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."

#133: oh paddy, your daddy, well he's richer than everyone

I finally got around to editing the pictures I took circa Liz's wedding. They all look grainy and wobbly because we inhabited inadequately-lit spaces all three days and I hate using the flash because it's disruptive and also I don't like light. Or happiness, rainbows, unicorns, singing Irish maids?

Here's the main piece I wrote for yesterday paper. The doom-laden headline is only 1/16 accurate. "BLAAAAAAAAASTED!!!!" I like to imagine the city council leaping as one body atop the bench while the angry citizens rush forward jeering and rattling their pitchforks. But that never happens here.

In other news, there is something wrong with me. I've felt horrible the last few days. I'm not sure if it's sickness or sleep deprivation or an early onset of death. Thankfully, my week slows down a bit today so I should be able to come home and sleep for an absurd amount of time after I finish up proofing and water districting and observing in the morning and early afternoon.

Also, I've decided to start reading again. It seemed like a good idea.

1) "Silent Spring" Rachel Carson -- I expect this book to upset me because I'm always upset when I rediscover how careless we all are and that there are, in fact, more of us in the world than I realized and there is no Wilderness, but neither is there a Garden. And NOWHERE on this earth can one escape government regulations or people trying to influence government regulations, nor can you get more than one mile away from a county road. I used to be amused when our family would think about moving somewhere and Dad would stop at a potential house, get out of the car, and look with distaste at the trees: "Hmmmph. Not enough prairie." But I think I have some of that in me. Also, the hiking obsession, just like Dad. Get away get away get away from the babel. You never can though. This is another reason I love the ocean: it drowns out the noise of the highways and people like nothing else can.

2) "Lord Peter: The Complete Stories" Dorothy L. Sayers -- Lord Peter is better in novels than in short stories, but it's a big, long book so that's not my final judgment. It's true though that I'm enjoying the non-Lord Peter stories in this collection ever so much more than the Lord Peter front-and-center stories.

3) "The Day We Found the Universe" by Marcia Bartusiak -- Stars and, you know, stuff.