Sadly, I have nothing topical to bring to the masses this eve; this is oft the reason why tiny dog festers sans update, sometimes for many weeks. Tonight is so particularly desperate that I had to virtually consult Nup's deck of creative idea cards, via instant messenger, to come up with something.

The card says:

"Thrust your hand deep into life, and whatever you bring up in it, that is your subject," said the poet Goethe. Let's take Goethe's suggestion literally-- thrust your hand into a pocket or a drawer and use the first object you touch as a subject for your writing... It is in the secret places-- pockets, drawers, purses, closets, safety deposit boxes-- that the hidden life of a character is revealed. As Goethe told Johann Peter Eckerman, "at bottom, no real object is unpoetical." So explore finding poetry in the mundane.

So, tiny dog goes to her upstairs desk drawer, one of several disturbingly stuffed full of years of back-dated receipts, suggesting one of those aging shut ins who creeps around in darkness between ceiling high towers of musty "Enquirers" that smell like pee, tending to her many cats, the number of which she's lost count.

In the drawer, shoehorned in between five years of receipts from middlebrow eating establishments in the Seattle area, were several now useless remnants of My Traveling Year, the one year of overseas business trips foisted upon me in a previous job. The objects were:

1. A blurry photograph of me on a ferry, passing in front of the Sydney Opera House in Australia
   
   So, I am working for the amorphous support division of a popular video gaming console that had a local call center in Sydney. The call center supported disgruntled customers in a half-dozen Pacific Rim countries and languages that I once could list off without a hitch, but now can barely recall. It was my job to rustle up a database worth of useless customer support help articles for underpaid telephone agents who didn't use them and instead yelled unauthorized fixes for various game outages to one another over low-walled cubicle dividers.
   
   I was on hand to stroll through the call centers and solicit commentary from various agents about how useless my efforts were to their daily objective of ending or transferring customer calls as soon as possible away from their queue. On the weekend, myself and my manager took a ferry to the Taronga Zoo, and watched a sleeping wombat.
   
   
2. A tiny white hairbrush culled from a resort hotel room in Miyazaki, Japan
   
   Prior to my Australian call center walkabout, I took a long, disorienting series of flights to the remote burg of Miyazaki to perform a similarly futile exercise in call center agent venting, but this time in a language I did not understand. There was much shaking of heads as the Japanese call center agents spoke of the travesty that was my translated support database, in addition, I can only guess, to the general failings of our misguided, unsubtle corporation, and its patron loud-mouth country, the United States.
   
   At night I took baths in the neck-deep traditional Japanese bathtub in my hotel, and brushed my hair with the tiny white hairbrush while perplexing Japanese game shows chattered in the background.
   
   
3. A stop-sign shaped 220V adapter for a European electric outlet
   
   This was used to connect my laptop to a power source in the back row of an extremely cramped call center agent training room in a Dublin, Ireland call center to which I was also dispatched that fine year. In a deep state of global burnout, I avidly ducked my training support and agent interaction responsibilities by concentrating on long, rambling chat sessions with stateside friends via the laptop, and lunch breaks of Krunky chocolate bars and Volvic bottled waters.
   
   At the end of my rope, I stared at the backs of listless call center agent heads, praying for the week to pass swiftly in a haze of jet lag and overlong video game hookup demonstration sessions. On the only up side, an old friend was coincidentally in town, and the two of us ate dinner one night in a cramped restaurant, with strangers at our elbows, discussing the sad fact that he regretted not ordering the gnocchi, as I had wisely done.

That's it: a story of tiny dog's junk. Credit goes out to the Nup for providing us with some random contextual value upon which to build content in an otherwise content-free situation.

Good night.

Hey, peeps. Send mail to mail@tiny-dog.com.