Dogs can climb chain-link fences.

I was very distracted last week by my search for employment and various betrayals (artistically rendered by my car with special malice) that I did not write. Not that I feel guilty about it or that I am a blog whiner, but I just thought that I would mention it. In an off-hand way, you understand.

Even though I was too preoccupied to actually perform my blogging duties, I won’t have you going around thinking that my brain was barren, completely free of the pointless sort of commentary that I find suitable for the Internet. On the contrary, I opened my Word program several times last week with the great intent of writing something driveling. But I found that after I had set my window to the correct rambling settings (10 point font, 75% zoom and Print Layout view) I was utterly unmotivated to continue.

So back by popular un-demand, is a list of the things that I neglected to blog about recently.

A) I spend a hearty chunk of my day cruising down the freeway, listening to various yelping DJ’s hawk their stations and while I’ve got no problem with pre-paid self-aggrandizement, I really hate when radio stations run little sampler-platters of the sort of music that they play. In my experience it nearly always leads to a severe disappointment.

For example, an ad might go something like this: “This is blad-blah-blah FM, playing the best music ever, in the best regional subsection of the best state ever!” and be followed by a loud animal call and a series of 5 second spurts of a few songs.

If you are an easily appeased individual like myself, you probably nod along with these partial songs in distracted appreciation. However, I inevitably find that the entire song that eventually follows this compilation is totally crap. And so now I greet these ads with wariness, hoping that each semi-decent fragment will continue to its full length, instead of stopping short to make room for a more obnoxious song. But it never happens that way.

B) I am in a literary funk. And not the fun kind of funk, either. I just can’t seem to finish anything that I start and just meander around starting new things for the sheer joy of getting bored and giving up. On my bedside table there is a variety of ambitious (Daniel Deronda, assorted stories by Maugham, To The Lighthouse) and lesser ambitious re-read (Franny and Zooey, The Fountainhead) undertakings.

Here I would like to make some kind of play on words that incorporated “literature” and “littering,” but nothing really leaps to mind.

C) Twitter. Could it provide me with the happiness I once realized during the AIM away message hey-day of my college career?

Dropping-eaves

Best thing I overheard all day (and I spend my days eavesdropping so this should be good):



"Ohhhhhh man. I need me some Sega Genesis."

-Provoked by a discussion on the possibilty of money exploding forth from a person on impact.

Does double-sided wrapping paper qualify as environmental?

Being full of humbuggery, I guess I will continue my previous (and oh so premature) railing against holiday specialty items. Don’t freak out, I promise that I won’t talk about the early appearance of Santa statues in the Walmart during September or rattle on about the quantification of the holiday season and the real meaning of Christmas.

Oh no, secularize away, holiday season. I‘ll be at home polishing my “Happy X-Mas” Hanson CD and watching the neighbors put up those massively hideous inflatable snowmen on their balmy arid-plant landscaped front yards. But despite the fact that I was raised in a home where every holiday is stripped down to its most base gift-giving manifestation, I can’t help but quail when confronted with grade-school kids selling wrapping paper out of catalogs.

A co-worker placed a catalog suggestively on my desk today while pitching the yearning desire of an offspring to be a classroom best seller. She knew, she claimed, that I was a bit young for buying expensive wrapping paper and probably hard up for cash. Helpfully, she suggested the multi-purpose gift bags.

Since my day has been very slow, I have had no choice but to browse the catalog and ponder. (It’s a widespread weakness for magazines and catalogs…I love the Skymall.) After all, I couldn’t take the chance that sandwiched between the Elegant Rhinestone Picture Frames and multi-level candle holders there was something that I might need.

Like a tote-bag that has clear pockets on the outside were I can arrange my photos for display.

To conclude, (and one must conclude so as to commence furious working) one question haunts me: will I ever evolve into such a domestic and well-adjusted adult that I will be comfortable buying something costing 10 dollars and labeled “Item: 0226. ‘Ready, Set, Snow!’ Snowman Roll”?

Comments.

Holiday-oriented scrub tops for medical personnel...what an industry.

Also, did you realize that Jack London did time in the penitentiary for vagrancy? He also thinks that hobo-ing is the best way to advance one's writing chops. So maybe I'll take to the rails soon, since I am reading The Road and learning all of the appropriate hobo terminology.

Apparently "to kip" means to sleep.

Real quick realization

Some days I am somewhat intelligent and certain Americanisms just make sense. For instance, I generally roll my eyes whenever I hear someone compare something really nifty to sliced bread, but today I abruptly realized that yes, sliced bread is totally bitchin'.

The genius is right in the name: sliced.

Pita bread? Impossible to cut, and ergo, leakage of pita juices onto a person's favorite zippy. English muffin? Forget about cutting that with enough precision to ensure even toasting.

And since sandwiches are the most exulted of all bread-related meals and require two sections of similarly sized bread to accomplish sucessfully, I'd have to say that sliced bread is in fact, the best thing.

Excessive dia-blog.

Sometimes I feel a very keen compulsion to be spectacularly lazy and let my brain turn to mush and leak out of my ears. To be clear, I don’t mean regular laziness (a reluctance to lift things above my head, ect) to which I am a devoted subscriber, but a more ambiguous mental laziness.

I suspect that without the rigors of the school work that I was accustom to and lacking a proper employment, I’ll become a slack-jawed person who can’t piece together the phonetics of personalized license plates. I’ll spend my days mulling over the riddles on the back of the Fruity Pebbles box and being confused by military time. I have a strangely acute desire to never be outsmarted by my breakfast, so I have taken it upon myself to hamper the liquidation of my brains whenever possibly convenient.

Since I don’t have a TV and I hate sodoku like early New England hated the Quakers, I’ve been forced to find other methods of exercise for my brain-case. Usually I just read. However, since I am often reading, it doesn’t feel particularly productive.

So I try to read things that seem difficult (read: boring). And since I am by nature a boring person who is drawn to boring books (I avoid things that remotely imply adventure in favor of excessive dialog, usually regarding people who don’t have sufficient dowries), this quest requires a severe level of boring.

To bring this back around to a vague sort of point, I’ve been reading Daniel Deronda for the last few days, and it’s been kicking my ass. I’m moving through it as a snail’s pace and growing impatient with things that I would usually think just dandy (love between first cousins, getting your shoulder re-set by a blacksmith after a hunting accident where your horse breaks all of its knees). I am assailed by the tediousness of the wording. Jesus-in-a-juicebox, I’m on page 112, and where is this Daniel Deronda already?

Mind you, this certainly isn’t the first time that I have been defeated; my previous conquers include Ulysses and several huge books with a rearing horse and an evil knight in black armor on the cover. But I was surprised to find myself so daunted by good old George Eliot, since I am moderately fond of The Mill on the Floss (or at least I was until I rented the crap mini-series in misguided flurry of BBC fervor).

And yet, whenever I have time to read I find myself accidentally misplacing Daniel Deronda and searching out something I’ve read 200 times before. Hence the laziness and inevitable leaky brain.