The Tender Lives of Shrimp

This morning a new feeling woke with me. It was Inspiration, for it stung my heart and raced through my veins (leaving, oddly, my brain completely unaffected).

Inspiration told me to start writing: Hell, Sylvia, start with children, the bottom of the totem pole, if you need to. Just start writing! For a moment I disagreed with its suggestion that chidren were easy to write for, but I urged myself to be prudent, to follow instructions from this supreme being, however out of touch with reality it is, what with its own laurel-laced lifestyle.

With Inspiration behind me, nagging me toward creative expression, I will write a medium-length book for attentive and well-behaved children. The book will be called The Tender Lives of Shrimp. Countless and nameless shrimp will be featured in colorful illustrations throughout the book, following my narrative about the brave disinterest which the shrimp possess, especially in the know-it-all face of Inspiration. They have eyes, but they refuse to see much.

Words Are a Waste...Unless You Use 'Em in a Song

For years, I wanted to be a photojournalist. Writing is overrated. A picture is worth a thousand words, they say.

They? Who's they?

Pipe down. I'm trying to paint a picture.

Painting? I thought you were a photographer.

I'm not a photographer...yet. I said I would like to be a photographer. Stop interrupting.

Do you even own a camera?

No, but I have friends who have cameras.

That doesn't show much commitment.

What are you, my coach?

And work for almost nothing? Ha!

I wish my subconscious would stop butting in when I'm trying to get my photojournalist career going.

If only I'd gotten a clean shot of Barry that night in 1977, I'd be a real photographer by now!

Good for nothing.

During the wintry months in December and January, I was trapped under a foot of snow, rendered immobile and unable to post anything on this blog. A foot of snow, and I survived, I survived!, I shouted at the other Angelenos driving along the Angeles Crest Highway.

Those days I spent paralyzed in the snow-lined embankment, I thought of you only, my faithful readers, wondering if I'd ever return to the warmth of the foothills. As I lay there, I thought not of death, but of dipping my frostbitten fingers into lukewarm water just to get enough feeling back to type a blog entry.

Nursed back to health by a young stray kitten -- precociously maternal one she is -- I regained enough strength to press my fingers on the keys of my notebook computer. I never felt more alive when I saw all the activity on the blog I'd missed so much. These are true fans! I thought to myself, tears welling in my defrosting eyeballs.

And all I saw were complaints.

Nice to be Chinese...for once.

Finally, a perk. The one other Chinese staff member in the office gave me a box of Ferrero Rocher (which has become the Chinese New Year tradition among Chinese, at least in L.A. County). I'm so glad for this new tradition because authentic Chinese New Year candy quite sucks. See the cough drop correllation pictured.

Welcome to my newly formatted blog, FRIEND.

Mediocrity is Safe now features a refreshing modern look, delivering the same mediocre content you’ve come to expect. Notice the addition of “A Few of my Favorite Things” in the right column and navigate with relative order the disorder of my brain. Yes, that’s right: the disorder of my brain!

Now that the blog/brain correlation has been made known, any reader might ask why a person like myself would have no friends to categorize. To be quite frank, the thought of a “Friends” category would suit this blog well, and I suspect I would categorize my friends mercilessly, but alas I admit I have no friends to speak of.

Shall I make them up? Would it be a crime? Yes, a crime to mental health, for how healthy is it to submit to the mental indolence of simply drumming up a couple of bland folk to label as comrades each time I require a new “Friends” essay? The only true and honorable approach to making friends is to come face to face with real individuals and then strategically lower your own standards so that 9 out of 10 people you meet can qualify favorably in your endeavor.

We're friends, right?

Jab! Jab! Jab! (Gardening Advice)

A little research on eHow.com lead me to this nifty tip:

I use plastic forks inserted upside down into the dirt around my flowers. It stops the cats walking through the flowers because the little fork prongs jab their paws.

Little plastic fork prongs, eh? I prefer gentle explosives myself.

CHOSEN: The Lindsay Lohan Pumpkin of Well-Being Restoration

Thank you, Winona Public Library (now with wireless Internet access!!), for choosing my pumpkin-carving idea submission! (Also see pumpkin cousin 2,000 miles away in California.)

Apple Jacked

Last night I was once again an Outsider. Back at home in the Los Angeles area, you couldn't miss the four Apple logo stickers on my vehicle, but here I was in Minneapolis, driving my rental car by an Apple store packed with celebratory Apple folk who had put on nice shoes and glossed their locks with organic salon product in order to say, "Yeah, I was there at the Leopard OS release party in Uptown. Yeah, I was there..." I, however, was there only in spirit, creeping by from the outside in my Chevy Cobalt, feeling uncool, uncreative, underachieving (but not in the cool sense).

With the new Leopard, apparently, one would possess a much more talented version of iChat, one that could display files in addition to plain old video conferencing. Says a close friend who has given me permission to quote him based on the rationale that no one reads this blog anyway, "Ooooooh, I can also put a porn movie as my background so it looks like there are people screwing behind me..."

I'm feeling a little screwed myself.

Gone Fishing

Visit About to Snap this month for photo updates on my carefree adventures on the East Coast and in the Midwest.

More on the U of MN Strike

Read more about the strike from an AFSCME worker: http://www.cheek.blogspot.com/

University of Minnesota Workers on Strike

From discussion pages of TwinCities.com:

I'm a little confused. If the head of a company I worked for budgeted a raise of
3.25% for the employees as a cost of living increase, and my immediate
supervisor only gave me 2.5% I would be mad. I would also want to know where the
rest of the money was going. Since in the U workers case my taxes are paying for
this budgeted raise and the workers aren't getting it I am concerned. Shouldn't
all of you "get another job" people be concerned about where the money is really
going as well? It would seem this strike is about accountability.
Posted by:
Steve 9/5/2007 9:50 AM

Recent Exchanges with Two Friends I Made in Minneapolis

My friend Susan decided to have a birthday last week. I told her to have a happy birthday, but she knew I was lying because I'm the jealous type. It's not fair that she gets to have a birthday and I don't. To celebrate the lovely occasion, I went to the mall and got a really stylish dress and sent Susan digital pictures of me looking fabulous, hoping she would be jealous. She wrote back, complimenting me on the new threads. Of course, this incited even more animosity, so I went out and bought a new Corvette and sent her digital pictures of me in my dress inside my new Corvette. She wrote back asking me if I was okay. I said, "Yeah, I'm fine. Did you get the Chris Daughtry CD I sent you for your BIRTHDAY?" She said, "Not yet. Who's Chris Daughtry?" I said, "I don't know...some American Idol contestant! Happy birthday, you bitch!"

My friend Jonathan and his hot wife (whose name I won't say) had a baby last month. Normally, babies don't increase my life enjoyment levels, but this one is very Cabbage Patch Kid-like. I knew what had to be done, so I FedEx'ed some papers to Jonathan and the missus. He e-mailed me back almost immediately. Truly, my heart was beating with anticipation as I waited for my $5.95 dial-up ISP to take me to the next page in my e-mail box! Jonathan said, "I got your adoption papers! What is this? A joke?" I had resourcefully dug up the Cabbage Patch Kid adoption papers for my 1982 acquisition of Timothy Alastair and made a photocopy of it, whiting out Mr. Alastair's name and inserting the name of my friends' new child. I e-mailed Jonathan back saying that yes, it was indeed a joke, but it wasn't a funny one, no.

Latin Lover

Mediocria Firma!

(Thanks for contributing to Mediocrity, SSR!)

What Would Ramona Do?

Wedged between volumes of Ramona books was the very first diary I ever kept, and I found it this weekend while digging through my old closet. Paging through those early days, I noted what weird and wobbly handwriting I had a penchant for, but I was only 7 or 8 years old, trying, with limited skill, to detail my life before details eventually became too mundane to record. For instance, I wrote about the day I nearly succumbed to a powerful flash of capitalist desire, rescued only by my fortunate undiagnosed bi-polarism: "Mom went to the shopping mall to buy the coat. I went with her. I saw a Cabbage Patch Kid that I wanted to buy. But we didn't buy it because I said I didn't want it."

What's in your closet?

Cleaning Lady

Knock, knock!

Who's there?

Sylvia!

Sylvia?

Sylvia, your daughter!

What do you want?

Didn't you ask me to come home and clean out the closet in my old bedroom?

Oh, yeah, come in. But make it quick. Did the neighbors notice you? Where did you park? You still driving that thing? You're not staying for dinner, are you?

On Wikipedia

Fun article in the Wall Street Journal this week.

Free Verse

Before my high school graduation, my classmate Angie, who had purchased a half-page "look at me and my friends so cute and loyal" ad in the yearbook, said to me, "You write poems, right, Sylvia? Would you write a poem about friendship and graduation for our ad?" I'd never before been commissioned to write a piece, and I was not going to let this opportunity slip through my prematurely writing-cramped hand. After about six or seven sleepless nights, I realized I knew nothing about friendship, nor graduation (because it hadn't happened yet), and that I was no one's friend--just a lot of people's poet. I was the People's Friendless Poet. And I said to dear, sweet Angie, "Wha? You weren't going to pay me?"

Your cake for my birthday today.

Sound Aborning

(Thanks, Mark.)

"I'll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette." (Lester Bangs, "A Quick Trip Through My Adolescence," 1968)

My first story is due tomorrow...

and I have nothing.

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/lists/21RobertHinderliter.html