For those of you keeping track, I have a brand new essay just published HERE on Ninth Art, concerning new advances in slacking off at work. Go read it.

So I went into the bathroom to blow my nose, cos that's where the tissues are, you see, and there's a spider on the mirror. It's not huge, not tiny either, but it's the most peculiar shade of white-ish yellow. Or yellow-ish white, depending on your vantage point and taste in colors.

Now I already have a tissue in my hand, so my natural reaction is to smack the sucker with it. Well, smack it with my hand covered by the tissue, as throwing a tissue ain't gonna do much good, unless I can get it up to, say, mach 1. And I haven't been able to do that since college.

So I smack the thing, but when I look at the tissue, it's not there. I thought I saw it drop just as I went to squish it, and apparently it escaped somehow. But here's the weird thing: It completely disappeared... I scanned the whole bathroom counter, moved all my stuff, looked everywhere it could have gone.

Then it hit me: The spider was the exact same color as my bathroom counter. That's right: Spiders are evolving camoflage IN MY BATHROOM.

Needless to say, I'm a little freaked out.

Marshmallow Peeps: One is good. Two is okay. Three is bad. And four is just plain wrong.

This is what they make you wear in Hell.

(Originally written last night late, but Blogger was down.)

Things I currently hate:
• Any TV show that uses the phrase "ripped from the headlines"
in the promo. (Sole exception: The West Wing.)
• Creed.
• This flatlined economy.
• Cereal that cuts the top of your mouth.

I had other things on the list earlier today, but it's getting late and my memory isn't what it used to be. I used to have a photographic memory to the point where I could remember excruciating detail about Transformers plotlines, but nowadays I have trouble remembering what I had for my most recent meal. It's like the old joke: What question can stump any stoner? "What were we just talking about?"

Maybe I should start watching Transformers again.

I'm a little bummed, honestly. I did everything right today. I got to bed at a reasonable hour last night (thanks in no small part to some Tylenol PM), got up, was mildly productive during the day, even did my running at a decent hour as opposed to the past-midnight thing I usually do. (Then I ate a hamburger and a Ding Dong -- separately, thank you -- and completely nullified my workout, but that's another entry.)

I'm a little fuzzy on what happened next (the memory thing again). It's nine o'clock, dinner's done and cleaned up, the night is fresh. Next thing I know it's 2:30 in the morning and I've done absolutely nothing. What the hell?

Undoubtedly, part of the problem comes from my idiotic habit of needing to be in a particular physical state before I can write. I need to be perfectly awake and thinking clearly or else I won't even try to start something. Inevitably, this means naps, but naps require preparation and recovery, so even a twenty-minuter can eat up an hour. However, back when I had regular deadlines, I wasn't always this picky about my mental state. Sometimes I had no choice, I had to write, and that adrenaline was usually enough.

I guess I need regular deadlines again. Not the easiest thing to come by these days.

In other, less navel-gazing news, my ex-girlfriend from college showed up in town unexpectedly yesterday. When she called, she was evasive on exactly why she had dialed me up. After a little conversational dancing, she slipped this in: "I've only slept a half hour in the last two days," and then continued on talking about other things, I guess expecting me to get the hint. She needed a place to crash, which I was willing to provide, but why the verbal evasiveness?

Giving her the benefit of the doubt, maybe she wasn't looking for a couch to crash on, but agreed since it was offered. My intuition tells me otherwise, though. Her passive-aggressive behavior was one of the things that drove her and I apart, and years later I still pick up on it. Why can't people just be direct?

Directness -- or rather lack thereof -- is definitely one of the main reasons my relationships have inevitably failed. No one wants to speak what's on their mind for fear of offending the other, an act that usually ends up hurting feelings anyway. I try to make the proclamation that I won't be like that next time, but as soon as I get involved, I find myself doing the same verbal tango again and again. I'm getting better at trying to be up front, but I still find myself making concessions. Concessions to her feelings, to my ego, to my habits. In my last relationship, I knew going in it had a limited shelf life, if only because I was prepping an out-of-state move when I got into it. Rather than saying just that, I said, "I've had plans in place to move at the end of the year for some time, but now that I've met you I'm not so sure..."

Excuse me, but what the fuck?

Okay, so to be brutally honest, I was hedging my bets slightly because I didn't want to spoil my chances of still seeing her naked occasionally. But if I'd been direct, maybe things would have turned out different. Then again, hell, maybe I would have got dumped even sooner than I eventually did. "Babe, you're great, but I'm moving in a few months. Can I still get into your pants until then?" Not exactly romance novel material.

Maybe that's how people know they're really ready marry someone: when you finally meet that one person that you can cut through the bullshit with, but they still let you get in their pants.

It was finally warm enough to go running tonight. There are still massive piles of snow out there, but the sidewalks are clear, and even at midnight it was fairly nice out there. My guilt over too many Burger King chicken sandwiches has been getting to me, so I forced myself to go through my routine. Felt nice to do it, even if it ate up a few hours in preparation and recovery. (I'm always starving after a run, which seems to defeat the purpose somewhat.)

Earlier, a friend was boasting how he had run a mini-marathon today, something like four miles, which, honestly, is nowhere near a marathon. He reminded me of something that happened in my senior year (and a half) of college. I used to run the same route every other night, pretty much like how I do now. This particular route was longer than the one I run these days, probably three or four miles total, depending on if I came back one of two ways, compared to my current two. One night, I decided to make a slight deviation from my course, assuming that some roads ran parallel and I would rejoin my usual route just a while later.

This, being Iowa City, where nothing is parallel (and even less is straight -- ha ha), failed to happen.

I ended up somewhere way out of town, how, I'll never have any idea. For quite a while, I had no clue where I was, but I knew that if I stopped, I would become impossibly cramped and not be able to get home. (I had no money to call, besides the fact that I was nowhere near a public phone.) Eventually, I emerged near a mall that I recognized and I was able to find my way back home.

This was two and a half or three hours later. I honestly can't remember exactly how long it had been, but I do remember heading straight for a long, hot bath.

I didn't exactly keep up a regular pace the whole time, nor did I ever go back to measure the route, but I must have run at least 18 miles, and that's my most conservative estimate.

Of course, since then, I don't run nearly as regularly (and it shows), but I can always tell the kids about the day Daddy Got Lost And Kept Going.

Speaking of my mother, she's got this tradition of buying me one of those Far Side calendars every year for Christmas, though this year is the last year they're being produced. Predictability can be a virtue when it's something as harmless as this, so I shudder to see what she will replace this tradition with this year.

There's really nothing wrong with these calendars, except that I don't really use them. Not for their intended purpose anyway. They're like stickless sticky notes. I tear one off when I need to jot a note down. Or kill a bug. They're good for that too.

Anyway, I went to jot down a note and realized that the date on the front of the thing was September 12th. It's not really significant, like that watch where the hands stopped at the exact moment of the bomb at Hiroshima. It wasn't like I stopped using the calendar the day after the attacks. It simply brought back a more personal perspective on those chaotic days, which have since been co-opted by news organizations and politicians.

Not sure exactly what I'm trying to say here, except that lately I've flirted with the concept of completely shunning the news, which is an odd concept for a journalist. But in the era of 24-hour coverage on more channels than you can count on both hands, I have started to wonder if the constant feeling of unease in my life is somehow partially connected to the never-ending stream of information. Though, honestly, it's unfair to pin it on information, which is by its nature fairly benign, but rather the emphasis should be on the news organizations and their inherent need to get your attention by any means necessary. Information is filtered, reprocessed and reorganized for maximum emphasis on the more salacious aspects, which leads to the type of story that The Daily Show cleverly parodies under the "It Could Kill Your Children" banner.

Not that the news is completely responsible. The world is a fairly unstable place, particularly of late (though I sometimes wonder if the world has always been this way and I am just now becoming aware of it), and part of me simply hopes that by hibernating, it will all go away.

Hardly logical or even sensible, but at least understandable. I hope.

Unfortunately, right now the real problem is that I haven't a clue what it was I tore the page off to make note of in the first place.

Ugh. I can't figure out the archives on this thing, so it's quite possible that some of my wit and wisdom may be lost forever. If anyone knows what I'm doing wrong, drop me a line.

Feh

Anyway, this story may amuse you. Last week, as you may or may not know, sucked. Possible jobs saw probable rejections, possible ladyfriend saw definite rejection. By Wednesday, I was ready to spend the rest of the week in bed, and thanks to an ass-kicking cold, I nearly did. The one bright spot, however, was my mother calling me to tell me that my cousin Joe has a writing connection out in Hollywood and that he would be willing to hook me up. Yipee.

So I spend the last six days or so attempting to raise Cousin Joe (sounds like something out of Rawhide) on the tel-e-phone, and finally manage to connect with him tonight. The conversation goes something like this:

CUZ'N JOE: Oh, Patrick! Good to hear from you. I'm sorry I didn't get back to you, but I was trying to get my friend Brad to contact you directly.

ME: That's okay. I figured you were busy. So what can you tell me about this Brad guy?

JOE: Well, he does rigs for shows, mostly conventions. He has a company where they set up all the lights and--

ME: Wait, you mean he does lighting?

JOE: Yes. Technical lighting. I mentioned that to your mother and--

ME: No, no... "Writing," Joe. Writing.

And so ends another misadventure with the phone company and my mother's hearing. I can't exactly blame her; she was only trying to help. And it wasn't a complete loss, Joe's father Pat, who I'm named for, actually has connections in technical writing, so we'll see how that pans out.

One thing I forgot to mention in yesterday's entry was this revelation from my visit to the doctor: I have broken the 200 pound barrier, and put on more than 10 of them since September. This is hardly shocking for a number of reasons. One of them is the "You Only Live Once" factor that has crept into many people's lives since September 11th. It's hard to deny yourself a plate of KFC when your mail could kill you.

It also doesn't help that it's winter. I was probably at my healthiest right around September (excluding all the weird psychotic leftovers from my job), thanks to a running regimen and the occasional biking trip around the city. And thanks to a wrong-headed conviction that there was something seriously wrong with my circulatory system, I was almost obsessive about exercise and eating, though moreso about the exercise. I always figured I could justify the poor eating if I exercised like a bastard on fire.

Given that this was a mild winter, I did get out and run here and there, and even when I haven't run for quite some time, I can still manage a two-mile trot without having to collapse and wait for the police to scrape me up. So I can't be in that bad of shape, can I?

Damn.

Besides the obvious problems tied to getting fatter, I actually think I could stand to gain some weight, if only so I resemble a gawky middle schooler a little less. The real difficulty is getting the weight to distribute correctly. Lately I look less like an underwear model than a plumber. When I catch a peripheral glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror, I could almost mistake myself for my father. Scary thought. The old man's pushing 70...

Still, I'm told that weather is milder in my destination city of Portland, OR, not to mention their abundance of hills and public transportation, making a car almost unnecessary. So I should get plenty of walking, running and biking in, if I'm lucky.

And if I'm really lucky, I won't live anywhere near a Wendy's.

It was about 11:30 tonight when I finished watching Bergman's The Seventh Seal (got it from Netflix). Good flick, but I'll be flogged by badgers if I know what it all means.

By the way, that's The Seventh Seal, about a knight in the Crusades playing chess with Death starring Max von Sydow, not The Seventh Sign, about a housewife who thwarts the apocalypse starring Demi Moore. Big difference, though it would be fun to see them swap roles.

Regardless, when I ventured out to take the movie to the communal mailbox at the end of the street, there was a fresh layer of snow covering everything that hadn't been there a few hours ago. It was really something amazing; not a footprint or tire track to be seen. In fact, I had to pay close attention to remember where the paths were to get me where I'm going.

The past couple times I've gone walking to the mailbox or out for a run at night, I've stopped just to listen. There is always a dull roar coming from nowhere in particular. It sounds like a plane overhead, but indistinct. And then there are the sounds of the cars going by. Just noise that we've become so accustomed to that we don't notice it anymore. It was alternately comforting and alarming.

Tonight, that sound was gone. All I could hear was the wind.