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the latest
waddle: good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03 elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01 building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19 ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09 my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04
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THE LIMITS OF MY LANGUAGE ARE THE LIMITS OF MY WORLD ETC I haven't been around, have I? Where oh where could I have been? Why oh why am I even fake-updating now? I just want a Monday placeholder, and to establish some discipline in my life. This weekend I only left the house in order to binge drink. (Using the way-too-broad definition of that practice, that is.) In fact, I think I only got out of bed in order to binge drink. The binge drinking was accomplished with friends, in a social setting, but still I feel completely split-personality, Party Girl on one side, Stay-In-Bed Recluse on the other. Half Auntie Mame and half Tolstoy. Alcohol was also introduced into my system on Sunday afternoon, but that was for medicinal purposes, to keep from rending my garments and rubbing my face with ashes as I watched the Chicago Bears disintegrate into tiny gelatinous chunks on the field. Heavily medicated squirrels could have played better football. Falling-asleep thought: It is a terrible and limiting mistake to think that the things that happen to you are what makes up your life. Falling-asleep thought right after first falling-asleep thought: It is an equally terrible mistake to ever congratulate yourself for your falling-asleep insights, because they are sometimes more like fortune-cookie sayings than actual ideas. This fortune-cookie feeling reminds me of my complaints about certain types of writing. Particularly well-written, "poignant" essays or memoirs. It seems that, in these, the writer is always coming to some not-too-dangerous conclusion while gazing out the window at an ice-bound apple tree or a singing sparrow and it's just too pat, too bridges-of-madison-county, to be believed. Or they are holding the hand of their dying father and realizing what is really important about life. I am not saying that you can't write about holding the hand of your dying father and realizing what is really important about life. However, these soft-focus, touchingly well-intentioned (and sometimes even well-written) memoirs never seem to admit any complexity in the moment, and they are unabashedly sincere and meaningful (as in, pregnant with meaning) in a way I just can't get behind. Do these people not have internal self-observing hypercritical narrators or do they simply silence them in order to have their memoir-worthy moments? These writers are selling profundity and I refuse to buy, and I can't tell if that's my fault for being too cranky, theirs for being too predictable, or society's for swallowing ersatz profundity until we don't have any critical standards and we all need to be told how to feel. THE ASS OF AN INTERLOPER Last week. Every day when I come into work I sit down in my chair and start doing things and after a while I notice my chair is adjusted differently. Mostly it's been made taller, and is no longer comfortable for me. Now I have an office, with a door, but I don't ever lock the door because (a) that doesn't seem to be the culture around here, (b) if I were to walk out the door and get hit by a bus (or, less dramatically, if I were to just call in sick suddenly) other people need to get to my stuff quickly, and (c) I don't have the key, and I'm too lazy to call Building Services and fill out the several dozen forms that are no doubt required to obtain one. I checked my security logs and it doesn't look like anyone is using my computer (and they wouldn't know my password in any case), and nothing else in my office seems disturbed except the chair, so either it's a member of cleaning staff taking a break, or a coworker who appreciates the peace and quiet that an office with a door can bring, or (the creepiest and least-likely possibility) someone who likes to pretend they are me after hours. On Friday I left a note on the chair that said, "Do you use this chair at night? Why?" because I am curious about who's been using the chair, and what their probably-non-nefarious purpose is in doing so, but today the note had not been moved and the chair had not been adjusted differently. Maybe I scared the Secret Chair User away. What will really freak me out is if next my instant oatmeal disappears from my bottom drawer, because oatmeal is in a sense a type of porridge, and that combined with the chair makes this whole episode some sort of fucked-up Goldilocks allegory, with yours truly (that would be ME!) in an ursine role. DREAM THAT WON'T BE ENTERTAINING TO READ BUT WHICH MARKS THE FIRST TIME I HAVE EVER DREAMED ABOUT BASEBALL I dream that I am invited to go to an exhibition Yankees game with the guys from Car Talk. The tickets are large and green and have holograms on them and they inform me that the Yankees will be playing a game against a team called the Superhero Commandos. LINKS I am so going to change my tagline to THE NOODLES OF A PHANTOM. Postmodernism tackled on Jenny Jones. OH I GIVE UP Yeah. It sucks around here right now. Here�s the five-point plan for Smartypants Regeneration: 1. Pizza. Lots of it. Immediately. 2. Read something other than literature about gulags and forced-labor camps (what LT refers to as my "Russian misery books." 3. Answer e-mail. 4. Get back into the swing of writing every day, no matter how alluring are the whispers of my purple sheets and polarfleece blankets. 5. Get up on the downstroke. Everybody get up. ---mimi smartypants, for just pennies a day. back/forward |
