Friday, April 11, 2008

blogging myself to sleep

i have been having trouble sleeping this week. due to the stress of finding a new place to live. i found a new place to live. there is no more stress about that. but a little stress about something else that is related to that. i drank a can of coke a while ago. it may make it hard to go to sleep. i might wake up in pain because of the caffeine. i drank a can of coke because i did not get much sleep last night. and i needed to be awake and friendly towards my new potential apartment-mates. they are now my future apartment-mates. i just took a melatonin. i might be addicted to the stuff. i am waiting for it to kick in. it is working. a little.

everybody who reads this blog probably knows about the new issue of Lamination Colony. but its editor, Blake Butler, promised a gift to anyone who blogs about it. or that may be a false memory that Blake Butler has implanted in my head. damn him.

every issue of Lamination Colony has at least one thing that leaves me flabbergasted. i cannot tell you what this is because it appears that the current issue has disappeared. the last issue is in its place. perhaps the last issue has eaten the current issue. i think the first thing in the contents left me flabbergasted. it was a bunch of poems. i usually don't like poems. except for when i do.

Blake Butler also did cool evil things to some submissions like mine. his scheme was to accept the first time submissions that had an X in the subject line of the email and were able to run through the gauntlet of Blake's bulk mail folder. his stipulation was that he could do whatever he wanted to the things that were sent to him. i liked this idea. so i sent him something. i really liked what he did with it. i still need to read more of what he did with the things from other people. i haven't made it that far yet. almost.

i will be living down the street from Mike Young. he will be moving to the town where i live now in June. i think he decided this when i told him i was moving down the street from him. we might do an e-book anthology together. since we like the same internet-y writers. but have diametrical tastes in fiction. we will ask authors that we like for one story that is reality-based and one story that is irreal. i don't think Mike knows this. i told him we would ask for one literary story and one genre story. but i really meant one real and one irreal.

i just closed my eyes involuntarily.

i will be living with a couple from China. they were described in the ad as "a quiet and clean couple." i looked into my room and a woman was sleeping in it. she just flew in from China with another guy. they are staying for a week. after that i take the room. the room smelled like two people who had just traveled across the world. i hope it doesn't continue to smell like that. i am now a little worried. i googled the apartment area thing. this was a mistake. i found a site called ratemyapartment.com or something. most people did not have nice things to say. they complained about bad odors. they did not mention bad odors that smelled like people who had just traveled across the world. i hope the odor was the people who had just traveled across the world and not the actual room. the rest of the apartment did not smell like people who had just traveled across the world. the rest of the apartment smelled fine. mike young reassured me a little about the other bad things that people said on the website. like paper thin walls. this will not be much of a change from my current living situation. paper thin walls and vents in the floor so i can hear everything that is going on downstairs. i don't have a vent now because i moved down the hall into a small shitty room to get away from my vent. there was a vent because there is only heat on the first floor and it is supposed to rise.

i guess if my new apartment sucks i can always find a new place after the summer when the lease expires. i guess i am a subletter.

i just peed.

i walked back into my room and their was an odd odor. it did not smell like who had just traveled across the world.

i applied to the juniper writing institute for a week during the summer. i hope i get in. i hope it helps me get into grad school. i hope it serves another purpose besides helping me to get into grad school. i sent them a story about a bipolar mall security guard. i wonder if they will like it. i wonder if it's ok to use the same story as my writing sample when i apply to UMASS-Amherst since UMASS-Amherst is where the juniper writing institute is located.

Mitch! Maraude sent me the writing sample that got him accepted into Naropa. i was surprised by all the crazy shit. now i think it's ok for me to send them my usual crazy shit instead of my literary fiction that i write specifically for grad school writing samples. perhaps i will use a piece of literary fiction that i wrote specifically for grad school writing samples and a bunch of crazy shit. they may think i'm versatile. and they ask for ten more pages than everybody else.

i met Mitch! for the first time at the World Horror Convention. i liked him. we corresponded a little online in the past. he wrote the bible on the Valiant comics universe. we are both huge fans of the comic Archer and Armstrong.

5 comments:

Josh Maday said...

not being able to sleep sucks. i used to think it would be great because then i would just stay up all night writing. but when it happened i couldn't really do anything. i could hardly watch tv.

i hope the new living situation works out for you. moving also sucks. i am a packrat. you would think i lived through the great depression.

the new lamination colony is killer. every issue i've seen is killer. yes, the new issue has been abducted. it will probably return with embryos in its guts. but at least it will be back.

i like mike young. i don't know mike young, but i still like him. he does a good job with noo journal and other things. that would be cool if you guys did an e-book anthology.

good luck with grad school. that would cause me to be anxious a lot, worrying about whether i'll get in or not, or if i should have sent different writing samples.

Bradley Sands said...

The good thing about getting less sleep is not having to deal with my TMJ pain. Yes, the bad thing is being too tired to write/edit well.

I applied to 12 grad schools around the end of 2006. All twelve rejected me. I had planned to try again the following year, but I waited too long because I was busy with other things and wasn't prepared. It was still possible. I had a couple of months. But it would have been a very busy, stressful couple of months. And an oral surgeon told me that I needed to eliminate all stress from me life. So I decided to start preparing early for the following year. I did a little of that. I need to do a little more like write a critical essay for the University of Utah. I need to call somebody there to find out what exactly they want because I am a little confused by it. No other schools ask for a critical essay. I have not written a critical essay since 2001.

And now I found out about how Naropa asks for an additional essay besides the personal essay, so I need to get on that. I think I will write it in my blog in blog-style. Have fun with it Then maybe I will translate it into something that is more academia-friendly later. Or maybe not. Maybe I can get away with sending blog-style to Naropa. They are not like other schools.

BLAKE BUTLER said...

i will find you a present.

yes, this issue has been editing itself. it keeps adding lines to itself. then when i went out of town and couldn't fix it anymore, it deleted the new issue. hroem

Mike Young said...

I am moving to Northampton because people are sick of giving me rides home to Amherst. Down with the sickness.

Bradley Sands said...

Soon people will be sick of giving you rides to Amherst, unless you transfer to Smith's imaginary writing program.