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27 Oct 2012
Tried to talk to my son, who's nine, about last night's tantrum. He was dismissive. "That was a long time ago. I'm much more mature now."
16 Nov 2012
Someone on RateMyProfessor said that I'm anal & disorganized. But isn't that an accomplishment, in a way? How many can claim to be both?
25 Nov 2012
What's the proper response to someone who tells you that "everything happens for a reason"?
26 Nov 2012
Do people sit around wondering if they've peaked as tweeters? Look at old tweets and think, "That's when I still had it"? Just wondering...
29 Nov 2012
Our kids still act as if they believe in Santa Claus, but it's hard to tell. They might just be humoring us. (1/2)
29 Nov 2012
We want them to remain innocent enough to believe in Santa; they want us to remain innocent enough to believe that they still believe. (2/2)
3 Dec 2012
I invite writers I love to Sarah Lawrence, and then I'm too tongue-tied to talk to them. Need to get over that. Shouldn't be shy at 57.
23 Dec 2012
"Is thinking healthy for your brain?" my son, who's nine, just asked. What should I tell him?
26 Dec 2012
I tried to live-tweet my kids' fight this afternoon but they both turned on me in a rage. Ended the fight, at least.
19 Jan 2013
If your therapist keeps telling you to "cut to the chase," is that normal?
20 Jan 2013
Spending too much time reading about procrastination.
21 Jan 2013
My children taken aback to realize John Lennon died before there was an internet. But it feels as if he knew about the internet somehow.
20 Feb 2013
My son's starting to get it. "So there are some writers, like JK Rowling, who get lots of fan mail. And then there are writers like you..."
5 Mar 2013
Favoriting and retweeting aren't enough. We need tweet reviews. "A brave and necessary tweet."
10 Mar 2013
The dread that comes over you when you get an email with the subject line "Quick question."
11 Mar 2013
Death of a "family friend" who used to insult me when I was a kid, sure that his japeries were over my head. He wasn't quite right... (1/2)
11 Mar 2013
When you speak to a child, you're also speaking to the adult the child will become. (2/2)
18 Mar 2013
Amazing how things fall away as you age. I used to have opinions about Joan Robinson & Piero Sraffa. Now I can hardly remember who they were
20 Mar 2013
My daughter just looked over my shoulder to see what I was writing. "Twitter, Dad?" she said. "Seriously?"
21 Mar 2013
My son is 10 & is already rebelling against MFA "craft of fiction" advice. He wants to write a novel in which every character is named Bob.
26 Apr 2013
Listening intently as my children banter in the next room, hoping one of them will say something tweetworthy.
29 Apr 2013
Driving my 87-year-old, housebound mother through the town where she's lived for fifty years. "It's like a foreign country," she says.
5 May 2013
In old age, personal ambitions having grown less pressing, one finds fulfillment in retweeting the young.
9 May 2013
Feel alienated from the rest of the left because I don't care about basketball.
19 May 2013
"I'm an old school mango hunter"--my son, talking to himself in the next room.
29 Jun 2013
I'd like to let all my friends know that they have my permission to live-tweet my funeral if they want to.
30 Jun 2013
I'm so goddamn old I can barely remember my midlife crisis.
20 Jul 2013
My ghost tweeter just quit, after a disagreement about Noam Chomsky. Not sure what I'm going to do.
21 Jul 2013
Spent the weekend at a meditation retreat, and now I have 14,000 tweets to catch up on.
14 Aug 2013
Trying to get Sarah Lawrence to offer an MFA in tweeting. Meeting resistance from the old guard.
16 Aug 2013
It's sad when you realize you can't really think of yourself as an "aging hipster" anymore.
28 Aug 2013
At the end of the haircut, when the barber takes out a hand mirror and shows you the back of your head, what are you supposed to say?
3 Sep 2013
As you shrewdly tell your students that fiction has no rules, the look in their eyes tells you that their last 6 teachers already said that.
15 Oct 2013
Had my first session with my new shrink, an older gentleman. Spent a good part of it trying to explain what Twitter is.
18 Oct 2013
That look of excitement in publishers' eyes when you say your novel's about a 75-year-old feminist intellectual with Lou Gehrig's disease.
27 Oct 2013
My son has created a class of Lego people who always die during the Lego wars he stages. I asked what he called them. "Interns," he said.
28 Oct 2013
I kind of wish my new therapist hadn't told me that he's working on a screenplay.
8 Nov 2013
Disturbed by the thought that some people who've retweeted me may not have been implying endorsement.
11 Nov 2013
My therapist shared his thoughts about "Blue is the Warmest Color" today.
16 Nov 2013
Dreamt that a bowl of soup in a movie had its own IMDB page.
12 Dec 2013
Trying to put together a syllabus for the "Craft of Tweeting" class I'll be teaching in the spring.
12 Dec 2013
Try to leave out the part of a tweet that readers tend to skip. #craftoftweeting
16 Dec 2013
If your literary agent forgets the name of your novel, that's a good sign, right?
28 Dec 2013
My therapist still thinks I'm the Brian Morton he read about online, so I've been studying jazz & Scottish history to play the part.
28 Dec 2013
Don't want to disappoint the poor guy. He seemed so pleased by the idea that I edited a jazz encyclopedia. And his granddad was Scottish!
3 Jan 2014
Dreamed I was reading a novel about a washed-up rock star, titled "After the Best Of."
3 Jan 2014
If planning to meditate & not doing it & thinking about it guiltily is good for your brain waves, I think I've reached enlightenment by now.
5 Jan 2014
Dreamed Twitter had an algorithm that automatically deleted your worst tweets. Shredded tweets were coming out of my computer like confetti.
2 Feb 2014
Dreamed I was reading an article titled "31 Words Henry James Didn't Like."
7 Feb 2014
On the meditation retreat. Getting closer and closer to Enlightenment. Will tweet about it when I get there.
13 Feb 2014
Unhappy at first that my therapist asked me to pick up his medications on my way to his office, but have to admit they help him stay on task
25 Feb 2014
Dreamt Philip Roth agreed to blurb my book, then wrote blurb calling the book horrible, & publisher was contractually obligated to use it.
1 Mar 2014
Dreamt I was trying to find jobs for our cat & an unknown monkey. The monkey was getting a lot of offers; the cat was having a harder time.
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