The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Irked. I never get as much done as I want on the weekend. It didn't help that today is Cinco de Mayo, and I got caught up in the celebration.

Cheered. At least I finally got my damn book published today. The literary world can now breathe a happy sigh of relief. Details to come.

Befuddled. I was riding the PATH train today, when some people with small children got on. I wondered if I should get up and let one of them sit down, but there were a few empty seats in the car, so I decided they must want to stand for some reason. I got off at the next stop, and one of them promptly sat down in the seat I had just vacated. Only to make me feel like a jerk?

Reluctant. The landline keeps ringing every evening lately, but I don't answer it. There's a mayoral election coming up in about 10 days, and I know it's either a robo-call or someone claiming to be taking a poll. Generally speaking, a landline call is never a welcome interruption.

Perplexed. It must really be spring now; I'm confused about what to wear. It was sunny but coolish, so today I wore a short-sleeved polo shirt under a jacket. Cognitive dissonance.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Ambivalent; I don't have strong feelings one way or the other about iPhone 6 rumors. Ho hum.

Rankled by the continuing presence of a "Johnny on the Spot" in front of the construction site next door. I have never seen anyone use it. Why can't they make the first thing they construct in the building a rest room?

Disconcerted by the heavy police presence at the train station I use. Clearly, it's considered a potential target.

Distrustful of various politicians suddenly taking a pseudo-interest in me. There's a local election looming next month.

Sheepish about tripping and falling in public recently.

Gratified by finally getting a break, late in the game.

~~~

Meanwhile....

Take a sad song: 'Hey Jude' reworked in a minor scale.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Nostalgic. The last few weekends, I've been trekking to the Upper West Side of Manhattan to visit a relative who's in rehab at Phoenix House on 74th Street. I haven't been up there in ages, and it reminds me of a past life when I used to spend a lot of time in that neighborhood. They're mostly bad memories, but those can be the most poignant.

Elitist. I went to a birthday party for a three-legged cat last night. How many people in the world can say that?

Frustrated. It's taking forever to get this damn book of mine finished. I keep finding little things I want to tweak, especially in the way the pages are laid out. Even in this futuristic era of DIY, print on demand, and e-publishing -- it's still a bitch to pump a book out, even a short (170-page) one.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Warm. Rode home on the train tonight with an acquaintance who was returning from today's Presidential Inauguration. He gushed about how inspiring it was, and I was jealous -- for about a minute. Then I thought about standing outdoors in a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd -- in 30-degree (-1 C) weather -- for five hours. There's always YouTube.

Shell-shocked. I live in a semi-detached townhouse, and the house next door, the one I'm attached to, is being renovated. It sounds like I'm sharing a wall with a bowling alley or a bumper-car ride. The workmen have also stationed an attractive Porta Potty out front.

Puzzled. Some people on LinkedIn -- ones I don't work with -- are "endorsing" me for skills I've never used for them (something anyone can do with just a click on LinkedIn these days). Gosh, thanks, but I'm wondering who they've been talking to about me.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

(or felt)

Puzzled. I recently called my credit-card issuer to see if I could add a PIN number to my card, so I could use it at ATMs if necessary. They said they had to snail-mail me a form to fill out first. But before they could send me the form, I had to answer a whole host of their "security" questions, including very specific queries about my identity and banking info. So if they're going to ask me all of these questions over the phone, what exactly are they going to ask me on this form they're going to send?

Bipolar. It's that time of year when gifts of candy arrive at the office from various business "partners". So there's the sugar high, followed by the crash, after which I feel I have to drink some coffee, which leaves a bad taste in my mouth, which leads to more candy consumption....

Retro. Even though I have an e-reader, I've been reading an old-fashioned print-and-paper book lately on the train during my commutes. Often I'm sitting near or next to someone with an e-reader, and I'm feeling vaguely embarassed. I want to say "I have one too." I'm not a paper-snob. Or a Luddite. Really.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

(or felt)

Awed: My nephew brought his sizable telescope to my mother's house, in the wilds of upstate New York, for the holiday weekend. There's no "light pollution" there, so even without a telescope, the cold, clear night sky is spectacular. We looked at the moon's craters, Jupiter bands, and the Orion nebula's gauzy wisps.

Tired: Formatting your own DIY book in Word is, especially when it has a lot of text blocks, quite a chore. Headers, footers, line breaks, paragraph breaks, section breaks.... I need a break.

Scrooged: My extended family has decided not to exchange Xmas gifts this year. Just as well. We end up getting things that we would buy for ourselves anyway (and sooner), thanks to online "wish lists". Humbug!

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

(or felt)

Bushed from working 10-hour days at home, which is just as exhausting as working 10-hour days in an office, I've discovered. What has the Internet wrought?

Disgusted by the whole year's worth of different types of weather we've had here over the last 10 days.

Elated by the election results. Now everybody in D.C. can go back to bickering and prevaricating. Oh wait... they never stopped.

Panicky because I ran out of coffee this morning. I had to head out into the snowstorm to score some more.

Handsome, since somebody has asked me if they can use a picture of me in a "handbook". "Your name will not be associated with the photo", they say. Hmm. Maybe it's just that I look nice and generic?

~~~

Meanwhile....

David Lynch analyzes this year's presidential-campaign commercials

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Certain that people who insist on spelling it "Hallowe'en" (instead of Halloween) are either British, Wiccans, or unbearably pretentious, n'est-ce pas?

Shaggy because I need a haircut soon, or I'm going to have to go as the Scooby Do character for Halloween.

Slow when people keep passing me on the sidewalk in the morning as I'm trudging to the train station. (It might have something to do with the 10-pound retro laptop computer I have to lug on my back.)

Amused by this game of electronic hide and seek.

Impressed by the prose stylings of Michael Chabon is this book I'm reading, Telegraph Avenue: "Daylight was taking its sweet time fading into dusk, and the street at suppertime seemed to be holding its breath, torn into patches of deep shadow and sunshine, motionless but for the little white moths stitching their loopy crewelwork in the honeysuckle."

Mystified by why the barrel full of paper recycling I put out on the street last night wasn't picked up. The neighbor's was. Now I want to have a bonfire to get rid of it.

Retro because I'm reading page proofs for my book on actual paper.

Confused by having to wake up in the dark in the morning.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Surprised. I took a relative with me to the Landmark Loews Jersey Theater last weekend to see two movies: Alfred Hitchcock's psychological thriller about a female kleptomaniac Marnie and the first James Bond film, the somewhat comic-bookish Dr. No. I expected him to dislike the former and favor the latter. Just the opposite. (I like both, for different reasons.) Maybe I shouldn't make assumptions.

Queasy. Transferring an old family video from VHS to DVD recently was not a foray into sweet nostalgia. Some of the people, including my father, are no longer with us. And watching myself from decades ago made me worried for, uh, him, knowing what was coming, both good and BAD.

Damned with faint praise. Don't bother.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Surprised. Some instant coffee isn't all that bad. They must have improved the technology. Still, I prefer to grind my own. I need to buy some beans this weekend.

Interested. In seeing Paul Thomas Anderson's new film The Master, thanks to everything I hear and read and see about it. Gosh, I wonder what Tom Cruise will think of it. Kudos to any reporter who asks him.

Accomplished. I'm up to page 170 of this book of mine that I'm formatting, and I'm not at the end yet. I didn't think it would stretch out to such a length. I may be using a too large font, although it's the one that KreateSpase recommends. Formatting is a tedious bitch, by the way. You have to kill those widows. (No, I don't mean women whose husbands have died. It's a printing term.)

Sneezy. My nose knows: there must be a lot of invisible ragweed floating around now. This is the time of year, almost jacket weather, when the sternutation starts.

Fecund. The grass seeds I planted out back in the bare spots of our patch (I hesitate to call it a yard) have sprouted. I now have a slightly larger savanna to watch over. And mow. Someday I want to have a picture taken of myself mowing, dressed like this:

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Accomplished. I'm on a "staycation", so I spent part of the day today doing yardwork. For a while, I was amputating weeds around the apple tree out back with some hand clippers, but a huge green bug starting buzzing around me, so I decided to postpone that and pick up the weed whacker. A couple of hours later, I had denuded not only the weed colony in the backyard, but the grasslands sprouting in front of the abandoned house next door. Chop, chop. I'm mean to the green.

Self-conscious. Copyediting a 140-page book that you wrote yourself is a somewhat different experience from editing the words of others. It's a little like watching yourself in a video -- you cringe. But the difference is that you can still do something about all of your little imperfections.

Mystified. My car key has disappeared. (I have to use my wyfe's.) So has one of my crucial USB cables. Could it have something to do with the micro black holes that scientists have theorized about?... People I don't know keep sending me friend requests on Facebook. We don't even have any friends in common. (I wouldn't mind friending them if they would explain what the connection is -- maybe they read this blog? -- and why they want to be "friends". But they don't.)... What's the deal with my neighbors, a couple of senior citizens who sit on their front porch all day every day and stare at me whenever I walk down the street? Don't they have a TV? Have they heard of the internets?

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Wondering: If HM the Queen is watching all of this Olympic beach volleyball on TV. Beach volleyball... in London, where it's sweater-weather all year round, as I discovered when I visited there last July.

Repelled: By yet another crazy mass shooting, this time by a neo-Nazi with mush for brains who slaughtered Sikhs, probably thinking they were Arabs. He was in a heavy-metal white-power band, one of many it seems. Who knew they existed?

Terrified: Of co-workers getting sick. One of them is sounding hoarse, because she slept too close to a air conditioner, she says. Yikes.

Determined: To get this book project I've been working on (for a decade, in a certain sense) done and out in the world.

Amused: By this: today we've been seeing images from the London Olympics on American television six hours after the fact -- and images from Mars 14 minutes after the fact.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Annoyed. It irritates me that I keep seeing dates written as (for example) "635 A.D." Don't people know what "A.D." stands for? It's an abbeviation for anno domini, Latin for "in the year of our Lord". So of course it should be "A.D. 635". Just because a bunch of ignoramuses persist in treating it like "B.C." doesn't mean that it should be allowed into "common usage". I'm talking to you, Wikipedia. As for me, I prefer the secular designations CE (common era) and BCE (before the common era). Let's leave Jeebus Holy Crisco out of it.

Stretched. Writing a book is both satisfying and time consuming -- even if the "writing" is mostly a matter of assembling a lot of previously composed material. I want to work on it all the time, but life keeps getting in the way. So I work on it little by little. Accretion. Exactly the way it was all written. It's the same with the book I'm reading now: Macbeth, the recent highly praised novelization, not Shakespeare's spooky tragedy (also highly praised and previously read). I'd just as soon read it straight through, but I am forced to ingest it in fits and starts -- 20 minutes here, 30 minutes there, often in some sort of conveyance. It will all happen, though. Fate.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Relieved. We had our new central AC installed last weekend. Just in time: today is the first day of summer for us Northern Hemispherians, and it reached a decalescent 91 degrees (33 C) here today. "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines..." (William Shakespeare)

Wondering. If maybe I could turn all the "Word of the Day" postings here (I have more than 300) into a little ebook. Hmmm....

Rooted. After three visits to the dentist -- excuse me, endodontist -- I'm finally done with my root canal. It wasn't really painful, just uncomfortable. Now I need to be crowned....

American. I found out today that French people like to give hugs when greeting. And people from the Mediterranean really do like to kiss cheeks when you meet them, even the men, though apparently a Hollywood-style air kiss is acceptable. I really prefer a handshake.

Amused. I'm reading David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster (on an e-reader purchased from... a tall warrior woman... and I'm finding his nonfiction prose (and attitude) most entertaining. Ebooks are not ideal for displaying footnotes, however. And Wallace, may he rest in peace, was very fond of footnotes.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Tired. I'm tired of walking up and down escalators that don't work. An escalator can't, in a sense, break -- it instantly turns into a still-usable staircase when it stops running -- but that shouldn't be an excuse for what seems to be close to 50-percent downtime. I'd rather climb an actual set of stairs than a frozen escalator. The variable spacing between the steps makes my legs and feet feel weird. It's as if, with a single step, I'm suddenly several inches taller or shorter. I like to stay the same size, or at least feel that way.

Impressed. My hat is off to the novelist V.C. Andrews, who died in 1986 but has continued to write eight more novels after her death. Her genre: Gothic horror, appropriately enough. Apparently, she had some help with these posthumous thrillers, but still. One has to be quite well-appreciated by one's readers to earn such an extended career. I can't think of another field in which it would be possible (there are no posthumous copy editors, alas), although I did see a very lively looking Marilyn Monroe in a recent perfume commercial.

Amused. One of the softball teams at work is called The Hit Factory. That's almost clever enough to make me want to play. They would have to call it something else, though, like maybe the Unlucky Strikes.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Sick(ish). I've got a slight sore throat and a bit of a sniffle. I can't tell if I'm coming down with a cold or if it's just spring hay fever. The good news about this: I postponed my root canal.

Frustrated. I've got this corny 1980s pop song, which I heard while spinning the radio dial, stuck in my head. At odd, preoccupied moments, I catch myself humming it. I won't say what the song is, because I actually hate it and am too embarrassed to reveal the title.

Transitional. It's time to break out the short sleeved shirts, the thermometer says. Usually I wait till June, but global warming seems to have altered my sartorial schedule this year.

Smooth. I only shave every two or three days lately, what with the stubble look being so "in" now. (It must be driving the razor blade, aftershave, and shaving-cream companies crazy.) And who wants to bother with it? Last night I shaved, though, and felt good about it. When your face feels like sandpaper, you tend to rub it too much, and germs from your hands then get transferred to your mouth, which can make you sick. (See numero uno above.)

Caffeinated. I drank five mugs of coffee today. That's excessive, but it keeps me going when I'm feeling a tad rundown. It keeps me running to the office restroom, too, which is a good thing, since moving around is better than sitting for hours on end. You sometimes have interesting or comical manly chit chats over the sinks in the restroom, too. However, I frown upon the recent phenomenon I've observed of men who talk on the phone while peeing. Don't do business while doing your business, I say.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel + Link Mania

Appreciative. I saw Wicked last night, on Broadway -- my wyfe got tickets through work. For a musical that dares to psychoanalyze the Wicked Witch of the West, I thought it was quite well done. The question of why she was so mean is not one that has particularly haunted me, but it was satisfying to get an answer.

Amused. By this. The world's most infamous iceberg tells his (her?) side of the story.

Impressed. Here is one of the finest short foreign films I have seen. (I think every cat is a French existentialist to some degree.)

Puzzled -- at first. "World Peace was ejected from the game." That's a sentence I never thought I'd read on CNN.com.

Swell. I now know how to talk like a 1920s gangster.

Queasy. About the trailer for The Show. "America's favorite guidettes are taking their hijinks from the Jersey Shore to Jersey City in a way that you've never seen before." So sayeth MTV. Um... how could we have seen that before? Guidettes?

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Macho. I took advantage of today's preternaturally warm spring weather to make like a lumberjack: cutting down dead branches from the apple tree in the back yard and then sawing them up into sticks and twigs. Then I mowed the lawn, such as it is, for the first time this year. I thought I had left all such manly yard work behind me when I left the wilds of Upstate New York for life in the big city, but it seems to follow me wherever I go.

Puzzled. By this speculative Beatles album cover:



I'm wondering who put it together and why. It can't have been an early, rejected attempt at a "White Album" cover -- the Beatles would never have commissioned something so cheesy by 1968. Still, it's amusing... and interesting for the track list. What if the "White Album" had been a single, not a double, album? According to this cover image, the line-up would have eliminated the more idiosyncratic songs (which surely would have ended up later on solo albums).

Click the image for a closer, more readable view. And here is a rejected Revolver cover. I blogged about a more graphically interesting rejected "White Album" cover here.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

(or felt)

Weird. For a while, I was the only person walking around the Tilton Gallery on the Upper East Side of New York on Saturday, perusing the David Lynch exhibit. The place is a bit strange (appropriately?), in that it was obviously someone's 19th-century house at one point -- there are lots of fireplaces and rickety wooden stairs to the second level, which has a Victorian tin ceiling. But the walls are covered with some mighty disturbing and/or surreal contemporary images. (See a couple of pix I took here and here.) It's not an unpleasant contrast. It's just that when I think of an art gallery, I think of one of those minimalist store-front places you see in Soho or Lynch's hometown, L.A. (The man himself will be at Tilton for a reception on the 16th; maybe I'll go back.)

Hungry. I'm a cereal killer. Every morning I eat a bowl of Grape Nuts, which are very filling, but today we had run out of milk, so I had to make do with a bagel. I've felt empty all day, not ravenous, but as if something is missing. I bought milk, so maybe I'll eat Grape Nuts for dinner. Except then I'll feel like the day should be starting, not winding down. And today has been confusing enough, what with the preternaturally warm winter weather and daylight saving time starting. By the way, it is daylight saving time, not "savings". Daylight cannot be banked, more's the pity.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

or felt....

Pooped, because I did eight hours of freelance work over the weekend. That's a full day, though it was spread out over two. But even when I wasn't working, I was thinking and worrying about it, which means I didn't really have a weekend at all.

Strangely entertained. My wyfe somehow got discount tickets to a performance in NYC last weekend called Gazillian Bubble Show, in which a fellow of Chinese extraction, who said he was born in Serbia, but had a thoroughly American accent, blew huge soap bubbles on stage using enormous bubble wands. And I mean gigantic bubbles -- he invited children onstage and encased four of them at once inside a bubble. Strobe lights, a fog machine, lasers, and a pounding disco soundtrack added to the entire effect. I hadn't wanted to go, thinking it was some kiddie show (exclusively), but I ended up impressed by the showmanship. And the bubbles. I also wondered how someone could have discovered such a talent and entered into such a peculiar line of work.

Ambivalent about the crocuses that are already blooming in our backyard. Already. In February. What does this very warm winter presage about the summer ahead? Venusian temperatures, I fear....