Found out today, while scheduling PTO for the holidays, that I am currently at my limit for saving up my Paid Time Off. I’m unable to accrue any more free time-money. 280 hours, max. That’s 7 fucking business-weeks. What even am I doing with my life? In “Star Trek: Insurrection”, Captain Picard mentioned he had …
Author Archives: Shawn
Scribble
Dreamed I had lost the ability to write. Met a girl, we hit it off, she had to leave town, so I wanted to give her my number and email address. Tried to write it all down. My letterforms came out garbled, incomplete, illegible. Like I had a stroke or something. It was kinda traumatic. …
Leveling
“Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe In my third semester of Deutsch, I understand that the difficulty of learning a language increases logarithmically. It’s like the skill leveling in a MUD of old. 1x to level up once. 1,000,000,000x to level up ten times. I …
Idyll
I came from poverty. So in this day and age — even after personally making the grade — I can’t fathom, can’t understand how so many people can sit in their car and idle their engine for so long, as if gasoline costs nothing, as if noise wasn’t a societal issue, as if exhaust wasn’t …
Analyria
It’s funny to me, in my advanced age, how I would write so much poetry in my younger days, yet I never actually read any poetry. I still find myself unwilling and – if we’re being gracious – functionally unable to read poetry. It’s physically uncomfortable. Once I see verse on the page, my mind …