Author: grid

Laura suggested I write a blog entry about how much I hate her. So here it is.

I hate her not at all. Or rather, my hatred for her, if it were expressed numerically, would be a large negative number. In fact, it would probably be one of those numbers that is best expressed in scientific notation, perhaps with multiple levels of superscript.

I hate her so little, that hate is probably too weak a word. I should be talking about how little I loathe her, or how much I don’t abhor her presence.

Laura is my shooting star. She’s the icing on my sexcake.

She’s the whirl in my dervish, and the prop for my biplane.

She pushes my levers, and flips my buttons.

If I were flying higher than an eagle, she’d probably have procured the pot.

She is my muse, both good and bad, and inspiration for many of my “greatest hits”.

She’s the first thing I think of when I get up in the morning (horny) and she’s already gone. She’s the last thing I think of late at night when I’m trying to climb over her inert body and fall asleep without invoking her wrath. (Still horny, I inevitably fail, and can hear her mumble, “Why do you always have to come to bed so late?”)

I hate Laura so little that if hate were matter I would probably blow up the entire universe with the anti-matter in my brain.

Right now I am going home… to be with the one I hate.

Tonight I realized that I’ve been taking things too seriously the last few days. Laura and I have been arguing more, and I’ve been stressed about everything–from work to finances. Even my old mantra, “it’s just money,” hasn’t been doing me any good.

Everybody’s wallets get a little thin this time of year, and this morning I checked my online statement. I found that I was negative by like $150. Of course, I’d been carrying around a check from Laura for like $300 that I hadn’t deposited on account of my being sick and all, so immediately I started stressing about how many late fees I was going to rack up because of this crap.

We had family dinner at my dad’s place at noon; so on the way over, I stopped by the bank and asked them about it. Turns out I wasn’t negative yet, and if I deposited some dough, I’d be all set. So I did; and I am. …All set that is.

This has been movie weekend for me. Yesterday we watched The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, (which made me want to read The Portrait of Dorian Grey), and today it was Terminator 3 and Barbershop. We’ve still got Donnie Darko to watch from the video store, and a stack of like 5 or 6 new ones to watch whenever we get around to it, including Bringin’ Down Da’ House, the Charlie’s Angels sequel, Daddy Daycare, and Eight Crazy Nights.

I thought T3 was pretty decent. Left me wanting more, as was certainly intended. And it didn’t suffer from the usual “sci-fi really means fantasy” problem that I usually have with big budget Hollywood sci-fi. By this I mean that there is usually some plot point, often in the all-important climax of the movie that breaks out of the realm of possible science, and into the land of fantastic speculation. There are more examples of this in Hollywood sci-fi than there are of good solid science fiction, so I’m not going to go into any details here.

I’m going to get back to my reading. I hope to finish up The Catcher in the Rye before I go to bed here any minute.

I think I’m being punished. My whole body shakes, and I go through hot and cold phases about every ten minutes.

I’m warning you now; you do not want to read the rest of this. Graphic depictions of gastric illness follow:
Continue reading “Sick and Feverish”

Well, I caught up on my blog reading. Three and a half hours past midnight, four hours after starting. (OK, I guess I took a brief half-hour break to play some stupid video games with Nate when he got home.) I have been pathetic with my blog reading lately. I think there are several factors. I got behind when I was writing the novel, (no time for anything then), and I just never caught back up. Jason’s took the longest… he’s been writing so much lately that I probably spent a half hour reading the last week’s entries. I promised him I’d be catching up on it all soon… but after the first page of 20, I had to stop reading the comments, and after the second page I started skimming. Finally I found some entries I knew I’d read before, and I felt a sick sense of relief.

I think too that I’ve been appreciating good literature more and more… I hope this doesn’t offend anyone when I say that reading blogs is just often nowhere near as fun for me as reading a good short story or poem. The problem has always been that finding those rare good short stories or poems can take awhile… so the ratio of crap to good may be very close to the same… it’s just that the good is so much better when you find it.

I’m not sure if I have enough left in me to catch up on the other task I was planning for this evening–bringing down the swelling in my email inbox. I owe about 4 or 5 “real” emails to various people. I blame a freak desire I had earlier this week to write to a bunch of people I hadn’t heard from in ages. Of course they all wrote me back yesterday. Maybe I’ll find time to write them tomorrow before we head off to our friend Julie’s birthday dinner. We got her a present earlier tonight that I’m excited to give to her.

and now… sleeeeeeeeeeep.

Haven’t posted in a few days. I’m not sure why, exactly… I’ve seen two sneak preview movie showings in three days… Last night’s was “The Cooler”, which despite an impending theatrical release had a 2002 copyright. (Yes, that was the first thing that came to mind when thinking of it, so no, don’t bother.)

Tuesday night we saw “Big Fish”, the new one directed by Tim Burton. Last night nate and I debated the style of it, and how Burton it felt to both of us. I felt that it was a very good movie, compared to other movies, but that it didn’t really stand up next to his other movies very well. It was good in its own right, and worth seeing, but perhaps a disappointment to those of us who really want Tim Burton’s visual style to dominate a film. Also, Ewan was fairly wooden… (again), and the rest of the cast supported him throughout.

On Wednesday night I purchased used books on amazon, and paid less than $12 for all four. Then I paid another $14 for shipping, but it was well worth it. I’m very excited to get them in the mail.

I could blame the writer’s almanac, but it hasn’t just been there that I’ve been finding new poets to read and admire. For years now (three?) I’ve probably only read one new poet a year. Now in the last week I’ve actually purchased a book of poetry (by fernando pessoa, an author recommended to me by my friend Pete) and I’ve also discovered Mark Yakich who was featured today in the almanac. I spent a few minutes pouring through some of his poems, and have yet to read something of his that I didn’t like.

Elia’s latest blog post mentioned a comment on her previous post that was her best comment ever, so I checked it out. I recommend you do too.

The premise is a war. The soldiers are unwilling participants… the soldiers are blogs.

The poster of said comment, Angelo, left no details of how the war would be waged, other than some notion of “character”, to be determined by what is said and not said in Elia’s blog. The other combatant will be represented by another blog.

I turned to my best source of enlightenment… A google search for blogwars brought me to a MemeFirst post about pitting of three blogs against one another. There was quantifiable scoring, but the categories didn’t really strike me as subjective.

Then I discovered several other blog-fight type things, and remembered that I’d seen blog survivor somewhere before. Once the reality-TV comparison was made, the excitement of “blogwars” faded… (note, none of the links above is the blog survivor thing that I remembered seeing before, and I looked pretty hard–3rd page of google results counts as “really hard” for me, just fyi.)

I realized that it wasn�t the content of the comment that had excited me so, but rather the tone and “flavor”. A religious war holds much more appeal for me than a reality-TV takeoff. I’m excited to see if we’ll hear anything more about this battle, or if it’ll just fade into memory like everything else.