Procrastinating!

Dr. Missy's Almanac

1/16: Rearrange Your Dirt Day in Westmoreland, TN
1/21: Be Mean to Mr. Claude Templar for No Good Reason Day in Parkland, OR
1/25: Valentine's Day in Canadia
1/28: Order the Clam Special at Howard Johnson's and Refuse to Eat It Day in Houston, TX
1/30: Wear Your Shoes Backward Festival in Kansas City, MO


How to procrastinate

It's a whole new year! Woo hoo! Yay!

Everyone is busy making resolutions to make this the bestest and brightest year ever! In fact, people on the CW list are being forced (possibly at gunpoint, possibly by blackmail) to come up with their "one word" for 2009, that single clump of letters they will use to steel themselves for the challenges of the next twelvemonth period. These words include: hope, contract, dedication, confidence, pus, finish, and kretch.

As the purpose of this blog is to be as dysfunctional as possible, my word shall be... PROCRASTINATE! Ha ha!

Here are ten activities I will use to successfully procrastinate throughout 2009:

1. Tweezing the middle out of my unibrow
2. Singing the Madagascarian national anthem (it rocks!)
3. Playing my extensive collection of Cowsills records backward to find secret messages
4. Spying on my neighbor, Mr. Bushida, via one of the cameras I secretly installed in his home
4. Playing Wimpy Bells over and over at www.wimpykid.com/WimpyBells.html
5. Writing hysterical letters to Dotti Enderle claiming that her books have caused my soul to be taken over by Randolph Mantooth
6. Counting how many staples are left in the staple gun
7. Bandaging wounds caused by checking how many staples are left in the staple gun
8. Staring at interesting bits of metal discovered in the driveway
9. Seeing how many different words I can make out of "SCBWI"
10. Arranging my tubes of foot lotion in alphabetical order


What happened to this blog?

Okay, it's been a long time since I updated this blog. I could say that sinister forces were at work trying to corner the world's supply of Corn Nuts and only I could stop them. I could say I had been kidnapped by a cult dedicated to the overthrow of the Jonas Brothers, whoever they are.

Or I could say I've been busy managing my real estate empire, which consisted of a couple of apartment buildings my mother left me. After a month, I decided to rename the apartments Mom's Revenge because being a landlord is a crummy job. People called up constantly wanting things! My bathroom faucet doesn't work. I lost my keys. My apartment needs to be repainted. I think I saw a mouse last night. There's a vampire hiding under the kitchen sink. On and on and on, except when it was time to pay the rent, and then half of them became very quiet and were never home when I came around to collect. Then I had to toddle off to court in a vain attempt to get the non-payers to cough it up.

Eventually I found someone to buy the apartments. I didn't quite get the price I wanted but my life suddenly became less complicated and now I have enough money to buy a trebuchet capable of hurling a grand piano at least 500 yards. (Never mind why I need one--I just do.)


Email of the day

Dear Dr. Missy,

I'm writing a story and I want to include this line: "The sun shone bright." But then I got to thinking, maybe it should be "The sun shined bright." Or the "The sun shone brightly." Now I'm horribly confused and don't know what to do. My writing has come to a standstill and I now spend most of my time wandering the back yard muttering to myself. I'm afraid the neighbors will think I'm crazy. Please help me finish my book!

Perplexed in Vegas


Dear Perplexed,

One thing is for sure. You will never get a book published if you continue to write like a hack. If you were an author with any real talent, you would have written this: "The sun blazed in the sky like some massive sun-like object, a roaring furnace of fantastic heat that, if you were to touch it, would hurt like the dickens and probably cause a blister. And while the sun shined brightly overhead, the mother died and her kid acted up and got all full of angst. A bunch of other people died too, horrible lingering deaths with a lot of pus and bile and stuff. In the end, though, hard lessons were learned, lessons that would carry them through the tough times when robots ruled the world and everyone was forced to eat asparagus." That, my friend, is the stuff that wins Newbery Awards. Get with it!

Dr. Missy

Do you have a question for Dr. Missy? If so, write in care of this blog and it might get answered, depending on how busy I am with the new trebuchet and any legal problems that result.