Starting over! Why not? It’s my party and I can cry if I want to.
Do you know that I have been writing this blog for ten years? Who even was I when I began? I didn’t really know what a blog was or what the internet was for. I hadn’t even met my old man. My snoopy’s parents probably weren’t even born yet!! I had not yet seen Inglourious Basterds. I had never read a DFW book–I don’t think I had ever even heard of him. September 11 had just happened and I was super upset about the war in Afghanistan. Ha ha! Oh youth.
Have any of you been reading this shit for that long? What a journey we have been on together. A very long, boring journey composed only of words.
I have become friends with many of you people IRL. Some of you have been commenting for ages and I don’t know anything about you but feel like I know you IRL. One of you mailed me a bicycle one time in exchange for a sack of CDs. I have heard amazing tales and had amazing wisdom bestowed upon me. I have gotten many annoying comments from dudes who don’t like something I’ve said about Jack Kerouac.
I get very stressed out about people in my straight life finding this blog and connecting it with my real name and then not hiring me for a job because I use the F word or something. I try to be careful about talking about my field, not using real names, etc., but after awhile when I see there are over 1,000 posts and I don’t remember what most of them are even about, I get freaked. Perhaps I have said something about Beethoven or the nation of Israel that someone on a search committee will not like. I mean, I know it is an elaborate thing to fear but this is a new dawn and it could totally happen. May have already happened???
So anyway.
So anyway! The advice business is going quite well. I’d like to invite everyone to feel free to comment over there. Advice is often very well-aided by crowd sourcing. Also you should ask Andrew some questions! He has very good straightforward advice that you can actually follow, whereas I feel like mine is all like “write in your journal! Read Frankenstein!”
The other business that is booming is the business of me not getting any work done and just sitting around all day feeling bad about myself! Also the business of being 320th in line for the Wolf Hall sequel at the library. And the business of eating so much asparagus. Also the kale business is booming–all my kale sprouted like gangbusters. It’s Kale City, copyright David Rees, up in here!
Speaking of kale, here is a great way to eat it:
– shred some kale
– put it in a bowl
– mince a bunch of garlic and put it in the bowl too
– squeeze like half a lemon in the bowl
– dash of olive oil
– put some salt in there
– stir it up!
total health blast. I will call that salad Kale Health Blast City. Garlic and vitamin C for the immune system; the lemon also apparently helps you digest the kale; the kale has iron and calcium up the wazzoo; and the salt probably isn’t good for you but who cares.
My husband is back to hanging the laundry on the line outside like an old-timey peasant hausfrau. They dry in like 2 seconds and they smell delightful. The other day we went to see a 35mm print of Jaws on the big screen and it was incredible. I was with a bunch of people who had never really seen it (!!) and they were all gratifyingly amazed by the excellent craftsmanship and performances. The big screen experience was great because you could finally see what some of the traditional fuss is about, w/r/t for example Spielberg’s supposedly amazing use of foreground/background tension. Oh yeah, I get it now!!
Our yard is Wasp City. Where do all the wasps come from? I want them to all die but I’m too scared to go on a killing rampage. I suspect they are living in the abandoned trailer in our yard.
Jaws is a great unifier. Just today a friend of mine told me about some conceptual art video he made back in the day which was a TV screen playing Jaws, with a video camera focused on only 1/4 of the screen at a time, and then that was what was blown up on the wall for passerbys to gaze upon. Apparently it went over really well.
Did you really delete all your archives? I’m crushed. I was reading them from the beginning and only made it up to 2010. I guess I’ll never find out about how the worm thing turned out, or when you finished your dissertation or how you finally got out of Iowa, rats! It seems like such a waste if you only did it to please a bunch of stuffy academics who don’t deserve to work with you anyway if that sort of thing pisses them off.
wasps upset me…. I am a window washer now, and am confronted by small wasp nests several times a day. There are always a couple huge bumble bees flying around bumping into them as they try to build their nests, trying to make their lives difficult. They can’t actually kill them though… they only have that one chance to sting somebody. When the wasps get all settled, and have babies of their own.. they will go to the local bee hive and gobble up all the bumble babies and feed them to their own young. Can’t be bothered to make the nutrients on their own. I feel like a bumble champion squishing the wasp nests (as generally requested by homeowners)… but occasionally feel a great deal of sympathy for them too. They are so gentle and sweet while building the nest… they politely ignore the bumble bee as it tries desperately to keep it from moving in. I seem to remember reading that its actually some chemical trigger in their body that suddenly makes them brutally murder and kidnap a whole pile of bumble babies… i don’t think they have any idea that they are even capable of that…
i think im drunk
10 years!!! Oh my god it really has been a long time and we are aging, all of us, slowly but surely turning to creaking bones and dust. And I have not even been to Portland yet! Will it come to pass in my lifetime?? If it does, will you help me locate a burrito??
Also I commented my ADVICE UPDATE, but got a horrifying sort of web-language looking message when I hit ‘submit’ and it may be GONE, GONE. I really hope it isn’t because it was mega-cathartic and I don’t know if I have it in me to write it again, because I’m lazy. But if it is truly gone, suffice it know your advice was EXCELLENT, I followed all of it TO THE LETTER with extremely satisfactory results. I suggest everything listen to you and do exactly what you tell them in their own lives, including making jokes about traumas and reading about holocaust rape to feel better about their own petty miseries. YOU SIR ARE A MAGICIAN.
I have many things to say, but I also get horrible commenting errors! Let’s see if this one works. 1. Google homemade wasp traps. Don’t smash them because they will release a pheromone to attract other wasps! 2. I have never seen Jaws!! ! CAN YOU STILL LOVE ME?? (PS: if Steve or whoever wants to know what the errors are, I can probably recreate them and oblige via email.)
Testing comments