Shot a man in Reno?

If so, you might find it useful to confess.

Catnip for grammar nerds

I discovered the archives of the NCSU Online Writing Lab and Grammar Hotline in the course of copyediting a document at work, but I quickly fell in love with it on a personal level. Passages like the following are what won my heart:

It is the Grammar Hotline's opinion that lowercasing brussels sprouts is one tiny step toward popularizing them. Furthermore, it is my considered opinion that Brussels sprouts are so vile that they do not deserve to be popular. In a quixotic attempt to keep them off my dinner plate, I am going to recommend consistent uppercasing of the "B" in Brussels sprouts.

Clearly, I need this shirt

A supposedly fun thing

D.T. Max's article in this week's New Yorker explores The Pale King, David Foster Wallace's unfinished third novel. The quietly iconic author of Infinite Jest committed suicide last year; my favorite of his works is the long essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," which lays bare the creepy nature of luxury cruises. Wallace's voice was consistently dazzling in its intelligence, and his sense of humor was both pointed and good-natured.

His superficial cleverness tended to give way to a kind of aching sadness, and Max's excellent piece reveals that this melancholy existed both inside him and in his vision of America, and Americans. His dissection of media and marketing, of the tiny tragedies of our consumerist society -- like his examination of the "courtesy smile" that's become a cloying, wholly counterproductive staple of customer service -- was rarely less than brilliant. I found a few of his observations, as noted in the article, particularly compelling:

In a letter to Nadell, he had made a promise: “I will be a fiction writer again or die trying.”

This, it seems to me, is precisely the kind of fervor that aspiring writers want; to those who possess it, however, it can be more affliction than blessing.

Wallace was pushing himself to get beyond the facile skepticism of “Broom.” In 1993, he told Whiskey Island, a literary magazine, “This is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values, and it’s our job to make them up.”

The quote above leads nicely into the next one:

As he told Salon, “I get the feeling that a lot of us, privileged Americans, as we enter our early 30s, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality and values."

Indeed. That's more or less what I'm working through these days; no wonder Wallace resonated with Generation Y. And finally, the quote that might hit closest to home for me:

To DeLillo he wrote, “I do not know why the comparative ease and pleasure of writing nonfiction always confirms my intuition that fiction is really What I’m Supposed to Do, but it does, and now I’m back here flogging away (in all senses of the word) and feeding my own wastebasket.”

I feel this way about writing journalistic pieces versus writing fiction -- the former isn't that hard for me, whereas I can barely get myself to contemplate the latter. Writing, it seems, was the ultimate "supposedly fun thing" in Wallace's life. Yet unlike the frighteningly prepackaged cruise he describes in the essay, he could never get himself to abandon writing, to never do it again. For that, at least, we can be grateful.

My chemical romance, part three

Some romances are destined to be short-lived. After less than two weeks on Celexa, I've decided to return to Lexapro. I could compensate for the price increase ($13 per month for Celexa, nearly $100 per month for Lexapro) by going to therapy biweekly rather than weekly, and as my money-management advisor, Moorea, wisely noted the other day, mental and physical health are things you can't put a price tag on, because everything else hinges on them. (Similarly, in tonight's Nextbook salon on Jews and the body, we discussed the idea that our corporeal selves are on loan to us from God, so we're obligated to treat them well; I think sticking with the medication that works absolutely qualifies.)

Anyway, I look forward to returning to Lexapro, since even my brief time off it has been marked by trouble concentrating and, amazingly, problems articulating my thoughts -- a situation I rarely find myself in. (Even if my thoughts are ridiculous, I can almost always spit them out coherently.) Here's hoping I don't have too much longer to wait until the contentment I've enjoyed since Thanksgiving comes back to me.

The sincerest form of flattery

Priceless. Thanks to Kelly for the tip-off!

News feed

Since my last post, a bunch has happened. To wit:

• My boss pointed out author-provocateur (provocateuse?) Norah Vincent's newest outrageous, ethically questionable piece of muckraking;
• my former NWsource.com colleague Jon Palmer drew my attention to the Times' new blog, Coffee City;
• Facebook revealed plans for another big facelift;
• and former Seattle Weekly managing editor Chuck Taylor -- aka my former boss -- unveiled his new Seattle Post-Post-Intelligencer wiki, just one of many online responses to the probably imminent demise of the Seattle P-I. Chuck has been interested in the topic of technology and journalism for a long time, so it's good to see him stay ahead of the curve.

In more personal news, I:

• visited my half-sister Lore in Los Angeles and took a lot of pictures (the image above is of a public high school, believe it or not);
• watched The Class, the Heroes pilot, and Atonement, the last of which was better than I thought it would be (The Class and Heroes were, respectively, quite good and just fine);
• saw the Irish band Lunasa perform on a wonderfully warm night;
• read quite a bit of Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife, which I'm really enjoying;
• began to realize that my 20 daily milligrams of Celexa aren't, thus far, measuring up to my previous prescription, 10 milligrams of Lexapro;
• visited L.A.'s Central Library;
• consumed various authentic Mexican delicacies, including candied lime skin stuffed with sugared coconut and watermelon, cantaloupe, and mango cut in pieces, tossed in a plastic bag, and seasoned with chili powder, salt, and lime juice;
• and got my beloved car, Gracie, back from the mechanic. She's doing fine.

It's been a busy time, and I'm working full days (8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.) until St. Patrick's Day. I'm staying in Seattle this weekend rather than going to Vancouver, as I'd planned to do, because I'm in stop-the-world-I-wanna-get-off mode, and I'd like a few work-free days to cool back down.