I wish I was a monkey.

I never got any responses to my article, which was disappointing. Previous inquiries were at least met with polite rejections, which made me feel like I was at least getting something for my trouble. Ah, well, at least silence probably isn't an assessment of the piece's quality. Odds are they just tossed it in the trash and forgot about it.

Anyway, I'm also miffed because the couple I was supposed to see grindhouse films with tonight decided to blow me off. Things seemed great last time we got together for dinner and the guy told me to e-mail him just last week, but now they aren't responding. We'd only made plans together 3 times before now, so it's not like I'm losing valued friends, but I'm still pretty insulted.

In general, my relationships seem to form and then disappear at random, and the arbitrary nature of it all leaves me feeling like there was no point to any of it.

At least I'm doing alright with my bullshit education. I've got an A average, which is at least looks nice on my transcript. I've still got two years to go before I'm done with my undergrad, though.

I can also jog for six miles at a pace of nine minutes per mile, which is nice considering I spent my high school gym classes taking Beginner's Yoga/Power Walking every semester. I'm hoping to eventually make it to ten miles per session, then maybe work on speed. I've also started a push-up routine, though I'm not sure if I'll keep at that.

I love my Kindle so much, but, after downloading 100 public domain books, I now feel the crushing pressure to actually read them. Crime and Punishment? Seriously?

I ended up acing all my classes this semester, which would have been unthinkable a year ago. I guess that's progress, but it's hard to celebrate the fact. I'm still far from receiving the undergraduate degree that would have been mine years ago, if I'd only managed to pull myself together sooner. Thinking about that creates an image of the person I should have been, a guy who didn't make the mistakes I made and thereby reaped rewards I'll never touch. It makes everything I'm doing now seem worthless, like crossing a finish line after everyone else has gone home.

Giving up won't make that feeling go away, of course. Instead, I'm stuck doing the best I can under the circumstances and hoping the life I end up with is, if not ideal, at least capable of making me happy.

Anyway, the final project for my journalism class was a profile on an Evangelical Christian ghost hunter. It was a confounding and depressing experience, and I wasn't satisfied with the resulting article, but I still got a good grade. My teacher even encouraged to submit it to a few local publications (Boston Phoenix, Improper Bostonian, etc.) for comments and (hopefully) publication in abridged form. In spite of myself, I'm hoping it gets picked up, if only because another published article would be something I could show off. I'm pretty sure my entire extended family thinks I'm a failure and a reprobate, so I'd welcome some evidence to the contrary.

You can download the goddamned article here, if you want.

There's also that essay I'm supposed to submit to the Thomas Wolfe Review, but that's not something to get excited about. Even if they accepted it, nobody would read it. Hell, I've put off doing a second draft for so long simply because I don't want to read it.

I'm working on a short story too, but that's just a personal thing.

P.S. I love Amy Pond.



I also love my new Kindle, yaaaaayyyy.