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Typical daily agenda for the past month:

4-5 a.m.
Wake up early for no reason. Wait patiently until my alarm goes off at 7:06 a.m.
Finally get sleepy.
Hit snooze two or three times.

7:24-7:33 a.m.
Get out of bed.
Drag ass through cereal/shower/dressed/drive-to-work procedures.

8:30 a.m. – 7-8ish p.m.
Work at work, at the work where and at which I work at.
Hopefully eat lunch or just subsist on candy/snacks in my desk.
Stay late because things aren’t done because being interrupted is my primary responsibility and I take that seriously.
Take stuff home to work on.

8-11 p.m.
Work at home on more stuff — freelance, stuff for other people.
Work on stuff I brought home from regular job to work on.
Most likely, finish nothing before I hit wall of diminishing returns on effort/quality ratios.
Probably eat a Pop Tart.

11 p.m. – 2 a.m.
Lie in the dark trying to go to sleep.
Worry about things.

2-4 a.m.
Sleep.
Dream about losing teeth, abandoned supermarkets, food I don’t have time to eat.
Wake up with nosebleed and furious at my humidifier.

So, in aesthetics there’s a concept called “The Uncanny Valley.” You can read about it on the internet in a lot of places. It basically says that if you chart the relationship of “realness” to likability of something, instead of it just steadily going up there’s a drop when something is very-real-but-not-real. In robotics, specifically, there’s a huge dip in the likability of very realistic artificial things. For example, artificial limbs that move on their own are really creepy. “Toy Story” is great, but “Polar Express” gives you the willies. Instead of being better, they’re so good they’re worse.

Anyway, I think there’s a similar thing for the relationship of cuteness and reality. Case in point: do a Google image search for “morkie.” A morkie is a dog that’s half-Maltese half-Yorkie, and it’s so cute it looks artificial, and therefore isn’t cute at all, it’s just terrifying. See also: Ryan Gosling. So good looking it’s actually unbelievable. Blows my mind. I just don’t trust those people/things.

B-plot of this blog post: Wednesday someone asked me if I was engaged. I wear a ring I got for my 25th birthday on my right-hand ring finger that does kind of look like an engagement ring. (I like to think of it as a ring with which I could do serious damage if I punched somebody). Because of my total ineptitude with, you know, talking to other humans, I said no, and then when she asked me “Don’t you want to get married someday?” I said no because I don’t really like people.

More B-plot: My mom tried to guilt me into going to a baby shower yesterday by telling me that if I didn’t go, then nobody will come to my baby shower. I cackled laughing. What do I care if nobody comes to my baby shower? What does it matter? What would I do with a diaper cake? (Note: Diaper cakes are a real thing. It’s a sculpture of a cake made of diapers. This is something people want to get at baby showers.) In this imaginary future where I’m pregnant who says what I’ll care about or not care about? What kind of threat is that? Nobody will come to your baby shower. Ha. It’s like saying nobody will come to my funeral — what do I care? I’ll be dead.

Barely functional metaphor: I’m OK with all of this because it is all so far out of my realm of reality I can’t even begin to comprehend. A dolphin isn’t stupid because it can’t drive a car — it’s just not a problem a dolphin faces ever.

C-plot: Today I went to a lighting store. If you’ve never been to one (which, for thirty years, I hadn’t), it’s incredible. Completely overwhelming. First of all, it’s packed, wall-to-wall with lamps, sconces, mirrors and hanging light fixtures of ever imaginable shape, size and material. Indoor and outdoor, stuff made of metal, wood, plastic, mirror, crystal, painted-metal tulips, wicker, straw, glass bubbles … just, everything. And some of them are gigantic — like they belong in a humongous ridiculous castle house. Like I wrote, it was completely overwhelming, and I was completely overwhelmed. I just sort of doped around, wide-eyed and confused. I couldn’t remember the difference between anything I saw. I could only remember the lamp or dangling fixture I’d last seen. After about 40 minutes, I had to leave.

I started to have serious doubts about myself. I’m a 30-year-old woman. This should be the kind of thing that makes me all, I don’t know, happy or excited or something. It doesn’t. Do I have the wrong priorities with my life? I don’t care about lamps, just like I don’t care about babies or being pretty because I just want to be good at my job and work hard and get older and die proud of what I did. Why do I need a lamp for that? Why do I need to care about a lamp for that?

Would I be happier with my life/myself/the world if I was more interested in lamps? Are my lamp-shunning priorities ruining my existence?

Act three, where it all comes together: Fuck it. Lamps. And if they can’t handle it, let them riot. I’m not going to be pressured into caring about you. LAMPS. And if I don’t have to care about lamps, do I really have to care about all that other crap? All these things I’m doing “wrong” with my life. No. Not really. I don’t have to choose to waste valuable molecules of caring on stuff that doesn’t matter to me.

Resolution/takeaway message: Don’t threaten me with your beautiful-people-baby-lamp club problems, they don’t mean anything to me.

There are, at the least, about a quarter-million distinct English words. If you count distinct senses, inflection, words not yet added to the dictionary, obsolete words, derivative words, plus words from technical and regional vocabularies there are about three-quarters of a million. (For example, this second count would include every unique way one could use “like.”)

When people ask me if I’m paid by the word for writing, I wish I could say yes. I write you X number of words, I get Y dollars, we go on our magical separate ways. Too bad nobody is paying for just words. They’re paying for a specific selection and combination of words. They’re paying for my skill of selecting and ordering them. It’s a finite set of options, and there are finite ways of combining the selection, plus a ton of rules that govern how they may be combined and ordered, which, somehow, I feel should make it easier.

Comparatively, for example, there are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, 206 bones in an average adult human and 118 named elements on the periodic table. If you just looked at it by the numbers, an astronomer would need to know a lot more than an osteologist, who knows slightly more than a chemist, so it should be easier to be a chemist than an astronomer or a writer or an osteopath. Of course, this is wrong, but something I’d like to tell my doctor sometimes.

I will never discover a galaxy. I will not synthesize a cure for cancer or treat someone’s degenerative bone disease and improve the quality of his/her life. (I mean, I guess I could do these things accidentally, or on purpose if I decided to go back to school and pursue advanced degrees in hard sciences or medicine, or whatever — it’s not relevant to my argument here.) The best I can hope to do is choose a handful of words from a scant quarter-to-three-quarters-million and put them together in some order that captivates attention for as long as I’ve requested. A lot of the time, that’s hard work enough.

“Have you got any soul?” a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I’ve got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can’t seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn’t be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues.

-Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

In journalism-land, at the end of your copy/story/press release/whatever, you add a —30—. If a story is not finished, you write “No 30″ at the end to say you’re submitting more material.

My first journalistic experience, and where I learned this, was in seventh grade, at my jr. high newspaper. I was 11- or 12-years old, and have been generally a practicing journalist (scholastic, professional, otherwise) ever since.

To me, 30 means the end.

Tomorrow is my 30th birthday. If I don’t wake up, you know why.

Tonight I am watching the West Wing pilot, eating an entire pizza and drinking an entire bottle of wine. Once you’re 30, I don’t think you’re supposed to waste time like that. But what do I know? I’m still 29.

Will: I came in to show you the spots and to tell you I think we should run a counter-ad. I don’t have an idea for one.

Toby: Well get one. Have an idea. Don’t come in here with half a thing and not be able to … you know … after you walked me to the brink, and say “We’ve got to do this. It’s important, though I have no earthly idea how.” Like one of those guys who buys a big new thing, but doesn’t really know how to get the most out of it.

Will: Toby, either get Andy to marry you, or kill yourself.

Toby: [beat] Yeah.

Sometimes I help out with cool things. Case in point: this ad in The Economist for Zinio.

At one point this week, because I had to put my 2007 Volkswagen in the shop (I’m still making payments on it), I was carless. However, across the street, my grandpa’s 1989 Porsche 928 was ready to be picked up from the shop.

Because my family who lives near me works, and travels, and can’t be bothered to come all the way into the city just to give me a ride, I just had the VW guy drive me over to the Porsche dealership. Fewer than ten minutes later, I walked out with the keys. But that was it. Here, lady, have this Porsche. Technically, no, since this was the Porsche dealership, I didn’t walk out with keys, I walked out to where a guy was standing by the open door of the already-running car to help me into it because I am a delicate lady driving a ridiculous muscle car.

And oh dear. The thing has muscle. 5.0L, 316 hp of fine-tuned German-engineered muscle; 0-60 in less than six seconds. The back-seat-and-trunk area is comically small, and the front is ridiculously long. It’s hard to pull out and really see oncoming traffic, but thankfully, you can just romp on the gas and pull out in front of somebody and they’ll only notice you for a split second.

But you have to hold on for dear life. The thing is a beast, and it wants to go how, where and when it wants. My noodly little arms do the best they can to hold the thing in my lane, and a three-point turn is a bicep/tricep workout. Compared to this, driving my super-sensitive power-steering VW is like playing a video game, or the difference probably between flying a cute Cessna to your golf resort and slamming an F-18 Hornet off an aircraft carrier into a vast blue sky.

This car is not mine. My name is on the title, and the insurance. It’s registered to me. Barely any of its 33,000 miles were driven by me (seriously, I KNOW). This car is my grandpa’s. He loved cars. He loved cars that were made especially for the driver’s enjoyment. And I know that, because I’ve ridden in the ridiculous back seats of some of them.

He had this Porsche specifically because he was tall, and big, and in order to drive it, basically had to push the driver’s seat all the way into the back seat. A lot of people don’t realize it’s tough for really tall people to own regular, two-seater sports cars. You simply can’t get the seat back far enough to really fit in there comfortably. I feel like hunching over when I drive it and I’m only 5’8″.

My mom is currently driving his Mercedes S600. In reality, if my mom was not my grandpa’s daughter, my mom would be driving a normal mom-car. A Subaru wagon. A Toyota Rav-4. She would never have researched and purchased something like an S600, ever, on her own. But because he died, and we are the ones who like driving fast, fun cars, we are driving these cars. But we don’t think of them as ours. They’re always his. I’ll always feel bad for eating in one, or driving in high heels (it ruins the floor under the pedals), or leaving something in the back seat (like a jacket or an umbrella).

Coincidentally, I read somewhere that the No. 1 thing women consider when buying a car is cup holders. Amount of and easy access to cup holders. You know how many cup holders are in the 928? None. Unless you count the way you can sort of wedge a cup between the gear shift and the radio, but you still have to hold it or it spills. When I picked it up, I rode 20 miles in bumper-to-bumper traffic holding a 20-ounce coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts because there was simply NO PLACE to put it. And the whole time I was thinking, Why do I have this coffee in here? The car obviously doesn’t want me having coffee in here. Why am I going three miles an hour? The car obviously doesn’t want me doing that either.

I do love driving it. I love the sound and the feeling and the rumble that says “HEY, you. Yes, you, Nissan Sentra in the left lane. Get THE FUCK out of MY way, pleaseandthankyouverymuch.”

It feels a little like I stole it. Or I’m in a dream sequence. It makes me think of that Talking Heads song. “You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?” and then “You may say to yourself, my god, what have I done?”

So many coincidences and happenings and chances and one-in-a-billion-billions had to happen for me to be zooming down the highway in that 22-year-old German land-locked rocketship, but they all happened. From the big bang to now; 13.7 billion years of wild, strange accidents have led to this. So, thanks universe. And thank you too, science. And thanks Germany, even though that whole WWII thing happened, you still make incredible cars. And thanks Grandpa for sharing your toys.

P.S. Here’s someone’s gallery of a similar car. Same year/make/model. The one I’m driving is bright silver with gray leather inside.

When I lived in Washington D.C. I didn’t know a lot of people. Everything was expensive and I lived in a very pleasant residential area without much I could conveniently walk to for entertainment. I’d walk to Eastern Market and buy $7 tomatoes sometimes just for the trip. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but I spent most of my second year there in a major depressive episode. Because of that, and the stress of the job I had there, on weekends, I only wanted to be in my apartment, away from all other humans, watch movies and eat junk food.

One Thursday, I was having a particularly bad week, it was snowy and icy and it got dark an hour or so before I’d even leave work. I got to thinking I should do something for myself. To cheer myself up a little. Something nice. An indulgence.

I decided I wanted one of those big cookies from the mall. And that I would order it and pick it up on Friday after work and then be at home all weekend and enjoy it. Treat myself.

I called up the closest one, but then I started to panic. How pathetic am I? They’re going to know. They’re going to see me and say “How pathetic this girl is buying this entire party-sized cookie to take home on Friday night and eat alone in her basement apartment.”

I decided I needed to get “Happy Birthday” written on the cookie in frosting. Instead of pathetic, it’d be more like “Hey! This girl is popular and is taking this cookie to a party! How cool!”

While I was holding, I decided it would be even better if I had them put a name on it. A guy’s name. So not only would it look like I was taking this cookie to a party, I was possibly taking it to a party where there was a gentleman with whom maybe I had a relationship. “Hey, this girl is going to a cool party with cool friends and her cool boyfriend! Cool!”

I ordered a $45 cookie for my imaginary gentleman friend’s non-happening birthday party. I got the one that’s two cookies and a layer of frosting in between. I know how to imaginary-party.

This is, by far, not the saddest or most pathetic thing I’ve ever done.* And, it had the bonus upside of eating delicious cookie all weekend. I also think about doing it again sometime, only, I think I’ve grown, I’ve worked on my confidence and personality enough that now I could probably just get it to say “Congratulations!” and eat it while pretending I’d achieved something amazing. “Congratulations Nobel Laureate Jessica Clary.” “Congratulations Emmy Award Winner Jessica Clary.” “Congratulations Astronaut Engineer Jessica Clary.”

*Also, when I lived in D.C., I bought a ticket for a weekend matinee of “Toy Story 3″ right when it came out. Friends who had already seen it told me it was sad, and that I’d probably cry, and I was OK with that. But when I got into the theater, it was packed full of wide-eyed innocent children, and I decided I could not be that 28-year-old woman weeping openly in a crowded theater alone watching a Pixar movie at 2 p.m. on a Saturday. I count that as the most pathetic thing I’ve ever done.

So, a few years ago, my entire family went on a trip to Costa Rica. Entire family meaning my grandma, my mom and stepdad, my mom’s two brothers and two sisters, her brothers’ wives, her sister’s husband, the twelve grandchildren, the one great grandchild and the couple who used to live with my granddad. If you’re counting, that’s 25 people.

The first day, everybody was to gather on a plane flying from Charlotte, N.C. to San Jose, Costa Rica. My mom and stepdad flew in from Atlanta, and I was to fly in from where I was living in Washington, D.C. at the time. The night before, my car had broken down, so I had it towed off to the dealership and booked a shuttle ride for the hour trip out to Dulles airport in the suburbs. I got up around 5 a.m., got on the van and rode out to the gorgeous Eero Saarinen-designed terminal of Dulles, where things started to unravel.

I was not allowed to check in for my flight because my passport would expire within 30 days of my return flight. This was not great news. My mom’s passport would expire the same day, and one of my cousin’s would expire even earlier. I assumed they were going through the same thing. I rebooked myself on the same flights for the following day and started furiously trying to call my family to tell them why I was not present for the airplane rendezvous.

Nobody had cell phones with them. After enough calling, I reached a compassionate ticket agent who put an alert in the system so when my mom checked in for her flight, sirens went off and lights flashed and she’s told to immediately call her daughter.

About an hour later, she called me. I explained to her what happened (she says it’s bullshit and I should demand to be let on the plane), I told her they may not let her on the plane either, and then she could just book herself a ticket up to D.C. and we’d go over to the State Department passport emergency office and get new passports together. But no, everyone else is on the plane. My entire family, 24 of the people I love the most in the world, were in one metal tube full of jet fuel bound southward and I was not there.

Since I’m a problem solver, I rented myself a car, went to the State Department, hung out most of the day and paid a significant amount of money in rush fees for a new passport. I went home, slept, and then returned the rental car to Dulles the next morning to get on my rescheduled flights. Of course, since my family was already in Costa Rica, they didn’t know any of this. I can’t call them. I had just told them to send me some kind of ride from the airport to the house.

I got to San Jose, waited an hour for my luggage and then finally found my van driver, who spoke no English. My Spanish is limited to simple statements about the weather, cheese and butter. I got in a large 28-passenger van with him after a conversation via mime.

The day before, a different van driver had loaded my entire family into a similar van and they had ridden this trip together, singing songs and talking and drinking beers. Apparently, also, this trip was about six hours over a mountain. With no common language skills, it was silent.

We eventually made it to a gorgeous rental house where my family was waiting for me, having managed to get, on my own, from D.C. to Manuel Antonio National Park on the west coast of Costa Rica. I went inside the house and start eating everything I could find.

Eventually, my mom showed me to my room. It’s sort of a studio apartment tacked on the back of the house, like a maid’s quarters or something, but nice. You went outside into the yard, around a little walkway and then inside the door to it. Everyone else was too scared for it to be their room. I was too tired to care. I put my stuff down and then I saw a huge spider. To me, all spiders are terrifyingly big, but this one was about the size of a quarter, plus legs. It was against the wall near the door, so I just figured I could open the door, sort of softly kick the wall behind it and it would run outside.

This is what I did. The spider did not respond as I had imagined.

Instead, she (or he, cause I don’t know much about spider mating and parenting customs) exploded into about a hundred teeny baby spiders, who ran in all directions, like someone had dropped a bag of marbles on the floor.

I was finished.

I am generally pretty independent. But after 48 hours of independently fighting an airline agent, visiting the U.S. State Department, and traveling to a foreign country, I was done. I am a single girl who has lived alone since 2005, doing pretty much everything for myself, but this was the last straw.

I calmly walked upstairs, found my stepfather and told him what had happened. He went to take care of it while I leaned onto my mother’s shoulder and basically wept from total exhaustion. He returned, having battled, and I could finally go to bed. The room smelled like bug-killer, so I left the windows open.

This moment, the spider moment, where one thing happens that would be only minorly stressful on its own, instead happens at the end of 20 or 30 other minor and major stress things happening back to back, is a defining kind of thing. Some people just flip out into a rage. I, like probably many introverts, just shut down. Can’t process. Spider explosion is outside of my range of expected possibilities. It’s like when you try to make a calculator divide something by zero and it just says no. Incalculable.

The past month has been a long version of the 48 hours leading up to the spider moment, and it’s still going. I don’t know what the moment will be, or what my reaction will be, but I’m trying to prepare.

Is there a word like “misanthrope” for when you don’t like anything, not just limited to people? Not like “nihilist,” because I still acknowledge the existence of stuff and things and people and places and situations, I just don’t really like them anymore.

So, since the work shakeups, certain things that were never previously a hassle are now a huge big deal. And then other things that were a big deal are huge hassles.

After two weeks of not sleeping, barely eating and working 15-20-hour days, I went to see a doctor. It isn’t a secret I have some medical issues with anxiety and high blood pressure, and then when external stressors pile up, things get easily overwhelming. It starts to affect my body, and comes out as 36-hour headaches, digestive problems, extreme blood pressure swings (190/90 isn’t unheard of). So I have to turn to modern medicine to get myself back to normal.

All of this is to say that possibly one of the greatest meals of my entire life, up there with Le Cirque and In-N-Out Burger and that place I went in Mexico with the prawns and Cafe Gray and those steakhouses where everything is a-la-carte and dudes punch other dudes, is microwaved pizza rolls and valium. And sitting in bed, in my jammies, in the afternoon, eating pizza rolls, watching tv on the internet is just about the best therapy out there.

Today was the first day of fall quarter classes at the college where I work. Today was tough, and long, and I had a ton of things to do. I worked yesterday. I worked Saturday. And Friday. And Thursday I worked, closed on buying my condo, and received some difficult and challenging news about some reorganization at the college.

I’ve read all that stuff about how difficult times are when people worth their mettle shine through. And how things that are hard are tests of character and blah blah blah. But sometimes, things are just hard. On Thursday morning, a friend asked me to make plans for Saturday night. I told him I was closed to new problems or questions. My brain was full. And then 10,000 things happened and pretty much, my brain has overloaded. Now it’s crashing.

I feel like at any moment, I could just go catatonic. Mentally bluh out on being able to comprehend even just one more thing. I do not feel like I’m getting stronger, or my character is developing or this is a chance for me to shine. I feel like this is a chance for me to eat an entire box of Cheez-Its. The time for my ability to drink red wine to be tested and proven. An opportunity for me prove my mettle as someone who can get her blood pressure up to 190/90 and not be fainting. I’m incredibly good at maintaining a sort of walking panic attack and still just plodding through.

I’m completely overwhelmed, but I’m doing the best I can.

Four years before I was born, during a period of unique planetary alignment, two room-sized contraptions were launched into space on indefinite, infinite trajectories. Not really aimed at anything, really, but aimed to pass near some things and photograph them, and then keep moving. They’re Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, and since I first learned about them, in middle school, I’ve been fascinated.

Here’s a list of things about Voyager that make me all gooey and idealistic inside:

1. They have no destination. They just go … away. Out there. Way, out there.
Eternally out there unless it accidentally hits something. What foresight, to plan how to shoot something out so that it can pass everything and not hit stuff so it can just keep going.

Voyager 1 passed Jupiter in 1979, and Saturn in 1980, and then flew past Titan (Saturn’s humongo moon 50% bigger in diameter than our moon and something like 80% more massive). Titan’s gravity pulled it out of a path where it would pass Pluto to photograph closely. in 1990, it had photographed everything, and it is the farthest thing we’ve shot out there that can talk to us. It’s the fastest probe and nothing out there right now will ever pass it. And right now, it’s leaving our solar system.

Voyager 2 passed Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1981, Uranus then Neptune. It discoered Neptune’s Great Dark Spot, and more information about why it’s blue. In 2007, it passed the heliosheath, and in 2010 was twice as far from the sun as Pluto.

2. They carry stuff meant to be found by extraterrestrial beings of other worlds. And who picked out this stuff? Carl Sagan. The “stuff” is carried on a gold phonograph record (don’t worry, the probe also carries a record player).

“This spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about life on this planet,” Sagan said.

It carries recordings of greetings in 55 languages, animal sounds, photos of mathematical and scientific ideas, people, animals, food, music by Stravinsky, Mozart, Beethoven and Chuck Berry. On the cover are diagrams explaining how to play the record, as well as a map of pulsars showing where our sun is. And a drawing of a hydrogen atom in two states to show the time scale used.

And the opening line, from then-president Jimmy Carter, is eloquent and simple: “This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”

What Sagan said is right. The message of hopefulness and optimism, opportunity and excitement is something amazing and beautiful about our culture. About what it is to be a human citizen of this planet. If I think about it too hard, I feel like crying.

NASA and Sagan knew there was an incredibly small chance actual extraterrestrial beings would find and hear this recording but they did it anyway. They did it anyway. They chose to do something extra, something more, because of the hopeful, uniting message it gives.

That’s how I think about all of NASA: they did it anyway. Building rockets was dangerous and killed people. Sending humans out there into that bleak mystery was terrifying and expensive and took the combined efforts of thousands of people, working hard and at the highest levels of thinking, engineering and technology at the time. But they did it anyway. The moon was out there, so they went. And it took years of planning and testing and retesting and exceptional execution but more than anything it took the willingness to try to go. To do the hard work. To do whatever would take, without knowing what exactly that would entail, to achieve something incredibly idealistic and indulgent. And they did it. Despite everything, they did it.

3. Last year, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (the company that basically does all NASA R&D, where my aunt’s dad works) revealed that a bit had been flipped in the transmission from Voyager 2. One single binary piece of computer code, which could be represented as 1 or 0, had changed. What had happened?

Was this an alien race’s peaceful, non-destructive way to say hi? Was this something else? Actually, it was nothing, but for a few days, before JPL was able to reset it, there was a sense of fantastical wonder, not just from the possibilities, but also the excitement and potential of not knowing.

You know the feeling you get when you read a mystery, or watch a good thriller, and there’s a feeling in the not-knowing of excitement and anticipation and knowing that SOMETHING is coming but you don’t know what yet, and it’s … well, it’s something. And nothing else does it. And for a little bit, that wonder has been able to captivate our country, our planet, all of us, and there’s something to be said about that. Some credit to be given for captivating five billion people with just the simple idea of going out there.

So, recently, some of my “crazy, backwoods, Southern-person views” were called into question. I argued as best as I could, but without research (the debater’s best friend) I couldn’t convince my discussion-partners of my point. Now I have researched. Though I’m sure nothing will change their minds that they’re right and I’m wrong, I at least can say I have a well-developed argument.

My position:
I think American citizens should be allowed to own and use guns. I do not think that most gun-control efforts would work to reduce the amount of violent gun crimes in this country, and I think that any revenue and time from abandoning said gun-control efforts would be better spent in cultural and educational ways to reduce violent crimes of all kinds.

Yeah, I like guns. I like guns because I like freedom and personal responsibility. I like guns because I like the first amendment and my protection to say what I want. I like the third and fourth amendments for protecting my home and privacy, the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth for giving me a fair trial and protection from excessive punishment.

I would also like to point out that I do not own a gun. I have fired guns recreationally, and in my mother and stepfather’s home, I know where a loaded handgun is kept in case I need to defend myself against an intruder when I’m there.

My supporting research:

First, the text, “the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” By the governing document of our country, citizens’ rights to keep guns and use guns can’t be challenged.

Second, I previously had unrealistic ideas of how many people die in gun-homicides per year. I downloaded a complete copy of the National Vital Statistics Report on Death for 2007 (link is a PDF) (a lengthy, serious document chronicling all causes of death of the 2,423,712 persons who were reported to have died in the U.S. in 2007). On the front page, the 15 leading causes of death are listed, and right there, at No. 15, is Assault (homicide).

To me, as probably the simplest, most efficient way to kill another human, if one were to desire, would be to get a gun and shoot them. So, I made an assumption that yeah, I guess there must be a lot of people getting shot. For the past few years I’ve lived in cities that, for some reason, have higher-than-average levels of gun-related crimes (Savannah, Ga., Washington D.C. and Atlanta), and I’m constantly flooded with local news coverage of gun crimes and gun homicides. In my head, people were killing each other with guns a lot. If I had been asked to estimate, just off the top of my head, I probably would have guessed closer to 750,000 or a million people died from gunshots per year in the U.S. And dang, would I have been wrong.

And I kept reading. And I learned I didn’t make a really smart assumption. If you total the numbers for deaths from Accidental discharge of firearms, Intentional self-harm (suicide) by discharge of firearms, Assault (homicide) by discharge of firearms and Discharge of firearms, undetermined intent, you get 30,873 deaths from guns. That’s still a lot. But the breakdown is surprising, or at least, it was surprising to me.

• Accidental Discharge of Firearms: 613
• Intentional self-harm (suicide) by discharge of firearms: 17,352
• Assault (homicide) by discharge of firearms: 12,632
• Discharge of firearms, undetermined intent: 276

I was surprised that the number of gun-related suicides was so high, but more surprised that the number of gun-related homicides was so low.

(Of course, in reading the report, I saw some other interesting big, and small, numbers. 46,844 people died from motor-vehicle accidents, 562,875 from “malignant neoplasms” aka cancer, 30 from Salmonella, 2,644 from malnutrition, 411 from influenza, 769 from pregnancy and childbirth. For context, I tried to find other causes of death that caused a number of deaths near the number of deaths caused by gun homicides; roughly, these included HIV, esophageal, stomach, kidney, brain, bladder and ovarian cancers, multiple immunoproliferative cancers, and emphysema. Most of the heart diseases kill way more, most other things kill way fewer.)

What I’m saying with all these numbers is, and this is just as cold as it will sound, because it’s simply based on columns of figures and not thinking of those figures as human beings and sons and mothers and wives and grandchildren, is, on the whole, if you’re going to die, it’s not really likely it’ll be from being shot with a gun. And if you are shot with a gun and die from it, it’s more likely you do it to yourself.

There are a lot of things out there killing people we should be more furious and more outraged about than guns. Personally, those 2,644 who starved to death makes me pretty furious. People dying of curable diseases (pneumonia, hernias, tuberculosis, meningitis, syphilis, measles, etc.) makes me furious. And honestly, both make me more furious than even my imagined-number of gun-homicide deaths could make me.

Next, not a lot of guns actually are used in crimes. Here’s an interesting number from the National Academy of Science. Of the approximately 70 million handguns in the U.S. (in 2004) only about 7,500 a year are used in gun crimes. That’s .011 percent of handguns. Which means that 99.989 percent of handguns in the U.S. are never used to commit a crime. Never.

In debate, I would call this “no link,” because statistically, most handguns aren’t used in crimes. If you took all of these 70 million handguns away from their owners, you’d only be getting rid of about 7,500 guns that actually were used illegally.

Plus, think about the effort involved there. The effort to collect those 70 million handguns would be a colossal undertaking that would probably cost a lot of money and a lot of time. However, to collect just 7,500 guns wouldn’t take so long or cost so much, and really, if your goal is to prevent crimes, only 7,500 handguns are used in crimes in a year. Shouldn’t you just focus the utmost effort on just getting those 7,500 guns that are used in crimes, and not all 70 million? Wouldn’t that solve the problem AND have the added bonus of being very efficient?

OK, next research point. In the friendly discussion I had about my “crazy” views on guns, it was suggested that guns should be taken away from people, and not able to be purchased legally. High-profile voluntary gun buyback programs have been put on across the country and statistically, well, they sucked. People gave up their old and broken guns, and then took the cash and bought newer, nicer guns.

But what has worked to deter gun crimes? Police and penalties. Cities that put lots more cops in locations where lots of people got shot saw gun homicide rates plummet (re: Boston’s 1996 Project Cease Fire). Likewise, places that made crimes with guns highly punishable, more than just a regular crime (i.e. robbery vs. robbery with a gun), saw fewer gun crimes.

So, bottom line, based on proven attempts to deter gun crimes: taking away guns didn’t work, but preventing and prosecuting gun crimes worked. Wouldn’t it make more logical sense to then channel problem-solving efforts related to gun crime into the proven methods of reducing gun crime, instead of the wasteful methods that are proven not to reduce gun crime?

Here are two more statements, ones that don’t have as much research, but are to be considered, I think:

• Criminals do illegal things (you know, like crimes). If we make having a gun a crime, I doubt it will matter much to a criminal. He/she is already going to commit a robbery or a homicide or whatever crime, so I doubt he/she would gasp “Oh! But getting a gun is illegal!” Plus, there are already illegal ways of getting guns, and guess what, people get guns illegally. People also get guns legally, and then use them illegally to kill people. Obviously, the legality here is not the issue.
• This is just my opinion, and I didn’t research it, but I think making guns illegal would just make them some kind of worse fetish property. It would raise the glamour level of guns. It would make people who had guns somehow sexier, cooler, and then it would make gun crimes seem that way too.

Similar research has been done on other stuff like this. Like, kids who were raised in strict homes and not allowed sweets, or had big stigmas about alcohol, go off to college and eat junk food and get fat, or binge drink. Reactionary. Push one way and it only makes the other way happen.

Conclusion:
I think making guns illegal would be a waste of considerable time, money and effort. I also think that using that considerable time, money and effort on things that deter gun crimes would be an infinitely better solution to any gun-related-crime problem than criminalizing simple gun ownership.

OK, so, sure, call me a crazy, red-state-dwelling weirdo. I believe what I think on this subject is practical, rational and logical. I also have plenty of ideas and opinions that would not fit my crazy, red-state-dwelling weirdo persona (ask me how I feel about legislating my uterus, or about my public school education, or school prayer, or school vouchers, or, I dunno, like a million other things that explain why I’m registered to vote democrat in a state that never does).

If I want a gun, if my friend or mother or neighbor or son or daughter or husband or wife or whatever wants a gun, they should decide for themselves if having one is right for them, not the government. Likewise, the government should not take broad, inaccurate generalizations to make legislation to remove freedoms under the false guise of personal safety. (Plus, if it turns out anything like how airport security did, it’ll be totally FUBAR and won’t really make us feel that much safer.)

OK, New York. You and I are fucking finished.

This is the last straw: A bus driver dies and sits in an idling bus at Port Authority for five hours.

Before this, I read a story about how the city uses subway cars to transport garbage sometimes. Cars in trains that are IN SERVICE at the time. The story included a quote, from a union president, that ends ” … if you walk close to a bag, a rat could jump out right on top of you.”

And then, the one that started it all. The Chinese-food sex doll story.

Now, I realize that things like this probably happen everywhere, and that there’s probably a Chinese-food sex doll right in the very building I’m in while I type this. And I realize that people die all the time (and probably yes, some die at work, and some people work driving buses, so I get that this whole scenario isn’t astronomically mathematically impossible). And, you know, I believe in rats, and yeah, I understand trash has to get moved around somehow.

As a child, I dreamed of living in New York and being a writer. Frittering away on a typewriter and smoking on my fire escape. I didn’t hit the lottery at 11, though, so that dream became financially infeasible. Now though, I mean, if I wanted to badly enough, I could get my shit together and move to New York and work and go to parties and do New York things.

But I’m not going to. Because, seriously, New York, you’re disgusting.

I read a lot. Voraciously would be an accurate description. Copiously. Obsessively. There are five books on my nightstand right now and I’m in the midst of reading all of them (two nonfiction, two fiction, one Best American series collection). When I download a book on my iPad, I usually finish it in a day. Plus, I subscribe to 10 or so print magazines, have another 10 or so through Zinio on my iPad. I follow about 200 different news/etc. blogs and sites on my RSS reader.

And I read everywhere. If I’m in the bathroom brushing my teeth, I have a magazine, or a book, or I’m desperately searching for some text on a shampoo bottle to read. If I’m desperate, I’ll read my old day planners. That’s how bad it is.

I try to read without guilt, in that I should be doing other things that are more productive, or lucrative (I read about twice as fast as I write, and nobody pays me to read). Learning is responsible, though, I guess. (Right now, for example, I’m taking an online 100-level American literature course — free from the college I work at — just for fun. Likewise, I sometimes consider going to law school for fun, and also to spite people who think I’m stupid.)

Anyway, I must bring attention to something that bugs me. Occasionally, when my friends and acquaintances share stuff on their blogs/google reader/etc., they preface articles with “WTLR.” This means “Worth the long read.”

It’s insulting. Seriously insulting.

To anybody who would be actively searching for something to read, to even go to lengths of reading articles recommended by friends who are also always looking for things to read, something being long, if it’s good, shouldn’t matter. Ever. Good is always worth reading. No matter what.

So, yeah, everybody, you can quit warning me that something is long. Why don’t you just tell me it is, so I’m even more excited to read it.

So a while ago, some students and another adviser and I were driving back from the Savannah Record Fair to Atlanta. I was piloting a huge silver minivan full of two radio students (the general manager DF and the music director MB), the Connector A&E editor (MM) and my radio co-adviser MD. MD and I had been discussing relationships and high standards and how it’s tough to be a smart, single lady blah blah blah. The students were all asleep and we were rolling through someplace like Twiggs county.

Apparently, our yakking woke the guys, and DF announced he needed a bathroom stop. He didn’t specify urgency, so I assumed a stop was immediately imperative. I took the next exit and drove toward what I figured would be a cute little town with ample restrooms and maybe some kind of cookie store. I could have used a cookie right then.

We passed nothing. Some rundown houses, burned-down barns and fields. Finally, I saw something that looked promising: a painted wood sign directing us down a dirt road to a raceway park. Cool. They’d have bathrooms. And maybe also nachos.

The dirt road was deceptively long. As we got farther and farther into Twiggs County and off the interstate, we started playing that one-up crazy conversation game. Abandoned racetrack. Abandoned haunted racetrack. Abandoned haunted pig racetrack haunted by dead pig ghosts of yore and yesteryear. The road was basically one lane, red dirt and gravel. We didn’t see any other cars, so I just drove down the center.

Eventually, we came to the track, which was exceptionally well-maintained and fresh-looking, but also, you know, EMPTY. We rounded the dirt road and finally came upon something that looked like a concession stand with bathrooms. DF hopped out and went in cautiously. No lights were working, so I pulled ahead a bit so he could have a little privacy even with the door open.

MD asked me why I didn’t put it in park. I explained I wanted to be able to make a quick getaway in case things got all Deliverance in here. DF got back to the van safely and we scooted off back toward the road. He told us there had been no real plumbing, but he took advantage anyway. We laughed a bit about what would have happened if he was attacked by ghost pigs or some creepy caretaker type, and then we went on.

After a few minutes, DF proclaimed I probably, at this point in my life, wouldn’t make the greatest mother.

I agree.

He reminded me that I keep a desk drawer full of candy, and when students complain of headaches or stomachaches or anything, I offer them candy. It’s basically the 100% opposite of what an actual mother would do.

I’m just trying to make people happy. Here, have some Rollos. Need to pee? I’ll stop this van wherever we are, safety be damned. However, I think because of these things that make me a bad mother-figure, I’m a decent adviser. What, you have a problem that can’t be solved with candy or a pig racetrack? Well, you probably should try to figure it out for yourself. I can help you, but my immediate solutions aren’t going to be very helpful. Rollos do not solve much of anything (except, you know, wanting a Rollo).

If I gave out answers like I gave out candy, I really wouldn’t be preparing students for anything but asking for answers and getting them. That isn’t good enough for me, and it shouldn’t be good enough for anybody entrusted to teach students of any type or age or status. Problem-solving skills are the most valuable thing we can help students with, and they have to be practiced and exercised and coached all the time. I’m thrilled to be better at coaching somebody through solving their own problem than I am at solving their problem myself. (Especially when my solution is to let it fend for itself in an abandoned haunted pig racetrack or just give it candy.)

This is a conversation I had a while ago:

Me: I’m thinking about things I can do for fun.
Person I know who is smart, level-headed and not impulsive like me: Oh, like a hobby?
Me: No. Like law school!
Him: Why? Do you want to be a lawyer?
Me: Oh, no way. Him: Then, why would you think about going to law school?
Me: To prove to people I’m not as dumb as they all think I am.
Him: So, spite. You’d be going to law school for spite.
Me: Yeah!

As yet, I have not applied to law school. But, if I ever do, and if I ever go, this is 100% the reason. This is 100% the reason I do a lot of things. Spite. And to prove I’m not as (insert negative thing here) as people think I am. I finished undergrad in three-and-a-half-years, to prove it wasn’t a fluke that I started college at 17. I was a journalism major to spite a high school teacher that said I was a terrible writer. I went to graduate school because my friends thought I couldn’t. I moved to D.C. because I didn’t think I could. I’ll even do stuff just to spite myself. The easiest way to get me to do something — and do it better than anybody else, or at least to do more, go farther, work harder, do whatever it takes — is just to let me think you doubt I can. Forget it. I’ll do dumb stuff. I’ll do stuff I don’t even really want to do, just to say hey, guess you thought wrong, huh?

Except for two years while I was in DC working in media/communication professionally, I have been constantly involved in scholastic journalism (either as a student on staff of a school publication, a student studying journalism or an adviser) since 1994, when I worked on the staff of the student newspaper at my middle school in seventh grade. It’s 2011 now. I have done this for more than half of my life. And I believe I recall someone telling me, back then, in sixth grade or so, that the journalism classes were tough to get into, and I might not make the cut. But I did.

It’s not necessarily a good quality, especially not combined with my unyielding stubbornness, but so far it’s led to positive accomplishments. Hopefully it will lead to a lot more.

Note: No matter what, no matter if he just recycled every single joke for the rest of his career and never really wrote anything new, he’d still be one of the greatest writers, of any kind/genre/mode, alive today. End of story. Dude is one talented MF.

So, I finally got around to watching “The Social Network” eight months after its release. It was pretty much what I expected, as I read magazines like “Entertainment Weekly” and some tv/movie blogs. I’ve also seen other David Fincher movies and other movies and tv shows written by Aaron Sorkin, and I’m a fairly adept reader/watcher of popular media.

There was one thing that surprised me that I didn’t expect, but should have known to expect: Aaron Sorkin recycles his own jokes. In his defense, they’re great jokes, but to the gluttonous consumer of his writing, it’s pretty obvious since they’re such great jokes.

Specifically, there’s a joke from “Sports Night” where Jeremy is winning tremendously at poker and informs Natalie she’ll be living on a charitable donation of the Jeremy Goodwin foundation if she loses, which Eduardo* makes in the film while he’s the only investor in the company. It’s a pretty good line, and it’s clever and funny both times.

Also, specifically, there’s a joke from “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” where Tom says he could buy his parents’ house and turn it into his ping pong room. Mark says nearly the same thing about a Harvard final club. It’s a pretty good line, but tough to believe either character (Tom from “Studio 60″ or fake/real Mark Zuckerberg) having (or wanting) a ping pong room.

These are funny jokes. And they’re good writing. But something about it rubs me the wrong way. Yes, I understand the viewership of both “Sports Night” and “Studio 60″ was small, and probably way small compared to how many people saw “The Social Network” and wouldn’t have a chance to hear that joke otherwise.

But, a small part of me has this feeling like when you laugh too hard at your own jokes, or when you tell a joke a few times at a party, but to different groups of people, trying to show everyone how funny you are.

Aaron, you’re funny. I admire you as a writer more than any other writer. I’m sure you can come up with 10,000 new jokes that are just as good, or better, than recycled jokes. You can do better, and frankly, as a large-scale consumer of your writing, I deserve better.

*Where did this adorable actor person Andrew Garfield come from? Somebody put him in my purse at once.

I can’t whistle. I tried SCUBA diving once and almost drowned in the shallow end of the practice pool. I’m not great at math (once I got past algebra), and my handwriting is often illegible even to me. I can’t apply eyeliner, mascara or eyeshadow. I can’t do much of anything with my left hand. I’m extremely bad at buying pants that fit me (out of about 15 pairs of pants in my apartment, four fit). I have lost my college ID twenty or thirty times. I can’t eat spicy food without my head filling up with snot. I can’t draw straight lines. I’m horrible at remembering things so I have to write nearly everything down. I set my alarm clock an hour early because it’s really tough to get me out of bed, and when I do get up, I’m a grumpasaurus for at least another hour. My nightstand is just a pile of books and dvds and Pop Tarts wrappers. My desk is worse. Birds and fish creep me out (something about their weird flat eyes). I get sunburned really easily and I hate the feeling of lotion, so my skin is disgusting. Even the thought of a mani/pedi makes me squeamish. I’m bad at standing up for myself, and I tend to apologize for things that aren’t my fault.

However:

I can parallel park like I was born to, in anything — little cars, big trucks, power steering or not, automatic or manual transmission. I make brownies so good you want to join a religion based on them, and a carrot cake that will bring you to tears. I’m a good swimmer (and fairly bouyant). I can figure out how to thread and operate almost any sewing machine, given enough time. I can plan and execute a cross-country move by myself (and have done it more than once). I can tell you when and where and how to use an adverb instead of an adjective and a semicolon instead of a comma or a dash. I can give you directions to anywhere I’ve ever been without using Google Maps, and I can give you general directions to plenty of places I’ve never been. I have some sort of subconscious energy aura that makes babies and dogs love me. Seriously, dogs will lope up to me like they know me and babies cry when people take them away from me. I can throw together a meal without much planning and without a written recipe. I am good at being alone and I can read a 400-page novel in a day, carrying it to the bathroom, the kitchen, anywhere. Once I decide I want to take on a project, I take it 100 percent, until it’s finished.

I feel like I’m just about breaking even sometimes, and sometimes I feel like I’m coming up short. I don’t ever feel like I’m edging over to the plus side, where my talents outweigh my flaws. Maybe someday, if I keep working at it, I might, but until then, I’ve got to keep working.

So yesterday, I came home from work about 6:15 p.m. and after changing out of my work clothes, thought I’d just sort of lounge on the bed for a minute. Take a little catnap. I put on my sleeping mask (yes, I use one) and dozed off.

I woke up some time later and glanced at my watch. 7:15. My apartment was quite light, and it was cloudy outside. I looked at my alarm clock. 7:15. I got up, amazed I’d just slept 13 hours, ate breakfast, made coffee, took a shower, blow-dried my hair, got dressed, put my coffee in my travel mug and went to pack my bag to leave. Only then did I look at my cell phone and see it was 19:50. 7:50 p.m.

This is the first time I’ve ever done anything like this.

I’m not really the scatterbrained type. Yes, I lose my work ID in my office a lot, and yes sometimes I can’t find my keys, but generally, on the day-to-day, I know what’s going on. I am lately, though, really really tired. For example, Saturday I slept from about 11 p.m. Friday night until 4 p.m. Saturday afternoon. And while I was sleeping, I was dreaming about going on vacation to this splendid vacation house with a very comfy bed and sleeping in that. I was dreaming about sleeping. That’s how sleeping I was.

My mother called me, and I told her what had happened. “That’s devastating,” she said. She really sounded concerned. “That’s how tired you are,” she said. “Your body can’t even tell the difference in how you feel after sleeping one hour versus thirteen hours.” I started to freak out a little. “What about now?” I asked. “What if this is sleeping? Is this real? Am I losing my mind?”

She assured me it was real, and that I wasn’t crazy, but that I should rest more. I honestly don’t know when I’d get to that resting.

The other day, I confessed to a friend that if I had a husband and children to take care of, cook for, do laundry for, a house to clean with a yard to mow, I’d honestly need some kind of serious amphetamine addiction to get through. As it is, I don’t know how I manage taking care of my work and life, and I don’t do a whole lot of life-care (like I don’t have furniture, like my cable has been out for 3 weeks and I haven’t called about it, like there are still boxes I haven’t unpacked and I moved here in August). I don’t get it. My mom raised me mostly by herself, while working more than full time. When did she have time for that? Granted, we mostly lived in condos (no yard) and had a nanny to watch me after school and do some daily chores, but still, my mom did all cooking, most cleaning, and still worked, and dealt with me. (My unruly, toddler self who did things like park her tricycle on top of a water moccasin.)

What changed? Is work harder now? More time consuming? Are the techno-media advances really hurting us after all? Is my never-ending email/BlackBerry/iPhone to-do list crushing me? And if it is, what’s my alternative? It’s not like I could remove media from my job (it’s 100% media), or change my own media consumption habits  (I have to stay informed, you know, and read for entertainment too). What else can I quit to stop feeling so rushed/spread thin/worn out?

“My goal is to always come from a place of love … but sometimes you just have to break it down for a motherfucker.”
- Ru Paul

I love my job. Straight-out, slap-drag love it. I’m sad to leave every night, I’m happy to go every morning and honestly, over the weekend, I get sad and miss it. Last week I worked at least 60 hours. I’ll be working this weekend. And next week, I will probably work another 60+ hours. And I will love every single minute.

I am the adviser to a student media program with a quarterly print magazine, an online newspaper and a 24/7 online radio station at a small fine-arts college.

For a while,  I taught a college class, and I’ve never really been able to fully articulate why I prefer advising to teaching. Then, a couple days ago, I saw this RuPaul quote. Seriously. Nothing much I’ve ever read before has explained my feelings so well.

In teaching, success is always your outcome. I helped students become better writers because that was the course objective. I helped them write essays, then I helped them write better essays. In advising, sometimes, success isn’t your goal. Learning is always my goal. Providing an environment for maximum learning is my goal. Sometimes that means students go all-out on an overambitious idea, and they don’t make it. But they learn a lot. In a classroom, they wouldn’t get an A, but down here, the process, the learning, is the goal — not the outcome. And sometimes, that means I have to have really tough conversations.

Now, I’m 29. Most of the students I work with are between 18-28. This isn’t like I am automatically respected for my age or experience. I have to earn my respect by demonstrating my knowledge and ability to be straightforward and direct. My skill in, for lack of a better word, breaking it down for a motherfucker. Sometimes I have to say, hey, you know what, this isn’t going to work, but I seriously am going to back you up every step of the way, and I will be there to help you every minute. And then when it’s over, and no matter how it turns out, I’ll still be there. You won’t get an F, but we are going to have a serious talk about what went wrong, and how it’s going to be different next time, and what exactly you are going to do to make sure it’s different. For some people, having to endure that conversation is worse than just getting an F and walking away. But for other people, for the students who get the most out of working in student media, it’s one of the most valuable learning experiences they get in college.

RuPaul has it right. I’m always coming from a place of love and support and I-am-here-for-you-no-matter-what, but sometimes, out of love and support and all that, you gotta say some pretty difficult things. Because I am willing to have these difficult conversations, and because I feel like it’s an exceptional real-world learning opportunity for the students, I love my job. And while I can’t really say I’m happy do have these conversations, I am grateful to facilitate, and be a part of, a one-of-a-kind learning experience.

And did I mention I get to do this every single day? And I get paid for it? Seriously. If just everyone could have the experience of a job that makes them feel this kind of satisfied, honestly, the whole world would be a better place.

John McIntyre is a copy editor at the Baltimore Sun. The Baltimore Sun has won 15 Pulitzer Prizes, and is the paper for which Henry Louis Mencken* wrote from 1906-1948. In short, The Sun, and Mr. McIntyre, are class acts all around.

A few weeks ago, Mr. M wrote this entry in his blog: Skip the team talk; there’s work to be done. Go ahead and go read it. This blog will still be here when you get back.

Read? Great. He’s a genius.

In my years of leadership, especially leadership on college campuses where lots of these sort of “leadership” workshop things happen, I have never really gotten it. Half the time, I couldn’t get into it because it was so hokey. And the other half I couldn’t get into because I was too busy thinking about what was waiting on my desk back in my office. Revisions. Another issue of the campus paper. Budget proposals. Emails. Whatever. And, horribly, because I am one of those awful, disgusting persons who loves — and lives for — my work, I would rather have been at my own desk, doing the work. Because, as Mr. M says, “You build a team by doing the team’s work, the way an orchestra becomes a team by playing the music in rehearsal, not by pretending to be ninjas.”

The team works by putting out the paper, or the magazine, or the web-based news site, or the radio broadcast that plays 24/7, or the ad, or the copy, or the book, et cetera ad nauseum. Whatever it is, and whoever it is, you learn to be a team the best by doing the thing you’re doing. End of story. Period.

And yes, I pretended I was crossing a lava field on carpet squares. And yes, I helped haul people over a wall. And yes, I blindfolded myself and let people lead me around. But when I left, we all went back to our jobs, where we were at team already, and we were working together already because we were doing our jobs well.

Maybe that’s the thing for people in media. Maybe, instead of going out on retreats and to ropes courses or teambuilder games, coworkers from other industries should have to put on a 3-hour news broadcast from 5-8 a.m. 7 days a week. Or put a magazine together once a month. Or a tabloid newspaper once a week with college students. Or keep a radio station running all day every day. Maybe they should have to feel that “holy crap it’s deadline and the designer and copy editor are standing over my shoulder waiting for my story and I can’t remember if this guy’s name was Thompson or Thompsen” feeling.

Because there’s the feeling that a team supports you when you’re doing trust falls, and it’s a lot different than the feeling that a team supports you when it’s 11 p.m. and you’re banging out 800 words while the whole team is waiting because they’re not done until you’re done.

In my leadership roles, I’ve tried hard to be a worker bee. I’ve tried hard to be the first one there and the last one to leave. I don’t ever want to be resting on my laurels or awards. It always must be “What’s next?” not “Hey, look what we did.” I’m not big on complaining or blaming, but I am big on fixing processes and looking ahead. I’m also big on work.

(Side note: I am one of those really bizarre, weird people who believe that the feeling of having done, and completed, an arduous task is the best reward for it. Knowing I did hard work is the best reward for hard work there is. I don’t care if this makes me a freak. I love it. I thrive on that energy of daunting tasks and things people say can’t be done. In the words of Jay-Z, “Difficult takes a day; impossible takes a week.”)

I hope I’ve succeeded. But even if I haven’t, I’m still young(ish), and at least I’ve identified a goal for myself as a leader. And that’s progress, too.

*HLM was kind enough to write his own epitaph, but it isn’t on his tombstone: “If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.” He died in his sleep, which sounds like a pretty lovely way to go.

So, on the radio, my show is now called “The Independents” and I’m now called “Meatball.” Today’s show featured music by bands who are on, or have worked with, labels associated with Beggars Group. Indie powerhouses like XL, 4AD, Matador, Rough Trade, etc.

Here is what I played:

Bon Iver – For Emma
The National – Terrible Love
Iron & Wine – Naked as We Came
Frank Black – Headache
The Mountain Goats – No Children
Ra Ra Riot – Dying is Fine
Stereolab – French Disko
TV on the Radio – Staring at the Sun
Arcade Fire – Ready to Start
Belle and Sebastian – I Fought in a War
They Might Be Giants – Dr. Worm
The Pixies – Broken Face
The Hold Steady – Stuck Between Stations
The Breeders – Cannonball
The Strokes – The Modern Age
The Fiery Furnaces – Here Comes the Summer
The Decemberists – Sons and Daughters
Sufjan Stevens, Springfield, or Bobby Got a Shadfly Caught in His Hair
Modest Mouse – Whenever You Breathe Out, I Breathe In (Positive Negative)
Badly Drawn Boy – The Shining
Beirut – Postcards from Italy
Thom Yorke – And It Rained All Night
Sonic Youth – Teen Age Riot
Sigur Rós – Gobbledigook

Next week, maybe a SST and Dischord show? East coast vs. west coast. Or maybe a midwesterners show. Tune in next Wednesday, 2-4 p.m. Eastern on scadatlantaradio.org to find out.

According to the Meyers-Briggs personality type tests, I am categorically INTJ. This means Introverted-Intuitive-Thinking-Judging. Of Americans, 2.1 percent are INTJs (about six and a half million people, or approximately the same number of people who live in Massachusetts). It’s something I regard as any of my other personality traits  — good or bad, they’re what I am, and better to try and embrace them, and nurture them positively, than try to hide them.

Some traits of INTJs: independent, creative, logical, problem-solver, analytical. INTJs also care more about ideas and efficiency than other people’s feelings, and are not very good at pretending otherwise. Hence my abhorrence of bullshit, intolerance of most other humans and my ruthless application of “Yeah, but does it work?” to nearly everything I (or those around me) work on. I don’t care whose idea we use, only that it’s the best idea in the room. I hate wasting time (mine or others’). If there’s a better/easier/more efficient way to do something, it will kill me to do it in a wasteful way. I like to be the person on the inside, building the system and improving it, figuring out efficient ways of working and implementing them, then testing them and changing them and making them better, so that the people on the outside, the pretty people or the people who speak well or are however in the spotlight can count that their stuff is being handled right, because I did it. Behind every great man/woman, there’s an INTJ somewhere managing the SHIT out of things. (And then, also, hopefully, some kind of intermediary manager person to keep them from the mutual unpleasantness of having to talk to each other.)

Not surprisingly, this personality type is rare among women*, and people with this type are most likely to be engineers, lawyers, scientists, etc.** While I’m none of those things, I do have a career where I solve (sometimes complex) problems all day, develop systems and test them and tweak them, help other people solve problems through logical reasoning and creativity, and usually spend at least 2-4 hours (sometimes entire work days) completely alone. Days where I spend a lot of time in a large group of people, or talking to lots of people, or being sociable, wear me out. It feels like for every hour I spend at some large-scale event, or talking to lots of people, I need to spend at least an hour in my bedroom alone being quiet and thinking. There’s a tipping point, I bet, between “INTJ” and “Avoidant Personality Disorder.”

I tell you all of that to tell you this. If I know you, and we’re friends, or acquaintances, or we work together, or are colleagues, or however, I’m usually very happy to see you, even if I don’t seem like it. Sometimes, we really don’t have to talk. I don’t think silence is awkward. (Some of my favorite days spent with my mother we’re both just sitting around the house reading books and not talking. It’s lovely.) Yes, I am alone a lot, but I’m hardly ever lonely, so don’t worry about that.

If we work together, and I inadvertently hurt your feelings by not being emotionally supportive, well, I acknowledge that. I can’t really say I’m sorry, because such a thing does not compute. To me, in my head, work=logical and rational. Work is about ideas and doing things to carry out those ideas in the most efficient, practical, useful way possible. If you want warm and fuzzy, get a puppy.

If you tell me a problem you’re having, and I interrupt you to give you practical advice, feel free to tell me “No, I really just want you to listen to me as my friend.” Seriously. Otherwise, my brain is reacting as the problem-solving machine it is and just wants to pump out solutions. People who are my friends can tell you that, if I’m aware that advice is not wanted, I can be a compassionate, friendly listener. I can be a good friend, I just have to know what you want upfront.

All this heavy self-analysis is making me hungry.

*Side note: I wonder if it really is, or if women lie when they take these tests to choose traits more stereotypically feminine like caring a lot about other people’s feelings.

**Blech. Also careers not considered stereotypically feminine. I hate this crap.

My hair is gray. Only about 25 percent of my hair, but enough of my hair that it’s noticeable (most of the gray areas are in the front). The other 75 percent is dark brown, but I don’t have much of an issue with that hair. It’s this other hair I don’t know what to do with.

I started having gray hair when I was about nineteen. This is unusual. I read a bunch about it, and among Americans, 40 percent or more have some gray hair by the time they are 40 years old. I am not 40 years old. Your hair goes gray because the melanin-producing parts of your hair follicles stop working, so your hair grows without pigment. (Melanin is also what’s responsible for skin color and eye color, as well as other pigmented parts of your body on the inside.)

I would describe my skin as “fishbelly translucent pale.” Really. And it’s not of that beautiful, sensitive, alabaster quality either. It’s of the “don’t go outside because you might catch on fire” quality. I don’t tan. I burn, quickly, and to a lobstery red. Or, I freckle, to the point where any of my skin exposed to sunlight is freckly. My face is always pink, like I’ve been running (or drinking whiskey for days). My eyes are green, but since I also have a round, pug-shaped Irish face, they’re small and deep set. This is all just for context. I’m having a raging hair debate here I need to talk about.

So, I’m going gray a la Anne Bancroft in “The Graduate.” (Note: she was only 36 in this movie, and Dustin Hoffman was 30.) Previously, I dyed my hair. From age 18-19, it was bleached and processed into hot pink, purple, light blue and dark blue. It’s been dyed black, and brown, and highlighted blonde and caramel and red and other classy/appropriate/ladylike combinations. But now I don’t know if I want to keep dying it.

It feels like there are these “Adult Woman Things” that I am expected to do that I don’t remember signing up for. Like manicures and pedicures. I hate that stuff. When they bring out that metal scraper thing and shove your skin back into  your finger between your skin and nail, I want to pass out. The only thing worse is when they start cutting it all off. (Seriously, isn’t that skin growing there for a protective reason?)

Same with eyebrow plucking and waxing. I occasionally now will pluck errant stray hairs, but I used to go get them waxed. (A lady puts hot wax onto your face with a popsicle stick, puts a piece of cloth on top and then rips your sensitive eye-area hairs out by the roots.) And yeah, it hurts. And, since my skin is the aforementioned transparent-pale, it gets really really red. And swollen. Like two bloody slugs are laying on my face. Getting a wax meant immediately going home and staying there for at least 24 hours or risk being asked what fight club I belong to.

Ditto makeup (that’s a lot of work, plus I hate the feeling of stuff on my face, I do wear a daily dusting of mineral powder to even my face out, but that’s it). Ditto contact lenses (I’m not functional enough in the early morning to put my finger into my eye). Ditto other hair removal ickiness (I do shave my legs, under my arms, and neaten my lady areas, but beyond that, really, is terrifying.) I do personal care things (shampoos, conditioners, fancy face washes and lotions and sunblock all day every day and deodorant and sometimes even perfume, and on fancy occasions I’ll wear lip gloss and maybe a little mascara, but then I have to be crazy careful not to rub my eyes and turn all raccoony). I take care of myself, my body, etc., I just don’t go farther than that.

I feel like dying my hair to disguise the gray (either by dying it all brown to match, or getting some blonde/caramel/whatever highlights to blend in) is one of these “Adult Woman Things” that I REALLY SHOULD be doing. I’m not being rebellious here (at worst, I’m just lazy, and don’t like things that hurt, or take time, or feel slimy), or trying to strike out against whatever prescribed woman’s roles/responsibilities to the beauty dynamic whatever stuff. I just don’t LIKE these things. Just like I don’t like spinach so I don’t eat it, and I don’t like gin so I don’t drink it, and I don’t like brown so I mostly wear black and gray as my neutrals. I like coffee better than tea, but nobody asks me if I’m trying to make a statement whenever I order at Caribou.

I’m 29 years old and single. A lot of women (yes, women) have tried to coax me to makeup, clothes I don’t like, lifestyles I don’t like, etc. because it will make me more attractive to guys. This is the reason they offer. The benefit. Really? I’d be more likely to wear makeup if you told me it would summon a magical delivery of those big, soft pretzels you get at the mall. Sure, I’d love to be more attractive to guys, but I would also love to not have to do things I don’t like.

I’m sure other women (and plenty of dudes too, and plenty of people of other gendered-or-non-gendered self-identifications) love makeup. Or love getting their eyebrows waxed or having their nails done or would just simply die before letting gray hair show. And I respect their choices. I want them to do what they like, and I want to do what I like. When I see girls in Sephora (yes, I go there for fancy lotion and body wash and lip gloss) getting giddy over makeup or whatever, it makes me happy, the same way it makes me happy to see a little kid be excited about a balloon, or a cookie. I want them to love things and to be happy, even if they’re things I don’t love myself.

(For the record, there are plenty of things I love, like shoes, and dresses, and specialty shaping undergarments that are not exactly comfortable. But I’m willing to make that sacrifice for how I look or feel in them, just like other people are willing to make sacrifices and endure discomfort for the way they look or feel with other things, like pushed-back cuticles or botox.)

I don’t think I’m going to dye my hair. I just want to see what happens with it. Will it all go gray? Or just the front? It will be a surprise. And there are so few real surprises possible in our modern world that this little, nothing surprise might be worth it. It’ll be just like when I dyed my hair hot pink — I didn’t know how it was going to turn out, but I knew it would be something I’d never seen before, and that was really exciting.

Today’s show was about great independent record labels. I tried to represent as many of the classic indie labels I could, and I also played a lot of new new stuff. (New stuff is marked with a *. I am calling anything new if it came out in 2011 already. Some stuff on here came out this week, or hasn’t even come out yet.) Labels represented included: 4AD, Matador, Sub Pop, Merge, Saddle Creek, Kill Rock Stars, Jagjaguwar).

I absolutely loved planning, scheduling and playing every second of this show. Love love loved it.

Bright Eyes – First Day of My Life
Best Coast – Boyfriend
The Babies – Sun Set*
Dum Dum Girls – Take Care of My Baby*
Deerhoof – No One Asked to Dance*
The Mountain Goats – This Year
Spoon – You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb
J. Mascis – Very Nervous and Love*
Built to Spill – Liar
The Decemberists – Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect
Guided by Voices – Big Boring Wedding (by request! Hi there James in Massachusetts!)
Animal Collective – Grass
Modest Mouse – Breakthrough
Thao with The Get Down Stay Down – Bag of Hammers
Cursive – Sink to the Beat
Okkervil River – Singer Songwriter
Wolf Parade – I’ll Believe in Anything
The Shins – The Past and The Pending
Bon Iver – For Emma
Mogwai – Letters to the Metro*
Wye Oak – Civilian*
Shearwater – I Was a Cloud
Sparklehorse and Radiohead – Wish You Were Here
Iron & Wine – Boy With a Coin
Bright Eyes – Shell Games*

This is a wildly self-indulgent post that doesn’t make much sense, and for that I apologize. But really, it’s my blog, and if I can’t be nonsensical and self-indulgent here, where can I be?

In 2002, I lived in a ramshackle house with my friends near the railroad tracks in Columbia, S.C. Sitting between what we thought was a halfway-house and a vacant lot, and for some reason diagonally cornered from the back of the governor’s mansion, the place was perfect. Just dumpy enough that you didn’t worry too much about damaging it, and just nice enough to sleep easy. Right now it’s for sale and listed at $94,000. It also calls itself a 2-bedroom, 2-bath. One of those bathrooms is as big as a bedroom, but all the fixtures are crammed over in one corner, and the other is the laundry room with a toilet and sink. The back yard is brick pavers. The sewage lines are made of clay pipes, and would overflow into the yard.

I moved in with three of my friends in April or May, from a dorm. I was graduating in December, so signing a full-year contract with the college’s res life department was dumb. Our rent was $800 a month, split 4 ways. I still can’t believe it.

I was 20 years old. I didn’t know what to do with my life, and the days were counting down to when I’d graduate and need to have that figured out. I alternated between feelings of complete panic and reluctance, and a strange satisfaction with my everyday life. Classes were going well, we lived near a park, I was dating someone I liked to be around. I had great friends and a sports car and things to do and was generally okay with everything. But any thoughts of what would happen after December 2002 sent me into a wide-awake nightmare. What do I want from my life? What am I going to do? Why don’t I have this figured out yet?

That year “Lifted” by Bright Eyes came out. It was one of a few albums I listened to constantly.

To be honest, I can’t remember buying it, and I can’t remember how I found out about it, or how I liked it, or who told me about it. Did I read about it? Did a friend tell me? I have absolutely no idea.

There’s something about it (as well as subsequent Bright Eyes releases) that I just love. Something about the simultaneous simplicity and grandiose sound. Conor Oberst’s strange and imperfectly perfect voice. And a general feeling of anxiety, excitement, sadness, joy and everything else. It felt how I felt, in a way I couldn’t put into words.

When I moved to Atlanta last year, my friend Matt introduced me to his friend Jason. Jason is a couple years older than me and he’s great. Funny, loves good food and friends and lives in a house perfectly suited for wonderful evenings of cooking, eating and enjoying good company. He’s really easy to be around, and has a spirit of adventure combined with a sense of down-to-earth-ness that’s very comfortable. He and I got along great from the start, and I don’t know how it took so long, but we discovered we have the same ridiculously weak spot for 90s-2000s indie rock.

(And not to sound stereotypical, but before this, I’d only ever met very typical guys who like indie rock: dangerously chubby or skinny, socially awkward, timid and brash at the same time, straight and with jerkily high standards for girls, working at record stores or copy shops or as designers or artists, etc. Jason is a tall, good-looking, has-his-shit-together gay guy with a law degree.)

So last night, Jason and I went to see Bright Eyes. They’re on a farewell tour of sorts. I read that Oberst wants to wrap up that alt-folk-country-rock-amalgam that is Bright Eyes and close the door, with a nice loving goodbye. It was a fantastic show, entertaining and brilliant and beautiful, at the Tabernacle in Atlanta, a huge dramatic old church downtown. The floor was filled mostly with people our age (late 20s, early 30s), but near us in the crowd was a teenage couple I couldn’t take my eyes off. They sang along to every word of every song, even the new ones, with their heads thrown back and their eyes closed, or jumping and waving their hands.*

Simultaneously I felt old and jaded and boring and somehow incapable of feeling that kind of unrestrained joy publicly. That unjaded, reckless enjoyment of something. The feeling in the crowd was so positive, so lovely, even Oberst himself sounded genuine and honest when he told us how much he loved playing here, and how we were just the nicest audience. I love seeing and being around people that are just so happy and enjoying what’s happening and who have an energy that’s palpable almost.

People who know me are aware of my reluctances and difficulties with being emotional. I get easily overwhelmed with feelings and can’t function like a regular, sensible person in society. It’s not that I don’t have feelings, it’s just that it’s almost physically painful sometimes to feel this much inside all at once. If I had to feel things all the time, I’d probably just stay in bed crying all the time — not just from sadness or happiness, but the combined, compounded effect of 29-years’ worth of feelings I can’t let go of. And then how would I get any work done?

It’s so hard to be happy sometimes, but I was happy when I went to bed last night. Thanks to Jason and Matt and Conor and a little bit, I guess, thanks to me. Not everything is perfect, and my life isn’t figured out or settled, but there’s something to be said for feeling OK about it, even just for a little while.

Playlist for today: I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning by Bright Eyes, of course.

*The show had a lot of really fantastic moments. For example, during the encore, Oberst introduced a song by saying “This song is a little mischievous, and for that I apologize.” Then they launched into a loud, boisterous “Lover I Don’t Have to Love,” which is a song I wouldn’t call mischievous (it isn’t cheeky and cutesy or told with a wink, it’s about love and hurt and using people, which is a lot worse than just mischief). But something is really interesting about the dichotomy. Let me apologize for this song that’s pretty hurtful and severe, but while I’m apologizing, I’m going to totally downplay that it’s so harsh. That conflict, somehow, is just so human. So flawed and so perfect all at once.

This week’s theme was Desert Island Discs 1994-1996. So many of my favorite records of all time came out during these three years it’s crazy.

Pavement – Gold Soundz
Picked by Pitchfork as the #1 track of the 90s.
Weezer – Getchoo
Elastica – Connection
Matthew Sweet – Sick of Myself
Radiohead – High and Dry
Apparently, nobody likes this song but me. Not even Thom Yorke likes it.
Belle & Sebastian – I Don’t Love Anyone
Modest Mouse – Dramamine
The Rentals – Friends of P
Trivia: Maya Rudolph from SNL sang backup and played keyboard on tour with The Rentals.
Tripping Daisy – Got a Girl
Members of this band eventually went on to form The Secret Machines, The Polyphonic Spree and School of Seven Bells.
The Specials – Pressure Drop
Green Day – Welcome to Paradise
And punk becomes mainstream.
Rancid – Time Bomb
Sounds like Operation Ivy, who sound like The Specials.
Jawbreaker – Accident Prone
This is my favorite song of all time.
Bjork – It’s Oh So Quiet
Fiona Apple – Criminal
Beck – Devil’s Haircut
That dog on the cover is a Hungarian Komondor.
Eels – Not Ready Yet
Cake – Sad Songs and Waltzes
Actually a Willie Nelson song.
Fountains of Wayne – Everything’s Ruined
They Might Be Giants – S-E-X-X-Y
Blackstreet & Dr. Dre – No Diggity
This is the song that FINALLY knocked The Macarena out of Billboard’s #1 spot. All hail Blackstreet.
Beastie Boys – Sure Shot
Veruca Salt – Seether
The Lemonheads – If I Could Talk I’d Tell You
Pavement – Rattled by the Rush

Of course, there are tons of things I didn’t play that came out during those three years I also love, like:

1994
Hole – Live Through This
Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik – Outkast
Dinosaur Jr. – Without a Sound

1995
Fugazi – Red Machine
Mercury Rev – See You On The Other Side
Sonic Youth – Washing Machine
Montell Jordan – This is How We Do It

1996
Tupac – All Eyez On Me
Blur – Live at Budokan
ATLiens – Outkast
The Doggfather – Snoop Dogg

Overall, a show I enjoyed doing. Now… what to do next week?