Oh, last night was excruciating in so many ways.

Went back to the gym last night, where my dance class got canceled because nobody showed up, again. My teacher and I were bitching about the people who refuse to go back to town until like midnight the night before classes (and then flee right after their finals end) because they hate the town and love partying in the Bay Area. I have to agree with him- if you don't like this town, WHY ARE YOU HERE? Why didn't you transfer to some Bay Area school? Last I checked, there were plenty of colleges around there, and there ARE colleges in your beloved San Francisco, folks, even if you can't go to the UC one.

Tonight is the only night all quarter I can attend a weights class, and fifty bucks says nobody but me shows up for that. Again.

As per usual on the night before vacation ended (i.e. Sunday), I didn't sleep all night. So I was pretty zonked Monday night. Naturally, my upstairs neighbors, who presumably won't have to start waking up early until tomorrow, decided to fuck noisily from about 2:30-3:45 a.m. Earplugs did not block this out. Earplugs suck. I ended up getting up, still really groggy, and watching season 2 of 24. Particularly, an episode with lots of loud gunfire. Not that they gave a shit, but it made me feel a little better.

After finally getting to sleep...well... for Christmas I got an iHome (kind of a combination clock radio/charger for your iPod) and for some insane reason, despite being set to wake me up to music, it's waking me up with loud alarm buzzing. Hell, yesterday it didn't even wake me up at the time I set it to, but 20 minutes earlier. I've read the instructions, so, WTF?

I was catching up on my blog reading today and found this post.

"Ahh, the internet. I should have known that within 24 hours of my last post, someone would forward the link to Jonathan Carroll. (If, on the other hand, I had said that Glass Soup was a work of brilliance unsurpassed in human memory, no one would think to send him the URL. This is how these things work. No one dug up my posts saying that I'd liked previous books.) I got a very nice note from him, just saying that he was sorry I felt that way, and sad to hear it.
And my stomach went kind of twisty, because I don't know that Mr. Carroll is a nice man, but I strongly suspect it: most of the writers I've met have turned out to be decent examples of the species, and I don't go around saying mean things to or about writers in hopes that they will feel bad, or even in hopes that they will Mend Their Ways."

In case you perhaps haven't guessed by now, I had a similar experience today on my book site, only with Google instead of forwarding. (I hate Google, and TrackBack, and all that other crap that lets people stalk you by name and links. It's like snooping around to find out what the mean girls in high school said about you.)

I very rarely post anything bad on the book review site. If the book is that bad, I probably didn't finish reading the fucker in the first place. I'm out of school and no longer forced to read total crap to the end. I've written maybe three reviews in the last year in which the book or some aspect of it outright made me angry. I can tell you off the top of my head which books those were and why I was mad to this day.

How many authors have found my site after I positively reviewed their work? One.

How many have found it after I gave an angry review? Two out of three. Within like 12 hours of me posting it, too. (Though the book that pissed me off the most ever, thankfully, the author never found. That book made me angry I'd paid hardback. The only good part of it was the opening!)

Oh, teh pain when I check my e-mail and find out that one of them found it. Especially when one of those authors that found it was one that I'm on a few mailing lists/message boards with and we're friendly there. (Though she sent me a free book last month, so we are still on good terms.) It gives me flashbacks to the time I went to a play with my mom and while reading the program, saw that a girl I knew from dance school was in it. The girl was an okay person, but her mother was this total stage mom and irritated me. And I then proceeded to tell my mother all about how this girl's mom was pretentious...Yup, girl's mom was right on the other side of my mother. And I KNOW that the second the show was over, mommykins ran off to her baby and told her what I'd said, then followed up with, "Oh, she's just jealous because she has NO talent at dance."

Okay, so far the authors are nice and polite despite the fact that I stabbed them in the heart, they respect the difference in opinion, we read it differently, etc. So it's all okay. Hell, the author today and I have been back-and-forthing chatting in the comments today. And I'm still a fan of one of those authors and loved her other two books, and I'm interested in getting the next book of the other one. But even if I had my reasons (and god knows I will list them in excruciating detail), it's still a moment of "Goddammit, I got caught ragging on someone BY that someone, OW," you know?

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