1. When I was in Pre-school, my cousin and I got in trouble and had to sit facing a wall for time out. I kept talking to him, and once, when he shushed me, the teacher saw him, and he had to stay extra long, while I walked free.

2. My kindergarten teacher was also the dedicated tooth-puller for the small elementary school I went to. She kept pliers in the closet.

3. My favorite superhero is the Green Lantern. I got a secret tattoo of his symbol on my leg, but I only kept the secret for 3 days.

4. I love my wife more than anything in the world. You mess with her, you mess with me, and while I may not match up physically, I am smarter than you, and I will make your life hell.

5. I work from home doing marketing for Shmoop.com. They’re pretty rocking people there.

6. I took 4 semesters of Spanish in college, and all I really know how to do is say my name and ask some banal questions about the weather. Sorry, Arturo.

7. I’m looking into possibilities of buying a bookstore or starting one. In either case, I’m just sort of bored and need a challenge. I think that’d be a WONDERFUL challenge for me.

8. I impulse purchased David Sedaris’s When You are Engulfed in Flames, and it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a while.

9. I was introduced to Twin Peaks, David Sedaris, and Annie Dillard all by the best English teacher I’ve ever had, Reed Wightman. I hope I can one day be like him.

10. I fancy myself a pretty decent writer whenever I’m not writing anything. Whenever I start, I find it all utter drivel. This is why I so rarely write anything.

11. My self esteem is far lower than you might imagine. I often poke fun at people and employ my dry wit, which often leaves others hurt. Whenever I do it, I momentarily feel better, then feel terrible for making someone else feel bad. It’s a vicious cycle that I’ve been trying to stop.

12. I’ve been in counseling on and off for the past 7 years. I’ve also been on and off medication since then. I take it long enough to start feeling better, then I quit, even though I know how much havoc that wreaks on me psychologically.

13. I’ve studied psychology for the past four years, and I admittedly had more fun and found those classes more interesting than most of my English ones, I just can’t stand statistics, so I only got a minor. I’ve considered going back into the field for graduate school.

14. I flat out told a PA once that she was placing me on the wrong medication, and backed it up on my next visit with academic proof. I’m pretentious that way.

15. I pride myself on my intelligence, but I constantly realize how much I don’t know, how much better other people are than me at X, Y, Z topics. While that should galvanize me, I usually just find myself despondent about it. I really should change that.

16. I went through high school bored with the work. I went through college bored with most of the work (there were some assignments that I made interesting, and some projects that I undertook on my own that were interesting), and I’m afraid that graduate school won’t be any different. When do I get to write, research, and discuss the things I like with other people who actually care?

17. For 2 years, I had (almost) weekly meetings with a professor on campus for counseling. These sessions were nearly always therapeutic, they usually consisted of me and the professor mentally sparring, which is way more than I could get out of my peers. Of everything from college, I miss that the most.

18. For about a year and a half, I always carried with me a book of Emily Dickinson poetry. Before that, I always made sure I had something by Edgar Allen Poe with me. I’ve since stopped carrying things around, though I should start again. Honestly, I’d love to be one of those people (like Abigail Adams) who could just rattle off poetry on a whim. I’d love to be one of those people, but I don’t do anything to make myself that way.

19. I wrote a paper about Sylvia Plath’s poem “Blackberrying” for class. I’m doing more research on it, and will expand it out a bit. I cannot find anyone who talks about it like I’m talking about it, and I really think I’m onto something with it. It excites me, if no one else.

20. While I may enjoy Literature and Psychology, I’m also a tech-head. I’ve been working in tech support / PC building and maintenance since 2003, and while I’ve got more experience doing that than anything else, I still can’t find a decent job.

21. I am guilty of getting stuck on stuff. Music, juice, food, whatever. Whenever I get in the mood for something, I’ll do that thing, listen to that band, eat that kind of food for weeks until I’m sick of it. I used to go through a bottle of Simply Orange about every 3 days. Now, I only drink it every couple weeks. Also, I’ve had the same Decemberists CD in my car for almost 2 months now.

22. I drove a pick-up truck for almost two years. I sold my Honda Civic and purchased that truck after my then-fiance and I broke things off. That summer, I changed a lot: New truck, new laptop, and I got LASIK so I didn’t have to wear glasses anymore. I blew every bit of savings I had.

23. I judge you whenever you use poor grammar. Even though I know there are grammatical errors scattered here and there on this site. (To defend myself: I don’t edit these posts. I type them out, and publish them. Sometimes I’ll write ahead and schedule it for later, but the only time I hit the “preview” button is whenever I’ve got some weird formatting or pictures, to make sure all the code worked right.) Despite my judgments on poor grammar, I’d be lost without a spell checker. My spelling is atrocious (and, yes, I had to use the spell checker to get that right).

24. I’m a movie fanatic, though I don’t get to watch nearly as many now as I used to. That whole life thing gets in the way, but I love movies. Old, new, they’re all good to me. I’m often accused of not being descriminating enough when I hand out praise for movies, but be sure, whenever I despise a movie, the vitriol (spell check) flows just as generously as the praise for a good one.

25. Whenever I have to whip up a quick website, I still use tables because I haven’t taken the time to learn CSS formatting. I know. I know. So shoot me. (Sorry, Ren.)

I don’t typically get very angry about things. Whenever I do, it rarely lasts very long. I can’t say that I’m really “over it” per se, but I have gotten past the initial knee-jerk reaction of the thing. Here, let me ruin a movie for you.

Seven Pounds is about a man who is out to help several people turn their disease-ridden lives around. His plan is to find people to whom he is a donor match, then he’s going to kill himself so those people can have his parts. What a hero! A man’s going to commit suicide, which is bad, terrible, no good. But wait! There’s more! He’s going to donate his parts to other people, so that’s okay. That’s right. Because none of us could find them before, Seven Pounds points out to us all the redemptive qualities of suicide.

Now, I realize that murder, violence, etc have been glorified in movies for years, but there just seems something different about treating suicide the same way. I mean, when do we get to see the redemptive qualities of child molestation or rape or elder abuse? I mean, those are all taboo, so they’re bound to be packed with oh so subtle redemptive qualities, right? Right?

Maybe suicide just hits me a little too close to home. I’ve been close. Too close. And whenever I see it being portrayed as something to strive for, something heroic, I guess I just get a little up in arms. I just fail to see how that message could be portrayed as heroic. Again: I understand my hypocrisy in my having no problems with the murder and violence being glorified, but there just seems to be something so different with suicide.

Thoughts?

Last week, I made a wordpress plugin that turns any twitter style name into a link, automatically! For example: @rachelskirts @jacefuse @thursdayschild

See? Automatically linked. If you’re interested in said plugin, you can check it out over on its page at Wordpress. Twitterlinker is the name.

Enjoy! Comments are surely welcome. If you use it, drop me a line as well!

As we were talking, one of my coworkers looked him up on IMDB, and found out he died in 2003. “How?” one of my coworkers asked. “Says here, he died from injuries resulting from hanging himself.”

“Oh, so he killed himself,” one said. “Not necessarily. It just says he died from injuries from hanging himself, not that he killed himself.”

“Yeah,” I suddenly chime in out of nowhere, “it may have been auto-erotic asphyxiation.”

For some reason, everybody got all awkward after that.

1. TV chefs have got to have the best jobs in the world. I mean, they get to spend all day in a kitchen, eating all the yummy food they make, and most of them get to showcase their alcoholism right there on the air! I mean, seriously, if your job is cooking and drinking, and you hook thousands of people into watching you cook food they could never make and drink drinks they will never mix, you’ve got it made.
2. As simple as they make all those dishes look, I realized I could never actually cook any of that stuff in my home. Who has all those utensils? Choppers, peelers, smashers, not to mention the massive stores of herbs and spices. Personally, I’m doing pretty well to have salt and pepper.
3. Why doesn’t anyone ever make, you know, Mamwich, Ramen, mac and cheese, etc? I mean, make some REAL food for once!

There was more, but Iron Chef Bobby Flay captured my attention, and well, I’m inspired to get cooking. PB&J, here I come.

1. Constitutional Law Paper (3/31)
2. American Lit presentation (4/1)l
3. Spanish Country Presentation (4/1)
4. Brit Lit presentation (4/2)
5. Hootenanny (4/4) (Including rehersals all next week)
6. Brit Lit Paper (Early April)
7. American Lit Paper (Early April)
8. Constitutional Law Briefs (Mid April)
9. American Lit Journals (Mid April)
10. Brit Lit Journals (Late April)
11. Lit Crit Journals (Late April)
12. Lit Crit Paper (Late April)
13. Inklings Final (Late April)
14. Inklings Reading Reviews (Late April)

I’m pretty sure that’s everything. I hope it’s everything, anyways. So, basically, between now and the end of April, I shall be living in the library. Forgive me if I’m not around the internets too terribly much for the next little while. I shall try to keep on top of things as best I can, though.

In case I don’t see you all, have a fantastic April!

I’ll cross items off as they get finished. Hopefully, I can knock out several things this week and weekend.

You can either give a listen to some of my Utterings via the new sidebar module, or you can go check out my Utterz profile.

My first Uttering is me reading the Juxtaposition 2. Let me know what you think!

Avitable is wonderfully frank, and his off-color humor never fails to entertain.

Sarcastica is a charming Canadian girl, with a true gift with words.

Joel Dueck is an insightful and extremely creative type. His is in podcast format most of the time.

Sarah over at A Child’s Romance, is an extremely gifted poet. She’s just started blogging, so lets all try to get her some readers and traffic, eh?

We were talking, and I wasn’t particularly paying attention to driving, so I came up to the red light, stopped, saw nothing was coming, and instinctively took my privilege of turning right on red. She (rather overly, if you ask me) emphatically told me that I wasn’t supposed to do that. How could I not have seen the sign? What if I got a ticket? What was I thinking? I sort of shrugged it off, and we parked at the restaurant which wasn’t too far away.

As we were walking in, she asked again what I would do if I got a ticket. Rather smugly, I said, oh, I’d just tell the judge that I had…” WHAM. Right about that time, my shoulder met with the corner of what I assume to be the electrical switch of the large, lighted sign for the restaurant. Much to my surprise (and chagrin) the encounter was less than amicable, and the resulting and sudden pain in my shoulder prompted me to flail my arms up defensively, tossing my phone in the process.

Nevermind that my phone flew directly in front of my girlfriend. She was too busy already doubled over laughing to try to save it from a death-drop to the concrete. Thanks.

Rubbing my shoulder and picking up my phone, “I’d tell him I had my mind on other things,” I finished, but at that point, I decided I should probably shut up, lest I run smack into the doors of the place. Besides, it’s too hard to talk when the both of you can’t stop laughing.