the pieces of my life

Well, too bad. My comments have gone MIA, and I’m too tired to look for them. Save that thought for another day (or better yet, just e-mail it to me at jbrown68 at yahoo.com).

Now, we all know that I’m a reality TV junkie. But this has got to be the best one yet: The Will. Anyone got a rich relative who wants to adopt me?

I’m not sure how I’m going to make it through a winter in Boston, when I can barely make it through November. With constantly fogged up windows, my driving has gone from bad to worse (but not as bad as my neighbor across the street who hit my car while parked. Nice. Now I have to deal with getting it fixed, which is no biggie since obviously her insurance has to pay, but is a royal pain in the neck). I start every other sentence with, “Well, back in Seattle we…” I think my house sucks the energy from me. Leaving work, I think of all the things I’m going to do and all the pages I’m going to write, but the minute I walk in the door, it’s as if all spirit has drained from me and I just want to sleep. I feel disconnected from things here and life feels foggy right now. I keep waiting for things to clear up.

Many thanks to the Claire Bear for sending me the article from The New York Times that totally validates my becoming nonplussed over the incorrect usage of, well, nonplussed. This is from an article about the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:

“One of my favorites is ‘nonplussed,’ ” he said. “It has always meant puzzled and confused, but we have evidence that in America some people use it to mean the opposite, as in ‘sort of shaken but not stirred,’ like ‘He was doing his best to appear nonplussed.’ ” Mr. Stevenson flashed a conspiratorial look. “It’s really a mistaken use,” he said.

My husband can’t even remember my middle name.

“You know,” he said this morning. “Your middle name is ‘difficult.'”

Um, no it’s not, It’s Sue. And he can bite me in the butt.

(Because Verbosity Is Good is just three words.) Word count: 16, 216. Finds of the day: awkward? Nope. Ill at ease. Three words. He doesn’t? Nope, he does not.

Hey, this thing is starting in 1998. What the hell did we do in 1998?

An odd sense of déjà vu creeps over me frequently these days. Surreal moments of complete displacement. For instance, I’ll be driving up Fresh Pond on my way home, and the reception on the car radio will go hazy. It’ll be dark–because it seems as if it’s always dark these days–and the road curves a bit. And for a moment, I’m sure that I’m on Market Street traveling from Fremont to Ballard, in that one curvy spot headed down to 3rd Ave. where the radio would also fritz out. It’s not that I’m reminded of Ballard. It’s that I think that I am in Ballard. So it’s a jolt when I look up and I think, “Hey, this isn’t Seattle,” but it takes a few moments for me to figure out where exactly I am. This happens frequently, like when I went to meet Kara for brunch in Cambridge, and I drove around and around for parking and I just kept muttering, “I hate going to Capitol Hill,” and was surprised when I realized I wasn’t in Capitol Hill. I’ve been there before, but I haven’t. Buildings will look similar in the dark, Storrow Drive will feel like Aurora.

If you go to the Amazon.com site, you can’t help but notice they’ve launched apparel. But my favorite part is that while looking up the movie L.A. Confidential, I was advised: “Customers who shopped for this item also wear: Clean Underwear from Amazon’s Gap Store.” No shit? (I didn’t mean that literally.) That’s just so good, I don’t even know what to do with it.

Up to 8,551, which has me pretty much right on track (and how did I get so much done, you might ask? Easy! Adam’s off at a section event tonight). This is a lot easier to do this year than last. I don’t know if it’s because it seems like I have more time to write, or just if it’s because I know that it can be done. I find I’m able to write without too much of a problem… but what I’m writing has got to be some of the driest stuff ever written. It’s as if I’ve completely forgotten how a novel is supposed to read, as if I’ve never read a fictional book in my life. I have a plot, but really no idea of how to get from point A to point B and my character is terribly boring (which is especially devastating, since she is supposed to be based on me), and I probably should work out some sort of outline on where the hell this is actually going. Work is a little slow right now as I wait for my newsletter to get back from design, so maybe I can think about the outline there. By the way, my novel is temporarily titled Learnings. I’m open to suggestions for better titles (and more plot ideas).

Speaking of work, I spent half of today obsessing because I forgot to spellcheck an e-mail before it went out, and it went out with a truly horrible typo (and no, I won’t tell you what it is). It was horrible enough that I turned on automatic spellcheck, if though it’s incredibly annoying since 95% of my e-mails are going to friends, and I don’t cap or punctuate or really even care so it just slows me down. I can’t help it. I obsess about these things. (And how is it that spellcheck doesn’t recognize the word “spellcheck,” and it surely must be one word although Microsoft Word has the following forms listed: spell check, spell-check, spellchecker, spellchecked. That’s wrong. I hereby declare “spellcheck” to be one word. And in future dictionaries, when the etymology is described, I’d like credit for it, please.)

Okay, the yellow’s gone. Now no more complaints from you people (I’ll fix the archives another time)!