I should take this more seriously.

Somebody contacted me about publishing a book. He seemed totally legit. We are even going to meet for lunch (free food, yay). Anyway, he said that my stuff is fabulous (just fabulous) and that I should write some more along the lines of the Russian Party and the Cancel Cable articles. Now, this seemed like a completely asinine idea. And I told him so. He thought that was charming, and told me to write a first chapter or an intro sort of thing. So I did. Because, you know, I have papers to grade and problem sets to solve, and, well, I have all this coffee here. So this is what I sent him:

I am writing this book, primarily, to impress a man. The magnificence of this feat can be truly appreciated if you understand that the man I have in mind happens to be the smartest man in the Universe, and is not easily impressed. I don't expect him to be particularly astonished with the content of this volume, but merely with the incredible achievement of getting something so obviously mediocre published and sold.

I am also writing this book to make enough money to buy a three-bedroom, 1600 square foot, single family town-house in the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn. Bay Ridge is a lovely neighborhood, which has enough Starbucks cafes to be ridiculously overpriced, but not enough independent anti-Starbucks coffee establishments to be considered trendy. At this time, such a house, in a relatively inhabitable condition, goes for anywhere between 700,000 to 1.5 million dollars. American dollars, that is. Writing, while tedious and unpleasant, seems to be a more expedient course of action than waiting for the New York real estate bubble to burst. By the way, you may be interested to know that this is precisely what Michel de Montaigne did in the sixteenth century, when real estate prices in the Bordeaux region of France were also exorbitantly high, due to an influx of Renaissance hipsters who were priced out of the nearby Bergerac locality.

Your enjoyment, dear reader, is only tertiary on my list of motives. I could've lied, you see, and started off by telling you that this little book of irreverence and irrelevance, and other such words, was written with the explicit purpose of making you happy. It was not, and I'd like for this to serve as the point where I set a precedence for total honesty. If this book makes you giggle, or smile, or go to sleep easily, all the better. But if it doesn't, I won't complain either, as long as the above two points are satisfied.

I can't say with absolute certainty what this book is, but I can venture to relay what it's not. It's not an epic, it's not a novel, it's not important. It is comprised of a set of self-indulgent stream of consciousness essays (more accurately, posts, but essays sounds at least a bit more literary) that I have written over the course of approximately one year, and published on a blog, which is an online journal, for those of you who are of my grandparents' generation. These were written mostly as an elaborate inside joke between myself and the eight people who find me funny, or cute, or both. It also contains some bits which have never been published anywhere before. Because, after all, trying to make 700,000 to 1.5 million American dollars by selling something that is already easily available for free seemed like an inherently bad business plan.

It would also be prudent to make it clear that I am not going to try to convince you of anything. People are always accusing me of trying to convince them of things, which I am not. My ambitions are puny and self-centered. If I ever make enough money to get by without having to go to work, I will spend a great deal of time thinking of something important enough to convince you of. And when I finally come up with something, I will publish a nice, long, highly acclaimed book, at the end of which, you will most certainly be convinced. Excruciatingly convinced.

Don't get me wrong. It would be absolutely fantastic to live in a world of just politicians, outstanding free healthcare, and impeccable educational equity. A world where everyone is attractive, intelligent, funny, and a Mets fan. And I would love to do my part to bring us all closer to that ideal. But, I'm just a graduate student with a day job and long commute. So, please cut me some slack.