Thursday, 13 September 2012

This evening, my wife and I ventured downtown for the 2013 St. Paul Alamanac’s release party. As you may recall, I submitted two short pieces to the almanac with the hopes that they’d accept at least one of them. To my delight, they accepted both.

The event was held in a swanky, hipster building with lousy parking. The party actually spilled into three businesses: A cafe, in which they were passing out delicious congratulatory cake to the attendees; an art gallery, in which the original photos and paintings – reproductions of which appear in the book – were on display; and a Buddhist center, in which a few authors were slated to read their work.

The highlight for me was receiving my complimentary copy of the book and a check for $100 (authors received $50 for each accepted work). Here I am gloating:

Money in my left hand and a book in my right. It just doesn’t get much better than this.

If you want to read my short stories, the book is going up for sale around the Twin Cities this weekend. It will soon be available at the Ramsey and Hennepin County Libraries, too. Also, there are several author readings planned in coffee shops around St. Paul over the next few months. I will be reading at the October 1st and November 19th events.

Friday, 14 September 2012

As I noted back on August 9th, I won a short story contest sponsored by Hamline University and Homewood Studios. The short story had to be about malaria, of all things, and I am sure I won due to my extensive experience with malaria. (NOTE: Here I am using the word “extensive” to mean “none at all.”)

A few weeks ago, one of the contest coordinators emailed me to tell me I won an opportunity to meet with a professor and talk about how to polish up my short story.

I wrote back and told her that was basically bullshit because, for one thing, the contest flyer said the winner would receive a gift card. For another thing, I told her, I am currently enrolled as an English Major, so if I need to talk to a professor about my writing, I have ample opportunity already. Thirdly, I told her I didn’t care to work on the short story I submitted. I said that the point of the short story was to win the contest, which it did. So as far as I’m concerned, it’s done. I don’t care if a professor feels it needs work.

So then I got a response from the head of the contest explaining that the other lady didn’t communicate very well. He said that what I won was a chance to work with a Masters-level professor on any of my writing, so if I have anything else I’m writing, she’ll be happy to help me with that. He said she normally teaches these $200-300 classes, and I’d basically get that for free: I could email her any writing I’m currently working on, tell her what I need work on, she’ll read it, then we can meet in person to hammer it out. He added that if I preferred the gift card, he would mail me out a $10 Barnes and Noble card.

The Barnes and Noble offer sounded tempting, but today I decided to write to that professor and ask her for some help with areas of my book that my editor says need to be fixed.

Saturday, 15 September 2012

Do you remember when I posted this…

An extremely condensed version of my book has been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of FREE INQUIRY. I was given the option of submitted either an excerpt or a condensed version and, though I would have preferred an excerpt, I really couldn’t find a ~2,000 word chunk of the book that was capable of standing on its own, so I gave them a condensed version.

…? No? That’s probably because I posted it back on June 29th of last year. And, today, the good folks at the Council for Secular Humanism finally got around to publishing it.

Yeah, it’s true. First it was slated to be published last September, but then they emailed me saying it was delayed until December. Then, in November, they emailed saying it would be delayed until now. I even wrote back, essentially asking WTF?, and the editor-in-chief wrote me back saying it was pushed out due to more timely events requiring space. He said not to worry, ’cause they almost never push things out twice. I wrote back and said, “Um, you already did push this out twice.” Then he wrote back saying: “Oh. Yeah. Sorry about that. Well, unless Mitt Romney decides to leave the Mormon Church and give us an exclusive interview, I personally guarantee your piece will be in the October/November issue.”

And so it is.

Sunday, 16 September 2012

As I mentioned back on the 7th, today I was part of an authors’ panel during the Minnesota Atheists’ monthly meeting.

I was a tad concerned that the meeting would consist of just people reading excerpts from their essays. Sixteen people each reading for three to five minutes would, I thought, take a loooong time. I was even happy when one of the authors had to cancel, bringing the total down to fifteen.

In fact, it worked out fine. Most of the authors chose appropriate portions of their essays, and about ten of them only read for about three minutes. One author decided to read his whole essay, but his time-grabbing was compensated for by the author who read for merely 20 seconds.

After the meeting, I sat in a row with the other authors – not just the other 14 people who read, but also some of the authors who attended but did not read (this included my wife) – to sign copies of the book that attendees were purchasing.

Then we went out to eat at a buffet, where we all got a discount. I ate too much, but since I had a headache all day, I was more than happy to swap out my headache for a bloated belly.

Lastly, I want to thank my friends and family who attended to support me today. I appreciated it.

 Tuesday, 11 September 2012

 For class today, we had to read a decent poem and then write a two-page paper about it. I know I whine about Hamline a lot, and so this day will be no different…

Two pages about a single, thirty-line poem?

Here’s the poem.

Needless to say, I was able to turn in a paper that met the requirement, but, damn, it’s hard to write two whole pages about a single poem. And I say tha tas someone who’s usually so verbose I have to edit like mad. For example, when I write speeches for Toastmasters, they’re usually over 15 minutes long on my first read-through. I then have to take a chainsaw to them and bring them down to ten or eight or even six minutes. For today’s assignment, I had the opposite problem. Tough.

In other news, my old friend Tim has decided to take a photo every day and post it on the old WWW. My wife had this same idea back in 2006-07. So I’m sure Tim was inspired by that, especially since I just talked about my wife’s project in This Recent Post, which I wrote just before Tim’s project began. Either way, good for him. He’s taking some great photos. Comment on them, if you feel so compelled. Comments help give bloggers the incentive to continue.

Wednesday, 12 September 2012

Well, today Owen and I completed reading the book Detective Camp.

If you’re one of the two people who actively check my list of Books I’ve Ths Year, then you’ll know why this is a milestone: I have now read at least one book from each letter of the alphabet (I’m talking about the titles here).

Honestly, I didn’t try to do this…it just sort of happened. Of course, I was helped along by reading the A to Z Mysteries with Owen. This year, we read the G-Z books (but not the T book, which we read last year). So, just by reading those, I had already read a book from every letter except A, B, C, D, E, F, and T. As luck would have it, I read a book with a title beginning with A, B, C and T during the first part of the year, leaving only D, E, and F. I talked about that last month.

Coincidentally, my father-in-law let me borrow the book Fire and Rain last month. I didnt’ even ask to borrow it, so don’t think I asked just to satisfy the list. Nope. He just gave it to me. So I read it. Then Owen and I read the really awful Esio Trot, which I don’t reccommend you parents out there reading with your kids.

Anyway, this just left the letter D. Owen insisted we read Detective Camp (I didn’t even want to read it, being plenty done with Ron Roy’s writings). But even if I hadn’t read it, I’m positive I would have read a D book by year’s end. I just received Damned Good Company in the mail to read for a book review, and one of the books I had to buy last week for my latest university class has a title that starts with D. So there you go.

Sunday, 09 September 2012

Ten years ago today, I began my employment with Part Three Analytical, a contract lab for 3M that refused to call itself a contract lab for 3M.

This may seem like a somewhat arbitrary anniversary to acknowledge, especially since I don’t work there anymore, but it was a big deal to me at the time.

Earlier that year, I graduated from Century College. I spent the summer looking for a new job. I wasn’t terribly eager about it. For one thing, I liked my current job. Yes, it was in the eyecare industry and, yes, I had to work with the public, but working at Apple Valley Eye Care was an enormous leap forward in terms of job satisfaction.

See, in February 2001, I finally quit my job at Lenscrafters. I worked there for over six years, enduring all manner of incompetent and micromanaging bosses – a revolving door, it seemed, of goons who each had their own idea of how to ingratiate themselves to upper management. Then there were the long and inconsistent hours – one day I worked from 10:00 to 2:00, the next day I worked frmo 9:00 AM to 9:30 PM. The pay was marginal, my co-workers were so-so, and the customers collectively rank as one of the worst experiences of my life…right up there with junio high school, the orthodontist, and the Wheelock Parkway congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

So, yeah, leaving that hell and going to Apple Valley Eye Care was downright glorious.

But, like I said, I still had to work with customers. There also wasn’t much room for advance. And the benefits, as is typical for a small company, weren’t much to speak of.

Finally, in August 2002, I interviewed and was offered a job at Part Three. Following our wedding anniversary, and jury duty, I began work there on this day ten years ago.

When I arrived home that evening, and Jennifer inquired as to my day, I said, “It was awesome, I didn’t have to talk to one customer all day.”

And it’s been that way now for ten wonderful years.

Saturday, 08 September 2012

Well, in the world of obscure and nearly meaningless trivia, I’d like to take today’s post to point out that Jimmy Carter, our 39th President, has now set a new record for longest Presidential retirement. He has now been an ex-president for 11,554 days. That’s one day longer than Herbert Hoover’s retirement, which ran from March 4, 1933 (the day FDR took over the reins) to October 20, 1964 (the day he died).

Nine presidents, of course, had no retirement at all. That’s because eight of them – William Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, Warren Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy – died on the job. While the ninth, Barack Obama, is still employed at the White House. 

Of the 34 men who outlived their tenure as president, some of them didn’t have much of a retirement. President Polk, for example, died just over three months after leaving office. More famously, both George Washington and Woodrow Wilson died just under three years after leaving the job as Commander-in-Chief.

Of course, the word “retirement” isn’t the best word for it. Carter hasn’t exactly been sitting on his duff these thirty-one years since he moved out of the White House. Other ex-presidents, too, had notable careers after leaving. John Quincy Adams, for example, went on to serve in the House of Representatives for 17 years following his Presidency. William Taft followed up his four years in the White House with a stint as Supreme Court Justice (this thus gave him the unique distinction of being on both ends of the Oath of Office for the Presidency).

So, you might ask: Does this mean Jimmy Carter has lived longer than any other President? No. At 87 years young, Carter has had a long life, but he hasn’t lived longer than several other former Presidents, including the man he beat for the job back in 1976: Gerald Ford holds the record for longest-lived President. He was 93 years, 165 days old when he died. In fact, Carter isn’t even the oldest living ex-President. That distinction goes to George Bush, Sr., who is about three months older than Carter (but, having left the White House in 1993, has had a far shorter retirement).

Any way you slice it, Carter’s been collecting a Presidential pension for a long time. As The Atlantic kindly put it, his ex-Presidency has lasted longer than 26 Iranian Hostage Crises.