The New York Times

While living at home in San Jose my internet homepage was the New York Times. I almost always found myself enthralled by one of their "Most Popular" articles. My flimsy qualms about being conformist were always quelled as soon as I began to read. I still base some of my romantic endeavors on Daniel Bergner's findings in his What Do Women Want? article. Or justify them, at least.
Now that I'm here I don't read the Times or the Magazine nearly enough. I've left it out of my E-mail-Facebook-Blogger routine and can never seem to recall it when I'm bored and looking for other things to investigate on the internet. As you can see my internet-media radius of knowledge is decidedly smaller than most people's, but what can I say? I'm a simple girl. Yet on those rare occasions when I do decide to read something, I'll notice that the next day it seems as though most of New York has read it too. For instance the day after the Times had an article on the absence of subway announcements, A.K.A. the omnipresence of mumbling train conductors, even the G train got it's act together enough for me to know that the Fulton stop was next.
Today while skimming over the home page I had my second rendezvous with a lovely man by the name of Bill Cunningham. Ol' Bill does a style segment for their multimedia section called On the Street with Bill Cunningham. Bill is like your great-uncle with ambiguous sexual orientation. As far as you know he could have a wife and children, but he could just as well have a feminine, balding life-partner and everyone in your family is too polite to speculate. Bill is just one in a long list of people that remind me of one of my goals to fulfill while living in this or any other city. I love being an observer of oddities and curious characteristics in people. I've always loved to draw "weird" or "different" people because I like exploring why these people strike me as such and it's something I want to examine further in my work.* Let's hope that these intermittent inspirations produce results and continue to make for an interesting life and an interesting body of work.

*Is it typical for someone as antisocial and awkward as I am to have such an interest in people? Have I compensated for my own social awkwardness by using the excuse that I'm an observer in order not to participate in society? Good God let's hope it doesn't go the sociopathic route, because it very-well could. Let's hope I can find the participant-observer balance.