Cleaning the attic

One Anne Rice biographer said of Rice as being in constant pychological evolution. It was written years before Rice converted to Catholicism, and that biographer would not have raised an eyebrow when, in recent years, Rice excommunicated herself from the Vatican corporation. She's not a Catholic anymore, in the same way a self-disciplined driver discontinues her membership from a motorists organization, but still adheres to the principles of defensive driving, taking care of your car, preparing for long trips, and being socially respectful to everyone on the road.

Rice, for as long as I've silently worshipped her vampire-lore-reinvigoration novel, "The Interview with the Vampire," had always been an atheist. What am I driving at? Blogging is a box I've kept stale for years now, not knowing what new items to throw in. I'm going to take this slow, and sift through my blog items (posts) of way back up to the latest, to see how depressing my online writing evolution has become, acting as my own detached biographer.

Climb every mountain

I'm not Catholic, but it makes sense why the "Board of Directors" of that church would want to prevent the Philippine poor from having unrestricted access to pregnancy prevention programs. If, and these are "ifs," if the middle class, well-to-do, and educated Catholics tend to switch religions, or (practice their faith in private and) avoid giving abuloy to Catholic churches (or require their services - kasal, mass, blessing, etc.), then that's revenue loss right there. Bad for business.

Another "if" - if the consistent abuloy revenue comes from the poor (who multiply like rabbits because they're economically barred from access to contraceptives), then it makes sense to oppose moves (like the RH bill) that would stop the poor population from ballooning. As long as there are poor Catholics, the revenue continues.

Corporations, we have to remind ourselves of this, have to protect their mind share. Faith in business. Business in faith.

I will be hated for articulating the above, but it has to be said.

I'm home

There's something nice and warm about donuts hiding deep down in a crumpled paper bag of love. Shove them down a plastic sando bag that survives the whims of an indifferent rain, and they won't be the same. Paper means risk - you could put the bag down on a damp table and the contents might drop through the tear. (If you soak us do we not go limp?) Hence the love. My wife bought us donuts last night - only two - there's only two of us. And I brought home the crumpled paper bag - I must have done most of the crumpling - and fixed us coffee while I wondered if the donuts got bored on the taxi ride home at 5 in the morning. The sun had not risen and our other cat (we have two) hadn't come yet when we divided the first donut - more of a cupcake, really - between us. What is it about the sound of crumpling paper bags that allure me? A gift that takes time to open up. The sound of something coming out - a surprise. The possibility that the donuts smashed against each other, with only me to blame, on the way home. Coffee, donuts, all that crumpling, and the hmm of this goes so well with coffee. Makes me feel loved, hugs me in a way that makes me say.... (read the title.)

basics

"I never thought I'd be so happy as a cat."

- Mao, contract killer trapped in the body of a cat, to Hei, another contract killer, from Season 1 of "Darker Than Black."

the sudden clue sleeps

Ma'am Jing threw me a clue in class. I caught it in midair, like an afterthought. I shot my mind's hand up, absentmindedly, and cupped it. It's like when you're pushing your grocery cart down the isle, mentally squinting (what is it again that I need?) and you notice you've been holding something you picked up from the other isle: ahh! this is it! A clue. I hate my own writing, the clue said, because I listen for flight. For lyricism. Something I only mold in moments of downward plight. Or fleeting out-the-window gazes. Not a mood in the everyday. But if I hummed a metaphor and a rhythm for every articulation, I'm thinking I'd trip. Getting up, dusting my knees, I'd mumble and go for blunt and pedestrian. Like pulling out a branch from the mud, because I could shoo a stray dog away with it, just as I could with a sleek 9 iron golf club. The shame of the mundane! (When I read recent journals I etched in fatigue, I squirm at how wayward and pointless they sound.) 

To talk always in poetry. How else must I talk to myself so I'd listen? (Note to self: you're not even a poet.)

-----

A classmate, naturally I didn't ask for his name, because I thought I knew, and the way we talked, it's as if he knew that I knew, anyway, I've dropped hints in our talk that I'd show him my on going sudden novel. Sudden novel. I'm still reveling in the sound of that. Sudden. Novel. That's not a short story. It's got chapters. Maybe even an epilogue. A sequence of parts that long is not ordinarily sudden. It is not. But it is. Each chapter, composed of smaller scenes (episodes), are written like sudden fiction. Smallish, self-aware of a time limit, and they end in the moment following the moment they started. Put them all together and loop some scenes and symbols, and that's a sudden novel. But will it work? I'd have to put the chapters side by side and let another pair of ears listen to the short burst, for his mouth to sip the teaspoons of scenes. Since I'm inflicting this on him, I should know his name. 

-----

Turns out one of the short stories Ma'am Jing assigned is a chapter of a novel. Sly devil old woman. Fooled me into thinking we were into short short fiction (the other name of sudden fiction), not that I complained. If a chapter is that full and yet so short, how would the entire novel taste like? Anyway, what's important is that I skittered into class unprepared to talk about my assigned story. I could talk, yes, but it would have no shape. A chaos of rambles. Good thing she upped her chin in someone else's direction. The guillotine fell not on me. So I'm uploading my more refined, thought about, talk, to our eGroup, over the Christmas vacation. 

-----

One of the stories assigned is written like prose poetry. How can people write like that? (Translation: what the fuck? this is so great! i can't write like that even if i trained for a lifetime.) 

-----

One should stock up on sleep before running off, blinking silly, out of the house after a sudden toothbrush, so early in the morning. I had to catch the train to class two cities away. That's probably why I couldn't think straight about the story assigned to me. I had only read it twice, with no notes etched down. Just some confident private mumbles. But at the time those mumbles, my mumbles, about the story, seemed brilliant. Therefore I was brilliant. Sadly, no greatness survives when you articulate those mumbles. I hereby promise to sleep the night before. 

when the fog clears

I'm not even sure I want a cake. But my wife insists, and I think she's right (I'd probably want something to see that sets the theme), so I'm hovering over images of nothing but chocolate in my head, and the memory of my not wanting something so sweet. Maybe something with some filling inside, something that, when I rub my eyes in the wee hours of dawn, when the refrigerator fog clears, pokes me awake (a discovery): hey there's a cake here--I'm digging in. Over and over. Because it's not so sweet. And there's some filling inside. The last thing you want is to keep seeing cake and keep being reminded there's cake and whose birthday cake is it again, and that oh, there's cake, you want some cake?

Ayokong maumay.

And please, no two candles stabbed into the cake spelling out my age. We almost always eventually have to pull them out of the cake. Because the cake won't fit in the ref with the candles jutting out. And we're sure we'd see the candles later, in the same drawer where we keep the kitchen stuff, like old knives, barbeque sticks, plastic forks and spoons, electrical tape, and an unused can opener. Someone but someone on someday will slide open that drawer and see a 3 and 2 with wicks burned long ago and holler, huy, birthday ni Yayen, eto o, look: proof.

But that's in the foreseeable future, far and away from here, which is now, and now is the time for a cake. My cake. Darling, you buy. You choose. You know me better than any other psycho with thinning hair.

I'm gonna go grab the cat and hose him in the bathroom. It's my birthday after all.

almost a week

The thing about completely freelancing at home? Even after you've marked your work hours, your mind is never really away from it. I'm ronin. Again. But I don't even see it as work anymore. It's been six days since I quit my affiliate marketing manager post in Makati. Never felt better. Wish I quit earlier.

I'm just resting a bit before I go back to cleaning manuscripts to submit to clients whose names I can't be sure are even real. But they do pay. And they're polite in their emails. And they like my writing. if only I had the patience to copyedit for them for long hours. I don't have a proofreader's eyes. But I am retraining myself. I get paid extra for that. I just don't want to edit my own blog entries. That would be depressing.

Been cleaning up wedding jewellery articles for some British websites since this morning. This one article I migrained through, its title had nothing to do with the first paragraph, and the rest of the article had nothing to do with anything else preceding it. Wow.

This is who I am now.

you can't drag it with you all your life

I used to have a room made for daydreaming. Mornings were a golden brown glow, six a.m. light dampened by thin bamboo drapes over windows. Windows left half-open, and through them cold air filled in, like a slow fog, nowhere to go, and so it stood still. I would pull my blanket up, covering me whole, through those cool golden mornings, cocooning myself deep in white, white laundered so many times Mother said she'd have to cut them in large squares, fold them into rags, and what good rags they'd be, she said. I said no.

It had, that blanket, so common a design you could walk into any public market, grab a blanket from any stall that sold them, choose the white with wide-apart blue stripes, and flowers here and there, and you'd have my blanket.

But not that blanket. That one, remembered too much. It knew of a time when windows where half-open, and one could cocoon oneself in one's dreams. All morning.

With no one saying no.

ahhh... kids

true story, overheard ko sa jeep, from a gradeschooler: "saya ng pasko namin last year. kumain kame ng aso. dami naming tira. bigay ko dapat kay brownie kaso di ko mahanap..."

i miss my friends

Camille is behind me. I am pulling her through the maze that is my Mother's house. I breathe in fabric softener as I wave aside hung shirts, blankets, and emerge in the sala. Mother's eyes meet mine and I stop, I pull Camille from behind, to my front, and she blinks under a spotlight. My classmate, Mother. But Mother is not new to this, her eyes swing back to the flowered curtain she is mending. I don't, her averted eyes say, have to meet every scrawny kid you drag back home. I tug at Camille to follow and the elevator shudders, like it suddenly remembered something, and opens into my room. My classcard is taped on the floor-to-ceiling mirror. 'Ok, we're ready!' I yell, and Camille yeheys with me, jumping up and down like a ten year old. I am jumping, too. Now I can enroll. Someone is hollering from behind us. I stop and stare at my classcard, all eight and a half inches by eleven inches of it. The paper is brownish-yellow, like my original birth certificate, and I see, highlighted in neon green, my grade in Charlson Ong's fiction class: 2.0. Dammit! I stop jumping, and I notice that whoever was hollering was saying exactly that. Dos. My grade. My bad. I turn around and see Siege on top of the Faculty Center, his hair dishelved by the wind, his legs in an upturned V, his arms crossed on his chest, like a lazy I-told-you-so pose. A photographer leans close and frames him, digitally. I wave my aging classcard at him and Camille resumes jumping up and down, waving at Siege, too. Siege says, 'Para,' and I suddenly remember my grade. Dammit. 'You know,' Abi says in the Ikot jeep I suddenly find myself in, 'I've screenplayed this.' She hands the manong driver a shining ten peso coin, and the driver rows faster, ignoring the other passengers outside, all floating in the debris of a flooded UP after an anonymous storm. 'You just have to say two lines, one to your Mother, and another to Camille.' At that I wish I had stopped Abi from giving the manong ten bucks. Because Camille is still in my room jumping up and down. And Siege is still on the faculty center rooftop, posing, still hollering 'Para!'. I jump out of the Ikot jeep. Airborne, I can hear Abi screaming, 'Don't do it, Dude!' And I wonder, before I hit the cold water, if my bond paper-sized classcard is waterproof.

the soaps that bind

Blabber this, blabber that. What is a jobless one to do these days? He watches soap.

I am loving the new season of Grey's anatomy. The cast has trimmed down. Addison moved to L.A., in her own spin off series. Burke left Seattle Grace, and the actor behind him was fired from the show. He could still get back. This Cristina angst arc is not that final in tone. Negotiations could open up and get Burke back. Not that I care, except that Derek compared to Burke paints Derek to be the sensitive type, and our attention is diverted into comparing the parallel couples' lives in the show: the Meredith-Derek/ Cristina-Preston tandems. But let the record show that I like Izzy. Must be the hair. :D

Oh, and Meredith is having guilt problems with her half-sister, who will probably find out later that Meredith is part of those who sort of misdiagnosed her Dad's second wife. The only child, as Meredith calls herself now, is having a crash course in past tense sibling rivalry ("We don't have the same dad. Mine left me when I was five years old. Does that sound like your dad to you?" she asked her half-sister.). She is also keeping an arm's length relationship with Derek, because Cristina didn't get her happy ending, so how could she end up wit hers? Right? So Meredith and Derek are now having S and M. Sex and Mockery.

House. I am having trouble downloading episode two season four of House, where the old crew of Chase, Cameron, and Foreman is shown as getting on with their lives; and House is forked between admitting he missed them and wanting to not need them again. Good way to bring novelty into the series. Good scriptwriters, these two shows have: Grey's and House. Hmmm. Reminds me, House said in one episode, "So, you think Grey's anatomy was wrong?" He was alluding to both that medical book, Gray's Anatomy, and the series, "Grey's Anatomy." Nice one there. I am waiting for Grey's to poke f[p]un at House. Meredith could welcome her interns into her home, and exclaim, "Welcome to the house of Grey!" Oh I miss Cameron's moral naiveté, and the indignant looks she swings at her boss. Lovely. She has an eight-year old for a boss who can't admit to himself that he, too, has a romantic (in the chivalrous sense) motive for saving (not all, but) some patients. Download House. Download House. That's my mantra for today.

Har har. By tomorrow it will have been a full week since I quit my nightshift web content writer job at Ortigas. Been sleeping at nights now. I am eating more and sleeping more and I feel slow and bloated even though I am still pencil-thin. Day schedule living allows more time to eat, and more time to dawdle. I am cleaning the house while I stuff more paragraphs into short stories I am sending to some contest whose deadline ends when this month ends. Actually, I think I can only send one. By working on two I increase my chances of, during the writing, feeling which I want to devote time to.

One story is set in an abbey, a la Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose," and that abbey's secret is the cause of the dwindling population of the surrounding fishing villages in a pre-World War I Germany. Lots of misty, cold mornings. Lots of pitch black nights. I wish I could speak German, or write just a few lines. I'd like to invest more in building a tense atmosphere, so I'm slowing down the narrative. And I'm rereading Eco's novel, to get a layout of that Abbey, how one shivers after waking up hours before the rise of the sun, so I could render how helpless the townsfolk feel when a winged figure swoops down to snatch their babies. Could the abbey be hiding a monster in their midst?

The other story follows three days in the life of a Philosophy major during the final week of one semester of his life. He is reviewing for his exams. His roommate is preparing to go back to his home town for the sem break, having finished his exams early. Left alone in an old boarding house in a quiet, semi deserted street, our Philosophy major finds himself talking to his roommate again, who, he remembers seeing walking out the door. So who is he talking to?

Hah. Better get back to cleaning the house. Stuffing paragraphs. And overfeeding the cats. I really shouldn't eat this much food. My wife is back to her cooking since moving to day sched as well, and we suddenly find ourselves having too much food. Of course, for my cats, there is no such thing as too much.

of the pickiest kind

Nice to know that people out there, friends, they know who they are--all right, their names are Camille and Jea--are still writing. (So much for blind items.) Point is I'm relieved to hear from them, and to get to read their stuff; just so I could tell myself that my writing job is no excuse to freeze up my own tilted-world essaying and sudden fiction writing.

Camille sent me her re-envisioned short story, an earlier study of which she submitted to her fiction class, under Butch Dalisay. Her class must have scooped up her story like a handful of sand, and squeezed hard; later, they unclenched their hands to see what's left. I did my own squeezing: I emailed Camille my comments. She wanted it brutal and honest. Brutally honest. Good girl. That's the writing workshop spirit.

First person point of view narrative. Manipulative mother-protagonist. Work in progress, but the neurotic character of the mom and her world view is the twin allure ("is" because the two are properly one). That's my "unputdownable" back-of-the-book synopsis of Camille's story, which doesn't tell much, really. We like to keep things mysterious around here. Tends to keep the publishers guessing. (Har har.)

Jea is going through her pickiest-kind blogging phase again. Her current blog is the umpteenth reincarnation of her ADHD'd brain. That's Aversion to Dim-Hwitted Doodling. (I just made that up. But that explains things.) She has had so many blogs, which she edits and edits--resizing header text and margins now, changing titles and labels later, and finally settling on a backdrop color that doesn't redirect your eyes from the life-stuff on the webpage. In at least one previous blog, she told of her terrible tales of teaching tupid tudents. She has picked up on that theme in her current blog. Lucky me. I love those posts. A handful of sneers.

One should take lessons from these two. Camille and Jea, who both happen to be teachers.

Writing is a neurosis.

Of the pickiest kind.

the idle villager

I always have this impression that Ricci is constantly harassed by her teaching schedule. She told me once that you need some free time to imagine consequences, so you can write. Her use of the second person (you) is really some underlying "her" trying to tell herself, and me, about the need to rise to the surface and breathe. Her use of 'consequences' intrigues me. If you live on a weekly basis, there's that dual anxiety: you might not be hitting deadlines; your life is nothing but deadlines.

If you are always in the thick of things, life things, work that foots the bills, there's not much mental space and time to space out so you can write. A writer needs some amount of idleness to remain sane.

I'm starting to ditch some side jobs so I can sleep more, so I can be idler, so I can write. If you're routinely pressed by the four cubicle-walls of work, you're hemmed-in soul tends to whine, pant, and give up.

that's one mean dream

I am probably a junkie of some kind. Addicted to something. Some kind of high. Achievement. A witty conversation. A finished, polished essay or short fiction. The chance to sneer at someone while demonstrating my acumen. Shit like that. Had a dream and in that dream my job was dulling my wits, diluting my charm. But the job in that dream paid the bills, so technically I was killing myself to foot the bills. Slow death for a chance to enjoy a shortened life. There's a moral to this somewhere. I just have to find it and wrap around my boss' neck, tie the other end to his desk, and push him out the window. Whoa! That's a high right there. Good times. Good times. I want my next fix to be at least this good. That is one mean dream.

kemmon, talk to me

So, I say, talking to you, who obviously went here to read something. How do you, I begin, looking away, sighing, and glancing back at you before I look down; how do you recharge your fount? You know--regain the life, the enthusiasm, the wonder, the itch, the secret giggle, whatever. 

You lean back on your chair and sigh. You're about to confess uselessness in a mumble but I stop you with a raised palm.  

Say you're all worn out from thinking through a project--not just thinking of--thinking through: you came up with it, it was promising, you pulled off two-thirds, you're half-dead, and it's not yet perfect, but your boss wants more, ahh, refinements...and there is another project slated after this one. What do you do? So you won't get fired, so you'd keep the image of a go-getter creative. 

You're not answering. 

I don't need stares. 

I need ideas. 

I'm drying up here. 

bottles of beer on the wall

Saw Ricci go online a while ago. I immediately waved a hand. Told her I wasn't enrolled in the program [creative writing program], for a year now, come to think of it. So much raket writing that I haven't been able to breathe. Ricci is not enrolled, too; she told me. "Life and all that," she said. I miss our alcohol chatting sessions. We used to meet online and, beer with me and wine with her, we'd chat away on and about just whatever avenue of such we fancy.

When the alcohol sets in we'd notice we'd miss hitting the right keys, and the drinks take their revenge on our spelling. Too many exclamation marks. Laugh out louds. She loves poetry. I like the absurd. She'd post a link to an online sound file of a Neruda poetry reading. I'd touché with, maybe some tall tales I'd been practicing when I'm alone.

Sometimes I wonder if she and I tiptoe on the same soft soil.

Next time, she said, inuman na talaga.

Yeah. That's my cue: I'd definitely have to get back to the program.

moody, schmoody

I think I did. I think I told my wife that, at the rate I'm coughing out articles for my night job, I won't be able to write decent shit by the end of the year. Yeah. I think I did. I was whining then. I am whining now. The small window for working on and turning in those bursts of paragraphs, about four to five per article, and fifteen a night, has led me to devise ways of staying awake, and of talking care of that which allows me to write decent stuff--my mood.

Saw this study in some psychology website, a site filled with advice on just about anything; anyway, the study said that one has a finite fount for working on something, and then when the fount is empty shit comes out. Non-quality work. If you look at a donkey in the face, that's not it; you have turn the donkey around and look at its ass, that's the work I produce when I am not in the mood. So I sleep. Eat heaps of chocolate cookies. Drink Mountain Dew and coffee. Read blogs of people I don't know. Follow threads of stories I started to write and then dropped, due to emotional exhaustion. And I recount small victories in my writing life.

Like last week, just this Friday. I turned in six sudden fiction--500 to 700 words--to this upcoming flash fiction anthology. I am hoping that at least one of those I sent will make it. The deadline has since been moved to July 15, I think, and if I find strength by that time, I might polish a rough story and turn that in as well.

So, where were we? My mood. It's a constant battle to stay in the mood to be amused, to be whimsical, to be playful. Because the moment work becomes sour to the feel, it's definitely work. And I don't like to work. I like to be playful, and get paid for it. Good thing this job allows me room to write those small bursts of paragraphs with some wit. At least while my mood lasts.

Sleeping, of course, is part of the job. How else does one recharge the fount?

This, by the way, is just a blog, not a psychology website. There is no Freud, no dreams, no self-realization, no emotions to untangle. Just whining.

world enough and time

So, this post isn't for everyone.

Carljoe, my classmate and fellow felon in the racket writing life, is stamping his blog with thoughts and such about an addiction from which those who tried it never really quit: Magic: the Gathering (MTG). You need disposable income to play it--you need to buy the cards. You need time to burn on it--you will lose sleep trying to assemble the best card deck to beat other people's card decks. Like kids building large robots to fight against other kids who build their own large robots. Only here, winning the game between two card players takes on so many forms, and losing also does not "just" happen. MTG is like chess, only you get to choose the pieces and how to win; and in tournaments, you get to see people pilot their own created decks, with different ways to win, pit those decks against other created decks. God this is so hard to explain.

Which raises the question, why am I trying so hard to explain this? Because I like the game, too, and I played tournaments for which I couldn't win--the cards were hastily acquired and the decks just-then assembled, the play testing group were my fellow friends who had jobs, and little time to spare. My kind are reduced to casual players, those who follow the game from time to time, lose track of it, rejoin, and talk about the old days, get hooked up again, and then remember they have bills to pay and lives to live.

If one had world enough and time, world enough and time. I'd play Goblins! Weeee!

Owen Turtenwald

4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Wooded Foothills
4 Wasteland
4 Rishadan Port
4 Mountain
3 Taiga
23 land

2 Siege-Gang Commander
4 Mogg Fanatic
4 Goblin Lackey
4 Goblin Piledriver
4 Gempalm Incinerator
4 Goblin Matron
4 Goblin Warchief
4 Goblin Ringleader
2 Tin Street Hooligan
1 Goblin Sharpshooter
33 creatures

4 Aether Vial
04 other spells

4 Pyrokinesis
4 Tormod's Crypt
2 Krosan Grip
2 Pyroblast
1 Red Elemental Blast
1 Goblin King
1 Tranquil Domain
15 Sideboard Cards

Ah, Goblins. The deck above got as far as runner up to the recently concluded Grand Prix Columbus, where the format was Legacy, my favorite--because you could play your pet decks and stick in almost every card in existence. The deck that topped the tournament could win from turn 0 to turn 3, with no disruptions, that is--I'm not going to explain that as I am not a fan of that deck, efficient as it may be--and Goblins beat some decks just like that, before losing to the same deck it beat in the semifinals. Ah well.

I had always loved aggressive creature decks--even though my first complete deck was Stasis-- but had always hated the empty-hand and your non-survival from mediocre draws. Ah hell.

But back to Goblins. The deck above surprised me by its use of four copies of Gempalm Incinerator and four copies of Rishadan Port. The usual deck lists only include two Gempalms. If you draw Port and Wasteland on your opening hand and you have no Aether Vial, you cannot cast anything; which is why I had been thinking of using only two copies of Port.

Owen, the guy who piloted the Goblin deck to second place, won his games even after mulliganing to four or five cards. His solution was aggressive and smart mulliganing. The four copies of Gempalm also helped in the dual creature removal and cantrip function. This guy Owen has playtested a lot. Something I probably can't do, since my Legacy buddies are all sucked in by their jobs.

A Goblin deck combines aggressive combat damage from creatures with the interaction other Goblin abilities in the deck provide--like card advantage (Goblin Ringleader), creature removal (Gempalm Incinerator, Siege-Gang Commander, Goblin Sharpshooter), creature finding (Goblin Matron), creature pump (Goblin King), direct damage (Siege-Gang Commander, Goblin Sharpshooter), artifact destruction (Tin Street Hooligan), and combat damage multiplying (Goblin Piledriver).

It's a nepotism deck. If you're not a Goblin, you can't be part of the club. Unless you're a deck thinner (fetch land), mana disruptor (Wasteland and Rishadan Port), and artifact trickster (Aether Vial smuggles in creatures into play by cheating casting costs).

Did I mention that I love this deck?

So, Carljoe, man. World enough and time. If you blink, forget to think, settle with a mediocre draw, or cite other excuses raw, you'll see red all over. I'm a Goblin, too.

i'm still writing

Odd. At 11 pm on an election day, I am typing away, during my break, for a blog entry. In a few minutes, I will return to churning out my quota of articles, and I'm going to be doing this until sunrise.

I remember being hemmed in between the workstations of two old people in the office where I used to work. Listening to old people is nice. They're old. Some of them are nice. What is not nice is when they don't notice that they are shoving down your throat their cynicism about life, as they know it. Nobody needs that emotional burden, especially when writing takes from an emotional fount within.

My boss back then had me move out of that particular set up, into a more quiet area, where I was left deliciously alone, until I left that place entirely.

Now, I am still writing. A shift in content and format and purpose, yes, but writing still. I actually thought I'd have to try out a call center life and wait till my throat and tongue cramped up. Never thought there'd be a night writing gig like this one.

I could always go back to freelance if this one doesn't work out. Or even teach somewhere. But the odd thing is that I have never really tried another job other than writing.