In Which I Say Five, Make That Six, Things about Today That Might Be Slightly Impolite

1.
Dear mother pushing the over-sized shopping cart that includes a race-car extension containing two somewhat unruly children:

Perhaps you should not take your eighteen items into the ten-items-or-fewer line. Perhaps if you went to the regular check-out line, you would not feel so exasperated.

2.
AP English Language essays are scored on a 9-point scale. I gave my first score of 8 so far this year tonight for a student essay that derides the prose of Dan Brown, Christopher Paolini, and Stephanie Meyer.

3.
Yesterday, Johnathan Williams wrote, "Only a career in telemarketing could add more rejection to my life."

For the record, if we consider it in terms of percentages, I was much more successful during my brief stint as a telemarketer working for one of the schools I attended. In my experience, getting people to read and publish your work is far more difficult than getting people to give you money.

What's the lesson there? Maybe it's that poetry editors are much less gullible than most folks.

4.
And, speaking of getting people to give you money, at what point do we draw a line between Girl Scouts asking for money outside the supermarket and outright panhandling?

I know there's a line there, and I know it involves cookies, but still.

5.
And, speaking of rejection, I'll say this: most of the time, when I get one of those polite thank-you-but-no emails from an editor, I'm a little disappointed but also very grateful for the time the editor spent reading and perhaps commenting on my work. But today, I got one that made me want to click 'reply' and ask,

Are you kidding me? Did you read what I sent you, or did you happen to be looking away and just hit the button to send the form rejection? Maybe your phone rang. Or you were texting. Or you reached down to get a swig of your Mountain Dew. Because, seriously, I've read your journal, and it's good, but it's not that good.

I didn't, but I sure felt like it.

6.
Yoko Ono is now following me on Twitter.

Do the math: 789,124 people follow Yoko Ono, and Yoko Ono follows 231,720 people. That means that Yoko Ono follows only 29.36% of the people who follow her. Yoko Ono is insanely famous. Should I take this as a sign of my own impending stardom? That Yoko Ono includes me in the less than one-third of people to whom she listens via social media?

Probably not. But still, it's fewer than one in three. And that's saying something.