sorry

i've just gotten home and my entire room is full of discarded cheese wrappers. there are about three fist-sized holes in the back wall leading to the closet, which means the closet has to be full of plaster dust, which means i need to go to the dry cleaners. my neighbors left a message on my cell phone about some noise they heard earlier, but no one was home today.

adeppp.i3

i don't care about your

no

no

stop now


ablip

joerp

-please stop reading and go purchase some cheese

crunchkrunchchrunch cruchn

we have taken your cheese

sowh us the wsiss chese

all are awanting chees!

will nt

not standfro this

no cheese!

i like swiss cheese

let's be honest, how many foods are iconic in nature because they provide an easy way to:

-attack someone you're debating (your argument has more holes than swiss cheese)

-des.

sorry, the rest of this message was destroyed in a robot attack.

fighting

mayhem

bad dialogue

yukky!!!./1

a theme develops

cake is good. i also like ice cream.

we are watching

we are the evangelists, we are artists producers and performers.
we are watching you, and eating your cheese.
we are forming small groups to debate your excesses.
we are party to your losses.
we inhabit phone banks.
we stay late in order to read your mail.
we have not learned manners.
we have abandoned ordinary lives in order to pursue you.
our mouths are dry with the thirst for redemption.
all along, our leaders have followed our progress.
they are grooming us for future success.
we wish to prove worthy of their remaining confidences.
our hands are bloody with the wounds of eager servants.

a brighter day seems to us only another.
our steps cannot be measured for all their numbers.
the battles we survived tore no limbs from our bodies.
the tales we brought back taught no stranger our ways.

your toast published successfully

we become jealous of a breakfast food. 'sorry, the toast is not available this morning; it's on a book tour.'

find me a dessert or two

today is one of those days when i tried too hard to enjoy shopping. i had not been looking for clothes in some time, but i felt compelled to give it a whirl this afternoon. the good news is i had been at the library previously, where i found a joshua ferris short story featuring the characters from 'then we came to the end,' a fact that made me smile a little. since i have a half constructed rock band following me around in my head, it was nice to think of him working on these fictional chicagoans before they were ready to be dumped into a novel. i read a page and a half of another story of his that was wholly different in voice, and decided maybe you can't make a career out of writing that unique 'then we came to the end' style. is it too unique to work consistently? somehow it might be distracting, or suited only for certain passages. i'm curious to see if it comes out in the other story.

hold out your hand

i don't want to smile for the camera or listen to what you have to say. i'm turning my head slowly to stare out the window. the lawn looks different than last year; most of the dirt patches are gone, and the flowers by the door seem to have blown away in one of the rainstorms. you're still talking to me, which is difficult because i'm not here.

park, 2pm

i picked all the leaves off a tree today and crumbled them in my fingers. i took bits of leaves and threw them on the ground. i made sure no one was watching me and jumped on the piles of leaf bits. i removed my shoes and socks and scraped them against the sharp pavement. slowly lowering myself to the ground, i lay down on my stomach and stared into the mashed plant matter before me. my nose prickled with their broken scent. i gathered my strength and blew them, each tiny stack, with breaths that sang softly to the trees.

viva knoxville

i have made little progress on the song 'g was a serial killer' (thank you semi-conscious brain for that one), but that's ok, because i should have plenty of time to work on it in graduate school.

i may have a broken laptop, messy hair, and a phone that looks like it's been chewed on (it hasn't, at least not by me), but i was privileged recently to find my favorite soda beverage, which i have not seen in stores since college. yeah, that's right. unfortunately, my primary source of this carbonated bliss is one hundred ten miles from my apartment.

don't be ashamed

i wore a t-shirt with your face on it today.

disappointed

i am struggling right now to accept the fact that i cannot compose lengthy pieces on a device with a tiny screen. perhaps i should just give up rather than try to explain what footwear people should wear with a sport coat. as a warning before your brain is overwhelmed, shoes that can't be worn with sportcoats (soon to be discussed) also do not go with preppy wool winter coats. the only way this will work for you is if you are the mildly hapless guy with a preppy girlfriend. if you want to be that guy, just hope she thinks it's cute and that it isn't just another reason she doesn't take you seriously. should you truly aspire to be that guy, note that this also means you pay full price at preppy chains for clothes you look silly wearing. you may think hipsters look weird, but at least they want to look weird.

personally, i have never dated a preppy girl. is that a new goal for the year for me? um...uh, writing it here means it is not happening.

things that are important

in a freak accident sunday, i destroyed the lcd of my working laptop. now i have two broken ones and an ancient but cute little computer i bought in my "i want to do computer support for a living so i have to own a couple" days. that four lb wonder helped me, in the days when campuswide wireless was new and exciting, to take notes in class while attracting curious attention because it ran linux. of course i can't remember my linux password or figure out how to free significant hard drive space on...yes...what may now count as my most functional machine.

i found today that it is much easier to spend money on awesome clothes than to spend ten times that amount fixing a computer. my "future" plan to survive with an even tinier linux book in grad school has now become my plan to avoid committing funds until i know if i was accepted. not getting in to school is going to feel like an enormous windfall, but now it is time to admit that i would still want to go in the future.

on a more frivolous note, be aware that shoes can kill any outfit. they can also save many outfits when chosen properly. my old roommate c said that nice shoes are the key to looking good for a date. you can render most well conceived outfits date- appropriate just by making sure to wear something a little nicer than sneakers. conversely, the right sneakers are the perfect way to tone down a boring office outfit and look appropriately laid back. i feel like it might be worth talking about the "right" sneakers. one easy rule: never wear running shoes with sport coat. the people who can break this rule don't need my advice to begin with. for all you borderline talents who think they can get away with it, i'm not sure i can stop you right now. just promise never, ever, to wear running shoes designed after 1993 with a sport coat. this is especially true for sneakers from germany's second finest athletic brand. like germany's next-to-best automaker, they have clearly lost their way stylistically. they seem to understand that they should make new shoes that share more than names and logos with classic models. still, they consistently get it wrong. one company that has been successfully building new visions of the past has no lengthy history of it's own to build on, and continues to shine as a fiefdom of the number one snowboard maker. it all goes to show, it's not so much who literally came before you as who you really follow and whether you've got the right concept of what to accomplish.

the winter coat concept does make it tougher to properly attire yourself in colder months. no matter what the season, you are still limited by this simple rule: an outfit should work no matter which combination of layers you end up wearing by the end of the day. possibly, you might think it's a waste to worry overmuch about which shirt you wear under a sweater. even if you never take the sweater off, it is the completeness of the outfit that is important. it might even help you stay a little sharper out there.

i'm sticking with you

it's okay that you hate my cat.

i won't worry about the carpet, it was old and ugly.

we might have to take fewer walks during daylight hours, but i'll get over it.

i'm getting tired of those sneakers too. don't worry about it.

whatever happens, i will never again criticize you for brushing your teeth.

your left ear is perfectly normal in size.

i will ignore your friends, i will continue to ignore your friends, and i will not retaliate when your friends compare me to various animals.

toffee is overrated anyway.

i promise to drive with the dome light on.

don't even move an inch

sense and sensibility
-jane austen

i'd read it before, but this time through i got more of the subtleties of it. i would enjoy studying some of the historical context of this book just to see exactly how snarky jane austen is; there are moments that i, the relatively uninformed reader, don't know whether she's trying for irony or not. i may not end up following through on this, but i can see doing some research to enrich my reading experience.

it's too early to be good early

put down the phone.

we are doing you a favor.

which brings us to this evening's entertainment

i brought gloves on my trip, for no real reason other than a desire to be prepared. i had long since given in the reality that no foreseeable scenario would leave me exhausted at the bottom of a snow-covered mountain saturday, but i still brought the gloves. around nine pm, having drugged myself with another dose of internet-streamed television, i decided to review some job postings i had repeatedly ignored. only then did i start to think about the applications i'd sent out a month ago. i'd given up already, but for a time i was hovering over my mobile phone every minute or two, desperate in the wish that a voice mail would show up offering a chance to interview for one of those openings. what i hadn't counted on, however, was an email reply. my resume has my present email address, but i'd applied to these jobs through a site that is linked to an email i rarely check. looking through the last week or two of messages, i found nothing of interest, but i remember that it had been some time since i'd applied for the job. sure enough, out of two applications i sent in early january, i was asked to go in for one interview. unfortunately, it took me a month to respond. after lobbing snowballs into the emptiness across the street, i came back inside to hang my gloves up to dry, calm down, and penitently seek a second chance at that job.

does the world exist any longer?

i'm just checking

...because i think it doesn't

no, really, make me try harder

i had a difficult time on the way home tonight, but then it's never easy to come home from a lousy day at the office and find a dozen people waving placards in front of your apartment building. it's even worse when they're shouting and pointing at you. i thought my wave of staff cuts had passed so gradually and carefully that nothing was really going to come of it. well, it turns out that my web team thinks i took took ideas they presented to me last summer and used them as the basis for the site's new template. they were out for a drink tuesday and ran into intern janelle (who still has her unpaid job, of course), who was there meeting a college friend of hers - my former personal chef, marc. marc left me two years ago because i had started talking about eating vegan for a week, a plan he saw as both ludicrous and potentially harmful. he was afraid not just that he'd be fixing vegan sausages and lentil soups for a week, but that i'd trick myself into becoming a full-on vegetarian. well, he was right about that.

so anyway, marc quit rather than watch his creative options become limited by what he saw as a permanent dietary change. he harbors a lot of bad blood, mostly due to the stale french fries he used to find in the kitchen trash on weekends, when his carefully prepared meals were going untouched. he always felt i owed him a better severance than i'd offered, but it was all in his contract. good grief. people wonder why i'm still keeping a legal team. please.

two years later, it was my bad luck that janet introduced him to piers and khaled, who have become increasingly angry with me these past few days, as they've slowly drunk away their own severance checks. upon hearing of my staff cuts (marc always hated the site, so of course he'd been out of the loop), marc made a few calls to some chefs who'd worked catered events for me in the past. most of them hate me even more than marc does. people don't seem to understand why i need professional help to serve popcorn and carrot juice, but i pay for quality, you know? i figured that my habitual use of craigslist was wise, considering i can never get one chef to work more than two parties. well, unfortunately for me, freelance craigslist chefs have some kind of web forum or something, and the url seems to have the words "no," "carrot," and "juice" incorporated in it. i've always been who i am, although my preferences may change, and i'm sorry that my ex-employees have so much pent-up anger over the limitations my choices have placed on them. apparently, my parties have resulted in an organized, angry online community of freelance chefs. they've always kept to themselves, stewing in their own frustrations with me and other past employers, but when they heard i was downsizing, marc had them ready for blood. thus, i arrived home to a mob of angry chefs and web developers shouting and jeering at me. just when i thought i'd successfully navigated through the situation without so much as throwing an elbow, marc and khaled came tearing out from behind a huge potted plant, savagely basting me with turkey juices and plastering me with giant capital letters cut from the newspaper. that seems like some seriously weird stuff to premeditate. it's funny what people spend their time on when they're out of work.