Friday, December 30, 2005

Lauren is getting Married. Anabeth is getting Married. Hooray.

Two of my bestfriends are getting married. Lauren is getting married to Kole in September. Anabeth to Josh in May. I take full credit for Lauren and Kole. I have never met Josh, although I gather he's real nice and stuff.

But enough about them and that. I am Lauren's maid of honor and one of Anabeth's bridesmaids. Life is good. They both know this is important to me because one of my ex-bestfriends, Emily, got married the year we all graduated, and had the nerve to not put me in her wedding. This was particularly annoying because she had about 80 bridesmaids, whom she seemingly pulled out of the woodwork. I'd never even heard pf some of them, yet there they were in their gaudy faux-satin dresses and big, classy - yet bordering on white trash - hairdos. Needless to say, I haven't spoken to Emily since her wedding. When she later called me to find out good places to live in San Diego, I decided not to call her back. Then I dropped my phone in the toilet and lost all of my phone numbers. The rest is history, as it goes.

Long story short: Put me in your wedding or die.

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

This is Why


My friend, Cesar, and I started an underground humor & literary magazine in San Diego. We, with the help of a handful of others, created, designed, marketed, distributed, and generated revenue for what was slowly becoming a successful and sought-after publication. An old family friend got a hold of the magazine and promised us the world: He wanted to take over the responsibility of all distribution, sales, and costs involved in bringing the magazine to Indianapolis. While we were only producing 20,000 issues every other month in San Diego, this guy was going to pay us to create a monthly magazine and print 50,000 issues a pop. We opted to discontinue our run in San Diego to focus on making the magazine more consumer-friendly for our launch in Indianapolis. We established a writing and web team, as well as streamlined our production plan in order to make this magazine competitive with current Indianapolis publications.

Cesar and I were working at bars while trying to make all of this happen. So, the thought of quitting, moving to New York City (where we planned to run our side of production—the creative side, that is) and working for ourselves was too good to be true. Literally. For, as the cliché goes, “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Everything fell through two months before our proposed launch. The following will cover what we have done to cope, how it affected us, and life after the magazine we spent two years creating.

Let’s take a moment to make a toast to catharsis, shall we? Cheers.






A very detailed account of the magazine's making can be found here.