Duuuuuuuuuuuuh

It's been a few billion degrees in the Northeast lately. To make matters worse, my air conditioning situation is, well, crappy. We're going to do something about that by the end of the week, but in the meantime I feel like a sausage and am pretty much incapable of (1) reading (2) writing and (3) doing anything that involves thought. If it wasn't for family proximity, I'd probably have moved to the Pacific Northwest by now. Extreme weather is clown shoes, yo.

I spent last night eating a cold roast beef sandwich, drinking iced tea and flipping back and forth between The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency, which featured Janice being insane, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which featured a medieval reenactment guy proposing to his girlfriend. As much as most reality TV gives me a headache, I like makeover shows because I try to figure out if the host(s) like the person of the week, or if they're just going through the motions. The Fab Five put on very brave faces last night. Then I went to bed, and woke up pretty much once an hour hoping it'd finally rained, when it hadn't.

If this heat wave continues much past Project Runway tonight, I'm going to have to Swiffer up brain cells.

More proof I am a tool in this weather: I read this very good article by the poet (not the musician) Nick Drake, and all I could think of was Michael Bolton in Office Space. (link via Sarah)

Cee has an interesting post about Robert Olen Butler's writing guide. Butler had a profile in Poets & Writers around the time that their covers started going to color, and it discussed some of his dogmatic, right-brained approach to teaching fiction writing. I like much of the his work and I'm glad to hear there is another book about writing that doesn't spend lots of time dwelling on mechanics, but I think an all-inclusive system would make me crazy. I'd go to his workshop and probably get something out of it, but I'd get caught rolling my eyes more than once. Which is true anywhere, come to think of it...

And finally...this over at Booksquare makes me insanely happy, because it's something I've wanted to say for a long time -- and it says it better than I ever could.