Lack a daisy

I don't honestly know why I even came to computer lab tonight. Check email, I suppose. That's about it. It's one of those days, weeks... I won't say months. Last month was one of those months.

I'm about three weeks out, now. I'm ready to come home, in almost every sense but one--and that one is, now that I have a new job, I want to make it my own and improve it before I hand it off to somebody else. I need a bit of time to do that, but it'll get done. I've made a few changes already.

I was going to go to the gym tonight, but it's after nine and I haven't yet so the safe money is that I won't. It's been like five days. I don't feel as bad about it as I thought I would. I came out here with this great goal, this idea that here I was in a place for four months and change where I'd have nothing really to do but go to the gym. I was going to come home all buff and drive Smittygirl crazy (I may still drive Smittygirl crazy, but not for the same reason). Instead I've been to the gym less in the last four months than in any four month period before this going back at least two years. Oops. I could blame outside factors but the truth is I think Djibouti has just made me lazy. Lately I've actually been looking forward to going home so I can go back to the gym again. Really.

And what exactly have I been doing other than going to the gym? Um... let me get back to you about that. Really, I promise I will. I think. I'm thinking I may at least start riding the bike again. It's something. Not much but something.

I haven't written a great deal on the November book--I'm somewhere around 8000 words--but it does have a title now and the main character has finally been introduced, and with him has come the shape of a plot, or at least a driving idea. See, the main character is The Reporter (also the title). But really, the main character is also Mordecai Metropolitain, who is a reporter for the Porktown Banner.

Porktown is a very bizarre community, as my previous snippets from the book should make clear. The conceit is that Mordecai Metropolitain, although he lives in Porktown, lives in the real world. He eats at McDonald's and watches American Idol and reads Spider-man comics. Everyone else in Porktown--well, not everyone, there's a sizable expat community of people who, like Mordecai, grew up outside Porktown and know how ridiculous the place seems--eats at the local Chinese-Italian restaurant, Ramakrishna's, which usually has a mariachi band playing; they watch tv shows like Operation Fungicide, and read comic books like Creamy Porridge. And they think this is perfectly normal. To cash in on this Mordecai started drawing a comic making fun of Porktown, which he publishes in the Banner because the Banner is the newspaper of choice for expats (natives read the Bugle). And then he decided to turn the comic strip into a comic book, and created the hero, The Reporter, and the comic has become very popular.

And I haven't quite figured out how it's going to work, but at some point Mordecai, to his horror, starts to turn into his creation, starts to become a part of the bizarre insanity of Porktown. And of course the characters already introduced will themselves become a host of villains and minor heroes--obviously we know where The Canary stands in this group, but Melllllllody and Van (of the Romanostovich-Spastiziczisikowski clan) are still a bit up in the air. (Also, there's a Col Mustard now, and someone known only as The Candlestick, who were introduced waiting to see The Canary in his Conservatory). Obviously there's no way come hell or high water I'm going to get 50,000 words written by the end of the month, but this is certainly an amusing project and I'm keen to see where it goes.

And that's about all there is from Smitty's World for today.