I'm back in the book group

Life sure is funny sometimes.

I've been telling Adam that I'm over everything I'm writing about in The Project. I told Tracy that too.

I think I was wrong.

"Older cars L.A. teens like"

Oh, hell yeah. This is the car I liked to drive when I was a teenager. I had my own car, but I preferred my mom's 240D because it was a stick and it just looked cool.

I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of "Three Blind Mice"

And I start wondering how they came to be blind.
If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister,
and I think of the poor mother
brooding over her sightless young triplets.

Or was it a common accident, all three caught
in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?
If not,
if each came to his or her blindness separately,

how did they ever manage to find one another?
Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse
to locate even one fellow mouse with vision
let alone two other blind ones?

And how, in their tiny darkness,
could they possibly have run after a farmer's wife
or anyone else's wife for that matter?
Not to mention why.

Just so she could cut off their tails
with a carving knife, is the cynic's answer,
but the thought of them without eyes
and now without tails to trail through the moist grass

or slip around the corner of a baseboard
has the cynic who always lounges within me
up off his couch and at the window
trying to hide the rising softness that he feels.

By now I am on to dicing an onion
which might account for the wet stinging
in my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard's
mournful trumpet on "Blue Moon,"

which happens to be the next cut,
cannot be said to be making matters any better.

- Billy Collins

Today

Today was great because I got to show Tracy the awesome place where I live, from Piedmont Ave to the Farm. I'm looking forward to seeing her again in the relatively short time she's here.

I also quit the book group today. It's a hasty decision and I'm not sure whether or not to go back on it. What happens when there's a great group of people mixed in with one person who you absolutely don't want to share space with? What do you do then?

Writing samples versus free labor

Any freelance writer will eventually come across this situation: A potential client wants you to do work specific to his or her own business in order to prove your chops. The work could be as simple as providing a sample product description or as time-consuming as rewriting a website.

I give these requests the mechanic's test. They're the equivalent of pulling into my mechanic's shop, popping the hood, and saying: "Change the battery. If I like the way you do it, I may just hire you to fix the radiator."

I've been a professional freelancer for years. I've got clips to back up my abilities. When I'm asked to do free work to prove my worth, I keep my mechanic's business model in mind.

"You don't always have to cop to everything."

That's what Adam told me last night. It made sense.

I'm big on self-awareness. I'm always trying to figure out what I could have done better, how I can look at myself to improve a given situation.

But last night, Adam just shook his head. Sometimes I have nothing to do with it. Sometimes it really is just external factors.