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this is probably my favorite thing ever on the whole internet. maybe even better than wikipedia.

It’s the fifth week of school. I have five chapters left to draft on my thesis, then revisions. I have 39 days left. i still have:

• no idea what to do this summer

• no idea what to do next fall

• no idea what to do with the rest of my life

that pretty much sums it up.

three things:

“As I look back over a misspent life, I find myself more and more convinced that I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It is really the life of kings.” -H.L. Mencken

And this, by David Simon.

And the positively dreamy class discussion I had today about em dashes.

This is almost enough to remind me of what I like the best, the feeling of listening to somebody talk, and taking notes, and the little voice in your head going ‘This is going to be so much fun to write’ and the feeling that yeah, it will be. So maybe I’ll never get a ph.d. And maybe I’ll never be a Radio City Music Hall Rockette. But I could move to any small town in the country, I could move to Fayetteville, Arkansas or Hendersonville, North Carolina, or Sonora, California and be a newspaper reporter. I could do respectable work and live a respectable life doing a respectable craft. (That’s right, a craft, like carpentry or welding.) I could do something worthy of self-respect. I feel like myself when I’m reporting. I feel like myself when I’m editing, when I’m sitting there with my stylebook and my blue pen and my coffee and really reading and making things better. I could do this and be happy.

And that’s reassuring.

i’ve officially been rejected from every phd program and writers’ residency i’ve applied to for next year. i’m crashing and burning on my thesis and i can’t sleep more than 2 hours at a time (i have a bird situation outside my house). i’ve tried sleeping medicine, makers’ mark and deep breathing. everything is just getting out of hand lately. i can’t maintain. i cannot go on like this for much longer.

i just keep thinking about hunter, and how for fourteen years of my life i wanted to be him because i felt like being a journalist, in that way, in the way of chronicling a time so comprehensively, was important and valuable and meant something. maybe it did then, but i don’t think it means the same thing now. i don’t think it’s even possible.

i feel like i was born in the wrong time, as the wrong person. why couldn’t i have been a 19th century typesetter, or a 1970s newspaper reporter, back when writing mattered and people read. what’s the point anymore? nobody reads and it doesn’t matter if you can write or not, because nobody cares. can’t use a  semicolon? so what. try to say something is “very unique,” people let it by (unique means one-of-a-kind, therefore, nothing can be “very unique”). i’m sick to death.

proof of this: last week, in las vegas, i called the Tropicana to tell them good job on their billboard for the Bodies Exhibition. Instead of the typical misused-verb “Exhibit,” they’d used the noun, “Exhibition.” I called to say thanks, and congratulations, and i couldn’t get anybody on the phone that didn’t want to refer me to a manager to take my complaint. i don’t have a complaint, for once, i said. it didn’t matter.

born in the wrong time, probably. born in the wrong place, probably. born as the wrong person, 100%.

“Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits.”  -Hunter Thompson,  1971

A few days ago I saw a television commercial for an Apple product featuring a song by Brendan Benson. The song is called “What I’m Looking For,” and was a single in 2005. (That’s right, three years ago.) It’s off his third solo album, The Alternative to Love. I’ve been listening to this album since before it came out (one of the many, many perks of working with college radio). I have his first two albums (Lapalco and One Mississippi) at home, but I wanted to listen to them at work today, instead of Alternative to Love, over and over, like I listened to yesterday, so I went searching through the B racks in the station.

This anecdote is the background for two separate musings below:

1. WTF, Apple? At least when you used that Feist song, you used it in the year it came out, not three years later. Why didn’t you use the Brendan Benson song back in ‘05, maybe to promote the iPod nano, or something else you made back then. People would have bought the album back then and then everybody would love Brendan Benson now.

2. One day I’m going to have a mental breakdown and re-shelve every single CD in the radio station. While looking for Brendan Benson (should be filed under “Benson”) I found Ben Kweller (in the B section, should be filed in the K section under “Kweller”) and Ben Folds (F, “Folds”). Of course, I didn’t find Brendan under “Benson” or under “Brendan.” I searched through L, thinking maybe it could be filed under “Lapalco,” but it wasn’t. I did find Ben Lee there, correctly filed under L (indicating the filing problem is not specific to artists named Ben, or whose names contain “Ben”).

These bring me to my actual point: Do other people just not care about anything anymore? Can Apple use something timely, instead of dredging up my favorite records from years ago to sell stuff (namely stuff I already own)? Can things be properly alphabetized? It’s not like I’m asking you to learn the Dewey Decimal System or anything—it’s just the alphabet. I mean, I know by now that nobody learns in school anymore how to correctly use punctuation, but letters, right, don’t you learn those in kindergarten or something? Am I a total nutbar for thinking people should know the alphabet? God forbid someone use a semicolon correctly—I might just have a stroke.

so, even though i don’t make a lot of money, or have a lot of money, i still like to give it away. i donate to charities, i donate to the college i work at’s scholarship fund, i donate to my old college’s alumni association, i donate to political campaigns and nonprofit organizations that lobby for things i believe in.

and i believe in WFMU.

cause yeah, you can donate money to cure diseases and to save people’s lives, but then, after you do that, you can donate money to make radio better, and so those people whose lives you saved will have something to listen to.

i’m alive. just really busy. updates soon, i promise.

I currently cannot find my copy of Al Burian’s “Burn Collector.” This angers me for many reasons.  First, I hate losing things. It proves my parents right, that I’m irresponsible. Second, I want to read it right now before I go to Chapel Hill in February for a weekend. Third, I’d buy a new copy, but this one has sentimental value. Fourth, I just reread it a few months ago. I just had it. And now it’s gone. It’s just so frustrating.

But probably it angers me the most because I just wasted about an hour looking for it and procrastinating doing my real work and didn’t find it and therefore have nothing to show for my efforts. This is so frustrating.

Even on the hardest days of my job, the days where I’m there for fourteen hours on a day after being there for twelve hours, the days where people yell and cry and fight for what they believe in and the days where I go toe-to-toe with everyone in sight, those hard days are still better than the very best day at any other job I’ve ever had.

And that’s something.

So, I just read this, and for some reason, it really depresses me. I always imagine France, especially Paris, as this weird anachronistic place where people smoke like people smoked in the states in the 50s and 60s. When I went to Paris, nothing seemed more natural than the literally hundreds of people sitting in cafés, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and reading the daily newspaper. It was as natural as elderly women in all black and high heels. It was as natural as being kind of almost a little bit felt up by a stranger on the Metro. It was so Paris-y.

But here’s what really bugs me. In the article, about seventeen graphs in, a curator from the French Museum of Smoking explains that he’s concerned that if not allowed to smoke, there may be fewer brilliant French writers. I understand this. When you write every day for a living, it’s difficult to do it without some sense of stability. Sitting in a specific chair, or eating a specific snack, or doing it at a specific time, or having a specific thing on your desk to fiddle with, or drinking coffee, or juice, or something. For me, it’s specific music, desk set-up and hot tea for serious writing (hot tea not coffee, because I get jittery if I have too much coffee). Non-serious writing I can just have the laptop anywhere, but still, the way I open up a text file and write in it, and the way the files on my computer are arranged are all part of the method. And none of these little idiosyncrasies are chemically addictive (maybe the tea, a little). So yes, I do feel like writers in France who write best in cafés with a cigarette in their hands will suffer. And yes, I feel sorry for them. I always felt like as a writer, France would be a great place to expatriate to, but now I’m not so sure.

I submitted grades from teaching yesterday. It felt really anticlimactic. Teachering is done. The past three weeks have been so fun I almost forgot I got older. I had a great birthday, except for the part where my house flooded. Hanging out on the porch with friends and neighbors, eating pies and lowcountry boil and new people and everything. It’s like I forgot I was capable of having fun and being sociable. It’s nice to have that back.

I do wish I was going home for Christmas for an extended period of time. Just because of the reading time. At home, my family will cordon ourselves off into different corners of the house for hours reading. I get to do that at my grandparents’ house too, and it’s probably my favorite thing about holidays: quiet.

Instead, I’ll be on a whirlwind tour of Greenville-Spartanburg-Atlanta in as many days.

In the spirit of open options, I’m applying to a few Ph.D. programs. The application process has changed a bit since I applied to MFA programs in 2002. Most everything is online, and the forms are all pretty confusing. Sometimes there’s one set of forms. Sometimes there’s separate sets for the college and the specific program. Sometimes you can’t even get to the writing prompts for the essays until you fill out a ton of the online form. Yesterday I worked on 3 apps and it took most of the day.

And now I’m writing an essay. This is the prompt:

Essay A: Autobiographical Essay. Give us your best writing. Tell us about yourself. You can include information on your family, significant persons, places and events in your life, what interests you, etc. You have some leeway with the writing format however overly dramatic or comedic writing including poetry or writing in the 3rd person is not encouraged. After reading your “feature” the reader should be both informed and hopefully want to find out more — about you. (750-word limit)

I mean, how vague can you get? They could have just said hey, write something. Go. After staring at a blank page for about 2 hours yesterday, I gave up and graded essays for the class I teach and worked on my thesis for a while. Today, though, is the day I will write it. It will happen.

Help me.

as much as i’m frustrated by adbusters , i am a fan of their ‘buy nothing’ day. today, i successfully bought only one thing: a barbecue sandwich. i was driving through south carolina and it was a must-have. except for that, i didn’t buy anything else. i didn’t even look at stuff to buy people for upcoming holidays. i resist the urge to purchase.

in other news, yesterday my mom grabbed  my head and asked if i’d been painting. apparently, the gray hair that has been attacking my head since i was nineteen is now attacking in clumps. and one of the clumps in the front does look a lot like titanium white. i guess it’s time to dye my hair. i really thought i could make it to twenty-six without having to become one of those women that dyes her hair every six weeks. apparently that’s not in the cards for me. apparently i’m going to be one of those hair-dye women. it’s just a few steps away from pancake foundation makeup and false eyelashes and acrylic nails and breast implants and liposuction. the end is near.

So, I missed posting yesterday, but it was the last day of school and I had to celebrate. Our whole class went to Moon River, and Kristine gave us the grand tour of upstairs. We all talked and hung out and had fun, and then I turned around and it was late. But finding new friends is always worth it.

And I think I got straight As.

Today in my office, I was eating a Werther’s and my jacket slipped off my chair and I realized it was finally autumn-ish.