Director Blake Edwards has died. Edwards is best known for the Pink Panther series, but he also directed Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Micki & Maude and Victor Victoria, the last two of which I remember absolutely cackling at as a kid. Edwards was 88.

I saw a woman reading Mein Kampf on the subway this morning. The cover was on it, she hadn’t ripped it off, or covered it with a brown paper bag or anything. She did tuck it face-inward when she closed it to get off at her stop, but that could have been unintentional. But it made me wonder: if e-book sales of romance novels are big because, as genre expert Sarah Wendell told the Times last week, the print editions “are not always something that you are comfortable holding in your hand in public,” how does Mein Kampf do in that regard? Well, it turns out. March of last year, it topped Amazon’s Kindle Book Mystery & Thrillers sales chart.

by Josh Duboff

One thing that happens is that you stop speaking altogether. One Thursday afternoon, shifting between various gchats — all with friends bored in their cubicles at offices across the city — I realized that I hadn’t said a word out loud in close to 18 hours. So I said “test” out loud. For a split second, before the word came out, I was actually worried about whether or not I was still able to speak. After I found that I could, I then worried about the fact that I had been legitimately worried about this.

I had stopped shaving. I mostly dressed like “Jonah Hill at the beach” or “Kristen Stewart on laundry day.” I knew all the afternoon shift Whole Foods employees by name. While the rest of the world was hitting the “3 p.m. stretch” at work, I would be starting episodes of “Glee.” Entire afternoons were spent mulling trips to the gym or a coffee shop or a museum without ever moving from my couch. This is where I was at by the end of my life as a night blogger.

After two years of working in an office, in a “normal” job with “normal” hours at a Park Avenue consulting firm (totally disgusting, I know), I switched careers. My new “work day” began around 6 or 6:15 p.m. and would last until I was finished with my tenth post, which meant I generally finished up somewhere between 3 to 4 a.m.

As is so often the case, this blogging took place at the desk mere feet from my bed, meaning that as I would blog the night away — fueled primarily by almonds and Diet Coke — the end of the tunnel was always an arm’s length away. The modern isolation of your standard blogging job — the lack of non-virtual people around, the relentless Internet tunneling, the lack of sunshine or regular movement — was multiplied by the lack of even having digitally present coworkers, the darkness outside, the silence.

While the centerpiece of my conversations with friends-of-friends at bars had previously been the latest Lady Gaga music video or “that sketchy guy” standing near the bathroom or an anecdote about the subway/Korean food/Twitter, my night job quickly became the primary thing I talked about with acquaintances and strangers. People were just fascinated by this idea that I started work when everyone else was finishing for the day. What did I do with my days? When did I sleep? People would look at me in this pitying, almost disbelieving, way, as if when I said “I blog at night” I had actually said, “I am not able to digest chocolate.”

“Yeah, sometimes I feel like I am turning into the world’s most boring vampire,” I would respond, as if I had just thought of that line for the first time, and my roommate’s friend’s coworker or whoever it was would laugh politely. I would spare her riffs on the many other oddities of working at night… and there were, as anyone who has worked a night job before knows, countless others.

Since I couldn’t see any of my friends during the week, I started to feel on weekends like I was Katherine Heigl in the classic film 27 Dresses, in which she had to go to like 14 weddings in 14 horrendous outfits in one day or something. Some Saturdays I would schedule a brunch-drinks-dinner-drinks quadruple-header as some sort of completely misguided overcompensation for not interacting with humans during the week. There was also the havoc that working nights performed on my eating schedule (let’s just say that most of my eating during the week took place after 6 p.m.).

First dates had to be scheduled on Friday and Saturday nights, a stipulation that eliminated any semblance of “casual” about them. And there was the unrivaled shame of sleeping in until 1:30 p.m. on an odd Monday and then feeling so guilty about it that there was no choice but to just get back under the covers and sleep some more.

There were aspects of working nights that weren’t so bad. I got over my phobia of going to movies by myself. I could schedule doctor’s appointments at literally any hour I pleased. I had a built-in excuse for missing all sorts of weeknight social engagements that I previously would have had to begrudgingly attend. More significantly, I increasingly felt like I was part of this rare and special tribe. Working at night by myself when no one was on the Internet made me feel like a solo spaceship pilot, like every post about Sarah Palin or James Franco I churned out was going to ensure we stayed on course. I was careening through quiet forgotten Internet space, a vast calm all around me. And while all my friends were at work during the day — gchatting and fidgeting in their itchy button-downs — I was scarfing hummus and preparing for this noble take-off.

Now that I’m working during the daytime hours again, I feel like I have returned to the land of the living — back in the sea of hyper-stressed, closed-off New Yorkers. While I’m generally happy about this, I have to admit there are certain mornings where I catch myself feeling sort of wistful when the alarm goes off at 7:30 a.m., and feeling sort of ordinary on the subway at 8:25 a.m. I miss the Starbucks barista, Kevin, who would hand me my drink at 6 p.m. every night with the resigned look I imagine he reserved for people who order venti iced coffees past sunset.

I do not miss how I would feel on the way out of Starbucks, knowing that the day was over but also just beginning. I don’t miss the Chinese food. And I don’t miss spending 15 minutes at 2:45 a.m. trying to come up with a joke about Naomi Watts to conclude a blog post, only to settle for something King Kong-related that wouldn’t even really make sense when I re-read it the next morning… by which I mean the next afternoon, but then, anyway, it was nearly time to start blogging again.

Two months later, Josh Duboff is still having trouble falling asleep before 3 a.m.

Photo from Flickr by nicksarebi.

Science, what excuse can you give me for my inappropriate behaviors today?

The brain does not stop developing until we are in our 30s or 40s — meaning that many people will still have something of the teenager about them long after they have taken on the responsibilities of adulthood. The finding, from University College London, could perhaps help explain why seemingly respectable adults sometimes just can’t resist throwing a tantrum or sulking until they get their own way. The discovery that the part of the brain key to getting on with others takes decades to fully form could perhaps also explain why some people are socially awkward well past their teenage years.

This actually ties in somewhat nicely with something an elderly uncle told me on my 35th birthday: “That’s the perfect age. You know who you are, but it’s not too late to do something about it.” Still, I have mixed feelings about these findings. The idea that I still have the irrational, self-defeating impulses of a teenager is incredibly depressing, because, my God, what an awful time. On the other hand, the fact that we’re all still teenagers totally explains why nobody understands me and how sensitive and brilliant I am and they just don’t get it and it’s so unfair. I knew there had to be a reason.

Drinks are on you tonight in Boston, the town where the drinks are always on you! The Boston Bawl v.2.0 — a casual holiday party thrown by Awl readers for Awl readers — is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. tonight, at the Green Street Grill (in their downstairs bar), which is located, unsurprisingly, at 280 Green Street, Cambridge, Mass. Questions? Talk to your cohosts, Garge and BoyOfDestiny.

Congratulations to Gabriel Parent of Carnegie Mellon University, who managed to get the phrase “I smoke crack rocks” into a peer-reviewed academic paper, thus winning the 2010 PhD Challenge. [Via]

This is kind of cool. Also, if anyone from Cleveland is reading this, let me know if Whiskey Island is as delightful as it sounds, because it seems like somewhere I should move to immediately.

“In 2007, he cried while delivering a speech on the floor of the House, in support of funding for the war in Iraq. “After 3,000 of our fellow citizens died at the hands of these terrorists, when are we going to stand up and take them on?” he sobbed.

Then this year, he voted against providing money to take care of our fellow citizens who became ill while doing rescue and reclamation work at ground zero after the terrorist attack.

Twice.”
 — Gail Collins knocks it out of the park in this column on John Boehner.

Image by donkey hotey, from Flickr.

“”Dennō Senshi Porygon” (でんのうせんしポリゴン Dennō Senshi Porigon?, literally “Computer Soldier Porygon”, although most commonly translated as “Electric Soldier Porygon”) is the thirty-eighth episode of the Pokémon anime’s first season. Its only broadcast was in Japan on December 16, 1997…. The episode is infamous for using visual effects that caused seizures in a substantial number of Japanese viewers, an incident referred to as the “Pokémon Shock” (ポケモンショック Pokémon Shokku?) by the Japanese press. Six hundred and eighty-five viewers were taken to hospitals; two people remained hospitalized for more than two weeks. Due to this, the episode has been banned worldwide.”

WATCH AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Meet Daniel Petersen, philosophy professor at Hawaii’s Community College and the University of Hawaii at Hilo. He just quit his job, because of what ensued when the parent of a student wrote a letter to the school complaining because he said “shit” in class. Can you imagine? An adult saying “shit” to other adults? BURN DOWN THE COLLEGES.