Posted January 14th, 2009 by Mike Lawson
I got the title of this blog from a Joan Didion short story called “On Keeping a Notebook.” [pdf version available here]
In the short story Didion writes about how she sometimes has trouble remembering what really happened and what could have happened. And I sometimes struggle with this same distinction. Didion wrote:
I tell what some would call lies. “That’s simply not true,” the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a shared event. “The party was not for you, the spider was not a black widow, it wasn’t
that way at all.” Very likely they are right, for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters. The cracked crab that I recall having for lunch the day my father came home from Detroit in 1945 must certainly be embroidery, worked into the day’s pattern to lend verisimilitude; I was ten years old and would not now remember the cracked crab. The day’s events did not turn on cracked crab. And yet it is precisely that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in family love and guilt. Or that is what it was to me. Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.
So this blog will serve as a place for me to tell my stories (sometimes peppered with a few embellishments). This blog serves the same purpose as Didion’s notebooks.
Tags: blogging, didion
Posted January 14th, 2009 by Mike Lawson
GoDaddy.com sucks. Seriously sucks.
I’ve been a customer there for about four years, and I’ve hosted many sites with them…including this one. Last weekend when people clicked onto this site they were redirected to a wordpress install page.
WTF?
So after talking to GoDaddy tech support (which took a few days to get a hold of them, and I sat on hold for over 45 minutes), I was told to basically go deal with the issues on my own.
Very unhelpful.
If anyone is looking for a company to purchase web hosting from, I wouldn’t pick GoDaddy. I’ve never had problems in the past, but now my entire blog is wipped out. EVERYTHING. Gone.
I’m going to take a few days off, and I’ll be blogging again next week.
Tags: blogging
Posted January 6th, 2009 by Mike Lawson
Okay…hear me out before judging me.
Every time that I pass all of the purses for sale at Target I kind of wish I was a woman.
I’m not saying that I feel like I was born the incorrect gender. It’s just when I see all of those options I am sad that it is socially unacceptable for me to carry a purse.
I carry a man-bag. A boring, black man-bag. If I were a woman, I probably would buy all of the 30 bags they sell at Target, and keep buying more and more.
While at Target last week I confessed this to Daniel, and he played into my hypothetical (that’s proof that this is love). Daniel said that he couldn’t be a compulsive purse-buyer because he would be unable to transfer all of his crap into a new bag each day. But I think that the junk transfer is at the heart of why I would have a million bags…each time I transferred my stuff I could throw out or remove some of the junk I had been lugging around. “I guess I don’t need to carry these gloves around anymore, it’s June.”
Posted January 5th, 2009 by Mike Lawson
The Phoenix Zoo does this thing each year called Zoo Lights, and locals talk about this annual event like it’s the second-coming.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that zoos across the country hold these annual scam events. So tell me if you’ve heard of anything like this at your local zoo.
Zoo Lights is a nightly event (Thanksgiving through New Years…give or take) where the open the zoo up and they put stupid Christmas lights. See:
Dumb.
People actually PAY to walk around the zoo when all the animals are asleep just so you can see lights. It’s such a rip-off.
I got 2 free tickets, so Daniel and I went this past weekend.
I really didn’t see what the appeal was. Anyone wish to clue me in??
Posted January 4th, 2009 by Mike Lawson
