Packing for the Last Time

In five days we'll be in Vestal, New York.

We got a POD instead of doing a UHaul, and the guy just left with it.

I hope nothing's destroyed, but that's the thing about just being married: You usually don't have the best stuff. Therefore, it's not hard to replace something like a lamp.

That said, I'm not looking forward to doing this again (yes, I know: Who is?), most likely in a year. We're married. I'll have at least three years left at Binghamton University after this year, so it may be time to get some equity. We're thinking a condo instead of a house. That would be easy to do in Richmond, but we haven't researched it yet in New York.

It's just so easy these days to become complacent and pay rent, especially when you keep gathering and more and more stuff fills your apartment. So I understand. That's why, in our apartment that we'll be living in together in five days, I still don't feel the need to replace a lot of the stuff we're taking with us.

We have money and gift cards from the wedding, but shouldn't that really be used for necessity? AKA: future nicer furniture for a condo living room instead of the hand-me-downs, and things like that.

Plus we have to get acclimated to much within the next year.

As always, we'll see.

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I'm cleaning out the desk that we got from a friend a few years ago. The thing is massive. We're either going to take a sledgehammer to it or try to get someone to saw it into a bunch of pieces so we can get it in the trashcans. It's way too heavy to deal with and travel with.

I usually keep my rejections and acceptances in a pile, however, and it was interesting to see those places who haven't taken poems but have been encouraging. It's good to make that "Remember to send here in the fall" list.

Also, I decided I'm going to be a little bit more judicious in my journals I submit too. There are places that have rejected me, sans any semblance of ink, for years now, sometimes in the double digit range. Not a big deal, of course, but these are all snail-mailed submissions. A 44-cent stamp and usually around $1 to send the submission is around $1.50. Multiply it by ten over the last four years or so, and that's $15 I could've had in my pocket.

Right: I didn't know that would happen. Sometimes it takes once to send to a place to get an acceptance. Sometimes it takes six. Sometimes it takes sixteen.

But I'd rather spend the money, at this point, on past ink: encouraging editors, the "send again" or even "thanks for trying us" notes. And I found many of those I'd forgotten about. No guarantees, but it'll make me feel better to send to places where I have a more legitimate shot. Hopefully.

There's nothing like workshops and being back around writers and taking classes and whatnot that makes me want to start sending out work again. Maybe that's weird, but it's how it works.

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Got an acceptance from Portland Review the other day, but the two poems they wanted were accepted by two different journals months ago.

I felt bad at first because apparently the email address I was using for them, when I let them know the poems were taken, was an old address. So clearly they didn't get the email.

That said, they took almost nine months to get back to me. It's fine, don't get me wrong, but that's maybe the second-longest acceptance response time I've ever had, so that seems to diminish your chances of publishing someone's poems the longer you wait.

I'll be sending again in the fall, though, and this time they have an online submissions system in the works I believe.

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Also funny was another rejection from Controlled Burn.

They took two days to get back to me, and I noticed that the normal "Dear Writer" response that I've always received from them was not only in bold, but it was in maybe 18-point font. It seemed like it was on purpose. And I laughed more than I was taken aback, as that's the first time I think an editor has seemingly hated my work so much.

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Back to cleaning out the desk. Soon enough I'm going to compiled my What I'll Miss About Richmond / What I Won't Miss in Richmond list.

Should be fun.

Shouldn't

I shouldn't be blogging right now, but I am. I have too much other stuff I should be doing.

*

The whole Bridgeville shooting debacle is very sad and sickening and heart-dropping. I hate to say what I'm saying, but Thank God only three people died, not counting the shooter. For all the "planning" the psychopath did, it seemed like the damage could've been much worse. That still doesn't bring back the lives of the three women he shot, I realize this, which makes me feel weird, again for posting the last few sentences.

And the fact that he was blogging, or writing, or whatever you want to call it, about his upcoming shooting, is frightening in so many ways.

Yet somehow I can't stop thinking of Brad Pitt's character at the end of Se7en: "You're a movie of the week. You're a fucking t-shirt, at best." That's the case for this guy. A sad, clearly good-for-nothing "man," who, because he had no social skills or no wherewithal, decided because he could not get laid, he would shoot a bunch of women in a Latin dance class at an L.A. Fitness in a small town outside of Pittsburgh? Are you fucking serious?

I continued to be baffled why these things keep happening, and how they are allowed to happen, and unfortunately, that they will probably keep happening.

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The above makes the whole Steve Fellner / Seth Abramson debate look like the size of a grain of sand, which is one of the reasons more people should be writing their own poems instead of starting all the debates and blog posts they've written in the last few days.

Stopping psychopaths from easily obtaining guns is much more important to me than caring about what ALC is charging to read a personal statement, which is one of the reasons why I decided not to waste my time commenting substantially on the situation.

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And yes, switching gears, on a lighter note, I sent out my last batch of poems today before the move to 10 places. Oliver de la Paz sent an encouraging "Get it done now before you move" note on Facebook, and I decided to wise up, listen, and get them out.

If good things happen, awesome. If they're all rejections, at least the work, for now, is out there, along with many other submissions.

I'm officially stopping until at least halfway through September, I swear.

And that's not too far away.

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The Lovely Bones trailer is up. I found it amazing that a novel that's been so popular as of late is actually very, very good. That's what happens in the age of Nicholas Sparks and Jodi Picoult.

But it seems like it really can't miss.

Brian Eno score. Peter Jackson directed. A great supporting cast. Can it be sustained for 140 minutes? I hope so. I think so. I wish Ryan Gosling, who I think is an incredible actor, would've played the father, especially after Wahlberg's Titanic-sinking effort (can we call it that?) in The Happening, but alas.

So many good movies coming out from now until the end of the year.

Can't wait.

Flares

Upon reading "River Road" by Herbert Morris, I immediately went to Half.com and purchased his first three books, including shipping, for a total of $15.

I remember Wojahn in workshop talking about him once, and though I couldn't really get into What Was Lost, which I do own and am probably too young for it to really make an impact at this point, I need to take another crack at it, and there are other poems from AGNI you can find online by Herbert Morris also.

He was someone who I don't believe gave readings, and someone who didn't have a lot of biographical information floating around, which is both weird and admirable for the current times. He passed away in 2001.

I'm now ready to dive into his earlier work and climb up to What Was Lost.

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About a year ago I caved and bought a Bose Sound Dock from Target for my IPod.

A few months ago the thing broke. Maybe it was a power surge, because I didn't drop it or spill anything on it. It still worked, technically, a few months ago, but there was this annoying, bass-like and pounding pulsation that clearly was due to some speaker or other part malfunction within the system.

Then about a month ago the thing collapsed to a low hum when plugged in, and I can't even charge my IPod on it, much less play a song.

I was smart, though, and basically got the 3-year Target warranty free, since it was $29 and I saved 10% with the Red Card, to only be used then and immediately shredded later.

I called a few days ago and got the return FedEx label today, so now I just have to figure out the specifics of all the confusion going on with the instructions. It's this kind of thing that makes me consider technical writing as a field that could really help folks who can actually read not take a ton of extra time to figure out the perplexing logic of some of these seemingly simple sentences.

Hopefully I can figure it out, send the thing back as they request, get a new one, and probably plug the thing into a surge protector, because I think it did indeed get fried from a power surge.

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I lied about not sending out work until the fall.

I realized recently how many journals only take submissions from now until most other journals actually start accepting submissions for all their new reading periods, come September usually.

I have a handful of poems as ready as they're going to be, so I'm gearing up to submit.

Maybe something will slip through the cracks...