Yeah, I know. Yet another prolonged absence from dland.

The bad news is that I'm no longer on the first page for sloth human interaction on google as previously reported. I guess having this entry is just not of enough relevance to sloth-human-interaction enthusiasts for google to return me on the first page. Oh, woe is me! Not that I got a lot of hits for "sloth human interaction" but I'm a click slut so every hit counts and helps support my fragile self-esteem.

I've got nothing to say today, so bear with me. I will release the results of this contest either later today or over the weekend. I don't know who won yet or I'd tell you right now. It's not too late to enter, though, so just note, email or comment me your answers real soon and blammo! You may already soon be a winner of, well, nothing.

I've been thinking about writing an essay on the word "real". I made a few remarks about it over at my livejournal. Check them out here. Be forewarned, I tend to get all Jesus-y in my livejournal, so if that makes you uncomfortable, just stay in the nice safe dland waters. I don't know why I write so much differently here in dland. Probably habit. Also, it could be because I tend to approach updating my dland page in a different way than my livejournal.

For example, I will update my livejournal on a whim. I don't mind putting filler there or just one of those stupid blog quizzes - "What Kind of Medieval Basket-Weaver Are You?" and that type of junk. On dland, I try to have something meatier to say. Today is an exception as there is no meat here. So, I tend to write on my dland page once a day at most. I think I've done two or more updates on maybe three occasions. It's a rarity. When I do, it's usually because I have some slight thing I want to add. That's what blogs are for. Putting stupid, inconsequential things up very quickly and without much thought.

Dland requires more effort and thought and to me, that is a good thing.

Anyway, my last two dland entries have been pretty depressing as I've been pretty depressed. I'm not angry, just sad. Anger tends to make me funny, so I'm guessing most of you wish I was angry. Nick Hornby makes a similar reflection here. It's one of several essays available here, some of which are achingly beautiful. They have really inspired me to get back to the personal essay which has always been my greatest love in literature. Novels, short stories, poems... to me they all pale in comparison to someone just laying their thoughts on the table in a personal, (hopefully) entertaining way. When I took freshman English (twice - once at NYU and once at Umass Boston) I was always swept away by the personal essays. These were usually the bulk of the reading we did.

There is something beautiful about people and when they take down the pretensions and just spill part of themselves on the page something wonderful can happen.

Have I renounced my antisocial ways? Maybe. I still find people to be the single must frustrating thing in the world. Almost all of my pain is caused by people and many days it is all I can do to stop myself from running away to live in the woods by myself.

But why the two pages? I've already mentioned (here) my disturbing propensity to cut my life up into distinct chunks which I try to keep as isolated as possible. I've been trying not to do that. Is the dland/livejournal split just a backslide in this effort? Perhaps. I don't think it's that simple though. I think it is a question of having certain standards for what gets into my dland page because I love this thing. Do I not love livejournal? No. I love it because I can just toss out a passing thought or a quick question over there. This is where I come when I have something I want to put some work into, something to roll and knead.

Well, this hasn't turned out to be as funny as I hoped. I had wanted to just sit down and spontaneously work myself up into a state of "funny", but I seem to have fallen short. I hope I didn't disappoint you.

Reading The same as yesterday. Whatever that was...
Wishing I had never wrapped my happiness up in someone else. Lesson learned. No bitterness, no regret.
Plotting To return to the fundamentals