Tom is Away

reading a bit, then sleeping.

My readership is spreading rapidly across the country. One might even say it was selling like hotcakes… that is, if I were selling anything, and if I called pancakes hotcakes, which I don’t.

Anyway, i have confirmed readership in the following states:



Massachussetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Iowa, Maryland, New York, Illinois, and Florida. (By the way, I think that already makes mes more successful than John Kerry.)

And now, we’ve just added Texas to the list, as my apparently bored former teacher, Justin Cronin, has tracked the site down too, even commenting on my half-plagiarism of his writing earlier this month.

Anyway, the point is… nothing? Keep spreading the word, and maybe someday this can be a way I get money somehow, because we all know nobody’s planning on paying me to be a real writer.

Part 2 of a continued message:



The Miami Dolphins recently targeted a white man they want to hire, but have delayed the process by several weeks just to degrade a few respectable black men like Art Shell and Ted Cottrell, parading them around like sideshows just so they can say "hey look, i have a black friend." Isn’t that token gesture nothing more than an acknowledgment of their differences, and therefore a contradiction of the spirit of the rules? Isn’t that pointless interview even more degrading to black coaches, since it implies that they can’t get a job without the NFL forcing people to hire them? Let the teams hire who they want to hire, and let me pass the ball wherever I want. If someone can’t hit the open shot, I’m not going to keep passing it to them. The qualified candidates emerge on their own without your PC bullshit, Paul Tagliabue.

This is part 1 of a good, insightful away message that may not entertain or interest you in any way, but I’m going to be self-indulgent and let you deal with it. It is divided because the away message window is much too small to fit everything I wrote, and it’s all worth saying, if I do say so myself, and I do say so. The second part will be posted immediately after this in my archive, and I trust that you can reconstruct it with little trouble. Here it is:



When we played basketball in grade school gym class, our teacher enforced a rule that we had to pass the ball to at least one girl before shooting.



What does this rule have to do with the NFL’s minority hiring policies? Well, The NFL requires all teams who are searching for a new head coach to interview at least one black candidate, whether or not they have any interest in hiring him. Failure to comply results in massive fines.

mourning yet another near miss/heartbreaking loss at trivia night, all because we didn’t know when Millard Fillmore was president.

But at least I got another free crappy t-shirt for winning a round.

reading, then getting mentally prepared for trivia night. I hope most of the questions are about which Eagles made the pro bowl, John Irving or doing laundry, because that’s all I’ve thought about today.

TMC Away Message movie review: Ocean’s Twelve



Entertaining, witty, and fast-paced like the original, but unnecessarily convoluted for the sake of being convoluted, and possibly confusing at the end. Not a terribly satisfying ending, after putting up with the director intentionally confusing yuo for an hour and a half, with the implicit promise that you would forgive him the confusion once it was all wrapped up.

A rental, not a theater movie.



I just saved you at least $4, and possibly up to $30, depending on how many people you go to the movies with and how much food you consume while there.

I guess the Eagles have erased any doubts about their "shaky" secondary by sending 3 out of 4 starting defensive backs to the Pro Bowl. Just for good measure, the one who didn’t make the Pro Bowl (unjustly, in my opinion, because he’s the best DB on the team) was named NFC Defensive Player of the Week on the same day.



Regardless of all this, however, being an Eagles fan still sucks, because now you just know one of them is going to have a stroke on the field and die during the NFC championship game.

The goal for the rest of the week: get a full, proofread, polished draft of this damn story done before christmas day.

time to get to work.

If I have to get a rubella shot just to register for classes next semester, I’m gonna be bitter.

in case any of you people in real grad programs have forgotten how ridiculous mine is…

I just got my grades back for the semester… All 4 were an S.

If I’d gotten an S in grade school, it meant I was doing a mediocre job. If I get one in grad school, it means I’m close to getting a Master’s degree from a prestigious program, because all my classes are pass/fail, and one of my teachers had us write down our names and the grade we wanted during the last class.

apparently, i’m stressed.

i’m just sick of getting emails from students who aren’t happy with their grades.

someday when I’m not making a living as a writer, you can point to timeslike this, when I go whole days without writing a damn word.

maybe it’s about time to get a haircut, since it’s been about 3 months…

File this one under Sentences I Never Thought I’d Say, right next to "So, Doctor, now you can see how the stapler got in there":



Tom brady was completely outplayed by AJ Feeley on monday night football tonight.

Nevermind, I"m gonna go watch a meaningless footbal game at durkin’s, then come back and write all night.

time to get back to work on this crappy story that just won’t end.

"We looked at each other… and we thought– Is that all? Is that all you are? Is that you? Ah, well if that’s you, if that’s all there is to you, then you’re not so remarkable anymore. I know your story now, there’s nothing else for me to know and quite suddenly I don’t know what to say to you. In truth, I find you a little dull, you shouldn’t have told me everything, you should have kept something back to keep my interest alive… I suddenly find myself unable to talk to you anymore." — Edward Carey

In non-Eagles news, apparently President Bush has been named Time’s Man of the Year.

I can only assume one of the following:



1. The editors of Time are retarted.

2. The editors of Time, like the rest of the mainstream media, are corporate and political ass kissers

3. It was opposite day in Time’s editorial office the day they made that decision