Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Cloud 9,000

I got perhaps the best news of my writing career this afternoon.


About a month ago—it seems far longer!—I got in touch with a reputable literary agency in New York. A friend of a friend worked there, and I sent them my query letter, and they responded with enthusiasm. (Which pretty much on its own put me into a manic state.) I sent them the manuscript.

And I waited.

And I waited.

And I waited.

It’s hard for me to be patient or realistic with such things; I had sent them a manuscript that was about the same length as Moby Dick, and I was in near-suicidal despair when they hadn’t responded after a week. (OK, maybe it wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t far off; I was checking my email pretty regularly, and checking the spam filters too, just to be safe.) I completely lost track of how much time had elapsed; if it weren’t for the time stamps on the emails, I wouldn’t believe it has been under a month.

But there was an email in my inbox today; after the salutations, it read:

"I want you to know that I’m almost finished with Part 3 of Resistance and will surely be finished by the time I get back from the Thanksgiving holiday. I am really enjoying the manuscript! I have some notes that I’m writing up and will, again, share those with you as soon as I’m back from the holiday. Please hold tight and thank you for your patience!

Have a very happy Thanksgiving!"

Now, I’ve never gotten to the point of having a respectable agent read and like my manuscript, and have serious notes and comments in the works. So I dashed off a quick reply thanking her, and telling her that her email had made my day, my week and my month. I then updated my facebook status to indicate that I was “on Cloud 9,000.”

I did stick to my evening routine, which felt good; I’m even making a point of writing this, just to do some writing today, because that habit—aping a lot of far more successful writers who have gone before me—is what’s even allowed me to get to this point. I’m trying to stay present, rather than scripting scenarios of and talk show appearances and book tours, and book tour groupies piling in to the back of the Resistance tour bus. There’s a lot that has to happen before I get to that point.

But right now, things are going as well as possible. Happy Thanksgiving, indeed!

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Fun Indie Rock

So I've had this song in my head after seeing Tell Your Friends at U.S. Beer Company last night. They're a great little indie rock band with wierd catchy melodies and an angsty-but-exciting lead singer. Rabbit Children played too; they also rocked.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

A Slice of Corporate America

OK, I've been trying to keep posting stuff, but I'm a little lazy, so it may all be good but it won't all be fresh. Anyway, this site's been up a while, but it still rocks, especially if you've ever, like, used a computer at work, which should be all of you. The first two episodes are the funniest, but the new ones are worth watching, too.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

LSD and MLB

Mixing drugs and sports is always a bad idea, right? Maybe not, as this fun little video suggests.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

School's In

Last Friday, I caught a great comedy show called “Mrs. Gruber’s Ding-Dong School” at the Gorilla Tango Theater.


Now, it seems I can’t swing a dead cat these days in Chicago without hitting a friend or co-worker who is studying improv and aspiring to be a comedian of some sort. (Believe you me, I’ve tried. And I have plenty of funny friends with claw-marks on their face to prove it.) Their shows are usually decently entertaining. Still, they tend to be improv-based, and/or rely heavily on sex humor and things of that sort. Not that I mind sex humor per se—but it does get less-than-shocking after a while, and a certain amount of the comedy/titillation comes from that thought of “Oh my God! There’s my friend/colleague/co-worker/boss/spiritual advisor simulating a sex act on stage for laughs, and/or joking about Cleveland Steamers! I’ll never be able to look at them the same way again!”

ANYWAY, I went to this particular show because a co-worker of mine is a co-founder of a comedy troupe called Robot vs. Dinosaur. They’d staged this show, and I went expecting the standard stuff. But I got a lot more.

“Mrs. Gruber’s” is really delightful—and, most importantly, incredibly well-written. It presents a series of vignettes that deftly skewers the utopian cartoon B.S. we were all shoveled in our youth. Mrs. Gruber is of a type we’ve grown to love, and then to despise—the wise Mary Poppins type, kindly and innocent, eager to shepherd young children though various life lessons with a wink and a smile and a kindly pat on the head. Only here, the lessons are more realistic, and a lot funnier. Instead of being told “Feed the birds, twopence a bag,” we get a harangue from a schizophrenic homeless man—sung to the same tune—about how fish have lasers. We see the “Diversity Chicken” imploring the children that they don’t have to actually like minorities, or make them part of their lives; they just have to tolerate them. A young cloud gets an important lesson on racism from a gun-toting hillbilly. And, in the show’s best sequence, the “Reality Fairy” shows up to give the kids a little perspective on what they can realistically expect from their lives.

Unfortunately, it’ll only be around for another week. But catch it if you can! I’m seriously considering schlepping back up to 1919 N. Milwaukee, shilling out another $15 bucks, and giving it another go. Even if I don’t, though, I’ll be keeping my eyes on this group and looking forward to whatever they put together next.

Saturday, November 07, 2009

Facebook

I realized very shortly after setting up my facebook account that I’d gotten myself into deep trouble.


It was September, a little over a year ago. I found my thoughts racing, and usually heading straight back to my friend list. I obsessed over my profile even when I was doing other things; I remember going running by the lake and wondering almost the whole while which Elliott Smith quote defined me as a person. I learned to love chatting with three people at a time—when I’d see the little red message indicators start popping up in rapid succession, it felt like human Whack-a-Mole. I felt plugged into the lives of everyone I knew, and vice versa, in a way that I hadn’t felt in a while; every accepted friend request felt like a little shot of self-esteem delivered right into my ego. All the parties I’d missed because the invites had been online—I would miss them no more! All the girls I hadn’t asked out because I didn’t know if they were in relationships or not—I’d ask them out! (Or I would get asked out, because I’d write my profile so convincingly that one of them would realize they were my soul mate.) At any rate, the problems I had would no longer be problems. I had arrived.

The only problem was that, based on these symptoms, it was pretty obvious I was addicted. I’d pop in to facebook in much the same way that I used to peek in to the neighborhood bar—as if it held the key to relieving my unhappiness. And deprivation anxiety—the fear of not getting your next fix—I felt that, too.

But some of the symptoms of my trouble were even subtler, and weren’t evident in those first few days. I went to those parties I hadn’t known about in my dreary pre-facebook days—only I spent a lot more time taking pictures. And I’d get home late afterwards and, rather than putting on some music or a movie, I’d go online, just to see who was up and available for chatting. And these were often people I’d been hanging out with—at least in the physical sense—just minutes before, at the party I’d just left! And I’d post my pictures, and tag them, and enthusiastically read their comments, and enthusiastically comment on their pictures, and spend far more time doing these things than I spent actually, you know, hanging out with them.

Also, I came to notice a curious phenomenon—facebook lesbianism. I was initially depressed to see that a fair amount of women with whom I’d been interested were, themselves, apparently interested in women. Eventually, I realized it was often just a means to ward off unwanted advances by unfriendly friends; still, it left me back where I started—having to actually put in the work to actually, you know, get to know them and find out what was going on in their life.

Granted, there have obviously been some clear-cut benefits of being on facebook—I’ve been able to send birthday greetings to a lot of friends without wasting paper and stamps, and I’ve been able to share my vacation photos with anyone who cares to see them, rather than taking anyone hostage. And I’ve been able to reconnect with a lot of people I hadn’t seen in years, and keep up with their lives and keep them posted on my life in a way that wouldn’t have been possible—at least not with so many people—back in the phone days, or even the email days. But it was one of these very friends, a girl from high school that I’d had a huge crush on back in the day, that articulated the problem with all of this. “I HATE facebook,” she’d said—on facebook chat, of course. Then she added: “No one is ever PRESENT any more!”

Those words definitely hit home; I thought of them today when I was walking home from the gym. It was a beautiful fall afternoon, but I had a little way to walk—two or three blocks—and rather than just be alone with my thoughts in that brief time, my first impulse was to check facebook on my cell phone and see if anything was going on. I’ve heard it said that one will always be uncomfortable if one’s head and body are in different places, and it seemed this was one of those times where my head wanted to go somewhere my body couldn’t even follow, somewhere where it seemed that all my friends had congregated and I could talk to and hear from all of them, but not in a meaningful way—for, as one writer pointed out, facebook is just icons of people interacting with icons of other people, an imaginary village of facades that one can’t even look behind.

I’ve tried to keep it real by posting funny and risque stuff, regardless of whether or not it might be read by family members. (One that seemed to get a good virtual laugh involved my discomfort at standing behind an elderly Frenchwoman in the Walgreens line and hearing her ask for herpes medicine.) And a few of my friends have me beat in the fun-status-updates department; one male friend, for instance, recently proclaimed that he “loves all you guys—but in a totally hot, man-on-man action sort of way.” My dad—a Catholic deacon, and somewhat straitlaced on social matters—seemed a little put off by this type of thing when he finally got his own facebook account, but then said he could see why I did it, because otherwise it was just an endless boredom-inducing procession of “I’m tired” and “I’m hungry” and “I’m eating dinner.”

But even the fun status updates can get lost in between the ever-worsening layout changes and the endless Farmville/Mafia Wars/Vampire Wars postings. (And I do my share of Mafia Wars, so I can’t even pretend to be above it! I am addicted to it, unable to stay away for more than a couple days from a game that basically just consists of clicking on buttons until you can’t click on them any more.) Mafia Wars is more primitive than many games I was playing 15 years ago, and probably more primitive than some of those lab-rats-with-levers experiments they use to model addictive behavior. So what’s the allure? Is it the fact that it’s open-ended? Is it the subject matter? Perhaps it is because, every time a member of my Mafia “assists” me in a fight, or gives me a gift, it gives me impression that they’re actually involved and interested in my life.

So is this what we—and by we, I mean I—have been reduced to? Going online to connect with people, and finding most of my interactions to be fake interactions with automated proxies?

Well—and maybe this is just an addict trying to rationalize—it isn’t entirely that bad. I have had real visits with real people that were only possible because someone mentioned they were in town, or because I said something that someone commented on, and so on, and so forth. And I’ve moved around a lot and have a lot of friends in places I never get to visit, so it is nice keeping them in my life, even if only at the fringes. And now I’m still going to the parties I get invited to on facebook—except now, rather than using the camera as yet another barrier between myself and the people around me, I’m actually taking the time to have conversations and enjoy myself. So perhaps facebook can be useful, but only as a sort of Platonic ideal, an imaginary model for my social life. Here is your hypothetical universe of friends, it is saying—now it is up to you to keep these friendships real.

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Album Review - Eminem's "Relapse"

I posted a review on Amazon of Eminem's recent album, "Relapse."