Little, Yellow, Different
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Packing unpacking
- (the scene: we are unpacking in a smaller house. I'm a minimalist, K is a hoarder, I mean, collector, so we are having... disagreements.)
- K: Do we want this book?
- Me: What book?
- K: "Do It: A Guide to Living Your Dreams."
- E: Aren't we already following our dreams?
- K: Yes. You're torturing me, thus you living your dreams.
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Everything will be fine Two sorta-related stories I wrote on Medium about genetics, mental disorders and walking on a Texas service road.
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While watching a preview of the Beyoncé concert on HBO
- K: You've seen your share of concerts. Which has been your favorite one?
- E: I dunno. There's a lot I've liked.
- K: ... have you ever seen Amy Grant live?
- E: (sigh) yes. Twice. With other people.
- K: could other people see these "other people?"
- E: (death glare)
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Are you f’ing kidding me, Medium Digest?
Medium has recommended the following Medium articles in an e-mail this morning:
- The garbage that could kill the whole human race
- Are We Out of Big Ideas? What we think are great ideas aren’t. What if we’re out of them?
- While you are all briefly worried about black men getting shot by police Here’s a few other things to worry about
I have one I could write right now:
- 10 amazing brands of rope to hang yourself with, now that life is no longer worth living
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By Beez/Mirage, 1992.
This is an old ANSI I drew for a pirated bulletin board over twenty years ago. (!) It’s crazy that this art form is making a resurgence again.
(via text-mode)
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To his defense, some people really don't like cantaloupe
- Me, in the kitchen: Babe, do you mind if I store the cut-up cantaloupe with this pineapple?
- K: Do you mind if I take a shit in this living room?
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Mother's Day. On the phone, in Chinese, English in ALL CAPS.
- Ernie's Cellphone: ring, ring.
- Ernie: Ma.
- Mom: My game broke.
- Ernie: Your game broke?
- Mom: Yes, the one you bought me a long time ago. BOY GAME.
- Ernie: GAME BOY, mom. It's called a GAME BOY.
- Mom: I have nothing to play with when I watch my television shows now. You don't want me to get Alzheimers, don't you? It helps with my brain.
- Ernie: Uh-huh.
- Mom: But only if it's not too expensive. If that's the case, never mind. I don't want to give you any added stress.
- Ernie: Of course not, ma.
- Mom: I tried to go to the store, and when I showed it to them, the American man said they stopped selling those four years ago. Why would they do that? Can you buy it online?
- Ernie: What does it look like?
- Mom: I don't know. It's Nintendo.
- Ernie: Mom, but what kind of Nintendo?
- Mom: [pause] White.
- Ernie: No, there are different versions of Nintendos. How many SCREENS are there?
- Mom: WHAT IS SCREEN?
- Ernie: [sigh] Can you read off something on there?
- Mom: Okay. There is... S...
- Ernie: And...
- Mom: S... L.... O... T.
- Ernie: Mom, that spells SLOT.
- Mom: [pause] I DON'T KNOW.
- Ernie: Are there two windows?
- Mom: What? Windows? There are two screens, but a screen isn't a window.
- Ernie: Okay. Does it have the letter D and the letter S on there?
- Mom: Yes. Why?
- Ernie: Okay. Nevermind. I know what to get you.
- Mom: Okay. Don't forget to take a walk. TAKE WALK.
- [pause]
- Ernie's Cellphone: ring, ring.
- Ernie: Ma.
- Mom: And thank you for the flowers. They're lovely.
- Ernie: Of course.
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That Time I Went to Shen Yun Something I posted on Medium which I’m cross-posting here in case you don’t read Medium.
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“OONTZ oontz oontz oontz OONTZ
oontz oontz oontz OONTZ oontz oontz oontz
OONTZ oontz I’M… SO… HIGH”— A little haiku about the Ultra Music Festival. (via sobehaikus) -
That moment where I almost trash 24,000 words of stories and start over again from scratch
Remember how I was working on a self-publishing a book? Or at least, make progress on it? I said I was going to do that. And now it’s been oh, a year and some change, and there’s been nothing.
So what happened?
At first, I was doing really well. Two Christmas’ ago, I had self published a test run of some short stories about my family to some friends and I gave it out to folks at our annual Christmas gathering. I wrote and I edited and I re-wrote again. I worked at Starbucks and I spent a New Years at a cabin in Georgia with no wifi. At the end of the day I had a rough draft that came to around twenty four thousand words - not enough for a novel length piece, just some stuff to see if it got the attention of the people who read it. The folks who did read it - for the most part, liked it.
My next step - and this is the deadline that’s been tougher for me to hit - was to have fifty thousand words of content about my family. The thought is that from there, I could find an editor to help me make it more of a cohesive story, maybe get a Kickstarter to have some assistance write the design of the book, finally cross “write a book” off my bucket list.
But no. Turns out that this has been tougher than I thought it would be, thanks to the following, in order of magnitude of excuses:
- I started a full time job less than a year ago, after a lousy two months of freelancing and worrying about where the next paycheck would come from. But a full time job with a steady paycheck and domestic partner health insurance means a sudden lack of wanting to do anything after work that involved thinking.
- My blog used to be funny, and so everyone - me included - expects my writing to be funny. And then things in my life became heavy, or at the very least the way I responded to these things in my life changed, and so I wrote in other ways. When I write stuff like this out, I relive it. And it could get exhausting, no matter how much of a funny spin I make things.
So I tried writing funny stuff again, or at least did my best to put a funny spin on things - but otherwise I wrote some pieces that came off as angry and bitter. Those didn’t get published. - Some stuff happened from my last trip home which, uhm, changes the narrative from what I previously written. Obviously I’ve had no problem writing about it before, but does that mean I have to write this thing all over again? My God, I’m tired of writing.
- Which brings me to that point: I’m getting a little tired of writing about my family. For example, I could write about my time here in Miami - and trust me, it’s been REALLY tempting to just throw all my stories into the deleted folder and start from scratch - but I know my worst happen is to not finish projects I am starting, so it’s something I’m shelving for now.
On the other hand, I’ve written a LOT of stories about my family, and I still need a good chunk of additional stuff. There can only be so many stories which revolve around my sister being mentally ill, my mom being well-intentioned but eccentric, my dad being an 82 year old aging asshole. I write all of that in danger of me looking unappreciative, like I have issues and the only way I can get over it is by writing a tell-all.
Maybe I do have issues. Maybe the only I can get over it IS by writing a tell-all.
“Maybe you should just walk away and not think about it for a while,” my boyfriend suggested. So that’s what I’ve done.
But now it’s been a good chunk of time, I need to figure out what to do - either walk away and write this off as a life lesson or, make a final attempt to write (as well as make a serious effort to throw money at an editor to help me figure out if there’s a overarching story to all of these stories.) I think that’s why I’m writing this as well - maybe it’ll nudge me in one direction or another.
Side note to everything: the boyfriend is reading a 340-page memoir of a man who had self-described consensual sex with a dolphin, for “research purposes.” (The book reading for research purposes; not the dolphin sex. You’ll have to read the book or ask dolphin-fucker directly.)
- I started a full time job less than a year ago, after a lousy two months of freelancing and worrying about where the next paycheck would come from. But a full time job with a steady paycheck and domestic partner health insurance means a sudden lack of wanting to do anything after work that involved thinking.