SMART Failure Predicted on HARD DISK 2. Warning: Immediately back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure my be imminent.

The title of this blog is most of what it said when I booted up my laptop last night. I thought it would be fun and exciting to write this blog entry while my hard drive was dying, but I'm not doing that because I am not fun and exciting. I wish I was fun and exciting because blogger seems to save the draft automatically every minute or so.

I bought a three year service plan on my laptop a while back, thank god. The Prince of Candy is driving me to drop it off in the morning. I am not using the laptop because of some delusional belief that the computer specialists might be able to repair the hard drive if I bring it in before it crashes. I think they're just going to replace it and I will start anew.

I would be very stressed out right now if I didn't buy that service plan and if I didn't have a desktop computer. I am surprised my hard drive on my desktop computer hasn't annihilated itself yet. It's six or seven years old.

I hiked up a mountain with Seth Schultz yesterday. It was nice. It was a pretty short hike. There were only a few really steep parts. I hate really steep parts because I am out of shape. There's an observation tower at the top with a nice view. I got some sort of weird cramp while I was walking down the tower's steps, but it didn't last for long.

Seth Schultz and I are going to try to hike up the same mountain three days a week. I guess until it's too cold to do it. He is the only person who is cool with hanging out in the morning.

After, Seth Schultz took me to the Yankee Candle Company. I have never been inside it. Seth Schultz says that everyone who lives around here needs to go there at least once. He says it is a surreal place where it is Christmas all the time. He says it is the Disney World of candle stores. Yankee Candle wasn't open when we got there. We were a half an hour early. Seth Schultz didn't want to wait a half an hour. We left. We went grocery shopping.

I read a couple of the Jaguar Uprising Press books. I liked them a lot. Although there were a lot of formatting/editing issues. I wonder if I would be so anal retentive about things like that if I wasn't an editor. Probably not, but I think I would still be a little anal retentive. I don't think I would notice it when paragraphs have indents that start in different places if I wasn't an editor. I don't think I would notice a lack of consistency if I wasn't an editor.

Andrew Boye wrote one of the books. He's at my gas station now, covering my night off. He's a really good writer. Maybe a little too "literary" for my tastes. His novelette starts out slowly. I had to push my way through at first even though it was still good. That's because there really wasn't a plot/conflict. Later when there's a plot/conflict, I couldn't stop turning the pages.

Joe Lindsay's book is also a good read. It meshes non-fiction with things that are fictionalized. It is about Chris Benoit. It is very interesting.

The books are online at Bore Parade:

http://holesatelliteshovel.blogspot.com (think this one is really hard to read due to the white text on a brown background and lack of spaces between paragraphs, but it usually hurts me eyes to read fiction online anyway. sometimes I think I'm way too critical)

http://deathofcrippler.blogspot.com

I'm also reading James Tate's Ghost Soldiers, which I like. All of his prose poems are one paragraph long and most of them have conversation between two people. I wish he broke down the conversations into paragraphs because they are a little annoying to read in one paragraph.

I went to a James Tate reading a couple of weeks ago. He's not a very good reader, but I liked what he was reading a lot. I like it when people "perform" at readings. It would make even more sense to do this with poetry than prose. James Tate is pretty monotone-y.

I went to a question and answer session with him the following morning. I was late. I missed the bus because I forgot it was a Saturday and the bus comes at a different time on a Saturday. I walked all the way there. It took an hour. It sucked. It was very humid. I was all sticky. I was told later that I made a spectacle of myself when I came into the room late. I do not remember making a spectacle of myself. James Tate is a Pulitzer Prize winner.

I enjoyed the portion of the Q & A session that I didn't miss. I like James Tate as a person. He's exactly the kind of person who I would like to sit next to on a park bench and talk to. He is endearingly eccentric. I wish he was my kooky grandfather. My grandfathers are dead. James Tate is alive.

I did a phone interview a couple of days ago with a recruiting agency for ESL jobs in South Korea. I was interviewed a couple of hours before my bedtime. I bombed the interview. I am horrible at doing interviews. I am bad at coming up with things on the spot.

A day before the interview, I remembered that I needed to write a cover letter. I wrote a cover letter the night after the interview. It was basically a coherent version of the answers that I gave during the interview.

The recruitment agency emailed me the day after the interview. They did not want me. This made me really depressed. I felt like I had a lot riding on this. I thought it would be a sure thing considering I have an English degree and no criminal record. I wouldn't have felt bad if I didn't think it was a sure thing. I would have been surprised if they had hired me because of how badly the interview went.

I talked to The Prince of Candy about this because he has taught in Korea before. He said that getting turned down by a recruiting agency was typical. This made me feel better about myself.

He said it was a sure thing if I apply to many, many recruitment agencies.

But I don't want to do this because I don't want to end up at a shitty school.

My friend in Korea is going to ask his friends in Korea for recommendations for other recruitment agencies.

I wrote this in an email this morning:

"I am trying to decide if I am ok with working things like a shit/awesome overnight gas station job for the rest of my life while I continue to do the writing and editing thing since it gives me a shitload of free time. As long as it's in a nice area where I'm not likely to get murdered. I think I might be ok with this. I just wish I knew more people who were into hanging out in the morning. It's pretty ego crushing though. I think I'd rather give Korea a try, but I might be ok if that doesn't work out. I don't know. I am torn."

I also wanted to run off to Korea after the summer because I was worried about finding a new place to live. But now I might have found a place, so I feel a little better. I talked to a customer at work. He always brings his dog into the store. His dog got loose. It walked behind the counter. I wondered if my manager would look at the recording of the video surveillance and think, What the fuck is a dog doing behind the counter? I picked up the dog's leash and led him back to the customer. He was a little drunk. Later, the dog got loose again and walked to the aisles. This might have been the second time I have seen the customer and his dog. Both times, he has promised me that the dog does not urinate indoors. This time, he rapped.

He also told me that he was looking for roommates. His house is a two minute walk from my work. It is a sweet deal. It has a pool, which may or may not be indoors. I won't have to sign a lease, so I can go to Korea if I find a replacement for myself. If I was to stay in my current apartment, it would be hard to get out of the lease because my building is owned by a real estate agency that owns a shitload of stuff around here and the wouldn't let me get out of it unless my replacement meets their dumb qualifications.

The customer seemed to like me, but he was a little drunk. He gave me his phone number. He asked me for mine. I gave it to him.

I called him this morning about taking a look at the place, but he has not called back yet.

I am a little worried about something though. He told me that the house is the second or third oldest building in Hadley (I think he said Hadley).

Seth Schultz used to live in a house in Hadley that was nicknamed The Schoolhouse because it used to be a schoolhouse. It was shithole. He says it was the oldest building in Hadley. It was two minutes away from my work. So it might be the same house.

He says someone bought the house after he moved out and might have done a lot of work to it. But he warned me about something: When he was living there, there were holes in the floor next to the windows in the bedroom. Not big enough to fall through, but he could here everything that was going on downstairs. Once he was washing dishes and couldn't help hearing his roommate having loud sex with his girlfriend.

There are holes in the floor because the second floor was added on later to the first floor and the windows are too big. So the second floor and the first floor share the same windows. This only makes a small amount of sense to me. I can't really get my head around it. I guess the house is really poorly constructed.

If this house that I might live in is the same house. I hope the new owner did something about the holes in the floor. If not, I wouldn't be able to live their unless my room is over and under an area where people do not frequent.

My last house was bad enough. There was no heat on the second floor and there were crappy vents in the floor upstairs where the heat was supposed to rise through. This didn't work properly, but I could here everything that was going on downstairs. I hated it. I moved into a smaller room without a crappy vent. When I had a crappy vent, I would hear one sided conversations all the time between my roommate's girlfriend and him. Except I didn't hear him. Only her. I guess her side of the bed was directly under the vent. And she was a very loud talker. It sounded like she was in my room all the time. They broke up after he moved out.

Back to The Schoolhouse, Seth Schultz says that he heard the new owner is crazy. This is based solely on the fact that he/she carpeted the kitchen.