This is how I spend my time

DONE!

I am finally done with my last 500 questions and will never, ever again have to find myself awake at 3am looking up "famous literary horses" on Wikipedia.

Now to do all the important things that I should have been doing all along - working on Second Look, writing about Bulgakov, reading for the Northern California Book Reviewers annual prize, editing at Identity Theory, and much more.

I also have a stack of personal reading to catch up on, including
Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Capitalism, and Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, not to mention a stack of back issues of the New Yorker and New York Review of Books.

Radio Shack and Human Dignity

I've spent the last several days churning out question after question on Renaissance history, punctuated by the occasional demeaning trip to Radio Shack.

You see, on Friday I purchased a new cell phone and an accompanying new cell phone plan. It turned out the phone was not what I needed, and I returned on Sunday to exchange that phone for another, while keeping the same plan.

I spent seven hours on Sunday trying to straighten out the ensuing mess, including visits to two different Sprint stores and two different Radio Shacks.

The endless miseries do not bear retelling, but suffice it to say, at one point I entered a Sprint store to be told that I needed to call customer service for assistance. I was forced to use a display phone, still affixed to its display with a cord that a single moment's inattention would snap back out of your hands. I stood there quite literally tethered in place for 60 minutes.

At the end of the day, I had spent about $600 in fees and deposits and had no working phones at all.

On the plus side, I picked up a $5 "body fat analyzer" at Radio Shack as an impulse buy, so now I have something else to feel bad about - for only five dollars!

Last night I went to a small press reading at Intersection for the Arts and spoke briefly with someone who may be able to help me secure 501c(3) status for my proposed magazine. Because I'm planning a web-only publication for now, there shouldn't be much I need to pay for, but it's always good to have that option.