Distracted Mind

_Rant ahead. If you don’t want your cheerios soured by my bitterness, go read Family Circus or Marmaduke. You have been warned._

I got my first rejection letter today. It was for a juried “art show” in California. I use “art show” instead of exhibit or any other term because I saw the “winners.”

I’m not used to rejection — it’s something I haven’t had to deal with very often. My first reaction to rejection is usually a brief period of depression, followed by anger. In this case, the depression was _very_ brief. It was followed by a white-hot anger, once I saw the pieces that got in.

I know that rejection is sometimes good for the soul — having never gotten one of those “We’d _love_ to take everyone, but we only had X number of spots…” sort of letter before. My reaction? _Bullshit_. If you’d love to take everyone, why the hell did you make it a juried show?

That sort of “everyone would be a winner, but some just aren’t up to our standards” hypocricy just makes my stomach turn. It’s a lie. A lie that says “Thanks for your entry fee, now bugger off–we have more important things… but here’s a platitude, so we’ll feel better about telling you to bugger off.” Give me a break. If you don’t want to feel bad about telling people they couldn’t hack it, don’t put yourself in that position. Don’t try to make me feel better with a verbal reach-around. It won’t work. You insult my intelligence by trying the whole “Everyone’s a winner” approach. Perhaps other artists buy that schtick — I don’t.

Honestly, The rejection doesn’t sting half as bad as the half-assed consolation phrases in the letter. I realize that the writer is just trying to be nice, but there’s nothing nice about rejection. Anyone who’s ever been rejected can tell you that. Any attempt to be nice, to let someone down easy, to play Stewart Smalley, is just a ploy to make the rejector feel better about telling someone they weren’t up to snuff. My advice for anyone who has to write a rejection letter? Don’t do the easy let down. Just tell them: we could only accept so many, you weren’t in that group, thanks for applying, we won’t patronize you with a whole bunch of “But you were good too… just not good enough” type phrases. It’s like the “It’s not you, it’s me” break-up speech. No matter how true it is, it doesn’t hurt any less and it won’t make anyone feel good.

Just let me be bitter. I’ll get over it, I promise. I may not like you when I do but, then again, you probably don’t care and I know _I_ don’t. It will be alright.

Three years ago today, some time around 4 ‘o’ clock, I was home early with chronologically confused morning sickness, kicking back, watching some Xena, Warrior Princess. Then, the fuse box in my crappy Lakewood standard apartment blew again. At least I thought that’s what had happened.

I called the boy, who was still working in Toledo during the week, and asked where the spare antique fuses were.

“No, I don’t think it’s the fuse box. The power’s out here, too.”

Shit. It’s August, it’s hot, I’m at that bitchy, sensitive and exhausted part of my first trimester, and the power’s out. I climbed into the camaro and turned on the radio: the power’s out everywhere. No one knows why yet, there are traffic jams everywhere, there are people stranded in major cities. Wonderful.

I drive around for a bit, avoiding accidents and appreciating the volunteer traffic directors at Clifton and 117 for saving me from some spectacular sideswipes. Giant Eagle’s not out of water yet, so I stock up and pay with a check, since I can’t use my card to pay, or to get some yuppie food stamps at the cash machine.

I get back to the duplex of horror to find my neighbors preparing for an impromptu block party. Since no one knew when the power would be back on, there were fridges of meat and beer that needed used before either got warm and skunky. We gathered candles, any beverages we had available, and sat on Anita’s porch talking and joking.

We sat on the porch, coming up with our own conspiracy theories about the blackout (It was terrorists! No, it’s just incompetence. Maybe the government forgot to pay the electric bill). We gossipped about the house where that doofus blew up the bigwheel, about “Slipper Lady”, and slowly wound down. More people from the neighborhood showeed up, each with a story: Steve had to walk down over 30 flights of stairs to get out of work, someone else barely got out of downtown on a bus.

I don’t think anyone went home until after at least midnight. We were having too much fun — at one point a group of us walked over to the drugstore, which was letting groups of five people in at a time, with flashlights, to buy… you guessed it, flashlights! Flashlights, water, and batteries actually. They had a middle-aged off-duty Lakewood cop manning the back door and a cardboard box to hold cash. It wasn’t exactly a high-security event.

I know there were plenty of people having fun that night, despite the lack of electronically-powered entertainment — let’s just say that I had plenty of people asking me if my bump was a blackout baby (no, she’s about two and a half months too early for that). For me it was just a hot and sticky night, worrying about a spouse a state’s length away and trying to keep cool in the dark.

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It’s been a while. A long while. There’s been a lot that I’ve wanted to write about, but life and its craziness has gotten the better of me. I could be an Ike Turner and be all “Sorry, baby, I won’t do it again — I love you! I’ll change, I promise!” but it would be a lie. A vicious lie.

So, instead, I’m contrite. I’m a bad, bad blogger, but I know it. Instead of more penance and self-effacement, I’m just going to throw some cool links at you. These are a few things that I’ve found lately that seriously rock my socks off.

• Blog Bridge — This is an open source, totally free (as in beer) feed reader that is absolutely stunning. Not only does it read the feeds, it allows you to create “guides”, which are groupings of feeds that you can share with others. Why is this cool? Because you can get other people’s guides, sync your guides on the ‘net, and sync your feeds from computer to computer. Sure, you could do it all on a web-based feed reader, but this one is so much more fun to use–you just have to try it.
• SuperDuper! — Not completely free, but dead useful. For macs, this is a backup program that works for “old” macs (powerPC types) and “new” macs (intel-based) and does a beautiful job of backing your stuff up. It’s free if you don’t want to schedule backups, or if you don’t mind not having a backup of your user files, but it’s only $27.95 for the full version.
• Canvas — Hat tip to SupaMB. Canvas is a very cool plugin for WordPress that allows you to have a “drag and drop” interface to design your weblog. Very cool stuff.
• Democracy TV — an open source, free internet television platform. Tons of channels, no boredom.
• Qumana — Sure, I may be behind on this one, but this is a pretty cool desktop blogging application. It works well with WordPress, which is always a plus.

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