Now that my commute involves a 45-minute drive to Cabin John every day (it’s here, btw), I’m trying to use it as an opportunity to do some homework. I’ve been listening to albums that I should have in high school, or college, or, like, last year. There’s a lot of music out there, you guys. This is all possible because of M’s extensive CD collection. And when I say extensive, I mean half of the boxes he had moved from his 5×10 storage unit in LA were CDs that he’d been collecting since 1994.

Sometimes, M hands me one as a joke, and I take it too seriously. Which is how I ended up listening to The Counting Crow’s Hard Candy, and found out that I knew all the words to Miami. If anyone from my past can tell me why I know this song by heart, but none of the others, please get in touch.

The highlights:

• The Clean/Mister Pop
• Invisible Shield/K Records compilation
• Xiu Xiu/Fabulous Muscles
• Chickfactor.com*pilation
• Transformer/Lou Reed
• Human Amusements at Hourly Rates/Guided By Voices
• All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone/Explosions in the Sky
• The Glow Pt. 2/Microphones
• Any Other City/Life Without Buildings

I’ve always talked about Pittsburgh in extremes. When I was 16, I thought it was the worst, the grayest, the bleakest, the stifflingest.

Now that I’ve had some distance, I speak (and think) in glowing superlatives about the Steel City. It’s the best, the greenest, the friendliest, the rust belt-iest. You should go there, why haven’t you been there already? It’s the best!

I love to talk about it as if it were my relative, or sometimes, as if it were my brilliant friend whom I think should be a household name. Oh, but I don’t want her to get too successful, because then I’d have to share.

Now that I’ve embarked on a Pittsburgh research binge for an essay collection, I finally have run into someone who shares my affection for descriptive melodrama. A professor at the university of Pittsburgh, Franklin Toker, wrote a history of Pittsburgh architecture in 1986, when it was named the most livable city. The dude even put the title in all caps. PITTSBURGH: An Urban Portrait.

Here are my favorite Toker lines:

• In the beginning was the land.
• The chief distinction of Pittsburgh is not smoke, and it never was.
• Pittsburgh is the classic overachiever among American cities.
• Nature gave Pittsburgh the gift of water.
• A romantic spirit, often inclined to playfulness, is a prime experience of architecture.
• The strength of the old Pittsburgh lay precisely in the fact that it did not care what the rest of the nation thought of it.

* Art is from a Mattress Factory exhibit. Seamus Nolan, “310-312 Sampsonia Way, For Sale By Owner, Great Opportunity,” 2011.

I dedicated the inaugural event of Call Your Girlfriend to my friend, Alison Matela. Alison passed away a year ago today, and she will always be at the top of my speed dial. Below is the “transcript” of the introduction that I read.

A few years ago, I cut the shallow part of my index finger, right near the knuckle, down to the bone, on a piece of broken picture glass. Blood was pooling, a flap of skin was dangling. I was fairly certain my finger was going to fall off, but I was also pretty sure that I could put a bandaid on it and everything would be fine. I called my friend Alison, and she was there in five minutes.

She came with gauze and Neosporin, and she Googled “when should you go to the emergency room” and “knife wounds” while rolling her eyes at me because I kept threatening to faint.

While we were deciding whether or not I needed to go to the hospital, we went to dinner. We ate pasta with a Bolognese sauce and drank wheat beer with coriander. We called her mom. I kept lifting up the edge of the bandaid to see if it was still bleeding, which would only make it start bleeding again.

On our way home, she flagged down a throng of nurses who happened to be on their way to happy hour, in full scrub attire. She convinced them to stop on the corner of Mt. Pleasant and Irving and look at my finger.

“You know, we really aren’t supposed to do this.”

But they did anyway, because Alison had just gotten accepted into Brooklyn Law School on a full scholarship that day, and no one could tell her no.

The nurses said that I was fine, and so I didn’t lose my finger, but I always wonder if I hadn’t called Alison maybe I would have.

I love that with a simple call to your girlfriend, you can solve most any problem. Call Your Girlfriend obviously isn’t about solving the world’s problems, but we’re showcasing some of the women, like Alison, who can.

Be like B. Call Your Girlfriend, March 21 @ Big Bear Cafe, 7:30PM.

In honor of Call Your Girlfriend, I’ll be doing a GIF a day until we get this thing started.

Don’t forget to call you girlfriend and tell her to come March 21st at Big Bear Cafe.

I’m organizing a new reading series that will showcase some monstrously talented ladies. And I named it after a Robyn song.

March 21 is the inaugural night. I hope you’ll come and hear all of these brilliant women do their thought-provoking thing at Big Bear Cafe.

Tell your girlfriends.

*Flyer design by the lovely Jenna Crowder.

Some are calling her stupid. Some are calling it a “reconciliation.” The New York Daily News poll is idiotically asking if this shows that she has “forgiven him.”  

Matthew Perpetua, who I usually really enjoy reading, says that he is “grossed out” by Rihanna’s decision, that she is sending a “poisonous and tremendously irresponsible message to her audience.”

When we start telling domestic violence victims what they can and cannot do, and judging them for how they live with and process their abuse, we are just as bad as their abusers. And it’s dangerous—it errs on the side of victim-blaming. Something that we as a society can never seem to get away from, no matter how hard we try.

It’s also a really naïve assumption about what domestic violence is.

When someone gets punched in the face by their partner, they are not in control of their “cultural narrative” or even their own personal narrative.

And, no one gets over, or “forgives” anyone for throwing their head against a car window.

Abuse isn’t just about someone hitting someone, it’s about emotional manipulation—complete power and control over another person. Abusers often start by isolating their partners, taking away their support system slowly, and then emotionally manipulating their partner to feel as if they have no one else to rely on (financially, emotionally, physically, creatively) but their abuser. They take away your self-worth, and your will to fight back. And that is when they strike.

I understand where this cultural anger over an abuse victim’s actions comes from. I worked with domestic violence victims for over three years, and the idea that leaving an abuser is one big, clear choice, or that it’s the same for every victim is, well, wrong. The shelter where I worked housed women who had left their abusers five or eight times. Even those that that were luck to leave once and never go back, thought about leaving so many times before they finally acted.

I worked with a woman who was beaten with a hot curling iron by her husband, who went back to that same husband three times until she found the strength, the support system, the financial help to leave for good. The social workers at the shelter were heartbroken every time she went back, because they knew it might always be the last time they saw her.

But they would tell me: No one can regain their power back in one fell swoop, or even in a few months or years. And when you start judging their process, you are just making it harder for them to get back that power, and regain control of their lives.

We can’t know why Rihanna is working with Brown. It’s impossible to fully understand a person’s process for leaving and working through abuse, and how they try to gain back the power and control they lost over their lives. It’s heartbreaking to watch.

Rihanna should not be “responsible” for her “cultural narrative.” WE—the media, her friends, her peers, the Grammys producers, our society—should be.

We are clearly doing a terrible job.

One positive thing to emerge from this whole Klosterman guffaw, is that it got me to spell tUnE-yArDs as the way Merrill intended. I think we owe her that much. I’m still working on whokill.

Other things that it has done include making the internet, or a certain part of it, hysterical. A good thing, I think. Both sides of the gender aisle are talking about what his piece means and doesn’t mean about music criticsm. Here are my favorite takes on Klosterman’s take on tUnE-yArDs:

• Sydney Brownstone at L Magazine
• Maura Johnston at the Village Voice
• My husband’s
• Rob Mitchum’s Tweets

 Somehow, I forgot that Klosterman did write about Andy Rooney:

“He’d open a can of mixed nuts on 60 Minutes and separate the various nuts by type, and then he’d count how many of each nut were in the can. What made this so interesting (at least to me) was not the metaphor this act represented; what was interesting was that there was no metaphor at all. It wasn’t a veiled sociological commentary or a criticism of advertising or a meditation on consumerism. It wasn’t about anything, except the contents of the can. This, I suspect, is why Rooney’s seemingly banal essays were so infuriating to a certain kind of person: We have come to assume that whenever a media personality talks about something basic, he or she is actually trying to explain something complex. The idea that someone on television would just sit at his desk and complain about mixed nuts and have it only be about the ostensive subject — without a larger meaning and without a defined purpose — seemed facile and ridiculous. ”