Gawker
Readers love lists, according to the Gawker Media Editorial Guide. So, on the occasion of my last day here, you're bound to love this list of the best things I ever did at this website! Yoga teaches us that within our greatest failings, our greatest strengths can be found. Breathe deeply and enjoy.
1) I coined a term for thirtysomething ladies who walk four abreast down cramped sidewalks on their way to drink colorful martinis and muse about their lovelives: Scary Sadshaws. Maybe this is immodest, but I think it is maybe a more important "word of 2007" than "lolcat," even.
2) Along the same line: the telltale signs of unloved aloneness that infest Scary Sadshaws' apartments are called singlefiers. My apartment contains many singlefiers, but only one cat at the moment!
3) It's possible that these coinages and confessions set back the cause of femiladyism.
4) On our 2007 Staff Retreat, Doree and I had an im conversation predicting that Noah Baumbach would direct the movie version of Claire Messud's fun novel 'The Emperor's Children.' This prediction came true. Will our casting suggestions also be heeded? Stay tuned!
5) On live TV, I espoused the theory that celebrities are protected from real-life stalkers by their enormous "piles of money." The greatest failing/greatest strength thing comes into play here.
6) The pun in the top tag of this post is my favorite joke I've ever made.
7) Besides this trenchant 9/11 observation, that is.
8) I quit!
So, that was the last year of my life. I'd like to thank everyone I worked with, most especially Choire Sicha, the man who taught me right from wrong and weak from strong—that's a lot to learn. Alex Balk and Doree Shafrir are my heroes. Josh, we had a time. I will always remember the time we sang "Mr. Jones" by the Counting Crows in the office and found especial meaning in the line "we all wanna be big big stars, but we've got different reasons for that." I felt so symbolic!
Thank you also to everyone who read my overshares and sent sympathetic or even chidey emails. I suspect that I'll miss all of it eventually. If you miss me, you will find me writing sometimes in some capacity at Jezebel, and also who knows where else. Oh, and also my waspish novel about working at Gawker comes out in Fall '09. J/k!
Comments
And THAT, Emily, is a list to be proud of. Nice job!
All the best to you.
Even though I think The Emperor's Children was simplistic, manipulative, and very frustrating, I won't hold that against you. Be well. Be awesome. Kick lots of ass.
We're going to miss you, Emily -- bon chance, bon voyage!
"You liked it, though, right? It made you, like, happy?"
"'Cause that's probably all that, you know, matters."
"To, you know, the person...who wrote it."
Repost the rooftop picture!
Oh, my wee sad head. Best of luck, lovely.
for me you will always be the one never to shy away from the dirty business of bringing the world's worst persons into the public eye. mankind owes you a big thank you for that alone.
#9: rooftop photo shoot?
Here's to 2008, Emily.
Your little self's dinosaur tshirt is like totally awesome.
Good luck.
"I feel like I just been through a....a thing."
- Dylan, Don't Look Back, after playing Albert Hall.
You will be sorely, sorely missed, m'dear.
sometimes your POSTS irritated me, but YOU are more than all right.
That photo is too cute. Dinosaurs rock!
I've always loved "Scary Sadshaws". At least, when I become one, I'll know where the term started. Good luck to you, darling.
My favorite Emily moment: Emily walks into the office one afternoon carrying a small white dog. Someone asks Emily "what's with the dog?". Emily says, "It's Julia Allison's dog." "So why do you have Julia Allison's dog?". Emily, without hesitation, "Because that's just the way my life is."
I use that phrase ALL THE TIME now.
wait, emily is leaving and so is josh...who will be left behind to keep us company as we slave through our miserable days and nights?
@flathead: alex and doree are leaving too! have ya heard?!?!
Wow - seems like a lot of people are working today - bummer. I'm cleaning my apartment. Weee! I suppose it wouldn't be so bad to be working today if it was your last day. Good luck, Emily...I hardly knew ye. But I do envy ye. Such life changes are so scary and fun!
Nothing dries faster than a tear.
Good luck darling. I'll be reading La Jez more now since you'll be around there. We miss you already.
Oh Emily. I used to read your posts the second they went up, back when they were anonymous, from the confines of my own soul-crushing job. Now I check back in, maybe, every few weeks. And that, my dearest, is freedom. Happy Quitting!
Wait, which one was Emily again?
oh, libra.
@Goodbye, Editors!: The one with the keffiyeh.
Sigh. Don't leave me.
Aw Emily. You ARE symbolic. I will miss you, even though you executed me at least once.
Best of luck always!
This place is gonna suck without you. Good luck!
Aside from Emily's pre-vacay rooftop pervtograph, my favorite Emily posts were the fake New Yorker cartoons she got people to submit. Em, you OWN awesomeness! I look forward to enjoying your wordsmithing + wittiness elsewhere as you move on from da gawk . . .
Fuck! I'm never reading Gawker again.
Oh come on everyone. It's exciting. Emily and Josh and Choire will do great for themselves. They're coming off a high-profile job and easing themselves softly into a whole world of promise. Choire will return to his first love of following Damian Hirst, collecting his shed hair and skin flakes. Emily will write an angsty novel about Gawker, then burn it, then make a fortune in the science-fiction world with a trilogy about a lovelorn psychic cyborg searching for authenticity in the republic of the advanced humanoid lizard people. Josh will finally perfect his "angry dance" and take it on tour with Imogen Lloyd-Webber. It'll be fantastic.
I myself am job-hunting in Scotland, and will be going soon! Woot! Everything is exciting in 2008. Salman Rushdie will probably release another novel. Maybe John Updike will die, finally giving me that push I need to actually read one of his books! But proably not. I get to review a production of Macbeth for a newspaper! I bought that Harold Bloom book about Shakespeare and it's awesome. I've lost like 20 pounds in the last 2 months and I look awesome.
What are you doing in 2008, commenters? Drinking doesn't count as a "thing", but drugs do. Interesting drugs are worth like... 2 novels each on the list of "things".
Keep writing it like disaster.
Oh, and...what a long, strange trip it's been. Yep.
Seriously, though. I'm going to be looking for your waspish novel/roman a clef very soon.
Wish you the best. I haven't been around long, so I won't drop obscure hints about some fan favorite post of yours that tickled me incomparably, but from reading the above...I'm sure I would have had a few choice references.
BTW, love the high tops with the Velcro, and the sheepish grin that says you either just pooped during the class photo, or the boy next to you smells like Doritos and you like it.
Good luck!
Re: #6 -- that pun is hysterically delicious and may have actually elevated use of ABBA lyrics to an artform. In keeping with that sentiment, "So I say
Thank you for the music, the songs I'm singing. Thanks for all the joy they're bringing. Who can live without it, I ask in all honesty. What would life be?" ALL THE BEST!
But how do you thank someone who has taken you from crayons to perfume?
9) THAT PICTURE. You so cute!
Lots of luck with everything... have fun with Jezebel, I'm a fan.
@Pope John Peeps II: The Updike thing happened for me and Benazir Bhutto. LOVING Daughter of Destiny! And this is an awesome Shakespeare book:
[www.amazon.com]
Care to share the weight-loss tips...?
As much as I adore your plays on words and your general intellect and I think you won that fight with Jimmy Kimmel, I am sort of irritated that a yoga-bodied 26 year old with a no-doubt promising career ahead of her thinks it's OK to cast aspersions on the sad and single delusional women in their 30s. It's like a high-school senior giving a new college graduate a hard time for not having gotten laid enough as a student.
Good luck to ya, hope you don't find yourself lonely at that age where men begin to ignore you in favor of a girl in her 20s.
Sorry to see you go, but best of luck. I'll be sure to look for your posts on Jezebel.
@sing_michael_sing: Wow! Free speech on gawker... somebody had to say it...
Aw man. This was nice. See you around, Emily! And, as my great aunt used to say, Stick with that writing thing!
1) I beg to differ: Lolcat gave birth to Lolcait who will be the only reason I continue reading Gawker after tomorrow's hangover. Sad day today!
Miss you Emily! Can you post a picture of yourself in a bikini? The one-piece didn't do you justice!
@Spirit Fingers: Re: the high tops with velcro: Are those Reeboks from the aerobics era? I always wanted a pair of those, but I think the boys version had two velcro straps. If so, I'm dating that photo circa 1988. I never did get them.
To Snark, With Love.
@the cajun boy: Exactly. That has to be #10.
I still hope for a regular Emily's Book Reviews for Gawker, and more of her inimitable restrained musings on life and love on Jezebel, which I will now start reading.
@Darienlake: I think Emily's invocation of "Scary Sadshaw" serves more of an apotropaic function, rather than actually casting aspersions on, you know, an actual person.
Thank you for engendering in me a profound and lasting fear of walking four abreast with a group of chicks. It needed to happen.
Although the fact that Gawker Media gives the heir apparent, Gossip Girl (In The City) and its worshippers a pass is the most irksomely fatiguing inconsistency. (I'd draw a Scary Sadshaw parallel to one of the characters for myself, but I can't bring myself to watch that jenkem.)
So long and thanks for all the dish.
Après vous, le déluge... et délosers?
In the future I will always feel a pang whenever I hear or read something particularly Emily-y...you will be missed! I will have to head over to Jezebel more than I currently do to see what you're up to.
--Yours in femiladyism, Lycosidae.
U discovered Ask Tionna too. So u go girl. I will miss u but I have all your info so I am gonna harrass u. We need to do a new site together. lol.
That picture is hizot. I had the white Reeboks too.
It's true, Emily. Tionna is number 9!!!
Also, weren't you the author of the Foxy Brown post?