New Blog

Dearest readers (all three of you),

I started a tumblr. The URL is as follows: http://citizendork.tumblr.com/ I'll let the first post explain why. Please redirect your interwebs and bookmark accordingly.

A New Year's Resolution

I'm bad at resolutions. I usually forget them or ignore them. This year I'm trying something slightly different. I'm going to try harder at something I'm already trying to do: this year I want to publish at least three short stories.

I was originally thinking two, which seems like a realistic goal (maybe), but I thought hell, why not push myself a bit. I've spent the break revising many of the short stories I've written over the last year into drafts I'm happy with. I've got four good short stories to send around (I started submitting yesterday), with two more coming up, as soon as I polish up the most recent drafts. That's six stories. By the end of the year, I want half of them to be in print or online journals. Now it's public, so you all get to hold me to this and harass me to submit.

Books I've Read: December

2666 by Roberto Bolano. See previous post. Man, what a tome.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. This is the first Atwood I've read, and I enjoyed it. It's literary fiction and science fiction in equal measures, and tells the story of one of the last surviving human beings as he remembers the events leading up to the biologically-engineered apocalypse. It's also a fun satire of corporate responsibility, technology, and what happens when we think we're above human failings. There are a few points where Atwood gets carried away with the satire and derails the story for a few pages to make a point about Starbucks or video games or whatever is on her mind, but generally this was excellent, and I recommend it. There's a sequel too, called The Year of the Flood, that I want to check out at some point.

Straight Man by Richard Russo. A novel set in an English department. It's pretty slapsticky, very witty, and always funny, and it manages to make riveting, hilarious reading out of personnel hiring committees and budget cuts. This is my second Russo novel (I've also read Empire Falls), and it's by far my favorite. Highly recommended!

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. This much-loved sci-fi novel was published in 1956, and in some ways it shows it. For example, it opens with a long expository prologue that explains the history of the world and some of the ideas at play, something not many sci-fi writers would try nowadays. The pacing has a distinctly retro feel--some parts feel like Bester was really taking his time, others feel like he had a deadline and needed to get the job done. Some of the perspective shifts and how they're accomplished/developed feel a little amateurish by today's standards. In other ways, the novel feels very modern. Nothing ages faster than sci-fi (try reading some early William Gibson now that it's 2011), but The Stars My Destination feels timeless. It's action, comic-booky science, and depiction of scary corporate interests feel like they could have come from the '70s or '90s or 2000s just as easily as the '50s. And the main character! Damn! Gully Foyle is a great anti-hero, one of the most fascinating characters I've seen in a sci-fi novel. He's violent, stupid, uneducated, and a murder and rapist, and Bester does some really interesting things with him by the end of the novel. Did I mention that the book is full of intrigue and action? At times it feels like a science-fiction version of a good James Bond movie. I'm very glad I read this one--it was really interesting.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. More classic genre fiction. I own an anthology of old pulp detective stories and I'd read stuff by Mickey Spillane and Dashiell Hammett and not really liked it much, so I was leery of The Big Sleep. And then I read the first paragraph:

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

BOOM! The language throughout The Big Sleep is similarly amazing, and it elevates what would be an exciting but rather conventional detective story into literature. People are starting to reevaluate Chandler and accept him as one of the great American stylists and I can see why. Gorgeous writing.

I'm Still a Bad Blogger

But I'm home! And, two nights ago, I finished 2666, which Jeff and Selena gave me to read before I left for New Hampshire in the summer, and which I have been reading for four freaking months.

Now, of course, I have school, I have student papers, I have writing to do, but still. Four months? For one book? Ah, but what a book--it's almost a thousand pages, many of which have no paragraph breaks. Sentences will run on for pages, it's often experimental and surreal, cast of thousands, etc. Plot summary is futile.


I'm not sure if I can recommend 2666. While it was a damn good book, in the time I took to read it I could have read at least four or five other damn good books, without the pressure of a punishing 900-page slog. It's super-dark, confusing, often very disturbing (I had creepy 2666-infected dreams at least twice), and not at all rewarding in a plotty sense. But oh man, the language, the images, the dozens of fantastic dream sequences... If you're really into Latin American lit, or you're looking for a summer project and you've already read Proust and Infinite Jest and you're moving onto the next behemoth, give it a shot. Just don't try to do it during grad school.

Guilt

It's been two months since I've blogged. Ashley is blogging every day. Josh is blogging again (and helping his wife in labor as I write this! Woo hoo!). I have blogger's guilt. I blame Chelsea for not needling me into doing it. For shame, Chelsea.

Actually, I blame school. School is not exciting to write (or, I'm assuming read) about. I've got student papers, I read short stories, I eke in some writing when I can. I've actually been frustrated with how little writing I'm getting done--students take up a lot of time, and I'm trying to force myself to find a balance between the TAship that's paying for me to be here and the thing I'm actually supposed to be doing while I'm here, but it's hard.

I've been writing recently because I have a story coming due in workshop. I was trying to write this historical piece about an American soldier who goes traveling after World War I and ends up in India and has to shoot a tiger, but I think I may have found my "faking it" limit. I can write a story about hunting. I can write a story set in 1918. I think I can write a story set in India. But I can't do all three at once. Too many levels of abstraction, too much research to do. I wrote like fifteen pages, did a ton of research, read half of Man-eaters of Kumaon by Jim Corbett (a British colonel who spent thirty years tracking and shooting man-eating tigers and leopards in central India; super-interesting), then I threw it away and started writing something else. The new story is coming very easily.

In other news, I'm going down to Boston for a northwest brew festival on Monday! Boundary Bay! Deschutes! Issaquah and Lompoc! I'm really stoked. I also have my plane tickets home. December 14th, kids. I'll see you then, and I'll try to be a better blogger.

What I Would Have Written About

I would have written about arriving in Massachusetts and being confronted by awful New England traffic and clueless Masshole drivers. I would have written about getting lost in a warren of unmarked state highways less than two hours from home. I would have written about the long and hellish move from Dunn's Bridge Lane to my new place on Central Avenue, and my neighbors who I thought at first were meth-heads, but now I'm pretty sure were just really wasted when I met them, and I would have written about the cigarette ash in my windowsills and the slanting floors and the fact that I didn't have power for the first four days I lived here.

I would have written about building a shelf and tacking up panelboard so I could write notes to myself in dry-erase pens on my walls while I'm working on my fiction. I would have written about decorating my apartment with pages and covers from vintage science fiction pulps (an arts and crafts project! Me!). I would have written about seeing my New Hampshire friends again, and orientation for English 401, and the horrifying heat wave that swept New England, followed by the very disappointing hurricane, and visiting Scarlet and Carl in Boston, and the insane Scottish guy who yelled at us for "keeping the black man down."

I would have written about these things but I no longer have as much time as I did this summer, and, as you can see from the list, I've been busy. I'll try to do better, and you can just imagine those seven or eight awesome blog entries that I would have written. Back to writing now!

Road Trip 2010 Day 3: God made dirt and dirt will bust your ass

I rolled up to a toll booth in Illinois blasting Old Dirty Bastard's "Baby I Got Your Money" and as soon as the toll booth lady asked me for the $1.25, the chorus, where Kelis sings "Hey, say hey, baby I got your money, dontcha worry" kicked in. She didn't seem to notice.

Road Trip 2010 Day 3: The Angry Truck Driver

You see a lot of sketchy people in bathrooms along the interstate. 99% of the time, you ignore these people and they ignore you and everybody does their business and goes happily on their way. About 0.8% of the time you wind up talking to these sketchy people for some reason, and they turn out to be really pleasant, nice people (albeit with awkward weight/fashion/hygiene/what-have-you problems). The other 0.2% of the time, you wind up talking to these people for some reason and they turn out to be just as crazy as they look. Such was the case with The Angry Truck Driver.

TATD was pretty standard--beer belly, tee-shirt tucked into jeans, giant belt buckle, beard, baseball cap--except for the fact that he was washing his hands furiously in the Conoco convenient mart's bathroom. I was washing my hands as well and couldn't help but look over and notice his anxiety. He must have noticed me looking, because he said, very loudly, "This water is cold!"

I wasn't getting any hot water either, so I nodded, said, "Yeah, man," and gave a "what are you gonna do?" kind of shrug, but TATD wasn't done.

"This water is COLD!"

"Maybe we should talk to the manager?" I offered.

TATD huffed and shut off the sink, dried his hands just as ferociously as he had scrubbed his hands, said "Cold water doesn't kill fucking germs!" and walked out the door.

And that was The Angry Truck Driver.

Road Trip 2010 Day 2: Ambivalent about South Dakota

The first two times I drove through South Dakota I hated it. Kitschy tourist billboards and dinosaur-themed water parks obstructing the views of the beautiful Black Hills, crowds of gross tourists at Mount Rushmore, swarms of Harley-Davidsons and no hotel rooms--not my favorite place.But, driving through western South Dakota in the afternoon and evening of my second day, I began to reconsider. I-90 through Eastern Montana and Wyoming is empty. Like, really empty. Closes in the winter because there are no humans to plow it and it's under too much snow, no gas for 90 miles, never see another car kind of empty. This time it felt pretty good to see other people, suburban sprawl, and fast food restaurants--and Starbucks! I hadn't seen a Starbucks since Missoula, and while it's not my favorite coffee, it's a lot better than the swill McDonald's sells, which I became intimately acquainted with later on in the trip.

Anyway, I was starting to reconsider South Dakota. Maybe, in the right context, it was actually pretty cool. Any state that has Wall Drug in it can't be all that bad. I got a little less stoked when I stopped for a nap outside a visitor's center, lay in the grass, and felt something tickling my arm. I looked down to see a grasshopper the size of my fucking finger chilling on my arm.

Grasshoppers, the myth: cute, cuddly, look like Jiminy Cricket.

Grasshoppers, the reality: ugly, terrifying, look like the aliens from District 9.

It was so big I could see that it was looking at me with its beady little grasshopper eye, probably sizing me up, figuring out if it could take me. I brushed him off my arm and went to sleep.

My faith was further shaken when I reached eastern South Dakota, which is almost as empty as Wyoming. The entire region also reeks of cow poop. Eastern South Dakota is also home to approximately one thousand gajillion bugs, half of which committed suicide on my car's windshield. About one hour after the sun went down, I drove through a bug storm. It was actually pretty amazing. I've never seen anything like it. I was used to quite a few bugs splattering on my windshield after sunset--it happens--but I drove for several minutes through massive clouds of bugs that hit my car so fast and so hard it sounded like it was raining (and hard, New Englandy rain, not soft Seattle rain). I was afraid to turn my windshield wipers on and smear my windshield into a completely opaque mess of guts, wings and shattered carapaces, so I squinted through the splatter until I reached a gas station and spent a good five minutes scrubbing it down. I wish I had a working camera. Verdict is still out on South Dakota.

I would have felt pretty bad if I accidentally killed this guy. Such a gentleman.

Road Trip 2010 Day 1: Camaraderie

I planned on sleeping in my car as much as possible on the trip from Seattle to New Hampshire, because I am broke. By 11:30 on the first day I was tired of driving, so I pulled into a rest stop outside of Bozeman, Montana. I had my blanket, a rolled towel for a pillow (yep, forgot a pillow), and a big heavy wrench to defend myself in case I was set upon by a crowd of wild vagrants.

I was expecting to be a bit sketched out by the whole sleeping-at-a-rest-stop thing, but it turned out great! After some experimenting about how to get comfortable in my tiny car (pro tip: move all the luggage to the front and sleep on the back seat with your legs curled up however will work), I was good to go. And I was not the only person sleeping there, which helped.

There were at least half a dozen other cars camping out at the rest stop, including a van with a young couple and their kid (they had a mattress, though, wussies), and a few other traveling college/grad-school aged guys. I fell asleep to the roar of I-90 and the glow of the young mom's booklight.

We all woke up at about the same time the next morning, when the sunlight became too bright to sleep through. Everybody got out of their cars to stretch and look around, then we all went into the bathroom to wash up, brush teeth, etc. Everybody was smiling at each other like we were some weird, temporary I-90 family. It was great.

This is the Road Trip Again

In about twelve hours I leave the northwest for the northeast. I hope my car survives, and I hope the weather cools off a bit (Washington is in the middle of a heatwave, but the national forecast looks promising). I've been so busy these last few days, what with getting trip stuff together, Sam and Jon's wedding, and Ashley and Kili in town--the fact that I'm leaving here is just now sinking in, and it's kind of got me in a funk.

I'm going to miss the northwest, and the people in it, a lot. This has been a most excellent summer, and I'm sorry to see it go.

As for the road trip itself, I would take pictures, but I accidentally broke my camera last night at the wedding. Dad and I tried to fix it today, and Dad eventually got it to a place where it will turn off and on, take pictures, and do everything but focus, so it's basically useless. Oh well. At the very least there will be some written blog entries. I might have to supplement them with pictures I find on the internet.

So Washington people, goodbye; New Hampshire people, get ready. I'll be switching coasts soon.

Accountability

Reading through my old blog entries, I found this paragraph in a post from April 21st.

So my goal for the summer is to try to spend less time in front of a screen. I'm not sure how well this is going to work out, since I'm going to try to bust out as much of my thesis as I can (goal for the summer is three-hundred pages of crappy first draft), and I have to work at least twelve hours a week for Smarthinking, but hey, it will be the summer. I'm going to go on runs, go on hikes, get outside, lounge in the sun and read a book--I also have an extensive reading list for the summer, which I plan to supplement with trips to used bookstores. We'll see how it goes.

So, how well did I do?

• Less time in front of the screen. Hmm. While I definitely spent less time in front of the screen than I do during the school year, I still spent quite a bit, and I wasn't working on my thesis (see below). Mostly I was g-chatting, or watching movies, or listening to music (I found a lot of new music this summer), with a little bit of writing thrown in here and there. Still, it was nice to have a break from the nine months glued to a computer screen that is my school year.
  

• Thesis. I totally failed in this category. Three hundred pages, Ian? Really? Wow. Well, at least I have a semi-legitimate excuse: I abandoned the project I was working on (for which I had written a good thirty pages of new material on top of the sixty I'd written in school) halfway through the summer in favor of a more manageable project. On this new project I've got twenty-five pages and a few homeless paragraphs floating around. So, in total, I wrote about fifty-five pages of thesis this summer, thirty of which don't count. I don't feel too bad about it, though. It's the summer, I've got another year and a half at least. It'll get done.
  

• Getting outside. A bunch! I think I only ran once, and I'm not a big fan of lounging outside and reading a book when I could be lounging inside on a very comfortable bed or couch and reading a book, but I went on a ton of hikes and found out I really like hiking. So success!
  

• Reading. I've read a bunch this summer, although surprisingly little from the reading list I set up. Still, I don't feel too bad. I've already written a lot about the books I read this summer in the "Books I've Read" posts (May, June, July), so I won't say much more here.
  

Also, happy first anniversary to this is no longer the road trip. I started this blog on August 7th, 2009, with a post about my dehydrated cat. A lot has changed since then. I've moved across the country, started a new program, become a hell of a better writer, gone to conferences and got fiction published, joined the world of singledom, moved back across the country, and gotten to know my niece and nephew. I hope this next year is just as interesting.

Books I've Read: July

The Story Thief by Joshua Young. Yeeeeeaaah! It's Josh's book, and I'll say little about it to prevent from spoiling it for all of you, dear readers, or from embarrassing its author. I will say that I loved it, and that it's not only Josh's prolificity (prolificness? prolificiness? I don't know, he freaking writes a lot) that drives me mad with envy, it's also his willingness to cut what he's revising to shreds and rebuild it, expand it, tweak it, and generally turn it from a solid first draft into an actual novel. Nice!

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. I picked this up because Jeff and Selena and I were talking about it and I haven't read it since high school and I wanted to see how I would react to it now. Strongly, it turned out. Bear with my huge, sweeping generalizations here: reactions to High Fidelity are pretty strongly divided along gender lines. Women often are bothered by it--Rob, the narrator is neurotic and whiny, the book is a find-the-right-woman-who-will-fix-you fantasy, who gives a shit about all those old soul records, etc. One WWU student I talked to actually had to get rid of the book because she said that having it on her night stand felt like "having a sketchy stranger in her room." Most men (and bear in mind that most men who have reactions to the novel High Fidelity are the kind of guys who seek the book out to read it) think that it is an incredibly accurate representation of the male mind at work. Jeff, in response to Selena's comment that Rob is whiny and neurotic, replied that yes, Rob is whiny and neurotic, but he gives voice to neuroticisms that most guys think about but would never in a million years actually talk about, which I think is a good way to describe it.

I was really torn by High Fidelity, and it's narrator especially. It is a find-the-right-woman-who-will-fix-you fantasy, and the last quarter of the book is mostly about Rob bumbling around and being a douchebag while Laura (the love interest) patiently tries to put his life together for him. Rob definitely doesn't earn points for likability. He's a self-consciously hip narcissistic hypocrite who sees the problems in his behavior and lets it eat at him, then does nothing whatsoever to change it. Unfortunately, Rob is also so similar to me that it's shocking. He's an A.V. nerd, like me and most of my male friends, and if he developed an obsession with twenty-year-old video games, we would probably be besties. This was upsetting for me to realize--I wanted to hate Rob, but I didn't. I couldn't! This needs more thinking about...

Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O'Malley. Several people have asked me why I like these books and I have had a hard time explaining why--the plot sounds gimmicky and infantile, the art style is highly stylized (it appeals to me, but I can see how it would drive some people insane), and the narrator's comments often start to feel a bit dictatorial. But then I noticed the blurb on the back of the last book, from Joss Whedon: "Scott Pilgrim is the best book ever. It is the chronicle of our time. With Kung Fu, so, yeah: perfect." Word Joss Whedon! Basically the fact that Joss Whedon is blurbing this book should tell you why I like it--he could have written it. It has that same mix of angst and pop-culture references and ass-kicking that made Buffy the Vampire Slayer so awesome. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, it's a lot like Buffy. Huh. Anyway, I was actually a bit disappointed with the ending of the Scott Pilgrim series. I'm not sure what I expected--it ended exactly how anybody could have predicted it would end all along--but it just felt a little too... easy? Not earth-shatteringly awesome? I'm not sure.

The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis. Ah! A male-coming-of-age novel with a narrator I can really love to hate. The Rachel Papers takes place in the five hours before Charles Highway turns twenty years old. He spends those five hours recounting the previous year or so of his life, with special emphasis on his relationship with Rachel, a girl he sets out to bed but with whom he winds up falling in love. Charles Highway is arrogant, manipulative, hypocritical, elitist, callous, disgusting on pretty much every level (including and especially the level of personal hygiene, his lack of which he spends a great deal of time describing), and is just an all around asshole. There's really nothing good to be said about him, at any point in the novel. That said, I didn't have to like the narrator to enjoy the novel. It was very funny, and much of the pleasure I got from it came from seeing what the hell Charles was going to do next--his willingness to tailor his musical tastes, conversational modes, and even his accent to suit the various women he tries to pick up is rather funny, and the used condom switcheroo is a great moment.

Yes, "the used condom switcheroo." This book is freaking filthy. I honestly have never read anything so crass. I'm trying to think of a good analog to help explain it, since--as my family reads this blog--there's no way in hell I'm going to quote some of it's more filthy passages (many of which run on literally for pages), but I'm having trouble finding one that's adequate. I guess it reminded me a bit of a British novel version of American Pie, only much, much, much raunchier and willing to describe the gritty details of... well, of just about everything that American Pie can only hint at if it wants to keep its 'R' rating. Its several pages dedicated to the symptoms of Charles bad case of gonorrhea were particularly memorable, and terrifying, and I also wondered how many different ways Martin Amis--who is, by the way, a very well-respected, very British novelist--could think of to describe bronchitic phlegm. Yeah, ick, ick, ick. I enjoyed the book, but if you're easily offended or disgusted or embarrassed, this is not the book for you.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. This is a book my professors and classmates were raving about all last year and one that I wasn't that interested in. Old people? Stories about grief? Small town life on the coast of Maine? It just didn't seem like there was a lot there that appealed to me. But man am I glad I read this book. It's solidly written and very compelling, and I love how Strout handles Olive. The book is composed of thirteen short stories that all share a setting and a character--cantankerous middle school math teacher Olive Kitteridge. Sometimes Olive is the focus of the story, sometimes she only passes through a scene or gets a mention, but she's always there. Olive is a fascinating character, and I was never sure whether to hate her for her domineering pushiness and cold passive aggression, or love her for her ability to push through all the horrible things that life piles in front of her (or sometimes, like in one of my favorite stories, "Security," love and hate her in great measures, at the same time). The book is definitely a downer, but it's worth it.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower. Maybe it's that I came to this short story collection after Olive Kitteridge, which puts its emotions right up front, but Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned bothered me. Wells Tower's name and some of his more successful short stories (like "Retreat," which I read here and in the Pushcart Prize anthology a few years ago) get tossed around a lot in writing programs, because he's young (mid-30s), hip, and regularly places work in places like The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Wells Tower also writes like a young, hip dude. I'm curious to see if other MFAers (particularly fiction people) have noticed this, but there seems to be a certain mode that white male writers younger than forty-five tend to fall into. Emotion is hinted at but rarely mentioned outright. Everyone is very, very angry and/or callous. Outright statements of intent or emotion are passed over in favor of oblique images or dialogue. It's all about elision, deferment, and deflection. Think Raymond Carver but more ironic.

This is fine for a while, but after three or four stories in the same style, it gets really tiring. I found myself looking for the huge emotional crescendos in Olive Kitteridge, or the heart-on-your-sleeve angst of Scott Pilgrim. Still, this wasn't a complete waste of time. The title story is excellent, "Retreat," which I mentioned earlier, is flawed but interesting, and "On the Show" gives up Tower's typical narrative structure completely and gives us a collage of workers and guests at a small town carnival that's really, really awesome. Also, this is a good example of what I want not to do in my own writing: reticent white guy lit.

Positive Thinking! Positive Thinking!

I leave for New Hampshire in eighteen days, which is very strange. I feel like I just got here. As many of you know, New Hampshire isn't exactly my favorite place in the world, but I am trying to keep the blog-whining to a minimum. To that end, I've decided to talk a bit about things I'm actually looking forward to (!!) about returning to the Live Free or Die State.

• Living free or dying. I intend to live free.

The other option is dying hard. This kind of shit happens in New Hampshire all the time.

• Teaching. Oh man did I miss teaching this last year. I can't wait to have students, to be in front of a classroom again, even to grade papers--Smarthinking has made me realize how awesome it is to grade and evaluate on your own terms.

• Writing and reading. Sure, I'm writing and reading this summer, but it's going to be fun to have myself exposed to stuff I wouldn't pick up on my own, and to have a dedicated writing schedule. Writing over breaks always feels kind of like a dalliance or a hobby, even when I'm really cranking it out; in school it's basically all there is, so it feels much much more important.

• Shipyard Summer. I know this is weird, since I'm in the land of microbreweries, but I have been totally craving Shipyard Summer Ale. I've been enjoying a lot of Northwest summer ales and IPAs (apparently there's a very distinct "west coast" style of IPA, pioneered by WA and OR microbreweries, that has a lot more kick to it than its east coast cousin, which explains why all the IPA in New England sucks except for Smuttynose) but the Shipyard Summer is kind of like liquid crack-beer. It accompanies hot, muggy weather quite nicely. I promise I'm not cheating on you, delicious Northwest brews! It's just a fling.
  

• Having a car. New Hampshire is going to suck a lot less when I can get around it, or leave any time I want to go Boston or Portland or the mountains. Thanks for the car, Kate and Adam! You have noooooo idea how awesome this is. (Fingers crossed the Civic makes it across the country incident-free.)

• My new apartment. I can't wait to have my own space and fill it up with books and video games and brand new kitchen stuff and the things I like. Plus, it's in downtown Dover, right next to an awesome used books store and a bunch of nice bars, coffeehouses, and restaurants. Sweet.

My building. I'm in one of the studios on the corner.

• Fall in New England. We haven't had a ton of summer weather in Washington, which I'm just fine with. I'm already done with 85-degree-plus weather, sweating myself to sleep, sitting in front of fans, etc. (And has anybody else noticed how the red lights in Seattle are one or two minutes longer once the temperature gets to about ninety? I swear I'm not making this up.) I know that once I arrive in New Hampshire I'll have even more miserable weather to deal with for awhile, but then fall will be here, and it will be nice and cool and pretty-colored, and I can eat apples and candy corn and wear coats again. Huzzah!

Yeah, it's pretty there.

• Hiking. I hear the hiking in New Hampshire is great, and they do have lots of woods and mountains (sorry, "mountains"). I'm going to buy a best hikes book and use my newfound transportation to travel the state and walk all over it.
  

• Seeing my cat. I miss her.

Clementine circa early 2007.

See, positive thinking! Maybe I could follow this up with a list of things I won't miss about the Pacific Northwest. It might be short, but worth it.

On my Mind

It turns out I really enjoy hiking. I've hiked Tiger Mountain and Mount Si and a good chunk of the trails in Saint Ed's, and I'm wondering why I didn't start doing this sooner. I lived in Bellingham for six years, for god's sake, and I never went hiking once. What was I doing with that time? Why wasn't I climbing Oyster Dome or exploring Chuckanut? Stupid Ian. I'm considering buying a better hiking backpack when I get some money (read: when student loans drop), and I'll definitely pick up a New Hampshire trail guide when I get back for the summer.

***

I'm dreading going back to New Hampshire; I'm going to miss the Northwest a lot. The landscape, my friends, my family, the ethnic food, the mild weather, all the cool little places in Fremont that I've found in the last two months. There are definitely things I'm looking forward to on the east coast--primarily my new apartment, a corner studio in the heart of downtown Dover that overlooks the old textile mill--but I'm enjoying this weird limbo summer away from school and my work.

***

Speaking of my work, I'm writing again. New thesis project is underway. I don't really want to talk about it, so you'll get to read it when it's done. Heh.

***

I just realized that I've been back for two months and still haven't eaten any sushi. This needs to be remedied.

***

Other tidbits: Smarthinking is over and done with and I'll soon spend a weekend wandering around Bellingham, looking at the water, hiking, drinking Boundary Bay, visiting the farmer's market, etc. I can't wait. Everyone should listen to Veckatimest by Grizzly Bear. The Young Ward is close to walking, and she's loving it. When Josh's novel The Story Thief hits the shelves and is a triumphant New York Times' Bestseller, listen to old Ennio Morricone tracks while you read it--they fit together like puzzle pieces, and it's weird. That's all.

A Brief Summary of the Weekend

Friday

I drove up to Sam's cabin near Cle Elum with Jarret for a night of delicious food and Chris's homebrewed beer (which is delicious). I ate salmon and lots of good food, tried to solve a ridiculous puzzle, and sat next to a campfire and talked until very late. It was lovely.

Saturday

Got up early and drove out of the mountains so I could do the Fremont zombie walk. Tore up clothes with Lindsey and Sydney and had a lovely day wandering around Fremont, lunching on lamb burger, and checking out all the costumes. Lindsey, Sydney and I went as corporate zombies (office clothes, a tie for me, coffee cups) and got many compliments on our zombie-gear. We are in approximately 3000 complete strangers' photographs.

The best part about dressing as a zombie is the more dilapidated your clothes become, the better of a job you are doing. As I became progressively more covered in dirt, blood, and sweaty smeary make-up, my costume looked better and better. What an excellent day! Everybody was having a goofy good time, there was a great feeling of goodwill, and we pretty much had great times with random strangers all day. I highly recommend going on a zombie walk. Pictures are on Facebook, but I'm too lazy to upload them here. Sorry.

Sunday

Seattle weather defeated us! Some friends and I camped out at Gasworks at noon, hoping to have a good spot by the time fireworks started, and for a while it was great--cloudy but warm, good food and hanging out--but then it started raining and we had to retreat to Lindsey's friend's apartment in Fremont to watch movies (This is It, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, and season one of The Guild; excellent lazy holiday watching) and wait for the show. The view from the roof was incredible--Ali's apartment is near the Fremont bridge, so the underside of the bridge is arcing overhead toward Queen Anne, Seattle's skyscrapers are poking out from behind the hill, and Lake Union and Gasworks are right below. The fireworks were lovely. Of course, I forgot my camera.

Monday

Recovery day. I was lazy and sat around, watched more of The Guild, drove over to Woodinville to play Magic with Chris, Chris, and Ballew, ate Thai food with the parents, and generally took it easy after my crazy weekend. Man, I wish all weekends could be like this.

Nothing is happening on the writing front. I am feeling more and more justified in my laziness, as it seems few people from UNH are getting anything done this summer, yet I am still full of jealous rage when others are productive (I'm looking at you, Josh). I am wavering on my dedication to my thesis. The project seems too big, too massive in scope and ambition for an MFA thesis, and frankly, I don't think I've got the chops for it yet. I may try to reconfigure it as a collection of related short stories and novellas, but more likely it's just going to go in a back drawer until I'm ready for it. I've got another project in mind that I'm pretty pumped about and is slightly shorter and more achievable. I'll keep you posted.

Books I've Read: June

Tailchaser's Song by Tad Williams. This is a dorky fantasy novel about talking cats who go on a quest. It was my friend Lindsey's favorite book as a kid, so I read it, and I found myself enjoying it quite a bit. It's like Watership Down with cats, and I do love cats. It also had a fascinatingly down-beat ending. It totally skips the standard fantasy-trope "Everything is all right, here's your reward in the form of a title / a love interest / a big wad of magic or money" ending and goes for something really ambiguous and cool. I won't spoil it in case you ever read it.

Masters of Doom by David Kushner. This is the biography of John Romero and John Carmack that I think I mentioned earlier. It was really interesting, full of cool details of video game development in the early nineties, and a blow-by-blow description of how these two titans of game development fell out (Ion Storm--yikes). I was thinking about this and the Salinger biography, and it's fascinating how often geniuses are douchebags. John Carmack was the worst kind of programmer-nerd--no social skills whatever, he talked like a robot for years just because he thought he could, lived in an empty apartment with a computer and a mattress--and made a habit until his late twenties of just being a dick and generally mistreating people. This guy was also singlehandedly responsible for creating the PC gaming industry in the early 90s. Every single graphical breakthrough came from his brain. Odd how often genius and douchebaggery coincide.

Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness, Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together, and Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe by Bryan Lee O'Malley. I had never heard of this series of graphic novels before I saw the trailer for the upcoming movie (which could either be an awesome guilty pleasure or just really, really, really, really bad), and I was intrigued because of how they were supposed to treat video games, anime, and nerd culture--as an integral part of the narrative and visual style. I loved them for their witty banter and jokes about NES and Genesis games that made my childhood nerdiness feel hip. They're quite funny, and total fluff. I read all five books in about seven hours. The sixth comes out in a few weeks, and I intend on parking my ass in a Barnes and Noble and reading the entire thing to find out how it ends. Highly recommended.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. Okay, this one is in progress, but I felt guilty about how little I've read this month, so I'm putting it on here to make myself feel better. This book is crazy! It's set in an alternate history where after World War II, European Jews sheltered in Sitka, Alaska instead of Israel. And it's a Chandler-esque literary crime thriller, full of hard-drinking, fast-shooting, Yarmulke-wearing police detectives and black-hatted, side-curled, corrupt Orthodox Jew crime families. Pretty awesome stuff. I won't say too much about it, since I'm only 2/3 of the way through, but I'm really enjoying it so far, and I know I'm missing out on a ton of awesome stuff because I don't know that much about Judaism. There are whole paragraphs that I just don't get at all, which is kind of too bad.

Josh, you're next.

Hey look

New format! Also, to try to counter some of my nerdosity, I hiked up to the top of Tiger Mountain today, and regretted not bringing my camera. Oh well. It was a lovely hike, nice exercise, and now I am very, very tired. I bet tomorrow I will need to eat ibuprofen like popcorn. Worth it.

Nerdosity

Perhaps this summer I have aged backwards and become, once again, a twelve year-old boy. When I was a twelve year-old boy I was a huge nerd, and I am reaching impressive new levels of nerdiness. Ladies and gentlemen, the facts:

• My friend from college has got me getting back into Magic: The Gathering. Gabe dug up my old cards for me, and I have been building decks and realizing how hopelessly outclassed my cards from the mid-nineties are compared to the new stuff. My creatures stand no chance! As much as I love the game, what I really want to do is buy a booster pack, rip into the foil and smell that vacuum-sealed fresh-ink scent all new Magic cards used to have. It is the smell of my young nerdhood.
• I have been babysitting Kaylee at Gabe and Amanda's house, which seems to have a never-ending supply of DiGiornio pizza. DiGiornio pizza is my weakness--once I bake one, it is hard for me not to eat the entire thing. I love it, and I have been eating it almost every day for lunch. Turns out when you eat pizza almost every day, you get really greasy. Greasy hair, greasy skin, lots of zits... and yet I can't help myself. DiGiornio truly is the food of the gods. Soon I will be stuffing it into my head--which will be attached to my ginormous blob of a body by a neck the circumference of a five gallon bucket--while I drink Mountain Dew and play World of Warcraft.
• I'm not at WoW yet (nor will I ever be), but I am enjoying the hell out of Assassin's Creed 2, which, believe it or not, is better than the first one (Holtmeier take note). I play it on Gabe's PS3 when the young ward is sleeping or willing to entertain herself. There's even more great stabby action, and I'm learning a ton about renaissance Italy. It's pretty cool when I can play a video game and nerd out over architecture, art, medieval politics, etc.
• That same friend who got me back into Magic is exposing me to a bunch of really solid electronica (cheers, Lindsey). I highly recommend Discovery, Jonsi, Passion Pit, and especially Miike Snow. I know electronica isn't really nerdy--it's rather hip at the moment, as far as I can tell--but I can't shake my old techno and electronica stereotypes: ravers, comp-sci students, weird skinny guys who do modtracking and never leave their rooms. Well, the music is damn good anyway.
• Up until this morning, I have had no car for a while, which means most of my social interactions have been through texting, gchat, and Facebook. Ugh.
• I am reading a book about John Romero and John Carmack, the two guys who designed and programmed Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. It's a fascinating book full of lots of cool details about how video game development worked in the nineties.

Well, that's about it. There are other, non-nerdy ways I'm spending my time, too: taking Kaylee on walks, playing catch with dogs, listening to the Avett Brothers (awesome, Kate!), other stuff. More updates soon!

Hey look, I'm a guest blogger

I wrote a guest post, ramblings about short story form, for Jory over at Literary Magpie. Check it out here.