this is where we look for things

Get your own
 diary at DiaryLand.com! contact me older entries

1.10.01 - 10:56:38

ok, so there's a guy in the office down the hall who can only be described as a curmudgeon. i've never met a real live curmudgeon before. i thought he might become a scrooge around christmas time, but no, he clung firmly to his curmudgeonness.

you know what's fun? emails from japanese authors without full command of the english language. i mean, not only are they amusing, they're just so nice. i should visit japan sometime. i don't think people who aren't japanese have the capacity to be so gracious and yet so intensely competitive. yeah, i know. it's really politically incorrect for me to generalize about an entire country. i'm sorry.

i'm writing with a very sharp pencil today. i never ever ever use pencils, but you have to on accepted manuscripts. and this pencil is just crazy sharp. i thought it might be a harder pencil than a number two, but it wasn't. fascinating, isn't it?

the gourds' cover of gin and juice is right up there with travis' cover of baby, one more time as far as amusing covers go. i never use the word funny anymore. everything is amusing. when i see funny, i think laugh out loud. when i see amusing i see a sneaky little half-grin. kinda shady. i wonder if that's what i really mean.

it's gray and rainy outside today. yuck.

what part of 'do not start a sentence with an acronym' is so difficult to understand?

i watched a dateline or 48 hours or something about the national spelling bee a couple of weeks ago. it was ridiculous, watching that, watching how important this spelling bee becomes to these contestants. it becomes the focus of their lives. and i'm sitting here on my couch watching this girl burst into tears after misspelling a word, knowing that this contest is of absolutely no consequence and that she will see herself on network television a year from now or two years or five and be embarrassed as hell about it. it's strange to watch the ways things change in your life, how things that are so important become entirely insignificant. sometimes it becomes difficult to keep things in perspective when it's impossible to say that anything is really objectively important. and it's scary when you're deciding what to let go of and what to hang on to and what to throw in the trash for good because you can't go back and fix things all the time. there are a lot of people i know who have burned bridges completely, but most of them also know how to blaze a trail. it's easy to think that elementary school or high school or your college fraternity is the only place you're singled out for being different, but it's not true. the playing field is never completely even and people will always think you're weird and they will never fully understand. either you let it get to you and you change or you decide that it's their problem and move on with your life. sometimes it's worth it to take the difficult route. you're more likely to hang on to yourself going down that road. i would extend that metaphor, but it might make me puke.

previous - next

about me - read my profile! read other Diar
yLand diaries! recommend my diary to a friend! Get
 your own fun + free diary at DiaryLand.com!