Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Last night I had a bit of a start. I was watching TV and nursing my mouth (I'd had a tooth extracted earlier in the day) when my sister came home and asked me if "I'd picked up the ham."

My buying the ham was news to me, and that's what I told her.

She said I'd said I'd do it three times, but I only remember talking about having a ham instead of turkey.

So now I have to buy a ham this morning. I fully expect there to be none available at any price. The markets don't have much, anyway, because of the strike and HoneyBaked probably has some "you had to order it" nonsense.

Not only that, but Christmas dinner is tonight! Her daughter and grandson are coming over tonight, so it looks as if Christmas will be ruined and it will all be my fault. I'm used to Christmas Dinner happening on Christmas Day. Christmas Eve, my niece's birthday, is solely devoted to opening gifts.

Less than perfect

You'd think someone who spent as much time, effort, and money on computers as I do would be better with them.

For several months I've been thinking of moving everything to a better computer and off the W98 machine that has some weird problem with not playing sounds. An eventual step was to get a new, cheap box. It was working fine until I screwed up the partitioning tables and lost everything. I've spent the last week restoring and installing stuff, trying to get all the components to work. I had a decent arrangement Thursday or Friday, but the Linux part of things wasn't seeing my printer, which is necessary.

Got (actually bought!) a new Linux distro, SuSE, installed it, but the BSD boot loader wouldn't see it so I had to reinstall it a few times. Now I'm loading everything with GRUB and, wonder of wonders, all three operating systems work!

SuSE had no trouble at all finding the printer and it works. As an added benefit, it even kludged my non-supported sound card, and sounds play when X-Windows starts and stops. But, for some reason, I can't hear CDs playing.

I'm in the laborious process of moving all my e-mail stuff over to the new box. Eudora has no export feature, which blows.

Dreams and disturbing habits

After waking up at three this morning I was able to reclaim a couple hours sleep from seven until nine. During that nap I had an interesting dream. Minardi was tearing up the house, or at least the couches, and I got a phone call from someone I didn't know offering me another dog (an Austrailian Shepherd) from someone I *did* know. It may have been one of those people I only know in dreams, though.

I turned down the offer because there were already too many animals in my life, including birds, rats, and a monkey, in addition to several dogs.

I was bothered by the interruption since I was trying, endlessly, to write down a shopping list (something I rarely do IRL). I was trying to write it on the smallest sized yellow stickies, and kept having to re-do it because my writing was bad and the list wasn't making sense. For some reason, Glenlivet was the first thing I listed, followed by some antisceptic and some software (tax acctg?). There were other things on the first list I made, but I got stuck trying to write those first three down, and made several attempts.
...the disturbing habit?...

Tribal Customs

I may have adjusted things too quickly: my mood is now logged at being over medium over half the time. That can't be right, that can't be me.

Today...foreign affairs. For awhile I had a couple online friends who lived in Croatia, and from them I got sort of an idea of Central Europe and all the crap that's going on in the Balkans (this was years before Kosovo, but lasted through that). Now, with all the mid-east nonsense, I'm reminded about the biggest problem I have with some of these distant cultures.

I have no idea what it is to be a member of a tribe, to have tribal loyalties.

I can relate to family and friends, maybe to even country, but to a lesser extent, but I can't fathom what it would be like to associate myself with a member of a tribe. Is there anything except animosity that separates tribes from each other?

Maybe I should try starting one of these tribe things.

Yikes!

Oh my.

Last night I got bored or something and read Kicker. It was worse than I expected as far as continuity goes, but some of the writing is pretty good. I think I even had a couple good sections of dialogue, and that's the part of my writing I think I do the worst. I may be getting better!

It surprised me how much I talked about underwear. I fixed some of it today...my first revision!

It's far away from what I want it to be and I'm wondering what to do. I can either try to make it more like what I envisioned or (and this is the better idea) make it more of what it is. The thing I was too stoopid to realize before I started is that if I have two POVs, it ends up being more than one person's story. To do the thing justice, I may need to bring Lotty's side of things to some sort of conclusion, too.

Oh well. It's not like I have anything else to do with my life.

Grocery Strike

This is just sad...

So I just went to the grocery store. It's been drizzling a bit, but not right now. It's a little chilly, but that's about it, maybe a touch of mist, but nothing I needed my windshield wipers for. I go to Vons, just because I don't like being told where to shop, and there's a man and a woman striking. Sort of.

They're huddled in a corner near the entrance wearing rain coats. Their signs are propped up against the wall. Instead of hassling me like they're supposed to, or even handing me their new fear-based warnings, they're fighting off the elements which aren't even threatening.

When I come out of the store, and it still hasn't rained as much as a drop, they've given up sheltering themselves from the December Storm and are busy making out.

Okay. I'm a jerk for crossing the lines, something I never did before this grocery thing. I just don't like being put in the middle or having to shop at more expensive places right now when I can afford it.

Teeth

I was pretty proud of myself a couple years ago when I followed a dentist's advice and got one of them Sonicare toothbrushes. It polished up the teeth I have, or made them feel shiny, anyway, and I had several good checkups after.

Then, a few months after I got mine the guy in the cube next to me got one, too. He had the same reaction I did, that his teeth felt brushed for the first time in his life. It may be all that buzzing, but something was at work here, and we both liked them a lot.

Then, yesterday, mine died.

I'm pretty pissed. It's one thing to spend a hundred bucks on a toothbrush, but quite another to have to do it every couple years. I can't now, of course, afford such an obvious yuppie luxury, but I think I'll write the Sonicare people and tell them of my disappointment. Yeah, it outlasted the warranty. BFD.

Today I went to Sav-On and got a Braun. Much cheaper, works about the same.

Overcast and depressed

I think the greater miracle is that more tortillas don't look like religious icons.

What to do. Part of me wants to keep on writing about the triplets, but it doesn't feel right when I do it. Kind of like their story has already been told. I hadn't expected that, not when I missed them so much on Dec 1st, but my attempts to carry it on into another chapter feels forced and totally artificial. I'm resigning myself to spending time with them again later, when I look at what I wrote and decide if I'm going to rewrite it.

I'm also considering seeing if I can make some money. That scares me, too. I used to feel totally employable, but lately I see my age really working against me. No one I've talked to wants to take me in an entry level position, they all want someone younger, someone with a burning desire to work, that whole "fire in the belly" nonsense. I don't want to wear any more suits. I 've had it with corporate culture and don't have any desire to put up with all the lies and bullshit.

I wish I could make a living doing what I want. I'm too old for this nonsense any more.

Uncertainty

Oboy! A mood adjustment!

Due to recent events, I've readjusted the Russ-o-Meter to more properly reflect current realities. Today I'm the new, improved "average."

The DVD experiment was a success. The disks are okay, but why would I want to watch anything on my PC? Besides, I think Paris Hilton would get jealous if I watched other movies.

Last night, after writing more on the new final chapter of Kicker, I wondered why I was doing that. I guess I'll see it out, but it seems where I ended before is probably a better place. This new one would just be forcing the ritual issue, which didn't play any part in what I wrote earlier.

Today I should do some chores.

Continuing

I'm about to find out just how broken something is. I got LOTR DVD over Thanksgiving and while the movie plays, neither of the bonus CDs did anything. Instead of going and buying it somewhere else, I took it back, got another copy, and nothing changes. I find it more likely that my DVD player is hosed than that I stumbled on four bad CDs.

The DVD player in the new computer I don't use refuses to work until it has sound. Oddly, this computer has no sound, and that's why I bought that one. But then I broke that one and had to reinstall everything and then November came and I didn't feel much like doing anything. Also, I'm hoping to save that one instead of freshly installing everything.

I do lots of disk swapping.

Last night I broke down and kept writing my novel. I'm adding (at least) one more chapter to the end to see if I can get a better ending. I cried at the end of the first one, but I don't know if I would again. Then again, it's easy to make me cry.

Blahs

I spent a sad evening not writing and seeing what Chester and Lotty would do next. I guess I ended up liking them a lot more than I thought.

Also, last night was the TGIO party, and I didn't go but kept thinking about it. I was up most of the night, and have no explanation for that.

Today I've been pretending that I have something to do and have finished playing with the Kicker website. Also, caught up on e-mails and other computery stuff I've neglected the last few days. Pretty much just trying to keep busy so that I don't think too much.

I recover much more slowly than I fall, but I think that's normal. I see that happen with the market, too.

I should do something worthwhile. Where can I get some of that industriousness I was talking about the other day?

It's Over

Well, the novel's done.

How sad that I won't be spending time with my characters any more, at least not for awhile. I miss them already!

The novel didn't come out at all as I expected. The big, major themes and ideas never made it onto the page and it ended up being a love story. I crammed the whole story I wanted to write into a couple of chapters, big "exposition dumps." I do nothing to *show* what's happening, I just tell the reader what's going on. That makes the climax, which I also "tell," very flat.

What can I say? I ran out of time. I had to struggle as it was to get from beginning to end in thirty days, but didn't have any trouble getting to the 50,000 words that were needed.

Now I need to find another justification for my life. The role of amateur novelist can only be milked for a month.

NaNo

"There are 51,746 words in the file."


Too bad the novel isn't done yet.

November

It's been a tough week for me, and I wish I were someone else, anyone else.

When I differ with people I feel wrong. Maybe not in a "right or wrong" sense, but more like the way I think isn't the right one. I see everyone around me handling things, doing things, relating to people and happy and content with their lives or willing to do something to fix them, and I despair. If I were a good person when adversity struck I'd pull myself up and do something about it. Instead, I get depressed and give up.

There's only so many things you can give up before there's nothing left.

Maybe I could do or be lots of things. Maybe I have talent or skills, but I don't have the necessary emotional strength to pursue anything. I quit easily, gladly, and wish I were better. It's been a rough week and everyone I've looked at and everything I've seen just reinforces how out of it I am. I don't fit in well with anyone or anything, have nothing but ego and pride.

Dream Theory

I just lost my ring. I'd been playing with it and had it loose on my finger when I tossed something across the room and it flew off. I feel naked, though not particularly vulnerable.

A cool thing about dreams is how someone is "introduced" as being my best friend. A total stranger shows up in my dreams, sometimes, but in the dream he or she is my friend or lover or whatever and I never question it. I think that's neat, and consider it meaningful, like there's one part of our brain that stores associations and another that perceives things and this is proof that they can get crossed up.

In the dream, for some reason, I had a test of determining what was wrong with the garage. I had three flares to use to find out the problem. I punctured a soda bottle and it spun on the floor, spraying the empty walls with water to protect against setting fire to the garage. The first flare burned on the floor and the second I had trouble figuring out how to get in my mouth (!) to heat up a tooth or something (!) to fix the roof. I went in the backyard and there were several ladders because construction was going on and used one of them and the final flare to see that there was only a sheet of plywood for the roof. No joists or framing of any kind. (another roof dream)

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving, or holiday, or Thursday or whatever.

Eat lots of turkey, or rice, or corn (candy and otherwise), or whatever.

Look around you in wonder, and be grateful.

Russ

Too Friggin' Slow

My site (the one you're visiting) sucks.

George Carlin points out that the word "blind" is much hotter, sexier, and meaningful than "visually impaired," which has no spirit, life, or excitement at all. PC may have some value for self-esteem, but it sure takes all the flavor and intensity out of language.

We're pretty clever now and it looks like we know everything. This identity theft stuff can be handled by buying and using shredders. When I was growing up we had an incinerator in the back yard.

Someone used my credit card a few years ago to buy some large woman's clothing. The credit card people called it fraud, which isn't nearly as dramatic.

I am really sleepy.

My host is real slow.

Another Lost Art?

The other night I was driving home and glanced in the car next to mine where there was a man smoking a pipe. I don't think I've seen more than one or two guys in the last ten years doing that. Whatever happened to pipe smoking?

Cigars are, or lately were, popular, but pipe-smoking seems to have fallen completely out of favor. That's odd since I remember pipes smelling better than cigars and the sight of some guy, pipe in his mouth and usually wearing a hat and fiddling with something, is part of my experience.

Vittorio, my ex's late brother, suggested that we smoke pipes, back when I was married and we were building model railroads for his son (and ourselves). It was Vittorio's goal to become one of those guys who could keep a pipe lit for hours, and we gave it a shot for a few months.

I think I'd like to see people smoking pipes again.

A new word!

I've been wrong all these years.

For quite some time now, as long as I can remember, I've been thinking that I'm lazy. I don't honestly know if I'm less apt to get off my ass and do something than other people, but many people seem to get more accomplished than I do. Then again, I run circles around others, so maybe I'm in the middle or at least the bottom third.

The thing is, though, that it's hard to overcome laziness (or inertia, if you're more comfortable with physics). There are even laws about it, so it appears that this tendency of my body to stay at rest is something that's already pretty well documented.

I can get up and move when I want or need to, of course. Perhaps it will be painful, but it can be done. My comfort in not doing so isn't because I'm lazy, however.

I don't need to overcome laziness, I just need to become industrious!

I could kick myself...

Oh, now I've done it.

So, last night I was out writing with a friend and hammering away on my AlphaSmart. Some of the keys have become a little sticky, but no big deal (and you can probably already see where this is headed).

To make things better I pulled off all the keys and cleaned the crap out. I wish the problem, now, is that I simply replaced them in the wrong places, but I've managed to make the Z and the G worse than any key was originally. They stick down, once pressed, instead of the earlier problem when other keys required more force than I cared to apply.

So now I get to use those keys once. Then, they stay pressed down and rapidly fill up lines and lines with the letter until I turn the damn thing off, pry the key back up, turn it on and doing a lot of backspacing.

Yes, I have a laptop, but the battery sucks.

Sunny Day

Many people have a lot to say, and they say it well.

I was thinking, during the recent fires, about how interested I am in the doings of homo sapiens and how I think they're, somehow, important. I guess I have a vested interest in their survival, but I'm not convinced that makes us all that important. The fact that we can pass on news about each other doesn't make that news important, not outside our own selfish interests.

The world will get along just fine, whether or not I get a job. That scares me.

More importantly, I need to cut my hair. Again.

I think I'll go out and try writing today. I wish my laptop lasted longer on battery, but I wish for a lot of things.

Weather!

Woo Hoo!

Thunder rippling across the southland! Big thunder, impressive thunder, and big, fat raindrops! We don't get many summer thundershowers in LA, and even fewer of them in November, so I'm jazzed. This is weather that's doing something!

I think it's a good day be inside and would only be better if I were making a big pot o' chili.

Dogs up and down the street are howling at the rain and thunder but Minardi is behaving himself.

I've come to terms with never kissing anyone for the rest of my life and the novel is continuing. Things are not going at all badly. The roof is holding out the water and the electricity is still on.

Yikes!

It's a beautiful day and I have a lot of writing to do.

Minardi is shedding all over the place and putting my new dust buster through its paces. He's not sleeping on my bed anymore so that's keeping that room cleaner, but he still hounds me all the times for treats. I've never seen such a one-track mind. He pays me attention when I have, or will get, food for him, but has determined that I'm good for little else. Whatever happened to that "I wish I was the person my dog thinks I am" stuff?

I've remembered that I've been looking for Jim Carroll's "People Who Died" song for about twenty years now. Checked a couple places but no luck :( I'll probably forget I'm looking about it again before I find it.

It amazes me that I can do so much writing without telling a story. I think the only thing I'm doing now is perparing something for the editing phase. Then again, if no interesting story develops, I won't even want to edit it. I'm reminded of writing rule #1: If it doesn't interest the author, it won't interest the reader.



...don't remember

There was something I was planning on talking about here.

I don't think that was it, though.

Brooding

Not doing so well on the writing today, but did catch up on other things. Got half my total done and hope to do the other half when I get done here.

Got another rejection and this one pissed me off. I think it's from the Univ of Georgia and I should know better than to expect anything from the South. I guess they have a different take on "experimental" than I do since they cited "inappropriate elements" as one of the reasons for turning it down. I think I handled the situation quite well, very matter-of-factly and not at all lurid. Nobody else has said that so it shouldn't be bothering me as much as it is.

I think that leaves just one more place to turn it down before it goes out to another six.

I'm afraid to follow up on my novel, but I'll do that, too, over the weekend.

I'm throwing away all my Dixie cups.

Frabjulosity

I wish I had a job. Or, at least, money. Iggy Pop is playing this weekend in Long Beach and I don't have the money for a ticket. No one is likely to ask me out, either. I never saw him. I wonder if you still gob him.

Mowed the lawn today with the electric mower. I have no idea if that's better, worse, or neutral as far as the environment goes, but it's quieter. The trouble is, I spend as much time worrying about and moving the cord as I do actually mowing.

I got to be laptop expert just now. The one we lent out, the girl says, doesn't work. After going through all the stuff with no success she called back and let me know "it works now." Turns out the outlet she was using didn't work. She was calling from the train on her way to San Diego for the weekend. I lurve trains, but not so much the new ones.

The picketeers at the markets are much pushier than they used to be. I don't feel as sorry for them as I usually do for people having contract problems.

Postponing

I'm eager to begin working on my novel, but also afraid that I'll end up empty of ideas.

This happens to me a lot, with many things. The perfect ideal I have in my mind rarely is the same thing I get once I do something about it. Shoes don't shine as well as I think they should, dinners don't come out as planned, construction projects fail to be square and true, things like that.

Before I do my writing (or whatever), I haven't failed. After I start something, I can screw it up. One of the ways I handle this tendency -- and it's not a good one -- is to avoid starting. As long as I haven't tried to make my dreams real, they're still glorious and perfect.

I guess it's a fear of failure thing.

Anyway, so instead of writing to see what emerges, I put it off, keeping it in that "possibly wonderful" state as long as I can.

Apathy

For most of the morning my motto would have been "why bother." Or, maybe, "who cares" but that sounds too confrontational (cuz whenever I say that somebody answers).

Didn't want to do any writing, anything. I prefer a painful life to an apathetic one.

But I wrote some, anyway. I'm behind all the jackrabbits, but I have no jealousy. There are two people already finished, and many more who are writing ten thousand words a day. If you're that prolific, I don't think NaNo is the thing for you. It still reminds me of the Seinfeld when Kramer beat up his Karate class. No challenge. Why are they doing this if not to show off?

Besides, I'm convinced their novels must suck major ass. Probably boring as hell, too.

Me? I'm going for quality. Not one mention of ninjas (yet).

Sleeping Patterns

What have I done now?

Saturday I think I overate or something. I had a troubled tummy all night, at one point even getting out of bed to sip on some broth and do a bit of reading (Elvis Lives!). After waking up about every forty-five minutes, I finally managed to get to sleep around four or so.

Then, Sunday, I didn't get out of bed until 10:30. Up for a bit and ended up napping on and off until about six in the evening. All day long I was alternately hot and cold.

Last night was pretty much the same thing. Went to bed about 10:30 and woke up about every hour until now (4:30). I think I've gotten enough sleep, so I'm fixing some coffee today and hope that I'll be back to normal tonight.

A good thing about being up early is that I can catch the people who try to rip the things out of the recycle bin in front of the house. I don't know why that bothers me so much.

November

Last night it rained and I wore an orange sweater. I take it that summer is over, and although the skies were crisp and blue today I nearly froze wearing my shorts. It didn't help that I was in the shade.

Actually, the "freezing" is an exagerration. I was cold and had goose pimples, though. If I were a girl I would have been pretty popular, what with my stiff nipples and all, but since I'm not everyone pretty much just ignored me.

I have a ton of candy left over from Halloween. When the rain came, and it showed up right after the sun set, all the kids in the street got hauled back into the cars that brought them to our neighborhood and hustled back to wherever it is they come from. Each year I see more and more teenagers who can't even be bothered with dressing up, which saddens me a little. I don't say anything, or even glare at them, but the holiday is eroding into "free candy day." One kid, dressed in dark pants with a leather jacket, at least joked about being "Men in Black," which made me laugh. At least he displayed some shame.

Aging

If you're me you may notice that after sitting for a couple hours your knee will stop working. In fact, when you stand up it's so painful that you can't stand on it, can't bend it, and tears come to your eyes if you try to do any of those things.

Even if it's a weather thing, it's still embarrassing. I intensely dislike being old.

Parties and Chicken

...I got some flack about yesterday's entry...

Okay, I admit that there's tons of drinking going on that I don't see. How else to explain the Girls Gone Wild videos? Still, it isn't the same thing and my take on what I've seen in the past few years only serves to reinforce my idea. Lots of craziness *does* go on, but the huge majority of it is of the structured type and not the spontaneous celebration of life that I miss.

Getting plastered during Spring Break or on Jello Shot Thursday just isn't the same. That's still doing what you're led to do and still puts you in the audience.

And, no, the idea is not to go through life hammered. Losing control of yourself that way is the symptom, not the cause, and I still maintain that kids nowadays are way too structured. Maybe it results from having to wear helmets when they bicycled, maybe not.



Non-Sonic Youth

I wonder what's coming next and figure it's at least twenty years out...

Went out to a club the other night and it's true: things aren't the way they used to be. I've been noticing it more and more lately, the difference between what I remember it being like when I was twenty and what I see now. Maybe the wildness is restricted to raves (I've never been), but nothing I've been to in the last few years approaches the clubbing of my youth.

Nobody is getting drunk any more, and everyone is passively standing around listening to kick-ass music with an "entertain me" attitude. Are people now less capable of being part of what's going on around them and content with phoning and messaging each other about what they see? When did life become a spectator sport?

If going out and dancing and getting crazy is off the table, if traditional entertainment *has* become something only to be enjoyed from the outside, then something new will have to come around. I hope to hell that something will emerge that can get people back into living instead of watching. The clubs of the seventies and eighties may well have run their course and a new form of entertainment is needed. I just hope it isn't a computer-driven electrodes in the brain virtual reality thing since I think that will drive us further from each other.

While I can't do it myself any more, I long to see someone stand up and fall across the floor into a wall.

Sunny Morning

I made a mistake yesterday when I was talking about being a misanthrope.

I think what I meant was lycanthrope. Pretty common error.

When I was out and about yesterday watching people buy coffee and walk around I had to admit that I didn't hate anyone, no one at all. I don't think I honestly hate anyone (except for myself at times), but that's probably a character flaw more than a virtue. I mean, lots of people do things that annoy me, and there are plenty of assholes out there, but I don't hate them for it. Maybe I just don't know what "hate" is.

Also, it's hard for me to be mad at people who do the same things I do (or have done). It would be easier get pissed off at that guy who cut me off if I hadn't ever done that to someone.

Still, that's not to say I don't still get short with people who strike me the wrong way. I think I have less tolerance for ego than I do for anything else. That and honesty. I have trouble taking seriously those who believe their own bullshit and who can't see how lame we all are and laugh at themselves.

Loathing

Oh my.

My self-loathing may be getting out of control, and I may be in danger of becoming a misanthrope.

Maybe it's just age, and I'm just turning into a crotchety old fool. Or maybe a lifetime of sarcastic cynicism is catching up with me. Yes, I'm genuinely interested in people and have little or no desire to move to North Dakota and begin writing my manifesto, but some of my earlier patience is eroding. I'm increasingly dismayed by how serious so many people are about things that I don't think matter.

Am I missing something? Am I wrong?

Post NaNo warmup party

Enthusiasm. That's what I lack: enthusiasm and confidence.

No, I don't feel like going through all the pop-psych stuff to gain confidence. A succession of baby steps won't get me where I want to be, which is an entirely different, better-functioning personality, mostly because I won't let it.

No longer despairing, which is good, but still extremely cynical and, perhaps, smug. It's easy to have everything work out the way you expect when you refuse to see any other outcome. The blinders of self-determination are strong, and I would guess, there for a purpose.

I think the thing that bugs me the most is that I totally believe in the whole "the world is what you make it" idea. Since we live in the world we want, how fucked up am I to want this?

I need a subject?

I've spared writing for the last week. When you can't say something good about someone, I was taught, it's best to remain silent. Since the subject of this blog is me, I've been quiet.

I'd like to be optimistic, to think another door will be opening, that all of this is a great opportunity for me and that something more marvelous than I can imagine will soon pop up. I think that's a pile of shit. I am, and have been, struggling for the last month trying to ride a life without goals. I don't want to write anything negative or maudlin, but I have no hopes at the moment and it's been a lot going through the motions, but without really going through any motions.

I've blown off friends, meetings, events and things with depressing regularity this last week, and what concerns me is the ease with which I've done it. I should feel worse about it, if not for their sake than for mine. I'm in no mood to receive encouragement, either.

"A shell of his former self," one could say. I've lost, I feel, most of what's accompanied me this far in life, and I have little incentive to even try to get it back. A lot of things just don't matter, not now.

Nearly the weekend

What a sad and sorry excuse for a blog this is.

Last night I had a pretty good idea for my novel, but didn't write it down and today it's lost. Maybe it's stuck somewhere in the back of my mind, where all the good ideas happen, and once I begin writing the damn thing it will come out. I think it had something to do with an atagonist, although where I would put one and what he or she would do is a mystery to me.

Dragging myself through household chores and stil relying on miracles to save my sorry ass. I missed a reading with Tim O'Brien (didn't find out about it until too late), symptomatic of my life. Need to check my e-mail, but am afraid of having to write back.

Sunny Day

Last night a good ballgame, but the result sucked. I don't like the Marlins, the Cubs are the ones I'm rooting for, and they began the game with two triples and four runs. I can't remember ever seeing a game with two legitimate triples in one inning.

All for nought, though, since the Marlins won.

Bastards.

Had trouble falling and staying asleep. I'm alive and awake on no more than five or six hours sleep. Coffee tastes like crap, and I have a headache. It's a nice day outside, though.

Today I'm supposed to play with my car and the laundry as well as finish up a chapter or two of TRE. I'm okay with what I have to do, but not in the mood to do anything. Why does that sound so familiar?. I keep thinking about fixing this blog thing, too, and may end up messing around with the scripts and ruining the whole thing. I can hardly wait.

Eh?

Only two or three days in and already I've missed a day. This does not bode well for the future...

Yesterday was one I could do without. I accomplished nothing, which is one thing, but didn't want to, which is entirely different. I'm getting upset at myself and mad at the world. Everywhere I look there are people being productive, people who matter and who are doing things, and I'm just coasting along. True, most of what they are doing doesn't matter, but maybe it matters to them.

I wish I could just give up on corporate America, but it pays well and is about the only thing I feel qualified to do. I really wish I'd spent more of my youth learning something more meaningful than how to shove paper around.

I'm rested today, which may account for my better mood, and I'm happy that both the Cubs and Bosox have won. I can't see the Green Monster without remembering Dave and Callie.

Another Work Week

A lot more baseball yesterday.

It's one thing to have added Division Championships into the game merely to increase TV viewers and to get added revenue, but it's quite another for the broadcasters to be wrestling with trying to bring that travesty in line with the teams' history. I mean, really. There's no justification for celebrating the Cubs' first "post-season series victory" in ninety-five years when they've won the pennant several times since then, but failed to win the World Series of Baseball.

And people wonder why I cringe at marketing.

Good grief. Create a new category, a new prize, to hype someone who wins it.

So that has me disturbed.

Feeling headachy.

Lazy Day

Spent entirely too much time today watching baseball but didn't want to miss anything potentially historic.

Yes, the blog now has a title thanks to a blog-naming site, and I think it fits well into whatever it is I plan to do with this.

I'm in that disliked attitude of feeling old, feeling spent. The things I'm seeing or thinking serve more as remembrances than as anything new, and with the memories come regrets. I hate getting stuck in this rut. I like it much more when I don't greet everything with the flavor of my past.

Oh, my. Aren't I maudlin?

Weekend

There were no elves, so it looks as if I'm gonna have to work on the emoticons myself, as well as screwing around with the scripts to make this look more like me and less like an example of a blog.

Slept poorly, worried or thinking about my book, my finances, my future, my past.

Lots of things to tackle today. I wish the coffee was done brewing.

Still tweaking

Okay.

I gotta work on the smileys.

I gotta change the name and colors and stuff.

I gotta get some reading done before sleeping.

Tomorrow is another day -- somebody in that famous book about the South

This is a first

I have now joined the 21st Century and tens of people can see what I'm doing whenever I can be bothered with typing it down.

So far, I'm not doing much.