Dear Diary, A Funny Thing Happened To Me On Friday…

 … I got laid off! To be honest, I’m not taking it as tough as the guy from Wayne’s World, I just really like Ed O’Neill and his work in that clip.

But yes, I am no longer with Patch. As a result, I probably will be writing a bit more in this thing. Considering that my last entry was in October 2012, and I only had 24 entries total in 2012, well, I haven’t really set the bar particularly high for myself!

I have been yearnin’ to write some pages recently though, and to inexplicably review video games and movies that you probably already finished with months and months ago. I have that going for me, as well as taking pictures of my cat and other things on Instagram and writing insincere cutlines for them.

And finally, just to put this out there as a teaser – I’ll be making my podcast debut this coming week, if all goes well! So, if the idea of me talking to someone you probably don’t know about subjects you probably aren’t aware of is appealing, heck, this is an exciting time in your life!

To close things out, here is Boston Bruins announcer Jack Edwards laughing manically, in case you’re feeling glum. I know it always cheers me up.

Getting a new job

So, as I was saying about my new job...

Oh wait, that's right, I haven't written about it at all. I've never had to leave one job for another in the past, so I'm not sure what the proper etiquette is for it. (Hopefully, Miss Manners or Dear Prudence is reading this and will chime on.) I've known that the job is mine since two weeks ago, but because I was still employed by The Westerly Sun, I've been holding off on announcing it.

Since I'm no longer The Sun's employee, I suppose there is no harm in saying that I've been hired by Patch.com to be a local editor for Narragansett, Rhode Island. It's a small, coastal and college community in Eastern Rhode Island, and I've lived there twice in the past. I'm about 15 minutes away. Although my site isn't up yet and won't be for a bit, the Newport and Portsmouth and Middletown sites are, and they look pretty nifty. There might also be one in your area already, depending on where you're reading this from; you can see the full list here.

It's Internet journalism, but I'll essentially be a conventional editor slash reporter. I'll be writing a lot myself, but I'll also have a freelance budget and (hopefully) be able to hire interns. It is a lot more work and responsibility, which I'm not exactly shy of at this point in my career as a 26-year-old in a new apartment.

The financial commitment that AOL is putting out there also makes me confident that they think this can work. They also sent me a Macbook, a Sony Cybershot, a Blackberry and a police scanner, all of which is sparkly and new and wonderful. (What can I say? Much like Kaylee from Firefly and Serenity, I like shiny new things. Although, I feel like I'm about 60 because I'm having trouble using the Blackberry like a human being.)

Also, as part of the whole hiring process, I get to travel a bit. Sunday afternoon, I'm taking the train from rustic Kingston, Rhode Island to New York City. I'm staying in (I've been told) a swanky hotel for a night, getting training Monday morning, and then taking another train to Boston for another hotel Monday night. After another training session Tuesday morning, I'm back to Rhode Island on Tuesday night.

The timing is actually ridiculously convenient. My car's inspection sticker expires on the last day of August, and I've also been putting off several other needed repairs - the check engine light is on, it's about 3,000 miles overdue for an oil change, the brakes / rotors make a grinding noise under 30 m.p.h., and the front driver's side headlight and a back brake light are both in need of repair. And oh, as I actually write this post at 8 a.m. Saturday, I'm sitting in the lobby of Safelite as they replace my windshield, which had a deep gash across the entire surface of the glass, like I was in some god damn horror movie.

Sooooo. It's probably for the best that I'm off the roads until at least Wednesday morning, since it will probably take them a couple days to completely repair my car anyway. (Another plus of the job? I can work from home most days, meaning I can actually plan reasonable times for car repairs now.)

Anyway, if you have any questions about my new gig, feel free to ask. As of now, I don't think it will affect my output here, except for the immediate future. Because I probably won't have time to write on Monday and Tuesday, and possibly Sunday, I'll be cuing up some Baggage reviews for those days. I trust this won't be that distressing to most of you reading this, since they tend to be fairly popular in terms of page views.

Note: On the rare chance that one of you out there does want to, like, meet me in NYC, and you're not a weirdo, I am game for going out for a quick drink Saturday night. Same goes for Boston on Monday, assuming I don't have some work-related schmoozing to do. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail if that's the case - sgre6768@gmail.com.

Blogging about tweeting

[Left] Not about her.

I got a Twitter account a couple months ago, although it was primarily to promote this blog; I had no real desire to post 140 character updates about my life. Yet, this minimalist format has indeed snagged me a bit, as I've done 552 updates - tweets, as the kids call them - in the past four months or so. (I wish it was easier to look-up when I joined, but I can't find that button right now.)

Because you are so limited in terms of length, it forces you to be brief and to the point. It is kind of the opposite of blogging, where I just ramble for 800 words and then post a silly picture.

The oddest thing to me is how easy it is to add other people. There are things like a Major League Baseball feed that I'll normally add a person or two from each day, along with The Match Game's Charles Nelson Reilly, which is maintained by friends of the late comedian. (By the way, future idea for a posting - Best game shows of all-time, since The Match Game is on it.)

I also wonder what the semi-professional bloggers and writers and journalists think when they see my updates to my high school and Internet friends. I'm sure they are very interested in my comments to my friend about how I did an article about our mutual friend and my former roommate about him competing in some lifeguard games. The guys from Gamezebo probably get a real kick out of it, and think to themselves, "This is so utterly relevant!"

Masterpiece Book Theatre

[Left] My favorite book of all-time, The Phantom Tollbooth, and by the way, you can bet your sweet ass that I'm upset it didn't make this list. What gives, BBC??? No wonder you're a broadcasting company.

So, my friend Danielle tagged me in this survey the other day on Facebook, and because I couldn't answer it right away, I thought I'd do it here on the blog. I added comments where appropriate. Since Saturdays are normally slow days for hits anyway, I didn't think anyone would mind. Here we go!

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - x
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - x
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - x

Total: 5. The Lord of the Rings is really, really dry, and I wish people would just admit that the movies are better, as opposed to insisting that others read 1,500 pages of sluggish material about Elven words. I find Jane Eyre and 1984 just as sluggish and bad, but Mockingbird and Great Expectations are great and good respectively.

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - x
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - x
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

Total so far: 8. I read Tess, but it was for some research paper in high school, and barely remember doing it. Catch 22 took me three attempts for no discernible reason; I loved it. And The Hobbit is Tolkien's actual great work, since it is accessible by just about any person or age grouping.

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - x
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - x
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Total so far: 12. I share Hunter Thompson's opinion that The Great Gatsby is the best-written novel ever. It doesn't mean that it is my favorite book, but in terms of tone and skill of writing, I think it is what I grade out as the best. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the quintessential "wacky" book that everyone should read. Alice in Wonderland is overhyped a little; the movie is better. And Grapes of Wrath is important, but a bit dry and depressing to re-read.

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - x
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - x
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Total so far: 14. The CS Lewis books are a lot more accessible than Lord of the Rings, too. Oddly, I didn't have any sort of religious backing as a kid, so all of the symbolism and ideology inserted by Lewis went over my head. Also oddly, I haven't seen any of the movies.

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - x
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - x
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

Total so far: 17. I had to read 1984 when I was in high school, but now, they make the kids read Animal Farm. I wish I had had that assigned to me instead, because I think it's easier to read and its political symbolism is better. I hated Lord of the Flies in ninth grade, but I had to re-read it in college, at which point I found it a lot better. I read Far From The Madding Crowd at the same time I did Tess, and I can't say I remember it any better. Given its title, I imagine that is the one about the harsh, silly judgments of society.

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Total so far: 18. Brave New World was yet another book I had to read for school. I think between high school and college, I had to read it four times; ugh. The first half of the book is great, with the explanation of how the society worked, but the last couple chapters I just wasn't into at all.

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - x
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - x
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Total so far: 20. Yeah, I've read Bridget Jones's Diary. So what, big whoop, you wanna fight about it? I thought it was a decent, breezy book, but I definitely wouldn't put it on the same scale as the others on this list. Speaking of, Count of Monte Cristo is a great, compelling story.

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante - x
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

Total so far: 21. In ninth grade, I thought the concept of the book sounded neat, since it's about Hell and what not. Actually reading it was Hell. har har!

80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - x
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Total so far: 23. Charlotte's Web is a classic, and I think I read it for class in fourth grade; it was the first chapter book we did. I've read various Sherlock Holmes tales, inspired by my childhood love of Encyclopedia Brown, and I liked them all.

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - x
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -x

Total: 27. Le Petit Prince! Our final project in high school French V was reading that book and translating it to English, I believe. It was a sweet little story. Likewise, although Les Miserables has a completely different tone, I did check out an English version after we covered it extensively in French class. I've head Hamlet a half dozen times for various classes, but I still enjoy it. And Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, while a solid book, is better as a movie with Gene Wilder. The book's sequel is one of the first novels I actually owned, so it has a special place in my heart, even if I did find the vermicious knids scary at the time.

I think this list does underrate how much I read - My primary interest is non-fiction, so a lot of great non-fiction books, like All The President's Men, Moneyball and Outliers aren't even eligible. Boooo again, BBC!

Steve Greenwell, narcissist, and the blog business

So, Dr. Drew has a personality test that you can take online that assesses how narcissistic you are in various areas. If you're interested in taking it, you can click here, and find out your own score. The higher the number, the more narcissistic you are, although Drew does stress that this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

If you want to have some fun with it, I can try to guess your score before you post it. My score probably isn't that surprising – I've taken the test twice and gotten a 21 and a 25, putting me well-above the “average” score of 15. The maximum is 40. I write a blog that is basically just me pontificating on various subjects, and think that other people enjoy it, which takes a certain amount of narcissism to believe.

And because the post the other day on the scheduling of this blog got such a great response, I've decided that from now on all scheduled posts will drop at roughly 4 p.m. EST every day. As long as issues don't pop up, there should be a new post at that time every day. This does not apply to “news” posts, although I don't do as many of them now, and any sort of “spur of the moment” post.

Scheduling

So, what time would people prefer to see this blog updated? I recently found out that I can schedule posts for public consumption at certain times, which is great in terms of helping me get organized. For example, I'm currently typing this on Saturday morning, and I already have the iTunes post queued up to go Sunday morning.

I realize that my readership might prefer seeing posts at a certain time. They're currently set to post at 9 a.m. EST, I believe. (It might be PST; I haven't been home to personally monitor it.) This is really early, so there is something for people there to start their workday with, or to distract themselves from work with. I also like getting the comments in my e-mail while I'm at work, so that I can properly ponder a good response.

However, I don't mind queuing them up for a later time, if people would prefer that. I know #1 commenter and former Tag Team participant Danielle Membrino normally comments at night, so 5 p.m. or 8 p.m. EST can also be accomplished.

How say you?

p.s. Also on the plus side, I finally found a place at the driving range where there is wireless internet available. So, I can update the blog and Twitter from time to time here, which is nice.

Summer vacation

[Left] The definitive summer vacation movie.

So, unannounced, I decided to take a few weeks off from the blog. This was partly because of my new job, which sucked up a lot more time then I would realize, and also as a way for me to just recharge my own brain and what not. It didn't hurt that a couple people I'm doing tag team blogs with took a while to respond, and that my #1 commenter went on vacation for a week, meaning that there wasn't a ton of outside pressure on me to write entries.

But. I'm back into the swing of things now! A couple of random notes:

1) I won't be including as many links and images on my posts. Sadly, some posts take far longer for me to format with various fun things than they do to type. It doesn't help that the computers I use – a desktop from 2002 and a laptop from 2005 – are really showing their age at this point. Right after I manage to move out, buying a new computer, even if it's using credit, is on my list. Maybe even before I move out.

2) Another way I can tell that this new job is sucking up a lot of my free time is by monitoring my weight. At one point I was at 200 pounds, ugh. That's not really acceptable for me, since I'm 5'9” and don't lift weights for a living, and my high school weight was around 160. For the past week, I've been trying to exercise at least once a day, and that has kept it in check for the time being, and I'm back down to around 190ish. Still, it's something I'm going to have to monitor. I'm not crazy about the idea of turning into Kevin James or George Costanza.

3) I've kind of stayed off Twitter during this hiatus, but I imagine I'll be back on it regularly now that I'm blogging again. To give people a bit of a peek behind the curtain, a surprising amount of my traffic is directly referred from Twitter, which has a different set of friends on it then here.

4) Speaking of hits, I should mention that I have officially made money off of this blog - $0.98. Woohoo! AdSense tells me that it is in my account, but I don't think I'll have them cut a check for me just yet...

Writing orgy

[Left] This picture doesn't have anything to do with anything, but I enjoy it. Maybe you will too.

At times, I'll just go into ridiculous writing sprees. The fact that I'm working a fairly easy slacker job at a driving range right now helps – I sit around for three or four hours, so unless I want to stare out at the grass, it leaves plenty of time for typing, reading or writing by hand. (Yes, I still do that from time to time.)

In a way, the lack of Internet is a good thing, because it forces me to be productive. I sometimes liken myself to Bill James, the baseball statistics pioneer who worked long hours as a security guard. When I read about that, my mind immediately thought, “So he was like me, and had plenty of down time to just sit around and think about baseball statistics.”

When I'm at the range, I am ridiculously productive, and I'm not sure why. As an example, in the previous three hours, I've typed 2,500 words. Most of these words were for three professional pieces that I'll actually be paid for and that people will actually read considering me a “professional” as they read it. That statistic doesn't include this entry, whose 200 words (as of this sentence) I typed in about five minutes.

However, these sprees lead to tremendous lows, and I'm not entirely sure why. For example, when I'm at home I'll often just stare at the empty Word screen for a minute or two, and then immediately find something else to busy myself with. Sometimes, it is in a productive way, such as playing a video game that I'll review later, moderating and posting at the Adam Carolla Show message board, or catching up on some decent journalism at Slate.com. But often, it's just sloth and wasteful on my part – Replaying Final Fantasy 4 or Earthbound for the 700th time, reading on Wikipedia about the X-Men, picking through Roger Ebert's archive for reviews on films I've already seen.

As I just suggested, these moments make me feel a bit slothful and wasteful, but should they? They sort of provide a subconscious reinforcement of my existing thought pattern and generate thoughts for my “idea bank,” for lack of a better term. If my writing and blog entries are full of random wanderings that people seem to enjoy, should I be trying to curb that rambling instinct in what I do in my “free” time?

... This is a sort of abrupt place to end an entry, since I normally go much longer, but that's the extent of my thoughts on the matter. I suppose I should start typing new. But maybe I'll play a game of Tetris instead. (See what I did there?)