I apologize for the inconsistency of my capitalization.

Ohmygosh I’ve done so much reading recently. But I don’t really feel like talking ironically pretentiously and sillilly (meaning: in a manner quite silly) about old stuffy Russians and their stubborn ridiculous ways of looking at literature or a stuffy old American anthropologist and his stubborn ridiculous way of looking at “systems” of religion or Frankenstein.

(I didn’t expect you to laugh at that last sentence [I *don’t* expect you? Maybe huh Woah I just got a tense migraine (lol.)] I didn’t expect you to laugh at that last sentence about Frankenstein and Russians, but I just want you to admire the jarring, seemingly sudden way it ended because of the lack of parallel structure. You would have been more likely to laugh and feel good about the sentence (hehe) if the third item had been longer like the first two. (It being funny would also have helped) As it was you were (probably) all set to speed through the first part of the third item to get to the expected joke at the end of it, but it both ended early and wasn’t very funny. Yay for parallel structure!)

I’d like to apologize for that.

But instead of that I will talk about something else.   Erm… (‘erm’ makes me think of Foxtrot. Think about it. It’s usually accompanied by Paige or Roger or ‘whatever the mom’s name is’ making the weird face where they’re concerned or torn or undecided about something and you can see their teeth and it looks like they’re eating their mouth in some kind of weird mutant monster manner.)

I had a dream about my teeth falling out a couple of nights ago. Popular superstitious opinion says that I’m either desperately trying to hold onto some deep dark secrets that are inevitably going to spill out like bloody teeth, or I’m just deathly afraid of dental surgery.

Have you ever thought about what Beyoncé would be like if she were a cat?  I’ve been meaning to shoot a parody of “If I Were a Boy” and call it “If I Were a Cat.” Ideally it’ll feature some Beyoncé look-alike in a fuzzy cat suit rubbing herself on furniture and talking about fish.

I went deep sea fishing once during my junior year of high school. What started out as a day of fun and fishing ended up as an eternity of nausea cold and vomit. (So I didn’t put any commas in here just to see what would happen, and it kinda looks fine to me which is interesting, but now this word processor program is suggesting I put a question mark at the end. Weird.) All our food got soaked, my hoodie was very much stained with vomit, and we ended up huddling together for warmth on a bench for hours as the cold waves crashed over the sides of the small fishing boat. Our first stop after returning to land was Walmart where we bought fresh boxers and vomit-free t-shirts.

Hm.

So I’ve been writing for a comedy magazine named BoUNCe this year. I go to these brain storm meetings they have, but it seems weird to me because they’re all just coming up with funny ideas and they assume people are going to take the initiative to write funny things with those ideas.  For some reason the concept of a trashy dirty collective idea bin that we all dip into before writing anything disgusts me, so I just listen to the ideas that they’re coming up with and spin off my own stuff, desperately trying to avoid copying what they come up with. So I go to their brain storm sessions to come up with my own separate ideas.

Here’s an article that I wrote that didn’t appear in an actual magazine!

Kyra Sedgwick Takes Break From Acting to Spend Time With Family, Eat Babies.

Kyra Sedgwick, star of television drama “The Closer”, announced Tuesday that she would be putting her acting career on hold in order to slow down, reexamine her priorities, and eat some babies.

“I’ve been working so much lately,” the actress said. “I just haven’t had any time for my family or any of my hobbies, like woodwork and hungry infanticide.”

Sedgwick, who played the insignificant female costar in The Game Plan with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, looks forward to spending more time with husband Kevin Bacon, running in the park with dog Minnie, and devouring small children.

“I really miss that fresh air, and you can’t really take it in when you’ve got all these commitments on your head,” Sedgwick explained. “And there’s no better feeling than snapping a dead infant’s soft neck open for some fresh marrow and knowing you don’t have to be anywhere in the morning.”

Sedgwick couldn’t say how long the hiatus would last, but she would definitely be back.

“I’m excited to come back to work, but I want to be a part of my children’s lives before their childhoods are over all. I’m just going to focus on Travis and Suzie,” Sedgwick said. “And dead babies.”

And now back to me. I hope you enjoyed that brief article-ish thing.

And here’s the application I sent in to a literary magazine last semester!

(blahs edited in once more)

 Well, my name is Michael Dickson.  I like writing, and I’m an indecisive sophomore from Raleigh.  So far I’m not telling you anything you haven’t picked up on from the first 1/4th of this page.  My apologies.

(shifting gears)   (*onomatopoeia*) 

I’m interested in “The Door” because I love writing, I love looking at writing, I love reading writing, and I love editing writing.  (I like gerunds too.)  I like analyzing stuff and overanalyzing stuff and talking to authors about stuff so I can argue with them about the stuff they wrote about.  

 Except I don’t think I’m actually very argumentative.  I’d say I’m pretty easygoing.  

I don’t know blah blah blah blah "work experience" blah blah blah blah "non-existent" blah blah blah "good work ethic?" blah blah blah.

I’m very organized – not in the sense that I obsessively sort my socks and make my roommate vacuum his mattress – but in that if I have something that needs to be done, I know exactly where it is and when I will do it and how.  (That might be the same thing as responsible – I’ll look it up.)  

As for specific writing experience, I’ve been editing my own writing for years – not to mention my friends’ blogs and my brothers’ creepy science fiction stories and my brothers’ friends’ college application essays.  I like writing (I feel like I’ve said that already) and I like making it sound good (More important than just *looking* good). 

blah blah blah blah "blog blog" blah blah blah "shameless plug" blah blah blah "link" blah blah blah "beg" blah.

Please excuse my liberal use of sentence fragments; I promise I am at least moderately conscious of and familiar with all standard grammar conventions and their uses.  

I hope this post has been at least moderately entertaining.

The Season of Lists! (I've been slacking a lot with the whole "proper punctuation" thing recently; sorry about that)

I have returned from my long Christmas break. I have come back to my compact, pleasant, and gnat-infested home after spending several weeks at my more expansive, comfortable, family-and-food-filled home. Thus begins the next season of academia, abstract education, and filling my mind with only semi-practical but simultaneously extremely interesting and thought-provoking nonsense. This marks the end of this rather short season of lights, family time, gift time, Jesus time, lots of food time, and lists. Time.

Now I’m going to delve more deeply into this last thought: the season of lists. Time.

This is because I have a very unpredictable attention span and I often venture off on long tangents in my thought processes without explaining or watching to make sure that my companion observers are close behind as I jump between trains of thought mid-journey on a whim, as if the Native American outlaw train-robber savages had me cornered, diving onto the roof of the train to Pasalacqua in a desperate attempt to escape peril. Ten-gallon Stetson hat in one hand and my six-shooter in the other, I try to provide some cover fire for them/you/the companions as I roll across the top of the neighboring train and deftly hang off the side in order to give the Indian criminal steam-engine burglar vermin less surface area to fire their blow-dart rifle knives at. I mourn the loss of any followers of mine who may’ve been blown gunned stabbed down by the Iroquois bandit railroad hijacker thief barbarians or their superfluously gratuitous nonsensical analogy about train robberies.

I should hyphenate more. That sounds like hydrate. I will do one of those two things.

So with that botched segue behind us, I will now smoothly return to what is presumably the main topic of this weirdly and overly narrated blog post.

So we just ended what is essentially the season of lists. Christmas lists, Naughty lists; the list goes on and on ( I assume). If you have not yet guessed, this is simply a poorly conceived and even more poorly executed narrative device set up to allow me to make some lists. I will now do that.

Lists about my Christmas break!

List of cool nifty things I got for or around Christmas (That was some confusing preposition action right thur.)

• Pickpunch (IT LITERALLY PUNCHES GUITAR PICKS OUT OF WHATEVER I PUT IN IT. SURPRISINGLY ENOUGH, THERE HAVE YET TO BE ANY [SERIOUS] INJURIES)
• A scarf (yay! Also an awesome jacket but only “scarf” sounds exotic enough to make it on the list.) (Maybe I don’t use “exotic” the same way other people do…)
• Snuggie! (I don’t… I can’t… um… yeah.)
• Coffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffee mugs.
• A zombie survival kit! (pressing concern)
• A lot of other things that I don’t have comments about but were nonetheless amazing gifts that I appreciated very much. I promise

List of things I forgot to do

• A lot of things, including sanding a guitar in preparation for painting, a project that I’ve been putting off for literally probably quite possibly three years.

List of things I said I wouldn’t do but did!

• Play video games/watch tv for more than an hour a day. (Ohhhhhhhh man I said I’d do that?)

List of movies I saw!

• The Adventures of Tintin (awesome and nostalgia! Adjectival suffix!)
• Source Code (yay inter-dimensional theory!)
• Cowboys and Aliens (YAY DANIEL CRAIG YAY HARRISON FORD YAY OLIVIA WILDE YAY YAY YAY)

List of movies I didn’t see

• Probs lots.

List of videogames I played

• Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (I played an Italian assassin who kept speaking in Spanish and had English subtitles [I may’ve messed with the language settings a little])
• Civilization V (I created a grammar-themed civilization and proceeded to impose stern totalitarian and theocratic rule over the entire world. This is only a little bit of a big exaggeration.)

List of videogames I didn’t play

• Anything Lego-themed (except for 15 minutes of Lego Harry Potter at a friend’s house but that doesn’t count.)

List of snuggies I got!

• I may have covered this already.

List of nostalgic old tv show dvds that I gave to a sibling

• Sheep in the Big City!  A very ridiculous old show about a sheep named sheep. Sadly no real dvds exist so I had to buy a homemade Chinese dvd version. Is this illegal? If so, then it was 10 years ago that I bought it. Statute of Limitations! (That’s probably not how that works.) (Either way, whatever punishment I would receive for such a crime would be more than worth it for the laughter and tears I brought to a child’s face. [Actually he just chuckled and pointed out that they’re recorded really badly and inconveniently.])

List of Lego-themed video games I didn’t play

• Did I cover this?

List of Lego-themed video games (created by Traveler’s Tales) that exist

• Lego Harry Potter
• Lego Star Wars
• Lego Pirates of the Carribean
• Lego Indiana Jones
• Lego Batman

List of Lego-themed video games created that I wish existed

• Lego Lord of the Rings =(

Yay lists!

Wait, what’s this, you get one more surprise??? You get a bonus analogy-allegory! I’d call it an “analogegory,” but that sounds gross.

So we’re talking about the Nuremberg Trials in my philosophy class, and it looks like what was really going on in World War II was that America and Europe were trying to get their house under control. They had a new roof and had spent a long time trying to make it strong and stable. (At first the roof was really more of a thatch weave, but Germany kept climbing on top and mussing it up.) Then the roof was more tile-y or whatever roofs are.  So Europe and America thought the roof was fine, and they didn’t worry much either because Germany was in bed with a lot of broken bones and a really bad toothache and he had lost his wallet and his phone so he couldn’t call or get a ride to his friend Austria’s house. 

(Austria had helped mess up the thatch roof earlier but then England called his angry authoritarian Austrian mama and he had to go home.)

So England and France are out eating lemonade in their sunroom when they hear a noise above them. They look out the window and they see Germany running all over the roof! He’s cackling and hopping around and ripping up the tile-y roof pieces and throwing them off at people like Poland, but they don’t know how he got up there because his new room had been in the basement and they’d thought all his bones were broken anyway. Then they saw Italy and Japan climb up on the roof too. 

(They were mean neighborhood friends of Germany. Italy was at that weird age where he was cool when he hung out with England and France, but as soon as he was with Germany he was an awkward and anti-semitic hooligan.)

Germany was throwing tiles at all kinds of people and England and France didn’t know what to do. They waffled around for a while and eventually started throwing stuff at him from the window. Then Japan threw a rock at America who was just walking by, so America joined up with Europe and France and their group of friends who’d gathered to get Germany and *his* friends off the roof.  Well they went to all the windows and threw everything they could at Germany.  The roof was getting weaker and Germany was sore, so eventually he stopped throwing stuff, but he still refused to get off the roof.

They had no idea how to get him off, so America, England, France, and 21 other neutral or allied nations (including Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Australia, Haiti, Honduras, Panama, New Zealand, Venezuela, and India) sat down to think and come up with a way to get Germany off the roof.

(At some point in the struggle Italy had fallen off the roof and Japan had exploded, so Germany was the only one left to deal with.)

After months of deliberation, America tentatively made a suggestion: “What if…” he began, “what if we went out on the roof too? Then we could take him back inside!”

A lot of other countries got pissed. What the crap was America talking about? If we went out on the roof then we’d be no better than Germany.

But America was all like “No way, we’re going on the roof for totally different reasons; the way we’re doing it, it’s not even really going on the roof.”

The other nations all said, “wat?”

“Yeah man,” America said, “Germany is already on the roof, so any going onto the roof we do to get them isn't actually going out onto the roof anymore, we’re just going out onto the roof to bring Germany back in.”

The other nations were still confused, but they went with it anyway. They went out onto the roof, grabbed Germany, pulled him back in, and then created a new roof. They called it the United Nations.

If You Ever See Me In A Coffeeshop Obnoxiously Tapping Out Rhythms On My Computer, It's Because Otherwise I'd Be Shaking Uncontrollably From The Egregious Caffeine Intake. Now You Know.

So here I am, sitting in a Starbucks in North Raleigh. (This is about as clear and specific as saying “I’m in a building that sells waffles somewhere in Johnston County.” Probably less so actually.) It is near the end of Christmas Break, which means that the parents are back at work, the little brother is back at school, and I only see most of the other brothers when they come by for a free meal. The rest of the extended family has returned to their home streets and states, and the cousin has left for Belize. You know how it goes.

I’ve realized that while at home, I am incapable of doing anything besides watching entire seasons of 30 Rock, wasting hours playing my little brother’s computer games, and checking the fridge every 15 minutes, assuming that I’m going to find something interesting wedged in there that was not there before. Thus I am at Starbucks. And now that this huge mug of liquid caffeine is causing me to literally buzz a little bit, I will write.

(The drug culture in this country is fascinating. You can buy machines for filtering your drugs at every big store or mart worth its beans, some people carefully grind their own personal blend of drugs every morning, and there are cafes in literally every shopping center where people can sit on smarmy couches and think smarmy thoughts while a smarmy liberal arts major in an embarrassing apron prepares their drugs for them, complete with hazelnut syrup and room for cream.) 

[I’ve begun to use parenthesis as an indicator that a particular thought is an offshoot from the central topic and an acknowledgment that I am comfortable and conscious of this fact. The brackets {or whatever they’re called} are indicative of a further tangent away from the original offshoot.]

At a certain point, however, I decide that the subject of discussion has become skewed enough that it is no longer clear or worthwhile to categorize things in reference to what the supposedly “central” topic is or was. (Think of it this way:  Your train is going to New York. From somewhere. If it stops off in Philadelphia, that could be considered an offshoot. The stop makes it take longer to get to New York, but it could still be considered a point on the way to New York.  Then the train goes to Massachusetts. This delays your arrival in New York even more. (Particularly because you just briefly passed through New York, and despite your shouts at the conductor, the train didn’t stop or change course. You think he might’ve been on the toilet.) This stopover in Massachusetts delays your arrival in New York, but it is still nothing more than a brief tangent, an offshoot from your original course. Maybe not a very efficient one, but you can still see the main route you’ve been pursuing. But then the train leaves Massachusetts and before you know it you’re in Ontario and there’s a lot of mounties asking for your passport and an obscure train analogy messing with your head and you’re not even sure where you were headed originally or who you were visiting; You’re left in a Canadian jail (imagine your average Holiday Inn but with better room service) with nothing to your name but righteous indignation and a vague disconcerting feeling that you’re supposed to be somewhere else. 

At that point parentheses are no longer useful, sensical or effective.

(This says “sensical” is not a word but I’m going to keep saying it is until it shuts up, not because I know it is a word but because I know it should be.)

I am ashamed to admit that I had to find and study a map of the United States for that train analogy. Hooray Geography!

Never again will I try to blog without a huge mug of coffee by my side.

I saw The Adventures of Tintin last week! Another reason I like being at home, besides the delicious home-cooked meals and the coffee that is magically already in the coffeemaker every morning as soon as I wake up (Where does that come from???) is the ability to go out to eat and watch movies with family, AND NOT HAVE TO PAY FOR IT!

I enjoyed Tintin immensely.  I don’t know if it’s an orthodox, expected part of remembered childhood for people of my generation, but I definitely hold some kind of nostalgia for it. The father Dickson has a huge collection of Tintin comics and I attempted to read every comic I found lying around the house as a kid, be they on the kitchen table, in the basket in the bathroom, or in the cardboard box discreetly tucked under my dad’s bed. (The box is where I found especially good ones like Catwoman and Bone. [*pause* for comprehension and analysis {Bone: an independently organized series of graphical novels about three bald white cartoon brothers: Phoney Bone, Fone Bone, and Smiley Bone.} Do as you wish with this information.])

So yeah, Tintin brings back a lot of memories. On a related note I kind of like the CGI animation used more and more in movies now. It makes everything look as similar to real life as possible without making it as boring as real life. (So the people look real but they don’t actually have to follow any natural laws of gravity, physics or thermodynamics.)

Before the movie I saw a preview for The Lorax, which made me squeal and squirm in excitement for the rest of the previews and at least the first 8 minutes of the movie. (much to the chagrin of my neighbors, but it serves them right for invading my arm space. [I SAID “CHAGRIN” I DID IT THEY SAID IT'D NEVER HAPPEN BUT I DID IT! THAT CRAZY WORD SOUNDS LIKE THE NAME OF AN ALOOF AND MYSTERIOUS FRENCH ADMIRAL RESPONSIBLE FOR A LOT OF COVERT ATTACKS ON BRITISH PORTS, NOT THAT THERE WAS REALLY SUCH AN ADMIRAL WITH A NAME SIMILAR TO "CHAGRIN" BUT THE NAME "CHAGRIN" MAKES IT SEEM AS IF THERE WOULD BE SUCH A STORY BEHIND IT]… *ahem*) Despite my tendency to get extraordinarily excited about ordinary things, however, I would like to emphasize how amazing and awesome and incredible and cool and fantastic it is that there is a legitimate feature film being produced based on Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax. It will be released on March 2^nd. Thus I will celebrate my impending transition out of teenager-hood (March 5^th=20^th birthday) with a resounding return to my childhood.

Now that my caffeinated buzz is beginning to fade, I will provide you with some extracurricular reading material.

Near the beginning of this last fall semester, I applied for a position as a staff writer at Bounce magazine, which is the satire magazine at UNC-Chapel Hill. Here’s part of the application I filled out: (I’ve edited my answers to the first two questions in order to remove the boring informative material; everything besides the "blah"s were in the actual application I turned in.)

Describe your ideal position at BoUNCe. What kind of work would you enjoy doing?

My ideal position at BoUNCe would include reading, writing, editing and free meals at Noodles and Company.  Ideally.  Parties with fresh fruit would also be ideal.  Blah blah blah blah “ideal job” blah blah blah blah “interests” blah blah blah blah “ideological compatibility.” Blah.

What relevant experience, if any, do you have with magazine publication or your position of interest?

I have no real relevant experience with actual magazine publication, but blah blah blah “I have a billion majors” blah blah. I’ve been editing my own work for years, and in recent years I’ve been the go-to-guy to proofread and edit my friends’ blog posts, my brothers’ wonky Lord of the Rings fan-fiction, and my brothers’ friends’ college essays.  I read the Onion religiously, and blah blah blah blah “journalism” blah blah blah “blogblogblog” blah blah blah; “socio-political expertise” blah blah. 

You wake up in a bathtub full of ice and your kidney is missing. What do you do next?

I jump out of the tub and take off any wet clothes I might still be wearing.  Then I start limping, squinting, clutching my side, and mumbling loudly about dinosaurs.  I need to reach maximum crazy before I run out of the bathroom and subsequently through whatever humble household I happen to be entrenched in.

Aside/Explanation: Think about it – if a mildly crazy-looking injured guy in his boxers starts wandering through your house and/or neighborhood and/or local elementary school playground, then you’re going to beat the peat(synonym for crud) out of him.  But if you see a half-dead, naked, soaking wet teenager yelling about a brachiosaurus trying to make yogurt out of his head while a diplodocus looks on, then you are much more likely to just sit in your easy chair, hunker down behind your newspaper, and tremble.

Approaching maximum insanity, I swing open the door and begin to run through an oddly clean living room.  It looks and smells like my grandma’s house. I get a momentary glance at a middle-aged man playing chess who stares at me and freezes, and then I sprint-limp-shuffle out of the room.  I then run through a kitchen pretending I’m being chased by iguanodons.  The three college-aged guys cooking breakfast look very much caught off guard, and one of them spits out some curses as I dive-tumble-crawl my way to the back door. 

Once in the backyard, I take a moment to get my bearings.  Then I abandon the limp and begin to run faster.  I compensate for the loss of the limp by yelling louder and adding nautical terms and random exotic fruits into my frenzied exclamations.  After a few minutes of running I realize I have no idea where I am.  It’s going to be a long road home.