As you can see, the website is undergoing some work.  Hopefully, we’ll have something reasonably finished by Christmas.

An essay titled On Jealousy, in which I somehow manage to be unhappy while lounging in a villa in Southern France, is freshly published at The Nervous Breakdown.

I managed to link the new material I’ve been writing to older material, and at least for a little while, should be able to sail through a little faster. The end of today’s count.

I discovered a fun phrase while searching the Web yesterday. When Russian writers like Mikhail Bulgakov were writing traditional Russian novels that the Soviet regime wouldn’t publish, they called it “writing into the desk,” because they wrote books that they knew they couldn’t get published.

Sounds a little like what most experimental writers are doing these days, given the present-day corporate publishing environment.

So the baby name panic button kicked in yesterday. As a writer, it’s my job to come up with a clever name for my child. You would think I would be good at this, but given the debacle with my first child’s name, I’m gun-shy. (It turned out OK, but the fact that we announced her name as one thing, and then caved to the groans and changed it to a name that’s more common (albiet, beautiful) still smarts.)

(Our first-born’s name is Ava Isabel Frost. A nice name that rolls of the tongue, but there’s about a million Ava’s in Portland these days… Our original name was going to be Wilhelmina Marmalade Frost–it’s tough to tell whether Ava would have pulled it off, or hated us forever for that one, but it was certainly more bold.)

There is the added stress of us choosing not to find out whether it’s a boy or a girl, so I have to come up with TWO good names.

Adding to the grief, I discovered a website that has a forum in which some so-called baby experts will review your name. So, of course, I listed my names there. The first woman shot them all down. (Although, I took some comfort in reading her profile. She’s in her late forties, and her sons are named the rather generic Michael, Patrick and Robert)

Anyway, here are some of the names we are thinking about. Feel free to leave a comment with your suggestions. I’m a glutton for punishment…

GIRL NAMES:

Beatrix Riona (nickname Bee)
Marguerite ______ (nickname Maisie)
Zia or Zaida ______ (middle name?)
Astrid _______ (middle name?)

BOY NAMES:

Ezra Rainier
Atticus ______
Jasper Rainier

During one of my not infrequent evenings of aimless web surfing, I came across an article about Jane McGonigal, a young woman who has predicted that a game developer will win a Nobel Prize by the year 2032. While I’m attracted to the both the arbitrariness of her having chosen the year 2032, the eccentricity of her pursuit of such a precise goal (it doesn’t seem such a stretch to think she’s envisioned herself as the recepient), and just her general geekiness, what struck me about her this prediction was how essential it seems to me.

One of the “games” that Ms. McGonigal has helped invent, is a month-long Alternative Reality Game (which, as all gamers must do, has been acronymed ARG), called World Without Oil. During the month of May, players of the game simulate a world oil crisis. They blog about the crisis, send video, and walk (or bike, or take public transportation) around imagining that oil prices are skyrocketing.

I’m not sure if the game has resulted in any major breakthoughs in how people should deal with an oil crisis (From the time I’ve spent surfing the WWO website, it seems to have merely encouraged an uptick in creative writing, photography, and gardening) but I liked the general tenor of it.

I wonder if we need this sort of game. If the warnings of the entire scientific community can’t stop us from continuing a carbon pollution that very well may destroy the planet we live on, and if the laws of supply and demand don’t stop us soon enough, how can we get everybody to stop?

I mean, seriously, the inconvenience of taking my bike everywhere, while every motorist who comes up behind me raises the hair on my neck, is just too much to do alone. It’s simply not very fun, and I end up in my car again.

But if we all spontaneously started playing a game and tried to make it a new human adventure…

David Rochester and I took my blog post On My Wasted Education a step too far.

One of the secondary consequences of moving into my new digs at Mercury Studios is that my laptop stays there in the evenings and the weekends. In a mere week, this has improved the moods of my wife and daughter, raised my dog’s ears, improved the countenance of my kitchen, and even shrunk the always growing pile of books by my bed.

I knew that I had problem, but the extent of it didn’t hit me until the computer was gone for a few days. I use the Internet much like my father used the T.V. when I was young, something which I always hated him for–he tuned out everything and channel surfed, watching shows that clearly bored the hell out of him. Seeing your father waste his time like this, instead of say, playing with you, permanently altered my relationship with him.

What I do on the Internet is identical. It’s terribly boring stuff that I tune out to: I’ll read arcane sports article after arcane sports article on Sportsline.com, despite the fact that I couldn’t care less about who the new basketball coach is at Wichita State; or I’ll read all the comments on Steve Master’s hurricane blog on wunderground.com, despite the fact that I live in Portland, Oregon, and don’t have even a passing interest in meteorology.

What I hate the most about my addiction is how hollow it is. People who are addicted to WoW are at least addicted to something interesting that there’s some sort of community around. Hell, their kids might even think it’s cool. My addiction is far more nihilistic. It’s really a big fuck-you to my very existence.

Train operator: “Ferry Terminal”
A gay man to his partner: “And there’s no cure.”