Back in touch

I love voicemails that start with "I hope this is still your number."

Salinger

I went through my J.D. Salinger phase junior and senior year of high school. I liked Franny and Zooey way better than Catcher in the Rye, though, and Nine Stories best of all. I even wrote a ten-page research paper on the Glass family (whose names I can still rattle off - Les, Bessie, Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Waker, Zooey, Franny).

The best part about coming home is grabbing a book at random off the shelf in my room, opening it to a similarly random page, and plowing in. I can do that for hours, and I often do. I reread a couple of the stories from Nine Stories last night. I enjoyed them well enough. I still think Salinger's a good author, but he's not my favorite anymore. Couldn't tell you why; he's just not.

His dedications still crack me up, though. Here's the one to Franny and Zooey:

"As nearly as possible in the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon companion to accept a cool lima bean, I urge my editor, mentor and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genus domus of The New Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors, to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book."

And here's the one to Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction:

"If there is an amateur reader still left in the world--or anybody who just reads and runs--I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children."

Status

Updating your Facebook status is the quintessential path to instant gratification. Feeling lonely? Send a quote, an inside joke, an offhand observation, or a gripe out into the void, and nine times out of ten, you'll get a couple "likes" and a sympathetic comment or two within an hour. It doesn't matter that they're usually from people who'd forgotten you exist until it popped up in their minifeed. It's human contact, it's validation, and sometimes, that's all you wanted.

Winter Break '09: To-do list

To-do list for Winter Break '09:

-Apply to Teach for America. Deadline is January 8th, so I still have some time.

-Apply to ACE. The Alliance for Catholic Education is basically like TFA, except it's run through Notre Dame. It's a two-year commitment where you're teaching in Catholic schools during the year and taking classes to get a Master's in education over the summer. My mom found out about it when she was dropping Katherine off at college in August and has been pushing it ever since. It's a good deal and all, probably the better of the two, but I'm applying more to placate her than because it's what I really want to do. Eight years of Catholic school was enough, thanks.

-Finish the first draft of my thesis. We were supposed to have all sixty pages done by the end of the first semester, but I told my supervisor around mid-October that that just wasn't gonna happen. He laughed and said to do as much as I could. I submitted a fifteen-page story and a twenty-page story, but the second one is a complete do-over that I wrote in 36 hours so I'd have something to turn in. Coming up with ideas, brainstorming in my Moleskine, jotting down outlines are easy. Writing is the hard part. I have to learn to to silence my inner editor, to write crap knowing that it's crap, to get quantity down on paper and worry about turning it into quality later.

-Set up a move-in date / cable / electricity for my new apartment. Just a few phone calls I have to make. I'm moving out of Jefferson West into my own place at 37th & Speedway next semester, and that's all I care to say about that on the Internet.

-Hang out with Danny, Emily, Michelle, and others TBD. Now that I'm back in town for good, I can start making plans with people. Danny and Em are no-brainers; we keep missing each other when they visit Austin. And now that all but the closest of high-school relationships have faded out, I think we're at the point where "catching up" is enough of a reason to get together with anyone we ever knew, regardless of how close we were or how long it's been.

-Read. Just finished a book of short stories by Breece D'J Pancake and loved it. A lot. Colum McCann's new book is next. Ham on Rye, by Charles Bukowski, is after that. I like how I can read for fun as much as I want and chalk it up as thesis research.

-Watch movies. I've been keeping a list of movies I learned about in my film history class (shudder, long story for another day) all semester, and now it's time to rent 'em one by one and enjoy. A lot of it (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, for example, or Annie Hall) is stuff I'm kinda embarrassed to have not seen yet.

-Apply to grad school. Oh, yeah, that. It's a back-up option.