Halloween costume idea: Fried Hard-drive… scary!

I spoke too soon: my computer is dead, dead, dead. It is gone. I’m less upset about losing all of my files (I have much of that backed up) and more worried about how I will begin writing my novel on Thursday (tomorrow!)

Now I have a third expense to weigh. Hawaii, crown for my tooth, or new computer? Suggestions are welcome…

Aloha novacaine?

I’m trying to decide if I would like to have a crown put on my broken tooth, or if I would like to fly to Hawaii this winter. It would cost about the same amount of money. I know it shouldn’t be too hard of a decision, I mean, Hawaii? In February? Come on now, it pretty much chooses itself. But I haven’t done anything about this tooth since it broke about a year ago…

I can be really dumb.

I thought my computer was dying, but really it was just loaded with files beyond what is healthy for a nearly three year old laptop. So, not really wanting to invest the time and effort it would take to carefully backup all my files and purge my hard drive, I just did a bit of random deleting. Presto, 12 gigs of space freed up! But oh, oops, all of my iTunes downloads gone. I’m trying not to think back on which albums I had downloaded and now lost, because that just makes me sad. But then again, it simplifies things. Who needs a music library anyway?

Why Commisioner, it’s a comic!

I’ve been living in Madison for over three months now–Madison, one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the US–and only today did I go for my first bike ride. It was nice. Short, but nice. I didn’t wear a helmet, which was stupid and reckless of me, and in exchange I
wore a baseball cap, which is exactly the way my last major bike wreck came about (reaching to stop my cap from blowing away). I didn’t crash, today. Today I rode my bike to the library to feed my newest habit, which is reading. I checked out three books: a collection of stories by Capote, and two graphic novels. I sat at a bench on the edge of Lake Monona and started reading one of the graphic novels, but after a while I was cold, so I went home to finish it. It was a big disappointment, especially coming from one of my favorite authors. I won’t name the book or the author, but maybe you can guess. The second graphic novel was a waste of time. I won’t name the book or the author because I can’t be bothered to check. It was so bad. But who am I to criticize any published graphic novelist? They’ve accomplish something that I probably never will, and that’s not me being pessimistic, that’s just the likely truth. I can hardly finish my monthly comic strip by deadline. Here, this month’s:

Did you notice the lack of a punch line? When I was young I didn’t understand a lot of the jokes in comics, but I thought that was because I was young and the people who made the comics were older and smarter. I thought that the comics must have been funny or why would they get published–it was a bit of the “Emperor’s New Clothes” phenomenon. I wouldn’t let on my stupidity.

Am I banking on that naked emperor now? Would anyone read “Plager*ized” and actually laugh? Does anyone even remember Calvin and Hobbes? I think the above comic is funny, at least. I get it. That is my new thing. Writing comics that are little inside-jokes to myself, and hoping enough people laugh out of fear of looking ignorant. Our little secret, okay?

Does it?

Friends, I am very excited to begin work on a new novel. I haven’t given more than a fleeting moment’s thought to a plot–partly because I would like to keep as much of the process within the month of November as I can, and more because I am terrified of coming up with a plot.

And what if I don’t have a plot, hm? Will the world end?

The world has already ended. It ended on September 11th, didn’t you know that? I feel like the world ended on September 11th, 2007. That is how I feel right now. Pretty pathetic huh? I’m not above pathetic, I won’t lie. Turn the page, turn the page. (What?)

This blog is full of a lot of junk that doesn’t make sense, because this blog doesn’t matter. I am going to try to cut a lot of that junk out of my hypothetical November novel, because I would like to go in with the assumption that my hypothetical November novel will matter. As for this blog, it doesn’t matter and it probably won’t ever matter, so you can look forward to a lot more junk. But probably not in the month of November, because I will be busy writing my masterpiece. You know. (What?)

Whatever, okay?

Nobody needs a plot, life happens anyway.

Here is what I think: life happens anyway.

Maybe I will enjoy this dental procedure afterall.

Maybe longtime readers of this blog will remember a time last year when I wore a pink shirt to work, and nearly clawed the skin off of my face as a result? Well today I wore turquoise to the same effect. It’s strange, because I would have thought I could tolerate turquoise on my body, but it turns out I can’t. It’s not quite as debilitating as pink, but it’s close.

Also today, my cell phone broke into two pieces. It was hanging on by a thread for a while, but today it finally bit the dust. I was really looking forward to breaking it in half myself, in a kind of redemptive celebration after canceling my phone service forever, but phone, it seems, had other plans. Phone, it seems, would take even that satisfaction away from me.

There is one week left before NaNoWriMo kicks off. I could start a countdown. I remember another moment in blogging history (oh, to reminisce!) when I counted down to the day I got my braces off. Thinking about that makes me feel very grown up. Thinking about that makes my looming crown seem like a trophy: Here, you are an adult now! We will cap a tooth and hand you the bill!

Thinking about that is kind of nice, actually.

Waste paper.

Today I scraped tiny glow-in-the-dark stars off of the ceiling of a childhood bedroom. They drifted to the floor and formed a scattered constellation of outgrown youthful whimsy, perhaps as distant as Andromeda and Ursa Major.

Waste paper.

“Your darkest days will become your brightest nights.” Thus uttered the former inhabitant of said childhood bedroom. He is now an adult. He is a shining star.

We are all stars, aren’t we?

Sigh… ence.

Today I attended a conference at Monona Terrace (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1938). (Built in 1997, 38 years after Wright’s death). (Home of Michael Feldman’s Whad’ya Know?) (I had to look up these facts, I don’t know these things). Anyway, it was a conference on various medical aspects related to the aging process, featuring a cast of reknowned doctors and scientists. I could stumble through a recap of things I had learned about aging, but instead, here are some very concrete thigns that I learned about myself today:

1.) I have ADD as bad as the next Millenial.

2.) I exist, for the most part, in an entirely different universe from most doctors and scientists. Up until recently I would have said this was because I was uninsured, and a doctor was something as exotic as a snake charmer as far as I was concerned. But today I realized that there is this entire realm of intelligence, of incredible research and scholarship, and in comparison I am prone to feel very stupid. I know that I’m not stupid, but sometimes, only sometimes, science has the power to make me feel like I am.

Did I ever mention here that I would have had a perfect GPA in high school if not but for one crummy semester of Chemistry?

Also, it is driving me crazy. KT–reveal yourself! I can’t figure out who you are!

Liberally speaking literally.

Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t really want to write about the environment the other day, but felt I should. It was half-hearted.

I just registered for NaNoWriMo, that is, National Novel Writing Month, that is, one attempts to write an entire novel, from start to finish, in the month of November. Perhaps here I should warn you that my energy next month will be devoted to said challenge, and my posts in this blog will be scarce (as if you haven’t grown to expect as much). For my NaNoWriMo user name I selected Beatrice Quimby, a literary icon better known as “Beezus.” If you feel like it, check my progress here throughout the month of November–keep me accountable.

I wrote a novel once before, when I was in college. It was awful. Really, it was lousy. But it’s one of my proudest accomplishments, because I set out to do it and actually followed through. I am really looking forward to that same overwhelming sense of achievement, should I complete the challenge.

There were a few things which helped me to finish my first novel:

1.) Delusions of grandeur. I thought I was writing the next Newberry Award winner (it was a young adult novel). I thought I would land a nice publishing deal with Scholastic and maybe have fans as loyal as Rowlings’. I thought that one day I might even be featured on Reading Rainbow. Well, I dreamed those things, anyway.

2.) My complete lack of a social life. While others caroused about Water Street and North Ave sharing a brew and a good laugh with their friends, I sat holed up in my apartment, typing away. My friends, then, were fictional. I think some of my real-life friends felt a bit slighted. Such is the cost!

3.) A quote by E.L. Konigsburg, a Newberry winner herself, who gave this advice to people who wished to become writers: “Finish. The difference between being a writer and being a person of talent is the discipline it takes to apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and finish. Don’t talk about doing it. Do it. Finish.” I had that quote taped to the top of my computer screen while I was writing my novel. And I did it. I finished.

By November 30th I will have finished a second novel. Mark my words.

Blog Action Day: Environment

I registered my blog for Blog Action Day because I thought it would get me more readers, not because I’m passionate about the environment. Of course I care about the environment, but I think I could have rallied more readily around Blog Action Day: Darfur, or Blog Action Day: Global Poverty. But here we are, Blog Action Day: Environment fully enveloping us in the blogosphere, and so let’s do it.

Here is what I have to say.

The environment does not have a soul, and it is not superior to humanity. I’m sorry Mother Earth-ers, but it’s not. Every good thing that the environment does for us is not because it is nobly seeking to serve others, it is just intrinsically useful. Just as nature does not intend to do us harm when it brings floods, fires, and earthquakes, so it does not rain to bring us relief, it rains because that is part of the water cycle. It does not produce food because it wants to nourish us, it produces food to reproduce and strengthen its own species. Nature is self-serving. Probably if the environment did have a soul it would be just as greedy as we humans are.

So, I propose that nature is not as selfless and benevolent as some would suggest. Maybe if the earth did seek so desperately to please us humans it would make sense for us to abuse that, to take and take without ever giving back. This too is the nature of things, isn’t it? But here we have an environment that has proven its ability to sustain itself, to prevail, to defend and even attack, when necessary, and suddenly this environment is something to respect. Suddenly it makes sense that we would seek an alliance with nature, not because we are able to mutually benefit each other (what, really, has man brought to the table?) but because we are not as strong as nature, and we do not want nature as an enemy.

This is all pretty secular of me, who at first planned to write a post about stewardship. I hope it’s evident that I’m only half serious. Because really, we are destroying this planet. And maybe the earth could muster up its survival instinct to produce a catastrophe so great it would wipe us parasites out forever, but it can’t really do that–not strategically. Equally lacking strategy, though, we seem to beg for such annihilation.

I don’t know a thing or two about global warming. I haven’t seen the Al Gore film and I saw only ten minutes of the Jake Gyllenhaal film. I’d like to deny it as much as the next person, but I don’t think we can really afford to be ignorant anymore. Truthfully, the idea of a warmer climate is difficult to disparage. “Where concerns about the world getting warmer/The people thought they were just being rewarded.” But surely this is stupid. Clearly we are wasteful, we use unclean power, and we are reckless even with our renewable resources. It’s simple logic–have we forgotten that we reap what we sow?

But things are changing. However slowly, I think they are. I know we’ve done some serious damage–we’ve put some holes in the ozone layer, we’ve permanently exterminated numerous species of plants and animals, we’ve clogged our land and water with synthetic waste–but we’re learning. I’m actually fairly optimistic about the changes we’ve been making, the ones we talk of making. And when hope in humanity fails me, I can look beyond that, to the source of all this. Yes, the Creator rears his head again (aha, not such a secular post after all!) And while we might like to think we can screw things up irreparably, or fix things, or even just control things, it would be wise for us to remember that ultimately the fate of this world is far out of our hands. What we do have in our hands we must use responsibly, and here I’ve slipped a bit of stewardship in after all. Really, though, why can’t we just take care of this green earth? Here we dwell! This is our bed that we make in the morning. These are the clothes that we put away in drawers. Sweep the floor. Recycle. Conserve water. Yes. This, for now, is home.