Summer tour

I leave for New York and Vermont tomorrow.  If any of you are around Monday night, July 2, please come join Jonathan and me at Room 18: 18 Spring Street between Elizabeth and Mott Streets.  We’ll be there from 8:30 on and would love to see you.

In the papers

I give so much legitimacy to blogs that I often forget that a lot of the world still finds them a distant second to mainstream news and other media.  So, while I am happy to see my friends and family touted on the best blogs out there, I also recognize that it’s pretty cool that two family members made it into the papers this week.  Today, another letter from my Dad made it into the New York Times’ Letters to the Editor section and Michael’s new book got a favorable review in the Washington Times.  He was also reviewed in the Washington Post a while back but I conveniently lost the link. . .

I’m going to be mortified

It’s hard to believe but surprisingly I was not always the cultured erudite person you know today.  When I was 14, I began a series of high school foreign exchange programs.  At the time, I assumed I would naturally be the cool and mysterious “studying abroad” student to the people I met in Italy, Japan, Israel, and Costa Rica.  But, as it turns out, I was a lot more American than I thought.

Fortunately, I kept a journal of my time away.  So, if you’re in LA next week, I invite you to see a completely new side of me when I read from my teenage travel journals out loud and on stage.  I’ll be joined by 7 other people who will also be reading from their 100% real journals, diaries, poems and love letters from their teenage years.  It’s a hilarious show called Mortified and I’ll be in the lineup on Wednesday, June 27th at 8PM at King King in Hollywood.

Thanks for your support!

I’m like in love with I’m in like with you.

I heard about iminlikewithyou.com last week and I am obsessed. I was reading PSFK who linked to a talk by Josh Spear about the way the digital generation communicates. I was familiar with almost every reference except for iminlikewithyou so I spent some time figuring it out.

First of all for the moment, the site is invitation only. I appreciated that the main link suggested I find someone on Facebook who could send me an invite. I joined the iminlikewithyou group and voila, an invitation was in my inbox about 2 hours later. I also got an e-mail from an old friend who told me her friends started the site and she could get me an invitation if I still needed one. They might be a good interview for POTW. Now that I am a member I have invites to spare as well so if you need an invitation, let me know.

But back to my point about it being so cool. Essentially, it’s just another social networking site but I like its twist. The only way to network with, talk to, flirt with (which I assume is mainly what the site is for) or date other people on the page is by competing for their attention and winning. This is exactly what life is like, right?

Users play “games,” essentially asking questions of one another and other users “bid” (with points allotted to them when they signed up initially and have more chances to earn later) to win the game. When the game ends, the owner of the game gets to pick a winner from the top 5 bidders. It’s only at that point that users get to connect with each other: the one who started the game and the one who was picked to be the winner can now talk. The website will connect you via e-mail or even by phone without either party ever having to reveal their contact information.

Of course this game would be a lot more fun if I was single but for now I’m finding a lot of other people on it who are just like me, out there to meet other networkers.