On The Infintely Useful Towel

It’s Towel Day! And I forgot my towel at home. This is what’s wrong with me. I go around flaunting my gleefully-held beliefs like one should always have a towel and then go around, tossing them out the window in fits of forgetfulness.

A further example: I pledged to send out a couple agent query letters today (CLOYD will be SOLD, damn it!), and here I am, blogging about towels.

Some explanation. Towel Day is a world-wide festival celebrating the towel, as inspired by Douglas Adams’s flawless – and it was flawless, damn it – Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy trilogy(ish). The towel is an infinitely useful object, deployed as everything from a method by which one can obtain sustenance, a weapon, and a disguise. It is also one of the very few things that the bumbling Arthur Dent has to remind him of Earth in his travels throughout the galaxy, and is thus better than a photograph, because you can bend a towel and no one will shout at you for destroying memories.

Now, I could talk about my own whacky uses for towels as inspired by Adams, but I won’t. Instead, in further penance for my stupidity, I shall discuss a time when I left a towel at home on a, and was thus put in an awkward position.

That’s it. There is no other point. The story will be me going to a place, thinking “whoops,” and that is it. It’s a meandering bout of mental vomit wherein no truths about humanity or myself are gleaned. I went on a trip, forgot to bring a towel, and life goes on. That’s the point of the story. But, still, I think I should get this out there. You know, appease the Towel Spirit by saying that towels are very useful, and this is what happens when you don’t bring a towel:

You write a shitty blog post in the hopes that doing so will get out a couple more pageviews.

Feel free to skip this if you don’t care about Towel Day, but only on the caveat that you’re going to go read Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy.

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In Which I Say Thanks to a Dead Man

For a while there, I hated reading.

It was right after my parents had their divorce, and I was all sorts of messed with. It was that delightful way where the mind (interesting thing, that) makes one thing everything’s hunkey-dorey one moment, and then a police officer is talking about how certain behavior will land a parent in jail. Yes, that happened once, and holy shit did it put the fear of God in me.

(Don’t get excited. It was because I didn’t want to go to school.)

I should explain. Before my parents divorced, I was really, really into reading. My Mom bought me a bunch of these illustrated classics books, and because of that, I can say that I read Moby Dick before I was ten. Then there were the staples of children’s/YA reading that I clung to, like Goosebumps and Animorphs.

I distinctly remember getting a mess of Goosebumps books for Hanukkah one year and spending dinner time on the couch trying to read three at once. It was hard, but I think I did well.

And then, when my parents divorced, I was hit with the realization that life was going to change. Subconsciously, of course. All I knew right then was that my mom, brother, and I moved into a smaller house next to a cemetery, which I thought was weird. I started despising school–though this was also partially because my third-grade teacher was a terrifying Filipino woman who was single-handedly responsible for my preemptive rejection of journalism–and refused to go. Instead of reading books, I watched a lot of TV and moped around a lot of the time.

Eventually, my brother went to college, and my Mom and I moved to Tennessee. (See Moving To The South for more.) There, I found myself in a very odd position.

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Thoughts on Last Night’s Events

So as you probably know, Osama bin Laden was confirmed dead by the White House late last night.

It sent a whole lot of Americans out into the streets to celebrate the man’s death, and a bit of closure to the families of the victims of the Twin Tower attacks. (For the record, I spent the night sending feverish texts out to friends wagering on whether or not President Obama would announce the news dressed as Captain America. I lost.)

From the outside, I imagine that there are two reactions to all of the celebrations: Either a shared elation at the death of one of the people on the FBI’s Most Wanted list; or a sense of confusion at it all.

I can understand the first reaction. I felt it a good amount last night, though that might have been the Scotch more than anything. (Anyone who looks through my Twitter feed from last night will no doubt see one post consisting entirely of the letter E in varying forms and contexts.)

However, as I’ve seen on facebook and many other areas, there is a lot of the second reaction.

People look at the pictures from in front of the White House North portico, or Ground Zero, or Times Square and wonder, compare it to the images of anti-American sentiment welling up immediately after the World Trade Center attacks, and a chill runs down their spine.

There are a lot of similarities, that’s sure. Because, and this might surprise some, but people like to dance. It might be because a terrorist got offed by Special Forces; it might be because the jihad was in full swing; or it might be because a bored megalomaniac hijacks a parade.

Of course, there are a whole shitton (some might say a metric shitton) of differences. I’m going to ramble on for a while about the confusion on both sides. (Well, confusion on one, elation on another.)

Join me, will you?

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