Yesterday this blog got something like 800+ views, which is something like 2.5 times my next most-trafficked post. It got retweeted a fair amount, but most of the views were from Facebook, so perhaps some writer-type people shared it? I guess people really were looking for advice on which writing manuals do not suck. Kind of funny. I’d definitely heard about this sort of thing–an article spreading beyond a blog’s immediate readership–but it’d never really happened to me before. I think that part of it is that I haven’t been as active on social networks until this year, really. Nowadays I’m making more of an effort to, like, do the tweeting and such, which at least puts me in a place where it is capable of being noticed by people.

Still, it’s very interesting. Part of me is, like, “Oh god! I have already used up my one article idea that was of general interest! And it wasn’t even my idea: a follower (whose name I do not know and who I have never met in real life) tweeted the idea to me yesterday morning! I am bereft! My idea box is bankrupt!”

But, intellectually, I know that’s not true. I will have other awesome ideas. This blog’s been evolving for some five years now, and I constantly feel like I’m only just figuring out what I should write about and how I should write about it. Sometimes I read other blogs, and  the writing seems so crisp and witty and assured. And that’s not me. My blogging is kind of chatty and slack and it often refuses to coalesce into a nice conclusion. But there is something developing. And I am sure it will only continue to develop.

Anyway, 2013 has been a good year for blogging! I was feeling somewhat depressed for much of it, which actually led to some pretty good posts. This is actually the 3rd or 4th time this year that the blog has set a new record for most-visited day. Anyway, nowadays I’m feeling way, way better. Even though it is 7:30 AM and I am really tired (only got 5 hours of sleep last night) and I kind of hate life, I also don’t really hate life. I love life. Life is the best. Someday in the future, I am sure I will once again feel terrible, so I’d better enjoy this while it lasts!

Sometimes I get this strange sense of destiny, like everything is moving closer at this incredibly slow but utterly inexorable pace. In my life, it always feels like nothing is happening, but when I look back even six months (or even three!), I can see that everything used to be completely different. I mean, three months ago, I was still trying to revise that terrible novel. Now I’m trying to revise an entirely different, but much better, novel. Three months ago, my most-visited day involved some 150 views. Now it’s 800 views. It’s all so slow and, in some ways, so minor. But still stunning to me that so much could’ve happened in so little time. And I just think, wow, I have so many trimesters left in my life. At least, I dunno…a hundred? Two hundred? To me, that involves an amount of change that is simply incomprehensible.

            If you’ve ever seen my author photo, then you’ve also seen a 22 year old* with a very dashing moustache and beard combo. I started sporting facial hair right after I graduated for high school, and I’ve had some kind of facial hair for the majority of the last eight years. The facial hair started out as an unshaven mess, but it’s gotten more kempt over time. I learned to shape it a bit, and I eventually fell into a style that I thought gave a little bit more angularity to my otherwise somewhat-round face. It was a little uneven sometimes, and had this odd curl that could never quite be tamed, but I looked forward to going on the internet and learning all kinds of moustache lore and eventually making the whole thing really work.

But then, just two days ago, I had a beard-related epiphany. I was driving south on 880 and I caught a glance of my facial hair in the rearview mirror and thought, “You know…in America, you never see facial hair on anyone who’s wealthy, powerful, or successful.”

I liked the look of my facial hair (I had dreams of someday looking like Salvador Dali or Freddie Mercury), but I’d never considered the social signalling that my facial hair was doing. I realized that, depending on the context and viewer, facial hair gives off one of three messages. The wearer is either: A) consciously or unconsciously claiming membership in a working-class or otherwise marginalized social group; B) too unsophisticated to understand that beards are actually a class marker; or C) too lazy to shave.

Every single person who saw my beard had to instantaneously throw me into one of these three groups. Early in my beard-carrying days, most onlookers probably (and correctly) pegged me as part of group B. Then, a few years ago (as it became clear that I was devoting some effort to shaving the rest of my face), I drifted into group B. And now that I’d had my epiphany, I was part of group A.

After I realized that successful (or, rather, upper-class) people in America don’t wear beards, I could only continue to wear a beard as a kind of political act. Now, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with aping the styles of minority and/or working class people (also, moustaches are part of my Indian heritage). But in my life, I’ve generally found more success by adopting upper-class habits. To me, the signaling benefits of stylistic nonconformity (the possibility of attracting certain sorts of people) don’t outweigh the negatives (the possibility that rich and powerful people [or their representatives, such as cops] will hassle or refuse to help you). Furthermore, stylistic nonconformity is a pretty big burden. If you fail in an attempt to be original and aesthetically pleasing, then you lose most of its signaling benefits while retaining all of the negatives. If I was being honest, I’d have to say that my beard (when not waxed up as in my author photo) was certainly not in the top tier of hipsterish Bay Area moustache/beard combos.

So I came home and shaved the damn thing off.

On a sidenote, this was a tremendously pleasing epiphany. One burst of inspiration solved an issue I’d been struggling with for eight years! In this, it stands in contrast to the uselessness and impracticality of most epiphanies. Most epiphanies are, like, looking up at the night sky and realizing how tiny and insignificant we are and how little our problems really matter. And, umm, that’s nice and all, but when you wake up the next day, you’ve still got yo problems! Wordless epiphanies become useless as soon as that feeling of understanding starts to fade. That’s why I much prefer a good practical epiphany about moustaches. If could have a moustache-level epiphany every few months, my life would be golden.

*yes, my author photo is 4 years younger than me–I guarantee you that 90% of authors use photos significantly understate their age.

Preparing For The Death Of A Beloved Cat, NYTimes.com Blog 3/23/11

An ultrasound showed that one of Toshi’s kidneys had atrophied and was essentially deceased. The other was enlarged, taking on the work of its dearly departed twin, and, as such, was incredibly stressed. Eventually, the vet said, it would fail. Within the year, probably. He seemed unmoved by the tears falling down my face.

I asked about kidney transplants. They were possible, said the vet, but they required a slew of tests, surgery that ran into the tens of thousands of dollars and the adoption of the feline donor who, presumably, had been raised for that very purpose.

Hello Kitty, Hello Kitty Clone, NYTimes, 5/28/05

When Mr. Cheng, who works as a technology auditor for a Wall Street investment bank, discovered that Shadow had a tumor that would soon prove fatal, he had the cat’s cells saved, cultured and frozen. Now, he is preparing for the next step: paying for Shadow’s cloned replacement. “I’m saving up some money,” he said. “It’s a lot like buying a car.”

Mr. Cheng said that he would pay whatever it cost – although he is waiting until the price drops a bit – because he misses his cat so. “Shadow had two really long, funny-looking teeth like sabers,” he said. “Everyone loved him.”

I’m not sure how most people dream, but I tend to remember my dreams in long, uninterrupted sequences that segue from one plotline and setting to another. For instance, I’ll be in the midst of one dream and then sit down to watch TV within it, and the content of that television program will become the content of my dream and we will never return to the action of the previous setting. And then I wake up, and nothing ends. It’s kind of exhausting.

But recently, my dreams have started to come to a close. For instance, last night I was involved in a thoroughly banal murder frame-up plot and I actually got out of it by blackmailing a cop who looked like Kevin James before I got involved in some weird singing quarter / vigilante squadron headed by Billy Crystal. It was great to have that sense of closure.

[Don't worry, in this post I will suppress that urge, as I so often have]

I once knew a girl who claimed that she had a ranked list of the best kisses she’d ever had. I’m still not sure whether she was joking (she was not inexperienced or anything), though she was the kind of person who would do something like that. I am the same way, I have a ranked list of the best bowel movements I’ve ever had*.

There’s just something about my own excretions that I find fascinating. Especially because they’re such a private topic. I find that I want to wax on about them. For instance, that feeling you get when you’re lying on your side and the earwax starts to drip, agonizingly slow, down your ear. And the feeling is so uncomfortable that you want to root around in there and scrape it out, but it’s also strangely blissful and you feel like if you wait there long enough, there’ll be a little pop and release and it’ll all have been worth it.

Twice in my life I’ve jammed my big toe really hard and had it turn black, fall off, and regrow over a period of six months or so. Each time I’ve wanted to save the discarded toe, poke a hole in it, and wear it on a chain around my neck. Each time this dream was denied. The first time I very carefully put the toe on our bedside table and then our maid threw it away. The second time I got really drunk and when I woke up in the morning, it was gone. I sent out an email about it, but I never recovered the toe**.

I used to rub elmer’s glue all over my hands and then spent hours picking it off. I still get the urge to do that sometimes. I always wondered if I could peel it off so adroitly that I could end up with a sort of glue-print of my palm. I wondered if I could steal people’s fingerprints by making glueprints of their fingers and then putting them on my own fingertips.

Later, when I first shaved my head, one of the impetuses was to see if all the dandruff would still be there, left behind. It had been falling off my head for so long that I wondered what it would look like still stuck up there. And without the hair to break it into pieces, would I be able to lift massive portions off and head up with a dandruff bust of my skull.

I had a wart on the patch of skin between my thumb and forefinger. I had it for three years. It just sort of appeared one day and it took awhile to get used to it. I thought about getting it removed, but I didn’t really mind it. I liked to scratch my nose with it (the wart was a very precision implement). One day, during IHUM section in my freshman year, it just began to flake and fall off. I was kind of off my guard. I guess, if you’d asked me, I’d have said that I thought it was going to be there forever. I was put off guard for days by its absence. And sometimes, even today, I find it strange to think that something that was a very visible part of me, something that I interacted with for many years, just disappeared. Today I can’t even remember which hand it was on.

* My second-best was when I was in ninth-grade after a camping trip we’d taken in Northern India. I wasn’t quite comfortable defecating in a hole on the ground, so I had alot stored up when we got back. It…was glorious.

**Later I found out that they’d discovered a toenail during houseclean the next day, but decided that it was too small to be mine. Foolishness, utter foolishness. How many detached toenails can there possibly be floating around?