2007-01-11 - 4:51 p.m.
My girlfriend's a fan of the governor-elect of Maryland, as most girls and women and gay men are, and she and her friend have bought tickets to his inaugural party, and so later today the plan is that I'll buy my first-ever suit. As a joke, for a friend's CD-release gig when I was 22, I bought two suits at a Salvation Army store in Annapolis. One was brown cordury and I gave that to my friend Blair. He says he still wears it. The other was charcoal gray and Calvin Klein. I wore it to the show, got drunk, and have worn it for every formal luncheon, wedding, job interview, and walking-around-the-apartment function since then. Several of its buttons are broken. So I'm getting a new suit. Long live the new suit, whatever it may look like. I already have shoes. They're shiny and the toes are sort of squared off. I also need ties, I think. It's a good thing I generally don't need to wear nice clothes.
Which gets me going on What I Want to Be When I Grow Up. So far this year, I've applied for twelve or fourteen openings at colleges, but not a single email or call so far. Sometimes these things get down to it, to the late spring, but it's just been tough this year and last year. I'm usually pretty modest about this stuff, saying aw, shucks, but really, I'm convinced that if some department hired me, I'd be a crack teacher. I like teaching--especially the specific kind of writing I know well, admittedly a very specific kind--and have written at least a few decent paragraphs. I'll keep at it, sure.
I feel like I've had a headache for two weeks now. Caffeine? Computer monitor? Ennui? The Post-It taped to my monitor that reads, "I Can't Hear You Over How Awesome I Am"?
Watched "A Scanner Darkly" last night. Robert Downey Jr. is one of my new favorite actors. But there's a whole middle section of the movie there, for about 35 minutes it feels like, where nothing happens except the establishment of paranoia. It got pretty tedious.
Something like sixteen hours of professional football-watching in store for the warehouse this weekend. Kevin's working one of his favors to get a projector and a big screen that we'll hang from the sprinkler pipes. That's a lot of commercials for trucks.
I'm halfway through a full-on revision of my manuscript. This is probably my sixth or seventh revision like this. After every one, I think, "That was hard. I think I'm done with this now." And then I pick it up a month later and read chapters that are clunky or cheesy or just not as good as they need to be and then I know I've got more work to do. I am working on something new, though, and I wish I could say it's a novel or something cool but it's about me again. Really, I didn't know where else to start, so I started with my first memory, went to a few pages about how my parents met, and then picked back up with age five. It's fun, though, because I'm thinking of it as more or less an A-to-B memoir about growing up, so when I get stuck on age five or bored with it, I think about a girl I had a giant crush on in the tenth grade and go to that for a while. It's fun and I haven't had that in a while. May be total crap, you know, but fun's never a bad place to start from. There are many worse.
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