It’s the fifth of April and yet, despite that, outside my window it’s snowing. Not much, just a flurry here and there tossed around in the afternoon wind. But it’s enough. It shouldn’t be snowing. Winter should let us go, wish us well and send us on our way. I’m starting to need spring the way I need water. I need the genuine article, too, not these false starts and stops. I need robins chirping in trees, flowers in bloom. I need warm sun, cool breeze, and most of all no more snow.
Uncategorized
“I like to say there are three things that are required for success as a writer…” Michael Chabon tells Writer’s Digest, “talent, luck, discipline. It can be in any combination, but there’s nothing you do to influence the first two. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.”
I have decided to heed Neil Gaiman’s advice, which is actually Daniel Pinkwater’s advice, on curing writer’s block. “He goes down to his study,” Gaiman says of Pinkwater, “and sits down in front of the computer, and he has to be there for a certain amount of time. He can either write, or he can do nothing, but he can’t do anything else. No reading books, no doodling, no browsing the internet or making phone calls. He can write, or he can just sit there. Pretty soon, he gets bored of just sitting there, so he writes.”
Every now and then, for whatever reason, I get spam written in other languages. It’s weird — except for un petit peu de francais, I don’t speak any other languages — but who am I to argue with their tactics? It’s not as if I’d be any less quick to delete them if they were written in English. Today, I got bored, so I headed over to Altavista’s translator and deciphered the following e-mail written, apparently, in Korean:
Interest to read the parturition attachment anger work which is in the western sea ocean ‘ island travel ‘. Specially ‘ in the uninhabited island ‘ the heirloom, when it is a minute when it wants the good chance is thought will become. This mail address sending whole aspect is reply to send with the mail address which is to attachment anger work.
There was no attachment, parturition-related or otherwise, but I guess that’s just as well. I’m reminded of the equally awful translation* I performed for the “Constitutional Peasant” scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail last semester for the Penn State Monty Python Society. Other languages are funny.
* Also available in all its glory as an MS Word document
I’m having some trouble convincing myself that it isn’t Monday. Last Friday seems like ages ago. I spent the better part of the weekend in New York, or on the long stretch of roads between there and Pennsylvania, visiting home for Easter and my birthday, and taking a much needed day off from work. It was nice. I got to see my parents and my sister, who was home for spring break, they gave me some wonderful gifts, and I got to play with our dog, who has been sick but now seems to be coping reasonably well with arthritis and diabetes. I just wish I had taken more pictures, or that they were of something more interesting than the house and neighborhood I grew up in. There’s always Memorial Day, I guess.
 |
 |
 |
 |
I’ve been twenty-five for about a week now, and it hasn’t killed me yet.
Well, I don’t think it’s particularly revealing, since the questions are phrased in such a way as to tell you more about the Endless than about yourself, and it’s relatively easy to guess which answers will yield which result, but I’m sharing anyway because that’s just the type of guy I am.
Which Member of the Endless Are You?
Found via neondisease, which used to have a link to me (and I guess I never understood why).