A few things I hate.

1. Rejection. I really, really really hate it.
2. Waking up in the morning to find you've been rejected.
3. Forgetting that I shouldn't look at my email first thing in the morning because of the possibility of rejection.
4. The way rejection takes over your day and makes it all about the big echoing NO you heard before you even got out of bed. Before you even drank a glass of water or practically even opened your eyes.

In conclusion: rejection is a stupid day-hogger, shade-thrower, summer-inversion rat bastard of a jerk.

There, I said it.

However, in defense of my day, there were other things that happened (besides being rejected):

1. chat with various kids, both live and digital

2. seeing Spy with my darling aunt Sal, and having it be just as hilarious the second time as the first

3. hearing this song



4. and hearing this song



5. shrimp taco (because I was too rejected to cook)

6. the thought of this:

6. listening to D sing various of the Zelda songs (the Ballad of the Gales? I think?) while he Linked it up and I held the baby

7. doing a really splendid revision of a poem in my manuscript so that I can

8. send it to three presses who are holding open reading periods at the moment.

Talking stuff over with the historian, and then revising that poem is what really helped me turn the corner. Anyway: rejectors, not that I think it was personal or anything--at least not for you--I just want you to know that I improved a poem and therefore you did not win. If you were trying to win. Which, probably you weren't. EVEN SO: rejection is not the boss of me, not today anyway.

Facebook, my enemy.

Last night, the historian and I had dinner with some people we hadn't met before, charming people, one of whom hates Facebook and refuses to be on it. The more people attempt to friend him, the stronger his resolve.

I am on Facebook, but I must tell you, my feelings about it are decidedly mixed, trending toward the negative, and here are my reasons:

1. It's like junior high. Who has more friends? Why am I not popular? A guy I know at work, when I said this, said, "You can have my friends," but why didn't they want to be friends with me in the first place? Junior high was hellish in the first place (I'm pretty sure there was a high gate at the entrance of mine, inscribed with the motto "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here"). Basically, life after junior high is just one giant renunciation of that hell. So why would I want to go there willingly?

2. I hate you and your stupid quizzes, Facebook. Not that I am at all averse to wasting time with a meaningless quiz! But when I click out to the suggested quiz and it says, basically, if you take this quiz, an army of data-miners can invade your Facebook life and start writing checks on your accounts, I say NO. There's nothing worse than tantalizing me with a quiz, then making it impossible for me to take it. It's like giving me the Cosmopolitan magazine with the "Does he really love you? Take our quiz to find out how you can know for sure!" teaser on the cover, then going inside and finding out that you have to give them your driver's license and passport as collateral. It's not worth it! Not even for a movie quiz!

3. I'm pretty sure that Facebook is responsible for the fact that the bloggers I like to read are blogging less. Tell me I'm wrong.

4. Glitchy.

5. Slow.

6. The status update as a genre flummoxes me. Which I think is hilarious, actually, since I am prepared to whine and inflate and engage in all sorts of rhetorical puffery to blog, but a single sentence seems inevitably banal. Or it crosses some sort of banality threshold beyond which I am JUST NOT WILLING TO GO, the people.

7. In conclusion, I will still be on Facebook for the opportunity to spy on my friends, and I may also occasionally offer a tiny little update from myself, and also I will use it to find people I never meant to be out of contact with but now am.

But I don't have to like it.