Posts from — October 2005

being name-checked in the lead story at Salon (okay, just page 4, and wow, thanks, Steve Almond) the night before you leave for a trip on which you’d resolutely decided not to bring your laptop for a change, effectively keeping you from following the various blogospheric reactions and responses and snickering and shitflicking that could ensue as a result of the article (though you don’t imagine any of it will be aimed at you (but if it was, though, you’d prefer to know (which just goes to show how much of a freak you are (which is pretty damn freaky)))). I mean it KILLS YOU to not bring the thing but you know it’s the right thing, philospophically and everything. So despite the temptation to keep logging on to see what everyone has to say about Almond’s article, my honest labor of self-reflection will not involve lugging my iBook and all its cords and attachments through airport security. Not this time, at least.

(But I can check my email, right? If there’s an internet cafe somewhere?)

See you in NJ tonight…

I like reading Miss Snark’s agent blog, because she writes aboout slogging through manuscript submissions, and since I do that for a living too, I feel very productive reading her every morning, even when I’m actually not slogging through submissions and editing half a dozen picture books and two novels in varying stages of production at that particular moment. (Though for the most part I have been doing those things, which is why you haven’t read much here lately.) And I especially like Miss Snark when she addresses some wee itchy little tiny dustmite of a detail about writing or publishing or submissions etiquette that has always bothered me. Like business cards, and whether writers should give them to editors and agents, and vice versa. No, really, this preoccupies me way too much. Cards are swell and cards are dumb. And what the hell kind of opinion is that? Oh, I’LL TELL YOU.

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and/or preventative meaures, since I’m flying out to read in New Jersey next week (Thursday the 13th here! At 7:00 pm!) and would rather not be sick, and also because I’m a big paranoid baby who hates any kind of physical discomfort:

Heating ginger ale in the microwave and drinking it with a little lemon juice and honey, and maybe–later–whiskey.

Every three hours or so, dropping one of those effervescent tablet thingies “into a small amount of plain water,” per the package instructions, and drinking that, too.

Trusting the warm ginger ale more, somehow.

Having Indian Tasty Bites for dinner (or, rather, since it’s just the one package, a single Tasty BITE, even though actually eating one requires lots of tasty biting), because they’re (it’s?) nice and spicy and thus my sinuses are happy.

Drinking tea when I’m not drinking goofy fizzy things.

Imagining that when I pee (which is often) I am flushing out the toxins, even though deep down I doubt toxins have much to do with my cold.

Going to bed early instead of writing a decent blog entry.

I fell into some kind of internet wormhole where time appeared to elapse at a normal rate in my daily life while I worked at my job and bought a car, and watched America’s Next Top Model (my heart beats KIM KIM KIM and CORYN CORYN CORYN and maybe just a little bit for LISA, though she could stand to be medicated a little, okay, a LOT), and counted Weight Watcher points, and then didn’t count Weight Watcher points and pretended it was “core,” and drank beer, and caught up with friends, and danced. The usual. But on the internet, time lost all meaning, and it seems I was sleeping for weeks and weeks in my airtight cyberspace pod. Then again, maybe I needed the rest.

Apparently summer’s over. For months there’s been a Dove Girl in an ad on the side of a bus shelter in my neighborhood, and tonight, when I drove by, I wondered if she was cold now, in her underwear like that.

Now that the site’s redesigned, the comments feature works a little differently than it used to. It’s set up to prevent huge onslaughts of gibbering robot comment spam, and over the past few months I’ve realized these measures allow me to moderate the incoming comments in other ways, too. My dumb little rules are as follows:

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