Sprained my wrist doing the safety dance

I have been, at several points in my life, a two-job lady, working a full time and a part time job. I usually only lasted about six months before it completely wore me down. In addition to needing the money, I usually tried to work for a friend, or somewhere I had worked before. I also preferred to work alone, like a hitman. One of my jobs was at a hotel gift shop. I worked nights, selling $9 toothbrushes to harried business travelers. Mostly, I listened to Prince on the jambox and restocked candy. One of my other tasks was handling the books. Since this gift shop was an extension of a European bookseller, namely W.H. Smith, we had a sizable collection of books. It was here that I learned the difference between trade and mass-market paperbacks and other things. I also learned about the worst practice in the whole publishing world. For mass-market paperbacks, booksellers don’t return them to the vendor. It isn’t cost-effective. Instead, the sellers tear the covers off the books to return to the vendor and then throw the books away. GASP! How horrible. They can’t be donated or given away or used to start a book swap at a retirement community. They are simple pitched in a dumpster and, in my store’s case, compacted with the nightly trash. It was devastating.

My boss at the time found the practice barbaric and turned a blind eye to the bag of coverless books we kept on Wednesdays and Thursdays after I weeded the books. What this meant is that I took home sacks of paperback books. I couldn’t stand to throw them away and would often take books I had no intention of reading: lots of Mary Higgins Clark and Danielle Steel and John Grisham. I also found a few good books. This was how I discovered Dennis Lehane (pre-Mystic River). I also grabbed a book called Dreamland by Kevin Baker; it is one of the best pieces of historical fiction ever. It is set in turn-of-the-century New York (Coney Island mostly) and is centered around the mob, Tammany Hall and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire (which also inspired one of my favorite Rasputina songs, appropriately named My Little Shirtwaist Fire). I loved this book and ended up buying all of Kevin Baker’s other books (even replacing my coverless copy of Dreamland). The second book I read was Strivers’ Row. This book is centered around the early life of Malcolm X in Harlem. It wasn’t as interesting to me as Dreamland, but it introduced me to the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley. They were New York’s most famous packrats and are the namesake of the disorder for hoarding. Langley was caught by one of the booby traps in his house and buried under one ton of newspaper. Homer, his blind brother, starved to death waiting for Langley to return. I am completely fascinated by the Collyer brothers. I just got a book about them from the library. I hope to read it this weekend. I’m sad that the book doesn’t have any pictures. Anytime you haul 14 pianos out of a house, the pictures are probably pretty awesome. I also feel bad for the construction workers who emptied the house since this happened before the advent of roll-dumpsters. Here is a photo of one of the rooms.



In other news, Villi (bass guitar, piano, vocals) and I (guitar, violin, vocals) have started a band. I think the Collyer Brothers would be an interesting name for a band comprised of two sisters?

Dunno. That is all.

DING

So, it's been like 4 years and, according to WoW, a whole month of my life, but I finally got my mage to 70. One goal down, one to go.

with a fist full of cash and a dirty magazine

Goals for my first alone time Saturday in about two months

1. Get to level 70 in WoW.
2. Read 10 Nancy Drew case files.
3. Not get too drunk to accomplish items 1 and 2.

I have to say, I am only in the position for a worry free Saturday because last night the cable was out (node wide outage). So instead of gaming and watching movies, I got all of my homework done. Tonight, I have to clean and do laundry and then I am free to spend my Saturday in any matter I see fit. So exciting!

Today, our resident cougar chaser came over while we were in the midst of buying domain names to start our office web wars. I told him he could buy www.cougarcatcher.com and then have all his older, sexy ladies email him at his custom domain. Someone, I'm not sure who, then said:

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe
Catch a cougar by the toe
If she hollers...

Then, out of nowhere, I added, spank her mo'

Sometimes I'm pretty sure I should be writing bawdy pulp fiction from my studio apartment in 1940s New York, wearing a wife-beater and suspenders with too-big flannel trousers.

Jesus and his lawyer are coming back

One of the things about writing that I could never get around was honesty. I’m just not an honest person. I have an almost unnatural fear of people judging me, and I knew that in writing, I would have to open myself up to that. Most importantly, I would have to write stories that were based on facts in my life, and I worried about how people would respond to those facts. Yesterday’s post was highly personal, and I thought about not posting it because I knew there would be explanation necessary. I was right.

I always thought writing would be great as long as it happened in a vacuum. And they (the nebulous group of writing people) always say write like no one is reading. How lucky for the people who can commit things to paper with personal amnesia. I wrote a short story once that was deeply personal. I wrote it one night in a sort of fevered expulsion. I wrote as if no one was reading. Then, someone read it. A writing teacher, in fact. And she liked it. She said it was moving and authentic and of professional quality. Instead of encouraging me that I could write, it just seemed to deflate me, because the assignment didn’t have my name and the teacher wasn’t judging me. I had only been brave enough to submit it under a ruse. I was am a coward.

I then thought if I write, I would write fantasy. That way, I could create my own universe and be as dishonest as I wanted. If I chose to write about my life, I could cloak everything in allegory and the Serpentine Cape of the 9th Paralanine Regiment. See, that seems like a fantasy type reference. Instead, when I signed up for school, I decided to skip the fiction, the screenwriting, and the poetry. I chose technical writing instead. It is a poor substitute for what I really wanted, which was to write haunting, personal fiction. I tell everyone that a technical writing degree is more practical, takes me further, earns me more money. I make it sound like my choice was guided by rationalism and capitalism. But then I’ve always had trouble with honesty.

and I hate disintegration

I have been hesitant to write over the last month. I have blamed it on sickness and basketball, but the underlying reason is chaos. My world seems to be descending into madness. Friend X hates friend Y, and there seems no hope of reconciliation. At this point, I would accept seething, clench-jawed anger behind a fake smile. And I know it sounds selfish, in the midst of their pain and frustration, but did they ever stop and think about what this would do to us? This accommodation has been exhausting; we’ve been sneaking one friend out the back door while the other comes in the front door. We’ve been toughing it out, hoping for the best, smiling politely. More likely now, both of them will just sort of stop being friends. You know how people turn into ghosts these days, right?

In my own home, we have been playing ring-around-the-powder keg, and all of us were holding fuses. Shakespeare always wrote about love, betrayal, treason, and murder, but we all know that houses usually don’t fall because of the big stuff. Instead, it is Christmas lights and recyclables, weed killer, dog food in the sink. It is always the small stuff. I guess I will have to wait and see how everything turns out, but I already have my mind focused on a possible leveraged buyout.

Even worse, I want to come here and spill my guts, but I know people read this, and you have to be careful about who you arm. So, I begin to self-censor, one thought at a time. Pretty soon, my life looks like one of those censored wartime letters that women got from their husbands on the front. All the important or dissenting words blacked out, leaving the rest of the words without meaning.

There is good news, though. It is not all tragedy. My film teacher picked me, and I’m sure a few others, as one of the chosen few to attend a lecture by Academy Award winning producer Frank Marshall (of Bourne and Indiana Jones fame). It should be very interesting. Too bad Villi and I don’t have our screenplay done. I could slip it in his briefcase during a hilarious distraction, a la I Love Lucy. Plus, I have a dentist appointment that day. Go oral hygiene is always good news.

In case there was any question about my mental state

I just watched 17 minutes of the Miss USA pageant. I have to hope that my weekend road trip to Lawrence, Kansas for the Jayhawks parade will shake me out of my funk. Instead, however, I worry that my penchant for pageants and books of the Nancy Drew/Princess Diaries variety point to a severe mental/emotional collapse.

I was moved by this passage in my sociology text this week. "In traditional society, life was experienced holistically. People would see birth, sickness, and death as part of their normal lives. Children were conceived and grandparents died in the same home. Today, most of those experiences are put away from us and occur in bureaucratic settings where we don't see them as part of our normal and daily life...The world has thus become clean, tidy, and rational."

I like clean, tidy, and rational: irrationally so. I don't know how I feel about it in relation to this loss of connection.

Working on my next piece for McSweeney's - "Live-blogging my heart attack by brokestocker62"

Don't worry, it's a Kansas thing

To quote Simon Stein - "Offense sells tickets, but defense wins ballgames."

Kansas wins in OT. Go Hawks!