[tba]

choire:

This chick. This chick is so fucking funny. She told a story that made me laugh till I cried. GONNA STALK HER.

This is so true.  I was doing the sort of laughing where regular laughing isn’t enough to express the extreme, excruciating paroxysms of joy happening in my heart, so I mostly shake and my face hurts and occasionally I squeak.

The whole Tumblr reading was super fun.  (For Heather, who’d asked on twitter, and anyone else confused, it was a reading by… 10? great tumblrers, mostly people who are also writers elsewhere, mostly Gawker or The Awl, or things like that.  Everyone read three minutes, and kicked ass.)  James and Tanner and I got actual chair seats, which was really wonderful, considering how crowded and hot Housing Works was.

Oh, and also the readers were awesome.  Halle, as Choire said, was beyond funny, and Choire’s piece was also smart and funny and fun.  (And - this takes balls! - read off an iPhone.)  Emily Gould read from her upcoming memoir, which I’m really looking forward to, because I have loved reading what she writes all over the internet for, like, years, and I think she has interesting things to say about being in your 20s and in New York City and trying to figure out how to be a good person and a smart person and enjoy stuff and be healthy, to yourself and others, without losing what James and I call the irony chip, i.e. becoming a sap, or, like, our moms. (I don’t think Emily would put it in terms of irony, and it’s not even about irony, really, it’s just, like, can you still be a good person and make mean jokes?  The bigger life-question version of that.  It’s not that simple but I think that’s why she can write so much.  It’s bigger than half a paragraph of a tumblr.)

It was really fun to put faces and voices and bodies to some writers whose work I’ve enjoyed for so long.  (Matthew Gallaway read from his lovely novel, and was a grown-up, which is nice in a room of grownup-aged people who reinforce my sense of confusion at being grownup-aged but just not really ever believing it.)

One of the early readers, following the hilarious Julie Klausner and someone else really funny, prefaced her reading with something like, “I’m not an improv person like those people, so I’m just gonna read!” but the person after her, Edith Zimmerman, read an absolutely hilarious thing, straight from the page, never looking up, and I was like (to the first girl) (in my head) “No, lady, that is a shy person.  But also a great writer.”

Everyone was great, and it was really fun.  I usually have a lot of agita about groups of awesome people who are all friends, whom I want to be friends with, but with the open bar and wonderful, fun readings, and sitting between James and Tanner, it just felt great.  And made me want to write more.  Which, you know, tumblr’s a good place for that, right?