(wilmington, n.c.; sept 22, 2011)

You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves
you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terr-
ible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself
a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy,
and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to
choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and
he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your
heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you
don’t even have a name for.

This is from “You Are Jeff,” by Richard Siken, one of my favorite poems and one of my favorite poets. Check it out. It’s a really interesting piece about two versions of one person — maybe a person you used to be and a person you will be — colliding.

I used to read a LOT of poetry in college… I think I started reading it because I just wanted to be the kind of person who sat around a college campus with my back against a tree reading poetry in the fall while wearing a sweater and drinking a latte. Like a person that exists only in a brochure meant to comfort parents. The thing is, the tree was uncomfortable, the grass was wet, and the latte was actually steamed milk with almond because I didn’t touch caffeine in college. It was not genuine at all. The poetry was good, though. I don’t read much anymore but I’ve got a few books I haven’t attacked yet, so maybe this winter.

Below, you can find a link to two of my favorite songs smooshed together in the most perfect way. Listening to this makes me want to drive and drive and drive.

it always seems night endlessly begins and ends and ends and ends
after all of the dreaming, i wanna come back home again
the screen door slams and mary’s dress waves
and like a vision she dances across the porch while the radio plays
counting crows :: rain king / thunder road (live in nyc)

(getting my hair done. this is the before shot. new salons are terrifying, hence the giant glass of vino.)

Read the rest of this entry »

(where i do work)

Confession: I am not necessarily proud of every single article I write.

If you read every single article I write, that’s probably pretty clear. I love my job and I think I do good work, but the business of online journalism is about clicks. It’s about getting people to click the link to your story, and sometimes, that means writing about whatever people are Googling that day, whether it’s some starlet’s leaked cell phone photos or Moammar Gadhafi’s last words.

I thought it would be nice to have a reference point for the stuff I do like, so I’m going to try to gather it up at the end of each week.

Read the rest of this entry »

It is damn near impossible to be a successful screenwriter or TV writer in Hollywood.

If you are a successful writer in Hollywood, it means you are exceptional, in that you’re amazing at what you do, but also in the most literal sense of the word: you are the exception. The exception to the rule — that unspoken, “Every single person in this Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf is on a laptop, writing a script, and every single person in this Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf is going to end up settling for Plan B.”

Some days I feel like I am on the right track; like I have the skills, the tools, and the network to be successful. Other days, everything is impossible, and I start calculating the number of motel stops I’d have to make on the drive home to my mom’s house in Connecticut. Those are the days when I watch this YouTube video (seriously, I even have it bookmarked on my phone) and it always makes me happy and hopeful.

If this whole screenwriting thing never comes to fruition, I can totally write a book. Is “Acceptance Speeches I Practiced In The Shower and Never Got To Make” too long to be the title of a book?

I illegally downloaded “Life As A House” the summer I was 15 and it’s been one of my go-to movies ever since. I feel like I’m betraying everything I stand for by supporting the man who broke up Seth and Summer (shut up, reality and fiction blur sometimes) but Hayden Christensen is magnificent in this movie. Plus, if we want to get shallow about it… he looks good even when he’s wearing eyeliner and blue hair dye and getting busted by his mom for practicing autoerotic asphyxiation before school.

It’s about a father (Kevin Kline) and his troubled teenage son (Christensen) who attempt to reconnect over a summer spent building a house. Despite the family bonding theme, I wouldn’t recommend watching this one with your dad, unless you want to have a conversation with your dad about autoerotic asphyxiation, which I do not, but it will probably make you want to call him and tell him you love him. Be respectful, mind the time zones.

Jena Malone is also good in this, though I don’t really understand the Jena Malone obsession from a few years back. I think she has a bit of a young-Jodie-Foster thing going on; maybe that’s why every single director wanted her in all the movies ever.

The film is beautifully shot, with a Guster-heavy soundtrack (you can’t go wrong) and a piano score that I absolutely love. It feels deep without feeling pretentious and, most importantly, it feels honest. Sam talks like a teenager talks; the writer wasn’t particularly concerned about the film being quotable, which I appreciate.

Anyway, basically, this movie will make you laugh and cry and reevaluate your feelings about boys with facial piercings. It also features my good friend Ian Somerhalder as a 17-year-old pimp, so, if you’re into that kind of thing…

sun starts sinking, can’t see my shadow
looks like trouble on a rainy day
guster :: rainy day

My friend Amy introduced me to Stephen Kellogg’s music when we were in high school. I actually owe a lot of my musical faves to our friendship; he’s just one of many artists that we used to talk about back then whose music I still love today.

I pretty much love every song Stephen Kellogg & the Sixers have done. When I was a teenager I used to use the lyrics in my IM away messages; in college they found their way into many a journal entry. Last summer, one line from “4th of July” became my mantra: Maybe if you’re not happy, it’s because of you.

I don’t go to restaurants or movies alone, but I’ve gone to three Stephen Kellogg concerts by myself. The summer I was 17 I drove forty minutes away to see him play at a street fair, by myself, and afterward I went up to him and thanked him, and he gave me a sweaty hug and told me I had a pretty name, and I was more star-struck then than I’ve ever been since.

SK writes love songs like nobody’s business. My favorite of all his songs is “Girlfriend as Pretty as You.” He met his wife when he was sixteen years old, and that song is sort of a chronicle of the ups and downs of a relationship, the struggle of loving and forgiving and accepting the changes in a person. It’s the kind of song that makes you want to walk out your door and fall into a crazy, dysfunctional, decade-long love affair with the first person you see.

His newest record came out last week. It’s called “Gift Horse,” and while it certainly has love songs, I find myself connecting more to the songs about death. (I know, shut up. I’m 24. My quarter-life crisis is right on time.) The focus of the album is SK’s family — there are several songs that he’s written for his daughters and his wife — but the theme of death and of having to leave those people eventually is definitely an undercurrent.

I have always related to his reflections on religion or lack thereof, and there are a lot of comments about religion on this album. There’s a line in “Long Days, Fast Years” that goes: I get scared, still, at the doctor’s. Who will prepare delivery from the church of non-belief? Call it artistic or agnostic, altruistic, now I’ve lost it. This uncertainty just gets to me. I heard it for the first time driving home from work the other night, and I couldn’t help but think, “Yeah, I feel like that too.”

It’s the same connection I felt when I was seventeen listening to his song “If You Have to Go,” when I was saying goodbye to high school friends as one by one, we all left for school.  It’s nice to feel like his music has grown up with me.

You can download the entire new album, “Gift Horse” from iTunes for $7.99. I’d also highly recommend buying the self-titled 2005 record “Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers,” with the bonus tracks, for “Girlfriend as Pretty as You” and “Flower in Rain,” both of which still regularly make me cry on airplanes.

she seemed so confident back then
french-kissing boys into men
stephen kellogg & the sixers :: thirteen (live in nyc)

Hello. I’m Carina.

I started this blog in 2008, when I graduated from college and moved to LA. Like so many of my actual book journals, I wrote in it a handful of times before the pressure to be deep or original or clever got to me, and I stopped updating. And it just sat there on the internet for years as a reminder of how weird I was when I was 21.

Lately, though, I’ve been wishing that I had a space to express my thoughts — a space that isn’t Twitter, as there are actually occasions when I think things that can’t be blurted out in a concise 140-character quip. I mean, it’s rare, but it does happen. Anyway, an actual book journal won’t do, because I am a product of Facebook and Twitter and I need attention to live.

So I deleted all of my blogs from 2008 — which contained great photos and music and the occasional insightful thought, but were generally way too embarrassingly angsty to actually leave up.

I’m just going to use this space to talk about stuff I love and stuff I don’t love. Hopefully more stuff I love, but we’ll see. Sometimes a girl needs a place to vent. The photos probably won’t be great, because the fancy camera that I bought for myself when I graduated got stolen a couple years ago, and now I am just one of those sheep who is obsessed with Hipstamatic.

Hopefully you guys will enjoy and comment and share stuff that you like and stuff that you don’t like. If not, this can just be one of those things only my mom reads. That’s okay, too.

you sent me sailing into the rocks
my queen of knots
your heart’s a jungle
a bar fight
lonely little queen of knots
matt nathanson :: queen of (k)nots