This was one of those days when I barely ventured outside, just stayed in and took care of business. Here I am at 10:30 kind of amazed at the weird variety of shite I “did” today.

1. booked a ticket to Mexico City for a short vacation in September (with possible artist talks), travelling with my friend, the poet Roman Lujan (he’s got some accents in there which I can’t reproduce)
2. created new header graphic and wallpaper for FSC (which I consider decent work for the half hour I devoted to it, but otherwise not mindblowing)
3. posted long list of electronic literature works on both this and the netpoetic blog (based on notes I had taken in the past few days)
4. figured out the problem with the exploding-letter algorithm in the new version of Scriptor that I am creating in Processing
5. started (finally) reading New Philosophy for New Media by Mark B. Hansen, some of which was making my eyes bleed but is really sinking in (about up to page 70)
6. sent off copies of two of my poems (rather old ones, one a sestina, the other a translation of Jules LaForgue) because they are being nominated for a Pushcart Prize (maybe I didn’t understand the e-mail correctly, but that’s what the editor wrote)
7. did actually venture out to Ralph’s supermarket to buy some decaf coffee, Krazy Glue, and a bottle of wine
8. tried to figure out, with the Russian lady who manages my building, Vera, why the smoke detector in the second bedroom here has been going off all day — she’s a trip, speaks nearly impenetrable English
9. wrote some cranky emails about this or that (an editing project, an old website I designed that went down because the owner didn’t renew his domain name), and also some nice ones (but always very short)
10. acknowledged some Facebook friend requests (of course!), because everybody loves me — never met any of them before
11. read the Wikipedia entry about Paul Mcartney and Wings, as some of their songs had been coming up in Pandora and I was lovin em (read articles about Bill Clinton and Kim Jong-Il also, contemplated changing Facebook photo — again — to portrait of Kim Jong-Il)
12. downloaded the graphics from the Richard Stockton Overdrive website since I know it will be coming down soon (nobody seems to care about it at Stockton), and I want it for my portfolio
13. made dinner for myself, shared it with my sister (this was the brief moment of my day when I actually interacted with organic material, i.e. an onion and several mushrooms; also communicated with organic material, i.e. my sister)
14. received in the mail the mini-camcorder I ordered online, the Flip Ultra HD, and walked around the apartment shooting ridiculous things like my books and my face, and then downloaded the videos to my iMac, then deleted them
15. wrote a very short blurb for an 800-page, $199 book by Matthew Timmons called Credit (I’m afraid he doesn’t like it), and agreed to do a blurb for Catherine Daly (I think hers clocks in at 146 pp.)
16. watched the catcerto
17. totally screwed up my wireless router in an attempt to get my sister on my wireless network, proceeded to panic for twenty minutes, but actually got it working again in a reasonable amount of time (about an hour)
18. reflected on people I miss and should call, or who should call me (but this was all in the process of multi-tasking)
19. used Krazy Glue to repair the broken slats from these creepy Hollywood blinds that come with my apartment — seems to have worked (Vera showed me how to use the blinds properly so they won’t break)
20. listened to a few tracks from Gary Numan’s The Pleasure Principle (see illustration), an album I’m really trying to love but not quite getting there with (it has some classic tracks, though), and listening to half of this amazing record by Dokaka called Human Interface, recommended by Christian Bok who calls him a “preternatural vocalist” on Twitter — available for free download
21. wrote short email to ubu list about George Kayatta (learned about him from William Poundstone), the self-described megagenius painter, jazz musician, translator of the Bible into rhyming couplets, and one of the “mathematical cranks” in Underwood Dudley’s book of that title — I’m sure I’ll post about him soon
22. checked out the amazing ambigrams — texts that read the same way upside down as they do normally — of Gilles Esposito-Farèse, as well as those of someone he admires, Scott Kim — both of these sites are worth checking out
23. sent information to ex-student who never spoke in class who wants me to write a rec for her for some internship, describing therein her great public speaking and interpersonal skills (a fairly trivial bit of activity, this last, but for some reason I’d like to remember it)
24. finalized plans (I think) for lunch and a visit to LACMA with Johanna Drucker to see show of 12 Korean artists and other fun stuff (also wrote thank-you email to William Poundstone for meeting me for lunch yesterday, sending him, among other links, one to David Daniels’ The Gates of Paradise)
25. watched Youtube video of Ukrainian band Los Colorados do great cover of Katy Perry’s “Hot and Cold” — pasting this one below — then proceeded to do “research” on Katy Perry — Wikipedia entry, “I Kissed a Girl” video — since I’m so out of touch (and I read about her in some magazine this month)

26. washed the dishes, drank the wine, wrote this post (didn’t shower, though), and revised post excessively as I remembered things from the day…

I think that’s about it, at least among observable phenomena. The strange thing is that, for the most part, I’ve been quite depressed today. Just feeling glum. I think that’s part of the modern condition, actually, leaving yourself open to a plurality of distraction in lieu of some grand scheme for one’s life, and I guess I get a little bummed because of that.

But I learned a lot. And now I’m writing this, an autobiographical blog post!