RandomCha

My old 15G iPod is in need of a new home. It’s a bit scratched and sometimes acts a little screwy, occasionally freezing up, but all in all it’s a reliable machine and still has a lot of life left in it.

Leave a comment, in 5 sentences or less, and tell me why you’d like it. I’ll let the contest run a few days and then after careful judgement I’ll pick a winner. I may ask for a $10 donation to my PayPal to defray the cost of shipping, but otherwise there are no strings attached. I’ll even include the ear buds.

(Of course you may try to bribe me if you like, but it won’t work).

Last night I was finally able to overcome my infantile work ethic (at least momentarily) and spent a good chunk of time hammering out the synopsis for Tiny Apocalypse. Yes, every query letter must include one. The tricky part is that a synopsis must be good, really good, but it can’t be better than the actual manuscript. Sort of, umm, tricky. Anyway, I’ll revisit it over the next few days and then I think I’ll be ready to send out my first letter. Blech.

It’s the kind of day where I feel like taking a long walk. Probably not though. I will head downtown after work to stop by Intelligentsia and also pick up the tickets to the Resnais film. 

Why can’t I find a good pair of jeans that fit me properly?! Aargh.

I just got the word that while I’m in London I’ll be able to crash at my friend Sven’s flat, thereby saving me at least $100. No hostels for me! And Sven lives within walking distance of Joe, the writer pal of mine whom I’ll be spending the bulk of my time with.

Yippee!

This is a copy of the email I just sent to Leona’s:

Why did you discontinue your deep dish?! Bad, bad, bad! I’m saddened and angered. That has to be one of the worst restructuring decisions in memory. Leona’s deep dish pizza was the reason I started eating at your restaurant more than ten years ago, and it’s the primary reason I’ve been a regular customer all these years. The square shape and amazingly yummy corn meal crust was my absolute fave. In fact, whenever I had an out-of-town guest come to visit who wanted to see what Chicago pizza was “really” like I always took them to Leona’s for deep dish. No more. Your thin crust is fine, but that’s not what I want from you. If you don’t bring the deep dish back I’ll have to get my pizza elsewhere, like Ranaldi’s or Nancy’s. Please reconsider!

The Saul Bellow novel I started reading (More Die of Heartbreak) is leaving me lukewarm. It’s fairly entertaining but I’m not engaged in the same way I was during Auggie March. Maybe I’d just rather be reading something else. I have a certain craving for Patricia Highsmith, but I sort of want to defer that until right before my trip so I can enjoy it then. I’m also reading the Diaries of Dawn Powell … what a fantastic woman. And writer. It’s kind of funny … for a long time, for whatever reason, I wasn’t reading many female authors. But over the last ten years that’s really changed. Highsmith and Powell are my writing godesses. Almost everything that interests me about putting words together is somewhere in their work.

Work is sluggish but undemanding today.

After work I think I may stop off at Panera to use up some of my gift card, buy some scones and bread for the weekend. Then do some window shopping on the walk home. Andy and I talked about having dinner at Nancy’s tonight. Tetrazzini. Mmmm. We haven’t been for a long time.

Last night we started watching The Birth of a Nation. It’s challenging, to say the least. Just goes to show that racism has hardly changed in 90 years. However, Lillian Gish really is pretty.

I don’t know why so many people dumped so hard on Art School Confidential. It’s true that it goes awry in the last 30 minutes and gets overly plotty, but I still think it’s pretty funny and very believable. It sure made me think back to my own first year at the Art Institute. I could recognize each character in the film as someone I’d known at school.

I’ve been battling tonsillitus this week. i usually get a mild case about once a year. My tonsils are bigger than normal (infer what you will from that) and so as a consequence nasty bacteria likes to take advantage. I combat it by bombarding myself with vitamins. I think it’s working. The swelling has gone down since yesterday.

Work is dull. Moderately maddening. Yet I have not come across any viable, worthwhile alternatives. Yet.

Andy got some inspiration from my closet-cleaning and is now cleaning the bathroom. This afternoon we’re going to the Chicago History Museum, and then an early dinner at Las Pinatas. O Las Pinatas how I have missed you. How I have missed your perfect margaritas and enchiladas nortenas. I know that if I want to get any writing done I better do it before our excursion; after Las Pinatas I will be in a nirvanic food coma bliss.

I’ve been reading about RangeRoamer, which essentially is a rentable cell phone service. It would be quite useful for my London trip. MY cell phone will be worthless there because it doesn’t function outside the U.S. The RangeRoamer phone is delivered to your office before your trip, and when you get back you just slip it into a prepaid return envelope. It comes with a charger and everything. $20 of prepaid talk time (all incoming calls are free). I think it let me be a lot more flexible once I’m there.

I need to come up with some Chicagoist ideas for this week. Don’t have any good ones. Like Andy said, maybe something at the museum today will trigger an idea. I miss writing fiction regularly. Sometimes writing all this non-fiction stuff is a drag.

Jeremy and I talked on the phone a few days ago. He’s been in L.A. about two weeks now, which is long enough for the two of us to have a fairly in-depth discussion of why L.A. sucks. The driving. The parking. The fear in the air; except, it’s a SUNNY fear, a fear that’s always the same temperature every day. And that makes it more sinister. I suppose it’s that dichotomy that David Lynch picks up on, draws inspiration from to create his work. L.A. is the worst and best of America. But mostly the worst. (I apologize if I am offending any L.A. readers out there).

Had a dream last night I won a spot on “Wheel of Fortune” being taped in Hawaii. But once I got there they decided it needed to be taped in Chicago for technical reasons and so they flew everyone back.

I cleaned out two of the closets here in the apartment today and donated a whole bunch of stuff to the Brown Elephant. Not a huge thing, but I’m fairly happy with my day. And the snow that’s been fluttering down off and on all day is a delightfully weird touch.

Random facts: the two DVDs we currently have from greencine are The Birth of a Nation and Art School Confidential. The two that are on the way: He Got Game and Scarlet Street.

Well I bought my ticket to London.

!!!