January 30, 2002 I'm feeling a little random today: I was checking out the stats for this site the other day and you would not believe some of the search queries that this journal is coming up for. Obviously, there were a ton of searches for "Dorothy Parker" and some for Philadelphia; I get a lot of hits out of searches for Sandra Bernhard because of this entry. There was even one for "What age did people get married in the 1920s?" But those are the normal ones. It seems that more often than not, the search engines offer this journal up in response to more, um, deviant queries. Like what, you ask? Oh, how about "boys who wear Mom's high heels"? Or "Glory Hole sex stories?" Then there's the ever-popular "slouch socks fetish" and "mind control stories." I've gotten a couple of hits from both "the chemical makeup of ecstasy" and "crack and sex." Someone else hit me from searching for "this is freaky" and you wouldn't believe the number of hits I've gotten from people searching for "self sabotage." But my personal favorite has got to be: "Women wearing Medusa wigs fetish." My God. I never realized how deviant I really am. ~*~ Speaking of deviance. Teddy seems to be slowly cracking up. He called me one night from a Thai restaurant blind drunk and mumbled something into my voice mail that sounded vaguely like, "I've got no place to live." When I spoke to him the next day, it turned out that he does have a place to live, it's just everything else that's falling apart. He made some mention about moving to New York. I'm mulling this over. Frankly, I'm mulling over how to handle this entire situation. Nervous breakdowns and drug addiction are not quite my areas of expertise, despite what those wacky search queries say. ~*~ In high school, I had this friend Simon. We had nearly every class together, right down to Latin, Italian, and creative writing. We also worked on the school newspaper, Bear Facts (ha ha. Bear Facts? Our school mascot was a bear. Get it? Ha.). Simon was the sports editor and I was the editor-in-chief (remind me to someday tell you the story of how my staff covered up for me when we all got caught sneaking off campus at a student publication conference just so I could be editor-in-chief, an honor I never wanted.) Anyway, we graduated and Simon went to NYU and I went to the College Formerly Known as Trenton State (because, yes, I was even lazier as a teenager than I am now). The last time I saw him was graduation day almost thirteen years ago. I've thought about ol' Simon every once in a while over the years. He was the only other truly creative person in my year (the other being ME. duh) and I wondered how things had turned out for him. Sometimes, I'd hear rumors: he'd dyed his hair purple and cut it into a Mohawk; he dropped acid A LOT; he played intramural hockey in Manhattan-- obviously, my town's gossip mill was burning up over that one. But I never heard anything solid. When Simon left Jersey, he left. He didn't visit home often and he didn't have contact with any of his old friends. Three years ago, I went to my ten-year high school reunion. The only people I was interested in seeing were Simon; Wendy, my best friend from the eighth grade; and Oliver, another friend with whom I had lost touch. Oliver was there. Simon and Wendy weren't. But, Wendy dropped me an email a year later, so the mystery of Wendy and what she's been doing was solved. That left Simon. I was still curious as to what he had done since graduating. The most I knew was that he had studied film at NYU and had wanted to be a filmmaker. I wanted to know if he had made it. Every so often, when I was bored at work, I would type Simon's name into Yahoo! and see what came up. The problem was Simon's real name is so common, he might as well be named John Smith. I refined my search to include mentions of flimmaking and NYU. I still got about twenty different people with Simon's name. Apparently, there are a whole lot of filmmakers with the same name who went to NYU. Perhaps NYU Film School only accepts people with this name. Or possibly, every student must change his or her name to this moniker in order to graduate. I gave up my search pretty soon after realizing that trying to find Simon on the Internet was like trying to find someone named "Rocky" in South Philly. Besides, I was worried that maybe I was crossing the border into the Wonderfully Wacky World of Stalking. (I know, everyone types the names of people they once knew into search engines in an effort to kill time between the hours of nine and five on weekdays, but I'm just really hard myself, okay?) Then, the other day, I was poking around on hypnotic.com -- a cool site where you can watch all sorts of student and independent films -- when, quite by accident, I came across a film that was made by an NYU Film School graduate named Simon. The site's bio for this Simon seemed like it could reasonably be the bio for the Simon I knew in high school. There was a tiny picture next to the film's listing but it was too small for me to make out anything besides the fact that the two people in the picture were male (and, really, it was so small that one of them could have been a woman in drag). So, since the site said that this Simon had written, directed and starred in the film, I figured I'd give it a look and see if it really was Simon. The only problem with this plan is that my lovely Compaq Presario lacks the necessary bandwith to play the films featured on hypnotic.com. Damn. I was so close. I pouted for a few days and then I realized that I could ask Holden to see if he could download the film at work and burn it to a disk for me. Problem solved. Not exactly. The site (quite rightly) does not allow you to save or download any of the films. Crap. Holden suggested that I try the computer in my office at University A and I'm going to on Thursday. Meanwhile, he actually did get to see a bit of the film. "Yeah, it says that Simon plays someone named Ralph." "Well, did you see who Ralph was?" "Yeah. Was Simon big and fat?" "He was a little chubby." "If this is him, the boy put on some weight." "Does he have brown hair?" "Yeah, but that's like asking if he was breathing. Besides he could have dyed it." "True. My mom said she heard it was purple at one point." "Hey, did he have a big mole on his face?" "Like how big?" "Why? Do you remember a mole?" "I'm not sure. I'm getting a vague memory of moles, but maybe it was acne." "This is a big mole. You'd remember it." "I don't know. I'm remembering moles but, well, I don't know." "You think it might be a false memory?" "Well, you put moles in my head." "Because he has one. I figured you'd remember." "Why? Is it a freakishly large mole?" "What?" "Is it this HUGE mole that he would have been known for? I mean, would this mole have made him 'the kid with that fucking huge ass mole' in high school?" "Nah, it's kind of big but not freakishly big. Besides, can't moles grow?" "Maybe. I guess it could have been smaller when I knew him." "Did he like sauerkraut? He ate some sauerkraut straight from the can in the part that I saw." "I don't know. He did eat our biology experiment in the ninth grade, but somebody paid him to do it." "It wasn't sauerkraut, was it?" "No, I think it was corn." Needless to say, Holden had no idea whether this was Simon or not. However, when he got home, I showed Simon's picture in my yearbook. Holden's immediate response was "Oh, yeah, that's the kid." So it is Simon. I'm going to try to check out the film at University A. After that, I don't know. I'd like to drop him a line. Say hi, see how things are going. But I'm kind of hesitant. His bio on the site says that he just sold two scripts to Miramax or some other big time production company and I definitely don't want him to think I'm just getting in touch because I heard about the sales. I also don't know how I'd explain how I found him or why I'd want to write to someone I haven't spoken to for thirteen years. I'd rather him think I was a mercenary bitch than a stalker. What do you kids think? ~*~ Philadelphia is a great town. I wouldn't live here if it wasn't. (Because, you know, I'm just the arbiter of greatness.) However, it lacks a literary magazine. Sure, the various universities in the area put out journals but nobody reads them -- not even the people who attend said universities. So I've decided to start a magazine. Two semesters ago, I took a class in Modernism and we did some research on the "little" magazines, small literary publications run by writers and artists to provide a forum for publishing their work and the work of their friends. As we were discussing The Dial and American Mercury, it occurred to me that there was no reason my friends and I couldn't do the same thing. The New Yorker started out in much the same way. Don't believe me? Mrs. Parker was one of the original staff writers. When founding-editor Harold Ross asked her why she had missed a deadline, she replied "Someone was using the pencil." The way I see it is this: You make your own opportunities. I pal around with a bunch of talented, intelligent writers and while we should all strive to get our work picked up by "major" literary publications, where's the harm in starting our own publication? The worst that can happen is that it goes nowhere and we have a little fun. The best? Hell, in twenty years, we could be sending people snotty rejection letters and avoiding David Foster Wallace's phone calls. It's worth a shot. There's definitely a need for a literary magazine in Philly, seeing as there are none. Scott has a few connections that may be able to help us out with production. I figured if people like F. Scott Fitzgerald and the members of the Algonquin Roundtable could put out their own magazines, my crowd should be able to. After all, all those Modernists were stinking drunk most of the time, and we're only stinking drunk half of the time. Anyway, the upshot of this crazy little scheme is that I'm hosting a preliminary meeting tonight to toss around ideas. We'll see how it goes. Which reminds me. There is no reason I should be sitting here at 3 am typing an entry when I've got an entire house to clean tomorrow before the meeting. Particulary such a stunning entry as this one.

7 Deadly Sins and Other, Less Fatal Diversions Pride: I think I taught a pretty good Creative Writing class tonight. At least, I enjoyed it. Perhaps the students didn't, but I was happy with it. Envy: My colleagues at University A who actually got to write over the winter break, instead of desperately trying to read Don Quixote. Wrath: I am not pleased that the department secretary at University A never ordered the book for my Creative Writing class. Sloth: I keep waking up around 8 am and then dozing until 1 pm. What's up with that? Avarice: Not feeling particularly greedy today. Gluttony: Godiva's White Chocolate Raspberry ice cream. Enough said. Lust: Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Book: The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, edited by Tobias Wolfe. For Carl's workshop at University A. He assigns a story each week from either this book or one of two other texts. For lack of any good Law and Order reruns, I read a few of the stories out of this one. I highly recommend Andre Dubus' "The Fat Girl" (even though the protagonist's weight is a dead give away that it was written by a man -- she's supposed to be obese and if her scale is showing the numbers that Dubus says it is, she'd better be 5'1". Still, overall, it's a nicely crafted story.) On the flip side, I was not impressed with Raymond Carver's "Cathedral." I know. I'm a Philistine. According to nearly everyone at University A, this story is THE BOMB. I found it boring and slightly pretentious. Tune: Son of a Preacher Man by Dusty Springfield: The only one who could ever reach me Was the son of a preacher man. The only boy who could ever teach me Was the son of a preacher man. Obsession: During one of my first trips to New York with my girls, I bought the most amazing perfume: Axis by Sense of Space. I got more compliments on that perfume than any other I have ever worn. The only person who didn't like it was my father who said I smelled like a watermelon patch, but then again, my father also thinks that blazers are "sharp." Anyway, I only bought a small bottle and when I ran out, I couldn't find th stuff anywhere. Not Sephora. Not the department stores. Not anywhere. I finally found it yesterday! At Perfumebay.com. This time, I bought the big bottle. Task at Hand: Cleaning the apartment. Quest for Publication: Total Submissions: 7 Rejections: 1 Acceptances: 0