July 30, 2003

Assignments

• Write a five day journal of a woman starting an internship at a design firm in New York.
• Write a small piece about a man walking around drunk trying to find his apartment.
• Write a story about two people breaking up - and about one person breaking up.
• Write a story starting with the word 'Watermelon'.
• Write a story about a man too afraid to go out of his apartment on his second month of doing so.
• Write a story about someone eating breakfast.
• Write a story about someone's first day at a new school or place.
• Write a story about somebody hysterically crying in the street.
• Write a story about someone hysterically crying at home alone.
• Write a story about someone that you know but don't really know. Lots to choose from.
• 10 stories about us. Different ways we would have fallen in love.
• Write a series of essays that defend the common usage of the phrase "irregardless".
• Write a story where every other sentence you use a number.
• Write a story that is one sentence and one sentence only and is over a page long.
• Describe in great detail the home that you grew up in.
• Write a story about your neighbors growing up and what you thought of older people.
• Write a story about what it feels like to lose your grandmother.
• Write a story about where you fit in the world.
• Cry a little, but don't write about this.

03:42 PM part of to do list

July 29, 2003

• Write some more stories.
• Think up some ideas for stories.
• Get some paper or a thousand-dollar machine to record all of these ideas for stories.
• Think about how much writing up a list of ideas is like writing the actual stories.
• Laugh out loud about how silly it would be to write a story about someone with writer's block.
• Stop laughing suddenly - some of your best friends have had writer's block - besides this, you are in an internet cafe and people are watching. In a related note, the internet here is delicious.
• Pour a little on the ground for your friends with writer's block.
• Think about how tragic it would be if you were writing on a piece of paper somewhere - writing ideas or a story - and it was lost from you by some wind or a really agressive bird, and then you had to rewrite whatever you were writing and you couldn't remember it all and you thought it was really good and now the bird has it and can't even understand it.
• Save the document you are working on every three seconds like a nervous tick. Ctrl-S, Ctrl-S after every sentence.
• Who taught you that keyboard shortcut Ctrl-S, can't remember, getting off track now.
• Write down a new idea about how weird it would be if the bird stole your pen instead of the paper, and then you were left not being able to finish whatever you were working on - and the bird would have a really modern-looking nest, it being made with a pen and all.
• Write a story about a really artsy-bird who took his songs too seriously and all the other birds hated him.
• Change the list of ideas that you are working on from an ordered list (with numbers) to an unordered (without little dots by default, not dashes which is what most people do when they write notes - nobody colors in little dots - don't kid yourself) since these sort of things aren't really sequential.
• Change it back, since the ideas flow from each other they should be in order.
• Realize that you don't have a disk and go print out your list.
• Go to the printer, which is broken and besides that out of paper.

03:52 PM part of to do list

July 28, 2003

Whatever the self describes, describes the self.

Jacob Boehme

08:55 PM part of inspiration

Racist things that I have heard since starting this job

• A coworker saying that his old car will be worthless when he resells it in a few years: Or I could just go down here and sell it to a Mexican, they'll buy it.
• A coworker talking to a client about Underground Atlanta: Well, they have had some problems - it has gotten rough down there, you know - darkened up.
• A coworker (actually 2) suggested that I not go to the Cheesecake Factory downtown because: It's like all black now.
• A coworker showing me an email forward entitled ghetto prom. After looking at a few pictures of some black high school kids in nice suits and brightly-colored dresses, he remarked: Man, that is some nig*** shit.
• A coworker making a racist joke: What's the worst thing that you can call a black person that starts with 'n' and ends with 'r'? Neighbor.
• Coworkers discussing a recent law that prevents a lot of people from riding in the back of a truck, which is a common way for manual laborers to get to work: Well how are Mexicans going to get anywhere now? Maybe they can pack them underneath straw in a line like they did on slave ships.
• A coworker complaining about how he has to go to the bank physically to deposit his wife's paycheck: Her boss is a fucking Jew so he is trying to save some money so he won't do direct deposit.
• You know now they want to give the poor another tax break, which is fair since they don't pay any freaking taxes anyway.(Not really racist, but classist and conservative and it has bounced around in my head since I heard it.)
• A coworker talking about what the city of Miami is like after going there for the first time: It's like a fucking third-world country down there - they have signs that say: "We speak English".

I am saddened by how long this list is, as there are probably things that I have forgotten to include.

02:51 PM part of unavoidable sadness

July 25, 2003

while($time) {
   study until $summer;
   goto sleep unless $school;

   my $time_here = undef and exists $the{exit};

   do { 
      bless $all, 
      accept $all, 
      connect $all, 
      join $all
   } 
   until last BREATH;

   while(left) {
      sin;
      bless@ed;
   }

   return ??;
}

09:43 PM part of a balanced breakfast

July 11, 2003

Ring

The sound of the phone ringing woke him up as if from a dream, but more jarring, like someone slapping him awake, but he was standing up, looking out the window, waiting for the phone to ring and trying with every ounce of his strength to somehow shut off his ears so that when it rang it wouldn't cause him physical pain, which it would, and did every single time.

04:18 PM part of stories

July 02, 2003

Things aren’t the way they are, they’re the way you are.

Anais Nin

01:52 PM part of inspiration