goblinbox

In which I need to whine and complain. (Don’t read this drivel. Seriously. Go read something else. I am such a baby.)

The boys over at Cocky & Rude nagged me into joining their diet competition back in July, and even though I haven’t really been dieting, I have been weighing myself every Wednesday and from that I have some fucked up observations to share.

For the first four weeks, my weight didn’t change (other than a slight and temporary bump during The Curse™, which is normal). On week 5, I gained a pound (for The Curse™, natch); but on week 6, I gained another pound.

Then on week 7, I gained SIX POUNDS. And week 8 I gained another 3 pounds, for a grand total of eleven pounds in four weeks.

I quit smoking during week 6 and ate whatever the hell I wanted in any amount I liked for about ten days, but then I went back to eating the way I normally eat, which pretty much keeps me at the same weight under normal circumstances.

I don’t think I’ve gained much fat because I am retaining so much water that my inner ankles are smooth; there’s no bone protruding where you’d expect to see an ankle bone.

This extreme water retention thing happened to me once before about three years ago and it lasted a cycle or two, if I recall correctly… I wasn’t weighing regularly so I don’t know exactly when it ended, but I remember being ankleless and reading up on edema and water retention. Home care is exercise, less sodium, and, counterintuitively, drinking more water.

Anyway, since this has happened before it’s probably not related to quitting smoking, and I have hope that next cycle I’ll drop all this hideous water OH GOD OH GOD PLEASE.

I’m noticing some other oddities too, in terms of moodiness and fatigue, that could be related to quitting – such symptoms are listed in all the smoking cessation articles – but feel more hormonal to me.

So: is this some kind of event I’m getting to enjoy merely because I’m a girl and This Sort Of Shit Just Happens Occasionally, or is it related to quitting smoking?

EITHER WAY, IT SUCKS! I’m fat and mopey and I have no ankles! Shut up looking at me!

In which I describe the awesome side-effects of suddenly halting one’s intake of various toxins.

I smoked my last cigarette in the parking lot of a condo in Joseph, OR on August 14th.

I had been heading toward that moment for months, really, and I was ready for it. I didn’t even want that final cigarette because it was the middle of the night after a gig, I was tired, and I’d been more or less chain smoking for the entire week.

I was acutely aware of how glamorous it is to be addicted: everyone else was inside, chatting, eating, getting ready for bed, and there I was, standing in a ditch, sucking on a cigarette like a total loser. Oh, yes, I planned my quit well. I’ll never forget that last smoke.

For the next seven days I gave myself permission to eat anything and everything I wanted to. I threw out any pretense about portion control or intelligent food choices or calories. I ate Mexican food, I ate entire bags of cheesy poofs, I ate chocolate truffles. I ate brie, I ate huge salads, I ate dill pickle sunflower seeds. I cleaned my plate every single time I had a meal. And on the eighth day, I stopped and went back to my normal, non-dieting-but-still-fairly-conscious eating ways.

Today is my eleventh day of non-smoking. I’ve had many, many non-smoking milestones that I’m really proud of, but this post isn’t about that. It’s about what’s happening to my body:

I’m exhausted. It’s all I can do to keep my eyes open. I went down for a brief nap yesterday evening – I was planning to do some late night QA testing – and slept, without moving, for ten and a half hours.

I’m fat. I’ve gained eight pounds in less than two weeks, but I can’t figure out how a little extra caloric indulgence turned into this. I think I’m retaining water in new and strange ways, because The Curse™ ended yesterday and the fifth day of my cycle is usually my skinniest day of the whole month.

I can now go hours without craving anything, but the rest of the time I have a vague, itchy, cellular drive to… something. Nothing in particular, just something.

I’ve finally figured out how to use the nicotine lozenges to their best effect, but I only manage to get six or eight miligrams of nicotine into my body each day. (I’m supposed to have eighteen per day for a month.) My quit plan has me using these things through November, and I intend to do that, but I might just forget to use them before that.

They’re great for emergency craving management, such as when I find myself in a room full of smokers, or I get into a vehicle I used to smoke in, or I’m on break in between sets at a gig, etc. but I have a hard time remembering to use them when I’m engaged in something that doesn’t remind me of smoking.

I haven’t begun any lung cleansing yet. I was expecting a lot of coughing and throat-clearing and sinus-draining, but I’ve experienced almost none of that. When I inhale, it’s free and clear and there’s no gurgling or anything. My lungs sound and feel like I just took a decongestant.

I’m hyper emotional today. I’ve misted up about five times about nothing. Again, I’m not in the emotional part of my cycle, so I’m attributing this experience to quitting as well.

Something clicked in my psyche somewhere; I no longer want to smoke. I mean, I have cravings, but I’ve figured out that there’s no such thing as “just a drag” or “just one cigarette;” I spent far too long making too many neuroreceptors for that to be possible. I either smoke, or I don’t. And I don’t want to suffer the long-term effects of smoking, so I can’t smoke.

The last time I quit, my voice responded with great suppleness within days. This time, I was expecting another rapid recovery but I’m not getting it. I don’t understand that, either.

So I’m fat, moody, unsatisfied, AND my voice sounds just like it did before I quit. In conclusion, quitting smoking appears to be just like PMS.

Only me, my babies. Only me.

In which I catch y’all up on how things are going lately.

THE SPOKANE TRIP last weekend was, on the one hand, really fun. I enjoyed getting out of town for a couple of nights. The motel bed was far more comfortable than my own. I enjoyed sight-seeing in Spokane, and eating at Frankie Doodles, and shopping (I bought jeans and a belt at Ross), and I loved the club itself to pieces. The staff was great, and the patrons were fantastic. The club comped my fettuccine alfredo even though it wasn’t from the appetizer menu, and the owner went out of his way to give us the cash he had on hand instead of paying us with just a check.

On the other hand, it was 48 hours of sophomoric ego-emo clusterfuck, the proportions of which can be reached only in the poly relationship known as “being in a band.” Nutshell: we were too loud, the club asked us to turn down – five times – and we (where “we” equals Someone Who Isn’t Me) didn’t want to; we had no set lists and Far Too Much Dead Air; and we ran out of blues material and defaulted to a bunch of old rock covers (which is fine in taverns, but not in Actual Blues Clubs that have Live Blues Bands Five Nights Per Week). I blew out my voice and went deaf in my first set. It wasn’t a raging train wreck – I mean, people danced – but we made enough amateurish mistakes to ensure that we won’t be asked back.

THE QUALITY ASSURANCE gig is going really well! The guys I report to are so swamped that I have to wait awhile for feedback, but they seem pleased with what I’ve done so far. I’m enjoying the work, which consists of making sure a software application does what it’s designed to do, and filing bugs when it doesn’t. I can work pretty much whenever I want to.

I have only the vaguest inkling of what I’m doing and how it fits into the Big Picture, but I’ve had just enough explained to me that I’m comfortable with not knowing what I don’t know. I’m a contractor, not a project manager, so I don’t need to know how it all fits together… it’s just my nature to want to fix inefficient or redundant work flows, maximize the efforts of actual human resources, and — right. Not my job!

I scrounged a card table and a folding chair so I’m no longer sitting on the floor while I’m working. My knees are happy about that.

SCHOOL STARTS IN less than a month. The WWCC web site says that financial aid packets were supposed to go out on August 20th. I haven’t received mine, and the financial aid portal shows no awards for me yet.

I can’t pay for school without aid, and if I don’t go to school I will have to pay back three months worth of unemployment benefits. I’m vaguely worried about this situation, but have decided to delay freaking out until September.

I’m hoping I’ll get the aid I need, and that I’ll get to do QA at night while going to school during the day. If it all works out, next spring I’ll have a pile of networking certifications and great references for QA work! And if I can’t get a fucking job then, I’ll switch over to my secret-until-now backup plan, which goes something like, “Uh, Be A Homeless Crack Whore In Hawaii or Something?” I always thought I’d keep my teeth, but sometimes you just gotta take a hint, am I right?

In which it’s ALL good news, people. It’s like Xmas in August, I swear.

Today is Day 5 of my smoke-free life.
I quit smoking on the 15th. I’m using 2mg lozenges for NRT and I’m “workin’ my quit” (that’s lingo from becomeanex.org) and I’m doing really well. I wasn’t even a little bit miserable on the patio at the Peony with the smokers last night, and I didn’t care when my brother smoked in the truck.

It’s easy because I had to quit. Permanent lung damage ain’t cool for anyone, but particularly not someone who loves to sing. I was noticing issues with breathing in general, I was having a hard time getting enough breath when singing, and my heart rate was permanently elevated (it had dropped the last time I quit, so I know it was the smoking). It had begun to hurt to smoke. Smoking kept me from wanting to exercise. Smoking had begun to try to kill me in earnest.

I understand, now, why people usually have to quit a few times before it sticks: you have to learn how to do it. You have to make your peace with really and truly wanting to quit. I think that for most people, it’s a complicated mental process involving amassing a host of reasons about Why Smoking Is So Bad That You’re Willing To Suffer Through Quitting, Even Though It Totally Sucks And You Will Probably Always Have Smoking Impulses Until You Die.

Working from home is freakin’ cool and I dig it.
The QA gig is great. I love it. I hope it lasts. I work with two guys in California; communication is done via email and IM and the occasional SMS. They send me projects, I log into the VPN and do them. The projects involve logging into a piece of software and testing to make sure it actually does what the build description says it should.

My little netbook hasn’t melted down yet, thankfully, but my boss said he’d send me a laptop or something here pretty soon since so many tests require access to two machines.

I’ve been working in my room, but it’s too many hours to sit on the floor and my knees are killing me. I really need to find a desk (or a desk-like item) and an office chair so that I can set up a workspace in the basement. I need another monitor, keyboard, and mouse, too. I might even need to purchase a second computer of my own so that I can have one for my personal stuff and one for work.

I need to accomplish all this over the weekend, except I’ll be out of town.

Live Music Are Better.
This weekend, I’ll be joining Coyote Kings for a two-night run at a blues & comedy club in Spokane called Bluz at the Bend. Yay hotel living! (I get to crash with the rhythm section. I hope those bitches don’t snore.)

I might take my netbook along; if the motel has a connection I could work… of course, without a monitor it might be too crazy-making. Hmm. We’ll have to see.

The Awesomest Clothing Bomb Of All Time
On Wednesday, I got this in the mail – two boxes of clothes from Sussette. She sent me a silk tank-and-skirt set from India; a silk Chinese jacket and wide-legged pants; a wrap-around skirt made of sari material; two cotton gauze trapeze tops with pockets; a tie-dyed tank dress; Thai worker’s pants; a black tunic; a tube-top half dress; a floor-length sun dress; a pink sari skirt; a black and red top; a white embroidered tunic; a silk halter top dress; and a cap-sleeved batik dress with ties.

IT WAS SO FREAKING WONDERFUL. The items are all new or very lightly used, they all fit, they’re all items I will totally wear… altogether it’s got to be hundreds of dollars worth of clothes! And all because she needed to clean out her closets!

I’m the luckiest girl ever.

Sweating and moving around and stuff.
My drummer woke up the other morning with a wild hair about fitness. He’s been texting me every single day about going walking or jogging, so today I went for a walk with him. I was going to do the first installment of Couch-to-5k (brisk 5 minute warmup walk, then alternate 60 seconds jogging with 90 seconds walking for 20 minutes, 5 minutes cool down walk after) but we walked around the reservoir instead. Halfway around, my heart rate was really high – probably too high for any real cardio benefit – and my hands swelled up like sausages.

I think these symptoms were a result of the following facts: I have avoided exercise my entire life because I don’t like it; The Curse™ is due today and I’m bloated; I haven’t been drinking enough water in general; I smoked for 25 years; it was 94 degrees F in the shade; I am 41 years old.

The good news is that I no longer smoke, The Curse™ will pass, summer will end, and I now believe – from the 200 Situps, 200 Squats, and 100 Pushups programs – that I can build up to an hour’s worth of interval training.

I’ve given up on wanting the results of physical activity to be my looking trim and cute, however. Now I just don’t want my fucking heart to explode.

Update: In conclusion, you can always tell when I’m not reading much because my sentence structure gets weird.

In which there’s, um. Psssh. Yeah. Whatever. Gah.

1.) Kid behind the counter: I know you look at me and see an ol’ lady, but seriously. I’m capable of irony. Hell, I’ve done your stupid shitty job and tons more just like it. Don’t roll your eyes at me, punk, when I smile at you after some conehead customer does something stupid, because I could totally beat up your mom.

2.) My hair is now about 20% gray. WTF, over?

3.) In my WordPress installation, on the Add New Post page, is a Categories window. It doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked for years. The only way I can edit or add categories is to go to a whole ‘nother part of the interface, which I don’t, which is why my categories suck. I’ve never been able to figure out how to fix it.

4.) There’s this website called freelancer.com. I spent an hour this morning looking at the jobs posted. My observations:

• You can get a part-time virtual assistant with pretty much my entire skillset for $200 per month. That person will live in India, and that $200 will probably go much farther there than it does here.
• There are persons or companies out there who need teams of ten or more to type CAPTCHA entries. I can’t for the life of me figure out why, unless they’re using cheap human labor to open doors for irritating fucking ‘bots. The pay is $.70 per thousand CAPTCHAs entered.
• There’s a huge market for “writers,” where “writers” equals “people who bang out enthusiastic three hundred-word articles about meaningless crap and get paid $1.50 to $3.00 per piece.”

Apparently if I wanna work in this world, I need to get new skills or move to India.

5.) I painted my nails red yesterday.

6. I have no idea if starting my EB while they were still debating EUC has fucked up my school plans or not. I have still not been awarded any financial aid, but they don’t even mail the stuff until August 20th.

7.) I sleep much too much.

8.) I cleaned my room and did my laundry, but I need to vacuum.

In which yesterday was guru purnima. (I celebrated with a lalita sahasranama and some midnight meditation under the full moon.)

The great Adi Shankara (the first Shankaracharya) of the 8th century summarized the entirety of Advaita Vedanta (non-dualistic philosophy) in six stanzas. When a young boy of eight, wandering in the Himalayas seeking to find his guru, he encountered a sage who asked him, “Who are you?” The boy answered with these stanzas, which are known as “Nirvana Shatakam” or “Atma Shatakam.” Nirvana is complete equanimity, peace, tranquility, freedom and joy. Atma is the True Self. The sage the boy was talking to was Swami Govindapada Acharya, who was, indeed, the teacher he was looking for.

(There’s supposed to be a video embedded here, but it’s not working in some browsers so the direct link is here.)

NIRVANASHTAKAM

Mano-budhy-ahankara cittani naham
na ca srotra-jihve na ca ghrana netre
Na ca vyoma bhumim na tejo na vayuh
Cidananda rupah sivoham sivoham

I am neither the mind, nor the intellect, nor the ego, nor the mind stuff. I am neither the body, nor the changes of the body. I am neither the senses of hearing, taste, smell or sight. Nor am I either the earth, the fire, the air. I am existence absolute, knowledge absolute, bliss absolute. I am He, I am He.

Na ca prana samnjo na vai pancavayur
na va sapta-dhatur na va panca-kosah
Na vak-pani-padam na copastha-payu
Cidananda rupah sivoham sivoham

I am neither the Prana, nor the five vital airs. I am neither the materials of the body, nor the five sheaths. Neither am I the organs of action nor objects of the senses. I am existence absolute, knowledge absolute, bliss absolute. I am He, I am He.

Na me dvesa ragau na me lobha mohau
mado naiva me naiva matsaryabhavah
Na dharmo na cartho na kamo na moksah
Cidananda rupah sivoham sivoham

I have neither aversion nor attachment, neither greed nor delusion, neither egotism nor envy. Neither Dharma nor Moksha. I have neither desire nor object of desire. I am existence absolute, knowledge absolute, bliss absolute. I am He, I am He.

Na punyam na papam na saukhyam na dukham
na mantro na tirtham na veda na yajna
Aham bhojanam naiva bhojyam na bhokta
Cidananda rupah sivoham sivoham

I am neither sin nor virtue, neither pleasure nor pain, nor temple, nor worship, nor pilgrimage, nor scriptures. And I am neither the act of enjoying, the enjoyable nor the enjoyer. I am existence absolute, knowledge absolute, bliss absolute. I am He, I am He.

Na mrtyur na sanka na me jati bhedah
pita naiva me naiva mata na janma
Na bandhur na mitram gurur naiva sisya
Cidananda rupah sivoham sivoham

I have neither death, nor fear of death, nor caste. Nor was I ever born, nor had I parents, friends and relations. I have neither Guru nor disciple. I am existence absolute, knowledge absolute, bliss absolute. I am He, I am He.

Aham nirvikalpo nirakara rupo
vibhutvacca sarvatra sarvendriyanam
Na ca sangatam naiva muktir na meya
Cidananda rupah sivoham sivoham

I am untouched by the senses. I am neither Mukti nor knowable, I am without form, without limit, beyond space, beyond time. I am in everything, I am the basis of the universe, everywhere am I. I am existence absolute, knowledge absolute, bliss absolute. I am He, I am He.

JAI GURU DEVA

In which I share my quiet Saturday afternoon.

I live upstairs in my grandmother’s house in a mustard yellow room that hasn’t been redone since the 70′s. This is the landing:

I keep my chrome citrus juicer and my bowling ball on the landing because I don’t have places for them in my room and I use them frequently enough that putting them in the attic is a pain in the arse.

I received the juicer as a wedding gift. I love it so much that I made a point of getting it from my ex-husband’s house and hauling it three thousand miles to the left coast. The bowling ball is reactive but I have it drilled as a straight ball and therefore haven’t been able break 120 with it in five years of not really trying. The poster picture is my uncle as a child; from the wall above the banister hangs a bundle of club cards from Vegas casinos.

I bought live basil from the store; it cost four dollars for three rooted basil plants. It’s been on the window sill now for four days and I think I’m considering potting it so it will last longer there on the sill above the sink, because it’s such a dear thing, a living herb plant.

I hate doing dishes but if I have to do them, this is the kitchen to do them in. Have you ever seen a bigger, better kitchen window? It’s gotta be six feet wide. Such a view.

My grandmother’s house is way cool.

I finally got a load of laundry in, after stating my intention to do so last Tuesday. Few things more satisfying than the view of a load of whites, drying on the line in the sun.

Besides also cooking and walking to the store and back and the laundry and the dishes, I read that entire book – five hundred and twenty pages – in one day.

In which I’m trying to figure out this back-to-school thing.

When I hatched my spend-a-year-getting-certs scheme, EUC was a given. The Training Benefits facilitator even told me I’d get them.

Then time passed, and EUC expired 16 fucking days before my benefits ran out, and now I’m using my training benefits months before I’d expected to tap into them.

My school plan depended on getting many weeks of EUC before having to use my 20 weeks worth of Extended Benefits.

I guess it really was too good to be true, the whole go-to-school-for-a-year-while-getting-deposits thing, because now if I don’t get EUC, I’m going to run out of benefits in mid-November and I have to go to school now that I’ve started receiving training benefits, otherwise I’ll have to pay them back.

Long story short: it’s not free money after all, if EUC fails for me, because I’ll be borrowing more than I wanted to. More damn student loans.

The current EUC bill is still in the Senate, and they’re supposed to vote on it tomorrow… problem is, if they make any changes it goes back to the House. Again. Which means it could easily be weeks, if not months, before there might be any EUC relief for yours truly.

The uncertainty is kinda freakin’ me out, but I guess I’ll muddle through somehow or another. If I get EUC, I’ll borrow less. If I don’t, well, the financial aid portal thinks I need $16k worth of aid for nine months in school and I’m nowhere near the borrowing cap, so I guess I’ll be okay even if I can’t find a P/T job.

In which I wanna post but don’t really have anything to say and am doing it anyway!

The latest WordPress upgrade looks nice! I’ll have to upgrade my dad’s installation this weekend.

I’m using a new template. I like it. Do you like it?

Amazon is pissing me off. It’s been three days and they haven’t answered my question about why their custom software DOESN’T FUCKING WORK.

This was my breakfast:

The onion festival is this weekend; I’ll be going to see Vaughn Jensen play Land Title tonight with Becca ’cause it’s her birthday.

I have fewer than three dollars to my name.

I called about my extended benefits; they had me leave a message and said I’d get a call back in two days.

I need to wash my hair more than all of you put together.

I’m spending tons of online time here and here.

Update: I finally decided to RTFM and the Amazon software works fine, I just need to feed it UPCs I don’t have. Bleggh.

In which I complain about living in a state with a 9.1% unemployment rate.

I just read a job listing at WorkSource. The job is called PT ORDER ENTRY SPECIALIST II.

The description says, and I quote verbatim, The FT Order Entry Specialist II will check accuracy of and enter orders for equipment and parts, balance daily order reports, request closing reports and acknowledgments daily, provide various bookings and shipments reports, maintain integrity of open and closed sales orders. Review initial sales orders for completeness and accuracy and input into log book. Perform file maintenance, update sales orders, balance the “shipment to customer” with accounting daily. Track and verify customer purchase orders for each piece of equipment ordered. Produce weekly order and shipment reports for both business units. Monthly, generate and mail verification of bookings totals and reports to appropriate personnel. Provide support for product specialists and field sales as required.

Yeah. It’s glorified data entry and report-running. Anybody could do it.

What’s fucked up is the part where they list the necessary qualifications to be considered for the job: Two year Associates degree (A.A.) accounting degree, plus four years business accounting experience.

A fucking associate’s in accounting? To enter sales orders? Are you fucking kidding me? Four years’ BUSINESS ACCOUNTING experience? Really? With that kind of qualification, you’re a fucking ACCOUNTANT, not an order entry specialist. Jeez.

~+~+~
I was idly looking at job postings because I haven’t received my EUC (emergency unemployment compensation) ruling yet, it’ll take the EB (extended benefits) people two days to call me back, I’m totally broke, I haven’t been awarded any financial aid for school yet, and:

The EUC program expired on June 2, 2010. The U.S. House passed legislation to extend the dates people can apply for and receive EUC benefits, but the bill is currently stalled in the Senate. The Senate is not expected to take the bill up again until July 12, 2010 or later.

If the bill becomes law people will be able to apply for EUC until November 2010 and receive benefits until May 2011.

Long story short, I don’t know yet but I might not be able to do the school thing if I don’t get EUC and/or a financial aid award.

Which would suck, because I was really looking forward to a year in community college, taking computer science classes with twenty-year-old geeks.

~+~+~
I haven’t paid my rent, I’m a month and a half behind on paying my settlement company, I need new glasses, I want new books, I need to pay my dentist, and my dog’s eating shitty grocery store brand kibbles.

My debit card is ten dollars overdrawn, I’m about to disable my Netflix and eMusic accounts, and the only reason I can drive anywhere is because there’s still half a tank of gas in the truck from when dad was here and filled it up. (I don’t drive much.)

G’ma lets me eat her eggs and bread and has offered to buy me groceries when I run out of my own, but I Do Not Want to cost her money. I’m stalled on my little data entry project for NLW because the Amazon Seller’s Desktop application isn’t working and their ticketing system is backed up. My next paying gig isn’t until August.

Long story short, I was surfing WorkSource because a part-time job right now would be freakin’ excellent, and data entry is my bitch.

Now please excuse me while I figure out the best way to spend my last $20 at the grocery store. I’m thinking tofu, ramen, and beans. Maybe some lentils, too; they’re cheap protein.

Hopefully poverty will help me dominate next week’s competitive diet stats!

In which this is a blog post containing words and pictures.

I spent most of last week reading, knitting, and watching old television series. I watched all of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and a season of Black Books and a season of Spaced.

I worked on wisp and the art nouveau poncho.

To celebrate Independence Day eve, I went out with a couple of friends and got drunk. This happened only because they paid for everything. There were shots of Jäger.

On the 4th, I went to my aunt and uncle’s and ate macaroni salad and about four pounds of melon.

This morning I finished the poncho, and (as soon as I take it off) I’m going to block it in hopes that blocking will solve the rolling problem at the bottom. If not, the thing may end up with fringe to weight down the hem. Srsly. Seventies brown poncho from hell, people! FRINGE! Whoo hoo!

In other news (because this is the sort of shit that happens when you have zero cash flow), my brother dumped the unlimited data portion of our cell phone contract because we’re poor, and so naturally last month my phone used data all on its own and I’ve been charged $42.09 for 1,403kb worth of data transfer. (Yes, you read that right: kilobytes of data. That’s less than a megabyte and a half.) Now I’m watching stupid fucking FAQ videos for my phone, trying to find out what application is using data and how to turn it the fuck off.

Later, I will knit more and watch more old British television. I will probably walk my dog. I will make some rice and Japanese curry, once the tofu is defrosted. I will do situps I don’t want to do. I will try to figure out what I’m going to do if it’s really true that I’m not eligible for EUC. I will be glad I’m too poor to buy booze because if I weren’t, I’d probably just drink myself into a hellatious hangover because there’s no work here and I might not be able to go back to school after all and I don’t really want to move because my dog’s old and I don’t have a car and damn it I like it here.

And by then the poncho should be dry and I’ll put fringe on it. Whee!

In which there’s a free-form ramble on the topic of writing. This is a zero draft with only basic editing.

People keep telling me to write, that I should write, that I should “be a writer,” and I do write. I write hundreds of thousands of words every year, but the secret I know is that I’ve read great writers and I’m not one.

I loathe my own mediocrity, I suppose, though I grok the math of the curve and accept my position here in the middle with everyone else. It’s cool here, it’s groovy and chummy; we can’t all be the cream in this pail of milk, the world just isn’t made that way, it’s made of gradations and variations and grades and levels, and if I’m to be allowed to be very good at something then it follows that I must also be not good at something else, those are just the rules. If I’m going to be average, why can’t I do it in an office somewhere, an office with a big fat OC3 pipe to the Internet and a 401k and phones that don’t ring very often? Why do I have to write?

Like I’m not writing? I am writing. I write all the time! You’re looking at nine years of writing right here, and it’s not brilliant: I know brilliant. I eat brilliant for breakfast. I’ve read a hundred pounds of brilliant books and what I do here, my noodling, sure, it’s good in places, really good in others, I’ll give you that, but if you want to read a writer, a real writer, someone who shines, a proper real life honest-to-God writer, well, I have a list for you. In the world there are paragraphs that change the way your brain works, chapters that make you weep, phrases exquisite and ephemeral and surgical like the light in a Caravaggio.

That is not what I’m doing around here.

Just thinking about “being a writer” makes me think of the writers I’ve read, and let me tell you something, buddy: there are the brilliant, yes, but then too there are the rest: a whole big bunch these days that are crappy banal crap. So many people devour so many words each day that embarrassingly common strings of them are just available for sale any old place, just as cheap and poorly-made as any cheap poorly-made imported t-shirt with the thin fabric and the crooked seams and a flaw in every single one of the damn lot of five thousand.

My point is this: even though they sell, no one wants to make those cheap fucking t-shirts because the work sucks!

You can get bad writing all over the place, and be just as pissed as I am when I snuggle in, expectant and open, to read, only to discover that I won’t be enjoying it. If I were a writer, if I were writing I would be only slightly better than that. I love to read, I love it perfectly and without reservation: how could I stand myself to sully it with a torrent of words only barely lyrical? What is the fucking point of that, I ask you!

I do write. I’m writing right now! What you’re actually asking me to do is monetize it, turn it into a job, and do the best I can at a volume of labor that forces me, enforces me, to work at my own median level, which is the very median of all possible writing, the mean, the middle, the mediocre, and I can’t figure out why I should do to the world something like that.

Sometimes, though, sometimes: sometimes I do approach something lyrical with these words here. I’m such a late bloomer, though. Now that I’ve glimpsed it and named it and scritched it under its chin do you suppose it will take me another thirty years to tame it?