This is week 113 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 784): The Veto Factory

A bucket and a half of water-stop concrete went into the cellar this day, my friend, and nary a grain did return. That cellar, she swallowed them whole. It took me a few hours to finish sealing the remaining cracks in the basement floor, and when I got upstairs, it was only 2PM. I felt like I accomplished something and still had a good portion of the day ahead of me.

#1GF! made me an egg salad sandwich, which she secretly prepared while I was in the cellar. She took a nap, and I looked up baby names.

Once #1GF! got up, we went through the list of baby names together. I tried slipping a few previously rejected names back into the list, but #1GF! was shrewd and fast on the override button once again. I expect that #1GF! must be running out of vetoes, or the veto printing office must be running on a twenty-four hour schedule.

For post dinner entertainment, we watched Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist. #1GF! seemed to like it, but I was always getting pulled out of the story by the reactions of the characters. When a Yugo makes a u-turn at a relatively slow speed with no oncoming traffic, there is no need for a passenger to freak out unless the character is written to be very nervous. I would’ve been able to tolerate being yanked out of the story all the time if the movie kept me laughing, but it didn’t. The movie wasn’t horrible, but it could easily have been titled “Michael Cera Infinitely Acts Nervous”.

Monday (Day 785): Your Fifteen Minutes Of Fame

I spent from 8AM until 9PM working on LOR 112. It was pretty humid in the house, and not much better outside, and my office is not climate controlled like yours is. Yet, like a mailman, I ignored the weather and delivered a teeming pile of junk to your mailbox once again. When they put you on the news, don’t you dare say that no one ever put in the effort to distract you from stuffing your boss’s limp body into that lockable, grey-green filing cabinet in the basement of your building. I mean it.

Tuesday (Day 786): Larry Bird, The Naked Cookie Monster, & The Fatchelor Walk Into A Bar

I did some food shopping and then went to the dentist’s to have my teeth cleaned. While I was there, I answered the question, “What’s new?” with the news that we were supposed to be having a baby this week. I felt like I was becoming one of those people who use any excuse to announce that they’re having a baby to everyone who will listen.

“So, do you have any baby names picked out?” asked one of the women.

“Not yet.” I said. “We’re getting there, though.”

“Well, what do you have for names?”

“Oh, well there’s a list of fifteen or so that we’re trying to narrow down,” I said, trying to avoid the question.

“Give me an example.”

“Oh, I don’t know. There’s so many.”

“Like?”

I was unsuccessfully parrying. I took a shot to shut down the questioning with a name that I suggested, but that #1GF! had solidly rejected. “Uh. Electra?” I said. The women just looked around. “But, I got vetoed on that one.”

“Oh, good because, well…no. What’s on your wife’s list then?” (I always let the whole wife vs. girlfriend thing go.)

“Oh, she has a ton of names on her list.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, um. I have no idea. There’s a lot of them though.”

I got off of the witness stand and she went on to tell me a story of how her husband, a big basketball fan, had tried to slip a name by her while she was still on drugs after the birth of her son. The nurse brought in the birth certificate for her to sign. “You’re not really going to name your son Larry Bird Davis are you?”

She wasn’t.

I thanked her for the idea on how to slip my name choices past #1GF!: wait until she’s hopped up on pain meds post birth. I went in for my cleaning and was out of there by 1:30PM. I called #1GF! to drag her out to lunch, but she was too busy. I headed home.

It was sticky, hot, and humid out, and when I got back home, even the largest of the beach parking lots were packed with cars. I went inside my house and closed the blinds to try to keep the sun out. I’m still not sure if having all the windows open or closed is the way to go on a hot day.

I added James Marsters to the Megalist of Actors Who Tried to Sing, and then tried to get into the book editing. It was way too hot, and the air was thick and humid. Even when I could get the air moving, it was like being surrounded with warm gel.

For an hour, I tried to get into editing, but I get annoyed when my internal temperature rises past a certain point. It’s the one thing that can be a mood changer for me no matter how much I try to stop it. I couldn’t concentrate, so I surfed the web for an hour, hoping to come around later.

When someone was paying me, I would push through those periods of lower productivity just to try to produce something. I figured that the company was paying me, so I should produce, no matter how slow the rate. In working for myself, I find that sometimes, it’s a lot better to cut my losses and come back later.

Usually, if I switch gears to some household project and return to writing later, it allows me to give my brain a break while still being productive. The task I stupidly chose was to go outside and mow the lawn.

It was 90 degrees out, and the lawn was not in the least bit interested in being cut with the human powered reel mower that I use. After showing the lawn who was boss, I patched one last crack that I had chipped out and forgotten to fill in the basement. I came back in feeling like #1GF! would be happy about the lawn being done. My brain was rested, I had a couple of small accomplishments for the day, and I was ready to return to work.

I got some animal crackers and a glass of milk and headed for my office. I figured I could eat them while I wrote, as a little reward for taking the lawn down a notch. I put the milk and cookies on my desk, and went into my bedroom to change my clothes. My shirt was so soaked that I got annoyed half way through wrestling with it and stood there for a few seconds with my arms trapped over my head. To the untrained eye, it looked like I was getting frustrated, but I was merely letting the shirt think it beat me so that it would let down its guard. Once it did, off it came, and into the hamper it went.

That’s when I noticed my shorts were soaked too. If I was this soaked, I probably would stink in a couple of hours and contaminate whatever furniture I came into contact with. I contemplated a shower and looked at the clock. There weren’t a lot of writing hours left before #1GF! got home. I smelled my armpits and shrugged. They still smelled as freshly deodorized as they did that morning. I wasn’t planning on going anywhere, so I figured a quick change into some dry clothes and I’d be fine.

All the shades were already down to keep the heat out, so I stripped off everything and threw the clothes into the hamper. I took out new underwear, new shorts, and a new T-shirt and got ready to put them on. That’s when I noticed that there were bits of grass all over my legs. My old clothes were soaked and off limits for putting back on, but if I put on the new clothes, I would end up with grass all over me. Covered in sweat and grass, I realized that there was no denying that I had officially stepped into shower-required territory.

I mentioned that it was hot, right? 90 degrees hot. And I had a glass of milk and some cookies on my desk and ready to be eaten. If I jumped into the shower, that milk was going to be warm, cruddy, and not much of a reward when I got back.

I’m not one for the flappy freedom of naked volleyball or jumping jacks, and I’d probably make a piss poor nudist, so outside of showering and wrestling with ladies, I’m not one to wander around naked. So there I was, standing without a stitch on, trying to figure out my options. If I got into the shower, the milk was going to end up warm and gross. If I ate the cookies, I was going to get grass everywhere. For some reason, taking a shower and then getting a new glass of milk never really crossed my mind.

So, I’m standing there, buck naked, thinking about going into the office, sitting in my chair, and eating the milk and cookies. I shook my head. “Sit in my chair? With no protective layer of cloth between my ass and the chair? Just sitting there eating cookies?” The whole scene seemed like something out of a video of your boss that you might accidentally find while Googling something innocent like “I love cookie monster”. It was a little too weird to me, so I scratched that option off the list.

Then, I thought about just throwing on the new clothes and pretending that I wasn’t getting grass all over the house. That would lead to a whole mess of questions from #1GF! about how I managed to unwittingly get grass all over the house, so I scratched that one off the list as well. So, what is a man to do when standing naked in a room with a glass of milk and some cookies? He finds a compromise.

I walked into my office, annoyed at the heat and my situation, and I stood next to my desk buck naked, shoving handfuls of animal crackers into my mouth and washing them down with the still chilled glass of milk. There was absolutely no reward in the cookies at all. I stood there angrily chewing and thinking. “What if #1GF! came home right now and found me standing here in the office buck naked eating cookies? How could I explain this one? She’d think that this is what I do all day while she’s off at work.” I shoved another handful of crackers in my mouth. “Even if I ran to jump in the shower when I heard the door, she’d probably see me running through the house buck naked, which there is no reason for doing in a house alone. Great. She’d think that I was having an affair and that some lady jumped out the window.” I was officially stuck standing there eating the cookies and willing myself not to make any sudden moves if #1GF! came home and witnessed the insanity. I’d rather have her think I was insane than untrustworthy.

As I was standing there, begrudgingly partaking in this naked cookie jamboree, I got annoyed with how ridiculous the whole scenario was. I enacted the most obvious solution to normalizing the situation: I took the cookies and put them on the bathroom counter and finished them over the bathroom sink…because obviously eating cookies naked at the bathroom sink is a whole lot more sane than eating them naked standing next to your desk. Yes. It’s during times like these that I wonder if I’m really destined to make it the full 75.1 years that I was statistically allotted at birth.

I finished my cookies, took a shower, and tried to put the whole naked cookie eating situation behind me. I tried to get back to work, but my office was broiling, and I couldn’t concentrate. Despite the shower, the heat soon had me greasier than a teenage fry cook at a fast food joint. I had no dinner ready because it was too hot to cook. To top it all off, I didn’t have an ounce of writing done and the heat was giving me a headache.

I’m putting this down right now as a reminder to myself: Sometimes there are days when it’s better to blow everything off and walk away. Go to the library or to sit with the old men in the middle of the mall. Give up and veg. You’ll feel a little guilty, but you’re going to feel bad anyway when you hit the end of a day and you have nothing to show for it but a mowed lawn and some clean teeth. Sometimes it’s more effective to take a break.

I was aggravated with the heat and was a bit short with #1GF! on the phone. Heat is the one thing that makes me nuts. At 5PM, I shut my machine down and officially gave up for the day. I opened a few windows and a breeze was finally kicking up. The house instantly started cooling down, and my attitude faded with the heat. I threw back some aspirin to deal with my headache, and sat at the counter to read. Within minutes, I started to feel better.

It was too hot to turn on the oven, so we had leftovers, which we ate while watching some one hit wonders of the 80’s show on VH1. VH1 is brutally addictive with their multiple show countdown format, and this was no exception. All the one hit wonders carried me back to a decade that I get less uncomfortable remembering as the years pass.

As prime time rolled around, I could tell that #1GF! wanted to watch More to Love, but was avoiding it because she knows how little I enjoy reality shows that are Bachelor based. I told her to go ahead and watch it. I only made it through the intro of the show before I left the room.

The tag line of the show was something like, “An average woman on a reality show is a size two. The average American woman is a size fourteen. This is a show for them.” Great. We are now entitled to proof that heavy people are as stupid and desperate as thin ones. Thanks, television. You are truly the great equalizer.

The thing is, even if I could stand the contrived and sadly desperate Bachelor-style reality format, this show seemed even more contrived than usual. As they were saying fourteen was an average size, they brought out a bunch of women that there is no way in hell were near a fourteen. No way. These women were large.

Look. Everyone can go through life like they want to. If you’re big or small, you have reasons that got you there, and they’re none of my business. You are what you are. If you want to be large and you’re okay with that, that’s fine.

But, if I give you a picture of a woman who is a size twenty, with a caption that says that the average woman is a size fourteen, you will assume that the woman in the picture represents a size fourteen, making a size fourteen seem a lot bigger in your mind than it is in reality. How does that help the average woman who actually is a fourteen?

I don’t know why I’m going on about this. It’s not like television isn’t inherently misleading or that I was in the target demographic for the show, but that sort of bothered me.

I wasn’t going to watch a bunch of women compete for a dude, so I turned the PC on. I read a little a few feeds, Quaked a little, while #1GF! watched The Fatchelor.

Wednesday (Day 787): Not Living Like A Slave

I got another offer for my beard images to appear in a book. Once again, I declined. I don’t know if declining is good or bad, but that’s the second time someone has offered me a copy of a book as payment to appear. I’m not trying to be a snob or act like my beard pages are some form of high art, but if you’re a legitimate publisher, offering a free book as payment for appearing in a book is on par with Craig’s List blogging ads that offer $2 to write a 500 word essay. Or those people who ask web designers for free design services because their free site will be good exposure.

Would you give up your likeness for less than you’d get for joining a book club only to benefit a company you’ve never heard of? Maybe the exposure is worth it for some people, but then, I know that appearing in high circulation publications like The Sun and The Financial Times don’t give a tenth of the exposure in a month that social sites drive in a day.

I’m not famous and the paparazzi doesn’t sell photos of me to publications, so I certainly wouldn’t expect someone to pay a ton of money for my likeness to appear in a book. By choice or by mandate, most of what I do here has nothing to do with money, but asking someone if you can make money off of something that they’ve created without offering them something for their work, is treating that person like a slave. And while money isn’t on the top of my list of important things in life, not living like a slave is.

I sort of feel like a dick for writing all of this, but if you know me and want me to donate time or energy to your projects, I’m always open to helping out: Logos, copy, scripting, design, whatever you need. I do it for readers all the time, and I have yet to care if they use my work for profit. When people come out of nowhere and expect that I’ll gladly donate to them solely as a vehicle to make make money for them, I get a little put off.

Here’s a quick and easy rule that I think will help all of us get a little more out of life. Give first, ask later, and try to give more than you get. I was flattered by the offer and gracious in the decline, but if using my work in a book is only as valuable as a single copy of a book, you’d be better off leaving me out and including something that will sell more books for you.

I added #1GF!’s edits to my manuscript and tried not to tinker with it too much. As I was working, I talked to a neighbor who was being nice and mowing another neighbor’s lawn just outside of my office window. She leaned on the fence, and I leaned on the window sill, and we talked for a bit as if we live in a nice neighborhood in a small town. Oh, wait. We do. For a city kid, this town gets better and better all the time.

I eventually went back to work, only to be taken away again to talk to my father on the phone. He called to find out a little about Facebook. I forwarded a couple of my Facebook posts (What Facebook Is and How to get started with Facebook), but I had a hard time explaining the point of it to him. The best I could do was to say that FB makes it easier to keep in touch with people that you normally wouldn’t stay in touch with.

When I got off the phone, I put together a quick regex to search my manuscript for duplicate words. It worked like a charm. I found five duplicates that #1GF! and I both missed (such as “that that” and “the the”), and forwarded the regex to Simon Haynes, to see if he might include a similar duplicate word finder in a future release of his outstanding (and free) novel organization software, yWriter.

I made a quick pasta sauce for dinner and smothered Costco raviolis with it. Have I mentioned how good the Costco raviolis are? They’re restaurant good. And I think I’m getting better at making a fifteen minute frying pan pasta sauce. #1GF! still prefers the twelve hour, three pounds of pork version that I make when the weather cools off, but she didn’t say that this last batch of pan sauce tasted like it came from a jar.

After dinner, #1GF! and I talked about names. We’re running out of time, and still not on the same page at all. I keep picking ancient, mythical, superhero baby names, and #1GF! is looking for something a little more traditional. Unless we can agree on something soon, I won’t know what letter will be sewn onto the baby’s cape, and all the other super babies in the nursery will think that her parents are broke and can’t afford a proper super baby cape. That’s something that is very difficult to bounce back from. Even for a super baby.

Thursday (Day 788): Agents, Synopses, & Electra Marvella’s Incubation Pod

I went with #1GF! to her doctor’s appointment, and she had another ultrasound. They gave us more ultrasound pictures, but to me, they still don’t look like much of anything. I never know if I’m looking at a hand or a face, so I stick the pictures in my notebook and thank the tech like you thank that relative who keeps giving you neon socks because you said you liked them once in passing in 1982.

Once the ultrasound was over, they hooked #1GF! up to a machine that checks for fetal heart rate and contractions. Surprisingly, #1GF! was having small contractions. She couldn’t feel them, but the machine said that they were there. Why would a tiny machine lie? To take over the world? Dream big, little monitor machine. Dream big.

The baby scored a ten out of ten on her tests, but #1GF! still wouldn’t accept any superhero names that I had suggested. I’m not sure how a baby is supposed to strike fear into an army of lying super robots without an awesome superhero name, but I’m saving that “I told you so” for later.

When we got home, #1GF! logged into her work, and I looked up the websites of the literary agents that I had written down on my trip to the library last week. It was an interesting experience. Some of the agents had profiles or even blogs that made them seem like really interesting people to sit down and have an amusing conversation with. On the other hand, I swear that a few of the agents really wanted to caption their websites: “We think you should fuck off. We really mean that. If you don’t feel this way, send us a query letter because we’re always short on paper to line the office puppy cage.” They were the web equivalent of a shrug.

Technologically, most of the sites in my search were fine, but there were a few who had the worst, one page web sites I’ve seen since grey, textured, repeating backgrounds were popular in 1997. Those sites made me reconsider some of my agent candidates because their sites gave me the impression that agents behind them were either amateurs or people who didn’t give the web any sort of consideration as a marketing tool. Neither might be the case, but all I have to go on is research and impressions.

On the other end of the scale, there were also a couple of agencies who did their websites up in Flash in an attempt to make their sites slick and modern. As a tech guy who has been on the ‘net since baud was a common unit of measurement, can I please offer this one tiny bit of unsolicited advice? Please? Use Flash where it makes things better, remembering that most of the time, it doesn’t. If you’re not a gaming site, and your page starts with a progress bar, there’s a very good chance that I’m going to either skip your animation, or leave before your page is loaded. And I’m not a particularly unique or impatient surfer.

In the afternoon, a guy showed up to replace our water meter. He rang the doorbell, and then cupped his hands and looked into the house through the small windows on the front door. What the fuck is up with service people thinking it’s fine to look into my house? Ring the doorbell and fucking wait a second. Don’t cup your hand and try to see if I’m on my way to answer the door a mere five fucking seconds after you’ve released the button. You don’t need to know what’s going on in here. I could be standing in the hall naked eating animal crackers. If I wanted you to see something like that, I’d put it on your boss’s website or leave the fucking door open.

The reason that we were getting a new meter was that the water company sent a letter threatening to shut off our water unless the new meter was installed. I thought it had to do with having an old inaccurate meter, but what it really ended up being about was that they wanted to install a radio transmitter on the meter so that they didn’t have to walk from the curb to the house to read it anymore.

Hey, great. Thanks, water company. I appreciate the threatening letter as much as I appreciate the extra $65 in service charges on the bill, even if we’re drinking rainwater. I’ll be sure to thank you in a few years when I’m growing a third nut because water employees can’t be bothered to get out of their trucks. Hey, at least the transmitter will keep your employees from looking in my windows, I suppose. Thanks for that. On a positive note, the install was quick, and within ten minutes, I was back to work.

I started back to work on my query letter and synopsis. The query letter wasn’t great, but because it’s only a page, it seemed manageable. In it, you introduce yourself and your book and try to convince an agent that your manuscript might be worth a read.

The synopsis, on the other hand, is a book report. It’s boiling down your entire book into a two to three page summary, including the ending. If you thought book reports were miserable, a synopsis is a book report that actually matters. My synopsis wasn’t the least bit compelling, so I stared at it for a while in hopes that it would change itself. It refused to do so.

I made a cup of coffee to kick my brain into high gear, but it simply made the suckiness of my synopsis even more noticeable. I even sent an e-mail to Christopher Moore for suggestions, knowing full well that I was wasting my time and his. A synopsis is something you have to plow through on your own. He answered back quickly, but only offered that he wasn’t very fond of writing synopses either.

I got frustrated and got up from my desk saying, “Fuck this,” under my breath. #1GF! was on her side of the desk, and she calmly suggested that I rewrite the entire synopsis from memory rather than from my chapter summaries. She suggested that writing it from memory might force me to touch on only the highest level points. The woman had a point.

Before I could get started, a couple of odd things happened. First, we got a baby toy in the mail addressed to #1BF!, which I thought was pretty funny. Then, my parents called and were acting weird on the phone. They said that they were going to stop by, but wouldn’t tell me why. They also weren’t in the area, so I didn’t understand what was going on.

When they finally stopped by, they gave #1GF! and I a HD video camera that was about the size of an iPod. I couldn’t believe it. My dad is more a technology user than technologist, so it sort of felt like when they bought me For Those About to Rock and The Song Remains The Same on vinyl for my twelfth birthday. They were impressively on the money in an arena that they were completely unfamiliar. I was in a little bit of awe until my dad mentioned that the camera got good reviews on “c something”, which turned out to be CNET. It became obvious that my sister had a hand in it somehow.

My parents left almost immediately, leaving #1GF! and I feeling like a gift bearing tornado had just whipped through. We wouldn’t miss a moment of Electra Marvella’s life once she manages to escape from her incubation pod. The escape will not be filmed because, really, if you want to see something like that, turn on The Discovery Channel.

Friday (Day 789): Gimme My Gumball!

It was raining again, and I had all the windows open in my office. Because of the room is mostly windows, it was like working in a hut in a monsoon. A hut with power. A hut with a power, a computer, and a giant desk. Not that I’ve ever been in a monsoon. Or a hut. Wait does Disney Land have huts? I might’ve been in a hut once if it does. Maybe. Oh, fuck it. It probably wasn’t like a hut at all.

I sat in my non-hut and rewrote and edited my synopsis all day. I got it down to four pages with one left to cut. It shouldn’t have taken all day without being complete, but what can you do? It was the opposite of the way I write.

With the blog or the book, I write a really basic story, and then add details to it while editing. The edits usually double or triple the word count (this post went from 2500 to 5600 words in editing). The synopsis, on the other hand, has to be written and cut back during editing, which is a completely foreign way for me to write. When I was close to done, I printed out the four pages so that I could work on it offline, but never did.

I made mac and cheese for dinner because I was being lazy. The entertainment portion of our evening was spent watching Slumdog Millionaire. For once, I got to see a movie that deserved all the positive hype it got. It was engaging and entertaining throughout.

This was #1GF!’s due date, and absolutely nothing was going on in terms of contractions. It was like paying the quarter into the gumball machine and standing there waiting for my gumball. Where’s my damned gumball? I guess if the baby’s not ready, the baby’s not ready. She was probably giving me an extra day to convince #1GF! of the awesomeness of one of her superhero names.

Saturday (Day 790): Overdue Baby Day One

My sister came over for breakfast so I made her eggs and homemade blueberry muffins. While she was in the house, she heard a baby crying. There are a lot of children in the neighborhood and #1GF! and I knew it was one of them. My sister, thinking we were playing a joke on her, briefly thought that #1GF! secretly had the baby and that she was wearing a prosthetic belly. Although my family is all about practical jokes (and a tough to beat in a game of Beyond Balderdash), I briefly wished that we were that good. My sister left, and I sent some muffins along with her for my parents.

#1GF! wanted to go to the beach, but she was officially a day overdue. I didn’t think it was a good idea to get drained by the sun, but I also felt like #1GF! should go and enjoy the beach while the baby was still quiet and ultra portable. A friend came over and parked in the driveway, and I drove them down to the beach.

I then started writing a little LOR and added Kevin Costner to the Megalist of Actors Who Tried to Sing before putting on the headphones and diving into a little QuakeLive.

When #1GF! returned home safe and sound, the two of us went out for Mexican food to see if the old wives’ tale about spicy food inducing labor was true. For us, it remained a wives’ tale. I gave the baby a talking to about how babies need to be on time and listen to their parents. Like most females, she chose not to listen to me.

What I Learned

• Naked cookie eating is weird and annoying.
• Sometimes, it’s better to forgo low levels of productivity and take a break to recharge.
• The average size for a woman in the United States is a size fourteen.
• A synopsis is not a particularly fun thing to write.

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