Excuses.

I did it again. I overextended. I have dance class Mondays (6-8) and Tuesdays (8-10) and my young adult fiction class Thursdays (6:30-10) as well as my two jobs every day (9-6 and then a few hours here and there after work), and I just was re-accepted (I bailed last year) to UCLA's Low Residency Master Class for the novel I now loathe.

It is very expensive and time consuming but I must take it, I think. It's for nine months and it's the closest thing I can have to working and being in school at the same time. Except I am finding that now I can never do anything during the week with anyone. I don't think this is bad as it pushes plans to the weekend which I always like filled and eliminates having too many drinks on a Tuesday, for Wednesday morning at work. But it has begun to be the case that someone will want to get together and my answer all the time is "I can't during the week." Whether it's a friend or a date, I just can't do it. I don't want to. Wednesday is my day to do anything, and I like to just come home and grocery shop and clean (or think of these things while watching T.V. in my underwear, split the difference). I am being kind of selfish with my time, but I suppose you have to be when you're writing two books and trying to stay in shape and trying to save money and trying to do a good job at your jobs.

Now the question. I am truly busy. And there is someone who wants to hang out with me. A set-up actually. I have been set up once before and it was wildly good, we actually ended up dating for five years. I remember looking through our college look book and there were two gentlemen with the name of my to-be date for the formal. There was one who was hot and there was one who wasn't. Somehow luck shined on me and I got the hot one. We started dating that night.

So, the set-up. I have seen his picture and just think "eh." I have seen his texts and they just aren't my style. I want to like him, but I already know this isn't going anywhere. And I actually am busy. Even if there was a guy that I liked I don't think I could slot him in any time that isn't the weekend. And now that I have this schedule, it seems weird to set up weekend plans with someone who I know it won't go any further with. A waste of my time and his. People tell me just to go, but I don't wanna. I don't want a free meal or drink. I don't need to "get back out there." I've had my share of flings since my break up and believe I got that mess out of my system. Now it's fall and I have a new apartment and a million new classes and a crazy schedule and I want to see my friends or take time to breathe on my own. I'm not interested in dating unless it falls in my lap. This set-up was done without me doing anything, and it fell in my lap for sure. But I am not feeling it.

What is the appropriate thing to do in this situation? See him once and then tell him no more? It seems unusually cruel not to at least see him. But I can't see him during the week. And weekend nights are so precious, why should I waste my time and his scheduling a Saturday night dinner when I know (and sometimes you just know, don't you?) that we aren't going to date...

Etiquette question today that needs advice...

Quote of the Day

"Time to treat yourself to a new pair of Chucks, kid."

-My dental hygienist upon seeing my blood and paint-stained sneakers

The Ritz Carlton: Brooklyn Edition

I am in love...with my apartment. It's the groundfloor of a brownstone and has a patio and an office and a sub-zero fridge and wood floors and is littered with antiques because my parents are letting me borrow them. Swirled wood, speckled marble, granite tops and soft lighting. Crisp starched linens and plush oriental rugs. Even the bathroom is fun to be in. If it weren't so weird, I might hang out in there. Blog in there. Write in there. Sleep in the tub.

And I have a fireplace (that works!). I would use it if it wouldn't melt the flat-screen mounted above, so I've got something fake in there with a warm glow that throws off heat and crackles. It's so fun being here, sometimes I forget to leave. All day Sunday was spent in the house after my incredibly exhausting weekend that I brought upon myself: cooking a boef daube for a dinner party, then scrubbing my house from top to bottom, then trying on a hundred outfits, then proceeding to down 6 bottles of wine with my workmates who I am still semi-nervous around because they are all serious music writers and I am a serious writer but not a serious music writer per se and they are a bunch of boys who might be called hipsters (not to their faces)...and at one point I had to ward off the advances of one of them by burying my face in a bag of salt and vinegar chips in an effort to disgust him out of advancing towards me (try it! sometimes it works!). It was a potluck, it was all boys and me, and of course it was my suggestion to throw it for some "family bonding."

Sometimes you never see these things coming. We are closer, and now it's awkward. Oh well.

They had a good time, I awoke with a horrible cough, and all the wonderful smells of the night before clung to the air--the crackling fried chicken and silken fennel sauce, the wine-braised beef stew, the salty cauliflower with raisins, the gooey mustard carrots, warm apple-raspberry pie and plum wine. It was an absolute disaster to see this in the morning, something that was so pure the night before, before we all started eating it. In the cold harsh light of morning, it was all made worse by the fact that my boyfriend was lying on the floor, sleeping in his underwear (he wasn't even part of the party, he arrived afterwards to help me "clean"--yeah right!). No glasses were broken and no one punched eachother, I think this finally qualifies as an actual adult party.

I would say that someone should have vomited to make it a good time, but my boyfriend actually did. Again, he did not come to the party. He vomited smelling the food after it'd been served and sitting in crusty pots for a half hour. I didn't take offense. I was already facedown on the bed in not my underwear, but my entire outfit, including my shoes.

This is not how you treat the Ritz-Carlton. We did anyway.

What's the policy on...

Being a writer is so weird and difficult and strange. Being a freelancer even more so. I've spent the better part of a week gently harassing a magazine that I pitched an idea to in DECEMBER. They said yes and it would run in March. Since then I went ahead, did the interview, wrote the draft, re-pitched as a blanket email went out for pitches and cc:ed everyone else important in case someone else would get back to me. I called the editor who said we'd do it. I emailed. I emailed someone else. And then I emailed all three together and said, hey what's going on with this pitch?

I haven't heard anything back. My friend says go sell it elsewhere. It was my idea and I did all the work. But it feels sleazy to sell it elsewhere. That said, the aforementioned magazine just hasn't gotten back to me, and I think I've been pretty cool about it. I mean, it's over 2 months without a hard deadline and contract. They said they'd make it work but I haven't heard anything for a while. I dunno why they won't get back to me--maybe they want a "more capable" writer to write a longer piece. I don't think it's the content because it's about a topic that is time-sensitive and about a band people really want to read about (plus their album drops right around when the issue would). So I guess I go elsewhere? I mean do I have to tell the first people? And I know this is not important, but why oh why don't people just say "no" in the first place? It would have felt much better to hear a "we're not into your style these days" instead of waiting around like a jackass and promising it to this band and having to call and email and beg for someone just to give me a deadline.

Writing sucks and rejection is involved at every turn. Why I chose it, I'll never know.

On A Break-Up : Quote of the Year

"You want to stay? That’s staying out of convenience. Because if you stay, and for as long as you stay in this home, my home, then all the things you said will be just that. What you said. But when you leave, they will immediately become what you did. And you will have forever done it."

Aaaaand We're Back

A little jumbled static today.

Happy New Decade, and many days late! I will now be updating this blog much more because I have an office job in addition to my music jobs and book writing jobs and rainbow-kitten-catching jobs (an idiot can dream!).

See, the office begets blog-writing. That's when I was all over this thang (check my archives from 2006--they RULED). And blogs and gossip and music and websites are what I like to read while sipping overpriced Asian noodle soup on my lunch hour in front of this blasted screen (this is my treat, my trade for taking a full-time, temporary magazine job in Midtown. I will eat soup, and I will eat it A LOT. You know, I'm really seeing why old people like soup. I'm on the wrong side of twenty-five, three years on the wrong side of it (did you also think you'd be dead by now when you were teenaged and knew EVERYTHING there was to know?), and man oh man how it soothes my bones. I can see why oldies eat soup and toast and complain. Because it's awesome, that's why.)

So what's new with you, dear diary, dear readers? Unfulfilled January wishes? Me too!

Here's the listsicle, here's what I want/here's what's going on:

1. I want to talk to you about my relationships like besties, like we used to. No, not my professional relationships or my sense of self, the dirt with the boy(s). I have gone through some good ones in our time together, yours and mine. And while the greatest of you have never met me, ALL THOSE BOYS READ THIS BLOG. Damn them! The crushes, the heartbreakers, the heartbroken, they all know. So I'd like to talk about my hopes, and dreams, and fears and my insanely moody feelings about all of them, past and current, and yet I cannot. Time to bring back "Annabella," a conglomerate of girls and myself who I spoke of on ye old Almost Literary back in the Aughts. Anabella has some stories to tell, about international DJs and crazy tattoos, about her live-in perfect boyfriend, about her affair with an older celebrity, and she has some quotes of the day. Good ones. We will discuss.

2. I want an agent for my book. It's good, I swear. If you have an agent who is taking clients, or work in the lit biz and would like to read what I've got, please let me know and leave a comment here!

3. All of my friends have abandoned me. Okay, they've abandoned New York. I am making new ones and that means more girl date stories. Why don't they make an e-harmony for girlfriends?! I would pay dearly for this service. Yeah, I'd pay for friends, want to fight about it?

4. I am starting to be offered some full-time jobs (kinda, sorta). After cobbling together freelance work for over a year, I'm kind of into the working at midnight on Sunday routine. It also lets me keep taking my art classes. But until I hear about where I did and didn't get into schools in April (and if anything does or does not happen with my book until then, I also need money). Stay a free bum or a caged suit? I never really fit in with either...

I have more...but I will have to think...

Baby Shower-- Your advice!

Dear readers, I am throwing yet another baby shower! And I sadly have to admit, this time, now that I've done it before and am organizing it in my city instead of Philadelphia, I'm doing a much better job. I'm on the phone with the baker, the tea staff, the party staff, I'm on top of invoices and meetings. It's going to be a good time for those who had nothing to do with organizing it!

This one is in Alice's Tea Cup in the Upper East Side. Everyone will be getting the Mad Hatter tea service with sandwiches, scones, and luscious baked goods. I have sent the invites, sent all the shower registry information, fielded questions and those who want to drop out, drop in, called guests to talk them out of bringing their own food.

It's close.

I've pre-paid for mint green and white latex balloons, handpainted royal-frosted monogrammed cookies and sashays of specialty teas for the guests, and a mint-green chocolate ganache cake (why are cakes the most expensive things ever!). I have also picked up a beautiful baby book for all the guests to sign, and have emailed them to check in with me to sign as soon as they arrive, and also to bring one crazy looking gift bow so that we may trashily deck out the baby book box while keeping everything else an elegant affair.

The mom-to-be will NOT wear a silly hat or play games. Any other suggestions on what I can do/bring/ask others to bring? Any ideas on something fun? Or lay back and just let it happen (remember here, I am now nearly broke after all this, even though I'm having lots of help paying for the space and the party itself, as I keep adding on extras).

And the sleaziest question yet...should I buy an additional gift? I do have the baby book which I bought, but everything else is a surprise or edible or really only is a gift to the party. The last shower I threw I brought an expensive gift that I spent a lot of time thinking about and hauled it to Philadelphia from Austin (where I bought it). But this time...I don't know if I can do that? Is there something with baby showers the same thing with weddings that I have a year to give it ;)

Babies, more and more babies

Not mine!

Check out Theo, he is the newest baby friend of mine. I'm not a freak! These are my friends' babies. Theo updates his blog more often than I do (courtesy of my bf from high school, Selly).

Making a Home

Now that I have a perfect place to live, how do I live like a perfect person? We scraped down cinnamon-wheat Ego waffles and split up, he ran to the art shop to buy materials for my new Parsons class and I got a neon yellow manicure. When it was done we trotted back, banging the pad back and forth as we rushed to avoid the rain. There are ideas floating around: runs in the park, enormous Sunday dinners, bi-weekly vacuuming, the bed made each morning, fresh flowers in the vase on top of my antique desk. Where are the curtains? How come I can't get myself to the YMCA to check out their classes? I'm too busy putting together my recommendation packets, tidying up my writing sample, sending my next 50 pages of the novel to the editor for edits, map out new novel, and send yet another friend packing--the third good friend to leave me and NYC behind in as many months...

Going to have to make this my home alone now, and a lot lies ahead.

How to Make a House a Home

I am now living by myself on a tree-lined, sun-dappled block in Park Slope. There are old houses and artisanal cafes and food coops and the park. At night, everything is still, cars drive by quietly, couples walk together, dogs wag and the air feels clean. Inside my section of the brownstone, it's 90% decorated--all with my mother's antiques: French ash buffet, Persian rugs, lamps made of stone urns, gilded frames and old flowered prints. A big soft blanket folded on the couch. My desk is a marble table top over an iron base, there are fluffy towels in the bathroom and outside, my patio has a rattan chaise with a big square suede-like pillow tossed on it. It looks over the little garden, the blueberry patch and the mint plants.

The kitchen is eat-in, the dining room table looks outside and my bedroom is a little cove, painted sage-green. Cream drapes fall from the windows, the bed is overstuffed with white linens and a stiff dust ruffle. My favorite white lamp draped with the beaded pearl necklace and a lambskin rug on the floor. It feels like sleeping in a layered wedding cake, an igloo made of fur, a room at a Vermont bed and breakfast. It's the first time I've lived alone, and I made the smallest room my bedroom so that my office and TV and everything is away. For so long my bed was my desk, my workspace, my entertainment center, even my breakfast nook where I sipped coffee.

Now the bed is sacred. And the apartment too. I find myself bouncing around, playing with the dimmers, cleaning the windows, sweeping the wooden planks endlessly. My clothes are in closets, not hanging over chairs, my papers are in folders instead of strewn across the floor. It feels like a beautiful home, my parents' maybe, my great-aunt's whose house is all white and spotless. Here the walls are pale yellow (except for the bedroom), the ancient fireplace irons flank the mantle, and not only does everything feel so adult, it feels full of possibility and promise.

I wanted a gorgeous place to be for so long, to work, to create. I didn't realize how much I wanted it, maybe even needed it, until I was blessed enough to get it. If I can't get my books published here, get into grad school here, flourish my freelance career here, then there is no hope for me at all.

But today I am positive. I just got here, but it feels like home. Only when I stop and really think does it occur to me it took 27 years for me to find it.

Moving!

I'm doing it! Moving to a beautiful brownstone in Park Slope with a fireplace, an office/library space, cherry cabinets, brush nickel fixtures, hardwood floors, Sub Zero fridge, counter to eat at the kitchen and a little patio. It's adorable and near Prospect Park (which Olmsted also designed, in addition to Central Park, and he always said Prospect Park was his favorite of the two). Still, I'm a little scared of Brooklyn. I can't explain it. The same way that we get irritated that the summer is full of rain. August is still August even though it rains every day...Brooklyn is still living in "the middle of it"...sure--it's not even 2 miles away! But then there is the obnoxious whiny part of you that is a child with everything who says, no there WAS no summer this year and Brooklyn might as well be in Ohio.

But then again, I'm not impressed by the bags of garbage and people shooting up on my East Village corner any more, or all the dog shit, or all the screaming. I've lived in so-so apartments in incredible neighborhoods for years and sort of just want a pretty place to be, especially since I'll be working from home these days, and applying for school, etc. And it's a place all to myself! I've lived with roommates my whole life (we're counting family right?) I just don't know who I am alone. Did I have to swing the pendulum the entire way to a quiet block in Park Slope? Maybe not. But there has been so much frenetic energy with my multiple jobs, courses, classes, roommates and everything else I kind of want to be for a while, get back into writing more (how lazy have I been about this blog), stop being so damn distracted.

Get a puppy.

My best friends have moved away save a few, and I felt like it was time, in my own small way, to move away too.

I'm getting old, for sure. But I'm kind of excited for it. I love the East Village, the Lower East side, the dirty bars populated with tattooed boys. But now that I'm in a relationship with one of them, we've decided we like to walk past the hipster meat market on any given day and head to the video store to rent old 80s thrillers--bad ones--(have you seen Consenting Adults? MY GOD) and drink wine instead. I'd like to do it in a new place, but I love New York to much to leave it now, so I'll jump across a bridge to Brooklyn and still have most everything I need to do and want to do in Manhattan proper. I am the only person without a family making the reverse jump. Well, I've always been a bit of a weirdo.

Pictures to come! And if you have recommendations for Park Slope, please leave them here! I have no idea what I'm doing...

Almost...Brooklyn?

It's a beautiful townhouse in Park Slope? Dare I leave the East Village for the first time in 6 years? Can I exist in Brooklyn, working out of my apartment, or will I go insane? Will I take the 40 minute train ride to my gym here because I have the time and not the cash to cancel my gym membership as I am hanging on to a shred of "city living"? The answers to this...and more...are about to come.

My gosh a place of my own! No roommates...can I make a tree-lined block of Carroll street work?

Eep.

Room Hates

Perhaps roommate stuff is better, but I still want to live somewhere else like an adult...

Drugs, Man

I didn't think people still did heroin (mistakenly thought that all stopped in the 90's, which was just a reincarnation of the 70's) but apparently they do if they're in New York and fancy themselves artistes but actually just do a lot of drugs and film themselves having sex and spray newspapers with semen and glitter. Trust. This is what Dash Snow did (if you don't know the name, he was big in certain circles here for the last five years who was buddies with Ryan McGinley and Gavin McInnes of Vice) and he ended up offing himself a few weeks ago in my neighborhood with 13 glassine envelopes of heroin.

He was 27.

Before we start thinking this is in any way romantic, he committed this knowingly (called his girlfriend to tell her he loved her) and did so despite his two year old daughter. As cinematic as this all is, it's actually very sad, sure, but more so, very gross. We know better. Come on. It's not Woodstock and it's not Punk and it's not even Grunge, all the forward "I'm young and it's a revolution, damnit!" movements in music and art and writing and politics have kind of been made, or at least, because of those who have come before us, have been made way easier and therefore has made this time of shock-value rabble-rousing pretty damn extinct (in my assertion, all we have left is technology wars, which is actually very cool). So what's up with this ridiculous shit! Even hipsters are over, are people really still selfishly dying from heroin for God's sake? This is just another landmark for people who get older but refuse the next and better stages of their lives to still skulk around in Ramones T-Shirts and bemoan when New York MEANT SOMETHING and was all thriving and filthy and dirty and therefore better. But you know what? That's bunk, because people only say that about New York, or any place for that matter, because it was the world they lived in when they were 20-27 years old. When they were full of promise and hadn't done everything already and they had a zest for life and everything seemed new and exciting: love, money, substances.

New York wasn't cooler in the 70's. There were shooting galleries and garbage fires and general malaise and gang violence and all that. Just because CBGB's was home to a burgeoning scene doesn't mean that scene was worth all the rest of the crap that came along with it or even that the scene was that good. But, you know, people who say that it was were young then. And the thing about being young is....everything is good! It's like that phenomenon when a guy gets laid in, say Ottowa, and then later relates to his friends, "Dudes, Ottowa is awesome!" No, it's not. Anecdotal good times aren't evidence, and are colored by factors that have nothing at all to do with Ottowa. And that's what people are saying right now about New York in 2005.

I know, this is what's being said. I can't believe it either. Now that Dash Snow is dead, he's become an icon for the hipster movement and everywhere you go people are going on about how NY was SO MUCH COOLER in 2005. No it wasn't! You're just four years older and you're pissed, because you're immature. People who choose life beyond one-night stands and pukefests that seemed so awesome a few years back are not losers who've lost their edge. It's like this, you thought you kicked ass when you were 13 didn't you? Was life so much more awesome then? No it wasn't. But somehow when this very same notion is applied to the time when you were 21, it holds water. Maybe because you can have sex and drive and do drugs and buy things finally. So you don't romanticize 13, you romanticize 21 because it represents the years when you finally had access to everything in the world and still had the naivete to think it was brand new and you ruled.

The thing is, if you don't think you can kick ass at 30 or 40 or 50, you never kicked ass to begin with. Sorry Kurt Cobain, Sid Vicious, Dash Snow. I had nascent crushes on all of you but I hope I never, ever be so naive as to think that's cool of you.

Also, this is the best thing that I've read on the subject of us as aging kids in New York City. It's just very good if you're not easily offended.

WTF

The first public death that affected me was Kurt Cobain, when I was 13. I cried for days, Then I was unaffected, an affectation where I was consumed in teenaged angst where nothing bothered me and nothing was considered by me unless it was my own selfish little bubble, who I loved, who didn't love me back, where I was going, why I wasn't there yet.

And now I think with last year's death of Heath Ledger, I felt oddly strange, upset, for a man I did not know, whose apartment I passed daily and did not realize, who if I saw while alive, would not care. And this week, there was Ed McMahon, who while important was old, Farrah Fawcett, who was the same to me, some abstract creature that did not relate to me in any way, I knew she meant something, I just didn't know to whom. I knew her death was sad, but for me, for cancer, there is time to reflect.

Michael Jackson, a man I grew up watching descend, his brilliance matched only by the swiftness in which he fell--much of it perhaps in his own creation, he was the first of us to overshare to nearly blog when there was no reason to blog, he was the first celebrity I knew of to melt down over and over, and why I knew this I cannot say. At the time I was too young for even grunge, even though I thought I was just old enough really, and I didn't care to understand disco, and thought pop was garbage (though grunge WAS pop, I see that now). I wasn't even a year old when Thriller came out, my mother told me that when I did, it terrified me, and again, far before anything else I mourned, I cried for him then, because I thought he was coming to kill me. The video, long-since considered a masterpiece, gave me nightmares, I hear. I saw it later, saw something which was mystifying and amazing and only scary in its complete awesomeness, but by the time I saw it--and saw that in him--he was not that man any more.

He was something else, a fabulous disaster to us, the grabbing masses, something that they called Sid Vicious thirty years ago when he self-destructed, and now I can't help but feel in impenetrable sadness as I watch hours of videos of imitators and news coverage feeling like this man, this poor man, was a joke to us in his twilight years. Today, at least we remember him well. I must be getting old or things are just different in the world, but now I see death and it comes very often, perhaps more than anything else.

Tonight I'm saying WTF. This is horribly sad to me, and I do know why, because it is death, and he was a man who must have felt an inordinate amount of pain for the past fifteen years, and part of me wonders why he couldn't have died before he was tarnished, as awful as that seems, because today we care about him more than we had for decades. Today we remember him more fondly, there are no Walmart boys' pants half off jokes, today we remember his genius, and we should have, we should have before.

And yet. If he did what he did...who can say. The man is dead and I for one, hope he can finally rest in peace.

Friends with an Ex, Part Deux

So there was a time on this blog when I asked, can you be friends with an ex? The discussion got good and then I got conflicted. All my exes (save one who flat-out refuses to talk to me because he thinks that talking to me will break up his engagement--come on I'm not that evil/fascinating/rich for that to even be a consideration! Think about it, Person Who Hates Me) want to be/have wanted to be friends at some point.

Methinks there is an ulterior motive sometimes. Others, I can't say. When you break up with someone (or someone breaks up with you) isn't one person basically saying to the other person "I deem you unworthy as of this moment" and shouldn't both parties just straight disappear forever? Won't you always be rehashing old times and pissing off your current boyfriend/girlfriend? What is the point unless you are going to try it again, and btw, don't ever try it again if you broke up because that trust can never come back, right?

I am full of questions tonight after an ex called long-distance because of a song 'that reminded me of him' and I sort of asked all these questions inappropriately. I sort of had a grandstanding speech when the guy was just trying to tell me he missed me. I sort of said, "We're fake friends, not real friends! I want real friends and we can never be real friends!" I got hung up on. I don't recommend following in my path. It feels crappy.

But crappy or not, is it true? Or am I clinging to some antiquated idea of what friends are and affixing myself to the pain of our relationship which ended years ago! Will I forever be the brat who can't let bygones be bygones?

I'm dying to know...

Everyone is Pregnant

Is there something* in the air? No less than four of my good friends are pregnant. Of course these fine young women are off married in other states. Is this a suburban** vs. city thing? Or is it just the whole world against NYC thing?

Are we all destined to continue a prolonged adolescence in New York where we don't want to get married until 30 if even then or have babies until 35+?

So many questions remain unanswered. Like how they're figuring out to pay for school for their unborn, and how I'm trying to figure out how to pay for school***...for myself****.


*My choice not to use "semen" instead of "something" proves that I am actually mature.

**My choice to use "suburban" even those these lovely girls live in Seattle, Philly and Jersey proves that I have finally succumbed to the wave of pretension around me, and therefore am not mature, and am simply, a pompous jackass who thinks NYC is the end-all be-all of the world.

***My choice to apply to schools everywhere except New York proves that I am less of a jackass than previously thought.

****Less of a jackass, maybe. But no less selfish....hey no one's going to make my life cool for me. It's up to me to do that now. And you know, I promise when I have a baby I'll spoil it rotten. Until then, there are plenty (about to be) around to teach me how.

Oh Brain, Where Art Thou?

Pardon me, I've been away,
Where exactly I can't quite say,
Burning bridges, Just about
Stamping career embers out....

Yes, about that. So there comes a time in every youngish-getting-old-as-hell writer's life when he/she is faced with a job opportunity which would essentially be managing person on a very large editing project but that is not offered full-time, nor permanent and would interfere with other projects that writer has going, so she has to turn it down. Fine.

But does that very same youngish-getting old as hell writer have to take an artistic integrity stand on another little project, one with a magazine she actually loves and hardly ever gets work from?

Because she spent so much time crafting a *fair and subtly balanced profile that was oh so nuanced (hey, we all think we're geniuses--zing!)* that after a revision became something she wasn't so happy to put her name on (PS Yes, said writer knows that she is an absolute nobody and does not have clout to flex) ?

With a bulleted email, no less, because the edit doesn't do the subject matter justice even though said writer kinda disliked the thing said writer was profiling? Bulleted in such a way so that the incensed email pointed out where the new director had not only substantive errors, but stylistic? Did said writer have to point out to editor, and by proxy, new director where they had made grammatical, fact-checking, and, by God, punctuation errors just to make a point?

In this economy, with this writer, the answer is yes. In the words of Homer Simpson, "I wish, I wish, I hadn't killed that fish."

SH*T. Guess I'm not getting hired there anymore. Hey, at least I fought the power...right? Right. Back to the children's book, which by the way is going swimmingly...no seriously, it's pretty awesome.

Idiocy

In times like these, blogs, links. books and communication are more important than they ever were before (plus I've got a lot more time to read them!).

I always loved the rejection letters given to now long dead and famous actors ("'Lolita' is nothing more than an exercise in perversion, and not even a very good one at that' comes to mind). And today, as we're all feeling like we're not good enough, smart enough, adept enough to handle the economic downturn*, I give you those smarter than us, who also act like idiots sometimes.

Inept literaries. Love them.


*I have a friend who upon learning his job was gone, immediately got drunk and then decided he would leave the apartment he's already paid the month's rent for, move in with his mother-in-law in LA as his wife stays behind in the apartment, left to clean up everything and find a job in LA all by herself, and she's a newlywed. Oh and did I mention that the gentleman in question has no prospects at all in LA, and could instead stay with his wife as she tries to pick up their lives together instead of insisting that she do it alone, while he goes and will of course, hate LA, having no resources and staying with HER mother without his wife, thereby forgoing any chance of a lasting relationship because they already don't get along and now there is no buffer. Oh and PS, they aren't hiring in LA either--it's not a magical world where jobs exist, there's no gold mines anymore.

Hooray for Kittens (AKA Yes, I'm Unemployed, What's it to You, Huh?)

Kitten cams...hooray! Now when I'm staring at the wall trying to figure out where it all went wrong, with one hand stuffed into a bag of Milano cookies and the other clutching a tear-stained copy of my resume, I can do this between crying bouts!

Honestly, I love kittens and this is why the internet was invented--to promote fluffballs of joy. They spend all day jumping on each other! This is the same reason I always wanted a bunch of siblings.

Sweet.