We met Holly and Dan at a sushi restaurant. I had been corresponding with Holly for a few weeks online, where she found me on the dating site I still use to passively acquire new friends. She wrote to me first, which was nearly unprecedented until recently. In the prior month, two other people had contacted me and then vanished after a few messages, this after well over a year of apparent silence on the site. I felt I was justified in being slightly guarded, particularly that I couldn't be absolutely certain that these were not three faces of the same person playing a curious game. (This is not so much wild paranoia as a hypothesis based on prior experience.)

I believe it was Holly's art site that convinced me it was nigh about time we met. It was too smooth, too lovely to be false. The art was skillful, the sort I would want hanging from my walls or decorating what would immediately become my favorite t-shirt, especially as it touched upon our mutual geeky love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Also, the web address contained her name, which would have ...

To break the silence, Amber says, "It's nice that people would miss us."

"They are used to having me around, love. Melissa pretty much insisted that our leaving wasn't an option."

We had just left Jacki's annual St. Patrick's Day potluck. When the other guests had vacated, aside from Eric, Amber mentioned that she had applied to a yearlong artist residency at her alma mater in York, Pennsylvania, over five hours from where we currently live. She would have to work on her art and programs for the community for fifteen hours a week, after which she would be free to do as she wished. We would have a rent and utilities free apartment for a year and Amber would be given a monthly stipend that could not feed a dog. She does make York seem endlessly dull, except where it is outright criminal, which doesn't precisely put a shine on the concept. But it is an option, one of the few being presented to us right now. It is something other than our having to live ...

Social scientists report that one lose half one's friends every seven years. I don't think it is too much of a coincidence that one's cells have been completely replaced in this same amount of time, a sort of Ship of Theseus. As a society, we pretend that this gradual transformation isn't existentially terrifying but, on a cellular level, both parties have become completely different people. Perhaps these two people aren't that close. Perhaps, on the most biological of levels, one really does outgrow other people.

Seven years ago, I was twenty-five. My life seemed to revolve around my long term relationship with Emily and a small nucleus of friends that resisted all my attempts make them like one another for the sake of turning my life a sitcom. I was just finishing grad school, clinging to my long hair as an unneeded symbol of my individuality and identity, barely managing to imagine what adult life entailed because I had spend every year of it concerned with an eventual degree. I know some people from this time, but I am not close with many of them. Seven years before that, seventeen, drowning in fondness for my emotionally distant best-friend-turned-gi

Ludwig Montessa

Ludwig Montesa was a fixture, an inexplicable light switch in the new apartment of the New Paltz community that definitely turns something on but you can't quite say what. You flick it whenever you get home and inexplicably feel a sort of relief, promising yourself that you'll figure out the wiring one of these days, but not today. Today, you are a bit too busy.

I met him for the first time at a party my freshman year of college. My then girlfriend, Kate, seemed to know him somehow and may have simply said by way of introduction, "Oh, that's Ludwig," as though that were enough to explain everything. To me, he seem to be an overly effusive and possibly gay Filipino stranger wearing ...

An Evening with...

My coworker offered me tickets to An Evening with Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman, since she is moving this weekend. I don't need these; I bought mine the moment I possibly could and presented them as a Valentine's gift to Amber. I drive to acquire them so that Daniel and Sarah M may join us.

Though the drive is only fifteen minutes, I do not doubt that I stretch if not outright break a dozen traffic laws in my excitement on my way to her condo, where I yank them from under the door.

Daniel and Sarah are already present when I return home. Amber is dressed in her best "artist" ...

Pornography is an art like anything else Amber does it exceptionally well...

It is a subject of great debate in the soft sciences why we want what we do in bed - is it hardwired or the product of formative experiences our conscious minds can no longer actively recall? (By this, I don't mean sexual orientation. If you need me to tell you that I think sexual orientation is part of your hardware, not software, you haven't been paying attention.)

The desires are there, no matter the provenance. The human animal becomes infuriatingly unpredictable when it comes to sexuality, as so many people have kinks and quirks one could not guess by looking. (I would imagine most everyone has a slight divergence from the supposed mainstream, be ...

-John Green

John Green is a monster from the hell dimension Lacrimosa who exists only to bring soul-wracking anguish into the homes of the literate.

I knew within a page that this was a book about Cancer Kids, having only picked it up because I kept reading quotes from it that I wish I had written. I don't like cancer as a plot device. Cancer is writing porn, like talking about 9/11 or the Holocaust. It's too effortless, too much emotion because of the condition which frees up the author to be lazy. Once a character is described as having cancer, the reader knows someone is going to be dead in the ...

Continuing with I Citizen Mag's series of Indie Author Interviews we've got a great Q&A with Thomm Quackenbush. It's always a delight for us to get to know authors a little better through this series, the online community may seem large at times but it's a small world if share our love for indie writing and support exciting, new or unique authors.

As always, the standard warning: I am going to relentlessly spoil this book.

Oh, what a joy it is to be able to write a glowing review.

(First, a note. I am going to refer to the main character as Wade throughout this review. This is not the name he uses for most of this novel, as it takes place within the virtual reality of the OASIS and everyone within uses a cyber-pseudonym. However, "Parzival" is not a name I care to spell reliably and the end of the novel leads me to believe it is a more fitting one than his screenname.)

My initial description to others of this book to others was that it was like a transcript of Roald Dahl and Neal Stephenson getting together over beers in 1989 to discuss the works of Kurt Vonnegut (or, less opaquely, what would happen if Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Snow Crash had a love child atop ...

Blanket Fort

I come home on Valentine's Day and the living room has been transformed into a blanket fort. I had been forewarned that this would happen - Amber had been talking for weeks about how she wanted to camp out and had me buy the fixings for something called "hobo stew" - but it is still startling to see what my lover can reduce our living room to when given a few spare hours, the contents of our linen basket and bed, and whatever twine she can fine. Within the fort, she has placed our inflatable mattress and the books she had been reading since finishing this masterpiece.

I had taken Friday off from work, knowing this would be a blissfully long night. We spend the night ignoring our ...