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2000-02-16

At work this week I've had a lot of busy work -- transferring a backlog of documentation into a cumbersome "Content Management Application," which essentially means cutting and pasting for hours at a stretch.

I amuse myself by listening to RealAudio interviews from the Fresh Air archives. Over the past day or two, I've heard Susan Sarandon, Fran Leibowitz, Maurice Sendak, John Irving, Sigourney Weaver, and Stephin Merrit.

Merrit is a musician I've loved since seeing one of his bands, Magnetic Fields, play along with Yo Le Tengo years back. He's just come out with a three-CD set called 69 Love Songs that is getting lots of press. (That's always kind of mixed, when a mildly obscure favorite becomes popular. As in the current interest in Nick Drake because VW used Pink Moon in a commercial.) Merritt's music is droning and morose and catchy and

melodic, and he comes off in the interview as very likable in a dry, morose kind of way.

I like morose in a person, a good thing considering that the word has been used more than once in describing me.

*

Yesterday I received a newsletter from this writing conference I attended in the summer of 1992. It's basically an opportunity for former attendees of this conference to brag about their accomplishments. Like the "class notes" section of my college alumni magazine. Those things inevitably freak me out. I guess you could say I experience reverse schadenfreude.

Schadenfreude is pleasure at the misfortune of others, what I experience is displeasure at their good fortune. Is there a word for that? Perhaps envy? You want to think it's more than that, but maybe envy is what it is. I don't know, it all just gives me a stomach ache. All these achievers, with their publications and awards and grants.

I submitted an entry to this newsletter in 1995 to say I'd sold a short story to Penthouse. At the conference I'd had an affair with this lawyer poet from California and after we'd returned to our respective homes he behaved in a deceitful and cowardly fashion; I admit I was hoping to elicit some kind of response from him. It worked. He wrote to congratulate me and apologized for having been a bastard. It was less satisfying than I would have expected. I did not respond.

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