When I Am Slightly Drunk I Can't Help Obnoxiously Correcting Americans' Pronunciation

[This seemed so touching on first read, then very little... almost nothing.]

I have started to like this website very much. I think I have linked to it here before. But I thought: let me collect the pieces on it that I really like, and maybe that will help to see why I like it. It seems hard to understand without being more aware than I am of some sort of youthful literary subculture or social network (I mean an actual network, not a web programming thing). I feel excluded a little bit. I feel anxiety of influence. But everyone is allowed to like lists.

1) Getting Used To America: this is maybe the first thing I read from this website. It is the first thing from it that is catalogued in my Instapaper archive. What attracted me to this article (which is more conventional than most things on this website) was this bit,

Americans happily blurt out the most private details of their addictions or surgeries or family dramas within minutes  to total strangers — the sort of emotional revelations that, in many other places, are held private for years, or decades, and shared only with intimates.

I think this is probably not true. I want to experience it, and believe it. Does the one who is so open long for secrets, in the same way as the one with secrets longs to be opened?

2) Taking My Younger Sister to a Belle and Sebastian Concert: "None of my sister’s friends knew who Belle and Sebastian were. And it became apparent that Olivia didn’t actually like Belle and Sebastian that much — but she knew I did. Among all those things my sister was better at than me included being a thoughtful, unselfish sibling. In truth, I hadn’t taken her to the concert so much as she had taken me."

3) Lies I Have Told: I think this is the definitive Thought Catalog piece for me. It has a sense of personality. It makes me a little bit sad to think that that personality is constructed; why? I nearly wrote "sad a little bit," because that's how the author of this piece would have written it. The lie "I don't really know what I'm looking for right now" and the truth she writes, I find, I don't know.

Quiet, but not boring. Laughs easily. Doesn’t take me or him or life in general seriously, yet has a capacity to earnestly experience emotions, and is aware of this paradox. Average sex drive. Gives compliments. Dark hair is good. Would probably not like it that I have written all of these things down about what I want him to be like, but would also understand and later make fun of me for doing it. 

 4) Updike for Beginners and How To Drink a Martini: these are by the same author. The male version of the persona from above? The Thought Catalog persona. There are some things about the person I don't want to be. I will try to write about that later. I think these stories are somewhere in between the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote, but in the now. But how many American realist short story writers have I read? Not many.

5) Why Germans Hang Their Socks to Dry: I Made a Facebook status update out of this.