$40 famous

That's right, boys and girls.

I'm a published author.

More direct link: Anthony's Room

How you like them apples?

I mean, to be fair, I was published once before.  But that didn't earn me any money and is therefore not worth mentioning.

Just kidding.  Money isn't everything.  It just separates the successful from the...bloggers.  BOOM! Take that, Huffington Post.  And me.

So this is kind of exciting.  It's at least a little shot in the arm for my publishing attempts.  I feel confident enough to pay $15 of the money I just made to enter a writing contest I definitely won't win.  Don't worry, a few more crushing defeats and I'll be back to self-righteous posts about sadness.

GO TEAM ME!

Bittersweet tastes like sick

God, I hate all this bittersweet drama in movies nowadays.  Not because it's badly done.  Because badly done bittersweet ends up looking something like this:

OH MAN, I'M SO PRETTY, BUT, OH, MY HEART!

Fuck you, Justin Timberlake, nobody thinks you have human feelings.  Celebrities operate in a realm of superhuman emotions, where their problems are exquisite delights for us ugly commoners.

No, what I mean is shit like Crazy Heart and 500 Days of Summer.  The kind of stuff that is specifically engineered to make you feel absolutely miserable.  But it's okay! They're SMILING at the end.  They got absolute fuck-all of what they wanted, but hey, ain't that just the way life is?

No, fuck you, Hollywood, I want the best job, the best family and I want to be the smartest and most talented person in the universe all without putting any real emotional investment or effort into anything.

I'm starting a new genre.  It will be called "Screw you, I get everything".  I will film the protagonist breezing through life with girls throwing themselves at him and Fortune 500 companies chasing after him with lifetime contracts.  Banks will error in his favor, always.  It will never rain on his parties, his outdoor excursions or his parades, because there will be parades, the man will have however many parades he damn well pleases.

Even better, he will never want anything he can't have.
He will take what is given to him, shit-eating grin about it.
When people bump him in the street, he will wonder at how the stranger knew that he wanted to be bumped exactly that way at exactly that time.
When another man steals his girlfriend and fills his harddrive with videos of them having sex, the man will sit and watch every video marveling at how perfect a way this was to fill an afternoon.
When he's fired, he didn't want the job.
When he's bankrupt, he'll think about how unimportant money is.
When he's shivering starving in the street,
He'll smile,
Nod his head,
And say
"This is just what I wanted."
Dramatic music.
Fade to black

I hate movies.

This is why we write

Inner life is one of those things.  A thing that's so all-encompassingly important, yet you can't touch it, you can't taste it and you only see flashes of it in the drawn-out silhouettes of your dreams.

We can measure brain waves.  Oh yes we can.  But it doesn't mean a damn things, it is a paint-by-numbers approximation that, yes, red goes here, sometimes, in the right conditions.  It's not the magnetism of our blood.  It's not the radiation in our veins it is painfully unreal.

I guess what I mean is you can think whatever the fuck you want and it's okay.  Because on the outside, you are still white boy age twenty six smiling surely.  I mean, if you're me.  If you're not me, the overlay might get a bit more problematic.  Our faces are like burqa, honestly.  More than that, because sometimes you can't even see our eyes.

It is 2 AM and I can't sleep, my head like an inflatable mattress, it's never comfortable too full.  I need to open the valve and catharse.  Is that a word? Verb form of catharsis? The internet is no help here and I'll be damned if I turn to the OED.  Bootylicious? Really? I mean, I know no one uses you anymore, but this is not the way to get attention.  It's like the loser kid at school smoking pot to be cool.  Then going on to major in English and History and eventually go to Hopkins.

See what I did there?

Can't let an entry go without insulting myself.

(This inanity brought to you by David Oshinsky, who recommended that everyone write 300 words a day.  Don't worry.  This kind of can-do inspiration usually wears off after a couple days.)

The effects of rejection

So, let's get back to the writing stuff.  If I wanted a livejournal, I would have opened a livejournal.  No, this is Blogger, it's held to a higher standard.

Now, I've been rejected so many times from so many different magazines that I've started trying to guess what the rejection will say.  How will they start, with the bland sort of

"I hope this finds you well"

Or will they tell me how incredibly small my chances were of getting accepted in the first place

"We receive so many submissions"

Will they soften the blow?

"And while your submission is excellent"

Or will they just go at it

"This is not what we're looking for"

Will they wish me well?

"We wish you luck in your future endeavors?"

Or will they do something like

"Cheers!
- The Drabblecast Team"

Yeah, that last one was for real.  Cheers! You're rejected.  It's like breaking up with someone and nudging them going "Good knowin' ya, eh?"

Or nice while it lasted or something like that.

Anyway, one of the side effects of rejection is acceptance.

I got accepted to be published in Underground Voices Magazine, which is not so much a magazine as it is a website.  But it's something! It's $40 of something.  That's right, it's my first time getting paid for my writing.  I'm gonna go spend that money on booze and drugs.  Just like a real artist!

Another side effect of rejection is this:
"Dear Mixer Magazine,
  I'm not going to lie to you.  This story will be published someday by someone.  That someone could be you.  That's the opportunity I'm presenting today, the opportunity to publish this story.  Think about how you'd feel if later on in life you woke up, had your morning coffee and set about reading your daily intake of literary magazines and suddenly BAM! There's my story.  Printed in a magazine that is most definitely not yours.  How would you deal with the regret?

  So do yourself a favor.  Don't live a life filled with regret.  Publish this story."

A writer's apathy is a fearsome thing.

Aggressive impersonality

There is something aggressively impersonal about online classes.

The drop down box says I can laugh
Raise my hand
Applaud
Or agree.

The professor can deny my request to speak.

If this is where higher education is headed, count me out.

Actually, don't.  Now I want to be a professor even more.  I can give an hour of lecture from my couch and get paid six figures.  Cha-ching!

My stars and garters

That expression is peachy keen.  I just watched the last bit of X-Men 3, which is actually directly related to my travel blogging.  On the flight back, I watched "The Fighter", which I mistook for "The Wrestler", thinking I was watching a movie that everyone had recommended.  I also watched the first half of X-Men 3 and was thoroughly unimpressed.  But some latent masochism in me made me watch the rest of the movie.

Beast says, while flying into the final conflict with the big bad guy and almost certain death: "My stars and garters".

Sometimes I think the people who write these big budget movies are just constantly drunk.

Anyway, I wanted to post a quick update to show I am still breathing.  Grad school has started, and with it a dizzying amount of social interaction.  I never realized one could actually have trouble hearing themselves think.  But after 8 hours of telling people where I'm from, what do I do, what's my goals, I needed to flee the room just to have a few inane thoughts to myself.

More to come.

Portugal Day 5: Why Couchsurfing is the most amazing thing in the world and you are incorrect for thinking otherwise

So I spent my last day in Portugal running up and down hills, which is essentially how I spent every other day in Portugal.  Technically it wasn't my last day, today is.  But today I went to the waterfront, sat down and found everything else I wanted to do today suddenly become a lot less interesting.  So here I am.  Writing a blog.  Because that's what first tier tourism is all about.  Doing the same thing in a different place.

I went to Sintra, which is a little city outside of Lisbon and home to one of the most elaborate, confusing castles I've ever seen.  This one, right here:

The picture doesn't do it justice, but in there are essentially three styles of castle: Arab, Medieval and Gothic-esque.  It's called the Palacio Nacional de Pena and was built to be the summer home of King Ferdinand II in 1842.  So, a kind of new castle, all things considered.  Apparently, it was home to the first indoor bathroom in Portugal.  High-tech, y'know.

I should actually say we went to Sintra, not because I feel royal today, but because I was picked up from Lisbon, driven to Sintra and guided up the hill by a Couchsurfer who turned out to be the nicest man alive.  He not only inundated me with Portuguese history, he guided me around the whole of the park around the palace, which consists of stuff like this:

And this:

So.  Valuable guide.  The whole park cost 14 euros, which made it essentially theme park price.  That's why I felt entitled to climb a few piles of rocks and whine that there was no cotton candy.

The second picture is of an old Moorish fort called, Castel Do Mouros.  It's much more my style, as the Pena Palace (Which translated to Pain Palace, ha ha ha ha ha) is a bit too modern, a bit too clean, a bit too full of tourists smelling like suntan lotion and cultural ambivalence.

Castel Do Mouros is like "No, screw you, there are stairs and they are steep and uneven and you just have to suck it up." Just like the Moors.

Back in Sintra, we had some tasty pastries.   One is called a Queijada, which is a kind of cookie filled with a cheese-related sweet mixture and the other is called a Travesseiro which, from what I can tell, is made out of crack cocaine.  It's flaky and sugary on the outside and filled with this sweet nutty goo that I wanted injected directly into my veins.

If that wasn't enough, the couchsurfer asked if I wanted to see the coast.  There's only one answer to that question and so we were off.  Within fourty minutes we arrived at the most western point in Europe.  Face with the full majesty of the Atlantic unfurled before me like a second sky I immediately put my thumbs in the air and said:

"Wassup America!"

Later, we went back to the couchsurfer's house and he cooked a really traditional Portuguese dish called Bacalhau à Brás which apparently means Bacalhau with potato chips.  Don't get me wrong, this was the most delicious substance I had ingested in all of Portugal.  But it kind of blew my mind that one gets it from adding potato chips to frozen fish.

Then I went to sleep in the amazingly comfortable bed the couchsurfer had prepared for me.  Honestly.  I'm not going to say that anyone who thinks couchsurfing is a good idea needs to get their head checked.  That's a bit too much.

I will say that they're wrong.  And I have a SD card of amazing pictures and a belly full of cod fish to back me up.