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.

Eve of my 100th post!

This is post number 99 for bigislandrachel. Please, try to contain yourself, the hospitals in New York are already dealing with heat stroke victims and won't be able to handle an influx of casualties if my readers started a celebratory riot in my honor.

Okay, maybe just a leetle riot. Sticks only. No stones. None of that fancy shit.

Much has happened since my recent run of gay pride posts, but I'd like to add just one footnote: Hawaii's governor, whom I'd pretty sure is living in the glass closet herself, just vetoed Hawaii's civil unions bill. It was passed in the state House and Senate, but not with enough votes for a veto override, so, yet again, Hawaii's LGBT community is robbed of their civil rights. No parade can make up for a lack of political power.

But on a happier note, I just spent the 4th of July weekend in Montpelier, Vermont, one of the few states which allows gay marriage. Hurray! The BF's mother (BFM) picked us up in front of Lincoln Center and we drove from New York City aaaallll the way up to Montpelier. It took two days to drive there and one really long day to drive back. This was our mascot, a present from me to the BFM. Yes, that's a dashboard hula man. If you're wickedly jealous, which I know you are, you can pick one up at the Aloha Stadium Flea Market in Hawaii. If you're not in Hawaii, you'll just have to wait for the gods to drop one of these beauties into your lap. That's how I found this one.

Vermont: the BF and I stayed across the street from Aunt Vermont, the BFM's little sister, and her husband, Uncle Vermont. Their house is from the 1850s and our bed and breakfast was from 1895. See if you can guess which is which.

If either of your answers was "the 1/20th scale replica of the Vermont Capitol Building getting towed into the 4th of July Parade," congratulations, you win the bottle of beer I put in the freezer for a quick chill and then forgot about. Careful of the glass shards.

We toured the actual capitol building while we were up there, because the BF and I know how to party like it's 1805. There were a lot of cool features, like the marble floor tiles with seashell fossils and the cannon from the Revolutionary War that I almost got my arm stuck in, but my favorite part of this particular historic monument was the statue of Ethan Allen just outside the capitol doors. Apologies for the up-nostril shot, but seriously, how ultrafabulous is Ethan Allen in this pose?
Mostly it was just nice to get out of the city. You don't realize what a cesspit New York is until you get up into the mountains and see the clouds like puffy white sheep and the rolling hills like sleeping giants, and then you realize that none of your paper cuts have festered from the subway germs and not once have you smelled urine on a street corner, and you're strolling braless down the middle of a street without fear of being hit by a yellow cab and see Space Invaders grafitti and you have to ask yourself: why do I live in New York again?

Especially when you come back from your trip and find waiting for you, in no particular order: a letter from the state unemployment office saying that you haven't worked in the last year and aren't eligible for benefits, your 2009 tax return be damned; an email from your main employer saying that your beloved rep, who always took care of you and got you good long gigs, is leaving the company and will be replaced by someone, at some undetermined time; and the beginnings of an epic struggle with your secondary employer, who hasn't paid you in six weeks.

We should have stayed in the miniature capitol building.

On the next post: Edith Wharton!