Struggling against the almighty tides of eventuality

I finally posted on this blog again for the first time in over a year last night. I’ve realized there are many reasons I don’t blog very much:

1. I don’t have much free time.
2. I never have anything to write about.
3. My writings, when they do come, are too haphazard and unrelated.
4. People will respond with unnecessarily negative responses.

These reasons are all crap. I shall detail why:

1. I have time for things that I make time for. In general, I sleep about 6 hours per night, and with commute time my work takes a chunk of around 10 hours a day of my time, 5 days a week. That still leaves 76 hours every single week that’s unallocated. I frequently fill this time with stupid activities like watching television and reading TV Tropes. Not having enough time isn’t a very good excuse.
2. There are a great many topics I feel very passionately about. My reason #4 gets into part of the reason I don’t talk about these very much, but there are others. Still, it’s just a trick I play on myself to worm my way out of actively showing feelings one way or the other on a topic. This is crap. I’ve realized this on an academic level, and even blogged about it at least once. Still, it’s something that I must remind myself of regularly: having an opinion is not, inherently, a bad thing. Expressing myself shouldn’t be as hard as I make it on myself.
3. This is, actually, a problem. I find that, the more I want to write, the more I want to cover various topics. I am a harpist, I am a programmer and database administrator, I’d like to be a linguist and polyglot (but again, going back to #1, I do not allocate time properly), and in my wildest imaginations, I think I’m an ok writer. I’d like to do all of these things, but cross pollination is a serious problem. Programmers don’t want to read my angsty poetry. I’ll get more into this further down.
4. There’s not really a polite way to put this so: “fuck ‘em.” I’ve long put up with people who override my speech and try to talk down to me. Either they think they know more than I do on anything/everything, or they quite simply don’t have respect for me, either because they have respect for no one or they feel like I’m an idiot. These things are fine and I can’t correct anyone’s behavior, but this is my personal space and I’m just not going to tolerate it anymore. At this point, I’m going to simply delete comments if I feel like those comments are detracting or distracting from what I’m trying to say; if you’re a friend or a family member of mine and I delete your comment? Well, tough cookies. Try to be a more positive person.

I think the only problem that isn’t simply me internalizing a level of criticism that is neither present nor valid is the problem of the fractured nature of my writings here. I mentioned in my last blog that I’m going to attempt to write my own blogging software from scratch. There are reasons I haven’t finished it already, but most go right back to the “improperly allocated time” space. But, in a nutshell: I want to maintain separate “blogs” for my various passions. This way, people could subscribe to only what they actually want to read about.

I have some friends who are interested in languages. I have some who are interested in programming. I have some who are interested in writing. Still, if they have to spend even half a second wondering if something I’ve written will appeal to them when reading over an RSS output of my blog, then they’ll probably just skip mine entirely.

This isn’t to say I need a huge fandom. I’m not running ads on this blog so it makes no difference to me monetarily; I simply would like for people to be able to hear my opinions when they want, without them feeling like I’m shouting in their ears about topics on which they could care less only if they could somehow care a negative amount. So, I plan to split it up, but that’ll take some time, and I am tired of waiting on myself to do any one of 15 things before I start doing anything at all.

So, I’m going to try to force myself to spend at least 30 minutes, preferably an hour, on any given day, writing in this blog. I will probably write many stupid and inane things, and while I find my footing and get my split blogs set up, there will probably be a lot of excess noise, depending on the reason you personally originally stumbled on this blog. I hope anyone who’s actually reading this will bear with me while I adjust.

In the mean time, perhaps you’d like to read what I think are the two best posts on the site? They’re both “creative writing” posts, so you can skip it if you’re only here for the tech stuff: Running and The Advent of Autumn.

If life were like a yarn twisted about, what kind of clothing would your existence make? It seems like one of those stupid questions that stupid people ask to get stupid responses that people think are deep. There’s nothing really to it. Your life isn’t cloth, it’s flesh and blood and bone and pain and misery. That’s what I’ve always thought, what I’ll always think. Sometimes people get fooled by the shadow of their fathers and mothers, and think there’s someone watching over their shoulder, but it’s just a tree scraping against the window, nothing more.

We’re all just empty little hobgoblins pressing up against the roof of our world, with most ignorant of the quiet vacuum lying just beyond. It’s big, and it’s cold, and it’s empty. Our lives, they’re just a fraction of a blink to a universe that’s only now waking up. Even the people who “matter” are just insects crawling next to us. They found a tiny little crumb to make them seem important, but they all died too, when the ever-impending flood rose up and washed them away. Maybe the stupid and the lazy have it right; you’re going to die, you’re going to end up not mattering in the slightest, and you’re going to be alone; why bother making anything bigger out of it than it is?

I want to matter, I want to be important. But a flash in the pan is nothing to write home about, and the soup will still be cold. Even if I could turn this world into a burning star with my passion, the stars themselves die long before the space that birthed them could be considered young. Why am I fighting, then?

I don’t know.

I should get that printed on a shirt.

Last night, I decided to try a little literary experiment. And, actually, it turned out pretty well! Just see for yourself. I asked several people to write me one sentence of a fictional nature. It could be any valid sentence, like you’d read out of a novel. The rules evolved as I went along, and eventually people asked for an example. As I didn’t want anyone to see anyone else’s, I came up with my own: “The single most important thing I was ever told was not to cry in front of witnesses.” As I didn’t necessarily care to embark upon the story until after I’d collected everyone else’s statements, I didn’t use that line. However, it’s at least here for posterity.

My original intent was to get five people’s sentences. I had picked the people out carefully based on what I figured was either a guaranteed willingness to help with literary excursions or importance to my life or some combination of both. However, I started late at night and most people had gone to sleep, and I wanted to strike while the iron was hot, so I shotgunned a request to a number of people. As it turns out, I got almost everyone I was going for initially, plus a couple extra, and wound up with seven sentences to use.

One of the things I liked was how each sentence completely rearranged what I thought was going to happen based on everything I thought might happen beforehand. As I said, I didn’t really start writing until after I collected everything, but ideas were coalescing with each puzzle piece everyone gave me. Here’s what people gave me, in the order I got it:

• Larry Saunders – My partner gave me the simple and straightforward line “I went to work today.” I eventually added on the clause that it couldn’t simply be something that was an inverted true statement, i.e. “the sky is not blue.” Given how short and straightforward it was I thought his sentence would be easy to work in and wouldn’t have an impact, but given the nature of the last paragraph, and the way it showcases Mildred’s escapist desires, I think it added some nice depth.
• Eric Will – Eric, who has contributed to this blog and works with me, gave me the statement “When I was young, I met this beautiful girl by a lake.” His was particularly interesting in that he started a trend that would be shared later where he gave me something from an abandoned story he had started himself. This beautiful girl turns out to be a pretty pivotal point in one of the narrators’ lives.
• Jason House – Another coworker, after giving me a bit of grief, as he is prone to do, gave me the most difficult sentence to work in: “Unicorns are primarily found in warm tropical climates but have been known to travel as far north as new hampshire in november to enjoy the changing colors of the evergreens.” I’ll admit that I cheated and used it as a quotation from a non-existent book. However, like the girl, this book turned out to be a key component in altering the first narrator’s life.
• Jessica Hughes – From an old character biography, I got “She stood tall and boldly faced the east with the burning remnants of her house and former treasure behind her.” Jessica has been a long-time friend of Larry’s and now we converse regularly on Twitter about music and many other things. Her statement contrasts with Eric’s pretty well, with the fire and water dichotomy, and features prominently at the point where the two narratives intersect, which I didn’t even realize until I was almost finished.
• William West – A friend made entirely through the power of social media (read: we are Twitter buds) gave me “I never did find out if she was a stripper or a bank teller.” He apologized for it, which he said himself he should stop doing, so shame on him. The character he gave me turned out to be more of an indication of the kind of life the first narrator led, free-wheeling and womanizing. That made me re-think the love interest with the girl at the lake, because I still wasn’t sure what was going to happen there.
• Molly – Another Twitter user, interesting in that I think she lives at most 500 yards away, I’ve probably seen her without realizing it, and I don’t know her full name, told me yet another line from a story she had started herself: “Mildred made weekly trips to the farmer’s market for social interaction and intrigue.” Strangely, this seemed to fit into the kind of lifestyle that the narrator would find interesting, per William’s entry earlier. It was also curious in that she finally used a proper name. I had considered restricting to pronouns in my request at first, but finally decided I wanted people to have as much freedom as possible. She was the only one who picked up on that open-ended promise. And it turned out to be the key to the hook that I came upon with the next and final sentence.
• Mykl Levi – A recently-made good friend gave me the final sentence I would collect: “He was institutionalized when I met him, but that didn’t make me want him any less.” At first I thought I’d turn my narrator into a bisexual or something, but then I realized I could simply make him crazy all along. Of course, after flipping that switch, I had to decide if all the women he was after were fantasies, or reflections of the same woman, or any number of other things. I eventually settled on his mother, who it turned out would be Mildred. Naturally, she couldn’t say she wanted her son unless I wanted to make this a really twisted story (which I did not want to do), and she definitely wouldn’t have just met him anyway.

From this point out, I created the whole story. A lot of what I said in the comments happened anachronistically from how it’s presented here. Clearly, the second narrator didn’t even come into play until after Levi gave me his sentence, but I mentioned both of them as early as the first as though they were a given. At this point, it’s sort of difficult to remember at what points which portions came into being. What really matters is that I really love the end result. It turned out amazingly well, better even than I had hoped it would be.

I know there is probably some medical fallacy in the son’s insanity, Eric or Molly (who I think is a doctor or a researcher, I’m not sure which) could probably set me straight on that. This story was not really about doing tons of research, though. Usually I pop open Wikipedia and Google and go to town researching everything, but for this I just had the quotes at the top of a text file and just streamed it through the fingers. I edited two sections after the fact, adding one or two sentences a the top and taking out a couple at the bottom, but ultimately it just flowed.

So, after all that has been said, I’d like to issue a big thank you to everyone who helped me out with this. It sounds like I’m making a big huge deal out of such a short story, but I think it’s pretty good and I have some good people to thank for that. I hope none of you are offended at how I used (abused?) your creative contributions.

Do you ever meet someone who’s so startlingly beautiful that you’re not quite sure you can handle it? Sure, we’ve all got those little adolescent crushes where your heart beats a mile a minute and your throat closes up and your mouth goes dry just before you can ask them how they’re doing, but I’m not that young anymore. Of course, when you’re any age love still feels the same, and the story stays the same.

When I was young, I met this beautiful girl by a lake. We spent the summer with our legs drifting off the sides of the pier, where there never seemed to be any boats to anchor or sail, and just talked. It must have been utter nonsense, because I can barely remember any of it. We were reading books at the same time, like we were going on adventures together. I still remember one of the curious little facts: “Unicorns are primarily found in warm tropical climates but have been known to travel as far north as New Hampshire in November to enjoy the changing colors of the evergreens.” Maybe it was the utter strangeness of the idea, or maybe it was that, while we were giggling about the book and watching the little waves glisten with stolen sunlight, that she leaned over and kissed me. Though it should be a happy memory, it’s not; because the picture of a Unicorn watching evergreens change color made me laugh, and she thought I was laughing at her. I apologized, and life went on. We played together, laughed together, and read together the rest of the summer. But she never kissed me again. And the next summer I was at the dock alone.

Maybe that informed the rest of my relationships. Sure, that seems like an easy thing to say, because it was just one girl and one summer, but it’s the truth. I never wanted to have attachments. Well, maybe I did, but I couldn’t let myself get close. They say there are many fish in the sea; well, I swam the depths for years. I met firefighters, secretaries, and even a writer or two. They were great at giving me what I needed, but I was terrible at giving back. I felt badly about it, but I never wanted to change. There just wasn’t any reason.

The longest I stayed with a woman was Mildred. Mildred made weekly trips to the farmer’s market for social interaction and intrigue. She saw adventure in every corner and under every bed. There was no story she couldn’t spin out of a few bare threads she’d overhear in the morning, and nothing she wouldn’t do for me. One day I told her I’d had enough and thought I’d like to move to Vermont. I said something about New England drawing me. I left, and when I came back to get my things, I saw the house on fire. She looked at me and her face was covered with soot. Then she looked away. She stood tall and boldly faced the east with the burning remnants of her house and former treasure behind her. I knew she wasn’t coming with me, although that was my first thought. No, I’d broken her heart, and I could see it melting, like glass, in the flames behind her that were blowing her ragged hair and filling it with ash.

Vermont was a fine place to live, but it didn’t have what I wanted. For years I went through each and every town I could find, trying to locate a little piece of something I’d never know was missing. Maybe it was a sense of adventure, I’m not sure. Somehow I got involved with a shady woman who dealt drugs for the mob. She had some strange cover stories for why she’d be late to everything. There was her job, of course, but it changed day by day, though I had a tie for the best two. Eventually, she made some mistakes and disappeared without a trace. I never did find out of she was a stripper or a bank teller.

My latest stop is at a nice hostel. I’ve been here for a while, now, and it seems nice enough. I can’t really tell you how long it’s been, exactly. Sometimes you lose track of time. A couple of the guys here are into that real hardcore stuff, and it messes with my mind a little bit. It gets foggy every now and then and I forget what time it is or how long I’ve been awake and little details like that. But the sense of adventure is still calling me. One of these days I’m gonna get up and get out. But for now, I’m pretty happy and I think I’ll just stay for a bit longer.

Sometimes, on hard days like this, the weaker parts of me think that maybe I should just abandon him here. He’s the only part of his father that I have left, though, and my only child. I couldn’t really let him go any more than I could rip out my heart and offer it to a stranger. Sometimes I wish he weren’t so much his father’s son. His father, he was such a charming man. He was institutionalized when I met him, but that didn’t make me want him any less. As a day helper I met with the patients and told them stories, and he was always the most lucid, and always offered me something nice, or something he thought was nice. They didn’t exactly have lots of disposable income or any trips to the local stores. Still, it was an incredibly thoughtful gift with a compliment each time. I often credited myself with his recovery, but I’m sure I was more of a bystander than an incentive.

I’m glad I had that experience at the institution, though. Fifteen years ago, they told me: “Mildred, you have to talk to him, you have to keep him grounded with your voice. It’s the only way he’ll stay cognizant of the real world.” It was easy at the time, because I always thought he’d get better. When they found him by the docks he was babbling about a girl and a book and a unicorn, saying he only wanted to read her something funny he had found. It turned out, the girl was a neighbor’s daughter who I’d seen playing by herself at the dock while my son was in his room, and that day I learned that no amount of apologies can make up for a lost child. But I still had mine, or so I thought.

He had a breakthrough a few years back. Each story I told him seemed to bring him back to the room a little bit more. He stopped fidgeting and stared directly at me. The new medications seemed to be working, finally. One day, he even asked for me by name to tell him a story. But then, a few days later, he looked at me and said “Mildred, I think I’m going to Vermont. Something about New England is calling me.” I don’t remember what happened next but I know that later I was sobbing outside with a doctor rubbing my shoulder and telling me that it was probably just temporary. But he didn’t know, he didn’t even have any children. I stayed away for weeks after that, and when I came back, he was the same as he had always been.

I went to work today. It was my first day on a new job, trying to make ends meet. The hours are horrible, and they keep me away from my son. But it pays the bills, and each time I walk through the door, I feel freedom for a brief moment, as I take in the world around me and think how I’ve given up and moved on with my life. But then the doors swish closed behind me, and the moment is gone. I know I have my obligations.

Lest it seem too much like self-congratulatory fawning over my own work, let me say this: I do not really think my last blog post was particularly great. I do think it was good, though I see some cracks, and clearly can see where someone might come across with a “bad” verdict. Still, I wanted to write a bit about what I meant by the whole thing, in spite of a distinct lack of comments on it (I honestly was expecting at least one or two).

To lead off: this story is decidedly fiction. It had a few elements to it that were inspired by real events, but for the most part it is fictitious. I wrote it while depressed, as that seems to be the only time remaining wherein I’m distinctly creative. I walled myself off and had Sigur Rós’s ( ) playing. Sigur Rós, like Massive Attack, has been a must-buy for me for years, all based on watching this haunting video at 4AM one night a long time ago.

I wasn’t really sure what I was planning on writing, at first. Actually, the first part I wrote was the bit in the third paragraph, at the well. As I was writing, I was taking periodic breaks to find quotes that were floating around in my head, and to either integrate them, use them as inspiration, or both. My initial search was for “The time has come to put away childish things.” It seems, based on my initial search, that I mashed up two quotes: one from Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter around the 11th stanza, and one from the Bible, specifically 1 Corinthians 13:11. Interestingly, I chose neither of those quotes, but ones relating to the 3rd stanza and 1 Corinthians 13:2.

I knew I had heard the quote from Corinthians before, but it didn’t occur to me until later where it was: wedding ceremonies. Strangely, I thought of it and immediately jumped to how appropriate it would be at a funeral (strangely I say, because I’ve been to many wedding where they’ve used it). I’ve got a friend who says weddings and funerals are the same thing. Of course he’s being incredibly sardonic, but it has some grain of truth (for the more religious/spiritual among us): in a way, it’s an ending of one life, and a beginning of another (presuming the presence of an afterlife, as one listening to scripture might do). And of course, for the humanist in me, being faithful is all well and good, but living and dying without love is pretty damn terrible.

The third and fourth quotes were somewhat more deliberate, as I put them in after writing at least half of the story, rather than at the beginning like the first two. I had just finished reading Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman” vol. 5, “A Game of You,” and the quote about wishing came from there. From what I could tell, it actually is an old saying, and most of the time isn’t quite as vulgar, but I liked the vulgarity because it seemed more like you’d expect a phrase like that to come. The last quote I looked for specifically as something to do with silence, cause that’s where I wanted to go with the last portion of the story. After passing up a quote from Shusaku Endo’s “Silence” because it hammered too heavily on the Christian aesthetic for my tastes, I settled on a quote from John Cage in reference to his piece 4’33″, which felt better as it had to do with the nature of silence (his idea was actually built into the narrative), and isn’t just something from a work titled “Silence.”

I said I wanted to critique my work a bit, so I’ll get to that, but I also realized another reason I was doing this was for attribution. Footnotes in the text seemed like they’d be gaudy, and so I didn’t include them. However, in fear of people not searching for these quotes and realizing who the original authors were, I felt compelled to discuss it, at some length. At any rate, onward:

As I said, I wrote the third paragraph first. The first I wrote specifically after the inclusion of the Lewis Carroll reference, and honestly it feels a bit forced, like I was leading into the quote and never quite delivered. The idea was that the person who died was just dead, and all the moping was pointless cause they were crying over an empty vessel. Unfortunately, that could not have been more obscured by the text and I think that ultimately the atheistic, cynical, and nihilistic existentialism in the first paragraph really jars when set against the more spiritual context of the scripture quotation later. Although, the narrator’s opinion could be argued to be changing by the time he’s at the bus stop, hence going to the well in the first place.

The other part that’s consistently bothered or delighted me, depending on my mood at the time, is the change in tense. For the first half, it’s in present tense. The second half is in past tense, and takes place over a longer span of time. The change in tense itself doesn’t bother me insomuch as the fact that it felt backwards: the first half occurs historically first, so if anything is past tense, it should be that. However, I keep waffling. It’s all after-the-fact reasoning, though. The real truth is that I just had tense trouble (going back and forth with present and past) throughout and it was easiest to resolve it the way I did, although…

I mention in the last paragraph a scene that didn’t occur anywhere else, with the drifting off in the first bus ride. The whole first half could just be a memory, and like all memory it’s faulty and only the parts that are important to you at the time tend to surface. When the narrator was cynical, all he could remember was his cynicism and the cause of it. When he was hopeful, he remembered something more positive. And, as the entire thing was a memory, he was narrating it like he was there. In that respect, the verb tense issue could be resolved, and I can pat myself on the back for something so deep that I didn’t necessarily mean to do in the first place.

Speaking of tense: I changed “could make it” to “can make it” to sound more hopeful. I’m not sure if it didn’t just sound like I’d forgotten the way I started the sentence. Instead of saying “could” like it’s past tense and has been proven wrong, I say “can” to show it’s still going on, thus: so far, so good. Whatever. The final word problem I had was in the first paragraph again, “tinnitus.” It’s a chronic ear-ringing condition that runs in my family, and it’s maddening. But, more than that, it broke up the narrative because someone might go “what the hell is that?” That would be a dead stop in the story right there as they pulled up Wikipedia, and would be kind of terrible.

Speaking of Wikipedia, I wanted it to be a timeless sort of story, set anywhere, so I avoided mentioning technology as much as possible. I’m not sure what I could have done about the bus stop, it just seemed like the right location, but clearly that places it sometime since the turn of the last century or so, and as such reduces the “timeless” quality (and not nearly every place has bus stops). Ah well.

At any rate, like I said, it wasn’t my best work to date, but I like it. I originally intended to post a follow-up as a comment on the post, but as you can see from the length of this post, that wasn’t particularly feasible, as it’s longer than the story itself. Hopefully it’s given you more clarity as to what I was thinking, or that it’ll help me to write better in the future. I’d really like to know what people think of these things, so if you’re reading, please do comment (either here or on the original post). I’ve got to approve posts when you do it the first time, but you’re “trusted” after that.

So, Baratunde suggests we need a #NewHate – Race, gender, sexuality, etc. are all “played out.”  Of course, I can see where he’s coming from; we’ve got plenty of high-profile people of various demographics now, and only the lunatic fringe (less fringe-y in some parts of the world/country than others) really has a huge problem with it.  I take it that the fires of irrational hate take energy to keep stoking and with Americans’ attentions being distracted by such activities as getting fatter by the second, we just don’t have the vitality for our old hatreds.

Of course, his solution is to hate people who wear their scarves differently.  That’s silly.  No, I don’t mean it’s not a valid reason to hate someone, I’ve seen some atrocious scarf-mountings in my day and I was this close ( |—| ) to calling Pat Robertson up to spew a vitriolic stream of moronic faith-based hate on them.  Rather, I think he’s missing one of the following two key points of irrational hatred: that it be something people have little choice in being part of, and that it be completely and utterly a stupid reason to hate someone (points for the latter, Baratunde).

My theory is this: let’s hate people based on the number of vowels in their names.  Personally, every one of my names has two vowels in it (even my nickname does, since “y” is only sometimes a vowel), and I think that’s the way it should be.  It keeps things simple, and that’s the way God intended it (he gets off the hook cause he’s God and all).  So join me, my two-vowelled brethren, as we take the world back for the righteous and the proud!

I bought this house two months ago.  Two months ago, we were sitting in a small room with not nearly enough ventiation; across from us: three people with whom we could barely communiate.  They spoke Korean and a little bit of English.  I knew how to say “no” in Korean, a vestige from a party with me and a guy who had a crush on my sister in high school.  I barely knew it, actually, and I think it might have sounded something like “no.”   It’s weird, but “no” almost always sounds the same in all languages.

Ever since then I’ve meant to fix the lights in our bedroom.  I meant to take those two cords, swinging merrily in the breeze, and unify them so they weren’t low enough to hit our heads.  I’ve never gotten around to it.  Tonight, I’m looking at them yet again.  They’re just another in a long line of projects I’ve never finished.  I’ve yet to fix the kitchen.  I haven’t called the radon remediation company.  I am miles away from sending out a slew of E-mails my boss has been on my ass for since three weeks ago.  But I’m staring at these light fixture pullchains, with my partner’s head in the nook of my arm.

The chains are two different sizes.  I just now noticed.

I’d never be able to unify those two chains, it just plain couldn’t happen.  It’s a stupid little thought, but for some reason it’s sticking with me.  After all these things that happen during the day, just one thought sticks out.  It’s because it’s so useless, so pointless, that I can’t get it out of my head.  We, as human beings, have about 10,000 useless thoughts run through our heads every day.  Some, they’re just temptations and easily forgotten; others, they’re desires never to be fulfilled.  What happens to them?  Like us, they are ephemeral: fleeting electrical impulses soon thrust out of our brains and never existing again.

I’m still thinking about those chains though.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll make a special trip to Home Depot, or Lowe’s because they’ve been caught less often trying to put a value on customers’ lives in court cases about safety.  Maybe sometimes, our thoughts, like us, can be held on to, made important.  There are six billion people, we’ve each thought more thoughts in a year.  Thoughts can cling to you, can make themselves heard.  Will you be heard?  Will I?  Time will tell, and time will make fools or heroes of all of us.