Fail

On the down side, I did not finish reading In Cold Blood by Wednesday. I also have not finished Bodega Dreams. My work load is pretty fucking retarded, and the first place I slack is on the readings because there's nobody checking to make sure I've done them.

On the up side, I'm half finished with Stoner and Spaz (a quick read) and I finished the first section of Joan Didion's The White Album (highly recommended).

On the annoying side, I am not receiving much feedback from my teachers. My first two graded assignments have come back A and A-, which is nice, but the comments on my work in general are frustrating. Mostly it's scattered, generic praise, like "Good!" and "Nice effort!" What could be more demoralizing than "Nice effort!" even when it's attached to an A paper? And this from a teacher who just that class ran a discussion on not giving empty praise when responding to student assignments.

I feel as if the work I'm doing is unremarkable, and I don't want (or think I'd deserve) an A just for "trying hard." I don't mind it being known that I've worked hard to achieve excellence, but it's the excellence I'd like to be known for more than the effort. Or perhaps I'm just so blazingly smart that my teachers are paralyzed and unable to comment.

Gas Station Observation

My dad noted the other day that "Full" has become the opposite of "Self." The existential implications of this cannot be underestimated.

Wants by Philip Larkin

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff—
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death—
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.





[I've probably posted this before. I just love it. Love it to death.]

Status report

Americana: finished
Vineland: finished
The House on Mango Street: finished
Intelligence reframed: finished (in a blur, don't remember much)
Universal Baseball Association: half finished (ETA Sunday)
Bodega Dreams: started (ETA next week)
Go Ask Alice: half finished (ETA tonight)
In Cold Blood: not started (ETA Wednesday)
School and Society: one-quarter finished (text book; ETA late April)
Weight: 211 pounds
Salsa dancing: Wednesdays, biweekly
Love: absent
Student loan status: pain in the ass
Motorcycle: in the garage, finally, post $3800 wipe-out; doctor advises no more riding until I'm off the meds
California: possible trip this summer
Little Brother: weird; uncommunicative
Ghost Rider: Better than Dare Devil; Worse than Spider-Man
Friday: no classes
Casual sex: cancelled indefinitely
Staples: better than Office Max
Office Max: hotter employees than Staples
Bowling: coupon for one free game at Centereach Lanes/AMF
Apple iMac "hockey puck" mouse: better than many defective Kensington mouse and trackball products
Howl's Moving Castle: 119 min
Harlem Globetrotters: Yes
Electric Six: Dance Commander
Tonight's homework: printed

Update: Go As Alice: finished; Universal Baseball Association: finished

$30,000

I have in my hands a check for $30,000. It's loan money. And it's supposed to get me through at least the next year of school. $30,000. I can't imagine I'll ever see a check this big again in my life.

This moment

The downside to this moment is that I have a cold. The upside is that I sound like Barry White.

Dear Roger,

Roger and Annamarie (students at the tutoring center) are 14 and 12 respectively. They have been flirting with each other. In the looks department, Roger ranges between geeky and plain; Annamarie is quite cute. Cupid has armed Annamarie with a machine gun. By the time she is 16 she will have an alligator for a heart. I want to tell Roger to get her phone number now, to go wherever it is that relationships between 14- and 12-year-olds go (an awkward conversation, maybe even an awkward movie) because unless there is a change in Earth's axis, and the magnetic fields that bind Americans together shift North and South to East and West, a girl like Annamarie will never flirt with him again once high school starts. Grab the memory while you can. If you're lucky, it will change your future.

Thanksgiving

It takes the boredom of Thanksgiving to bring me back to the blog. Which is not to say that I am bored of the blog, but that I am otherwise too busy to find my way here. Today has been quiet. It's the first day in many days where I don't feel compelled to do some sort of work. The only person working today around here is my mom who is busy cooking all the grub. Anyway, I was thinking about mom while clicking around Craig's List, and that's when it occurred to me that a smart chef would offer his services to cook meals for people on Thanksgiving. And a REALLY smart chef would put his services up for bid on ebay. I bet people would go crazy for something like that. Home cooking is grand, but having a home-cooked meal cooked by a pro chef in your own home would be pretty killer.

I also eat KitKats

I'm not sure what's up with this, but the other day I left two packs of KitKats in my car and they got all melted. I was going to throw them out, but then I realized I could chuck 'em in the freezer to try to salvage them. So I let them freeze overnight and then opened one to see what the results were. And the results were delicious. The KitKat had melted and reshaped itself from four individual wafers into one solid bar, the chocolate was extra flakey, and somehow the whole thing overall tasted richer. It's really the change in taste that I don't entirely understand. Maybe it was a freak occurrence. I'll have to run the experiment again and find out. But in the meantime I am recommending that everyone melt and freeze their KitKats. It's chocolatey goodness.

i eat words

I've been reading a lot lately. Actually, I've been reading a lot for the past year. This comes after a multi-year post-undergrad hiatus of not wanting to read anything at all. Now the pendulum has swung back and I can't go through books fast enough. A lot of what I've been reading are kids- and young-adult books -- everything from the Phantom Tollbooth to the His Dark Materials trilogy. I've been hitting a lot of classics, too, like Peter Pan and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; and I've read a bunch of today's fad books, like Eragon and The Wind on Fire trilogy.

All of this reading is ostensibly research for my own young adult book. But in reality I've been doing it because it's just plain fun. Even the little kid books, like The Scarecrow and His Servant, are fun (and fast) reads. And I've discovered a lot of new treasures, like Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne-Jones (which was made into an animated movie that is very different from the book, but also very good). Better still, I've rediscovered some of my childhood by digging up books I read as a kid yet which aren't published anymore. In particular, the Norby Chronicles, by Janet and Isaac Asimov, which are about a kid and his overly emotional robot. Some of these books hold up well to adult readers. Others, well, if not for the nostalgia factor, I couldn't recommend them.

The great thing about reading kids books is that they have kept me away from the "serious fiction" on the new-relases tables. Every time I walk into Borders or B&N, I of course start my browsing at the new-releases tables because they stand guard over the doors, and getting by them is like passing the Sphinx's riddle: will I or won't I be duped into picking up the loudest, most demanding, most earnest title on the table? If I fall for it, I leave the store looking like a learned New-York-Times-style intellectual, and the Sphinx kills my soul. But if I leave those books alone, I get to go see the Oracle, waiting for me in the kids section. Or the sci-fi section. Or the murder-mystery section. Or even the travel section, the history section, the women's studies section, the psychiatry section -- anywhere but the motherfucking fiction and literature section. That section is a fucking travesty.

Everyone and their fucking cousin is trying to write the next Big Important Book. And the result is one sour, downtrodden tail after another. It's depressing as hell. Not to mention the parade of egos. Every single one of those books screams, "Look at me and how artsy smartsy I am!" I do not need the bullshit enlightenment these people are trying to pass-off with their fiction. And I don't want to see life reaffirmed via triumph over tragedy. I just want to have a good time. Is that so wrong?

Butt spelunking

The ads at the top of the page are sensitive to the blog's content. If I write "butt spelunking" often enough, will they change to something cool?

I take it back

As much fun as it would be, I'm looking for more than some butt spelunking.

Holy shit it's an update

Seems I am most inclined to update my blog when I'm sitting outside in the gazebo. Being out in the warmth and sun helps fire my inspiration, gets the creative juices flowing. Even still, there's not a whole lot exciting going on in my life right now -- things are moving along at their eternal "too fast yet too boring" pace -- and there's not much happening that merits a blog entry (which is saying a lot when you consider how low the blog entry bar has been set).

But since we're all here, and the sun is setting in a non-metaphoric way on a lovely end-of-summer day (you should see the view from the gazebo here; it's sweet, with orange water and a purple sky and boats tinted pink), I may as well confide in you that these past few days I have been enduring intense internal debate on the topic of whether or not I should once again fire up the online dating machines. The issues pro and con are many and complex and I'm not going to detail them here. But I have noticed that there are two main issues that define the rest of the debate: at this point, I'm not sure if I'm looking for love, or if I'm just looking for someone to bang the shit out of for the short term.

Because I am a romantic (of the poetic variety, if not the candles and flowers variety), I believe that love, though harder to find, is worthier of pursuit. But I'm not sure I'm ready to face the risks of the pursuit just yet -- heart break, rejection, the feeling that everyone but me has found their special someone (which is a retarded term, "special someone," -- it's a vulgar euphemism for "someone you can put your cock in without wanting to kick her out of bed immediately afterward" -- and it'd be nicer if we could just say what we mean without having to prance around the truth like forest fairies).... Anyway, I don't have the energy or the emotional endurance to search for true love right now.

Which means what I'm truly interested in finding right now is a girl I can bang the shit out of for the short term. A girl with a big ass that I can whale away on. And I mean a gigantic fucking ass. An ass that might swallow me up if I'm not careful. I want to go fucking spelunking into some chick's ass. But meeting the right person for this has got to be even harder than finding someone to fall in love with. Looking for asses to plumb is too outside the norm for me to go walking up to big-bottom girls and asking if they're into starting a purely superficial relationship that entails nothing more than eating, boozing, and fucking. At least on Long Island it is. Maybe in Miami, California, or Brazil, where all our pro-am internet porno comes from, things are different. Long Island is where I'm at, though, and so Long Island norms are what I have to deal with, and in spite of the fact that Long Island is mostly Lutheran (which is code for "loose moraled"), it is not easy to find a nice big ass to bottom out in without also getting into a "relationship" with someone. Which is a damn shame because there really are a lot of lonely giant asses around here and I'd be more than happy to spend some time with them.

There is no reason

that sybchronized treadmilling shouldn't be an olympic sport.

Gazebo blogging

About a week ago, my sister and I finished replacing the gazebo's busted screens. We then swept all the crap out and did a thorough debugging (though we're still gonna get some outdoor bug spray because we suspect there are things nesting inside the gazebo's nooks and crannies). Then, today -- just a few minutes ago, actually -- we got the wireless Internet working out here. So even though it's 94-degrees out, I'm sitting in the gazebo's shade, enjoying the breeze blowing off the harbor, and blogging about it. This is the life.

All that remains for the gazebo project is to get one of them spring-loaded thingamajiggers to keep the door closed, and to put up some lights (of the Xmas and reading varieties). The plan to plant plants in the plant boxes has been scrapped due to wiener dog digging activities (we suspect they are building an underground wiener dog day spa. We also suspect they are gay).

Right now there is a yellow inchworm inching himself behind my shoe. Only a minute ago he was inching himself up my bare leg, but that started to tickle, so I had to relocate him. He was supposed to inch his way to safety, preferably somewhere far away from me, or perhaps under my chair, but he insists on lingering near my shoes and I'm afraid I'm going to step on him. Which would be sad because what if this inchworm is destined to become the world's most beautiful butterfly and I accidentally killed him? How could my conscience -- my soul! -- bear it? I shall deny the world no beauty! Such was the solemn oath I swore.

Little Brother

At long last, the FBI finally gave Big Brothers Big Sisters of Long Island the green light on me not being a psychopath, sex offender, or terrorist, which means all systems are go for me to enter the BBBSLI program. So today, BBBSLI called to tell me about a Little Brother they had in mind for me.

The first words out of my case worker's mouth were, "He's one of our more challenging children," and then she went into a long list of what those challenges are. The kid has been through everything from an alcoholic drop-out "inappropriate" father, to living in a group home because his mother is frequently hospitalized. It was jaw-dropping to hear about his life and all his hardships and troubles and how his main goal is to boost his self-esteem so he can help his mom. And he's only 14. It's crazy that there are real kids like this out there. You hear these stories and think they're made for TV, but here I am getting a call to be a part of this kid's non-TV life.

I think the case worker is expecting me to get scared away and ask for a different Little, and I get until Friday to decide if I want to be this kid's Big, but I think I've already made up my mind that I absolutely want to be matched with him. My heart was already going out to him even before the caseworker went into the list of positive things about him, which are, among other things: he's into reading and science, is super smart (college reading level), and very insightful, and kind of awkward and nerdy (which were originally in the "negatives" column, but I've re-appropriated them).

So I'm going to take the next two days to digest everything. It's all a jumble in my head right now. But I expect to say yes on Friday and then they'll tell the kid they've got a potential Big for him, and if he's interested in me, we'll get to meet and see how it goes from there. I'm totally psyched. Super psyched. Mega psyched.

Ask Dr. Z

Maybe you've seen Daimler-Chrysler's new "Ask Dr. Z" commercials. You can thank me.

Fucking health insurance

I've changed health insurance three times in less than a year. There's no point in going into the details why since it will just give me an ulcer to relive it, but presently I have MDNY, and I was very happy with them, until a few weeks ago when I started getting letters from all the doctors I've seen in the past few months telling me that MDNY has inexplicably been refusing to reimburse them for anything. It's unbelievable. My allergy medicine is apparently "uncoverable" because I'm too old. I'm not even sure what the fuck that means -- too old for allergy medicine? Do they think I'm trying to order something off the fucking Happy Meal menu? At this point, I don't even know why I'm paying for health insurance. When I call them tomorrow, I'll ask them to explain it to me.

I fucking love M&M's so fucking much I could fucking die

Those of you who have my home address should feel free to send me personalized M&M's. Those of you who would like my home address for the purpose of mailing me personalized M&M's should email me.

Dear Delmar,

I got your postcard. The weather is not beautiful, but I still wish you were here or I were there.