Oh darling ones,

It has been a week, and it’s only Wednesday. I packed so many thing into Monday that I had to spend all day yesterday recuperating.

Monday was the deadline to submit my afghan to the State Fair Creative Arts competition. It did not go well. At the very last minute, literally hours before the 7 p.m. deadline, I ruined my submission. In my sleep-deprived, procrastinatory panic I decided I could just paint names on the blanket freehand style.

I could not.

Apparently in that moment I forgot about my Floppy Scoop and distorted vision. So I did what any logical person would do. I texted the Sister Club, cried, and rage barfed.

Sister #2 encouraged me to submit if only for feedback/learning purposes and Sister #4 came over to help me fix it.

With all my anxiety focused on fixing the blanket, I jumped in my janky ass wheelchair and Sister #4 hauled me to Michaels.

YES! I went out “in the community” in my wheelchair for the very first time. I’m pretty sure this was the first time I was in a store since COVID, for sure it was the first time since my stroke. Thanks, Michaels, for taking my shopping in a store in a wheelchair virginity. It’d be really nice if you made your stores a little more wheelchair friendly. I got stuck in a bunch of portfolios and my sister had to rescue me.

With some mineral spirits and some gold paint we raced back to Supergenuis H.Q. to perform some sort of artistic first aid.

Sadly, it did not work, but I submitted my fucked up afghan anyway and holy buckets am I proud of myself for doing thing I said I was gonna do. I expect nothing but feedback, but I’m already winner. I learned so much from this process.

1. It’s almost impossible to elegantly turn crocheted pentagons into squares
2. Trial & Error involves a lot of error. And time.
3. My hubris knows no bounds.
4. Procrastination will bite me in the ass.

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Roughly 63 days ago I decided I needed to learn some Spanish. I know it was 63 days ago because it’s been 35 days since I was devastated by losing my 27-day streak. Math!

I took a semester of Spanish in 8th grade and never looked back. Watching every episode of “Jane the Virgin” hasn’t done as much for me as I’d hoped. Also, 64 for days ago there were a bunch of men roofing the house across the street and they were having very dramatic and hilarious conversations in Spanish for two days. I was more than a little pissed off that I was too ignorant in Spanish to understand anything other than hermano and tio. I really love to eavesdrop.

Practicing a bit of Spanish every day is the thing that keeps me from feeling like a total garbage person who just sits on the couch watching TV while her soul atrophies and she waits for death to come-a-knockin’.

My favorite words so far are bebo, naranja, and azucar. My least favorite words are quiero and necesito because even though they don’t look anything alike, I mix them up roughly 50% of the time. Even in Spanish I struggle with want vs need.

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• That Wolfdogg will probably have his suggestion rights for Rock and Roll Bookclub revoked again. His rights were revoked sometime in June of 07 because he suggested A Boy Called Freebird, a book so heinous and unreadable that I didn’t make it past page 40.
• Just because someone writes something funny for TV (Will Forte, Stephen Colbert, Andy Richter, et. al.) does not mean they can write a funny, fresh, uncliched essay about dating or relationships.
• I really don’t like Neal Pollack’s writing.
• You don’t need to know the difference between losing/loosing or couldn’t care less and could care less to get an essay published in this book.
• Obviously nobody but me actually read the essays in Things I’ve Learned From the Women Who’ve Dumped Me, because they are so riddled with errors and bad cliches that it’s made me question the future of publishing.
• When I started reading this book I was afraid it would get my feminist hackles up. Instead it just got my really? really? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? hackles up. Never before have so many hackneyed, predictable, and utterly pointless essays been gathered together between the cover of a book.
• I feel bad for Tom McCarthy, Dan Savage, Patton Oswalt, and Sam Lipsyte because they wrote funny and meaningful pieces that deserve better than this piece of shit book.
• McCarthy’s piece called “Don’t Leave Too Much Room for the Holy Spirit” is so good that I read it twice. It’s about finding letters from his bible-camp crush and a square dance. It’s really fucking good.
• None of the essays in Things I Learned From the Women Who’ve Dumped Me is actually about anything a dude might have learned from being dumped.
• 97% of the essays feel like a college-newspaper column written the night of deadline because you had a giant hole to fill in the paper.
• I hated this book so much it made me mad. You should avoid it at all costs, unless you like poorly-written, poorly-edited crap by famous people.

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