Friendly failure

Today I tried to type 16 pages and only wrote 7. That is a really crap result to what might turn out to be a very useful experiment. It is also the reason that this post is going to be so enormously boring, since that is about 4 times my daily average in word count.

Lessons learned today in this attempt:

1. My average daily work count might be too low. Only letting this mess sit and then examining it will tell.

2. Inside of people, at the point passed 2,000 words without a set fictional topic, there is only sadness. And ironically, I find this very depressing. I would like to think that deep in side of me there is resilience and a secret store of ass-kicking awesomeness, but I am pretty sure there is just a wealth of sadness. Stupid g.d. emo predisposition.

3. At some point I thought to myself that I would like to write a bunch of profiles on the freaks that I have known. Not the honest-to-goodness freaks that end up institutionalized or living off the government but the everyday subtle freaks. Because it seems to me that I know a lot of hilarious disturbed characters. Unfortunately, I think that that falls under libel or something so don’t look forward to seeing a brilliant expose of coworkers, ex-roommates and my favorite waitress at Applebee’s here.

4. Finally, I want to note that this brain exhaustion is very welcome. I worry a lot that because I am not really tired that I haven’t done anything all day. And this day, which went by in a blur, I don’t have to worry about that.

Now to find out whether 7 single-spaced pages can be pushed to16 pages with double spacing. (P.S.: I know that it can’t. I did college and all of that crap.)

Ode to Oats

It may shock you to find that I sometimes jot down ideas in my pretentious personal notebook regarding what I am going to blog about. This isn’t so much a strategy of ensuring that I have quality topics to write about – the proof is in the pudding on that one – but rather a strategy to remind me to write about random things that occur to me while I am otherwise occupied. (Hint: most of my best ideas come to me while I am driving with the radio off; screw showering, my brain works best under stress not relaxation.)

So this morning when I flung open my notebook to check something and saw, scrawled along the right-hand page the words, “blog = cereal, ode to” and I remembered how earlier this week while writing about something completely removed I found myself drifting towards a discussion of cereal. This discussion, which I had to rein in for the sake of sanity/continuity in my other piece, left me feeling so elated that I absolutely knew that I would get a wonderful kick out of writing a blog about it. Unfortunately, that feeling of grain-based bliss is long gone. And I even just had a bowl of Trader Joe’s cereal, sweet and crunchy with a few of those misshapen brown O’s clinging to the side of the bowl, but I feel indifferent to the meal.

I must chalk this indifference up to being in a bad mood, because there is no one in my youthful age bracket that feels indifference towards cereal. Young people love cereal. It is all of the best parts of eating without any of the preparation, and in a circumstance when you can’t muster even the minimalist preparation, it is still delicious dry. Cereal is the best of both worlds – it is chips plus sugar and ice cream with crunch.

In my life I have loved different cereals for different reasons. I loved Rice Crispies because it was so much fun to upend my mother’s heavy grey sugar-mill over the bowl, zigzagging madly and leaving a puddle of milk and soggy sugar in the bowl when I was done. I loved Fruity Pebbles purely for the taste and the texture, and the way that they conformed excellently when eaten from a mug. When I was in college I briefly loved Honey Bunches of Oats; the tall, slim boxes would lay fallow in my assigned cupboards, the bags open and the weird grains getting stale and sweeter by the day. In my last days of college I loved pouring a bowl of Raisin Bran and letting it sog up for a few minutes before eating it.

There is another reason, beyond nostalgia, taste and texture that I love cereal. I love cereal because it is such a universal topic for discussion in the 18-28 age bracket. In classrooms and bus stops all around the world young people are breaking the ice by mentioning how much they are looking forward to their bowl of cereal. And other people are responding, remarking on what they want for lunch, naming their favorite cereal and recounting the harrow tale of the time that they ate 4 bowls of Cookie Crisp (still around?).

I once had a 15 minute conversation with a complete stranger in a supermarket about Cinnamon Toast Crunch – so delicious if you can manage to eat it within the first 3 minutes of pouring it.

Why would you spell "biscuit" like 'biskit"?

Two points today, one is sort of somber and the other is the usual frivolous tomfoolery that I have convinced the internet to indulge me in. I should probably be devoting a greater part of this post to somber concerns since I spent the better chunk of the weekend at a memorial service, but that would smack of chronological relevance and I certain can’t have that.

One comment about memorial services though, before I forget and move along to equally irrelevant discussions. On the drive home my main squeeze and I stopped for dinner at a brew house and discussed our respective funerals. We both decided that people would be hard-pressed to think of nice things to say about us and that we didn’t want to put anyone to the trouble of fiction; ergo, we probably shouldn’t have funerals.

Admitting the attractiveness of not having a funeral is a funny thing when you take into account how popular the funeral fantasy is among teenaged girls. I know it seems crazy at first-glance, but it isn’t actually that morbid. I did this, and while I don’t paint myself as the model of mental health, most of my friends did this also. You merely imagine the reaction to your great tragedy and enjoy the professions of affection that are heaped on your coffin/hospital bed. If you can manage it, feel free to throw in a plot twist that means your death secures your revenge on that chick from second period.

Honestly, I’m not making this up. Most teenaged girls think more about what would happen at their funeral (or better yet, if they were hospitalized in some serious but attractive way) than they do about Twilight, and that’s saying something.

I am going to move along to discuss what I intended to discuss today, first the somber thing and then the cheerful thing so that everyone leaves on a high note. The somber discussion is a another reflection on the class that I’m taking. Yesterday we all had to rewrite a boring story and then read it aloud to the class so that we could understand how personal voice/detail make an essay. I liked this exercise in theory, but I hate reading aloud with a fiery passion, so the whole process made me glum.

For the first few minutes of the read-along I couldn’t listen because I was too busy being nervous and later I was distracted by my profound relief, but I eventually started listening to people reading their stories. I’m glad that I did because listening to other people read their work always reminds me that putting words into sentences isn’t a particularly difficult task – not nearly as difficult as I make it out to be. I putter and struggle with words and sentences and (above all) having the motivation to sit still and focus without succumbing to the many temptations of the internet. (Today I am doing fairly well. Or I was. I am running out of self control.)

Anyway, it is always humbling and motivating to know that putting ideas together is an easy thing.

So here is the joyful thing that I promised to bring this whole situation to a cheerful close. My question for people who make popsicles for a living: Why do you bother to put jokes on the sticks with the answer embedded in the frozen juice? Do you think that kids need more motivation for eating popsicles? You are just throwing away incentives on kids who love nothing more than a drippy dessert. Save your jokes for something that people hate, like the bottom of a box of Chicken in a Biskit.

Same goes for you, Mr. Cracker Jack.

As a point of interest I might be changing my blog quota to 3 X a week, throwing Sunday in the mix. I hate doing actual work on Sundays but I always find writing on Mondays so shocking that I figure that I shouldn't late my brain completely atrophy over the weekend anymore. I know what you are thinking and yes, I do think that this blog helps rather than accelerates the degradation of my brain. If not the writing then trying to remember how to keep this sucker for being double spaced and ragged-right....all ragged-right alignment is a blight on humanity.

I'm intimidated by all kinds of bikers

Please be amazed, devoted followers, I’m about to write something in (and about) a coffee shop. I know that I have harped on about this topic too often and that I have – on several occasions, I think – vowed to never do it again. But I can lie as often as I want; this is my blog and I do as I please here.

I’ve been writing for the last two days in the biker bar of all coffee shops…biker as in 10-speed. After months of Starbucks mothers and indignant hippies at the Coffee Republic, I have finally found a coffee shop frequented by mobile people, none of whom want to stick around inside the shop. That’s where I come in. It’s true, I am a little ashamed since I haven’t been on my bike in months and when I did bike it was in the stately commuter way, not the hardcore/spandex fashion.

Regardless, it is quiet here and although there is Christmas music playing it isn’t too loud and the employees seem annoyed by it as well. The chairs aren’t all that comfortable but the internet is free.

Mostly the people who frequent this place make me wish that I was more into nature than I am. They are all talking about how many miles they’ve ridden and they drink the regular drip coffee. Last night while at work I contemplated buying some hiking boots (they were a good deal and I was cold) and then I forced myself to stop and contemplate when I was likely to wear them.

Sure, I could wear them stomping around town, leaving large muddy tracks all around the grocery store. But it was unlikely that I would be out in nature with them, hiking around and getting them properly broken in. It is also not likely that I will ever ride a bike for several miles...but I don't mind stealing wifi like I will someday.

Remember I-Macs?

My new computer is coming in the mail tomorrow. If I can manage, I would like to say without any trace of the usual flippancy that adorns my discussion of my love/hate relationship with technology, that I am hellsa excited.

I haven’t had a computer of my own for a few years, ever since my old computer (a beautiful and faithful over-sized Toshiba laptop that I’d invested heavily in repairs to over three years) finally croaked. The manner of the croaking was thus: the wire between the computers “brain” and the computer’s “face” had frayed resulting in the “face” to display everything that should have been black in a searing red. For a person who already has radically bad vision, this was a death sentence.

From that time on I’ve been mooching heavily from my domestic companion. First I stole his old computer – blue, dell, chunky – for my use at home during the last stint of my academic phase. Later, when we moved in together and the pretense of domestic bliss allowed me to be so forward I began using his main laptop. And I’m using that very laptop to type this blog.

But my next blog entry will undoubtedly be typed from my new laptop.

I remember the first time that I had my “own” computer. It was a purple I-Mac and I was 13 years old. (Remember I-Macs?) The idea of possession thrilled me more than my computing abilities. I was more excited to pick a desktop background than anything else. The joy was only more pronounced because I had never used a Mac before and had absolutely no idea how to go about changing it.

I love desktop backgrounds in the same way I love car safety kits: both are the minor perks that make owning something important more palatable to the mind of a feeble sentimentalist.

Desktop background suggestions for my new computer are welcome. Until then I’m just hoping that the “fly fishing” default option is still available.

Me and my personal shredder

I sometimes find that I can't summon the appropriate emotions for certain occasions. I worried about this during my flurry of wedding-induced panic attacks; I was worried, yes, but I wasn't have nearly as many deep thoughts as I suspected the occasion warranted. I wasn't looking up to see dove's flying, and I wasn't subconsciously weaving bread dough into love-knots and I couldn't make my mind equate rings with dramatic symbols of unity. And for someone whose mind has been so warped by a stiff liberal education that I think Thomas the Tank Engine is a symbol of industrialization, this was a very low point.

I was considering this emotional stagnation at my sister's high school graduation over the weekend. I was sitting with my family in the summer sunshine, shading my eyes with a free program as the wind blew majestically (read: coldly) through the millions of balloon bouquets on the field. The kids were marching in time to the band, and the outfits that I remember as stifling seemed regal from afar, but even sandwiched between the tears of my older sister and mother I was sort of thinking: what crap.

Obviously I was not thinking "what crap" at my little sister, of whom I am very fond. I was directing my malice instead toward the do-gooders making speeches all about the unity of 2009, kindergarten besties, and the scary ledge of adulthood on which they all stood. I was wondering whether these kids (alright, these girls) could really muster this much emotion and hyperbole over graduation.

It's not as though I wasn't nervous about high school ending, I spent many weeks prior to leaving for college being upset that I couldn't get a clear mental picture of what my life would be like so that I could worry properly about it. I packed consciously for my dorm room (gargoyle bookends, personal shredder). But I didn't bath myself in happiness on the day of graduation and embrace the world anew. In fact what I remember worrying about most is how stupid I looked in my mortarboard and taking it off directly following the ceremony, photo-ops be damned (sadly I worried about the same thing at my college graduation and pushed nervously at it to the point that it fell off my head as I was jostled crossing the stage).

So I'm not sure if I envy or mock you, high school girls with real emotions at the ceremony. On one hand I wish that I was moved to tears by the idea of closing epochs and the exchange of friendship necklaces. But on the other hand (surely the more evil one) I wanted to take each of those girls by their Hawaiian lei and shake them until they realized that in a few years the majority of their high school classmates would become a reason to switch lines at the Walmart to avoid awkward conversation.

Wasting paper on the internet

I think that there are few things worse than journals with the word “journal” on the spine. This in inexcusable, even when the cover itself is old and leathery looking and the clasp might be made from an authentic arrowhead from the French and Indian War.

I admit to being a little emotional about paper-goods at times. This derives partially from my overwhelming and completely groundless nostalgia, and partially from my own heady and youthful desires to be a writer.

In my mind (and this is the mind that seriously considered looking up butter churns on amazon earlier) writers wrote in stern leather-bound books with ribbons for bookmarks. And no writer of my imagination was very silly enough to want the word “journal” embossed sloppily on the spine in Century Schoolbook font and so I’ve felt compelled to disdain this idea myself.

This tirade might actually have a point. So lately I have been trying to write in a more serious sense, and failing very miserably. I feel drastically unmotivated after getting home from work, and then I just have fits over not accomplishing anything. Really, it’s quite a drag. And I weirdly (okay, hypocritically) despair over how I was so productive in college, when all day long I curse college kids and their term-paper style melodrama and their Snow-Hoes and Eskimos parties.

“If only they knew,” I think to myself sitting in traffic. “When you become a working person there is no such thing as a free newspaper.”

And so I find myself being falsely motivated by the sirens of the paper world. I think to myself that maybe if there was a journal that wasn’t totally obvious about being a journal that I would buy it and become instantly more motivated and prolific as hell and my handwriting would probably be improved by sheer proximity to the thing.

But I know that if I were to find the perfect journal I would still be flakey and my handwriting would still be sloppy and the lines would start curving down and wasting expensive paper space before long. Hardbound journals are the most depressing thing in the check-out aisle of Barnes and Noble.

My pledge: no otters here.

I have recently stumbled upon what might be the best kept secret on the internet. If it seems foolhardy to give any numerical assignment to the wonders of the boundless internet, allow me to clarify. Over the weekend I saw something even better than that blog containing only pictures of otters, and that I feel warrants mention. What makes it better is that I wasn’t even looking for an internet-y thrill, but happened upon it while looking over the shoulder of my main squeeze who was inexplicably ended up on Youtube after adding a plush Seabiscuit doll to our wedding registry.

For what it’s worth, my virtual cap is off to you, Underground American Girl Youtube Community.

Oh yes, those American Girls. None other than the Chicago based, hugely overpriced, historically accurate, must have gift for every dorky girl. Being the epitome of dorky girl, I certainly had one. In fact, I had the colonial.

I got the doll for my 8th birthday after months of begging and leaving strategically circled copies in my mother's path of the monthly catalog (which she still receives) that I had sent away for after devouring the books. I can still remember the shock of reading the fuzzy-warm American Girl rendition of the American Revolution. Apparently the whole affair can be summed up by girlfriends, so symbolic of their respective countries, torn apart by political values though they shared moral and cultural ones. That’s pretty deep for a chapter book with little pictures showing the period vocabulary in the sidebar.

So there are these girls (presumably) who are putting elaborate videos of varying qualities, using American Girl dolls as the primary actors. I had intended on going into detail about one particularly dismal director, but I’m pressed for time so I’ll just air my primary reaction to this phenomenon.

These are children, equipped with what one might once have call ed imaginations. And where we once viewed the imagination as a private affair (and after adolescence something somewhat embarrassing), it is now the makings of a fanbase far surpassing in numbers what few friends these webcammed history buffs may have.

What is the youth coming to, when it proudly displays its imaginary friends to the world in slightly grainy footage and bad sound quality, and invites their comments?

Too many knick-knacks.

Further reflections on moving:

There must be some kind of physiological reason that certain disturbed citizens like myself hoard junk long after familiarity has eroded away the novelty. Do I need you, oversized dice? Do I, a tone-deaf and lazy individual, require 4 different harmonicas? Today I tried to find space for silly hats, tool belts, statues of Korean people and a bronze goblet that I won years ago in a crossbow-shooting contest at a Renaissance Faire.

Maybe the thing proclaimed my status in some overwrought script and phrases like “Crossbow Winner” or “Robin Hood in Training” or something I would consider keeping it. Unfortunately, I know that these goblets are just given out to youngsters willy-nilly and without honor, their cost already covered by the hideously inflated prices of the Ye Olde Juice of Jamba served on site.

Can people even drink from bronze? If I wouldn’t want to win a medal of it in gymnastics, then I don’t want to risk my health on it. Plus, that sucker is probably heavy, which is a huge determent where moving is concerned.

I guess the going excuse for keeping these sort of things (things= Gargoyle book ends, llama toy with real llama fur, framed internet comics, Jesus candle from the supermarket) is that they might make excellent conversation pieces.

I’m still waiting for someone to walk into my home and ask me point blank exactly (yet…. conversationally) what my intentions are in keeping a megaphone from my high-school beside an American Girls Christmas ornament, a collection of unclaimed rocks, keys and bouncy balls found on the ground, stacked atop a pile of readers from every course I took at college. Perhaps the ensuing conversation would bring enlightenment.

In other news, I’m reading two short story books cyclically, with no confusion yet. We shall see how this develops.

Just when I discovered a good away message for being in class...

Today I attended my last lecture. I also picked up my graduation outfit, but as the sentimental realizations there were limited to the chagrin of knowing that I was paying 40 buckeros to rent a gown that has shoulder pads and smells like hot-dog wienies in BBQ sauce, I'll skip the weepy descriptors.

I spent my last lecture drawing a robot man with square eyes on the desk and after giving him (the robot) six legs and adorning each foot with a hiking boot I wrote very melodramatically "Last Lecture" above him. I am well aware that I should have been listening to the Professor discuss "The Deserted Village" by so-and-so Goldsmith, and as eighteenth century poetry goes it's really not bad (the best couplet: "His best companions, innocence and health/ And his best riches, ignorance of wealth"). However, I was fairly distracted and felt that the last lecture of my career was hardly the best time to begin acting studiously.

Okay, that last bit was sort of a lie. I am largely very studious. I even re-read "The Deserted Village" before going to class, despite the fact that I abhor haughty English poetry and I vaguely recalled having read it some time ago in some Masterpieces class. When is comes to being a geek, I summon all other geeks to proclaim me as their overlord and pay me a yearly tribute in Buffy comic books. Geek though I may be, I just feel that there is no real reason to behave in such a fashion during lecture.

Chronological Development of my Lecture Behavior Patterns:

1)Falling asleep in class, in bold defiance of twitching motion that implies the weird falling sensation that characterizes these sort of naps. Oddly this has not happened to me since Freshman year.

2)Forming back-row coalitions of sarcasm. It's difficult to find the right mix of disaffected youth and slacker in the back-row, because there's no fun in forming a coalition of suffering with someone who never shows up. In fact, the only thing that is worse is forming a coalition with someone who always shows up but never wants to shoot the shit. A good unit of measurement is to try to locate someone who always looks around incredulously whenever that kook in the front-row who looks like Uncle Joey from Full House opens his mouth to bring up 24 again. Disdain for active participators is a serious plus.

3)Doodling. I started with boxes, moved on to cubes and finally settled on drawing circles and shading them to look like Easter eggs. For awhile I was daily re-drawing a reindeer with wings on this particular desk in my totally bitchin' Manifest Destiny class, because on the desk in front of me the words "Beer Run" had smeared to look like "Deer Run." I had high hopes that someone in another class who sat in my seat might respond to the weirdness of the Deer Run phenomenon, but the only thing that ever happened was some jerkwad inked in a joint for the deer to smoke, adding some tacky subtext to my flying friend.

4) Struggling to conquer the crossword. This very well might be the ideal lecture leisure activity. Firstly, it is deceptive, because your look of confusion and your furious scribbling suggests that you are zealously taking notes. Secondly it embodies the perfect level of lecture socializing. It doesn't require chatting and the exchanging of phone numbers to set up study groups, but there is an unspoken solidarity between crossworders. You know that if you are working on the crossword beside a fellow crossworder that there will be some healthy peaking going on, and perhaps even some collaboration. Nothing brings people together more solidly than the realization that "A Flower from Holland" is a tulip.

A plea for wood paneling.

I’m just sickly enough to like wood paneling in the professional atmosphere.

I used to work in a very nice ugly building. The ceilings were low and made of the same kind of paneling as high school portables, that disturbingly porous stuff that makes you think of worms and asbestos and if you stabbed your pencil into it, it just might stick. I never tried to stick anything into the ceiling, being too much of a pansy in both the school and work phases of life, but I imagine that a nice mechanical pencil would work nicely. In my old work station the aforementioned wood paneling was decorated with post-it notes and weird folk-y art featuring roosters with santa hats and driving tractors into endless fields of hay. All of this was overseen by the paper machete skeleton hanging from the pencil sharpener (which certainly no one ever used because we were all hanging onto our mechanical pencils with our eyes on the ceiling). Although I can’t vouch for what material the counter tops were made of, I can assure you that it made a very cheerful noise when slammed with a date-stamper.

Very recently my workplace has migrated into a new, shnazzy building. To my estimation it looks exactly like a Nugget market, without any of the cheese wheels that makes Nugget tolerable. [As a side note, I have experimented in calling the Nugget “the nug,” after being influenced in that direction by pals. Although it was more as a sandwich reference than a supermarket, I still find this nickname is poorly received.]

This new building is bright and inviting…and consequently sucks like the south. Because I have an “Okay-please-have-a-seat” kind of job, I am suddenly exposed to a multitude of cranky, confused and generally shrieking individuals, which is a mild rendition of my worst nightmare. Gone are the days when I would slouch over my text books and be so infrequently disturbed that I was often startled by any noise. Now I have to use my text books to slap away the hands of the rabid brats attempting to climb over the counter and soil my beloved date-stamper with their sticky little Reese’s Pieces fingers.

Maybe I’m just feeling extra surly because my new mandatory headset (emblazoned inside: “I Don’t Want Your Lice”) is squeezing my brain a little too tightly.