These are the days my friends, and these are the days my friends,
I write to you from six in the morning. I sleep on the couch for a week out of every month due to my night sweats, and it is odd to roll out of my dank sleeping bag and step directly into my coffee zone, but I’m not complaining (I complain ceaselessly).

Guess what? Readers of this Lament are hereby granted an EXCLUSIVE (or ‘sclusie, as Scott Aukerman calls them), not yet made public to the general readers of my blog. This ‘sclusie is as follows: …

PUBLISHER INTERRUPTION

Did you know that Zuckerberg’s Lament is also a monthly email? Well, it is. And normally we’ll send you just the intro to each of our wonderful articles and have you read the article on the web, but this month, in light of our POWERFUL EXCLUSIVE, we’re actually publishing the entire Letter From The Editor only in the email.

It’s April 4th right now and we’ll be sending out the email on April 5th, so…

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Hello my dear, dear friends,

What a wild ride it has been indeed, lo this long and dreary month of February. It was cold again, then nice again, then we had an ice storm, then the wind blew so hard I truly thought we would die. The Night Of The Dread Winds I slept nary one wink, laying instead abed thinking with an odd sense of detachment about how the enormous tree in our yard was definitely going to fall on the house at any moment. I found out in the morning that the old man had been laying awake thinking the exact same thing. It was eerie to realize in retrospect that we’d both been awake thinking of our impending brutal deaths but we each thought the other was slumbering peacefully.

I will tell you that I have had some job interviews, without giving too many details as nothing is decided yet and I don’t want to fuck anything up or jinx anything. Job interview are horrible. I know I am prone to exaggeration but in this instance every academic agrees with me. My mentor describes her own long-ago job interview period as “the worst time in [her] life, next to when [her] son got cancer.” It’s bad news. It’s so thrilling to get interviews but it makes you so incredibly anxious. So much rides on your performance, for one thing, and there are so many variables you can’t predict. Furthermore, they are just intense experiences. You spend two full days on campus going to meetings, teaching students you’ve never met before, getting interviewed by the Dean of the entire college, etc., all while wearing clothes in which you feel profoundly awkward. So in spite of how amazing it all is and how lucky I know I am, I also essentially have been sick to my stomach, to varying degrees of intensity, for 2 solid months. There is never a moment when thoughts of the jobs are completely out of my brain, and sometimes they consume me with morbid dread. First there is the phone call inviting you to a campus visit. This is followed by approximately 60 seconds of total elation and shrieking. Then the realization of what-all you are going to have to do to prepare for the interview hits you and your gut flips over. You start imagining all the wildest questions they could possibly ask you. What if they ask me to describe a grad seminar on Sibelius? What if they suddenly start speaking to me in French? They send you the details—how long your job talk should be, what your sample class will be on—and you just dive in, prepping with intensity. Writing a 30 minute talk about your research; planning a lecture on, respectively, Debussy, the Protestant Reformation, and Wagner. Getting your suit drycleaned. Fretting about whether the pants are supposed to fit this way or should you get them tailored again. Researching the department, figuring out where everyone got their PhD and trying to read as much of their scholarship as you can. Memorizing their course catalogue so you can talk knowledgeably when they ask you, “so where would you fit into our curriculum” or “tell us about three classes you could teach here.” Wondering if you should use a PowerPoint or just wing it. Having no idea what the students are like—are you pitching your Wagner class embarrassingly low or alienatingly high? Meanwhile you are also teaching full time, grading, prepping your own normal lectures, etc. You have to re-organize all your syllabuses so that they can incorporate the SIX missed classes you now have to account for. You worry that your students find you aloof and think you aren’t committed to them. Then the interview itself. You fly across the country and take a cab to a hotel room where you put Best Show Gems on your iPhone speaker and iron your suit and try to calm down enough to sleep, which is impossible because you are so wound up about the terrible day(s) to come. At one of my interviews I took a melatonin and fell asleep at 10:00, then woke up thinking it was morning and time to shower and then saw that it was midnight, and then watched Steve Brule episodes in bed until 5:00.

So ANYWAY to make it to the final round at three good jobs is pretty epic, if I do say so. One of the jobs was SERIOUSLY epic, and I made it to the final two, and then they gave it to the other guy. I don’t have the kind of personality where I hate the person who beats me for a job or whatever, so I wish him well and good day to you sir. I am proud to have made it to the final round at such a dream job. I also comfort myself with the fact that I didn’t want to live in that city very much (sour grapes; it would have been amazing).

All is well; life is good; my career continues to improve, knock on wood. I am less of a dipshit than 2 years ago and 2 years from now I hope to be less of a dipshit still. My life goal.

More details forthcoming soon.

In other news, there is not much other news. I need to rejoin the gym and go to the doctor.

I hope you enjoy this month’s Lament. We are getting some great stuff submitted here at the office and we look forward to bringing you many more delightful tales, reviews, recipes, personal ads, and maybe like poems or music downloads or something, as the years advance.

Franklin was extremely ill recently and he is now recovered but I still have anxiety nightmares that he is sick again. I read The Marriage Plot and hated its guts. We are watching True Detective and it is a very well-made show. How many shows about naked raped dead women killed by serial killers can American pop culture support? So far the answer is “a countless number.” I am not made of stone, and freely admit to enjoying this genre as much as the next sicko pervert.

Goodbye to you dear friends. I hope you are excited that it is March. Soon the flowers will be bustin’ out every which way and we will reveal our lily-white thighs to the gawping of public culture!

Hello friends,

DISCLAIMER: I wrote this a few month ago but is it not interesting that now the REST of the country has entered and left the POLAR VORTEX? Now you may all know how it feels to sand your door until it gets weird and won’t close.

First of all, I would like to point out that it is so cold in Portland right now that no one can believe it and it was so cold our house actually changed shape and now the door to our mudroom won’t close and Gary had to sand it down. And I am sitting in a coffee shop wearing my coat, hat, and scarf and my fingers are so cold I am typing awkwardly. It is 17 degrees, which I know is not very cold for Iowa or the Arctic, but is extremely goddamn cold for Portland, and everything is relative. In conclusion life is crazy.

Speaking of life being crazy, I thought I’d spend some time this Lament pondering how awesome it is that Anne Rice linked to my blog from her Facebook page, and also commented on my entry about her Charles Burney book. Like all weird female nerds, I went through a HUGE Rice phase in, I would say, like eighth grade maybe. Interview with a Vampire, all the other sexy vampire books, Queen of the Damned, the Mummy, I read them all and found them thrilling. Rice, for so many women I know, was part of that cadre of secret novelists we stumbled across in various epic library browsing sessions, who began showing us a window into Actual Grownup Sex. As cartoonish as some of this stuff was, it was still EXPLICIT in a way that I think I, and a lot of women I’ve talked to about this, really hungered for at a certain age. Rice, the sequels to Clan of the Cave Bear, Forever by Judy Blume…Crucially, these books actually told you WHAT WAS GOING ON, PRECISELY, with body parts and arousal and like the actual mechanics of the acts. PLUS they involved female desire—the C of the CB books are all narrated by a woman, as is Forever—which in retrospect is obviously a huge part of why they were so compelling. I guess nowadays kids just watch internet porn, which is utterly horrifying to me but what are you gonna do.

Anyway, so I will always carry a torch for Anne Rice, big time. Plus she has that kind of ooky gothic imagination that I’m obviously really drawn to. As a kid, those vampire books really obsessed me. They maybe were my first real entry into thinking seriously about the kind of supernatural themes and issues that continue to interest me and that I literally am like writing a book about right now. Well, them plus Stephen King, who I was reading at a much earlier age. I remember just sitting and pondering immortality—the way the dudes in those books go through phases of being tormented by not being able to die was intensely interesting to me. Remember when Lestat like flies up to the sun trying to burn himself up but all he gets is a rad suntan??

ANYWAY. So to go to Anne Rice’s facebook page and see her link to my blog, and say she is delighted by my delight over her Burney book, and to see all her adorable fans also being delighted, felt really awesome. A circle of delight, all of us delighted perhaps for some similar and some different reasons, but nonetheless. And I am really glad that I didn’t write anything off-handedly rude in that entry! Would have been very easy to make a vampire sex joke, and I’m glad I did not, for when you get down to brass tacks, I totally love Anne Rice. Plus, she is a cool interesting weirdo herself! Did you know she publicly announced that she is no longer Christian?

“Today I quit being a Christian…. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being “Christian” or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.” And later: “My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn’t understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.”

Tight!!!

One thing I did want to point out is how interesting it is that all the commenters on her Facebook post assume I am a man. I’ve been thinking a lot about how the default person is still a man, even today in this year 2013, and even when women LITERALLY OUTNUMBER MEN on this planet. I am forever being mistaken for a man on the internet. I assume most women who don’t foreground their gender in their various screen handles (god, is that how you say that? I am so old) also experience this. I was looking at a tumblr somebody made to document all the examples of “men are people and women are women” in the world and it’s pretty overwhelming. I was especially struck by all the iconography on signs, all around the world, in which the stick-figure human depicted is always genderless unless it is doing something involving children, in which case it’s wearing a dress. So then to note how all her commenters are calling me a “guy” and “him” and what-not was really striking, ESPECIALLY because IN THE ENTRY I refer several times to my male spouse. How heavy is that? That even the fact that “straight” is the default sexuality (which is an assumption that at least is backed up by actual numbers) isn’t enough to outweigh man being the default person! It is easier to assume an anonymous person writing on the internet (about something other than “shoes and chocolate,” as Shayla put it) is a GAY MAN than that they are a woman.

Food for thought! And now I am thinking about 30 Rock, when Kenneth is talking about the mayor of his town and then proudly emphasizes her gender, like to indicate how progressive his town was: “…..and SHE…..was a horse!”

Anyway, all this has very much inspired me to go get Cry To Heaven and read it over break. I assume I will love it. In conclusion, Anne Rice rules, the internet rules, lets try to stop assuming people are men until proven otherwise, kids shouldn’t watch porn, it is cold as ice here in Portland, and here is a new issue of Zuckerberg’s Lament.

Enjoy!

Greetings! Well, what do you think of our new hairstyle and fashion choices? It is truly a new Lament and we hope you enjoy it. We’ve brought aboard some exciting additional friends to beef up the usual offerings from Mike and myself, as, lets face it, there’s only so much of us any one person can take in a given time frame (actually, is this true? I feel like I could take a lot more of Mike than I get, and I see him in person all the time, him and his stupid, stupid dog).

The need the Lament was originally intended to serve was that of somewhat thoughtful, or at least long-form, roughly literary writing, in the age of the Tweet. We’ve decided to expand that original goal even more, and periodically invite a rotating cast of like-minded friends to enthrall us with short essays on whatsoever topic they may wish to expound upon. This week we have an intense and gripping screenplay from Starr Ahrens, local comedian and gifted after-dinner speaker, who, coincidentally, now lives in the apartment I lived in when September 11th happened. (I am intrigued by dates that are also events. You could say “I lived there during September, 2001” but it’s interesting that you can also use the date as a noun to pack a more dramatic punch. Anyway, good thing we had a TV). We’ve also gifted you with Matthew Spencer’s wonderful WE ENJOY, a series of links to things you might not have noticed but will definitely appreciate. And Mike’s column, usually billed as the letter from the editor, is now being called A BUSINESSMAN AT LARGE, wherein I assume he will talk about numbers and graphs and will attempt to dress up corporate malfeasance as free-market determinism as is his wont but we love him anyway. And now the letter from the editor slot, once held by Mike, will now be held by me, Yours Truly. I am also literally the editor now, meaning, the one who corrects misspellings. I am very good at it.

Finally, we’ve instituted a bold new element, which is the personal ad written by someone else. In this case, I have written one for Greg, who makes another appearance in my Host Autumn review, but please don’t let the unorthodox and offensive comments he makes in that review deter you from answering his personal ad if you feel you’d be a good “match” for him. If these personal ads ever lead to an actual marriage then Mike and I are taking ourselves on vacation to Hawaii, so GET ON IT please.

We hope you enjoy! All our love,
Yours Truly