vitality

The tea brewing in the pot is called "Vitality" and it has herbal stuff in it that makes you vital and vigorous and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, crush rocks with your fist and save innocent women using only a paperclip, chewing gum and a bit of lint you found in your coat pocket. Or so they tell me. It tastes like lightly-flavored hot water and it smells nice. Works for me.

I am my favorite coffee shop in town where the women know my name and sound excited when they see me and it combines to make me feel just a little bit loved. I am trying to be productive with my day. I am working on a self-evaluation for work because, hey!, I've been at the newspaper a year now and this is what you do when you hit the year mark.

What have I done this year?

"Wrote stuff. Took pictures. Sometimes. Please don't fire me."

I'm bad at self-evaluations. It's hard to bridge the line between self-effacing modesty and mad egocentric raving, and doing so professionally without sly undertones and asides, while still honestly touting my virtues and making a case for my continued survival on this planet. I was not made for the professional adult world. I'm bad at it and my hair is too crazy and I can't apply makeup. Also, I frequently whine about how I can't apply makeup which is just ridiculous. Surely there's a YouTube video out there.

There's always a YouTube video.

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What I read today:

"You see where I'm going with this. For your writing to be great -- I mean great, not clever, or even brilliant, or most misleading of all, beautiful -- it must be useful to the world. And for that to happen you must form an opinion of the world. And for that to happen you need to observe the world, closely and steadily, with a mind open to change. And for that to happen you have to live in the world, and not pretend that it is someone else's world you are writing about. A tendency of modern literature is to claim, 'We must love one another or die,' or 'be true to one another,' or 'only connect.' Sweet as such sentiments may be, they give up on the world and imply that the best way to live in it is to hide from it in one another's embrace. Instead, you must love the world as it is, because the world, for all its murder and madness, is worth loving. Nothing you write will matter unless it moves the human heart, said the poet A.D. Hope. And the heart that you must move is corrupt, depraved and desperate for your love."