121610. God bless diagramming, word puzzles, and working the room. 121410 This is a fucking travesty of education. While Asian kids are being successful (so the substantiated rumors go), my students are sitting here half awake, already on Christmas break three days early. And it's my fault. And I fell asleep at the print shop this morning. The device will not help you. Write that 200 times. Sometimes things and people smoke when they are under pressure. A particularly low point: a days' suspension from school for being mildly profanely honest; my wife harangued by the landlord--even that word, "landlord"--do I even need to say more? yes Normalization of deviance applies to the stalwart march of technology, too ya know. Like, OMG I have to have a text editor that syncs with Dropbox and doesn't force me to type at the bottom of the page. Wait, what? You used to use a typewriter, remember that? And if you didn't have it scanned, saved, archived, synced and searched three ways from Wednesday, you never really noticed. You were still pretending to be a writer. Now you're pretending to be an iA Writer, and you paid handsomely for the privelege. Sucker. I don't want your maudlin pavane; I want some stories! Nobody wants to hear the ongoing drone of your pedantic psyche. They want to hear back from themselves, from their great hunters, from their charismatic lovers. They want messages from where the fighting is, from where the survivors party through the night in incandescent tents, billowing with heavy steam, lust, music, and the mad laughter of new birth.