Alone and Unobserved

Not that James Cameron “Avatar: 3-D Smurf-Cats in Space” crap or that M. Night Shyamalan “The Last Airbender: I’m going to take something whimsical and funny and inventive and methodically turn it into overblown 3-D shit” shit.

I mean the *real* Avatar. The three awesome seasons of Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender series.

Which I am watching right now, instead of doing my cleaning.

Why don’t you join me?

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of the Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender. I own all three seasons and rewatch them frequently. The words “PREE-viously, on AVATAH” make me quiver and thrill. I have thought long and hard about which element I wish I could bend, and doggone it if I haven’t had to wuss out and just decide to be the Avatar (who can bend all four) because I can’t decide.

This is the long way of saying that I am what is known as an “Avatard.” (And no, those obsessed with James Cameron’s epic special-effects extravaganza [...] Continue Reading…

Linda over on All & Sundry wrote a post about how hard it is for her to make and keep friends. The paragraphs that really hit me were numbers 2 and 3:

I don’t have many friends, really. I am shy and reserved and I find it hard to accept the inherent vulnerability that comes with friendships and I’m not good at maintaining them and I’m terrible at reaching out and sometimes I wonder there’s something fundamentally broken in me in this regard.

I fill this friend-shaped void with the internet and I don’t really know if that’s sad or sensible, [...] Continue Reading…

I don’t know how many times I’ve told my deconversion story, in whole or in part, on this blog or elsewhere, but my impression has been—for years at this point; yes, I’ve been an ex-Mormon atheist for that long now and it blows my mind—that the fundamental seed of my apostasy, the moment I first broke from the faith, was when I was about twenty-two and finally began to accept myself as a gay man.

In fact, I’ve found myself defending this position several times, when people have implicitly and explicitly accused me of leaving Mormonism so I could go [...] Continue Reading…

What I want to know is, how do writers who write for a living deal with the constant rejection? Because I’m not good with it. I’ve mostly structured my life around avoiding potential rejection and failure: I don’t ask guys out because they might say no; I only apply for jobs I’m clearly overqualified for; and I publish my writing on my own website because I can be confident I’ll never send myself a politely crushing note that uses phrases like “doesn’t fit our needs” to disguise the stunning blow-between-the-eyes it actually is.

I went through a brief, optimistic phase [...] Continue Reading…

Sorry I’m not blogging very much right now. Partly it’s because I suck, but partly it’s because I’m spending so much time writing other things! Unfortunately they’re things I’m hoping to submit to publishers and magazines, so I can’t really show them to you right now (depending on the market, posting a story to my website can count as having ‘previously published’ it, which makes it much less attractive to editors). Don’t worry, though—once I’ve piled up enough rejection slips I’ll probably end up posting them here anyway.

A few days ago my friend John Remy over at Mind on [...] Continue Reading…

I’ve always been good at what I wanted to do. (Put a different way, I usually wasn’t interested in stuff I wasn’t good at. SEE: Chemistry.) So I’m not sure how to deal with this drive I’ve been feeling the last few months to take photos and write poetry and draw with pencils and charcoal and pastels, none of which I’m good at AT ALL IN THE LEAST BIT. I’m not used to trying to do things that stymie me.

Frustration!

Maybe this shows that my character is improving, since I keep trudging doggedly on (stopping every two seconds to bitch [...] Continue Reading…

I’m almost 100% moved into my new place. Over the past week I’ve slowly found room for most of my things, and thrown out what I don’t need and don’t have room for. I’m a hoarder by nature, so this is an agonizing process, but the lack space and storage in this apartment has forced me to be firm and steely-eyed when it comes to making hard decisions about whether or not to keep that six-year-old button-up shirt that never looked good on me, or whether to toss the six mostly-empty complimentary bottles of eyeglass cleaner scattered across my [...] Continue Reading…

So tired. So, SO tired. I’m not sure if it’s depression (in which case, why the hell am I taking an SSRI) causing the somnolence and unrefreshing sleep, or if it’s the unrefreshing sleep that is causing daytime caffeine overconsumption which is disturbing my sleep. Or stress? In any case, it sucks.

In other news, my friend Brandy gave me a box of pastels she wasn’t using anymore (I believe the exact phrase she used was “I’m so over pastels”) and good grief, they’re hard to use. I’ve developed some intuition for graphite pencil drawing, but add color into the [...] Continue Reading…

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• Okay, okay, I'll go hang out with my friends I GUESS, jeez, stop pushing.
• Testing My Qualifications
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• I think we may have a real problem here.
• This Isn't Even AdNonSense, This Is AdFuckWittery
• Focaccia Pugliese
• "Issues and Insights": The IBD editorial board demonstrates its tenuous gasp on constitutional law and the basic facts

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