I am a crazy-deliberate Scrabulous player, which does not show in the words I play, since I so often lay down “WO” or “ET.”  But I have been playing uber-slow games with people for the past couple months, and in the last two weeks, I have started playing a little more… I’m about back at the level I was when I first got interested in it.  Today around 5, I decided that I’d kill the pre-dinner hour with some live games, so I used the “host a table” feature for the first time and started playing some strangers.  I’m holding my own in one and doing pretty well in the other, which is a suprise because I have given myself no more than two minutes per turn.  Both opponents have now gone offline, within five minutes of each other, so I’ll probably have to drag these games out along with some of the other games I have going.

I have a great affinity for words but Scrabulous no longer seems much like a word game to me, though occasionally my vocabulary expands as a result of an ambitious arrangement of tiles that just happens to work.  But the electronic game does not, unless you play challenge mode (which bores me), force you to know the words, only to be willing to experiment with tiles until something works.  So it’s a math game that sometimes yields neat words.  Why I should find myself more excited about the game now that I have come to this realization is beyond me.  Logically, I should find it more boring than ever.

I just started my tenth concurrent game, which is my absolute max, so I probably won’t take any more on.  I’m hoping that I can finish some of these before I head to school, because once there, I will not play a lick.

A friend sent me The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which will be my nighttime entertainment this weekend.  I do not expect to read more than 40-60 pages before I head to school, but I’m told that the book is so good I’ll be envious, so perhaps…

Wow.  Little Fury lay fallow for over a month, the longest such dry spell since I started blogging in 2002.  Thanks to each of you who sent puzzled notes asking when it would be regularly updated again… you can now resume wasting valuable work time here, instead of surfing for Internet pr0n.

I just finished up my first radio appearance in a long, long time as a guest on WUNC’s The State of Things.   Producer Susan Davis, host Frank Stasio, and the rest of the production team do a really terrific job; from start to finish I was amazed at how effortless they make it seem.  I was on with Michael McFee to talk about The Smallest Talk, Bull City Press, and literary life in Durham.  Sitting in their new studios in the American Tobacco Complex, it’s hard not to be struck by how thoroughly Durham is in the throes of being revitalized, of growing into a truly exceptional place to live and work.

Assuming that I’m able to complete this last stretch, I graduate on July 12, which has been part of the reason for my silence.  I am now assembling a class and preparing for two thesis interviews.  I’m not sure why I have chosen to focus more of my energy and grey matter on these two tasks than I did on most of the rest of the semester, but friends, I tell you, they have eaten up just about all of my spare bandwidth.  I often feel like I’m not myself for days on end.  But I suppose that these two tasks are the first where I’ve been really beholden to my classmates, and I feel the weight of that responsibility quite keenly.  If I am to leave Warren Wilson with a sense of peace, I’ll have to feel like I knocked these two tasks out of the park.  (As an aside, I am also working with Lili Flanders on the fundraising for the graduating class gift to Friends of Writers.   Though wehave publicly stated that we really want 100% of the grads to participate, we’ve been a little more subdued about our other goal.  But I’ll put it out there, commit it to print: We don’t just want to contribute more than any class before us, we want to shatter the record, setting the bar so high for future classes that they will hire professional fundraisers.  We want the Holden Minority Scholarship endowed now.  If you are a loved one and you’re reading this, I hope you’ll consider a donation– the donation form is on the FOW website– in honor of the Summer ‘08 grads.)

So I expect the blogging will be slow a while longer, though since Ladybug is currently in Turkey, I have a little more bachelor time.  I don’t think any man wants to receive e-mail updates from his wife, half a world away, about coed naked massage, but that’s the state of my inbox right now…

Before work, my iTunes, on random, played three Queens of the Stone Age songs, including “Better Living Through Chemistry.”

On my way to work, my car mp3 player, only a 9% chance of playing Queens of the Stone Age at any time, played three of their songs in a row, including “Better Living Through Chemistry.”

When I arrived at work, iTunes, again on random, was playing MF Doom.  Then it played “Better Living Through Chemistry.”

I am trying to get a long list of things done today, but every time I make an attempt, I find that either I do not have enough information to complete the task, or I have enough information but I make so many mistakes along the way that I think, “Maybe I should do something else.”  The one positive thing I’ve accomplished at work today was completely an accident.

When I went to get some lunch, my car served up another two Queens of the Stone Age songs.  That was five in a row, despite only a 9% chance that any given song on that disc will be Queens of the Stone Age.

California has overturned a ban on gay marriage.  Charleston is hosting National Microfiction Weekend.  Schools, get your web filters ready to go to work, because Joe Biden just called Bush’s “Democrats appease terrorists” speech “bullshit.”  And if you check my Last.fm page, guess what just came up again?

OK, I will go ahead and tell you:

Queens of the Stone Age - Better Living Through Chemistry [mp3]

Productivity blogs I read have recently recommended that, in order to keep some balance, you make sure that you divide your life into several sectors (work, personal/private, social, health) and accomplish at least one goal from every category.  They’ve run features on the importance of social contact with at least one friend per day, and “tickling” social contacts who are at a distance… basically, ping them every so often to make sure they’re still responding.  To keep them friendly.  I had lunch with an old friend, one I’d not seen in almost seven years, and he told the story of how his former drummer had a long list of people, and would go through that list, calling each one to check in and say hello.  When he got to the end of the list, which could take a couple months, he’d start again at the top immediately.  “We had a place to stay in any city we went to,” he said.  “We never had to ask.  If they knew we were coming in town, they offered up their place.  That’s why they were on the list, sometimes.”

I think a lot of poets have this going on, too.  I do not.  I’m woeful at keeping in touch with the people who are important to me.  It feels like at any given time I’ll have about eight in my contact list that I’m a reasonable friend to and will reach out to.   And there will be a small handful who haven’t yet given up on me and will check in occasionally.  But I never feel like I have the mental space, the bandwidth, to keep up with all the people who are important to me.  The Facebooks and Twitters and all those other tools are useful, though with Facebook I don’t always see when people change status. (Twitter seems to be just about perfect for keeping in touch… which is why I have come to value it so.  I wish everyone would Twitter.)  So I’ll drift in and out– more out– of contact with good people.  And if/when people re-surface that I’m excited about hearing from, sometimes I still manage to blow the exchange in some way.  Sooner or later, the malaise strikes again, and I go underground, not responding to calls and e-mails unless they’re essential to surviving… like, I have to answer for work.

I almost wonder if I should do like my friend’s drummer did, get a list and just go through, checking it off, maybe even pruning it every so often if I’ve lost touch and find that it doesn’t bother me. It feels a little overdetermined, a little contrived.  But it would, at the very least, get me thinking about what and who is important to me. How… mechanical.  I never wanted my friends to be a contact database.  I’m not trying to make sure I have a couch to stay on if I come to town.

But I also think about the joy of hearing from those unexpected folks.  I’m not just talking about the surprise contact from high school who found me on Facebook or MySpace, though sometimes those are really fulfilling as well.  I’m talking about the people who mean a great deal, the ones who just drift and drift further if I let them, and eventually drift so far in the universe’s bizarre orbital pattern that they eventually come back around, and for a brief minute– an e-mail or a phone call or a chance encounter at the burrito place– they’re back in my life.  I want to keep them there.  I want to be a better friend than I am.  I got a LinkedIn invite today from someone I last heard from over three years ago… I remember, because it was the day before my wedding that I last heard a peep from this friend. Hey you– if you’re reading, I don’t ever want you to disappear again.

…to stay out way too late on a weeknight, particularly when they serve you free beer and you have 50+ people to talk to.

Here’s a vague “please send me some good vibes, I need them today” blog post.  Don’t you hate these?  Because then you start thinking, “Oh no, what’s the deal? Is something really wrong, or is this blogger just having one of those days where he can’t get the chocolate in the peanut butter?  Because if it’s the former, I will send my good vibes, but if it’s the latter, I could send my good vibes elsewhere… like to the Obama campaign, or to starving children.  Surely they need my good vibes more than this chump.”

So, while remaining perfectly vague, I’ll tell you this: No, I don’t think anything is wrong, and I’m having a perfectly fine day.  But good vibes are still welcome.

I seem to have wasted the better part of my day doing nothing, which was, after the past couple weeks, very, very welcome. It’s not that I have been extraordinarily industrious the past few weeks; if anything, I have felt far from it. But yesterday was the first day I’ve felt good in a while, and I didn’t use it to catch up at work or on my MFA work. I used it to hang out with my wife. It’s been a while since I devoted a whole day to that without worry.

Well, not a whole day– I spent a couple hours watching Carolina get taken to the wire by Virginia Tech in the ACC Tournament. And I was almost hoarse at the end of the game.

My plan today is to indulge in things that I know are bad for me, watch some more basketball, and then rock an annotation and maybe a revision that I have had my eye on. I sent my last packet in on Tuesday so I expect I’ll hear something back in the next day or two– I kind of hope I don’t hear back tonight, so I can focus in on what I didn’t get to in the last packet.

I’ve been quiet this week for several reasons, among them:

• general frustration
• a work schedule that has seemed unrelenting, but probably upon reflection wasn’t
• staring at poems, wondering what the hell I should be doing next
• when I read a poem I really want to post for you, by the time I get downstairs I’m already distracted by Scrabulous, ESPN.com, or a vague sense of paranoia

Emma, this is for you.

I’ve moved from Movable Type to WordPress and combined years of blog entries into one compendious monster. Enter the old entries at your peril.  Next up: I have to categorize about 341 entries created after I killed the White Noise blog and stopped using categories.  Don’t you wish your girlfriend would blog like me?

The day after a fine evening spent at a bar, my hair’s going to reek of smoke if I don’t take a shower. But if I’m working at home, and want to work in my pj’s, that’s the price I am going to pay.