Susan Coll's Blog, page 2

Dark Comedy

At the gym, riding an exercise bicycle while reading "The Ask," by Sam Lipsyte:
A man leans in and compliments me on my cycling: "You're really getting your heart-rate up!" he says. This is both sketchy gym behavior, and not remotely true. I have not broken a sweat. He then identifies himself as a masseuse. I'm not sure if this is meant to put me at ease.
"What are you reading?"
I show him the cover. He looks puzzled.
"It's a dark comedy," I explain. There is something about his demeanor, a certa...

The Book Party

Snippets of conversations involving the execution of a book party in Bethesda, Maryland, Thursday night…

"We need to leave now because I only put 20 minutes in the meter."

"Whoops, wait…let me just run back inside and get the parking stub validated."

"Double park here and I'll unload the liquor and then you can turn right and right again and park in the garage…But can you park there more than two hours?...You can park there for the rest of your life if you want…"

"I parked in the garage downstair...

Blogger, Overexposed

So this is an experiment to see if I've managed to deactivate all of the various links between this blog and Twitter and Facebook. I remember once talking to a nonfiction writer who told me that when her first book was published, she hoped that no one would notice. We had a good laugh about our self-defeatist promotional impulses---write a book, then hide under the bed for a few months. I've progressed WAY beyond that. I have a website (a new one currently under construction) and not just a F...

A Parking Lot Movie!

Ever since an interviewer asked me "why a parking blog?" this blogger has fallen into a paralyzing mini-blogging crisis trying to find the right answer. There's the obvious practical response: if you own a car and live in an urban area, the amount of time spent contemplating parking may be slowly eating a hole in your brain. (Three times around the block to find a spot near my house this morning; one parking ticket this week; some $10 in quarters, and then some, dropped in meters in just the ...

Not Quite a Parking Poem

At some point in the not-too-distant future, this enthusiastically conceived, sporadically updated blog will stumble into some form of coherence, but in the meantime, two links. Yes, parking altercations in DC are getting boring, perhaps, but remarkably still on-going, as evidenced by both a glimpse outside my window and by this item in the Washington City Paper. On the up side, it's a balmy 50 degrees today, and even though there are still giant drifts of snow eating what might otherwise be ...

Snowzaustion

True, that's not a word. And we're too tired of winter to try and come up with something more clever. Walking the dog on icy sidewalks has begun to feel like an olympic winter sport, and with gigantic mounds of frozen slush now lining both sides of every street, the parking stakes are even higher. Pretty much every vacant space in my neighborhood is reserved with some sort of improvised device such as a lawn chair, a step-ladder, or a giant plastic water bottle. Now pleas are springing up t...

Bostonians, They're Just Like Us!

Actually, they're a little bit ahead of us. My brother sent this link from today's Boston Globe about Bostonians getting a jump on the storm by claiming parking spots before the flakes even began to fall.

Meanwhile, here in DC, parking squabbles continue, but some of us are a little exhausted by this subject at the moment. So exhausted, in fact, that as we blog we are paying someone else to dig the car out this time around. (Note to self: clean out the garage and put the car inside next winte...

Some Good Things About the Snow

1. Excused from jury duty today.
2. People in famously grouchy DC are being quite friendly as evidenced by, among other things, "I LOVE DC" carved into a snow bank along Wisconsin Avenue.
3. A wicker chair set out in the snow (above) for weary pedestrians. (As if! In reality, the opening salvo in the latest round of neighborhood parking warfare as residents attempt to claim public parking spaces. But since we're in a good mood, let's give people the benefit of the doubt.)
4. A man in Starbucks...

Out Shoveling

Deep Throat

Maybe we don't get very deep here at Alternate Sides, but we know people who do. This just in from my friend, an investigative reporter who is known by the moniker: Ms. How the Fuck Did She Get That? She has a lot of sources. And even sources who are busily working to keep us safe from nuclear annihilation are, evidently, also thinking about parking:

"DC is shutting down tomorrow because we're getting a little snow. I welcome the snow. A snow like this in New York would make people deliriously...