good morning, class. we leave for london tonight. the lovely shannon is at work right now, cursing her boss's name soundly for making her come in today. it's okay, though. shan will be mellowed out by the time we get to the airport. then all will be right with the world. i have a handful of minor tasks to accomplish today while shannon is out earning pennies. and then we go!

while we're gone, your homework assignment is to figure out how to beat level 22 on this damned game. and let me know when you've figured it out so i can play, too.

have a good week and don't let the transition into febuary bite you on the ass!

(and we'll see you on saturday, mr. eccles!)

one more day to go!

right now, i'm reading a prayer for owen meany by john irving. this is the fourth book by this author that i've read (the world according to garp, the cider house rules, the hotel new hapshire). the weird thing is that my mother really likes john irving and she's been trying to get me to read his stuff for awhile. she recommended the cider house rules by telling me that one of the main characters was an ether addict. i found that a bit odd.

but my mother has always liked a prayer for owen meany and, a few dozen pages into the novel, i think i know why. the book is about religion. specifically, it's about why the narrator is a christian believer. i may not be a believer, but i refuse to pour scorn on christians in general because of my mother. she's a devout christian and is one of the more moral people that i've ever met. i respect her beliefs. i don't share them, but the fact that she doesn't try to get me to makes me respect her that much more.

(to be clear, i do have great disrespect for people who claim to be christian and act decidedly unchristian. and i studied enough church doctrine to know the difference. the church is a fascinating study and you need to know about the church to understand europe in the middle ages. so i probably know more about heretical doctrine than most devout christians, which i find funny.)

forgive for wandering all over the page there...

weirdness abounds. i'm getting hits on very odd search requests. first, there is this one (i won't come out and say what it is because this is a family blog. stop that snickering, carrie!) and then i've got punk girl. and boobies. which is always a favorite. after all, where would we be without boobies? hungry, that's where!

okay. i'm really busy now, so go find yer content elsewhere!

laser tag rocked tasty hard abs. as we knew it would. it was great to see everyone there. shout outs to shannon, sarah and the always blushing carrie. i'd shout out to others, but nobody else reads this but them and eccles and he couldn't be bothered to make the transatlantic flight for a night of fun. too bad, too. but that's okay. we'll see him on saturday! wooo!

only a few days left. it's soooo nice to be able to say "i'm leaving on thursday for london." that's always such a cool feeling. and we just packed a lot of our stuff up about ten minutes ago. it's real! we have the funny money to prove it!

today was a federal holiday, so we were not at work. but it was also a long, weary slog through my email over a dialup connection. the culture list exploded with conversation last night and i spent several hours in front of the computer trying to read and respond to it all. well, not respond to everything. just the bits that i felt i could contribute to. but that was still a lot. shannon got a bit frustrated with me, i think. but she got to watch hedwig and the angry inch, which lori gave her as a birthday present. so that made her happy.

but things are good in general. i got my velvet underground cd back from joe and jenny, so i was able to listen to stephanie says, white heat/white light, what goes on and pale blue eyes today. that felt so good. i miss lou reed sometimes. not always, but just sometimes.

heh. i just told shannon "you should be calling me to come pick you up from the metro right about now." funk soul brother...

so it's sunday. that means different things to different people. for me, it means the washington post book world. yah!

but let me get back to where it all began. friday...

we went to the american express office on friday evening and got money turned into pounds, which puts everything into perspective. it always feels real when you have money from another country in your pocket. so we were excited about that. we got ready to go to panic at the metro cafe on friday night, except that i made another classic matt blunder (i write these down so i can remember not to be an idiot and an asshole). the club was good, though. great music and interesting people. but the space was far too small.

it snowed on saturday, which meant the mall was dead (yay!). we looked at pimp suits for a bit and bought various things. and we went to catacomb, as usual. most unusual thing overheard last night: "i'm wearing panties now. if you wanted, i could not be wearing panties." you have to wonder about the conversation that line came from. well, i wonder.

and we left early so we could come home and watch the nerve.com special on hbo (which we taped). it was really good. really really. natacha merritt's new pictures are fantastic. she's someone to watch in the future. and her interview was great, too. i'd really like to meet her and interview her someday. sure... interview...

today we're going up to gaithersburg to eat dinner and play laser tag with twenty five of our closest friends. it boggles my mind that we know that many people and that that many people are willing to show up for something we organized. wow.

so someone on the culture list sent out a little message about this game where you can create your own rawkstar. so i created my own band, an emo group called stan and the big chrome buttplug.

a little history is necessary to really understand all of the nuances behind this name, though.

my friend joe had a friend named stan that was a pussy. so much so that when joe bought himself an artifical vagina, he called it stan. he told his friend stan "you're such a pussy that i'm going to name my artifical vagina after you." and stan was born.

the big chrome buttplug comes from this item at the folsom electric company. (yes, technically, it's a large chrome buttplug, but big chrome buttplug just rolls off the tongue better. and, if we're being technical, it should be stan meets the big chrome buttplug as the band name. and, sometimes, i say big steel buttplug. but that's just cause the syllables are nicer. anyway....)

i was thinking of writing a children's story called stan meets the big chrome buttplug, just for the humor value. but i couldn't think of anything to write. so i didn't.

last night, though, i got the new issue of national geographic and it has a whole little section about the region of the world that afghanistan is in. and it talks about the suffix 'stan.' stan (noun) from the persian, meaning place. and it talks about the stans all the way through the article. there are seven stans, for example. and the stans do this. and they do that. and so on and so forth. and, as i was reading the article, it occurred to me that (afghani)stan has already met the big chrome buttplug. they call themselves the us military, though.

i'm taking a break from the great mde manual revision of 2002 so i can eat my hoho and check some websites. (thought i was gonna say "check my email," huh? wrong! i do that anyway, thanks to the little yahoo! messenger thingie on my desktop that tells me when i have email. yessireebob. labor saving devices. that's what the computer age has brought us - little applications that tell us when we have email. god bless the humble programmers!)

okay. so i'm a little slap-happy by this point. but hell. i've been here for four hours and it has been four hours of complete nuttiness. i've had to deal with a metric ton of bullshit so far this morning and, although i won't go into it all (so i'll have something to talk to shannon about when she gets home tonight - lucky girl!), i will say this: yelling "pigfucker!" at your microsoft word might tend to attract the attention of your manager if you're not careful. stoopid tab settings... grumble.

yes. work sucks the giant hairy dangly things this week. ah, stress. the coffee of the modern workplace! it only makes me appreciate our impending vacation that much more. and what a vacation it will be! two nights in a row with the london crewe (including such out-of-town notables as our own eccles (hi eccles!) and rik from nottingham). and then cambridge, where we will be entertained by the amazing dancing jo, who may or may not knock things off a table during the course of her dance.

and i am only slightly disappointed that we will not be attending any of the strip joint pubs in whitechapel on saturday night. instead, we'll be at the normal ones, which is great for the kind of get-together that we're planning. after all, i'm there to meet and talk to my friends, not look at foreign boobies. not that i've got anything against foreign boobies, mind you. all boobies are my friends. it's just that most of them are friends i haven't met yet.

speaking of which, someone has been doing searches in google for sweater meat and hitting my site. what's that about? (yes, i know that actually putting the words into the content (such as it is) of this blog will make it jump up in the search results, but if someone is actually stupid enough to come here looking for mention of boobies, well... they've come to the right place, i s'pose.)

and that's all i gotta say about that.

today, anyway.

i was standing in the elevator bay over at the dot just now, looking at the bulletin board. there's a notice about one of the new training films that has been done up like a hollywood movie poster, including reviews and a rating (g for government). i thought that was pretty imaginative. for a government office, i mean.

on my way through the courtyard of the dot building, i swear i saw a single flake of snow. there was another one as i was crossing the street. it makes sense, though. the sky is so overcast that the reflected light hurts the eyes. now we just need a little moisture...

i had to reread my previous entries just to see what i've been doing lately. work is so crazy right now... polling, schedules, conferring, three phone calls from the same person, and two hours spent hitting check case for two hundred cases just to see what errors they all have. that was fun. i still have to do my screen captures at some point between now and then.

but. i'm getting the england stuff organized. cambridge looks fairly solid right now and we're going to see a japanese all-girl punk band in camden on the 27th. that should be fun. wow. suddenly i can read the list and think "yeah, that sounds like fun" and i can show up for the event! that's so amazing...

on top of all this, i'm trying to find an agent, so i can capitalize on the momentum (such as it is) that the contest gave me. why not, right? yeah. sure....

hardly any time to update today because, well, because we're working like crazy people to get the 2002 update out the door and i've got a trip to london right in the middle of the planning stages of the upgrade. which makes me more than a little edgy, frankly. i mean, things will get accomplished, but it's going to be tight. and everyone's on edge because certain people at the government end of things haven't bothered to finalize our contract yet. it's a whole thing...

so i had two meetings today and a whole lot of trying to figure out certain logistical nightmares to the best advantage of everyone. discussion is wonderful except when it's just throwing ideas out on the table. at some point, someone has to make a decision and i guess that someone is me. except that i'm going to be gone, so i'd have to make that decision early, before all the data comes in. wonderful.

where would we be without monday's to confound us? honestly.

yesterday was the best kind of saturday. relaxing and mellow, for the most part. we went shopping and i got art supplies at wal-mart and accompanied shannon as she did shopping-type things in the sunlight and nearly warm air. then we went to my office holiday party (held in january, which make some kind of weird sense, i suppose). i wore my electric blue suit and got numerous comments on it, all of them good. one of the dealers (it was vegas night) actually asked where i got it and wondered if it would come in his size. "yes," i answered. "the store caters to bigger and taller men than i." he outweighed me by maybe two hundred pounds. but hey. anytime i can direct people to the pimp suit store, it's a good thing.

anyway. shannon and i both lost our chips at the blackjack table by nine, which gave both of us two hours of good playing. then we lost some borrowed chips at the roulette table. it was fun, because it was just imaginary money. the winner for the night was sitting next to me at the blackjack table, but i kept ignoring his advice. i'm terrible at blackjack.

and then there was the raffle. i won a border's $50 gift card, which was cool. i actually jumped up in the air when i won. shannon assures me that it was really funny. not much later, my really drunk manager was unable to decipher the numbers on her raffle ticket. three times in two minutes. i found that funny. but then, i'm mean (as anyone who really knows me can attest to).

and shannon is at work today because she has to do research. it's what happens when you do an important job. i'm supportive of her because it's a great opportunity for her. and i'm doing the laundry. (i was watching final fantasy again, but that's over now. now i listen to booth and the bad angel.)

and.... eccles returned from his vacation and brought pictures. very pretty pictures, too.

and... i used this particular transition too many times. sorry.

little notes for a rainy friday.

i almost passed out in the shower this morning, which happens occasionally. i can't remember the last time it happened, but i know it's happened before. anyway, my whole body just decided that it didn't have the energy to stand upright anymore, much less do things like use soap or shampoo. so my hair is all greasy and i'm still a little woozy. but i had an apple, a bowl of cereal and a cup of tea before i left this morning. and a nutrigrain bar at work this morning. i'm doing better, thanks. it's just one of those things about being without body fat. my body shuts down really easily. it sucks and i hate it because it's never pleasant to be reminded of how fragile your metabolism really is.

on to other, less personal, topics...

ben brown is doing two minute shows every day. you should watch them. they're really funny. really really. and you should go look at moby's pictures. he dropped his camera and it started taking odd, surrealistic pictures. i know i've mentioned them before, but they're still really cool.

remember when mtv was cool? yeah. me, too.

as carrie said: the sky was beautiful this morning. there was a pastel red on the underside of the clouds and, on the horizon, the rising sun looked like the gates of hell opening up. in a nice way, of course.

the final episode of survivor is on tonight and shannon has to be at a work function. bummer for her. so i'm going to tape it for her. because i'm a good boyfriend and i need all the points i can get.

and, of course, i'm still smiling from the results of the contest. hell, even if i didn't win, i was a finalist. that was soooo cool. ahem. but i cannot rest on my laurels. i have to move ahead. right after the upgrade is done.

i got the following letter in the mail tonight:

Dear R. M. Rhodes,

The judge, Michael Langan, has chosen MEADOW FUGUE AND DESCANT, a novel by Faith Jackson as the winner of Washington Writers Publishing House 2002 Fiction contest.

As fiction coordinator I read all the manuscripts. I found THE PODIUM somewhat unpolished, but I truly liked the liveliness of the style, the underlining wit and the originality of the writing. Though I thought it might be a long shot, I submitted it to the judge as one of the five finalists on the strength of its difference from the other manuscripts.

Perhaps one of the problems (the judge thought it "didn't have much to say" though he liked the "non-stop verbal flow") is that the writing is better than the story, which only becomes strong in the end. I personally didn't find that a flaw, but the judge obviously did. The one thing that seemed contrived to me was the quirkiness of the characters' names, especially at the onset. It seemed an unwarranted bid for attention not yet earned. Perhaps the explanation of the names should come earlier, if that could be worked out.

I hope you won't find these observations presumptuous. As a fellow writer, I know how much work goes into a manuscript, and I feel that any submission should receive some feedback, not just a formula rejection.

Thank you for entering the contest, and all my best wishes for the new year.

Best Regards,
Laura Brylawski-Miller
Fiction Contest Coordinator

!

rawk!

so the publication option is down on blogger. guess that means that people will have to wait and see what i have to say.

anyway. random thoughts time. the construction site near the van dorn street metro is putting up more magenta-walled offices. someone keeps hitting my site with the boob grab queries on google. that's odd. i blew all my good boyfriend points last night with a crude comment, where a more cultured request would have sufficed. we were eating dinner at pizzeria uno last night when i went into the wrong restroom (my first inkling that something was wrong was when i noticed there were no urinals). and this reminded me of someone (she knows who she is).

on days like today, i wonder if i should have been a painter. joe says that my photoshop work drifts in that direction and i've been working with that in mind recently. color, composition - these are my guideposts, my touchstones. the rest of it? not so much. i'm almost not even interested in the details of the images i work with anymore. i just want the overall shape to be harmonious. odd. but i'm getting some good images out of what i'm doing, so why complain?

nothing else to report, really. we watched shallow grave last night and i'm rereading the good parts of cryptonomicon (it's a big book and there are a lot of good parts). other than that? nothing.

eh. every day is ennui day, but monday especially. do you ever feel like you're just marking time? checking off the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks as they pass? waiting and anticipating? i hate that. i want to live my life now, be excited about the things that are going on now, not just something that will be happening three weeks from now. i try to be, but sometimes it's difficult to get out of the rut of the same old thing. especially when that rut involves getting up and going to work every day. oh well, if i'm bitching about the samness of things, it must be the onset of winter and the aggravation it brings to my imagination.

i read an interesting quote in the kindness of women (jg ballard) this morning:

Recently she had become intrigued by the admiring glances of other women. The admiration of her own sex existed on a higher and more intense plane than anything men could offer, like the romantic rivalries of sisters. Together, women formed a conspiracy of glances entirely exchanged behind the backs of their menfolk.

and that's it for the profundity of monday. i'm still doing the same things i always do: polling, checking my email, wondering what craziness the world will throw at me today, thinking about thinking about writing. you know, the usual.

today we have an overly prurient post. i've had some unusual hits on this blog lately. this one about boob-grabbing and another one with a similar search request. what's funny is how far down this site is in each result. but someone came here anyway.

oh well. whatever gets people to this site, right?

and, in other news, i pulled a muscle in shannon's back during sex last night. i gave her a massage today and she's been taking it easy, but i find it pretty funny despite the fact that she's in pain.

i got this note in the mail last night and laughed as i read it on the elevator ride to the fourth floor:

31 DEC 01

The end of a very strange year

Dear Matt

Accompanying this note is a tear-out from today's NYTimes which might interest you. It is the latest in a series which was dealt with in one of the books you received for Christmas. Now that I know of your interest, I'll tear them out and send them along. Why not cut them out, you might ask when you see the jagged edges resulting from my tearing. Are you aware of the different skills needed to tear up-and-down as opposed to across the page. UP and DOWN is child's play compare to STRAIGHT ACROSS. If my father or grandfather were alive today I'd ask them why this is so. Both were skilled in the arcane art of papermaking. Grandmom is unsympathetic. For God's Sake, get a scissor and stop trying to tear. It is the challenge which women don't understand.

Warmest greetings,
G Pa Norris

today was fun. we went up to the national conservatory (that was just reopened a few weeks ago) and battled all the people for a view of the orchids in the southern corner of the building. plus, we got to walk on the catwalk. we'll probably go back when there are less people about. it's only two blocks away from my office, so i might just visit on my own sometime. it's nice to be around green plants and growing things in the middle of winter.

well good morning, all. it's almost lunchtime for me, which means that i'm posting rather late in the day (for me). but that's because i've been playing silly buggers with a troll on the culture list. he's got that really annoying posting style where he writes three words, does a little elipsis thing and then writes a few more. no context, no syntax, no grammar, no complete sentances. just a lot of random, rambling words. and lots of insults, too. but he's fun to fuck with and i've been doing that for the past two days. it's entertainment, i tell you!

the lovely shannon is home sick today. she was not feeling well at all last night. i hope she's feeling better now...

and today we just got word that the 2002 rollout may be sooner than we expected. that should be fun. right after i get home from london. the week after. literally. so much fun it hurts.

it's still really fucking cold outside. winter has arrived, which doesn't make much sense because we've passed the shortest day of the year. it's supposed to get warmer from here on out, right? more sunlight = more heat.

i got into a weird argument with shannon last night because she wants me to push myself creatively. i can see where she's coming from and i appreciate the fact that she's willing to stand up and offer me her opinions. that means a lot, actually. she thinks that i could be doing more than i have been and it's tough to argue with that without coming off as defensive or snippy. it's not a position i liked being in and i could tell that she wasn't very comfortable, either. oh well. we'll figure something out. we always do. it's one of the most important parts of the relationship to me: how much critique and imput am i willing to deal with from the person who lives with me?

i know she loves me. and i know that she wants what's best for me and my art. i love her. it's just tough to get criticism from the person that's closest to you. especially when you know that it's honest and well-meant and should probably be listened to. damned pride. always fucks with me.

in other news, there was a really interesting submission on red clouds the other day. it was a really artistic picture that had been retouched in photoshop. very impressive. i'm always impressed when someone takes the time to do something like that and then submit it. it makes the viewing experience more enjoyable.

i couldn't be bothered to get the cds out of the car last night, so i'm listening to radiohead at work today. kid a and amneisac. i have ok computer here, but i want to mix it up a bit. listen to things i haven't heard in a while.

i'm goofing off so far today, but i do have to compile a monthly progress report, so there is that. but what else? um. that's about it. so everyone gets a boring post today? yep. unless they want to hear about the fact that i got my bonus check, which was a nice thing to find on my chair first thing in the morning...

i had half an idea called the blowjob seminars. no real idea how to tell the story, just a title and a good idea. this woman beat me to it. (and i like the note about needing an olympic-level coach, too...)

good morning and happy new year (i assume that you're reading this in the new year). we had a low key night, which can be very nice, if you do it right. and we did it right.

we went to blockbuster and got some bad movies on dvd. then we had dinner at mccormick and schmick's, which was fabulous. (try the grouper with the jamaican rum butter. mmm... rum butter.) then we came home and watched our movies. osmosis jones first. then boogie nights. our first lesson of the new year was how much better a movie boogie nights became after we watched the director's commentary on the deleted scenes. it added a whole other level to the story. we started noticing things that just kept popping up: ringo, the magic tricks, maurice talking about the pictures, the paintings. good stuff. way to make a good movie better.

oh. and i did some more plotting yesterday. ask me some time about nine thousand days or morose or the revision wars. i'm going to write all of this stuff by the end of the year. that's my resolution. or, as much of it as i can. i can write two books a year. why not six? huh? it's a noble conceit. might as well make the effort.