Month: July 2011

This is my last effective email tip!

The Basics

Keep it short. After you write your email go back and ruthlessly cut. Do they really need that bit of information? I don’t want people to strip it so much that the email sounds like it came from a zombie, but plenty of people manage to convey personality with 140 character-max tweets. Edit.

Use paragraph breaks. There’s nothing more daunting for the email-receiver than one big, unbroken block of text. Break it up!

Identify yourself. If you’re writing someone who doesn’t know you, tell them your name and maybe a line or two about who you are. (I often forget this one myself.)

Say thank you. If someone does help you in some way, say thank you afterwards. It shocks me how few people say thank you to me after I’ve done them a favor. I honestly don’t help people for the “thank you’s” but it does take me aback, I must admit. Maybe because it was so easy to email me and ask they think it’s just as easy for me to do whatever? Oh god, now I’m wondering if I forget to say thank you too. I’ll bet I do. I suck! Who am I to be giving advice … oh wait, this isn’t the Reasons I Hate Myself post.

Tip 3 here.
Tip 2 here.
Tip 1b here.
Tip 1a here.
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Watching the game.

It’s 72 as I type this and I’m in such a good mood just for that. My window is wide open, the fan is blowing a nice cool breeze, and could life get better?? Plus, thanks to my friend Jackie I’ve discovered Fage yogurt. I’ve always hated yogurt, it tastes like sour milk to me, but not this stuff. I love a healthy thing to eat!

And now I have the whole day free to write, write, write. I’m working on a section about a composer named Robert Nathaniel Dett. I’m about to dig into what I got at the library yesterday. Bliss.

I shot this walking into the library. I do not want these guy’s job.

Before I forget, Nora sent me this really funny cat video. I’ve watched it several times, I laugh every time.

And before I forget this, Richard Dawkins, still kinda a dick. I had a link to a site explaining why I said that but it’s broken now. Oh, here’s another one.

So yeah, it’s supposed to be less hot today. I’m a little sorry I didn’t go to dance with Where the Hell is Matt? but Rav did! (I seem to be all about links today.)

This is something I almost never see—Finney and Buddy curled up together. Kinda. I wish they loved each other as much a Veets and Beams did, and they get along ago okay, but they’re not close. In fact, Buddy’s eyes seem to say, “You didn’t just curl up behind me, did you? Now I have to move.” Which he did, shortly after.

When I wake up the first thing I do is quick check the news to make sure nothing horrible happened while I slept. This morning, as usual, it’s all about the debt ceiling (snore, snore, snore).

So I feed the cats, change their litter, make my coffee, and then I sit down to my computer. I open the Times website and read the headline, “91 Dead in Norway, Most at Youth Camp.” Jesus fucking christ. The tv news doesn’t even mention this?? When I went to bed I think the total dead was up to two.

Seriously, news people (who are not the New York Times)? What’s happening with our ridiculous, dysfunctional politicians is not the most important thing in the world.

These are pictures of the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea. It’s so green it’s bursting out over the seminary walls. What’s inside I wonder …

Nice. Lucky bastards. It pays to be a seminary student in NYC.

I’m feeding a friend’s cats and watering their plants for the next few days while they’re away. Here is my puzzle – they live all the way east, I live all the way west, and it’s about a 40 minute walk. I should do it this morning, before it reaches a billion degrees, but I also want to go swimming. (My swimming window is 10 – 10:45am, after that it’s kids doing cannonballs.)

If I wait and walk over after swimming I might melt on the way over. I had a nightmare about dying by melting as a child. Seriously, I did. I think it was a result of a science fiction movie I saw. The point is I’ve never recovered.

So my choices are swim and melt, or walk and miss my swimming window.

UPDATE: I just realized they left this morning so it doesn’t make sense to go now, I should wait until the end of the day, in the high heat, when I will SURELY MELT.

Nuns walking in the heat yesterday.