I Have Become Accustomed To Rejection

Outstanding Submissions: 9

Rejections: 1

1. Judge Judy is fierce today. I don’t normally watch daytime television but I killed myself at the gym yesterday and today and I feel like maybe, I deserve to. She is dressing down some back talking wenches. I love it.  Yesterday I was made to do a series of squats with 135 pounds on my shoulders. It was difficult to make it to my car afterwards. When I got to campus, the elevator was out of order and I had a meeting on the third floor. I was very sad about that. Life felt very hopeless at the bottom of those stairs. Life felt very hopeless when I reached the third floor. But I was breathing. When I started working with my trainer, she asked me what my goal was. I said I wanted to climb stairs without feeling like dying. Good news! I only felt like napping yesterday. This has come at a steep price, that price being stepping up and down on different-sized steps for hours a week. My trainer is awesome. We’re having margaritas tomorrow.

1.5 My gym is a strange place. It’s not a fancy big city gym. The equipment is old. Most of my fellow gym goers are old as in older than 65 all the way up to 88 (seriously). The place smells like old sweat, Ben Gay, denture cream and mold. The old people are my buddies. They are always chatting with me and encouraging me and it used to bug me but now I embrace it because a geriatric gym posse is better than no gym posse. They teach me about the history of the area and old Finnish words and compliment me so that’s great. I do, however, have an admirer who is more effusive than most of my gym buddies. He is at least 60 and is always red-faced, florid. He wears the most form fitting, uncomfortable to look at gym shorts and mismatched shirts and knee high socks. I’ve known him for years because he hangs out at the bar/restaurant where I hang out with friends. He’s always said hi to me and tried to chat me up and I’ve never thought much of it because whenever a stranger talks to me I naturally think they’re going to make fun of me or kill me or something. I’m weird. Anyway, whenever he sees me, he comes running over, whether I’m in a training session or slogging away on the horrible treadmill or bouncing on a yoga ball and he chats about the weather and asks me about school and my friends and this and that and the other.  For the past three weeks, he has intensified his efforts and now is always telling me, things like “You are looking so fantastic,” or “Keep up the good work,” and he has even been sharing his enthusiasm for my “progress” with the gym staff. Yesterday, when I could not have looked shittier, felt more bloated and horrid, he said, “Goddamn, you’re looking good,” and then stood there and watched while I ran laps around the all purpose room and then did sit ups on the yoga ball. I think he was staring at my ample cleavage. Is he a geriatric chubby chaser? Is there something wrong with his eyesight? The whole thing creeps me out and makes me want to stuff my face.

2. February has been quite horrible. Is February ever good? One of the many reasons I love Light Boxes is how it makes clear that February is a bad bad man.

3. Bad men are underrated and underappreciated. I do my part to right (write?) that wrong.

4. The rejection was from West Branch; they hope I think of them in the future. I will think of them in the future. I will think of them so damn much. Then I read a blog entry from a writer who doesn’t really like PANK and was frustrated about his rejection from us. Coupled with the rejection and the rejection of my rejection was an acceptance to a magazine where I thought I would never get an acceptance.  Balance is important.

5. Every morning while driving to the gym I listen to this amazing radio show on a local station called the Super Saver Hotline. The two hosts, some guy and an older woman named Mary Anne sell discounted gift certificates to local businesses and they chat about the most random, quotidian things and I have to confess, I am IN LOVE with this show. I cannot get enough and when I move, of the four things I will miss, one is this radio show. Today Mary Anne talked to two women who work at the Kaleva Cafe and the restaurant ladies kept responding with these monotone, one-word answers and it was such a treat. Here’s a sound clip where you will be introduced to the term anti-broccoli-er. You won’t regret listening. I start laughing toward the end and sound like a crazy person, maybe.

This is excellence.

6. I was mentioned in a review of Artifice Magazine on the Kenyon Review blog. Thank you William Walsh for those kind words. I also had some nanofiction running in serial this week at Pic Fic. You can see the entire series here. I had fun writing that little series, trying something different. I also have a story at Women Writers Zine. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned that. I slept in a sleep number bed in a Radisson. Horrible bed.

7.  I learned about Magnesium Citrate this week. Wow.

8. This is my coffee table. While you can’t see it, it is super cute and has drawers in either end great for hiding crap when guests come over. The table is from IKEA, and yes, I assembled it myself or at the very least, carefully supervised the assembly.

As you can see, I am reading an issue of Barrelhouse, Keyhole 9, Mel Bosworth’s chapbook with the long title about razzing chickens (delightful), Canteen, Dave Housely’s Ryan Seacrest book, three issues of Poetry, Weave, Sleepingfish, Mather Schneider’s Drought Resistant Strain (SO GOOD), Emma Straub’s Fly-over State, a Broadset Literary Collective zine, the Holiday in Cambodia zine from Annalemma, Artifice 1, Kristina Born’s One Hour of Television, the latest issue of CCC, Pear Noir 3, Scott Mclanahan’s Stories II (awesome, review this weekend), the last two issues of One Story, a book on research design and a book on Foucault as I work on my dissertation, Naoko Awa’s The Fox’s Widow, the latest issues of Fence, Caketrain, American Short Fiction and….

9. The new DIAGRAM anthology. It is a deck of cards. IT IS A DECK OF CARDS. You can actually play cards with these cards and read interesting things.

My thumb looks discolored and weird here. It looks like a mutant thumb. I have pretty great fingers, I must admit. This is a bad picture of my thumb.

10. I can’t remember what Item 10 was supposed to be. Oh yes. My first short story collection, which I wrote as my master’s thesis, is called How Small the World. I re-read it in the wee hours of this morning when I couldn’t sleep. The hardest thing about being a writer is looking at the work of your younger self.

10.5 When my brothers and I were kids, we would hear this radio commercial in Haiti for Beurre Marianne, a brand of butter, and the last like of the commercial was, “Pas quittez yo péter sous nous,” and every time we heard this line we would DIE laughing because in Creole pété means to fart so we thought they were saying, “Don’t let them fart on us,” when really the line was saying don’t let them get one over on you. Good times.