99 RED BALLOONS--I mean, 100 POSTS!

This is bigislandrachel's 100th blog post spectacularino! Mitzvahs all around! And, as an added bonus, today is also my TWO YEAR ANNIVERSARY of moving to New York City!

Wet yourselves in excitement like ill-trained little puppies!

I know I promised Edith Wharton for this post, but since my New York anniversary and blog centennial coincided like an event ordained by the gods, Edith Wharton's getting bumped in favor of a clip post. That's right, here are, in no particular order, my favorite 10 bigislandrachel blog posts. If you don't see your favorites, leave a comment, preferably in English. Someone's been commenting in Chinese characters and I have no idea what he/she/spambot is saying.

1) On my one year anniversary of moving to New York, I almost lost a limb in the subway door.

2) A double hitter: two pieces of creative work, one about making bullets with my Daddio and one about a jumper on the Queensboro Bridge.

3) The post that inspired my very own blog meme: The viewer is in your mind with your neurosis delusions, or why I'll never escape data entry, or why office work is a feminist issue. Lots to love.

4) We all know how much bigislandrachel loves free stuff, especially if I find it on the street. Just search the tag "urban foraging" in my blog and you'll see references to street apples, street conch shells, street books, and streetwalkers (maybe not the last one). But my ultimate free find was my dining room table and chairs, bequeathed to me by my good friend GreenerPenny, who moved back to Hawaii and left me this, my dowry.

5) G-d help me, I'm such a nerd. I went to the New York Anime Festival. And I liked it. A lot.

6) And cats. I love cats. Even stupid ones that get stuck in the car engine. And I miss my roommate's kitteh Eva, who turned out to be a girl and had to stay behind in my old apartment.

7) The Village Voice hasn't paid me in ages, so while I could link to a post about the awesome times I've had as a member of their Street Team, instead I'm going to link to the absolute worst job they ever gave me. Fuck you, Electric Zoo.

8) Not many places in New York remind me of Hawaii, except the party held in a creepy, wet alleyway underneath the train tracks. That was a lot like home.

9) In which a tremendous amount of snow falls and mushrooms grow in my apartment.

10) I want to end with my favorite post on being a nerd, but I can't decide which one I like best. I could make an entire Top 10 list on my nerdly pursuits. In fact, I think I will, with Roman numerals to distinguish this sublist from its parent list.

I. Here are the Twenty Nerd Commandments.

II. Here's why the "geek chic" fashion movement pisses me off.

III. Here's Batman as a Buddhist thangka.

IV. In which I spend Girls Day binge-reading comics I don't intend to buy and get kicked out of the comic book store. This is probably the first time I blogged about comic books, but it sure wasn't the last.

V. A terrible temp job in Midtown has one ray of hope: the window of my office looks out onto DC Comics' New York headquarters. Propriety stops me from pressing my bare tits against the glass and gesturing suggestively to the DC employees, but only just.

VI. I'm such a big nerd, I played one on television.

VII. A visit to a forgotten New Jersey dumping ground lays the groundwork for at least two new comic book series. DC, you have my contact info.

VIII. Naked Girls Reading Science Fiction. You can try to find a nerdier Valentines Day present for your significant other, but it won't come close to my present to the BF.

IX. What's more nerdy? Emily Dickinson's frilly vagina, or a night in Edith Wharton territory? You decide!

X. This last post on my list is actually my favorite blog post of all time, not just my favorite in the nerd sublist. It's about comic books and the people who read them. This post was different from all the others. Normally, bigislandrachel is just a place for me to tell my Hawaii relatives what I'm up to in New York City, while getting some much needed writing practice. The posts are entertaining and sometimes rather personal, but not necessarily profound, and certainly not as scholarly as "A definitive post on comic books" turned out to be. It started out as a general, all-purpose rant about hard core comic book fans, but then a strange thing happened: I remembered my college education, and remembered that I used to be damn good at textual criticism. Although it's a good deal shorter than most of my college papers, I'd say that "A definitive post on comic books" ranks among my best literary essays, because it doesn't just deal with the texts (comics) in a vacuum, but explores how the readers relate to the texts. I'm not going to take any more of your time critiquing my own critique, but if you missed the post the first time around, I urge you to go back and read it again.

Working two jobs, sometimes back to back, doesn't leave me with a lot of energy or creativity at the end of the day--certainly not the kind needed to crank out intelligent discourse on a regular basis. I sometimes think the greatest conspiracy ever foisted on our society was to keep women so busy just trying to survive that we don't have enough of ourselves left over to reach our full potential. So please enjoy my fun, fluffy little posts about kittens and concerts and weekend trips on the train, but remember my favorite post, and remember that I'm not just a pretty interface with a curvy font.