to protest the first inauguration of George W. Bush and to visit a friend and drink a lot of alcohol in a lame club. First, though, I planned my sign. It was a gray piece of cardboard in the shape of a tombstone, and it said:

RIP
Democracy
1776-2000
"We hardly knew ye."

We stayed out late the night before, and the next morning she didn't want to get up and go to the protest, so I decided to go alone. I walked to Dupont Circle with my sign, of which I was extremely proud. When I got there, hundreds of people were gathering, and I quickly realized that they all had the same sign as me. At least 1/4 of the signs were a slightly different, handmade version of my brilliant original democracy tombstone. In fact, of the handmade signs, I would say a good 70% were democracy tombstones. A few of them even also said "We hardly knew ye", even though that part didn't make sense. So after about fifteen minutes, I chucked my sad, pathetic sign in a trash can, went back to my friend's apartment, and went back to bed.

And that's the story of the first time I ever saw The Naked Cowboy, who was also there.

"I just thought you'd want to help other victims"

* This is just really fun: watch celebrity babies morph into their future selves. It's all forensic and sh*t!

* The Onion: Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of US Independence.

* Sarah Brown's Cringe Reading Series to be filmed by Nightline next week! AHHHHH!!!

* This is a few days old but if you hate Nancy Grace with the same violent-fantasy-inducing passion that I do, you'll love watching Elizabeth Smart roll her eyes at her and put her in her place. (But it will still make you mad.)

* Breaking bad habits with rubber band aversion therapy. This reminds me of the time one of my friends broke up with some asshole in college. Like most girls with long hair, this friend always wore a ponytail holder on her right wrist. We were sitting at a coffee shop and she said "It's just that I still think about him all the time."
"Are you thinking about him right now?" I asked. "Yeah." she said. So I reached over, grabbed the ponytail holder, and snapped it back.
Hey, they never got back together and she's now happily engaged, with a new baby. Point: aversion therapy works (except when applied to my nailbiting.)

* My friend John Green, who is kind of a totally huge deal in the world of Young Adult books (and in my life, aww) humorously answers questions about "The OC"'s Josh Schwartz's upcoming movie version of John's first book, Looking For Alaska, and about The Problem of (Hollywood) Evil. (Incidentally, I just finished John's second book, An Abundance of Katherines, which comes out in September and is awesome, but it will have it's own gushy post closer to the pub date.)

the trash flash

All of the art in my apartment was either found in the trash, created by me (badly), or bought from the Steve Keene store. (When my friend AJ first saw my Steve Keene paintings, he exclaimed "What were you talking about? Your art isn't retarded at all! It's good!" and I had to explain that that was real art, my shitty art was in the other room.)

So I was really happy last week when my friends Amanda and Eric and I were coming out of a bar and saw the above painting propped up against the trash. I ran over and plucked it up and it instantly became one of my prized possessions. On the ride home, I stared at it, trying to think of a name, and then I noticed the guy is holding a knife. Disconcerting. I speculated that maybe I didn't "find" this painting at all, maybe the guy left it out to be found and this was his way of being an exhibitionist (an idea Eric named "the trash flash.") I decided to name the guy "Ira the Ripper" and to keep the painting somewhere other than the bedroom to ward off nightmares and monkey's-paw curses.

When I got home to my Chinatown apartment, I got my mail and read it as I stumbled up the stairs. When I reached my landing, my Chinese next door neighbors were having dinner with the door open. The only neighbor I'd ever seen there was the very sweet elderly Chinese woman who speaks no English, but sometimes knocks on my door with a present of sticky rice in a banana leaf. I assumed these were her grandkids, since they were my age. I smiled and started putting my key in the lock as the three of them sat there staring at me in a curious but not unfriendly way.

I couldn't get the key in and the girl got up to help. "Oh, no, I'll get it, it's just because I'm nervous" I said. I then looked up at the door and realized I was on the fourth floor, not the fifth, and that these were my downstairs neighbors. "Oh my god" I said, blushing. They didn't seem to speak English so all I could do was make the universal gesture for "too much to drink" and skitter over to the stairs. It wasn't until I got to my real landing that I realized that I was clutching a painting of a middle aged man with a large penis and a knife, and that it had been facing them the whole time I was trying to basically break in to their neighbor's apartment.

There was nothing left to do but make the biggest production that has ever been made of a key successfully opening a lock, throw Ira face-first in a corner of the kitchen, and call my best friend.