Pete's Log: delusions of something
Entry #1224, (Books, Writing, n such)(posted when I was 23 years old.)
I've been leading a somewhat seclusive life of recent, which leads to a certain lack of fresh material to jot down in my online exposition of myself. But I feel compelled to spill literary filth into my electronic record of life, and thus my readers shall suffer.
I have a new subscriber today, and though I'm not usually prone to commenting on that fact (in part because I don't usually notice right away), today I will, because I feel I should comment on any hypothetical influence that may have on my writing. I have a sense that given enough scrutiny, one could detect a certain effect on my journaling style every time I noticed that I had a new subscriber. Such an undertaking is ultimately impossible, however, because I have failed to record when people subscribed. Except, perhaps, today.
Instead, today I know for a fact that my style is significantly influenced, because I feel a need to impress a girl who informed me, shortly before telling me she had subscribed to my journal, that I was "the smartest boy in the world!" I must, after all, live up to such praise. At least I need not outsmart any girls to live up to that praise, which makes this task a bit easier.
My train of thought was just derailed, so I will allow a tangent. I just received another email from crushlink.com. This one, however, was not sent to any of my prijks@* email addresses. It was sent to an email address @esgeroth.org that I explicitly made up for the purposes of messing with crushlink.com when I first heard from them long ago. I never made that email address public anywhere. I used it only once when I was trying to figure out just how evil the whole crushlink concept was. Well, it seems they have now proven themselves even more evil by sending mail to my fake address again. This means that in response to one person listing your email address as a potential crush, they may send you multiple notifications that someone has a crush on you. In this case, my fake email address is getting notification long (more than a year, I think) after crushlink was told someone had a crush on it. Like, whatever.
I decided to set a goal for myself of 1000 words a week of fiction writing. It does not have to be written for any particular project or anything. I just want 1000 (or more) words describing stuff that, well, ain't real. My first deadline is approaching and I've managed only 99 words. But they are 99 quality words. So we'll see how that goes.
I finished John Irving's The World According to Garp last night. Sometime between 3 and 4 I gave up trying to fall asleep and made some Earl Grey (decaf) and started reading. I was on page 492 when I started and I had the novel done when I finished (I think it's about 680 pages long). I didn't bother looking at what time it was when I went to sleep, but it was still dark out. John Irving's writing delights me. This is the fourth book of his I've read and I liked all of them. I think this may have been my favorite, though. It made me laugh a lot and it made me think a lot. I felt very strongly for many of his characters. And every time I sat down to read some of the book, I ended up reading a bigger chunk than I'd intended to. It's genius.
I don't think this entry knows what it wants to be, but it looks like I'm going to file it away under "Books, Writing, n such." I had some observations I wanted to make about working at the dining hall my freshman year (insomnia leads me to strange thought patterns), but I think I will save those for another time, since they are hardly literary in nature.