The Advocate

Manic. Pixie. Dream. Girl.  MPDG. The term was originally coined by film critic Nathan Rabin in response to Kirsten Dunst's character from Elizabethtown , circa 2005. The MPDG is "a type of female character depicted as vivacious and appealingly quirky, whose main purpose within the narrative is to inspire a greater appreciation for life in a male protagonist." Of course, the notorious MPDG significantly predates 2005. Indeed, the first nigh-universally agreed upon MPDG is Katharine Hepburn's Susan Vance from the 1938 comedy Bringing Up Baby . Subsequent MPDG's include notables such as Goldie Hawn in Cactus Flower, her daughter Kate Hudson in Almost Famous, Zooey Deschanel in... basically every character she plays, Rachel Bilson in Last Kiss, Audrey Tautou in Amelie, Ramona V. Flowers of the Scott Pilgrim comics, and (my personal favorite), Natalie Portman in Garden State. Key characteristics of the MPDG include: eccentricity, quirkiness, idiosyncrasies, full...

I've been meaning to write this post for quite some time. However, full-time parent + full-time husband + full-time public servant + part-time gamer + anytime reader + once in a blue moon musician leaves little time in a given day/week/month/year/lifetime. Anyhoo, this is a subject that, the older I become, the more I invariably raise in casual conversation. Core competency: the innate ability to figure shit out, handle their shit, never let their shit slip, and then get that shit done. Basically, a person who knows their shit, figuratively scatologically speaking. It's often confused for the "management theory" developed by C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel. I'm definitely not talking about this, you heartless hippy capitalist. It's also sometimes confused and/or used as a substitute for: common-sense, wisdom, intelligence, knowledge, education, genius, cunning, craftiness, being gifted, being sly, being slick, being thorough, hard-working, street-smarts, ...

(Credit) This is a prose poem. Please do not confuse the art with the artist by projecting the contents of the character into the creator. Begin rant/ I'm no longer on my antidepressant. I still take the Xanax though. My therapist, who I was finally starting to get comfortable with after months, has moved away for a new job. So I've stopped therapy completely. I treat my psychiatrist like a mushroom because he doesn't seem interested in me. I feel like my treatment has helped me as much by not helping me as it has by helping me. I still have intrusive thoughts about terrible things. I still exhibit hyper-vigilance. I still worry excessively about my shit and piss and bathrooms and wearing protective garments. Yet now I have stopped putting myself down for past my behavior when I was a child. I give myself space to try and openly be sad, to feel things, to not be perfect. Some days I even feel truly, unconditionally, and briefly happy. Especially with my infant. Still, I al...

Been a minute since my last post. Got caught up in the grind, as we all do from time to time. Forgot about the take back, clap back, but it's a long weekend and some things have not yet arrived, so here we find ourselves. There are times when I've got that itch, that restlessness, that skin-crawling tingle. The feeling that keeps me up at night doing chores no one has any business doing at 4 AM. The feeling that keeps me up listening to another Bon Iver album, sweating in my boxer-briefs, typing into the cyber-ether. My proverbial shout from the mountaintops to the bottom of the sea. I hope you don't mind this divergence into something a little more personal. There are times when my fingers must. When they have to. Have to type. Have to spin words like spiders must spin webs, like electronic daemons must crawl the interweb, trawling cyberspace until the end of time. Soon, I'm going to be a father. I am going to have a little girl. It could happen at any time. She...