I'm still here, writing and grading and eating too much fast food.  I've been informed repeatedly that this blog is kind of depressing and I seem kind of depressed.  Well, yeah, that's true some. Consider your armchair diagnosis an armchair success.  But then, I'm not blogging when I'm hanging out with my friends on campus dodging paper-grading. I'm not blogging when my wife and I are playing Rock Band or laying on our big new couch that we can both fit on with just our feet touching.  I'm not blogging when I'm reading a good book, or when I'm writing something that I intend to print out and keep somewhere special, safe from fires and bear attacks.

A blog should be depressing.  It's someone saying to anyone who will listen, "I'm important enough for this to matter to you!"  Isn't that kind of sad?  Even the word itself has the community-theater-improv-sad-sack-attempt sound to it.  Blog.  Buh-log.  A blogger is just a person with a flaw, whether that flaw is the desperate need for praise (represented by number of comments) or self-assured narcissism (again, comments).  I think some self-awareness about this is healthy, and I count myself in on this.  The internet is just the frayed edges of society getting a chance to be raw together in the sun.  It takes all the high school cafeteria table divisions-- the jocks, the nerds, the stoners-- and it looks at them through the wrong end of the binoculars.

My flaw is that I need the clickety-clack of the keyboard to feel better about myself sometimes.  So what if it bums me the hell out?  Tomorrow I'll see a tree or a spiderweb or a really unfunny bumper sticker, and it'll be just fine for awhile longer.

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(Now he talks about some movies)

There is no reason for me to like Enchanted.  I am a grown man with a serious and complicated outlook on life.  I teach at a college.  I write books.  But a dopey smile was inescapable.  I wanted the Hot Girl from the Office to marry Patrick Dempsey.  There are serious ramifications to this.  I need to think for a minute.

Lars and the Real Girl is a movie you should see.  It goes like this:  Lars is sad for a big reason.  He finds out about these sex dolls that are fully customizable and orders one.  He proceeds to treat it like his real girlfriend, and his brother and sister-in-law, and the whole community, have to deal with it.  It sounds like a setup for an awful comedy, like Weekend at Bernie's with an anatomically correct, fully-articulated sex toy, but it's quite the powerful little indie film.

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(Now he makes a correction)

In retrospect, that binoculars line doesn't make a damn bit of sense under any kind of scrutiny, but that's also what a blog is about.