drupagliassotti @ June 16, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Although, like many professors, I rail against the use of Wikipedia as a source in my students’ research papers, I have to admit that it’s an extremely useful reference — as a writer, I often use it to quickly glean some little fact for a story. Moreover, inclusion in Wikipedia has become a sort […]
drupagliassotti @ June 12, 2008 # No Comment Yet
The drawback to being a writer, editor, and professor is that sometimes I live too much in my head. Getting out hiking or traveling is fun because it forces me out of my head and into my body. Right now I have a new project to work my body and relax my brain — cleaning […]
drupagliassotti @ June 11, 2008 # No Comment Yet
After yesterday’s blog post about gas prices, friend Dan Berger suggested working at a local library or coffee shop or starting to commute by scooter or motorbike. Since I’d been casually thinking about scooters since reading an article about their mileage a few months ago, we began discussing the issue more thoroughly by email […]
drupagliassotti @ June 10, 2008 # One Comment
A long time ago, when I was working on my doctoral dissertation, I picked up a piece of advice that’s lingered with me: “Treat your dissertation as a job. Work on it from 9 to 5 every day.”
I was a full-time graduate student living on student loans, so that summer it would have been easy […]
drupagliassotti @ June 9, 2008 # No Comment Yet
I received my custom earplugs from Westone in the mail last week and gave them a few nights of testing before commenting.
The good news: They are much easier to insert than foam plugs and less noticeable when sitting and moving around upright. They’re made from a translucent white silicone that looks pleasant enough — I […]
drupagliassotti @ May 31, 2008 # One Comment
Yesterday I took a long evening walk, deciding to follow a nearby street to wherever it dead-ended in the scrubby mountains that surround the area where I live right now.
The street took me out of my apartment complex beside a series of strip malls and into the rarified air of remote, high-income estates. The median […]
drupagliassotti @ May 29, 2008 # 2 Comments
Sartre said “Hell is other people,” and I often agree with him, particularly in crowded malls around Christmastime and when my Neighbors of the Perpetual Laundry are running their machines after 11 at night or at 5 in the morning. I may be one of the few people on earth who’s deliberately trying to […]
drupagliassotti @ May 26, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Just figured I’d provide a quick update here —
Fiction: I’m still working on the umpteenth draft of King’s Monster. At the moment, it’s going slowly because of my nonfiction writing commitments, but I’m hoping that after my Big Bad Deadline of July 3-4, I might be able to settle into it more comfortably. I’ve […]
drupagliassotti @ May 22, 2008 # No Comment Yet
I don’t remember exactly when Mom created “Alien Artifact” (more affectionately known to my sister and me as “Artifact” and to Mom’s friend Carol as “Arty”), but he’s been in the family since at least 1980 — I have photos from our time in Italy that shows Artifact looking regally over the family and our […]
drupagliassotti @ May 18, 2008 # One Comment
This afternoon I received an email from an old high school acquaintance taking me to task for ignoring her previous messages: “I have gathered by your lack of response to my previous emails that you do not wish to keep in touch with me,” she wrote. My first reaction was, “lack of response?” And then, […]