Thirty Days

Have September, April, June, and November. All the rest have thirty-one. Except February, it has twenty-eight.

The Non-Job

Not only do I have a non-blog, but now, as my mom pointed out to me yesterday, I also have a non-job. "Doesn't that just mean you're unemployed?" you ask. Well, no. Being unemployed is much better than working a non-job. While having a non-job is like being unemployed in many many ways (i.e. you're not working and you're not making any money), the key difference is that with the non-job, your non-employer keeps telling you that your non-job will start tomorrow. Two weeks and several more unfulfilled "We're opening tomorrow or the next day at the latest" promises later you are still not working and you are still making no money, but at this point it's too late to find another job, so you sit around hoping that the non-job becomes a job as soon as possible.

It's like when I was waiting in line to get hot dogs at the Phillies game on $1 hot dog day. By the time I realized the line was not moving because they were out of hot dogs, I had already been waiting in line too long to just walk away (10 mins). After all, how long can it take to make a couple hot dogs? (15 mins). And since there were fewer than ten people ahead of me in line, I knew it couldn't take too long after the hot dogs were ready.

This would have been the case had each person in line not been buying a minimum of fifteen hot dogs. But by the time I realized this, I had invested way too much time (30 minutes) to walk away without a hot dog. When I finally made it to the counter (45 minutes) to order my two hot dogs, I didn't feel a sense of accomplishment. Just an absence of failure, which, much like the non-Fenway frank, was not that satisfying.

SFB (June 23, 2006 8:33pm)

Because I am bored, and because I find myself incapable of writing anything new these days, I would like to share a poem with you that I wrote on April 16, 2003, which I came across this afternoon as I systematically went through all my college notebooks, ripping out the pages and throwing them into the recycling bin, not out of misplaced anger but the need to downsize my life to fewer than six boxes of accumulated crap (I forget what the assignment for this exercise was, but I think it had something to do with a poem we read that had definitions in it and maybe defining words that appeared in one of the scientific essays we read in a poem of our own. At least that's what I did, if I remember correctly) :

what fine definition, have you been working out?
tidal: moon pulls
ocean: waves good-bye

as
life: (cinnamon cereal, and needed by those who define:
  organic: not as exciting as Herbal Essences would like you to believe
  precursor: before the blinking line in your Word document
  hydrothermal: quick-dry long underwear
  synthesize: to make soulless music using an artificial drum beat)

goes on
as
  atoms: make up cells (jails of our DNA): creating origins: the endings of nothing.



Note: This was not part of my prize-winning poetry manuscript, but sadly it contains a similar level of quality. All I can say is that you should be thankful I don't have a scanner or you might be subjected to full-length reminiscing, like my ten-page analysis on using language to create racial and ethnic identity on MTV's Dismissed.

I Don't Pink So

It's time to admit that there is no longer anything about this supposed non-blog that distinguishes it from any other mediocre blog out there these days. (I don't think there ever was, but I was hoping there might be at some point.) But instead of fighting back, I'm going to embrace this, which means that like every other amateur blogger lacking a focus, I will now use this space for pointless rants.

Pink baseball caps. What is the deal? The whole point of being a fan is that you wear the team colors whether or not they go with your outfit. This is why historically men are more likely than women to be sports fans.

Ha, look, I just made a joke based on gender stereotypes.

Really, though, as someone who once wore a shiny brown spandex unisuit with regularity, I simply cannot understand, say, Red Sox fans, who get to choose from two very attractive colors-- red and blue-- but can't handle it and buy a pink hat instead. But the popularity of this whole pink "girly fan" clothes thing is not surprising when you think about it in the context of the whole sexism thing.

It's now ok in this post-Title IX era to like sports if you're a girl. Heck, they'll even let you play most of them. But being a real sports fan is still something that's a "guy thing." And as with most "guy things" there are women who have no problem taking part, either because they could care less about societal expectations or because they think it's fun to be that girl in the "one of the guys" kind of way. I think true fandom should be left to these women, the ones who can handle wearing the team colors. I don't think there should be an option to mark yourself as a "girly fan" and allow yourself to simulatenously enjoy the best of both worlds-- the wide world of sports and the wonderful world of enforced femininity.

It Annoys Me Too

I hate it when I check my blog and it hasn't been updated. This happens with embarassing frequency. Embarassing not only because of how often I check my blog, but how every time I actually think that it may be different than last time I checked, even though I AM THE ONLY ONE WRITING. Yeah. I guess deep down I refuse to surrender the hope that in my absence the blog fairy has paid a visit and deposited a witty, well-written gem on my website.