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I continue to think spam can’t get any more confusing or annoying, and yet it continues to confuse and annoy me. Case in point: today, not ten minutes ago in fact, I received a fake virus warning. “A letter sent to you was infected with a virus,” it says. “It was deleted. Below are the headers of this message and information from the virus scanner.” This didn’t come from my virus detection software, though, and I’m quite sure there is no postmaster at unreality dot net. Maybe someone tried to send a virus using a faked e-mail address and my domain name, but overall what I received looks suspiciously like spam since it, too, comes from an address I don’t recognize. Which begs the question: if you’re not selling or promiting something, and you’re not sending a virus, a link or something else, what then is the point of spam?

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.

“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:

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.