This post is about happy things

Small, happy and inconsequential things that make life a little better.

1. I turned on the AC and cleaned my room tonight, simultaneously fulfilling my need to clean when I'm distressed and alleviating part of said distress (the heat)
2. My choir is singing the Chichester Pslams for our next season
3. Honey dissolved into cool water makes my throat feel better
4. I have purchased bus tickets and made (nice! classy!) hotel reservations (did I mention we're staying right by the White House?) for our weekender to DC next weekend
5. Did I mention the AC?
6. I had Indian food for lunch today.

Ugh

Not funny, New York. Not ever funny.

Is this what being old feels like?

I just did a bunch of stretches designed to help alleviate/prevent carpal tunnel and now I can barely move my fingers.

Seriously, I'm 22, what the hell.

Work work work

Today at work I accidentally added my boss to the "spammer" database. Also, my neighbor's CPU caught on fire. No, true story.

Man, I love my job and I love the people I work with even more, but I swear to god it's going to kill me one day. I wonder if the company's health insurance covers a prescription for Xanax.

April is National Poetry Month

And because I suck, I have not posted a single poem this month.

Thus, I present:

<> !*''#
^"`$$-
!*=@$_
%*<> ~#4
&[]../
|{,,SYSTEM HALTED


(Please to read aloud as:

Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.)

Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese

Happy National Poetry Month.

Edited 4/25: I neglected to credit the creators of this poem, who are noooooooot me because I am not nearly this clever. The internet tells me it was first published in Infocus magazine in 1990. I'm pretty sure it was forwarded to me by a friend at some point, but I have since forgotten who it was - I saved it to my computer because I loved it so much. Whoever you are, thank you.

Crazy eyes, indeed

The trouble with writing fiction is that it builds on itself.

Not in a good way, most of the time, if you're me. I've reached right now what I call the "fractal" stage of writing, in which each train of thought spirals off into three more thoughts, all of which need fleshing out, and then once you go down that road you have to deal with all the spirals that come off the first spirals, and then there are exponentially yet more spirals until oh my god you're telling a completely different story than you were a couple thousand words ago, and in the meantime it's four AM and you're really supposed to be writing a paper about Irish emigration in the 1980's, except nothing is more interesting than the shit going on in your head, and also now there are all these thoughts that came from the spirals, so you might as well just keep writing since you'll be thinking about them anyway, and then Jesus Christ the birds are chirping, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU GO TO BED, APPARENTLY SLEEP IS IMPORTANT.

The fractal stage of writing is actually fun, really, if you're neurotic and into masochism, and don't have, like, other things to do, or friends, or a job, or a social life - all of which (I like to think) I have. Of course, the fractal stage of writing is immediately followed by the crazy eyes stage of writing, which then leads directly into the I HATE EVERYTHING stage of writing, at which point you're pretty much fucked and you should go have a glass of wine and write something else.

The point is this: right now, there are so, so many things I should be doing instead of what I am doing (see aforementioned paper, PS it has to be twenty pages and is due on Wednesday, I dare you to guess how many I have). I'm not doing them.

Crazy eyes, indeed.