Me Whining On and On About Writing

I’ve been sitting here on the subway reading Coupland’s The Gum Thief and thinking about maybe trying to do some writing before I get off at 23rd Street, thinking about how much I identify with all of Coupland’s characters, mainly the ones who narrate his books.  Thinking about how much like me they are except they seem to have no trouble writing witty and voluminous treatises about lives and jobs like mine.  So they essentially are working with the same base material that I’ve got to work with except they’re actually doing something with it.

Dude, Excedrin makes me feel awesome.

But then I remember that these are works of fiction, and that Douglas Coupland is a professional writer, maybe drawing from first- and second-hand experiences in the real world, but it’s still not fair to myself to draw comparisons between myself and fictional characters in the hope of learning tips about how to live my life and work my art.

Or can I?

No, I can’t, that’s madness.

Then I thought, well, this inner dialogue is actually quite interesting so why don’t I write that, so I am.

I sat here for a few stops casting my eyes roofward searching for a place to start writing, looking for an idea, a starting place, a firm interesting foothold within myself that I can use to kick off from.  It was a grueling search, and I kept thinking that if I had some inner anger or focused sadness or Purpose I could use it to generate friction by rubbing it against the World, then writing would fall out!

But sadly no, the Buddha made me cultivate Emptyness and see it as a good thing, so I’m slow to anger and quick to forgiveness and I willingly embrace the capriciousness of the Tao, and all this religious self-congratulation is attempting to excuse my lack of creativity.  Ha ha, I’m proudly unproductive, I’m not DAMAGED enough to be productive!  Take that!

So now that I’ve uncovered this thick vein of bullshit and whiny self-excuse in my soul, I think it’s time for me to  begin a serious investigation on how I can mindfully cultivate inspiration and imagination.  See, if I were Enlightened and Truly Empty I wouldn’t have this problem because I would  by empty of the urge to write and create.  But since I’m not willing to work to eradicate that urge (why not?  Note for a future blog: feebly rationalize this to yourself and to God), I’ve got to feed it in a way that doesn’t just roll back all this spiritual shit that I’ve managed to accomplish since 2001; it’s the only real progress I’ve ever made in my life, ever, since toilet training, so I don’t want to be glib with it.

Maybe what I should do is what the Hockstetter boy did in Lake Wobegon when he was trying to be a poet, which is to make a list of importance experiences that he felt he should have in order to become a writer.  I don’t mean make a list necessarily (hmm…..do I?), but at the very least focus on having experiences that I can mine for plunder and womens, generate some loot for me to drag back  and bury in the Monte Cristo Netbook, so that I may live the good life and venge my enemies (“venge”?  Note for after posting blog: look that up, but regardless, continue to use this word).

What I need from you all are important things that I can do around my home in NYC that will help me to spawn great literature.  Keep in mind that I am extraordinarily lazy, selfish, hateful, colicky, miserly, vegetarian, misanthropic, narcissistic, violent, and boring.  Here’s a few to get you started:

• Watch a Brooklyn sunrise
• Follow a single pigeon for an entire day
• Walk the Brooklyn Bridge
• Become an expert at cunnilingus
• Get a haircut
• Floss
• Watch The Matrix Reloaded with director’s commentary
• Join an amateur fencing league
• Buy a cigar
• Spend an hour in the Union Square subway station
• Patronize an independent bookstore
• Declare war on racism
• Attend the diamond exhibit at the Natural History Museum
• Find Michael’s Pub where Woody Allen used to play.  Photograph it.
• Punch a tree
• Purchase pornography
• Forget everything I know about XML, then relearn it
• Go Christmas shopping at Duane Reade

The Loneliest Place in New York

I was having some film developed at Flamingo 1-Hour (which actually turned out pretty good, take a look: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dsubnet0/), and to kill that hour I thought I’d visit what I call the Deep West Side.

Technically, anything west of Central Park is the West Side, but I’ve always thought that the region beyond 8th avenue takes on a distinctly distinct air especially below 42nd Street.  It’s the only part of Manhattan that doesn’t feel like Manhattan; that is, it’s not like any Manhattan ever seen in a movie or talked about in a book.  It’s weird.  It’s like a suburb.  What?  A gas station in Manhattan?  How the hell did they fit a car dealership into the same latitude as Times Square?  And what the fuck is a “pier”?  Someone who makes pies?  Why are there so many pie bakers near the Hudson?  Endless confusion.

Down around 14th Street there is a very nice footpath that runs between West Side Highway and the water.  I was strolling down this stretch, admiring the wide open spaces and the wind, when I see this structure up ahead, a huge rusted archway leading to one of the aforementioned piers.  Other than the arch, against which flapped modern banners proclaiming it as “Pier 54″ but otherwise showing no adornments post-Eisenhower, the pier was completely open-aired.  Just a plank of concrete fifty feet wide and extending maybe two hundred yards out into the river.  Some low chainlink along the sides and some trash cans showed that this was not completely abandoned property but it sure was abandoned today.

I walked under that arch and out onto that windy cement plain that seemed to stretch damn near halfway to Jersey and I just walked out there.  There was only the wind, and my gaping mouth.  Gaping that such silence and isolation can be found on this island, such alienness of place and purpose.  I supposed that events of some kind must be held out here (this turns out to be true) but to a single windburned man it looked like a leftover from a long-dead civilization.

I walked and walked into the wind and the water sounds and I found at the very edge of this peninsula a bench, a wooden bench like you’d find in a park.  Just by itself, empty in the midst of empty, facing out to the water.  I sat down, putting my back to my adopted city, and I stuck my hands in my pockets to protect them from the cold.  The pocket that my right hand went into happened to contain my Moleskine, but how could I write now?  Besides the bitter cold experience of it, how could I look down, away from this window into silence, this place that I (it felt) had discovered and had accepted me as its one true occupant?  I was thankful I was without my camera, for a similar debate would have ensued.  How dare I consider looking upon such a place as an observer, much less an “artist”!  The silence screamed imperatives for empirical attention, for rapt experience, not for Liberal Caucasian record-keeping.  Besides, I’d've just shot about fifteen rolls of film and never captured how that place made me feel.  Because a picture can’t do that, nor can a journal.  They can make you feel things on their own, and they can record events, and they can help you remember long from now when the dendrites have shriveled like old apples, but they can’t help me keep feeling the special wonder that I felt then, the quiet religious magic of solitude in the midst of space, silence in a world of machines, stillness in a world ever-churning, Elysium for the Introverted Claustrophobic.

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful that there are still places of peaceful surprise and surprising peace in my city, and I’m thankful that she is willing to show them to me.

The Bagpipes

Whilst jogging through Central Park today, I heard a lone bagpiper playing off to my left, beyond a knot of bushes.  I am not one of those who unilaterally detest the bagpipes; rather I enjoy them in the midst of a romping Celtic reel or mixed in with an Irish rock band like The Dropkick Murphys.  There is an ethnic power contained in those pipes that can push a band forward with the power of a steam engine.

However, singly, when played as a solo instrument, like one would play a tenor saxophone, I find them an affront to civilized music and society in general.  The one thing that can be said about the lone piper is that he can be easily found and eradicated, a victim of his own instrument’s penetration.

As I parted the bushes with the barrel of my blunderbuss and sighted on the beast’s inflated wind bladder, I reflected upon the few special appearances that this bizarre instrument has made in my life.

I recalled seeing a lone piper while walking into Camden Yards for an Orioles game.  I was a wee bit of a lad, and it was the first time I ever noticed that it’s possible for a piper to take a breath without interrupting the chainsaw-laser intensity of the tone stream; the purpose of his blowing is to fill the air sac at his side, which he squeezes with his elbow.  But, being a clarinetist myself, seeing a wind player breathe while sound comes out of his horn naturally made me scream “FAAKE!” in my tiny testicle-free alto as I arced through the air, slashing my baseball mitt down double-handed, Sparta-style.  But before I had the chance to reign down but a score’s worth of blows, one of my parents was kind enough to explain the true physics of the situation.

I also recalled a stand-up routine that I saw as part of a Live at the Improv compilation that I viewed on VHS whilst virulently infected.  I sadly don’t remember the comic’s name, but he was a terrifyingly tall and sweaty Ginger of a man whose routine was extremely high energy and abrasive.  He wondered aloud “How did they invent the bagpipes?”  He then adopted a thick Scottish brogue: “I wonder wha’ ‘appens when I blow on a vacuum cleanerrrr?”  He placed two fingers in his mouth an strenuously blew into them, crimsoning his face and crossing his eyes.  He proceeded to perform the best, most humorous bagpipe impression I’ve ever seen, which you can try at home.

First, make this noise: “fffffffffffffrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” and hold that “eee” out, the higher and more nasal the better.  Now hold your hand and fingers parallel to the ground  and sharply karate-chop your throat so that the sound warbles.  Experiment with different angles and throat locations.  Repeat the chop at 1-2 second intervals.  Now you’re piping like a pro!

Well, I guess the only other thing of interest I have to say about bagpipes is that when you blast a hole through through their air sacs with a lead ball, they make a hilarious flatulating sound that echoes off the building on Fifth Aveneue.  Also, this action doesn’t surprise the piper, who just sadly hands his head lower and lower in synch with the fading fart noise.

Subway Poetry

Found this poem hidden in my Blackberry.  Someone please set this to beats and send me some royalties.

My mind shrinks from the crack of an aggrevated dawn
The cage is full of rats but the man says strap it on
Rising from the subway like metro lazarus
Beating pavement,keys,bits, better than the rest of us
Sinking again to fuck and wait for the next resurrection
Each day bleeding hope like punctured erection
Gods words don’t change inflection

tho I kneel I see the morning beats as I dive into the datastream
Hot bodies in a metal tube like smith and wesson wet dream
He stands in clean shirt pressed slacks
Reading the list of ingredients on a shiny bag of salty snacks
Bad street musicians good ones too
Blot out ipods’ ineffectual blues
The battery not as big as the one in hungry hearts
Blowing horns beating drums made of old machinery parts
Envy the courage quake from possibility
Wretch from the smell smile at self-conscious laughability
Wish for quiet hope for endless fame
Jealous for talent anger at the game
Give the brother a chance Make her make her own way
Force american independence show him we know he can really play

antiquewhite thick attic dark-hued speed secret secret garden frosty

This is a story inspired by the above randomly generated words.

From his vantage point at the top of the attic stairs, he saw her as gradient of white.  The snowy day outside lit her face with a white so great and pure it was hard to look at from inside the dark loft.  Her face did not reflect back all of this light.  The lines wrought there by the past two days made subtle shadows, and her Aryan features shown back a shade darker than the snowlight.

The dress she was wearing was a shade darker yet.  It was new but made from heavy cotton, a canvas-like texture that wore well and toughly, but whose dense weave could never be white, would only ever manage a healthy natural off-white.  The color of piano keys and hand-glazed pottery and second marriages.

The hair that fell across the dress’s left shoulder as she gazed out the window to her right was a shade darker yet, a bright solar blonde with strands so fine they disappeared when spread apart.

The fabric she held in her hands was white, but much darker, evenly splitting the distance between the mirror whiteness of the January snow and the weathered insect brown of the attic’s sloping walls and rough floor and splintered rafters.  He saw that she held a wedding dress, the lace unmistakably belonging to another time, a previous epoch when the color of the gown signified purity and life and light.  Now it was only age personified, great hopes of great loves worn away.  Toxic stains absorbed from a dirty world colored the fabric and lace that richly colored no-color that we wish we never had to see.

He spoke, and her slight startled head movement caused a tear to roll down her right cheek.  It caught all of the light and all of the white as she turned toward him, and he followed the burning drop down her face to her bosom.

“We found the garden,” he said.  ”There’s a courtyard door tucked away inside the second pantry.  It was frozen shut but Timothy forced it open.”  She said nothing.

“Did you want to see?”, he asked, not surprised by her silence but feeling their time running out.  There was a commotion of voices and stomping feet across the door at the bottom of the stairs, and his body language became agitated.

She rose then, slowly, like a queen, and laid the dress out full and flat on the cedar trunk on which she had been sitting.  She spent some moments smoothing out the wrinkles and straightening the sleeves, until it lay like a chalk outline radiating its yellow age boldly into the face of the winter daylight.  She then turned and walked quickly past him down the stairs.

He followed her down the stairs and along the upstairs hallway, dodging the hurrying men with their loads even as she gained speed.  He was able to keep up with her, but just barely, surprised at her confidence rounding each corner.

She poured down the back kitchen stairway and ducked into the second pantry.  She walked out the tiny partially open door without a pause, and he was instantly sure she had known this was there the whole time.

The garden was small, made claustrophobic by the looming house on all sides of them and from the snow drifts which made lumpy obstacles out of every bush and tree and shrub.  These lumps were arranged roughly into three concentric circles around a large sundial birdbath in the center of the space.

She ran directly to the birdbath and threw her tiny frame against the edge of its eight-foot cement basin.  I slowed briefly, puzzled by this action, until I determined that she was was trying to tip the huge monument over.  I glanced over my should at the rushing forms through the door and across the windows, fearing briefly the shortness of time.  But then I rushed to her side and without questioning threw my weight against the cement bulk.  Together we felt the weight begin to tilt away from us, farther and farther, until with final push and grunt from us both, it fell away from us, landing hard but not breaking, cushioned by the snow and wet ground.

The snowless footprint of the birdbath contained a slight cavity in the middle about a foot in diameter.  She stooped and snatched from this hole a tiny box, a cube about eight inches on a side.  Without explaining anything, without looking at me, without acknowledging I was there, she turned and ran back towards the pantry door, holding the box in the crook of her arm like a football.

As I ran behind her through the high-ceilinged first floor, I could smell the kerosene fumes already permeating the house.  By the front door the men had piled the empty fuel cans, reaching almost to my waist.  As I ran outside, trying to keep her in sight, I looked back and saw the workers following us out of the house.  They were running as well, and through the basement windows under the front porch I could see a growing orange glow.

The Last Week

I can’t even read Hunter Thompson anymore.  Too jealous.

This is my last week at my current job, and thus a very weird week.  I gave my notice on 10/23 by email, and there was an audible popping sound as my destiny disengaged from that of the company.

Since then I’ve floated on a thin layer of bewilderment and out-of-placedness.  Like a dream, that’s what it feels like.  One of those dreams where something fundamental changes in your life, like your hand is chopped off, but then you wake up and the sweet smell of status quo fills your lungs, and you experience sharply the contrast between the dream state of everything being changed and the waking state of everything as it was.

This job change feels like that, like I’m trying to wake up.

New York City is throwing me a parade for my last day tomorrow, right down Broadway.  They say the Yankees might even show up to wish me best of luck.  That’s so nice!

Why are there no career books written for Buddhists?  Does capitalist advancement run directly counter to the Four Noble Truths?  Is it more wholesome to find happiness wherever  you are right now, or to leave a place to prevent forming attachment?  I know I know, both and neither, right?

But look how fucking dogmatic I’m being.  I’m ignoring my feelings which exist in Reality in favor of seeking to conform my actions to prescripts.  Like a good Gen-Y’er I’m desperately looking for my shoebox with the masking tape label for me to crawl into and be put on a shelf along with the other boxes.  And although I’m seeking my individuality along with everyone else, my individuality must be able to be summed up quickly and shortly into a little social soundbite.

I’ve been revisited by that horrible sense that I’ve violated some rule, some implied fine-print social contract common sense maxim about when and how to change jobs.  I recognize this feeling from whenever I move apartments.  I quake with the Loserfear, the metallic taste of anxiety felt by the fifth-grader when he selects a pair of high-top sneakers, checking and rechecking the brand and style and model against the mental photograph of the shoes he saw being approved of by his social betters in the hallway by the gym.  That cold wash of dreadful hope that the reaction to these shoes won’t be “You idiot, everyone knows that black sneakers are stupid.  It’s common sense, you missed the boat, you’re not plugged in!”  Some rule that was missed, some trend that was picked up on by the rest of the known universe except for the Losers, defined as such for the missed pick up.

I’m terrified to talk about essentially any adult choice I make or have ever made for fear that the “correct” decision, the one NOT made by me, was obvious to those plugged in, catching the boat, common sensing non-Losers that populate most of the known universe.

That is why being an adult is hard for me.  Not because I don’t have large numbers of very good arguments to support my decisions, but because now the stakes are so high for each decision, and the ridicule and judgement handed down by Better adults would just be too much for my fragile Caucasian ego to stand.

oh how intellectual

Hey, check me out!  I’m at Augusten Burroughs’ book signing at Union Square!  I’m hobnobbing with my fellow writers, and am therefore awesome.

(actually, I’m just holding the seat for my wife while she has dinner, probably with her lover.)

Aboutness

I saw the trailer for Jared Hess’s new film Gentlemen Broncos, and it got me thinking about Napoleon Dynamite and what made that such a brilliant film, and how it managed to change the culture of this country.

For me it is that it’s hard to say what the film is “about”.  It’s kind of a romance; there’s the pursuit of the girls by each of the male leads.  It’s kind of a coming of age; you get a sense that Napoleon has lost a certain amount of his innocence, being a part of something greater than himself (the election).  It’s kind of a family comedy; the grandmother’s injury and Uncle Rico’s injection into this small insular unit provides a major component of  the film’s first plot point.  It’s also kind of a character study, in that what it’s really about is these characters whom are shocking in there uniqueness in American cinema, yet who are all intimately familiar to us.  It’s kind of all of these things and each of them, but to call them the film’s “aboutness” short-changes the richness of the (dare I say it) comedic tapestry.

What I especially love about the film, and what I think America secretly loved, was that the filmmakers seemed to have some sense that a modern American audience would be hungrily trying to determine what the film was “about”, and the filmmakers have a lot of fun misdirecting us and keeping us guessing about this, sometimes into the third or fourth viewing.

The first part of the movie, where we’re introduced to Napoleon and his high school problems, to his weird family and to the unsettlingly peaceful open spaces of Idaho, America thinks, “Ah, a rural high school comedy, like Can’t Hardly Wait or The Breakfast Club or Superbad  (which doesn’t exist yet).  They’ll be concerns about virginity and alcohol.  They’ll be a dance or party of some sort that we’ll be expected to believe is the most important event in the universe, and this goofy underdog will share a surprisingly un-awkward kiss with sidewise ponytail girl who will become super hot.”

And then Pedro comes along, and America thinks, “Oh, buddies versus bullies, with the buddies’ secret weapon: Rex Kwon Do!”. 

Then grandma is hurt while getting her groove back, and we’re introduced to Uncle Rico, who is instantly hilarious (although we don’t really know why).  And since he draws our consciousness so intensely, America thinks, “Oh, this is Uncle Buck, told from the kids’ perspective.  Rico will embarrass the hell out of everyone, but the second plot point will involve a serious emergency happening to one of the kids, like Kip is hit by a car, or Napoleon realizes he can’t dance just before the annual Homecoming Hop.  And then Uncle Rico will step up and show us the power of family, if we can all just work together.  Rico’s final solution to the problem will somehow involve him throwing something like a football, and his heart will be healed as well.” 

And then Rico accidentally touched Kip’s knee, and America briefly though “Finally!  A comedy about molestation!”, but sadly, it was not to be.  But we were thrown off the scent.  Besides, Kip’s like thirty years old.

The adventures with the money-making schemes, the Tupperware and the chickens and the boob pills, they also threaten to consume the aboutness.  They certainly consume our attention and make us forget about the other candidates discussed above.  There’s even a moment where Uncle Rico starts talking about Deb’s boobs, and America got all excited about pedophilia, but it never pops back up again.

I could go on and on like this, listing subplot after mini-scene, feint after misdirection, in other words, candidate aboutnesses, each capable of providing sufficient fuel for an entire movie on their own.  And the brilliance of the Hess’ was that they understood (at some level) that we’d be looking for things like this, that modern audiences are used to big clues about ‘what the movie is about’ early on in the film.  But rather than give it to us, they thought they’d play some games with us first. 

And America loved being played with.

You can see this same phenomena in American Beauty.

Mamet is Trying to Help You

I’m watching The Spanish Prisoner, which is a brilliant film, badly mismarketed in some quarters as a Steve Martin movie who, though he performs brilliantly, merely co-stars.  The main problem I have with the film is that it commits the sin of most films written by David Mamet: it over-stylizes the language.  I’m referring of course to “Mametspeak”.

Mamet’s dialogue is idiosyncratically syncopated and truncated, and I’d like to use my tiny soapbox to remind directors to just listen to their actors.  If they sound like they are struggling to conform to the (admittedly impossible) script, help them not sound that way.  Do not accept the correct execution of the words.  There is no inherent value in performances that do not sound like human beings talking.  NEVER say “well, this is how Mamet is supposed to sound.”  Wrong.  He is not a musician, he is a writer and his characters are human beings.  In this film the characters often sound like aliens who understand the meanings of words and pauses but have never tried them out.

Watch Spartan and Oleanna and some part of The Unit and you’ll see the same problem.  There is a distinct cadence to some scenes that make one think “Oh, there’s that Mamet rhythm again, how wonderful.”  Except it’s not wonderful at all to have your audience thinking that.  As in all performance, the medium (words, in this case) should never overshadow the message.  In fact, a good performance will make you forget about the medium.

Actors, if the script has a stutter written in, find an emotional reason why the character would stutter at that point.  In rehearsal, allow yourself to take as much time as you need in that moment to feel out the feelings flowing through you from the character, and feel how those emotions could cause the character to lose their train of thought or to be unable to find the right word.  You can tighten the timing later, but you NEED to understand what is cognitively happening in the character’s cortex.

Directors, if there are incomplete or truncated sentences in the script, make sure that they are motivated or else it just sounds like the character has a stroke and fades off; make sure that truncations happen abruptly and that interruptions ALWAYS overlap.  When a human being interrupts someone in conversation, either the first person has stopped mid-sentence and is lost in thought, or the second person overlaps.  Always always always.

And remember, an ellipsis does not always mean pause.  Mamet frequently uses them interchangeably with hyphens to indicate an interruption.  I have no evidence that this is what he intends when he writes them in, but you MUST be willing to consider this if you want me to like the performance.  In real conversations, there are VERY few incomplete sentences that end in a pause.

The other side of this problem, when a character interrupts herself or truncates her own sentence in order to start a new thought, is more difficult, but is actually more annoying when it’s not pulled off correctly.

Let’s take a simple line (that I’m just making up) like: “Are you asking me to—Are you suggesting that I apologize?”  This kind of word substitution happens all the time in the real world.  But it gets fucked up by Mametactors constantly.  The tendency is to accent “you” in both fragments.  Try it and you’ll hear Mamet’s rhythm, which I believe lies in the exploitation of beat symmetries in proximal utterances (monograph to come, no doubt).

Now read the line again but this time accent “you” in the first fragment and “suggesting” in the second.  Do you hear?  Sound’s better right?

Well think about what the character is doing, in terms of “real” time; forget it’s a script and pretend like the character is just making words up as she goes along (JUST LIKE REAL PEOPLE DO!!!!).  The first word that came to mind when she thought of what her opponent just said was “asking”.  But before she can get to the meat of her thought (that someone else is telling her when to apologize, the bastard), she realizes that her opponent didn’t ask anything; her opponent sounded (or was trying to sound) more “helpful” or “casual” (the quotes represent airquotes done in the character’s mind during this inner monologue); her opponent made no explicit request but rather tendered advice.  The fact that someone has patronized her with friendly advice about when she is sorry, i.e. pretending to know how she feels, is shocking and maddening.  The character decides that by saying “suggesting”, a word characterized by feelings of casualness and helpfulness, neither of which the character feels are present in the current situation, she will be able to inject just the right amount of sarcasm into the sentence to adequately represent the anger that she feels at her opponent right now.

Yes, a bulky analysis.  My point (in the previous paragraph and in this article as a whole) is that if you don’t understand why the character would choose which words when, then you end up just reading the lines and hoping that the lines lead you to the correct emotion.  With most other writers you can get away with this, and may in fact be preferable.  But Mamet is trying to help you get to what is inside the character using not just words but the spaces and interactions between the words.  This is his genius.  And if you think that his genius is in inventing a new quirky pattern of speech and dialogue, I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with a shovel to the back of your head.

By falling into Mametspeak (or, directors, by allowing your actors to fall into Mametspeak (sometimes one can’t tell when one has done so oneself)), you strip meaning out of the content of the script.  There, I said it.  And the information you’re stripping out is the juicy stuff, the stuff that describes how the character thinks, without having the character explain how she thinks.  How we as human beings misuse our language is at least as important to understanding who we are as how we use it.  Mamet’s “unique writing style” is just him putting normal human errors and interruptions into his dialogue.  It’s brilliant and EXTREMELY difficult to simulate this in a word processor (try it).  But trust me, he’s trying to help us.

Weird Day, Weird Night

I’m sitting my pitch dark den typing this on my netbook.  I’ve got headphones on, attached to my desktop on the other side of the room.  I’m watching La Notte and I don’t want to disturb my wife, who is sick and sleeping next door.  It’s about to pass 11pm.

Today I gave my notice at work; my last day will be in two weeks.  I’m taking an offer to switch from finance to publishing, for slightly less money.  The FBI will just have to wait.  Nonetheless it was a hard decision because of how comfortable I’d gotten at this job.  I’ve heard that in IT there is an especially strong temptation to entrench oneself in a position; I was in serious risk of that.

My conference with my supervisor’s was silent and awkward.  One said he felt like he was being dumped by the hot girl.  Which was funny and flattering, but still an unfortunate indicator of how far my industry has to go in terms of sustainable personnel development.  Even if you’re not in IT, do yourself the favor and read an amazing article on this subject.

I bought a Moleskine notebook with some birthday money this week, and have begun to tentatively “journal” to some extent.  The will be good for both of us because my shorter, boringer thoughts and writings done out of habit can be sequestered away from the world (until I’m dead), and posting to this site can be saved for longer more polished works.  I may change the “tumblelog” appellation in the title, but calling it that would preserve the freedom that I currently feel.

In short, now is a time of changes, in my life, in my career, in my writing and art.  You can care if you want to; I just wanted to give you a heads-up.