Top 10 List!

I've been told that people on the Internet won't read prose anymore unless it's been cut down into bite-size, manageable chunks for Web consumers. Nuggets. That if you want to grab someone's fleeting attention on this speeding superhighway of information and reach the front page of Digg.com, your best bet is to distill the information you want to convey into a Top 10 List.

I am therefore very pleased to announce that this blog is now less focused on "writing" and more focused on compiling easily digestible lists of things.

Here is my first Top 10 List. I hope very much that you and your short attention spans enjoy it.

Top 10 Most Recent Paragraphs I Have Written Today

1. From a Letter of Recommendation I Was Asked to Write

Mr. Ryder has been a colleague of mine for more than two years (we share opposite sides of a desk), and what he lacks in creativity he more than makes up for in boisterousness. In Charles, you will find an employee who is never at a loss for words, which he adeptly strings together at all times and in no particular order. It is my great pleasure to recommend him for employment in your organization – not just because I will at last have an entire desk to myself (I am not so shallow!) but because I genuinely believe that he will thrive in an environment where his garrulousness is allowed free reign and his intellect is not overtaxed. If your office is such a place, then I am wholly convinced that he will fit right in.

2. From a Post-It Note, to Remind Myself of Something

Don't forget! When you're in a bad mood, the combination of gin, painkillers, and uppers can sometimes ruin a friendship! :0)
(Also, lunch with the Andersons is off this Sunday.)

3. From a To-Do List

1. Prepare To-Do List
2. Decide on Items to Include in the List
3. Write List in Entirety
4. Read over List
5. Mentally Separate Those Items That Have Been Completed From Those That Have Not
6. Despair
7. Cross Off Completed Items

4. From an E-Mail to My Mother

Dearest mother – thank you for your kind and forceful invitation to come and visit you in St. Catherine's. Sadly, I fear I must remind you that my engagement on this latest archaeological expedition has been extended into the indefinite future. I assure you that as soon as I return from Kharkhorin, it will be my first priority to stop by with news of my travels and to investigate the unfortunate incidents with the staff in your ward that you have so diligently enumerated in your latest e-mails to me. Goodbye for now, or as they say here in Mongolia, Bayartai!

5. From a Response to a Judicial Summons

I would also like to complain about the language used by the arresting officer during our encounters. On both occasions, Sgt. Wooster stated that "anything I say can and will be used against me in a court of law". If it is indeed true that everything I say will be repeated in court, then I should like to take this opportunity to state for the record that Sgt. Wooster is an ass and a cretin, who wouldn't recognize a tautology if it knocked him down and read him his Miranda rights. I am aware that a restraining order is a restraining order, and that – as you have astutely pointed out – ignoring one brings appropriately dire consequences. But must the violation really be met with such willful vapidity?

6. From a Shopping List

1. Sandwich Fixin's
2. Picnic Basket
3. Magazines (New Yorker, Harpers, The Economist)
4. Wool Sweater (Black)
5. Ski Mask (Black)
6. Camouflaged Treestand
7. Binoculars
8. Digital Video Camera
9. Change of Underpants

7. From a Sympathy Card

What I remember most about your son (and my dear neighbor) is not that he owed me 15 dollars from our bet that he could not jump from his balcony to mine, nor that he had just consumed half a bottle of my very best rum, nor even that he tragically landed on my brand-new Schwinn touring bicycle. What I remember most is his youthful vivacity, his tender nature, and the fact that he could always be counted on to pay his debts. Shall I send the bill to your address or to his executor?

8. From a Note Left on Someone's Car

So sorry – I think I accidentally broke your right front headlight when backing out of my parking space! Please do not try to find me, or I will be forced to come back and break the left one as well.

9. From a Posting in the Personals Section of Craigslist

m4w: SWM seeking d/df, hwp SF who also likes acronyms.

10. From a Discarded Blog Entry

Top 10 Best Things About Being Alone

1. Having lots of time to yourself.
2. Not having to go out because no one has invited you out and you don't want to go out anyway.
3. Spending time with the cat.
4. Cats are unable to file restraining orders.
5. They just scratch.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

Don't jump.

I had a dream on Friday night that I had created a website/marketing campaign based around the tagline “Don’t jump.” With the exception of the Fonzie one, all of these images are created from ideas I came up with in the dream. Don’t jump.

Bad Idea for a Love Story

This is an idea for an epic romance that will actually make money. Every day, after she gets back from the salt mines, Elizabeth writes in her diary – not about the grueling, soul-shattering drudgery of hewing precious saline crystals from the living rock, but about the world that only exists in her mind. About the idea that sustains her through the desert landscape of her existence, where no plant grows save the thorny cactus, and the thought of rainfall brings nothing but the bitter knowledge that life, real life, is a mirage – and the dull toil of living is merely a perfect negative of our steady, downhill crawl towards an inevitable grave.

The idea is of a boy – youthful, earnest, and full of a hopefulness that her soul yearns for with the same urgency that her body aches to hold him in her arms. To forget, for a moment and forever, that there is anything in the world beyond the softness of his skin and the gentle warmth of his breath against her neck. Her visions of him take many forms, but when he comes to her, he comes always as a supplicant, carrying in one hand a perfect white rose, and in the other, a cold, frosty Miller Lite^TM, full of delicate hops and a smooth, satisfying taste that will never let you down.

There could be other sponsors too. For instance, I have this idea for a part of the novel where it turns out that her visions are not the tragic delusions of a broken woman in a featureless world, but real memories of a vibrant past, dressed up as hallucinations so as to dull the pain of loss – and, like, the illusion is shattered one day, when she's walking home from the salt mines, and she stops short because he's just standing there, waiting for her, a beautiful dream from her childhood come to life – come to rescue her from her solitude and her despair and her empty, barren future in a brand new 2008 Jeep Grand Cherokee with heated seats and a V8 Hemi multi-displacement engine.

The boy, of course, had been lost in a storm many years earlier, and Elizabeth's grief had driven her to accept a job in the brutal salt refineries of her hometown where the harshness and the tedium of her work might eventually come to serve as a proxy for the agony of her lost love. But instead of being killed in the storm, the boy was miraculously rescued by a kindly old man who gave him the education and the training he needed to become CEO of Morton Industrial Salt, which, in addition to being a kind and benevolent employer, offers the most complete line of salt grades and salt-related products in the industry.

After that, there'll be a few chapters about how the power of their love for each other (plus a bolt-action Smith & Wesson Winchester rifle) finally frees her from the clutches of her cruel employers and her doomed town, and by the end of the story, she's blissfully working as Director of Product Development for Morton Salt Inc. In the final scene, they'll be lying together in the fully-reclinable passenger seat of the Jeep Grand Cherokee, lost in the warmth of each other's touch and the reassuring hardness of their custom Smith & Wesson rifles, as the memories of their years apart fade into the quiet absurdity of a bad dream that will never return.

Bad Idea for a Dating Site

The problem with dating, right? Is that it all starts out like this really exciting thing where you suddenly know someone who's at least not openly repulsed by the idea of touching you and, like, maybe just maybe you've found a real human person who will be there to stroke your hair and, I don't know, coo at you while you're drunkenly sobbing yourself to sleep at night. So much so, actually, that you're willing to overlook the fact that this chick has a psychotic fixation with, e.g., trying to talk to you while you're on the fucking phone with someone else.

But like before long, it turns out that having someone ask you who you're talking to every single time you pick up the telephone is actually the single most annoying thing in the entire world; and on the flipside, she's actually not all that into the fact that you're this oddly defective human being who bursts into tears for no apparent reason, and she starts telling you to, like, why not just cheer up? Which somehow just makes it all so much fucking worse.

Right?

But so this dating site takes care of that problem from the beginning of the process. Through a comprehensive 42-question survey, we'll identify every insecurity, nervous tic, bad habit, fear, psychosis, or piece of questionable taste that you have, and assemble this accurate-as-shit composite of what you're really like, so we can pair you up with someone who's fucked up in similar ways.

So for instance, if you have this deep-seated anxiety about physical intimacy, we'll find a partner for you whose germophobia is so intense that s/he would never be able to touch you anyway without the aid of a powerful sedative and a pair of heavy-duty burlap gardening gloves. Or, right? If you're one of those people who just can't keep the difference between "your" and "you're" straight in your head, we'll find you a life-mate whose degenerative brain disorder is so severe that they'll never be able to fully comprehend just what a monumental fucktard they've been paired up with.

Also too, it's a network, right? So you can have friends write testimonials for you that will help fill in information that you may have been too modest to include. Like,

"If you can deal with the fact that Jack will always be more emotionally committed to his music collection than he is to you, then go for it."

"Diane will often have a dream that you did something fucked up and then actually hold it against you."

"Stephanie genuinely enjoys reality television."

And then the real bonus of this site is that when your partner leaves you because you're "not the person they thought you were," you can be like, "Well maybe you should have read my fucking profile."

Bad Idea for a Movie

Here's an idea for a Monster Movie. Everyone's trapped in an amusement park – no, a brothel. OK, no, everyone's trapped in an underfunded semi-annual conference for Social Media and Emerging Technologies. It's called "Harnessing the Social Web." And it's in Detroit. No, that's absurd – it's in an old space station orbiting a distant, sunless planet. OK, no, so it's in Jersey City. And the characters – what the characters don't know (there are five of them – old friends from high school, and they all look like they're out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue, plus this talking snow-leopard attorney named Augustus, who provides comic relief.) So what the characters don't know is that the conference, which is called "E-Commerce: From Networks to Net Gains," is actually a front set up by this shadowy group of vampires or, like, zombies, or social conservatives or something, who want to trap them and eat their brains. Or, like, no, it's a cult, right? It's this cult of Satan-worshipping tech bloggers, who are fanatically obsessed with finding "the next Google" so they can use it to somehow summon a demon.

And the lawyer, right? The talking attorney who's their faithful companion. He's the only one who knows that something's fucked up about the conference, which is called "Is Facebook the New Google? How to Keep Up in a Web 2.1 World" – but he can't say anything about it because he has this pathological fear of expressing any sort of opinion, so the only thing he can do to warn them is, like, grunt and, like jump around in this agitated kind of way.

But yeah, so the climax of this movie comes when they're all at this panel discussion about, like, Social Media Marketing and the Occult, and they're all Twittering at each other that it's a trap, and the lawyer is freaking out and grunting and generally disrupting the panel discussion, which is actually getting pretty fucking interesting, and these mystical forces start converging and, like, it's fairly clear that this scary-ass demon is going to materialize right in the middle of the PowerPoint display, and all the electricity suddenly goes out, and the group has to work together to find a way to somehow stop the demon without using the Internet.

And then I haven't figured out how the ending works yet, but it turns out that the real monster is their own greed.

Note to Self

My Dear Jack,

I regret to inform you of a policy change which will significantly affect the scope of your responsibilities, and the liberties you may take in interpreting them henceforward. By way of elucidating the motivation behind this decision, I would ask you to remember that, while we maintain the utmost respect for your rights as an individual, it is essential—for your sake as well as ours—that you in turn respect the obligations that apportion to your role as a stakeholder in the aggregate of Jacks both present and future, which may be thought of as encompassing the atemporal quality defined as “Jackness”.

To wit: It has come to our attention that for some years now, you have—in an outright contravention of the wishes of Evening Jack and an apparently willful denial of the projected desires of Future Jack—been taking it upon yourself to decide that the agreed-upon time for Jacks to wake up in the morning (which, we will note, is marked by the ringing of an alarm clock that will have been set by a previous Jack who is just as entitled to a stake in overall Jackness as you are) may be postponed indefinitely to suit your own needs.

This cannot be allowed to stand. We recognize that your duties as a Jack—getting out of bed, dressing, grappling anew with the soul-shattering realization that one day must of necessity follow upon another—are not perhaps quite so enriching as those of (for instance) Bedtime Jack, Snuggletime Jack, or Beach-Fun Jack, but we must implore you to sacrifice your own fleeting comforts to a greater good that will benefit all of us in the long run.

We are quite certain that matters will not proceed this far, but we feel it our duty to warn you that a failure to make improvements based on this appeal to your better judgment will result in punitive sanctions. It is not in our power to physically prevent you from hitting the “Snooze” button after you have read this note, but we can, if pressed, ensure that future Morning Jacks wake up without bedding, air-conditioning, an absence of air-horns, or indeed any of the material comforts to which you have become accustomed—and which you have evidently begun to take for granted.

Please take this all in on your own time, and once you are fully awake, hand over the reigns to Breakfast Jack. Do not go back to bed.

Yours always,


The Jacks

Five Easy Ways to Fuck Up a Job Interview Before It Starts

On Tuesday, inexplicably (unless you are willing to grant that the universe is ruled by a malicious and spiteful entity who likes to kick people when they’re down and who believes, deep down in the core of his petty little soul, that I am a great big loser) …

Let me start again. On Tuesday, God crashed my hard drive while I was conducting simultaneous Internet searches for job opportunities in New York and naked pictures of celebrities. Suddenly, a lot more depended upon the solitary interview that I had managed to scrabble together—as a brand-new Mac laptop costs more money than I have ever even imagined.

So, on Wednesday, the morning of the interview, I woke up early and looked at the notes I had jotted down from my brief conversation with the prospective employer to make sure I was prepared with everything I needed. Which brings me to my first, easy tip on fucking up a job interview before it starts:

1. If they ask you to bring something, show up without it

At the time of our conversation, both the friendly woman who was setting up the interview and I considered it an exceptionally reasonable request that I bring with me a printed copy of my résumé and references. But at 9 a.m.—two hours before the interview itself, when I turned my thoughts to this request in earnest—I realized just what a monumental challenge I had been presented with: A pathological lack of foresight means that I have ever lived my life without such amenities as printer paper, printer ink, or, indeed, a printer. And even had I been able to overcome this particular obstacle, my useless, whimpering hard drive was a stark reminder of the fact that divine intervention had quite recently deprived me of almost all traces of my résumé as well.So I spent the next hour amusing Our Lord by attempting to install a driver for my roommate’s new printer while frantically cobbling together a résumé and set of references from the salvaged wreckage of earlier endeavors. Which brings me to my second tip:

2. Leave the house looking like a middle-schooler at his first "semi-formal" dance

With just five minutes to go before the absolute last second I could leave the house and still stand a chance of arriving at the interview on time, I looked up from the pile of cables, malfunctioning printers, and paper jams that had become my personal hell and processed the dawning realization that I was still in my boxer shorts, and that this would simply not do.

I rushed to my closet and pulled out my nice dress pants, which have a pin-stripey thing going for them, a shirt that looked like it was at least vaguely familiar with the concept of an iron, and my only tie, which is actually a good tie and does not generally make me look like an idiot. But fortunately, I would not be calling upon my tie to perform such a role just yet, as my suit jacket was quickly pressed onto stage for the part: Something you will know if you know these things is that a black suit coat and pinstripe pants have the exact opposite effect from what’s intended—i.e., they make you look like you just got out of fucking clown school. But there was no time. No time for anything except a swift kick in the pants from Jesus Himself on my way out the door.

3. A little stain goes a long way

For no good reason except to deliver a final, crushing blow to my sense of self worth, my nice tie, instead of sitting quietly in my closet for the past three years like it was supposed to, was busy creating out of thin air a small brownish stain right in the middle of itself. This tastefully positioned blemish is just a few shades darker than the rest of the tie, but it really stands out quite prominently in, for instance, daylight, as if to say to anyone who would listen: "I'm a nice tie, but the guy who's wearing me is a bum! A bum, I tell you!" I did not notice this stain until I stopped briefly in front of a mirror to curse at myself as I sprinted towards the subway. Which brings me to my penultimate tip:

4. Develop a limp

If you have ever tried running half a mile in dress shoes that are two sizes too small for you, you will know what I’m talking about here. The pain is exquisite, and, no matter how much you might want to look like a normal human being (as opposed to, say, a drunken Orangutan) there is very little that you can do to stop yourself from lurching and grimacing with agony every time you move. Potential employers do not generally find this endearing. Fortunately, I had one last trick up my sleeve.

5. Remember these phrases: "I'm sorry" and "Thank you"

Being British originally, I have a deeply rooted "survival mode" which consists of alternately thanking and apologizing to anyone who happens to be within earshot. Think Hugh Grant right after he got caught with that prostitute, except, like, nowhere near as charming or sexually fulfilled. The more stressful the situation, the more feverish and inane my expressions of gratitude and remorse become—the idea being that whoever I’m talking to will either take pity on me or just for God’s sake leave me alone. In England—where we consider actually communicating with other humans extremely impolite—this mode of discourse is universally understood and respected. Unfortunately, behavior of this sort tends not to go over quite so well at an American job interview, where you are supposed to say things like "utilize" and "proactive" instead of, like, "I'm so sorry I didn't bring my résumé and I'm limping and there's a stain on my tie. Thank you so much for being so understanding, but would you mind terribly if we printed it out from my email? I’d be ever so grateful. Awfully sorry about this."

"This is the shortest résumé I have ever seen," she said, once we had finally obtained it. She was very nice, and I thanked her profusely for her time. I'll let you know if I hear back.