procrastinaters.com

            You know those pieces of advice your teacher will sometimes give you where they precede it by saying, “If you take any one thing from this class, it’s this?”  Doesn’t it always seem like it’s the single thing that holds the least relevance to the course you’d heard the entire semester?  And doesn’t it seem like it’s the one thing you don’t take from that course?

            Anyway, all that is to say that a teacher prefaced a statement with this once, and seeing as how I’m repeating it here, obviously they do stick every once in a while, so scratch that last part.  She said “If you take any one thing from this class, it’s this: [okay, so I guess you already knew that part, so I could’ve skipped it, and even now that I didn’t, I could still delete it, but oh well I’ll just leave it in there] never start a submission, a job interview, a resume, a cover letter, etc with an apology.  Not only does it start things off on the wrong foot, but it makes it so that everything else they read/hear/see from that point on will revolve around the biggest negative they could take from it instead of focusing on why they should hire you/publish you/etc.”

            All of this is to say that I seem so very incapable of dealing with a situation wrought with vulnerability like submitting my baby of a creative work (and since it’s something I thought worthy to submit for publishing/workshop/etc, it is necessarily one of my favorite babies) without hedging my bets by saying, “I know it sucks, so if it sucks, then at the very least I was right about it sucking, but if it’s great, then there you have it, I’ve written something great.”

All of this is to say that I’m about to start off with an apology (though I guess I spent so much time introducing the apology that I’m not so much starting off with it anymore, so good game me?): sorry if this whole having a journal-themed day of the week is a terrible idea that will lead to boring content like having to hear about what I ate for breakfast and how I changed the banner on procrastinaters.com from powder blue to steel blue, etc, but I’ll do my best to make it fresh.

And all of this is to say that I have ADHD…quite a bad and extremely unmedicated case of it.  I guess the third paragraph also kinda got into my clinical anxiety.  So now you know two things about me, which might make all those “all this”s worth it.  Next!

            Some other things that might be of interest: hmmm.  Well, I maybe can’t quite say that I’m a friend of Bill W’s, but we’re certainly close acquaintances.  Our similarities start with the fact that I’m 3 days from 16 months sober.  Our similarities start to dissipate just the slightest bit at Step 1—we might quibble out some differences there a bit, but we’re still jiving.  Our similarities then abruptly end at Step 2.

            That brings me to my next trait of note: I’m an atheist.  If you’d asked me a few months ago, I might not’ve put it in such blunt terms and might’ve beat around the bush a bit before admitting that; if you’d asked me a few years ago, I would never’ve thought to’ve termed it that way, and even though I most certainly was an atheist, I may’ve found a euphemized worldview into which I could’ve more delicately classed my beliefs; if you’d asked me a decade ago, I would’ve told you all about how Jesus Christ is my Lord and savior.*  I think that’s the best way I can sum that up that extremely important thread of my life in two sentences.

            Something else that I’m not so sure defines my character or anything like that, but I’ll mention it because people always seem to think it’s terribly interesting: I played poker professionally for the two years leading up to Black Friday.  This leaks into my thought process a bit, and it’s the motivation for a ton of my writing on Game Theory, but for the most part I’m just mentioning it because people are always like ZOMGSOCOOL whenever I say it . . . and who doesn’t like seeming cool if even just for a second.

            Now that Black Friday happened, I work on my novel.  My novel project is pretty cool, I’m darned excited about it, I work on it a lot, so as such, I end up talking about it a lot.  If this Utility thing ever comes up, I'm referring to said interactive novel project with super sweet features like a soundtrack and graphic design template and “easter eggs” and a plot that involves murder, sex, deception and God!  ZOMGSOCOOL!

            Aaaaand that’s me.  I hope you go on to enjoy a sizable enough amount of what I offer for you to continue to consider me worthy of reading.

Con amor y sentimientos "groovy,"

surviva

* Hot damn that was a lot of “’ve” contractions.