Unsolicited Advice

[Author's note: Sorry for the delay on this. The AC adapter on my laptop finally expired, and it took a bit for the new one to arrive.]

My sidekick sent me a birthday book with a brief note attached. It had only faint whiffs of hysteria, which is to be expected from someone in a very compressed RN program who has planned her next bout of proper sleep for May 2017. 'Congrats on leveling up you managed to move again without dying life is awful but here is a book happy birthday?' more or less.

I complain a lot here, I know. I have a lot of thoughts about stuff that goes wrong, and if I don't let them out they will circle around and around in my brain incessantly until my head kerplodes. Every so often someone tells me they appreciate reading it, because it makes them feel less like an alien when they think similar things.

Life is, in fact, not perfect right now. I've done something to my back again, and I confess to being utterly mystified by it. I have no idea what I…

"The Adventure of the Speckled Band" (54:17)

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"The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" (41:33)

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I recently managed to justify buying myself a set of Bluetooth earbuds. Ruining regular earbuds is a recurring feature of my life; I go nowhere without a music player, and usually I'm carrying another ten pounds of oddly-shaped crap besides, so I'm constantly pulling the wires out of the drivers, or breaking the cord at the plug, or God forbid busting the actual headphone jack on the player with a hard enough hit. I'm trying to be smarter-slash-less desperate with money, and testing out this whole theory that if you wait a little longer and pay twice as much, you'll have to replace the damn things less than half as often. I've bought so many sets of cheap earbuds at CVS that I ought to have a buy-10-get-one punch card for them, so all I need the expensive set to do is last more than a few months, and I'm way ahead.

The first set I tried were terrible -- returned with extreme prejudice the very next day, on the grounds that you have to be trying to make earbuds …

I was asked a while ago to read through a book by Catherine Hakim, called Erotic Capital: The Power In The Boardroom And The Bedroom. The library finally coughed it up, so I did.

tl;dr: Hakim's thesis is interesting and absolutely deserves an entire book of analysis. She didn't bother to write one. The book is bullshit and you will just throw it at the wall.

The review inquiry came to me from one of my readers, on the grounds that I've worked in an industry where attractiveness, specifically conformist femininity, is an asset. So you are all absolutely clear where I am coming from, this is me (NSFW, if your work is hostile to cleavage):

"The Man With The Twisted Lip" (51:35)

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Internet back, back at work, back at the studio, doing a thousand things at once! As always. I did discover I can get /r/UnresolvedMysteries loaded on the Kindle, which basically means I will never look up at anything on the train again.

Circlet Press has a Patreon campaign running, I still have a Patreon campaign running, I am applying for a zillion artistic grants because if there's one thing I actually have now it's a body of (blogging) work to prove I am indeed a writer. If anyone knows of any programs or venues looking for a non-fiction essayist, send 'em my way.

More stuff later. Allons-y.

Comcast are wankers. We have the modem, it works, and we can see their network. but they are telling us they cannot turn on the actual internet until the "beginning of the billing cycle", whenever the fuck that is. They're lying about that -- I've gotten it done before -- and we all know it. I suggested the roommate handling the internet bill call Comcast back and sing The Song That Doesn't End, or anything else Shari Lewis and Lambchop ever did, until they give him a manager.

In the meantime, I am forced to work at the library, for an annoyingly useless definition of "work". Their federal funding requires them to lock me out of the erotica site I am technically helping to manage, so I cannot actually do much of anything online. It's also forcing me onto the exact business hours schedule that is the reason I do not have a regular office job, so this has to stop sometime very soon.

PayPal also has not bothered to pull their thumbs out, so the payment…

"The Five Orange Pips" (41:19)

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My birthday is a week from today. Being born on 9/9 has earned me a lifetime of gift-wrapped school supplies and funny looks from numerologists, as well as the one-time prize of going to college when I was still a minor. I had to wrestle every last piece of my university paperwork away from my mother. She couldn't be arsed to sign permission slips or homework sheets while I was in public school, but she attempted to hoard everything the university sent me.

I'll be thirty-five this year. I've already outlived both Janis Joplin and Jesus. Frankly, I dunno where to go from here.

I do not request birthday gifts. For a long time, I actively tried to avoid them by refusing to give suggestions even when asked. This lasted until one college friend informed me that if I did not point and ook at a book or comic or CD or something, she was going to go down to Wal-Mart and buy me a giant pink lawn flamingo. If you have the uncontrollable urge to buy me a thing, my Amazon Wish List is …