Maxwell’s Neighborhood

As most of you know, I've been keeping a blog on iwilldare.com for over nine years. It's a lot of content -- 7,193 posts (and that's not included the hundreds of posts I deleted, mostly about sandwiches and what a fuckwit my boss Shakey McDougal was) and 18,198 comments.

In the last year I've noticed a new trend, e-mails from people begging me to delete some asinine comment they made back in 2002. It seems all those annoying teenagers who had a lot to say about Donnie Darko and being bored in study hall have discovered the Internet has a long memory. Now, when they Google themselves (or their e-mail addresses) they're embarrassed to discover that something they said on a website five years ago is the #1 result.

Ha!

I'm of two minds when it comes to deleting the comments. Part of me thinks I should just delete them and be done with it. It doesn't take a lot of time, and most of the time the comment is not a great loss to the Internet. Of course, the other part of me is all, "Suck it up, loser. I refuse to edit my website because you were an obnoxious 15-year-old, let this be a lesson to you!"

What would you do?

On Friday, M-----l posted his whimsical Christmas gift wishlist in red in and book form. I admire a man with a good marketing campaign. For as long as I can remember I have executed extravagant birthday marketing campaigns which were often quite successful. In fact, on my 30th birthday I managed to weasel 30 bouquets of flowers from friends and family. It was a bounty of epic proportions.

This picture shows just a fraction of the flowers I received. In fact, I got so many vases that the following year when we threw my parents a 30th Anniversary party I outfitted every table with a vase (and flowers I bought at the farmer's market).

Flowers6602

So yeah, gift marketing for greedy pigs. I'm all for it! In honor of that spirit I present you with my wishlist for Christmas 09.

Joan Jett Barbie.
I loved Barbies as a kid. I loved Joan Jett as an adult. It's two great tastes that taste great together.

2010_joanjett

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Falling Water Legos
I'm a big fan of the Lego, and still get down on the floor to make houses and trucks with The Tibbles. Hell, I've even played with the Legos when none of the kids are around. Also I know about nothing about architecture, but I watched a PBS documentary (or three, it was architecture day) on Frank Lloyd Wright and he was a fascinating sort of scoundrel. So yeah, this is just plain awesome.

Falling water legos

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Pencil Sharpener
The heart wants what it wants. This is one of those things that I never think of buying when I'm at the store, but if anyone asks me what I want, I say a pencil sharpener. For a long time I was pretty set on the electric pencil sharpener, but now I think I might not mind an old-fashioned mounted one either. My mom offered me the old pencil sharpener from the bowling alley, which is cute. But man, that pencil sharpener sucked ass when the bowling alley was still going. I hated that thing.

Pencilsharpener

The amount of work in graduate school is shocking. I fancied myself as a seasoned academician and the shear volume of reading and writing has taken me by surprise. My blogging and extracurricular reading life ground to a halt. My classes end in early December and I do not have to return until February, so I’ll have plenty of time to catch up.

I also learned about the Upaya Institute, a place in New Mexico that teaches caregivers and healers how to deal with death and dying. I have a belief that many people suffer from a fear of death, which then causes great suffering in their lives. I feel that some of my life’s work will be helping people work through their fear of death.

I have an assignment for a foundations course that is asking me to come up with ten ways that I am going to integrate the course themes into my practice.

• I had a client put me on hold until after the holidays. It bummed me out. I think being "put on hold" might be a nice way of saying, don't call us, we'll call you.
• I watched some Dawson's Creek (I bought the complete series on DVD and it was the best $81 I ever spent) and felt better.
• The next day I had two new short term projects fall into my lap. That made the holding feel a little less scary.
• On Tuesday, I wen to an actual meeting in an actual office. It was quiet, like a morgue and it reminded me how much I don't want to ever work in a cube farm again. Cubicles feast on human souls. It's true.
• In class this week, we workshopped my crappy story The Boss. The story has the potential to be uncrappy, but it's not there yet. Matters were not helped when I got sick in the middle of rewriting it a couple weeks ago, so it's really not even a second draft yet. It's bad. Thirteen pages of situation and no story. I tweeted that last sentence, and one of my classmates brought up the fact that she read the tweet not once, not twice, not thrice, but FOUR times during the workshop. Nobody but me and my friend Steve knew what she was talking about, and I wanted to punch her for bringing it up. I was embarrassed and the class was puzzled. On Friday one of my classmates e-mailed me and said it was really weird and kind of stalkerish of that woman. I think she's right.
• I did some other stuff, but most of it has been obliterated by this book I'm reading. A book that is so bad it's making me angry.
• Oh, I also got mad at music bloggers and wrote a rant about music blogs, and how they kind of suck because they have no editorial eye and are too busy trying to find the next big thing rather than telling their audience what is worthy of their time and what is not.
• I've been kind of ranty this week.
  
• You're welcome for sparing you most of that.
  

I've watched this video about 11 times today. I don't know what exactly it is about it, but every single time I watch it I smile head off. So fun.

As you may remember I am sick. I have a cold. At least I'm about 99% sure that it's nothing more than your garden-variety, run of the mill common cold -- you know cough, low-lying malaise, and all the good mucus that comes with the cold. I don't have a fever or sore throat or anything else like that.

What I have is a cough. A pretty steady, annoying cough. My cough is legendary. It frightens small children and woodland creatures. When I cough it comes from my pelvis and sounds like I'm trying to expel the barking dogs of hell from my lungs. It is loud and deep and sounds painful. Hell, it is painful.

But it's just a cold, even if it sounds like death.

So on Wednesday night, I'm sitting in class coughing. Once my teacher arrived he made a crack about how he was so happy to see a few of us (four of us were in class already yapping) because so many people had called in sick. I told him, between gasps, that I was pondering going home too. "No," he said, bugging his eyes. "You have to say or they're be nobody here to talk."

I stayed.

About two minutes into class, one of my classmates pulls on a mask. "That's because of you," The Comedian who makes me want to punch people in the throat said.
"I just really can't get sick," Mask said. "I mean, really can't. It would be catastrophic."

I was stunned. I didn't know what to do besides sit there awkwardly and blush. Part of me thought I should leave. I don't want to cause a catastrophe. Part of me thought she should leave. If you're that worried about getting sick what are you doing mixing with the general, unclean public? Besides, I'm pretty sure that I picked up this cold from The Loft since everyone else I know is healthy.

What would you have done? 

I've manage to catch some sort of plague-like infection and it's totally put a damper on my weekend. What I had intended to be a weekend filled with working on short story has turned into nothing but whining and coughing and sleeping and sobbing.

In general, I'm kind of a crybaby. Even on my very best days. When I get sick, I'm leveled. I sobbed through a "Roseanne" marathon this morning, and because that wasn't quite enough I decided to watch the original "V" I TIVO'd last weekend, and cried through a lot of that too. "The Amazing Race" too.

I didn't cry during "The Maltese Falcon" though, perhaps that's progress.

Read a fucking book, you're probably thinking. I thought that too, but the pressure and burning in my eyes made reading nearly impossible. In fact, I tried and gave up because it just wasn't working for me. Some people are really good at working through the sickness. I'm not one of those people. My brain doesn't function well when I have a cold. It just feels slower and filled with mud. I try to think, but fail miserable. I don't get jokes and barely understand what people are saying to me. It's not good. Really, all I'm capable of is laying around being generally unhappy and whining about how much being sick sucks.

It does suck. I'm going to bed.

I have to leave soon to bring my ailing Ruby to Ben's to see if he can't figure out what is wrong with her. But before I go, I had to wish a heartfelt congratulations to Dabysan and CarrieNation, who are getting married today. 

I think I only read three books in all of October. That's damn near shameful. I will, however, blame my writing class on this. Where usually we read a majority of 12-18ish page short stories, this time around we're being bombarded by 6,000 word 28-page novel beginnings. It's been hell. Not just the sheer amount of words to read, but only a few of the novel chapters have been worth my time. In fact, one novel start was so offensive that the class was actually angry. Of course the complete lack of punctuation didn't help matters. It just goes to show you, domestic violence is not an issue you can make funny, right up there with rape, child molestation, and genocide. None of these things are funny. Let it be known.

On with the show.

BOOK ACQUIRED
Swimming Inside the Sun by David Zweig
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
Totally Killer by Greg Olear
Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving

BOOKS READ
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon: This novel about identity, identity theft, the Internet, brotherhood, and more is probably going to make my top 10 best books of 2009 -- will blow your mind.

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang: Even with an ending that comes off as a little convenient and coincidental, this graphic novel about growing up Chinese in America weaves together three different stories in a way that is sweet and funny.

Andromeda Klein by Frank Portman: A slightly disappointing novel by the author of the the fan-fucking-tastic King Dork is about a skinny weird girl obsessed with the occult and has a tendency to be a bit boring under the weight of all the magic research.

CURRENTLY READING
Every Boat Turns South by J.P. White
The Complete Essex County by Jeff Lemiere (which I actually finished today, but now it's November)
Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving

Here is my new favorite song: