Introducing Bianca
To further add to the ridiculousness of my persona, I recently enlisted the help of an aspiring young writer, Bianca, who will intern at the non-place that is “A Brie Grows In Brooklyn.”
I’ve known Bianca for many years, because she is the sister of Superbad, Blara’s best friend and future husband, and also my buddy. We grew up in the same town, with similarly dysfunctional families—for example, her dad is a charismatic and delusional businessman who grew up a Hassidic Jew in the Brooklyn, and adopted two children from Ethiopia, and my father is a charismatic and quick tempered investment banker from the South Bronx who gets in push-up competitions with 16-year-olds, and adopted two children from South Korea. That isn’t even tipping the iceberg of their mental deficiencies.
Thus, Bianca and I share similarly melancholic personalities. Neither one of us like parties. We prefer one-on-one interactions, or being alone. We both can fully articulate our thoughts after years of therapy. It’s a pleasure to meet with her in the middle of the day to discuss my feelings.
Bianca’s passion is writing, and she reads all of the time. If she could be from any era, it would be the Belle Epoque (can you see why we get along?). She just graduated from Occidental College with a degree in English, where she wrote a thesis in which she, and I quote, “debunked Freud’s theory of the the ego using trascendance of duality in Mrs. Dalloway.”
Bianca is not all heady fiction, however. She loves watching American Idol and Top Chef, and her passion, before writing, was fashion. She loves shopping in the East Village, on 9th street between 1st and 2nd avenue. Her favorite designers are Balmain and Nina Ricci. She has one of the coolest wardrobes I’ve ever seen, and I might have her use her “intern” skills to help me dress better.
Every day, Bianca meditates for 20 minutes to clear her mind. Sometimes, she admits, she doesn’t actually do it for that long. She loves brussel sprouts, she thinks Downton Abbey was amazing, and she’s about the sweetest thing you can imagine.
Over the next few months, Bianca will be doing things like fixing the comments section on my blog, and creating an archive. Some of the categories she came up with already are “Fun With The Walsh Family” and “Stories About Caleb.” She will also occasionally write posts, the first of which will be published tomorrow. And best of all, she will proofread my posts, which are rife with misspellings, grammatical errors, and the word “irregardless,” for which a fan called me out about today on Twitter. “I say this lovingly,” she told me. “But it makes me want to throw up in my mouth.” (Or something similar to that.)
More than anything, I’m just happy to have someone help me manage things, because at times, I get a little overwhelmed. It’s nice that I’ve known Bianca forever, and it’s also nice that I might be able to help her start her writing career, which so many people did for me when I started my own a few years ago.
