Back home

I'm blogging from the floor of my parents' living room. I came to town to visit with piwok and her husband, her parents, my parents, and my brother and his family. We had a big gathering and watched the Red Wings and the Tigers, ate too much food, talked and laughed, and watched the Belgian Farting Pig (sigh). I can't remember how long it's been since I've seen piwok, and it was amazingly good to see her. She says wonderful phrases like, "I think fart jokes are funnier than he does." I hadn't had a chance to really get to know her husband prior to this weekend, and I'm glad I finally got to spend some time around him. I think the two are good together. They both have similar senses of humor and rag on each other with equal (but playful) intensity and have their own little language that they occasionally have to translate for outsiders. It was fun watching them together. Piwok talked me into reconsidering graduate school again. Even though it's past the deadline that I stated before, I'm pretty sure I could still get admitted if I get on top of things right away. So I guess I'll go for it. What's the worst that could happen? I don't get accepted? I do get accepted? I realize that I still don't like MSU? I realize that I now love MSU? Would any of these outcomes be that horrible? I think I could probably deal with any of them. So. . . Here we are. Right back where we started. Just apply you moron. Then see what happens after that.

I'm grateful for yesterday (20).

Selling myself

I just sent out another cover letter (12), and I'm a bit uncertain of it. It's a bit more aggressively mememe than I usually make my cover letters. I've mentioned in the past that I have issues with promoting myself, and I'm wondering if maybe this fact has something to do with my inability to find employment. So with this one I decided to go all out with lots of I'mgreats and lookwhatIdids. I'm so unaccustomed to writing in such a way that I'm not sure if I'm going to come off as confident or as overcompensating. But I needed to try something different this time. I hope it works out.

I'm grateful for friends, family, and strangers (20).

The King at his best

I'm stalling. I was working on my book (2.1). . . ech. I hate the sound of that. My book. Now that I've done a little exploring into the local writing community, I've run into so many people that like to toss that phrase around. My book is about 20,000 words, so it's more of a novella, or is it novelette? It only cost me $5,000 to get 200 copies of my book published. My book is a period piece about a Victorian chimney sweep. mybookmybookmybookmybook. I don't know why, but it rubs me wrong when I listen to people talk like that. Hypocrite I guess. . . Anyway. I'm stalling. I was working on my latest writing project, and I did what I usually do: I go good for a half a page to two pages; then I have a little hiccup; then I stand and pace for a bit; then I irrationally and unrealistically build whatever I've just written into a masterpiece that I cannot possibly equal; then I get a kind of writing fear that tells me if I mess with it any more, I'll just ruin it. Why do I do this? First, nothing I have ever written is anything that even resembles a masterpiece. Second, if something I wrote was a masterpiece, it stands to reason that I should be able to create another masterpiece. Once again my rational self and my emotional self are in conflict, like a north-going zax and a south-going zax, neither wanting to budge, both freezing while life builds up around them. . .

I feel I should write about the concert I went to last night. Kitty Donohoe. It was good. Really fun. . . Nice description from the 'writer,' huh? She sings a lot of songs about Michigan and a lot of Celtic songs and a lot of traditional songs and a lot of traditional Celtic songs. The first hour of it was recorded for radio, but they never told the audience when it was going to be on, so if you want to listen, you'll have to look it up yourself. Donohoe has a good voice and her songs are beautiful and silly and moving and a variety of other flattering adjectives, but I didn't care for her guitar/cittern/piano playing. She was a bit heavy handed (smash, smash, smash) and fat fingered (oops, oops, oops) on all three instruments. She was accompanied by a guy that was really good at the guitar and mandolin and pretty good at the fiddle. But her pounding on whatever instrument she had in front of her often drowned out his lead parts, so that was a bit disappointing. But other than that the show was great. She had a bunch of fun stories that she told that got everyone laughing, and she took some requests. And. . . I've blathered enough. It was good. Really fun. Let's move on.

I'm grateful for Combos (20).

Life lessons from Milton Bradley

I took one of my antifreakout pills first thing this morning. It was probably a good idea. I woke up fairly early and felt the arbitrary pressure of May crushing my chest. My book isn't done (2.1). Actually, for the book I'm having a hard time trying to make sense out of what I already have, what I need, and how it all fits together. I'd push the deadline back a month, but I fear that's a bit ambitious for this project. May was also the deadline for applying at MSU. I missed that. Kind of on purpose. I had such a horrible experience at MSU that I can't convince myself that I really want to spend two to four years back there. But it's still disappointing to me that I set this goal and didn't follow it. . . Plus there's the whole no job thing. Starting yet another month without a job. . . All this and I'm still sick. But the pill seemed to work. I didn't freakout. I didn't start crying. I read for awhile, dozing in and out during the process. Turns out, it's kind of a sleepy pill. Not bad though. I could've stayed awake if I had anything that I needed to be awake for.

For my birthday, I got Chutes and Ladders. Get it? Because of the ups and downs in my life. I thought it was funny. But once we got started thinking about Chutes and Ladders on that deeper level (please don't leave), we couldn't stop. It's a good game for kids because it teaches them that hard work (the ladders) is fun and helps you to get to the top and that laziness/goofoffishness (the chutes), while fun, won't get you anywhere. This morning I looked at the game board and took things one step further. There are other messages in Chutes and Ladders: None of the chutes dump you back at start. No matter how far you fall, you never have to start over. Also, there are some chutes that dump you off a couple of spaces away from a ladder that will take you even higher than you were before you fell. So sometimes setbacks put you in a position to reach a higher level of success. . . Yeah, sorry. This kind of thing happens when you give an English major too much time to think about things.

So, today was a chute day. But I did come up with my next step toward a greater level of doingstuffness. I'm going to buy some sort of planner, and before each day I will plan six or seven things to be done on that day. One of these things will always be writing related. One yoga. One running. At least one job. One guitar. Then at least one activity not related to any of these other activities. My reasoning is that if I decide before what I'm going to do during a particular day before the day actually happens, I won't waste so much time trying to figure out what to do that day. I'm bad at choosing things. I'm working on that. But until then, I'm going to prechoose things.

Is it me, or is there some kind of notrightness to this post? It feels off to me.

I'm grateful for the ladders (20).

Dancing in the street

Last night I had a good time. First off: Yeah weather! Gentle sun. Cool breeze. Wonderfulwonderfulwonderful. We spent much of the night outside. My sister did some work and I read while we sat in patio chairs in the backyard, and the kids played in the swingset or with the balls, bubbles, and assorted outdoorsy paraphernalia. Unfortunately for my brother-in-law, he was stuck inside cooking dinner. But we all got to eat it outside, and it was delicious. Then we played with the kids for a bit longer. Then came cake, tasty white chocolate cake with strawberry frosting. So yeah, like I said, I had a good time last night.

Later, my gooddearfriend wanted to take advantage of the wonderfulwonderfulwonderful by going for a walk. So she came over, and we walked in through town to the fun little island park. We had a good time chatting and watching two male ducks fighting over a female duck. If you've never seen this happen before, it's quite something. The two ducks kind of wrestled and pecked at each other until one of them was able to get onto the other's back and then force his head under water. We were a bit worried that we were going to witness a drowning, a duckslaughter, but apparently there's some duck equivalent to 'uncle' because the dominant duck suddenly stopped and swam off with the female duck, the beaten duck following a safe distance behind the two. When we went back through town, we walked by a dance studio and peeked in at what looked like the pre- or post-class gathering of dancers sitting in chairs. We walked down the road a bit farther, and my gooddearfriend told me about the dance class that she went to recently, and then we stopped by the side of the road (a busy road no less), and she taught me some of what she had learned. Apparently, I'm a little grabby. I guess in ballroom dancing you're only supposed to lightly rest your fingertips on your partner. Oops. Then we went down the road a bit more, and we stopped so she could show me some Latin dancing. That's where we got honked at. It was really fun.

When I got back and my gooddearfriend had left, my brother-in-law and I played the video games he had rented. They were better than a lot of the games we had rented recently. One was a driving game that was actually more about crashing than it was about driving. So we had a good time smashing stuff up and what have you. The other game was a table tennis game. "A table tennis video game?" you may ask. Yes. And it's quite a bit more fun than pong.

My nephew just reminded me of a sweet story about my niece from yesterday. I'm a little sick. Yesterday I had a soar throat, headache, and stuffy nose. But nothing serious. In the morning I was wanting to kind of laze about for a bit, and my sister tried to keep my niece from bugging me by telling her that I wasn't feeling well and that I needed to be left alone. So the sweet thing went upstairs to her room and came back carrying her Care Bear, which she handed to me so I could snuggle with it and feel better. Awwww. THAT made me feel better.

I'm grateful for the wonderfulwonderfulwonderful (20).

Yesterday was __________

I started yesterday with a 'run' that ended with me walking. At this point, I've run the same route between ten and twenty times, and yesterday I noticed horses grazing in a field across the street from the cemetery. I was a little worried. Either the neighborhood was about to be overrun by an onslaught of horses, or these horses had been there all along, and I just wasn't observant enough to see them. Some writer I'm going to be. Takes me ten passes to notice a field full of domesticated mammal. . . Later on, my brother-in-law assured me that the horses have always been there, but they aren't always out. For the sake of my own self-esteem, I'm going to believe that yesterday was the first time the horses have been out when I've run by there. . . A bit farther down the street, on the same run, I passed a car with what appeared to be a freshly cut Christmas tree strapped to the roof. The needles were all still green, so it wasn't a really old Christmas tree that was finally getting discarded. The roots had been cut off the trunk, so it wasn't a pine tree to be planted in someones yard. I don't really know what was going on. But I'm pretty sure it's a sign of this neighborhood's decline. Horses across from cemeteries. Christmas trees in April. I don't even want to think about what's coming next.

We went to dinner at a restaurant in the area of my old apartment. It was fun looking around to see what had changed and what hadn't. There's my old grocery store. The Chinese place has changed to some other restaurant. The McDonald's has turned into some other Chinese place. There's my library. There's the Wal-Mart that the community was aggressively trying to prevent the construction of. Of all the things that had changed, I was pretty happy to see that one thing hadn't. The old man that used to walk up and down the streets, waving little American flags on sticks and smiling at cars as they passed, was still at it. I never could tell if he was some kind of crazy or just really patriotic (sometimes he wore stars and stripes shorts to go with the flags he carried), but he always seemed so happy to be doing such a thing that I feel happy just seeing him. Does that mean that I'm some kind of crazy? Or just really patriotic?

Last night I played in a poker tournament at the local American Legion. Things did not go well for me. Normally in a poker tournament, the payout is determined by figuring out a certain percentage of the prize pool for certain placements (i.e., 1st pays 50% of the prize pool, 2nd pays 30%, 3rd pays 20%, or some other payment structure). But because this tournament was for charity, they had decided that first through fifth places would receive a fixed sum and the rest of the money would go to the charity, in this case, the high school wrestling team. Well, because not as many people showed up as they had hoped, just before the tournament started, they announced that all the prizes would be chopped in half, thereby making the payout nowhere near enough to be worth the entry fee. But I was already seated so I figured I may as well play.

Here's a little side story: Before the tournament started but after it was supposed to start, a probablystonedmuscleydude showed up and paid his entry fee. When they handed him his cup full of chips, he said, "Oh, this is a poker tournament?" The lady taking the entry fees spoke in a fairly condescending voice, "Why honey, what did you think you were signing up for?" "Oh, I thought we were going to wrestle." A moment of silence. "Well honey, how would we do that here? We don't have any mats or anything. People would get hurt trying to wrestle with all these tables on this hard floor." "Well, I just thought it was a wrestling tournament." "Do you know how to play Texas Hold 'Em? Would you like your money back?" "I um. . . Yeah, I know how to play hold 'em, but I always lose. I thought we were going to wrestle. Maybe I shouldn't do this." And so on for about twenty minutes.

Back to the poker. I lost. Miserably. I was at a table full of people (all but one of my opponents) who didn't realize the importance of folding and raising in poker. Call. Call. Call. Call. Calling lots of chips on ace high. Calling lots of chips on a pair of twos. Just calling with monster hands. A table full of calling stations. And I couldn't beat any of them. Frustrating. I wasn't the first person to bust out, but I was the first person to actually leave because I wasn't willing to rebuy because I wasn't about to invest even more money toward winning such a small payout. So, yeah. That's that.

I'm grateful for flagwavingsmileyoldguy (20).

Oscar or Felix?

Yesterday was one of those days that support the argument that I should not be allowed to live with other human beings. To make things worse, it was the kids that got the brunt of my nastiness. They were just being kids - shrieking, running around, not listening, wrestling with each other, doing whatever else they could think of to get attention - and I poured a good deal of cranky on the poor things. At one point, my niece even said to me "Pretend like you aren't family, okay?" Because only family would even consider snapping at such adorable little kids. I hate my grumblywhydoeseveryonekeepdoingthesethings days. They're part of why I moved away from my parents. I kept biting my mom's head off for every little thing she did that was even slightly annoying. Not even annoying sometimes. A lot of the time she was just trying to help. She doesn't need that kind of crap. She has enough real troubles to worry about. But no matter how bad (pretty bad sometimes) I felt about sniping at her, I kept doing it. So, in part, for her sanity as well as mine, I moved in with my sister's family. Guess what? I still get unreasonably snappy, and I still feel bad about. I should not subject my loved ones to this. . . Maybe I should take the J.D. Salinger route, become a hermit writer that no one is really sure is still alive. . .

That last line is sarcasm everyone. I'm just now starting to test the shallow end of the pool of the living, and the water's pretty good. I don't want to get out of it just yet. One of these days I'm going to try that 30-meter diving board.

The irony (maybe not irony, I'm never sure) about my mood yesterday is that I had yoga class in the morning. To start every class, we have a centering time to clear our minds and set a personal goal for that yoga session. My goal? To be more open and understanding with people. Heh. Seems I should work a bit harder on that one. But it was a really good yoga session. None of the elderly women showed up; it was just me and a couple women in their late thirties or forties, so the instructor kind of kicked our asses. Before class, the instructor was telling me about how her baby girl was getting her first tooth and how that made her realize that everything was still new for her. They had taken her to the store, and everything she saw, the people, the products, the lights, everything, was new to her. The instructor said that she was thinking about how when you get older and jaded things often tend to get mundane and redundant. She had decided that for yesterday's class she was going to try to demonstrate how you can battle the mundane by adding a few new poses and by simply altering some of the poses that we do on a more regular basis. Yeah, many of the new poses seriously kicked my ass. The bow comes immediately to mind. She would announce, "Okay, now hold it for three more breaths," and I would think, 'we're supposed to be able to breathe?' I actually felt really good when we came out of the pose, though. We also did the pigeon, which is a pose we do fairly regularly. But she changed it up by having us stay in it for what must've been three to five minutes on each side. The pigeon is not a difficult pose for me, but by the end of it I was probably sweating more than I ever have while doing yoga. I think part of it may be because as part of the pose you rest your head on your hands on the floor. So my body heat and hot breath were collecting in the ring formed by my arms. Once I was able to relax my body and mind into it, however, it felt really good to be laying there, stretched into the pose.

Also, yesterday, as a sort of escape, I started reading for the first time since I got here. I don't know why I haven't been reading. It's something that's always been good for my mental, emotional, and spiritual state. Plus, as a writer I should always be reading something. I don't know why I had taken so much time off. But it felt good to be back at it. The book I've started is Going After Cacciato, by Tim O'Brien. I love the way O'Brien writes. If I were to try to model my writing on any writer, it would probably be him. Of course, I'm trying to develop my own voice, but his is quite compelling. It's been a bit since I've quoted anything, so here's something for you all:

"Paul Berlin, whose only goal was to live long enough to establish goals worth living for still longer, stood high in the tower by the sea, the night soft all around him, and wondered, not for the first time, about the immense powers of his own imagination."

Sounds familiar.

I'm grateful that the son of one of my occasionallurkers got his cast removed a few days ago (20).