Friday, June 27, 2008

'Spection

Reading:
"V." by Thomas Pynchon (sometimes a little complicated, sometimes a little mumbled, sometimes beautiful, always earthy. my approach: hang on, don't let go)

"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" by Raymond Carver (sweet, slow, and thick like molasses. perfect for on the train or bus or between people-watching at the park)

"Cast the First Stone" by Gwendolyn DeRosa (a tangy, bittersweet, and raw reminder of what it's like to grow up, and the kind of teenager I wish I'd been but never had the balls to be)

"Of Human Bondage" by M. Somerset Maugham (it's Maugham, what can I say? Pithy, perfect, rending, complete with adolescent humiliation, spiritual browbeating, and unrequited love)

Writing:

Short stories that may someday become a semi-autobiographical collection (theme: love, as always)

Novel editing will commence as soon as I work up the nerve

Some bad poetry

And I need to go back to the story i started in January about a child and mother who don't want, yet need, each other.

Doing:
Running, a lot. I logged 24 miles last week, 10 of which was actual running.

Eating, a lot. Due to running a lot, I can't seem to stay full (great side effect of running!)

Practices for Rollercon (a roller derby convention in Vegas at which the Jeerleaders will compete in the second annual Rollercon Cheerleading Competition)

Trying to find people to do all of the amazing free cultural things in NYC with me, and failing mostly


Thinking about:

School. The new idea is to take the GRE this fall and apply for MA/PhD programs in English and become a professor (while the current, or a new, company pays for it)

Road trip. I am in desperate need of some fresh country air and some time with the people who know and love me best. Chicago, Cincinnati, Atlanta, and Pittsburgh are calling me. I think I might rent a car and visit all four places over a couple of weeks in August/September.

Loneliness. I miss companionship. I miss being around people who really "get" me. I love New York, but I haven't really found that here.

Jobs. I may start looking for a new one that will pay me better so that I can accomplish some long-term financial goals a little quicker.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Mermaid Me


The annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade on Saturday was A-MAZING! If you are unfamiliar with the Mermaid Parade, it is an annual event to celebrate the official beginning of summer, and people sign up to march dressed as mermaids, often in groups with themes. This year, our group was the Rydell High School of Fish (Grease, that is). We had Pink Salmon Ladies, we had Sea Birds, we had Bad Sandy, we had Frenchy, we had Beauty School of Fish Dropouts. And then we Grease Lighteninged and Hand Jived our way down the boardwalk and back up Surf Avenue, cameras everywhere, and people in the crowd singing along with our sound system. My favorite group was the Marie Antoinette Mermaids, complete with guillotine float. Here are a few pictures of our group:





The only decent picture of me was taken by some anonymous type A anal retentive on Flickr who reserves absolutely every single right to his or her photos and I have not been able to steal it. Yet. Though I'm in the process of hiring a detective to track this person down, break into their apartment, and steal their hard drive, just for being difficult. Seriously, what's the point of taking pictures if other people can't use them as MySpace profile pics? I'd even be willing to give this person the photo cred. But whatev, here i am, in all of my mermaid glory.

I put up some more on the MySpace, and everyone else looks great, but I mostly just look like a cross between the wicked witch of the west (at some point, green body paint really did seem like a good idea) and a slightly psycopathic weirdo with a hat made out of curlers.



HOWEVER, there were SO MANY amazing, beautiful, crazy, colorful costumes. Though it is hugely biased in favor of the naked/pastied women at the parade, if you search on flickr for "2008 Coney Island Mermaid Parade" you can get a pretty good idea of what i mean. Fantastic! God, I love this city!

Still, though. So. Fun. After the parade, we spent the next several hours drinking beer on the beach, and then the next several hours after THAT drinking beer while walking around and riding the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone. BTW, the Cyclone is the oldest, most rickety, most amazingly terrifying-because-you-are-afraid-its-going-to-collapse-under-you roller coaster in the history of the universe. If you are within 1000 miles of Coney Island and you have any love for roller coasters at all, you MUST DO IT.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Do What You Want = Be Happy

Yes, it's that time again folks. The time when I realize i haven't blogged in weeks and so must catch you all up in one giant crazy nonsensical stream-of-consciousness post that most of you won't read to the end anyway. Don't worry, it doesn't hurt my feelings. But i'm sure you weren't worried, as stopping reading a post halfway through indicates a) annoyance or b) boredom. probably both. but i'm not here for you (sorry, true). i'm here for me. and i do what i want! yay! and so should you!

here we go:

so i'm perusing myspace today, and i see the profile of this guy i used to ahem "see" who was a friend but isn't so much a friend anymore and i wondered, "Why don't we hang out more?" Before realizing that the answer is that we're too busy boinking other people. i like the word boink as a euphemism for sex. it always gives me the mental image of two people's heads accidentally knocking together in a playful accidental way. which, i guess probably could be a deeper metaphor for sex if i thought about it, but i'm not going to. onward!

This week has been CRAZY. It's so bad that i haven't had time to buy groceries (for those of you who don't know, groceries are very important to me. i don't trust restaurants not to feed me poo-slash-weird chemicals-slash AIDS. and also i'm cheap and hate paying for food.). so i've been subsisting on takeout all week, BUT the upside is that I get to wear TWO (count 'em, two!) costumes this week! Tonight, I get to be a pirate at the jeerleader super-fun band night pirate-themed fundraiser, and then on Saturday, I get to dress like a Beauty School Dropout Mermaid for the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade. Yipee! Except that my beauty school dropout costume kind of looks like a futuristic military uniform of some sort, minus alien-evaporating ray gun. oh well. i'm sure everyone will understand once i'm hand-jiving. So that should be tons of fun, tonight and Saturday.

So, i've come across two articles in the past few days about changing from being a night person to being a morning person and here's what i think about that:
1. Night people get a bad rap as being lazy, but we aren't, we just function great while the morning people are being old-ish and going to bed at 9 pm.
2. But I don't WANT to be a morning person. I LIKE nighttime.
3. Night people should be able to work their corporate jobs on schedules that fit their sleep patterns. In today's global economy, i would think this would be an asset, as the morning people in Beijing could talk to the night people in the US, then we could have 24-hour-a-day office hours, thereby increasing productivity and strengthening the world global corporate machine. erm, wait. no. nevermind. that would never work. forget i said anything.
And D. There is too much emphasis on changing basic fundamental characteristics of who we are. Instead we should embrace ourselves instead of trying to change. Learn to love your nighttime awakeness, or your small boobs, or your giant schnoz, or your gayness (another article I read was about how they might someday try to "cure" homosexuality in the womb by flooding it with hormones so kids don't become queer...so, so disturbing), or your shyness or weirdness or nerdiness or can't talk to people of the opposite sex-ness. I say EMBRACE IT! Own it! I'm a nerd who doesn't have many friends and i can barely dress myself. so what do i do? I read books naked by myself! That's what. And do you know what else? It makes me happy! And if you're happy, it doesn't matter what other people think. unless killing people or something similar makes you happy. then you have a problem.

I've been writing quite a lot (for me, baby steps) lately, and i have an idea for a book that i've been working on and i'm really excited about it. i briefly (read: for 10 minutes) started to read the novel i wrote last October, but I wasn't really into it. So i stopped. I might revisit it later, when i'm done with my new super-fabulous (fingers crossed!) book idea. I would tell you about it, but I don't want to jinx it. I think it's going to be a cross between memoir, fiction, poetry, and short stories. I hope I can pull it off. But if not, it's still good practice, right? RIGHT! Which reminds me of this artist woman I was reading about who was talking about how adult people should be more like kids in the way that they create their art, as in, kids focus on the act of creating as their main goal, whereas adults focus on how their going to make money (or, rather, on the value of the end result), and how all of us adult artists might be more happy (and productive!) if we focused on the CREATING rather than what it may be worth to other people when we're done. i know that very idea has kept me from writing in the past, and the times when i write the most and best i'm writing to WRITE, not writing for other people. Which goes back to what I said about being happy. Do what you want = be happy. Write to write = be happy. Write worrying about what other people think = be unhappy.

Fantastic.

And finally and most importantly, a big shout out to one of the great loves of my life AND my first wife (her second), Ms. Gwendolyn Glover DeRosa, who was born today not so many years ago and who is a talented, gorgeous budding writer. Happy birthday, Gwen! I love you!

That's all i have for today. Kisses, babies!