Personal

Let's make a meme-ory! If I had to choose 10 books to recommend to someone as representatives of my personal favorite reads, it'd look a little something like this (today, at least): Fool on the Hill by Matt RuffGates of Fire by Steven PressfieldLa Perdida by Jessica AbelLadies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning by Jonathan MahlerMen of Tomorrow by Gerard JonesPet Sematary by Stephen KingUnsettling America by Maria Mazziotti Gillan (editor)When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago When the Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence BlockWhere a Nickel Costs a Dime by Willie Perdomo A little something for every taste there,…

Scrabble Tournament Ad from France Because the last thing I need is another Web 2.0 distraction, I avoided Facebook when it first opened up to everybody. I'm on MySpace and [used to] barely ever log in except to delete friends requests from newly relocated single girls who think I'm cute and want to share their nude pics with me, so I didn't see the point. Then, Facebook opened up their platform for external developers to create applications and I was intrigued. I signed up and played around with it a bit, testing a variety of applications that ranged from pointless but fun (Boozemail!) to mildly…

Picnic Spread Salomé's away for the next few days so it's just me and the kids which, unfortunately means the kids and a babysitter since I'm at work every day this week. Originally, they were going to be down at my mother's place in Virginia, but schedules got twisted around and they're not going down until this coming weekend, at which point we head to Cancun! Yesterday was a lot of fun, though, as the three of us headed to Glen Island Park for a family picnic with my cousin Joanne and her family, and a special guest appearance by our aunt…

Leos Rule Well, damn! There was a time in my early 20s when I was convinced I was going to kill myself on my 30th birthday because I knew life pretty much hit the downslope at that point. Dumbass. I got married one month before my 29th birhday, after a decade of attempting to make "30 with a Bullet" a self-fulfilling prophecy. Had my first kid shortly after my 31st birthday, the second after turning 33. Thanks to Salomé's inhuman patience, we're still married after nine years, and thanks to her good genes, we have two beautiful kids. (I take partial credit.) I've yet…

Lynne and I used to argue all the time about craft vs. passion when it came to acknowledging the potential of a new writer, she preferring the former while I preferred the latter. The ideal, obviously, is to have both, but with newer writers especially, you usually get more of one or the other. Ironically, Lynne and I became close early on despite my having a hell of a lot more passion than craft, so she's not really quite as hardline about the debate as she seems. :-P This year's National Poetry Slam got me thinking again about the differences between craft and passion, as well as…

There's so much to say about this past weekend in Austin, but I'm totally unable to process it into words that would be fully accessible to anyone who wasn't there...though that won't stop me from trying. The National Poetry Slam Experience is so multi-layered, a dizzying mix of emotional, psychological and physical stimuli, that you truly have to be there to fully understand its appeal. Even though I wasn't competing, you can't help but get caught up in the competition at some level, and it was a wild ride from the emotional highs of louderARTS' Thursday and Friday night bouts to the [brief] emotional low of Finals…