pink with spots

one of the cruelest minor offenses to sibling duty that my sister committed as a teenager was her stubborn refusal to tell me what one of her jellybeans actually tasted like. i was wearing braces, and generally honored the orthodontist's ban on sticky candies of all types, including jelly beans. my sister was enjoying her gastronomic freedom and private stash of candy, and i just wanted to know what the pink speckled ones tasted like. she insisted it tasted like "pink with spots."

best wishes

i was ill last week, and the recovery process wasn't as bad as the general desire to keep not going in to work. usually, my health tends to break down right around the time i could use a break anyway. that might once more have been the case, but i enjoyd the break a little too much. that, combined with a serious lack of motivation i've struggled with lately made the return to work a bit tougher than it should have been. the good news is that i've been overall pretty happy for 3 months straight. not to say every single day of that stretch has been awesome, but i'm running on a really good streak here. maybe it's come to a temporary end or maybe i'll be fine again tomorrow.

what's the matter with rain?

beautiful day for a picnic in the park. what is it about rain that ruins things like that? yes, it's wet and can make you cold, but it seems like it's no fun even when it is warm enough that it's ok. do we really hate being wet that much? i guess so.

at least it was brown rice

how has your day been? i just took a break from lunch, which i ate out of a saucepan, on my bunkbed, in the dark. lunch today was cold rice.

it was a farce?

the corrections
-jonathan franzen

i'm still not denying that jonathan franzen is a good writer, i just hope i don't read him again. this book was supposed to be a lot funnier than i found it. i guess married couples being horrible to each other just isn't that funny to me. i have to say, don't read this book unless you want to feel awful.

jonathen franzen is weird

i don't care how good of an author he is, i don't care how many awards he's won, i am so not happy (now that i remember which author he is) that i have a 500-page book of his to read on my travels this weekend.

oh well

social experiment

ingredients:

1 shiny music player

1 ordinary workplace

1 forgetful individual

1 evening


will the forgetful individual find the music player in the morning? will people from the ordinary workplace discover the music player, and if so, will they be friendly people who place it safely in a drawer? will the evening be completely uneventful?



stay tuned...

half alive, half dead, half working

my roommate was out of town a few weekends ago and i nearly killed his tomato plant. there's this little spray bottle next to it that you're supposed to use to keep it watered. once you've forgotten to water a three-foot high tomato plant for a couple days, you're unlikely to catch up no matter how heartily you spray the water at it.

half asleep

this morning, convinced there was no point in getting out of bed, i was writing a short story, in my head, half asleep. it seemed to be going well. i'm not sure if that's a good sign, or if i'm just delusional. i didn't write all that much, i think a scene was unfolding in a parking garage. if i had to guess, i'm thinking it involved a car, with the door open, and a man. that's all i can remember.

cards

one of my friends is interested in designing a greeting card. turns out it's not for anyone in particular; she just had an idea for something and wanted to see it to completion. the fascinating part to me is that she said it's not that often that she'll think of things that she wants to create. i have ideas about all sorts of things all the time, and i hadn't really thought of the possibility of someone not experiencing that. not all ideas are any good, and most of the ones i have are too tiny to really mean anything; they need development. that's natural, i would think. of course, i keep thinking about jack hannahan's name for no reason at all, and there's not much point to that. he plays third base for the oakland a's, and there's not much reason to think about jack hannahan himself, except for that fairly interesting name of his. sometimes i think extensively about some name i don't really like the sound of; it's like getting an annoying song stuck in your head.

life changes

various things have stuck with me longer and more solidly than they really should have. a t/a for college physics, grading one of my papers, corrected my misspelling of the word 'sentence' emphatically enough that i finally got it in my head that i'd been wrong. i had a friend in high school who insisted on pointing out this spelling problem of mine, but i'd ignored him. oh my arrogance.

reading, by the way, is a priority. nothing really gets in the way of reading. writing, on the other hand, is going to be of far greater importance. i've got some good starts on a few projects, most recently a biographical piece i like in concept. i need to work on expressing myself in simple language.