From: (someone)@aol.com
Date: Fri Nov 28, 2003 6:08:29 PM
To: wendy@candyboots.com
Subject: Your female?

I think you are rude and crass!� Your language likens that of a drunken biker.� I NEVER would have looked at your site if it hadn’t been sent by a very good friend.� I plan to ask her if she found it amusing or entertaining.� I found it to be neither.� You are wasting your time and our space on the internet.

You might try finding a more creative, useful hobby.

Well, okay. Maybe I’ll take up cross-stitch.

So I was in a hospital waiting room reading O magazine the other night because I’d taken my grandmother to the emergency room. She’d fallen and broken her hip. She’s okay; she had surgery yesterday. I’m thankful she’s okay, even if she does have to lie around in a dinky suburban hospital where time has a different meaning, with all the volunteer desk clerks drifting around in their nutty slow-motion underwater world as they try to look up my grandma’s room on the computer. And then they point down the hall to Elevator 5. And then I have to ask them, “Is Elevator 5 still out of order?” And then they nod, and point in the opposite direction. This happens every time. But I don’t think the people who are actually taking care of my grandma are like this.

I’m driving out there to visit today and then coming back to the city and spending Thanksgiving with friends I’m, you know, thankful to have. It’s a long drive but I just downloaded that Alice’s Restaurant song, and that’ll help.

Oh, shut up, Mary Schmich. (login: poundy/poundy) If that stupid sunscreen column you’d written a few years ago had been a blog entry instead of in the Tribune and in that dumbass Baz Luhrmann song, you would have peed yourself with joy over your own site traffic. And if you’d had a blog your column probably wouldn’t have been ripped off and attributed to Kurt Vonnegut in an email forward, either.

I’m just a little tired of this old joke that weblogs are the primary source of insipid pointless who-the-hell-asked-you blather. Because the other night I spent three hours in a hospital waiting room with only a copy of O Magazine and, O yes, I can now prove otherwise.

a new entry in the journal.

Today is the three-year anniversary of my first post on Pound. When I put it up I didn’t even have the poundy.com domain; I had a crappy click-and-build Homestead.com site. Homestead my ass. If we’re going by that analogy my site was the digital equivalent of a fucking sod house, and I had to walk fifteen miles through the deep prairie snow just to upload a page. That’s how it felt, at least.

If you must send congratulations please don’t use the word “journalversary” or I will smack your ass face hard. Thank you.

The subject line of this latest one has sort of a plaintive approach, a new voice in the pro-penis-enhancement discourse. It says: Why be so tiny?

I like the sound of this, since it sort of implies that there might be a reason to be so tiny. Why be so tiny? Well, maybe a guy wants to use it to paint figurines. Or clean his computer keyboard. Or maybe it could live in a nice little cottage in a Thomas Kinkade Christmas Village and it wouldn’t feel threatened by the itty bitty train at all. Awww. Tiny!

I’ve been told that while my hair does not quite shout it’s “definitely not using its inside voice.”

And heads up (speaking, you know, of heads): next week Pound turns three years old. It’s been a long time since I posted anything in the journal (and that’s been a conscious choice) but I might do something for the occasion.