But Call Me Betsy

NPR sponsors this writing contest every few weeks, Three-Minute Fiction , where they give you a themed writing prompt and you have a week to write 600 words on it. A famous author then picks the winner and the winner gets published in The Paris Review. I've tried this contest about three times now and have never had a story picked or even featured on their website where they post some of their favorite entries. But it's still a good daily exercise. What I've done the last few times around is to write a different one each day, and then pick the one I like best to work on to submit. I did four this time, and one was a definite dud; the other three were workable.  The prompt this time was this: Write a story in which a character finds an object that he or she has no intention of returning. I wrote one on finding a letter on the ground, another about finding a dog, and then this one below about finding a body. The one I submitted was okay--not 100% worked out though. Af...

I somehow accidentally voted for George Bush today. What the hell is going on? The weekend before last, Liz and Luke were up visiting from Park Slope and I told them this story about an email I got wherein the guy used (and misspelled) the word "masterbation" three times in two sentences. I can't remember who said the phrase first, but after I told that story, someone referred to the act of "sadly masturbating." We could not stop laughing. I almost choked on my eggs from hysteria (this is how we are all emotionally about 10 years old). There has also been some debate about what poem I'm going to read at their wedding in July. Liz wants "i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)," a lovely e.e. cummings poem, but it's been in a couple of movies so recently so now we're possibly looking for a different poem. I suggested a couple of others and then wrote one for them that referred to our conversation about sadly masturbating. Here it...