Irrelevant Cheetah

Like most habitual readers, I’ve got a pretty long TBR (to-be-read) list.

I’ve got some ‘normal’ books on my list. For example, there’s the new Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever series by Stephen Donaldson. There’s also the latest Shannara series by Terry Brooks, and quite a few Pratchett and Gaiman and Pratchett/Gaiman collaborations and some Cormac McCarthy.

But I’ve got some ‘classics’ on there too - books that many people read in high school or college or just because and I never did. Honestly, much of my motivation came from just wanting to know what all of the fuss was about. I read Catcher in the Rye for the first time about six months ago (pretty good read) and followed it up with Catch 22 (an awesome read.) Still on my list: Moby Dick and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

The one I just finished was Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand’s 1,100-page tome was a bit daunting to start, but actually pretty easy to read once I dove in. And after finishing it, I can only say one thing:

Wow.

Let’s be honest. It’s not a light read. It can’t be read as anything but a manifesto of Rand’s belief in the inherent good of capitalism and the evil of socialism. It was called “sophomoric” and “remarkably silly” by contemporary reviewers, and in general wasn’t much liked in reviews. I finished it, but I don’t think I’ll be going back and reading any of her other stuff.

But I liked it. There were some parts I skimmed, because the monologue gets pretty heavy sometimes, and towards the end, in John Galt’s seventy-page radio speech, I skimmed very lightly. But in general, I thought it was a good read, and it gave me a lot to think about. The plot kept me turning pages, and there was a decent amount of mystery and romance and come-uppance and action. I finished it because I wanted to, not because I felt an obligation to finish it because it was on my classics list.

And in the end, I think the measure of a good book is that it changes your views a bit. I may or may not agree with all of the philosophy espoused in Atlas, but since it did get me to think and to examine my personal beliefs, I really did enjoy it.

Bottom line: if you haven’t read it, I recommend it. I think it was a good read, and I’m glad I took the time.

Over the past two months, I have called every single advertising agency, promotional company, and video production agency I can find in Anchorage, large and small. I have asked them if they work with freelance copywriters, and whether I could send them some samples of my work.

Of those thirty or so calls, I have gotten about ten positive responses. These companies work with freelancers and would be happy to add my portfolio to their list of active writers. They give me an email to send my stuff to, and I send it off.

Of those ten responses, guess how many replies I’ve gotten?

One.

One copy director at one of the larger agencies in town has consistently replied. He has said that he really likes my stuff, but that he has no work at the moment and to keep checking in. I send him an email every two weeks or so, and he replies that he still has no work but to keep checking in.

The others don’t even give me the courtesy of a “We received your portfolio. Thanks for submitting.” Instead, I get deafening silence from their end. I wait a few days and send them a followup email, asking if they got the portfolio and offering to do a piece or two on spec.

Nobody replies, and it’s this silence that is making me angrier and angrier. I would prefer a quick note that says “Thanks, but as a copywriter, you have a promising future as a janitor” to being ignored, which is what I think they are doing. I know it’s easy to to just delete an email, but is it too much to ask to hit the “Reply” button and jot a few quick lines?

Bastards.

Maybe later I’ll talk about the complete lack of success I’ve had so far in marketing my fiction. As a writer, I think I do have a promising future as a janitor.

I have a confession to make.

Even though I haven’t read the book, I kind of want to see The Time Traveler’s Wife.

Not because of the “wife” part. Because of the “time traveler” part.

I know, I know. I just missed the whole point of the thing, didn’t I?

“So, Offspring,” I said to him. “It’s time to start thinking about what you want to be for Halloween.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Dad?” he said.

“Yes?”

“You know, in Star Wars 2, when Yoda saves the Jedi with the clones?”

“Yeah?”

“I want to be a Clone Trooper.”

I thought for a moment. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to find any Storm Trooper costumes,” I told him. “Star Wars isn’t big this year.”

“I don’t want to be a Storm Trooper,” he insisted. “I want to be a Clone Trooper.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Yup. There’s a big difference, you know.”

Though I couldn’t help thinking of the logistics of making a Clone Trooper costume, I also couldn’t help wiping a small tear from my eye. He’s my boy, all right.

School’s starting in a few weeks. I’ve registered for classes and started shopping for textbooks this morning. I was watching CNN, and Clark Howard turned me onto chegg.com. It’s a pretty cool service that lets you rent your textbooks instead of buying them. As any former or current college student knows, the cost of books is one of the hidden killers of going to school, so finding this option was pretty cool. I priced everything and found I could save quite a bit of money, so I signed up.

I was entering my mailing address in the profile section, and for some reason “AK” didn’t show up in the drop-down menu for “State.” I thought that was weird, so, feeling a sneaking suspicion, I clicked on the frequently asked questions link.

There was the question: “Is this service available outside of the United States?”

And the answer? “Chegg ships only to the forty-eight contiguous United States. Currently, we are unable to ship to Hawaii, Alaska, international or military addresses.”

Now, I know I live far away from the center of things. I’m pretty far removed from Los Angeles and New York and London and Singapore. Alaska’s kind of a remote place. But we live in a flat world, if I may paraphrase Thomas Friedman. I can conduct business anywhere on the planet with the wonders of mail service and the internet. Yet they’re telling me they can’t ship to Alaska? With all of today’s technology available to them, they can’t ship outside of the forty-eight contiguous states? Am I the only one to whom that makes no sense whatsoever?

I’m sorry, but I’m about sick of that kind of shit. I promptly opened up a “Contact us!” email link and sent them the following:

“I have to ask: why do you not ship to Alaska? Alaska is one of the fifty United States. It’s not as if I live in the deepest reaches of the Orient, where the only mail service is by wagon train. The USPS, FedEx and UPS all make stops here - every day, even. I just signed up for Chegg, but unless I can find a proxy to receive my books in the lower 48 states, I’ll have to take my business elsewhere. For a company with such a progressive business idea, it certainly is a backwards shipping policy.”

It’s probably not the best way to ensure I get prompt customer service from here on out, but I felt better.

So I’ve been suffering slightly from a creativity crisis.

“No, really?” you ask. “We couldn’t tell, judging from the huge outpouring of posts from Irrelevant Cheetah lately.”

Really. Believe it.

It’s not that I’m not writing. On the contrary - I’m actually writing quite a bit lately, and it’s actually helping to pay bills. Yay me! However, it’s mostly boring, mundane, non-fiction stuff that requires no creativity. You know, How to Edit a Registry Key in Windows XP, or All About Voltage in a Battery. When it comes to writing creative, interesting, sometimes-fictional stuff, the well hath run dry, it seems.

And nothing particularly interesting has happened here lately. I could post more pics, but this isn’t really a photo blog. There’s better places for that stuff - Montucky’s blog is an excellent example. I’ve been keeping my head down and behaving. I’ll be doing a 20-mile bike ride this weekend, so that may have some interesting connotations that you may hear about on Monday, but we’ll see how that goes.

So. Keep checking in, I guess. I do appreciate your support.

You see, summer in Alaska is an interesting time. It’s a four-month stretch of not-winter, and Alaskans have to take advantage of that fact by packing as many activities into eighteen hours of daylight as we can. Thus, indoor activities such as… oh, I don’t know… blogging, for example… tend to take a backseat to getting outside and soaking up the sun.

It’s not all fun and games, however. I thought I might share some of the things I’m forced to put up with during these grueling times.

On our trip to Fairbanks last weekend, I was forced to endure vistas such as this:

I was also forced to share the road with this guy:

After that, just outside of Fairbanks, I had to put up with driving through this:

You see? I don’t deserve your scorn. I don’t deserve your snide comments. Rather, I deserve your pity. Pity for the trials and tribulations I’m going through at the moment.

Pity expressed in the form of pictures of dead presidents would be especially welcome.

More to come.

To: The General Mills Company

Re: Betty Crocker Bac-Os

Yesterday I was enjoying a salad, and had decided to embellish my salad with some of your delicious Bac-Os brand bacon bits. My salads are normally full of less-crunchy items, such as cucumbers and hard-boiled eggs, and I have discovered that your Bac-Os add a wonderful element to the culinary landscape that is my salad.

After I added the Bac-Os and put down the bottle, I noticed that it states on the side: “Refrigerate after opening for added freshness and convenience.”

Now, I understand the “freshness” part. I agree that most things tend to stay fresher when you keep them in the fridge (except for my old gym teacher, Mr. Bob - he just got stale and cranky, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.) I keep my vegetables in there, and my milk, and - after reading your package - my Bac-Os.

But “added convenience?” How do you figure? What if my normal storage location for my Bac-Os is in my ever-present Salad Utility Belt, loaded with nutritional goodness, ready to be unleashed upon any salad in the immediate vicinity at a moment’s notice?

No, I’m sorry, Ms. Crocker. Try as you might, you cannot approach that level of convenience. As a result, I am now torn. You see, I love the convenience that my Salad Utility Belt offers me. (I’m thinking of trying to market it.) I rejoice in the fact that, like a culinary Batman, I can “bring the heat” on a salad woefully lacking in croutons or non-refrigerated oil-and-vinegar dressing. (I just watched a great cops-and-robbers movie, and now that phrase is stuck in my head.) But now I am forced to choose between freshness and convenience.

It’s not an easy choice. How do you tell one of your children that you love him more than his sibling? How do you choose between “tastes great” and “less filling?” How do you choose? How?

I eagerly await your solution to this dilemma.

Yours,

Wolf

One of my hobbies is keeping aquariums. I’ve got two, and my plan is to put some puffer fish in the larger of the tanks. Interestingly, puffer fish have teeth that are not unlike rodent teeth. They keep growing, and unless the fish is fed something hard, the teeth must be kept trimmed.

As a result, many puffer fish owners breed snails. Puffers love snails, and the shells are perfect for keeping their teeth in good order. The guy at the fish store told me to get some snails, throw them in a bucket of water with an air stone, feed them occasionally, and I could breed them easily for my puffers.

Snails, conveniently, are hermaphrodites. They’ve got both male and female parts. If two snails “meet for coffee,” they both go away pregnant. They’re like the rabbits of the aquatic world, only more prolific. I don’t have any puffers yet, but I thought I could get started with the snails early, so I’d have something to feed my new fish when I did get them.

We went to the pet store and got six of the black snails, thinking it was a good, round number, and a small fish bowl to keep them in. Within a few days, one of them died. (I could tell because there were little “x”s where his eyes should be, and he was rolling around on his back in a decidedly unsnail-like manner.)

The other five, however, thrived. I fed them fish food and lettuce, kept the air stone going, and waited to be a snail godparent.

I waited. And waited. And waited. And still there were no bundles of snail eggs anywhere to be seen. “Perhaps I should play some Barry White,” I told The Wife. “Put on some mood lighting, the whole nine yards.” I swear she’s going to pull a muscle if she keeps rolling her eyes that way.

Finally, a few days ago, she spotted what looked like some brown specks on the side of the bowl. “I think those are snails,” she declared. She pried a speck from the side, and with the aid of a magnifying glass we determined that it was, indeed, a miniature gastropod. Now that we knew what to look for, we scanned the bowl for more. Sure enough, they were everywhere. Apparently my snails had been making whoopee after all, and had managed to successfully conceal their pregnancy from everyone.

I decided to count the babies. It’s difficult, since they’re about the size of poppy seeds, but I managed to get a ballpark figure of about six gazillion.

That’s when we realized that there were white, globular clusters of eggs plastered everywhere as well. I did some quick mental calculations. “If every snail in this bowl is capable of having babies,” I muttered, “and if all of these eggs hatch into viable snails that are also capable of having babies, that means that inside of a month I’m going to be in some serious trouble.”

Which is how I found myself, early this afternoon, performing snail abortions with a Ziploc baggie and a plastic spoon.

Carefully maneuvering my surgical instruments around the bowl, I was precise. I was careful. I was deadly. Gelatinous blobs of snails-to-be were scraped from the side of the bowl and deposited into the bag, while the scads of babies were (mostly) left alone. My killing spree resulted in a mostly clean bowl and a baggie that was quickly deposited in the trash. Now I’m left with merely the original six gazillion + five.

I better get some puffers quick, and they’d better be hungry.

Sure, any idiot can slap some butter and jam on some toasted bread and call it good, but only if they want to send the nearest OCD sufferer screaming from the room. The following instructions will ensure that your lovable obsessive-compulsive will enjoy his/her toast without getting the heebie-jeebies.

1. Toast bread. A medium setting is preferable. Set the darkness lever 0.56 inches to the right of “Light.”

2. When toast pops up, be ready! For proper results, the toast must be on the plate, ready to be buttered, within 0.4 seconds of toasting completion. Any longer and the bread will have begun to cool, making butter-meltage difficult, if not impossible.

3. Begin to butter toast. This is probably the most important step. Use thin slices of butter to ensure maximum meltage. Thick chunks of butter do not melt evenly and do not cover the bread correctly. For optimum butter distribution, all butter must be melted and evenly covering the bread, to within 0.0625 inches of the crust.

4. When butter is melted - and not before - spread jam. Ensure that jam coverage is uniform, not too thick and not too thin. It is acceptable to take excess jam from one slice and add it to another slice, particularly since it is not acceptable to have the amount of jam on differing slices of bread widely disparate.

And there you have it! OCD toast! And you thought it might be difficult, didn’t you?

Next time on Recipe Thursday, we’ll discuss the proper way to prepare and serve waffles.