cocopunk

First let me tell you about the kitchen utensils in my bedroom.

I was looking for some sort of laptop lap pad, a pad to put between me and my lap, because I don’t like the heat. It’s not that I’m worried about an accidental hotdog roast, it’s just that it’s uncomfortable in the summer. Hot pad on a hot lap.

Anyway, if you search for any sort of lap desk on Amazon you’ll find huge contraptions with with plush linings and cup holders and USB ports to make the experience of using a laptop feel like you’re in an economy plus airline seat, but I just wanted to put something on my lap. Sometimes I use a book, and put a book between my lap and the laptop, for example. This is normal behavior. Everyone knows about lap book. Hot book, cool lap, a classic combo.

What I arrived at — another entry in my colorful Amazon history, which includes a bag of assorted miniature plastic trees, 20 miniscule glow-in-the-dark kodama figures, and a single package of brown play-doh — what I arrived at, and what I purchased, is a kitchen cutting board. Hot board, cool lap. So now I carry around a kitchen cutting board with my laptop like I’m going to chop carrots or do lines of coke whenever I’m typing. I’m not saying cutting boards are often used for coke but it seems like what you might think if you saw a kitchen cutting board on a bedroom nightstand. I don’t know where you get these ideas, buddy. That’s between you and your kitchen supply store and/or dealer. But the cutting board on my nightstand is for a laptop. It’s called self-care, sweetie.

I’ve said this before — subscribers to my AndyFans know — but I have a specific kind of impostor syndrome right now, in that I am in the Writers Guild, wearing my strike shirts and the various merch of the labor movement but I myself not on strike because I am not a TV writer. But I wish I was! I wish I were? Not sure what the correct word is because I don’t know how to write. That’s the first impediment in this situation. But I was able to join the WGAE by sort of happenstance when we organized with them instead of the NewsGuild back in the day.

I had vague intentions when I started in NY media — after dropping out of film school and languishing in LA desperate for paying work — that I could slingshot myself in various directions and those various directions would lead to more exciting things, like magazines, TV, movies, but once situated in online media, I was never able to do more than simply survive the blog grind. Blame the industry, anxiety, depression, I don’t know, pal. Peter Thiel didn’t help the situation either. I mostly stopped writing after all that. Not that I ever wrote very much when I was paid to!

So it feels ironic somehow — or maybe just sort of vexing — to be in guild but not gilded. Rather, no one in the guild is gilded; that’s the point of the strike. I just want to be poor in a new and exciting way!

I am however, against all logic and reason, an optimist. My career plan is on a geologic time scale, and I might not make any progress for another decade. But that doesn’t mean I won’t eventually write jokes for a reboot of Cheers in 2049 or whatever. Norm! (But he’s a robot now.)

In fact I’m just blogging in an effort to Get Back to Writing, which is something I try to do multiple times a year. The difference this time is that I just finished the new Zelda so I have nothing else to do.