Temerity Jane

It’s not November yet.

TJ: Just so you have time to mentally prepare yourself
I am letting you know now
that after today you will not see me in the office until Tuesday.
Dan: oh no
what will i do?
TJ: so if you need to take some time today to plan out some coping strategies, you can feel free to run those by me.

The same goes for you, Internet.

Anyway, I’m feeling better, finally. The nurse who works next door who often smokes outside with Dan and I told me today that she knew when she was walking up that I must be feeling better because my head is back to it’s former brightness. I was so wiped out for a couple of weeks there that everything had faded to a sort of dishwater purple color meets badly bleached vintage Kelly Bundy blonde. I’m not going to lie to you people, it was pretty ugly there for a while.

But now I am back, back to a shade of purple that makes me go “Whoa that is some serious fucking purple right there” every time I pass a mirror, and it’s not yet November. I had a dream the other night, see, that it was already November and I was already behind on NaBloPoMo and was suffering crushing guilt about failing so early due to my inability to read a calendar. I figure I’ve got some serious blogging issues if I’m suffering blog-related guilt in dreams. Normally I just dream about bears and sweet n low packets and mile long to-do lists.

But it is not in fact November yet, I have a couple more days of buffer, which is excellent for me because I am off to a conference tomorrow (Boardsource, if you’re… into that kind of thing. Boards. Not like, wooden ones. The ones made of people. Not made of people like Soylent Green kind of made of people, but comprised of people. You know, boards… boards? Anyone?), I’ll be in the office on my own for a few hours on Friday, I believe I have a lunch meeting of some sort on Saturday (hey, you read this blog, I swear, I’ll set up the lunch plans as soon as I… wait, you guys got the board thing, right? It’s for board MEMBERS. Boardsource is, I mean. Why didn’t I just say that in the first place?) and a meeting in DC on Monday that will have me out of the office, so I won’t be starting NaBloPoMo under the most auspicious of circumstances, but I totally can handle this. I did it last year. I don’t know if you could call it successful last year though. I mean, I did write every single day for an entire month, which is way more than I’m doing now, but last November was also just about the lowest traffic month in the history of this site, so not successful in the entertainment factor, I suppose. Of course, we all know that blogging is just about personal accomplishment and of course we all write for ourSELVES and not our audience and really don’t care if not a single other people ever reads it, right?

Ha!

OK ANYWAY. So guess WHAT? I’ve talked a bit on this site over the past few months about the Vlogbrothers and John & Hank Green. I definitely think you should be checking out the Vlogbrothers and John’s books if you ever get a chance. I very much enjoyed Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines. I think I liked the latter a bit better, but did greatly like both, so I was very excited to get my hands on John Green’s newest book, Paper Towns, which came out on October 16th. John and Hank are both travelling around the country right now, the first half of the tour being an actual Paper Towns book tour and the secon half being the great Tour de Nerdfighting. None of the locations that they were stopping were reasonably close enough for me to be able to attend, and I was very bummed about that, especially since Julia Nunes was at one of the events! But there have been lots of videos posted of the events, and John Green even sets up a laptop and live broadcasts on BlogTV during his signing events. They’re really great to watch, especially if you’ve been following the whole Nerdfighter thing.

Right, so, as I said I was very excited to get my hands on a copy of Paper Towns, but I haven’t been able to, because Phil went ahead and bought two. One for me and one for him. And then? He went to the Paper Towns signing event in Phoenix, and I was so jealous. He was kind enough to get my book signed, and even though John Green spelled my name wrong (he has placed an “i” in a location that is mostly reserved for creative stripper spelling), he also wrote “DFTBA!” just like my tattoo, so all is forgiven, but seriously, my first name is five letters, done in the most common spelling, and who the hell defaults to spelling it with an “i?” He was in a hurry, though, so again, all forgiven, especially because of… THIS!

John Green & Phil!!

Yeah, that’s right. That’s my blurry boyfriend with blurry John Green holding a blurry “HI TJ” sign. So now I’ve got Julia Nunes and I’ve got Sariah with the chicken nuggets and a whole bunch of other awesome pictures and John Green.

Hank Green, you are on my list, sir!