KnotMag's Great Eight
Mike’s Graduation
Features
Instead, I stand before you today only in literary metaphor. It is 2004, and I am an online columnist for Knotmag.com. I wanted to speak to you today because I never got to give a graduation speech, even though Mrs. Bissell, our 12-grade English teacher thought I would be good at it.
8.5.2004Michael Corey
KnotMag's Great Eight
Renting Religion
Features
But this tiny, empty, one-room space -- going for a hefty 480 euro (about $580) while outfitted with next to nothing -- comes equipped with an altar, for all my at-home supplication needs.
8.3.2004Giordana Segneri
KnotMag's Great Eight
First Night with Kittens
Features
They hazard to sniff my bracing hand, salty, cold and bloodless as clay, softly toothing (Should i make them stop?) and licking, stopping to stare in terror at my arching architecture rising above and the too-alive eyes staring back from their golem plaything.
8.1.2004Joe Heffron
KnotMag's Great Eight
Insecticide
Features
Many years ago, I made a pact with the world’s non-human organic matter in which I ceded them all the territory commonly known as “outside.” Glaring at the bug in my room, I whispered, “Inside is mine, you flying brown bitch.”
7.27.2004John Green
KnotMag's Great Eight
Raising Dad, Pt. 2
Features
He'd start off with some line about living the lonely life of a bachelor, alternately bemoaning and celebrating his diet of canned vegetables, Doritos and the occasional Marie Callendar frozen treat. But, we knew better. As a married man, he watched sitcoms and weeded the garden. As a bachelor, well, his dance card was full.
7.22.2004Leigh Householder
Laura Householder
Laura Householder
KnotMag's Great Eight
The Sas-squash
Features
“You never know with these things. After all, she’s new in town. She could be a solid 7 or 8.” As if I have ever placed an ad for a squash partner in an attempt to get laid.
7.20.2004Trevor Thompson
KnotMag's Great Eight
The Rambler
Features
Me? Oh, no. No promotion yet. Don't want to rush that whole career acceleration thing. Or, yes, I guess you're right. It's my boss who doesn't want to rush it. Ha, ha. That's a really good point.
7.13.2004Angelique Chaze
KnotMag's Great Eight
Clean, green snobbery machine?
Features
Yes, I'm suggesting that it's time to pay more, not less, for many of the items we now get for a pittance. It's time to apply "you get what you pay for" to a much broader spectrum of our lives. We need to reward producers who take sustainability into account.
7.6.2004Michael Corey
KnotMag's Great Eight
The Battle for Kiddie Lit
Features
Take, for example, the existence of Billy Crystal's awful I Already Know I Love You. I consider myself a fairly passionate reader, but after spending a few minutes with Mr. Crystal's book, I wanted to give up on the enterprise permanently. You can imagine the effect it could have on a five-year-old. It is not enough to give kids books. We must give them ones that don’t suck ass.
7.2.2004John Green
KnotMag's Great Eight
Losers in love
Features
She dances; he air-guitars. They never get self-deprecating. They don't act self-conscious or sarcastic or ironic or witty or aloof. And they sure as hell aren't acting hip.
7.1.2004Amy Hebert
KnotMag's Great Eight
The Ultimate Sales Person
Features
Case and point: last month I won an award for Outstanding Salesperson of the Quarter. It came as a complete shock to me, as I had the lowest numbers of any salesperson in the company for the quarter.
6.24.2004Trevor Thompson
KnotMag's Great Eight
Raising Dad, Pt. 1
Features
Dad had lashed a chain to the tiny trailer hitch on his petite Japanese pick-up truck. The chain's noose had a stranglehold on some of my mother's prized azaleas and rhododendrons. He was gunning the engine to wrench them from the flowerbeds. After years of gardening, our newly divorced Dad was going low-maintenance with a little un-gardening therapy.
6.22.2004Leigh Householder
Laura Householder
Laura Householder
KnotMag's Great Eight
This Week of Self-Improvement
Features
No caffeine. No nicotine. No kissing strange boys at parties. No excessive drinking that will lead to the belief that kissing strange boys at parties while smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee is a good idea.
6.17.2004Angelique Chaze
KnotMag's Great Eight
Missouri Tornadoes
Features
The tornado is a few miles south. I develop an internal mantra -- I don't want to die. I don't want to die. I don't want to die. Not now. Not ever. By the end of the trip, I will have changed my mind.
6.10.2004Amy Hebert
KnotMag's Great Eight
Seasonal Struggle
Features
Memorial Day inaugurates -- in addition to the annual love affair with barbecues, citronella candles, flip-flops, watermelon and daylight that lingers for 14 blissful, sun-soaked hours -- the emotional recession that is Bathing Suit Season.
6.8.2004Giordana Segneri
KnotMag's Great Eight
Archetypes of the Office Space
Features
I've worked in a few offices but my real resume includes an uncountable number of too late nights around one smoky bar or another. The characters are formulaic. The events, predictable. The frustration, inevitable.
5.27.2004Leigh Householder
KnotMag's Great Eight
The City Boy and the Mountain Lion Hunter
Features
Thus was my role in the group relegated: my father was the boss, Johnny was the ranch hand, and I was the woman.
5.25.2004Trevor Thompson
KnotMag's Great Eight
Happy Hour
Features
She will end the story by telling him that, when getting up to leave, she was so charged from hormones and gin that she cleared fourteen rows of bleacher seats in a headfirst tumble that ended with her landing squarely on her right knee.
5.21.2004Angelique Chaze
KnotMag's Great Eight
Old Way (Mosaic)
Features
The sight here is too crisp, the knowledge too pure.
5.20.2004Joe Heffron
KnotMag's Great Eight
Travel Section
Features
It is their one chance to make their mark on the world, to convince us working schmoes what was so wonderful about their two weeks off that the rest of us should yearn toward a similar outing during our 50 weeks of labor.
5.13.2004Amy Hebert
KnotMag's Great Eight
The Colonoscopy
Features
Much as I do get a certain thrill out of being anally penetrated by a man whose first name I do not know, I felt a little nervous in the days leading up to the procedure.
5.4.2004John Green
KnotMag's Great Eight
Operation Rondac
Features
They would go into Jordan and then to Iraq because she'd heard "Baghdad was the shit" and from there they'd rent or buy a van and drive through Iran and then up to Afghanistan to check out the Taliban. She was talking so fast my stoned brain couldn't keep up.
4.29.2004Trevor Thompson
KnotMag's Great Eight
Voting from the Bike Lane
Features
I learned the rules of the road trailing the back tire of a true urban cyclist. I can safely ride on skinny city streets with side mirrors ticking by inches from my elbows (and sometimes even grazing them). I can merge and know when to be aggressive and when to yield. I can kick hard off the stop lights so that my auto-ed brethren don’t miss the turn signal.
4.27.2004Leigh Householder
KnotMag's Great Eight
Not to be a Pill, but ...
Features
But there's new methods: There's the ring, hormonal shots and the resurrected sponge. Do you notice what these all have in common? They're all for women.
4.23.2004Michael Corey
KnotMag's Great Eight
Destroying Convention
Features
KnotMag's Joe Heffron interviews writer and producer Harold Lexington, Sr. on this season's sleeper television series, Destroying Angel.
4.22.2004Joe Heffron
KnotMag's Great Eight
Dating for Dummies
Features
Pick out your lingerie carefully. Stay away from the nannie panites, avoid the crotchless and make sure you wear some. He will either think you are a prude, slut or a slut who never does her laundry.
4.20.2004Angelique Chaze
KnotMag's Great Eight
Cin cin!
Features
Scrawled in white cursive across the little patch of grass: Another love story in Verona. If they were really comparing this wine exposition to Shakespeare's greatest tragedy -- to the gloriously heartrending story of the world's most famous star-crossed lovers -- and willing to plop oversized purple globules in front of the city’s most traversed entrance, I had to go see what all the hoopla was about.
4.13.2004Giordana Segneri
KnotMag's Great Eight
High Score
Features
Within a month, I will learn the physical agony of losing a loved one and the joy of making a genuine commitment to spend the rest of your life with another person. But right now, all I care about is getting high score on the Mrs. Pac Man machine at Casa Bonita, Denver's oldest and, by far, trippiest theme restaurant.
4.6.2004Amy Hebert
KnotMag's Great Eight
Why I Like Professional Wrestling
Features
With professional wrestling, I'm just
another dude with a foam finger and a $6 beer in my hand. I don't have to
analyze what I'm seeing, or worry if I'm cool -- because, rest assured,
there is nothing cool about a 26-year-old kid who still watches wrestling --
I just enjoy reacting with the crowd, cheering and booing bad guys and good
guys and seeing who will win.
4.1.2004Eric Gillin
KnotMag's Great Eight
Downward Spiral
Features
For the past few months, my sister has been sending me updates of her travels as she chases monkeys, rides elephants, swims with sharks, and hangs out late-night with Nepalise sex workers. It's great she's having such a wonderful time, but honestly, isn't all this traveling a thinly guised ruse to escape reality and postpone the inevitable entry into the world of paychecks and taxes?
3.30.2004Trevor Thompson
KnotMag's Great Eight
Generation DIY
Features
Self-absorbed, optimistic athleticism and health fanaticism are lame, but not as lame as self-absorbed, depressed fattiness. Republicans and democrats speak to nothing but lame-wad issues, Greens are both lame and misguided, and conservatives of any sort (especially young conservatives) have always been the lamest of all.
3.25.2004Joe Heffron
KnotMag's Great Eight
Exhaling
Features
"Now, exhale," Coeli instructs. "Hang your head loosely and let the worries of the world leave your body." Is she kidding? If I let all of my worries leave my body, I will be left with nothing.
3.23.2004Angelique Chaze
KnotMag's Great Eight
Homonupitals: A Big Gay Primer
Features
Let's not talk about who's right and who's wrong. We can argue loudly about that at a coffee shop later in a blatant violation of social manners. Today let's take a step back and take a closer look at all the legal wrangling going on. Why? First of all, because this is the biggest constitutional issue since abortion, maybe even segregation.
3.18.2004Michael Corey
KnotMag's Great Eight
Forza Italia
Features
This continent's 230-volt power system creates instant havoc for electrical equipment designed to run on America's 110 volts. Just turning on my computer without blowing a fuse was like capturing the brass ring in a complicated jousting match involving a veritable hardware shop of transformers, converters and surge protectors.
3.16.2004Giordana Segneri
KnotMag's Great Eight
Kiss Me, I'm from the Ivory Coast
Features
The main thing is that I just don't get why everybody and their mother is so cranked up over Irish pride, even if they're 2 percent Irish and 98 percent German, or Dutch, or French… My feelings toward this nationalistic trend are comparable to how I feel about driving around with a Free Tibet sticker on one's car. Sure, free Tibet. But how did the place become the geographic equivalent of the baby seal?
3.11.2004Amy Hebert
KnotMag's Great Eight
Famous Last Words: An Introductory Guide to Entering the Pantheon
Features
Look, you are going to die. You might as well say something memorable.
3.9.2004John Green
KnotMag's Great Eight
The Third Time's the Charm
Features
I wanted her to know I was the kind of boyfriend who was worth quitting her job, abandoning her family, and moving three thousand miles away from her home in the warm tropics to the bleak, gasping, ball-clenching coldness of New York in January.
3.4.2004Trevor Thompson
KnotMag's Great Eight
Tales of a Middle-Class Can Collector
Features
For years, I've always told people -- a bit too proudly, perhaps
-- that I came from a blue-collar middle class background. But I've repeated
the line so many times that it lost all its meaning, until I realized we
picked up cans as kids.
3.2.2004Eric Gillin
KnotMag's Great Eight
Two hours at a strip club
Features
I'm mostly afraid of having to react to a stripper, who I assume is only smiling on the outside, like a sad clown with bare breasts and, perhaps, the same amount of make up. Try as I might, I can't think of a reaction that wouldn't make the stripper think I'm a pervert. Smile, and I'm a lonely pervert. Frown, and I'm an in-denial pervert. Stay straight-faced, and I'm a perverted pervert.
3.1.2004Jason Feifer
KnotMag's Great Eight
Roommate Wanted
Features
I hear him open the cabinet under the sink. I still do not know his age, occupation or reason for moving. It is only appropriate that he now knows what brand of tampons I use.
2.24.2004Angelique Chaze
KnotMag's Great Eight
Confessions of an 11 a.m. coffee-shop wanna-be
Features
By this time in our lives, we've all read enough books and seen enough movies to know that the meaning of life doesn't show up on your W-2 form. We know about the good life. We've read enough online pseudo-psychology to know that "no one ever dies wishing they had spent more time at work." But to hear society tell it, we're not really supposed to figure that stuff out until we've worked away the best years of our lives.
2.19.2004Michael Corey
KnotMag's Great Eight
I Love You, Both Ways
Features
Italians aren't forced, at 18, to make the awakening, responsibility-doling transition between high school and college that's becoming more and more standard in America. And in that sense, Italians -- and their romantic relationships -- grow up a little more slowly.
2.17.2004Giordana Segneri
KnotMag's Great Eight
Seven dirty words, seven dirty companies
Features
Smith and Ose have also proposed that the obscenity fine be raised tenfold. Instead of $27,500 for each offending broadcast, the FCC could levy a fine of $275,000 for each utterance of shit piss fuck cunt ass hole cock sucker mother fucker or ass-hole.
2.12.2004Amy Hebert
KnotMag's Great Eight
Uncle Tom
Features
There was a time in which I naively believed that if I sold a book to a major publishing house and regularly made ex-girlfriend jokes on NPR, I could maybe make a nice living. In fact, I haven't made very much money at all. My roommate Shannon once introduced me to a friend of hers by saying, "This is John Green. He has a four-figure book deal."
2.10.2004John Green
KnotMag's Great Eight
The Writer
Features
He is so hung over that he stopped in a Duane Reede on his way to work this morning to purchase a bottle of Visene, hoping to cure the redness in his eyes so the client he is meeting today will not notice his condition. The reek of bourbon emanating from his skin is another problem, one not so easily solved. The interior of the cab is sour with his stink.
2.5.2004Trevor Thompson
KnotMag's Great Eight
Fridge Inventory
Features
In fact, the contents of my fridge are a better memoir of my life and the people in it than anything I could write. On those shelves, I not only get myself some breakfast, I also receive a status report on my relationships.
2.3.2004Eric Gillin
KnotMag's Great Eight
The Absolute beyond the Concrete
Features
He leaned wistfully over his balcony railing with hands clasped and watched the last family of visitors pull away, a mere silhouette against his clean, well-lighted apartment. As i approached beneath him, he sighed heavily and turned inside, drawing the curtains behind him."
1.29.2004Joe Heffron
KnotMag's Great Eight
Well, the Weather Outside is Frightful
Features
This is the kind of cold that paralyzes your insides, shoots icy darts through your legs and is the reason why the skin on your face bears a disturbing resemblance to a piece of raw chicken with freezer burn. This is the kind of cold that hurts.
1.27.2004Angelique Chaze
KnotMag's Great Eight
Smiling like I mean it
Features
In my 2001 photo, even though I'm sitting on my bed at home with two of my closest friends, I can still count plenty of signs of the uptight knots that I built up in my head. There are the tan lines on my bare feet, which testify to the absence of my rugged (expensive) Teva sandals, worn to scream "This dude not only camps, he's like, so laid back."
1.22.2004Michael Corey
KnotMag's Great Eight
La Dolce Vita
Features
As I stretched myself awake I reveled in the warm, heady buzz that comes only upon realizing for days upon days upon days you’ll not have a care in the world. And a part of me understood, even then, it would never be so sweet again.
1.20.2004Giordana Segneri
KnotMag's Great Eight
A Heavier France
Features
But on a totally self-indulged scale, neither of us are ready to move into THAT phase of life -- a generation that has had to deal with death and starts making their own families to make up for the loss. We're still more inclined toward thinking of a trip to Europe in terms of Amsterdam bars, all-nighters and Eurail youth passes.
1.15.2004Amy Hebert
KnotMag's Great Eight
The Quarter
Features
Also, Will and I decided to believe in this quarter. We decided to believe that if you asked this particular quarter a yes or no question and then flipped it, it would answer honestly, with tails being no and heads being yes. So we would ask it, for instance, if I was going to lose my virginity to Ali Lacavaro, and it would come up tails.
1.13.2004John Green
KnotMag's Great Eight
Why Lonely Girls Dance in Groups, Why Men Don't Call Back... And Other
Pickup Schticks
Features
Is being single harder for emotionally stunted guys who are expected to master that fine line between sexism and chivalry? Or is it harder on women, who simultaneously strive for independence while also wanting someone in their lives who doesn't just want to have sex?
1.8.2004Eric Gillin
Jamie Beckman
Jamie Beckman
KnotMag's Great Eight
My Favorite Story
Features
My grandfather was more of a story-teller than a reader. He had stories about everything, about flying bombers in WWII, about fishing, about hunting, and about fighting Indians on the frontier.
1.6.2004Trevor Thompson
KnotMag's Great Eight
Exodus 4:24
Features
During the journey, while they were encamped for the night, the Lord met him, meaning to kill him, but Zipporah picked up a sharp flint, cut off her son's foreskin and touched his foot with it, saying 'You are my blood-bridegroom.' So the Lord let him alone.
1.1.2004Joe Heffron
KnotMag's Great Eight
Dear Julia, Please Save Me
Features
The bus is late. I need coffee. I need for my boss not to look at his watch in disdain when I dive into my chair at ten after 9 and tag my computer’s keyboard as if it were a base I was stealing in the Divisions Finals.
12.30.2003Angelique Chaze
KnotMag's Great Eight
Everything's comin' up breakup
Features
Things that are familiar are strange like that. Even though we pretend we hate cliché, most of us depend on it in our own relationships. By far, the overwhelming majority of people who have gotten married in the history of the world only seriously courted one person.
12.18.2003Michael Corey
KnotMag's Great Eight
Ciao Chow!
Features
Food here is not fast; it is never grabbed and neither quick nor a bite. It can't be done right standing up, without utensils or, really, alone. It is not a means to an end but rather the end of all means.
12.16.2003Giordana Segneri
KnotMag's Great Eight
Scenes from a closet nudist
Features
Instead, when I looked down at myself -- my bare, skinny, slightly hairy and completely bare self -- I thought one thing: "Oh. Wrong event."
12.11.2003Jason Feifer
KnotMag's Great Eight
John Like the Baptist, Green Like the Color
Features
My least favorite part of being a John Green: the googling difficulty. Now, it could be worse. I could be named John Smith or Lance Armstrong or Susan Orlean. But John Green is no great shakes, when it comes to googling.
12.9.2003John Green
KnotMag's Great Eight
Dear Motorola StarTac Telephone
Features
So I wasn't always the best owner! But I never lost you, not even once.
Remember that time I was totally shitfaced and I pissed all over you? Or the
time I dropped you down a flight of stairs?
12.4.2003Eric Gillin
KnotMag's Great Eight
Attack of the Roach
Features
My heart quailed at the thought of going in after the roach. I would have to get down on my hands and knees and rummage amongst my shoes, trying to flush it out. It would probably run straight at my face and I would scream, at which point it would run into my open mouth where it would make a home and lay eggs that would eventually hatch into cockroach babies.
12.2.2003Trevor Thompson
KnotMag's Great Eight
Wookin' pa Nub [Fever Remix]
Features
After weeks, months, years of paying bills and cooking meals and mopping, sweeping, dusting, the pride of living well fades. More joy comes from the failure of decency, from open rebellion against the grocer, the laundromat, the mailbox, from an affirmation of sleeping and eating in a thin layer of one's own discarded, aggregated skin.
11.20.2003Joe Heffron
KnotMag's Great Eight
On the road to physical well-being, I found resistance
Features
I do not join Victor's gym deciding, instead, to join the most expensive gym in the city. My new safe haven is filled with Boston’s physical elite -- an anomalous group of highly motivated, fitness fanatics who all look as if they have leapt from the pages of a Nike ad. It also has free Power Bars in the lobby and twenty inch television monitors attached to each treadmill.
11.18.2003Angelique Chaze
KnotMag's Great Eight
Boxing
Features
The idea is that book critics get snarky because we want to advance our own careers. But for me, at least, the temptation toward snark isn't about competitiveness. I don't think I'm excessively envious of the writers I've unfairly maligned. Rather, I think I sometimes feel snarky because I forget that I like books.
11.13.2003John Green
KnotMag's Great Eight
Staying in Iraq
Features
Yes, things are bad. But any talk of removing U.S. troops from Iraq in the near future is simplistic, fantastical, and wholly counterproductive for serious opponents of President Bush.
11.11.2003Michael Corey
KnotMag's Great Eight
Gillin's Breakfast Club
Features
At that moment I officially gave up and realized my fantasy of becoming an
in-the-know gossip reporter was total shit. Not only did I hate the job I've
been asked to perform, I didn't have the faintest idea of what to ask the
people I was supposed to talk to.
11.6.2003Eric Gillin
KnotMag's Great Eight
Natural Fibers
Features
Proud of myself for choosing an article of clothing without first consulting her, I wandered back to the interior decorating section, the shirt clutched in my hand. She spotted it immediately and snatched it from me. "50% polyester," she scowled, reading the tag. "This is an unnatural fiber. It will make you sweat too much and you sweat too much as it is."
11.4.2003Trevor Thompson
KnotMag's Great Eight
