Fan’s Complaint

At work lately I’ve gotten back to box moving. The month or so prior to last week, I hadn’t been doing much box moving at all, it was mostly scrivening work. It’s good to get back to box moving, as that is what I tell people I “do”, when the inevitable question of “So what are you doing with your life these days?” comes up.

I have a whole spiel about box moving being good honest work, how the boxes start the day in one place and at the end of the day a bunch of them are in a different place. This satisfies the high school physics definition of “work.”

But you know, I don’t think it really satisfies me. Box moving isn’t leading anywhere. If I still want to write, I should be doing something that will put me on a path towards grad school or something. What I am currently “doing with my life” leads nowhere at all. I’m just going in circles, moving boxes, spending money, etc.

Yes, I know, old theme. More of the same. This just proves my point. I was only spurred to write this because this weekend, I bought the most pointless thing possible. I got a new faceplate for my cell phone.

May God have mercy on my soul.

This is why they hate us.

Children are starving and I’m spending money on not just something I don’t need, but something I don’t need to make another thing I don’t need needlessly flashy.

My glossy black cell phone with chrome keypad is gonna go great with my iPod though. Together with my black leather jacket, I’ll surely have enough of a sense of self-worth to be able to get some writing done.

Well, maybe I’ll need these $150 iPod speakers too. After all, I can’t write until I’m out of debt, and I need to keep moving boxes to get out of debt, and I can’t possibly move one more box while getting tangled up in my headphones (no, not the white ones, I got these Sony ones for 50 euros in Berlin).

My profligacy must be a result of my parents’ separation. My mom moving out probably damaged my fragile young psyche irrevocably. My impressionable mind, at the tender age of (hmm, did she move out before or after my 23rd birthday?) twenty-three, was scarred to such a horrible extent that not only do I not know how to love, I also sometimes have trouble remembering which one is my right hand (I often need to recite the pledge of allegiance to remember this).

Pity me.

S C A R Y

Links will require some scrolling. My picture may also be moved off those pages at some point. I know I have no one to blame but myself. Perhaps now is the time to explain to all future prospective employers that the picture is a result of a collaborative art project between myself and a photographer friend. I needed to draw attention for my literary magazine, and that picture was the best way to do it.

I was not depressed in anyway at the time of that picture, despite my not having any friends, failing two out of four classes, losing my social support network at college from an attempted suicide attempt (not mine), and living in almost complete isolation and squalor. No sirs, I was not at all depressed. Nor am I ever depressed, as you can easily see from the contents of this blog. I am a happy, well-adjusted, and most importantly, employable individual.

Yes, I know, I am two days late. It couldn’t be helped. On Sunday night/Monday moring I did not sleep, because of the farmers and the iron horse. Then on Monday, it was my mom’s day off, so she wanted to hang out, and it was my friend Adam’s birthday. Normally I would’ve gone straight home to collapse to the strains of Pennyroyal Tea, but on this particular April 5th, on no sleep, I decided to hang out with my mother (so I can have a couple of guilt-free weeks) and to go drinking with Adam.

Drinking was the usual thing. I met Adam’s co-workers, who seemed to be a nice bunch. Whenever I came back from the bathroom I would walk into some Ph.D level conversation. Meeting these people convinced me (for about a day or so) that I needed to get my act together and go to grad school.

Thing is, where a year ago I would’ve hated these people for being older and more together than I am, I now find them inspirational. Perhaps that is the wrong word. Recall the entry I made over a year ago about a night at the Lansky Lounge. I accused the young professionals there of being on “the wrong side of 25″. Yet here I am, edging closer to that arbitrarily magical divide, and now I too wear a collared shirt. I think I may have jumped trains of thought here. My point is that I hate what I do, my coworkers are old (they talk about church and mortgages), and even though I know I’d make a piss-poor grad student (piss-poor in a couple of different ways), I’d rather be around people my age who are all doing my thing.

But then maybe that isn’t a good thing. That is certainly no way to expand my horizons. But being a box lifter/scrivener hasn’t exactly turned me into the next Kerouac either. I think I just hate a few more things now than I did when I first graduated.

Anyway, Adam’s friends talked a lot about their studies, and they were a good group, and I wish I still had a good group like that. I miss the writing community at college.

***

On April 5th: 10 fucking years. He’d have been 37 now. I spent some time at work yesterday scanning google news for Kurt Cobain, and I read a bunch of articles. Most were poorly written. No, poorly written is perhaps too strong. They were well written, yet I did not get a sense of any of the writers being or having been fans of Nirvana. A lot of these articles felt far too objective. I guess that’s what journalism is supposed to be.

The stuff I wrote before the stars has nothing to do with Kurt’s death, but even if I had stuck closer to that topic, I probably would’ve written about the same damn thing. At this point, I feel no need to advertise about Nirvana. Either you got/get it or you don’t. If you never heard of them, it’s too late to jump on now–the train has not only left the station, but it derailed somewhere between Classic Rock and 90s Nostalgia. If you weren’t a part of it at some point before 1995, then just forget about it.

The thing that bugs me every time this date comes around is counting the years that have passed. 10 is of course an arbitrarily meaningful number, and realizing that it’s been ten years since I left middle school one day and heard the news at my friend’s house on MTV (we were still too poor to have cable), is just an utter mindfuck. Next thing you know, I’ll be on the wrong side of that 25.

To ppp-s189-n243-as5400-2.dialup.ufl.edu,

Tonight I looked at the logs for the first time in months, and I noticed that you have been reaching my humble little corner of the web by googling the site’s name. I’m flattered by your persistence. I don’t update often, and when I do, it’s never all that interesting. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but surely there are better things for you to be spending your paltry dialup bandwidth on than my site. Aren’t there bikini girls down at the University of Florida? Or maybe you are a girl (oh my heart is a-flutter!) in which case there must be speedo boys for you to ogle.

Anyway, the url of this site isn’t that hard to memorize, if you don’t feel comfortable bookmarking it. I just wanted to let you know that I AM WATCHING YOU, and if you just memorized the URL, I would not be able to keep track of your comings and goings.

XOXO

H. Y. Fan

There is absolutely nothing wrong with life! My life is the bestest! Boy, I sure do enjoy EVERYTHING. I love everyone, especially JESUS, our LORD AND SAVIOR. Working in New Jersy is SWELL! I’m going to donate my next paycheck to Macalester College, because gosh darnit, they gave me a heck of an education. I am completely indebted to them for all of the wonderful things I have.

I would also like to take this HAPPY TIME to thank everyone for giving me so much over the years. Thanks mom and dad! Thanks, merciless peers! Thanks, JESUS, our LORD AND SAVIOR!

I hope you all have a HAPPY DAY!

LOOK AT THIS CUTE BUNNY!