Starting over! Why not? It’s my party and I can cry if I want to.
Do you know that I have been writing this blog for ten years? Who even was I when I began? I didn’t really know what a blog was or what the internet was for. I hadn’t even met my old man. My snoopy’s parents probably weren’t even born yet!! I had not yet seen Inglourious Basterds. I had never read a DFW book–I don’t think I had ever even heard of him. September 11 had just happened and I was super upset about the war in Afghanistan. Ha ha! Oh youth.
Have any of you been reading this shit for that long? What a journey we have been on together. A very long, boring journey composed only of words.
I have become friends with many of you people IRL. Some of you have been commenting for ages and I don’t know anything about you but feel like I know you IRL. One of you mailed me a bicycle one time in exchange for a sack of CDs. I have heard amazing tales and had amazing wisdom bestowed upon me. I have gotten many annoying comments from dudes who don’t like something I’ve said about Jack Kerouac.
I get very stressed out about people in my straight life finding this blog and connecting it with my real name and then not hiring me for a job because I use the F word or something. I try to be careful about talking about my field, not using real names, etc., but after awhile when I see there are over 1,000 posts and I don’t remember what most of them are even about, I get freaked. Perhaps I have said something about Beethoven or the nation of Israel that someone on a search committee will not like. I mean, I know it is an elaborate thing to fear but this is a new dawn and it could totally happen. May have already happened???
So anyway.
So anyway! The advice business is going quite well. I’d like to invite everyone to feel free to comment over there. Advice is often very well-aided by crowd sourcing. Also you should ask Andrew some questions! He has very good straightforward advice that you can actually follow, whereas I feel like mine is all like “write in your journal! Read Frankenstein!”
The other business that is booming is the business of me not getting any work done and just sitting around all day feeling bad about myself! Also the business of being 320th in line for the Wolf Hall sequel at the library. And the business of eating so much asparagus. Also the kale business is booming–all my kale sprouted like gangbusters. It’s Kale City, copyright David Rees, up in here!
Speaking of kale, here is a great way to eat it:
- shred some kale
- put it in a bowl
- mince a bunch of garlic and put it in the bowl too
- squeeze like half a lemon in the bowl
- dash of olive oil
- put some salt in there
- stir it up!
total health blast. I will call that salad Kale Health Blast City. Garlic and vitamin C for the immune system; the lemon also apparently helps you digest the kale; the kale has iron and calcium up the wazzoo; and the salt probably isn’t good for you but who cares.
My husband is back to hanging the laundry on the line outside like an old-timey peasant hausfrau. They dry in like 2 seconds and they smell delightful. The other day we went to see a 35mm print of Jaws on the big screen and it was incredible. I was with a bunch of people who had never really seen it (!!) and they were all gratifyingly amazed by the excellent craftsmanship and performances. The big screen experience was great because you could finally see what some of the traditional fuss is about, w/r/t for example Spielberg’s supposedly amazing use of foreground/background tension. Oh yeah, I get it now!!
Our yard is Wasp City. Where do all the wasps come from? I want them to all die but I’m too scared to go on a killing rampage. I suspect they are living in the abandoned trailer in our yard.
