Everyone and their mom in Austin, Texas is sick right now, and I'm no exception.

You know, this week really started off perfectly. I went to sleep Saturday night, then when I woke up on Sunday, thus beginning the week, it was to the sound of my phone ringing. It was my manager at work, telling me I was supposed to open instead of close, as I'd thought, and that I was already half an hour late. That beginning perfectly encapsulated how the week would unfold.

I won't bore you all with the little details, but today was a Murphy's Law day. And I've been sick all week, which prevented me from going in to my tutoring job for this compliance training thing that I couldn't do online like everyone else because to do it I need to put in my University of Texas ID and password. No problem, except that, when I officially applied to the UT grad school, they automatically changed my password. I don't know what the new password is, and when I called they said they couldn't give it to me over the phone, but that I should just go online and change it back to what it originally was. Fine, but in order to change it I need to input my "current password," which I don't know. So yeah, in short, I was let go because I couldn't do this thing. And then I got into my main job only to learn that the morning shift manager was sick again, and that the guy covering for him had done absolutely nothing. So in short, I did the work of about three people tonight.

I am not in a good mood.

And with my luck next week will start off just the same way with the Patriots winning the Super Bowl and rewarding all the terrible Patriots fans who have been so condescending and intentionally hurtful toward everyone else. Fun times....

Barack Obama is the man. If he doesn't win the Democratic nomination I seriously may consider not voting, which for me would be a massive deal. I've already decided I would only vote for the president and state positions this year; I refuse to cast a single vote for anyone running for U.S. Congress. This Democratic Congress has proven to me that it doesn't matter who's in power; they really are all the same. I don't want to share any responsibility for giving anyone in the body any form of power.

NOVEL UPDATE: Much ass has been kicked lately. I work in the music section at Barnes & Noble, where it's rarely busy during the night shift (the day shift has a bunch of receiving to do, so it's a pretty full day). When the music manager works the opening shift, his managerial numbers are logged in to the product search computer, which enables the closing shift worker (me, usually) to access several "manager only" functions, one of which is Microsoft WordPad. This means I can write on this novel I'm working on when I'm at work. few nights ago I wrote eight pages (seeing as how I hold myself to one page a day, I was quite happy with this). Two nights ago I wrote ten pages. Tonight I wrote fifteen. I have a little over 75 pages overall, and I'm going pretty strong. I joined the Austin Writer's Leage when I first moved here, and they're sponsoring an annual agents and editors conferene in June. It costs $300, but it puts you in face-to-face contact with a bunch of agents and editors. I'm definitely putting in the money for that. By the time it rolls around, I expect to have complete pitches for both this (my teen-centric novel) and my main piece from my undergraduate work at Purdue (a MUCH darker, more mature, realistic novel), in addition to at least 200 pages of the teen fantasy story and 100 of the adult realistic novel. I need to get a lot better on my pitches, though; I've always been terrible about describing my work, going on way too long and going into too much detail. I need to whittle down the essences of these complex tales to a 30 second sales pitch, and I have to sound confident in them both. But I have until June, so it's something I've got time to work on. Thinking about this helps a little bit with the sting of receiving another rejection letter for one of my short stories today (though really, it's not a sting; I expect it).

Has anyone seen the video to Sara Barielles' (sp?) song "Love Song?" It's actually kind of refreshing to see a video where the artist is obviously having fun singing the song.

Yeah, that's pretty much all I've got right now.

RANDOM THOUGHT OF THE DAY (I may have already used this one; I can't remember. But it's a fun one, so here it is again): If you're ever in a war, instead of throwing a grenade at someone, you should throw one of those little plastic pumpkins at them. Maybe it would make everyone stop fighting and think about how stupid war is. Then, while they're thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.

For some reason last night I found myself thinking about the 7/7 bombings in London, when I was over there for a study abrad trip in 2005. I had been staying in a hotel in London, visiting my sister and her husband (who live there) before going to Oxford for my study abroad term. We didn't have classes on Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays, and on Thrusday, July 7, before I went to my morning class, I just finished making my plans to take up my old room in a London hotel in Russel Square. As my morning class let out, one of my American classmates announced that she had just read on her cell phone that seven different bombs had gone off in London; six on the underground tube lines and one on a bus on the street.

I rushed back to my dorm room at Oriel College and called my sister, who was okay. It was strange, though; that was her last day of classes, and she was running late but she wasn't in a hurry because they were only having a party in class. One of the tube lines that was bombed was the one she took. Had she been on time, she would have had a 1 in 3 chance of being on the train that was bombed.

The bus that was bombed was in Russel Square, and it happened right around the corner from where my hotel would have been. If it had happened a day later and I had been there, I probably would have heard the explosion and seen the aftermath (and from what I heard, the aftermath was a scene out of a war zone, with people missing limbs and wounded and dead bodies splayed across the street).

A few weeks later, after my classes in Oxford had ended, I went back to London for the final weekend before heading home. I was trying to meet my sister and brother-in-law at a restaurant and got lost on the way to a tube station. I was in a pretty deserted area and was looking for a street sign when I walked right by the Russel Square tube station, which had been the sight of both the bus bombing and one of the tube bombings. I just stopped and stared; people had placed memorials all along the closed entrance. One person had placed a teddy bear next to the picture of a little kid who had been killed. For some reason that one particular item really got to me, and I almost started crying.

I also thought about the e-mail my jerkoff professor sent me when he changed his mind about giving me a reference for grad school; he said I didn't understand how the world worked because I had unthinkingly checked the box on my applications that accepted my right to read what my references said about me after I got accepted. I should have e-mailed him back last night. I don't know how the world works? I saw enough about how the world fucking works in those five minutes I stared silently at the makeshift Russel Square memorial, not to mention the countless other experiences I could list off here.

One reason I think I'm so disillusioned with things right now is because, on one end, you have the Idiot Bush and his cronies who take the very real threat of terrorism and use it for their own ends; that I don't think I'll ever be able to forgive. But on the other end you have arch-liberals who think that terrorists (not other governments, mind you, but actual terrorists -- there is a difference, despite what Bush says) can be reasoned with simply by pulling the army out of their countries. If someone willingly kills himself and innocent people, including children, they're passed the point of being reasoned with. They need to be stopped, but Bush is more interested in his New American Century Project bullshit and others are too busy saying the opposite of everything he says that they don't even stop to acknowledge that there really are people out there who need to be stopped.

I have another diatribe on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I think I'll save my faux pearls of wisdom on that subject for my next blog.

All right, last night's blog entry was written during one of my random bouts of depression, so I figure I should put something else on here tonight to counter it a bit. Colts lost today, of course, which sucks, but oh well. As I told someone earlier, if being a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan has taught me anything it's how to handle losing. Plus I was really fortunate as a kid to have coaches in all my sports (with a few exceptions, like my jerkoff 2nd grade soccer coach who yelled at us like we were college athletes) who instilled in me and everyone else on the team the importance of handling both victory and defeat with dignity and sportsmanship. So yeah, congrats Chargers. I'm still a little bummed about it all, but at the end of the day it's only a football game, and I'm not even a part of the team.

I'm in an early part of my book where I have to describe an ocean liner, similar to the Titanic but smaller and from a slightly later age. I hate, HATE doing long descriptions like this. I never know what to say; I always want to get on with the story and the dialogue and don't like having to worry about what everything in the world looks like. Plus I also came up with a great idea for where I want to take this chapter (only chapter two) and how to tie it in with the overall story in one of those subtle ways that you don't understand at first but, if you read it a second time after finishing the book, you smile and say, "so THAT'S what that was about." I really want to get on with it, but I don't like skipping parts and coming back to them when I can avoid it; maybe I'll have to here, though.

And now, getting back to my original idea of countering last night's depression post, I'm going to list a few things about my life I feel good about; not to brag, but to reassure myself that nights like last night aren't nearly as common as they used to be. So, I'm gainfully employed, at a job (well, two, sometimes three) that lets me live comfortably and buy a reasonable amount of books, DVDs, and video games, which I love; I have a great girlfriend who's wonderfully weird and quirky (even if she HATES the Colts, which leads to interesting sports conversations); I really like the writing I've been doing lately; and I recently looked over all the books on my shelf and realized that I'm actually a damn well-read person, which makes me proud in a small way. But I'm not ready to say I'm confident about getting into a grad school yet, because it would be a lie, and I don't want to tempt fate....

So, adapting the practice from a few of my friends on here, some questions:

1.) If you're a sports fan, what things (OTHER than your team winning or losing) really makes you happy or upset when you see them?

2.) Did you ever take one of those questionnaires in school that asked where you thought you'd be at 25? Are you anywhere close? If not, does it bother you or are you pleasantly surprised to be in a different place? If you're confused or upset about where you are, what would you do to change it?

3.) How many years (if any) have you worked retail? Doesn't it just make you hate People?

My answers:

1.) I like seeing the "good guy" win. It's a relative term, in that hardly anyone who makes it to the professional sports level is probably a "good" person, but sometimes it's nice to believe the perception. Not to rehash what I wrote about last night, but a lot of times in the world the "bad guys" seem to win; this happens much more often in sports because, let's face it, sports lends itself to the egocentric, Aryan ,"purge the weak" mentality. To make it in professional sports, you kind of have to be an asshole. So whenever someone who seems like a decent person does well, I like seeing it. What really bothers me are those fans who talk like they're actually part of the team and try to denigrate others. I hate trash talk, always have, and hearing it from jackasses on the internet who are protected behind the veil of anonymity that allows them to say things they probably wouldn't have the balls to say face-to-face is almost comical.

2.) Well, when I was in preschool I wanted to be Superman or Han Solo when I was 25, and even though I have another six months to work on it, I don't think I'll end up as either one of those. As time went on, I wanted to be a football or baseball player, but it got to a point in middle school and high school where I absolutely could not stand the other players on the team. They were mostly rich brats who had the maturity levels of two year-olds. It stopped being fun. Around my sophomore year of high school I figured it would be cool to be a writer. I'm still working on that one.

3.) I worked retail (still do, at one of my jobs) for 8 years, and the correct answer to the second part of the question is yes. Anyone who says no must have a different definition of retail than I do because there is no possible way you can have anything close to a positive opinion of People if you've had to serve them.

I got into a "discussion" (not for the first time) with my aunt tonight about my inherent cynicism. I tend to believe that the "bad guys," for lack of a better term, tend to win in the world more often than not. I have strange criteria for this, though. I look at Hitler, for instance, who eventually was defeated but took the easy way out and killed himself before he could be brought to justice.

You see, I'm like Montressor in Poe's "The Cask of Amantillado" -- to really take revenge on someone, they have to be aware of it; they have to know they've been beaten and that you're the one who beat them. Hitler was so medicated by the time he killed himself he screwed the world out of that comeuppance. Stalin died of natural causes, as did Mao. On lesser scales, George W. Bush will never have to face the consequences of his awful career because he'll die honestly believing he did the right thing. You can even go lower on the importance scale: how many people do you know who are just terrible people, who actually want others to feel bad, and get a lot of what they want in life? (For a sports example, look at Terrel Owens or half the fans of the New England Patriots).

I realize this isn't always the case, but it seems to happen a hell of a lot more than what adults tell you as a kid. In all the stories you read as a child, the good guys usually triumph in the end. That doesn't always happen in the real world. Tonight I half-seriously mentioned that, whenever I have a kid, I'd tell him stories where the bad guys win to prepare him for the real world (NOTE: I doubt I'll actually do that -- I'll probably follow suit and make him believe in a just world that doesn't actually exist). My aunt just got so frustrated. You see, to her the end result is all that matters; in her book, Bush's policies have proven disastrous, so he's had his comeuppance, despite the fact that he doesn't actually feel it himself. Likewise, Hitler was defeated, and it doesn't matter that he never had to realize the consequences of his actions. Different worldviews, I suppose.

I really don't know how I got this way, or why I'm dwelling on it right now. Maybe it's the prospect that a Republican will steal the next presidential election, which I hate believing in because it's very conspiracy theory-ish, but it seems like an actual possibility, or maybe it's seeing the cruel Patriot fans genuinely try to hurt other people and get rewarded for it with another win, or maybe it's because I re-read parts of Tim O'Brian's The Things They Carried and I've been thinking about all the kids who got drafted to fight a war they didn't believe in and were killed for it. I don't know.

I'm just having one of my nights of depression, I think, more than anything. It happens. On most other nights, for example, when I think of World War II I think of the miracles at Dunkirk and Normandy; I think that the hard times are only there to test us and make the good times feel all the better. I think, deep down, that is what I believe, but nights like this it's hard to feel it.

It'd be nice to believe that, eventually, karma will come back to haunt everyone, but that doesn't always happen. You just gotta' live with it. Sometimes I think it would be easier to be one of those idiots who don't care about the world and don't know a damn thing about any country outside of America; they may be ignorant, callous, and annoying, but they also probably don't think about things like this that they can't control.

So what's better: trying to understand the world and getting upset about what you see, or ignoring everything but your own little world and being content, though useless to anyone else?

WARNING: long post, on a variety of topics on my mind at the moment, and it's entirely too honest to be posting for people that don't really know me, and most people will probably stop reading pretty soon, but here goes anyway:

I decided tonight that I'm going to volunteer to work with Texans for Obama. I don't know what they need, but I can write, and do media and publicity work, and speeches. Hearing Obama talk actually makes me understand what people like my dad must have felt when they heard Jack Kennedy speak. Texas is, of course, traditionally a Republican state (another area where Austin really isn't part of Texas), but I really feel like volunteering to do whatever small part I can to try and help out with this campaign. I've always followed politics closely, but I've never actually felt inspired to volunteer for a candidate's campaign. And this all happened just as I was finally beginning to grow disillusioned with the whole politcal scene at the age of 24, 15 years after I first started paying attention to politics (I was a weird kid).

In other news, I'm finally hearing from my professors who are writing me letters of reference, and I think it's finally getting done. All that's left is to see if I'm good enough to impress any grad schools....

Speaking of my writing, I've started a new tactic of forcing myself to write only one page a day. That way I don't get lazy, or overwhelemed with how much I have to do, and only have to worry about a single page, which doesn't take more than 20 minutes on a bad day. Sometimes I write more, of course, but all I really hold myself to is one a day, and it all seems very do-able. If nothing else, after a year, I'll have 365 pages -- that's pretty damn good. And it really helps that I know this story is good, and it'll be fun to write. It's one of those things that I want to write because I want to read it, too. I feel really good about this one. It's geared more toward teens, a la His Dark Materials without the relentless atheism. I love those books, but I think Pullman gets a little too overzealous and intellectually lazy when lambasting all forms of Christianity for being totalitarian and anti-wisdom. Nevertheless, I do love the story, and Pullman's approach to writing it: he said that, when you're writing for kids, you have to get to the story, because they're not interested in any of your fancy wordings or literary prowess. This basic approach is a differrent style for me, but I like it; and like I said, I think the story is really good, and it doesn't need any literary dressings (if anything, it would be easy to overwrite it). So far, as it exists in my mind, this story is a mix of Star Wars, Casablanca, and Lawrene of Arabia. We'll see how this one goes.

My mom should be starting her Hep C therapy pretty soon. She's trying to hide it, but I can tell she's really dreading it when I talk to her on the phone. I realized that I don't pray to God all that often; I talk a lot, and have little conversations in my head (like I used to do with imaginary friends based on real people when I was younger), but, for all that, I don't actually pray and ask Him for much. I know this sounds corny, and I respect people who don't believe in God (most of my friends don't), but it's something I do believe in, despite my scathing opinions of religion and fundamentalism. Sometimes I ask Him for the wrong things; I've gotten better about praying for a sports team in the heat of the moment (though I have recently prayed for a certain group of fans to simply not be rewarded for their terrible behavior, which I readily acknowledge is probably an inappropriate thing to pray for, but some behaviors have really started to bother me lately -- I just can't stand people who actively try to make others feel bad -- I'm a hopeless idealist, despite what most people see in me as relentless cynicism; ironic, huh?), but this thing with my mom is something that I feel better praying about. Maybe it's just some sort of psychosomatic feeling of relief, that I feel feel better because I think I'm praying to a higher power and that the sense of comfort I get from it is only imaginary, but I don't really believe that. We all have faith in something, whether it's devine or not.

It's weird... I'm normally someone who wants proof of things, and I've gone back and forth intellectually on whether or not God exists all my life, but I always keep coming back to believing in Him despite the lack of apparent proof. It's just a feeling. I can't really describe it, I definitely can't prove it, and I know it could be driven by some subconscious psychological need (see above), but nevertheless it's what I believe. Maybe that's what faith really is, after all: the belief in something that you constantly doubt with no evidence other than what your heart tells you. All I know for sure is that faith is not believing whatever your parents/church/school tells you and refusing to open your mind to any other possibilities.

There, that's enough honesty for one night.

I was driving with my dad through downtown Philadelphia tonight (and was quite impressed with how he's learned to be a "city driver") and we started talking about my mom's Hepatitus C. Apparently it's a lot more serious than I (and many other members of our family) was lead to believe. She'll be undergoing some sort of experimental treatment near the end of January (a lot like chemotherapy, which she only had to have a small dose of when she had breast cancer a few years ago) and she's really dreading it. There's a very real possibility that she could die in a few years from prolonged symptoms of the disease. That I wasn't expecting to hear.

It's weird; she's had breast cancer and now Hep C, yet her identical twin sister hasn't had any of these health problems. I think it might go back to the days my mom worked in a hospital as a nurse, before she returned to academia and got her Ph.D. In any event, that was a fun conversation to have on Christmas Eve. Apparently my mom didn't want me or anyone else to worry, but my dad told me because he wanted to be honest, and I think he knew I'd be able to handle it better than other members of the family. All in all, I'm glad he did; I'd rather know.

In other news, I'm still keeping my fingers crossed for grad schools, even though I have some more applications to turn in once I get back home. Of course I'll be keeping my fingers crossed for a long time because it'll take forever for them to get back to me on whether or not I was accepted. I used to imagine which school I'd like to go to; now that I've actually started applying (and now that I'm currently going through the requisite "my work sucks, how could I ever think this was good, I won't be able to fool anybody anymore" phrase), I think I'll be happy if any of the 15 schools I'm applying for accept me.

Fun times.

I feel like throwing up as I write this, so go me. I've been applying to grad schools over the past few days, and the only thing I can't control is, of course, my letters of reference. I had lined up three professors who agreed to give me referrals, but I haven't heard from two of them in at least a month and the only one I have heard from just let me know that he's no longer going to write me one.

Did I mention that 8 of my 14 schools' deadlines are in January? And that 11 of those 14 require 3 letters of reference?

I don't know whether I should feel sick or unbelievably pissed off. This isn't like losing a damn sports game or anything, this is my life.

I just sent an e-mail to my senior year of high school English teacher, asking him to be a reference. He would give me a glowing letter, but I don't know how a high school teacher's approval will be received by officials from an MFA program. If that doesn't work, well... I need to think of something.

I really want to just be pissed and/or feel sorry for myself right now, but I don't have time for that. I need to think of something fast.

I swear to God, if I don't get into a single grad school because of this....

I went back to see some friends in Indiana last week, and for my best friend's wedding (though I'm about 90% certain her new husband is gay, and I'm afraid she'll be the cover wife who has to get divorced at 35, but that's another story). I have several different groups of friends back home, but I really only felt like a part of one of them (and that was only two other people). I liked seeing everyone again, but I just knew I didn't belong with them anymore. When I moved from my hometown to Lafayette before my junior year of high school, it took me over a year before I realized I didn't belong with my old friends anymore; now it's happened in less than half a year.

It's not such a bad thing, I suppose, but now I don't know what to do. I don't have any real friends in Texas right now, and if it weren't for my girlfriend finally moving down here I'd be completely on my own. I can function without friends (hell, I went through most of high school that way) but having had several groups in which I felt like I belonged for so many years in college is making not having any again a bit harder to adapt to than I figured it would be.

In other news, I've officially begun the process of applying to grad schools. I've applied to Pittsburgh and I'm in the process of applying to NYU, but the applications always ask to list the publications my stories have been in. Despite numerous submissions (to be fair, they were all to high-profile magazines), I don't have any. I knew the competition was going to be stiff for the top schools on my list (Texas, Washington, NYU) but I seriously hope that it's just kind of expected that the people they accept have already been published. So yeah, fun times....