I am in a great mood today!

I visited my arch-nemesis yesterday. Peripherally. I went to visit someone else, who just had a book published (which is a collection of these comics), and my arch-nemesis was also there.

Have I told you about my new quest for positivity? It goes like this. I say, "I am in a great mood today!" Then people look at me like they don't believe me, and I have to explain why I said it. Then they laugh. At me.

So my experience with my arch-nemesis mirrors Kathy's, and I blame my new-found positivity. He doesn't have vampire fangs or speak unintelligibly or contradict everything I say. Sure, he's a quirky fellow and worked during the party (which in the past I would have said indicated his severe martyr complex), but he ain't The Devil. Or even my arch-nemesis anymore.

Cliche of the day: Time Heals All Wounds.

I am in a great mood today!

To-do list item one: Identify new arch-nemesis.

I love Cooper Renner now

Some of you may remember when I named Cooper Renner my arch-nemesis last year. If you don't, I named Cooper Renner my arch-nemesis on July 3, 2006. I submitted some poems to elimae and he proposed edits to one. Here is how I told the story to Sarah this morning:

"He didn't like the poem. Which is fine, whatever. But it started out as 20 lines and he cut it down to three. Then he said something about how elimae seeks to 'pay close attention to language,' and some other things with that grad school talk where you put people down in a hidden way so that they don't know you're insulting them. But I've been to grad school and I know." Then I said his name in the way that Jerry Seinfeld used to say "Newman."

Then I searched my email account for the old emails so that I could read his scandalous edits to Sarah. It turns out he didn't edit the poem down to three sentences like I remembered. He cut three or four lines of it and said this:

"I would like to propose to you a fairly severe edit of "Departure" which will remove even the hint of causation and "sense" from it, and focus on sharp images and language. Please let me know what you think."

Which is much different than the message I remember, which went like this:

"At elimae we pay close attention to language. You are terrible."

Most editors never respond to me at all. Cooper Renner was way nicer to me than most editors. I love Cooper Renner.

Elimae has also published our friends Megan Martin and Della Watson, as well as our newest favorite writer Tao Lin. I love elimae.

I remember July 3, 2006. It was dark. Everyone left town for the 4th of July. I stayed in Chicago and felt sorry for myself for being all alone in the world. I remember moping down the street of a completely deserted Magnificent Mile. But that probably didn't happen either.