"Baby Now that I've Found You" Alison Krauss and "Angel Doves" Mindy Smith

Bluegrass sung this way is that warm feeling of having just eaten a stack of pancakes and sliding back in bed.

This vicious tilt in the Earth's axis, bringing these ungodly winters. I need more sunlight.

"Age of Consent" New Order

Last night before Memoirs of a Geisha, I saw the trailer for Marie Antoinette. Sophia Coppola, that weirdo, chose to use this song and a punk-Pretty-in-Pink-new-wave font to push what will inevitably be a stylish but meaningless movie.

It was utter perfection.

I know somebody who used to be a hostess at various Chinese bars. There, she learned how to engage men for hours, and to manipulate them out of their money. She confessed this to me over pizza. She put her two younger sisters through college, paid for one of them to go to Europe and sends her two kids to private school. She now makes shitloads of money in the business world and negotiated two raises within her first year on the clock. What respect I felt for her ability to play-the-game or do what-a-girl's-gotta-do or some other hyphenated cliche was outweighed by this question: How can I trust anything she says?

Geisha create a fantasy that envelops you; making you believe that you are the architect of this world is their most dangerous illusion. Efficient manipulation is marked by the willing participation of the victim.

Ever since I got back from traveling over a year ago, I have been different. I'm not sure how, exactly, but I feel I am watching things very carefully. It is not the awareness of a curious mind, nor the vigilance of a paranoid-schizoid; it's something else, like I'm preparing to meet something head-on.

"Agua" Jarabe De Palo

Here's my last rejection:
Thanks for sending your sample chapters. Unfortunately, I do not feel that I could be the best advocate for your work. Please keep in mind that mine is a subjective business, and an idea or story to which one agent does not respond may well be met with great enthusiasm by another, and I encourage you to continue writing to agents. Hopefully you will find someone who will get behind you and your work with the conviction necessary in the present market.

Best wishes.

Sincerely,
W.C.

I actually love getting these rejections. I mean, what else can I do, right? Can't possibly do what I'm not capable of. My deadline for sending out queries is at the end of this month, and I'll give myself a nice pat on the back for having given it all I got. I'm going to turn in my published chapters to some compilations and we'll see how those go.

I have nothing else to say.

Aimee Mann's last album.

Last night I went to Newport Beach. There's a pier there that has functioned as my touchstone.

When I was in Catalina sometime in college, a student from Evergreen University asked me what it was that drew me to the ocean. It was part of her documentary. I said the ocean's rhythm is ours. The crash of the waves, the complexity of the undertow, the seeming placidness of its surface -- these mixture of forces mirrors what happens inside us. I go to the ocean because it reminds me of me.

Her assignment--from an apparently liberal college--was to use public transportation to travel down the coast from Oregon.

I have important memories of this pier in Newport Beach. I imagined what I normally imagine at the ocean: How deep is it? How far does it go? What happens when it gets angry? What happens if it decided to stand up all of a sudden? In what would be an imperceptible flinch in its massive body, it could swallow me whole. In the dark, the ocean merely adopts the characteristics I project.

A Tibetan monk checked my charts and said I was a naga in a previous life. Another psychic that lived on top of a jewelry store in Jaipur said I need to stay away from natural bodies of water. Somebody tried to drown me when I was a small child. When I was 12 and experiencing my first real anxiety attack, I heard the competing voices of a devil and an angel in the white noise of my shower.

There are times when I understand things with real clarity. I undertand the patterns that surround me, and patterns are patterns, and learning to define them empowers you to see where they will go. Part of growing up is coping with these patterns, part of living a full life is embracing these patterns and understanding that a system that ebbs will flow.

"I was in bed last night and I thought, I'm almost 30." I said this as a friend and I were driving towards the pier.
"Don't say that," my friend said, "because I'm almost there too."

I'm going for this.

"We Be Burnin'" Sean Paul

This is how much money I've spent in the last two days:

• $11 for lunch at Koo Koo Roo's
• $47 for a dinner at a nice restaurant
• $31 for my dry cleaning
• $18 for the string job on my tennis racket
• $14 for lunch today at a Vietnamese restaurant
• $3 for Java Chip Frap at Starbucks

This is too much money to be spending and I will need to cut back.

I saw on ESPN.com today that Paradorn Srichipan, Thai tennis star with one of the finest one-handed backhands around, shaved his head and retired his racket to take up the life of a Buddhist monk.

There are people who are of this world. I mean they just fit right in. These are the Donald Trumps and the Princess Dianas among us. Then there are people who seem to continually fight this world. These are the Che Guevaras and Yoko Onos. And then there are the Drew Barrymores and Dalai Lamas who seem as if they're simply passing by.

Right now I am thinking about 5 years down the line.

"If Your Love is Real" David Gray

The best thing that happened this week was running to catch my train home and waving at the passengers because I missed it by 30 seconds. And then the train stopped and the doors opened and I went in and people grumbled. I never felt so special and wanted.

Last night, I hung out with a couple guys I used to work with. I've shot better games of pool. We talked about work, about ambition, about going back to school. Ambition is strange. I feel a little weird when people say "I want to..." because sometimes I get very excited for them, and sometimes I know they're not going to do anything to get it done. But I have to respond the same way.

I work with very rich men who handle the money of those who are even richer. I spend time in their offices fixing their computers, explaining to them what replication in Lotus Notes means and fixing the synchronization process between their local address books and an online CRM that we use. But what I really do when I'm in their office is absorb their photographs, the books they've chosen to display, the "You're the best dad in the whole world" school projects that soften their personalities. I respect these men because of how they treat me. They, moreso than the others I support, respect my time. I'm observing as much as I can.

Here are some common traits:
1. Respect towards others
2. Quietly, methodically, and patiently consider data
3. Exude things like "busy" and "on-the-go" but are never dismissive. When you're in a conversation with them, they are fully engaged.
4. Concise.
5. Easily admit when they're wrong or when they don't understand.

"Smoke" Ben Folds Five

This song is from 1997. I have memories of Newport Beach and of Christmas that year. I also remember being very nervous about film school. During orientation, we were made to feel special. The 45-or-so of us that got accepted, they said we were part of an elite group. They used words like legacy and history. I have few friends from film school now. None of us has any interest in it. And we think people who talk about movies need to find better things to do, like get a job.

I was ironing my shirt tonight and I flashforwarded to my living in my own apartment. I did not like the feeling.

A friend from work talks about his big plan to sail around the world when he retires at 55. "It's the only thing that keeps me going," he said over lunch. He got pad thai from the C-graded joint at Grand Central Market. He took one bite and threw it away.

I don't understand why people work. I understand how work starts out as a game in which one feels compelled to excel. And then I understand how work becomes a means to gain small luxuries like a car or Ecco shoes or a Yonex tennis racket. And then I understand how these small luxuries turn into a "standard of living" that one feels compelled to maintain. And then I understand how work is no longer a game, or a means to an end, but a tether. I don't understand why people sign up for this. Is it because there's nothing better to do?

I said, "Houses, wives, work, cars--these are all distractions." My friend, who is married, agreed.

I believe most of us keep ourselves busy with work or play or following soap operas and the football season or waiting for the upgrade or next year's promotion because if we sit still we'll discover that underneath all these accessories, we're really very dull. Most of us are creatures of context, not substance.

I wonder if we've already made our choices.

"I Was a Kaleidoscope" Death Cab for Cutie

I was reading through some of my finished chapters.

The person in these stories is not the same person who wrote about him is not the not same person I am now. The guy who capped the cost of accommodations at $25 is not the guy who lived off his Citibank Mastercard for months is not guy who struggles to save 5% of his salary for his Roth IRA.

There are moments that sneak up on me when elements from these incarnations are misfiled and I'm thrown off for a few seconds. I looked up last week at the sky. I was waiting for the train to Union Station. It was dark and I knew I was really crossing the Bolivian border at 4 in the morning.

I like my lives. I like this one that I have now. But my lives are not like some mother's children. I can choose which one I love most. And it isn't the one I have now.

"The Ocean" Dar Williams

This is what a rejection looks like:

Thank you so much for your patience and for sharing this sample of [title] with me.

I apologize for the unusual delay in response! We've been so swamped with submissions.

Unfortunately, I felt that I would not be the right agent for this manuscript, but I have a feeling you may have already found representation.

I wish you the very best of luck and success, and thank you again for the opportunity.

Sincerely,
S.

"Got Carried Away" Trashcan Sinatras

I woke up this morning thinking I had caught the virus floating around work, a tricky sucker that slides into the body and produces few symptoms until it fully matures into a full-body cast. I couldn't get up. I was dead tired.

And then remembering that my immune system is that of a vulture's, I thought, "I couldn't be sick, so is it because I haven't been eating enough protein? Is my stomach eating up my muscles?" But I had a burger last night. "Oh, was it all the jumping and screaming, my silly reclamation of youth at last night's Green Day concert?"

And that's what it was. I am tired because that's what happens now.

"It's because he's getting old," my dad yelled from the kitchen early yesterday, as my ex-brother-in-law stopped by to pick up his kids and noticed my thinning hair.

This morning as I got my haircut I told the lady, "I usually get a 2 on the sides, but I'd like a 3 all the way around. Is 3 still good for me? I know the theory is that as you lose your hair, you're supposed to keep it short."

She said a 3 is perfect for me and then eventually it'll be a 2 and a 1 and when I'm ready, it'll be bald. "But don't worry right now, you have plenty on top. You should see the other guys who come here. You're just doing the receding thing." She traced my brow. "But it's different for men. You guys are lucky. When Bruce Willis shaved it off and was very public about it, it liberated you guys. For women it's different; we have to buy wigs."

Aging is weird because, like that virus at work, it sneaks its way into you and you don't notice it until one day you realize there's something very different about the way you feel. I enjoyed Green Day's concert not because of the music--once you hear one Green Day song, you've heard them all-- but because I was fascinated by the audience. There was a kid at his first concert and his dad explained, "We're clapping now for the encore. So they come out." And the kid clapped and stomped on the metal bench and eventually played his air-guitar and banged his head with not as much self-consciousness as when he first tried. Behind me was a very fat Mexican teenager who screamed every garbled and politically-charged lyric. Hell no, he wasn't part of a redneck agenda, or the moral majority. In fact, fuck George W. Bush. Not his president.

I thought, I was this kid for Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation tour in 1989 and the fat Mexican for Radiohead 10 years later. And there I was in between, smiling at them in recognition, as I cradled a cup of merlot with one hand and rubbed my sore right knee with the other.

"A Call to Apathy" The Shins

First thing's first: "For somebody who doesn't seem to understand the point of blogging" I seem to have created no less than half-a-dozen separate online journals. As an American, I'm entitled not only to changing my mind, but doing so unapologetically. I won't apologize but I will explain: These blogs have all been thematically organized and devoted to different phases of my life:

• Phikle Phiktion: Self-conscious musings and artsy mumbo jumbo that defined most of my early 20s
• Pretending Not to be Lost: International acts of idiocy
• Unemployment Life: The idiot comes home and commits himself to writing a book.
• Business Casualty: The musings, the traveling, the book are all done. Having carefully nurtured my soul in the garden of self-edification, I've decided to sell it to one of the largest investment management companies in the world.

Business Casualty will track the changing priorities of a yuppie sell-out, his desperate rationalizations as an unpublished author, and the daily annoyances he suffers at work.

Thanks for your time and consideration. I hope to see you again.