All writers shares a common epiphany on the writing path. I call it Staring Into The Abyss. This experience happens when our writing has strengthened to the point where blissful ignorance rubs away and we begin to realize just how much we don’t know.
It’s a dark moment, a bleak moment. We feel shock. Frustration. Despair. Some stop right there on the path, their writing spirits broken. Others take a micro-step forward, progressing toward the most important stages leading to growth: acceptance and determination.
Once we come to terms with what we don’t know, we can set out to learn. Taking on the attitude of a Learner is what separates an amateur from a PRO.
I have always tried to avoid using the generic “They” in my speech and writing. As in, “They say that mauve is the new black” or “They want us all to pay more taxes this year.”
What started out as a simple google image search resulted in this giant collection of Valentines from the past. Send them to your friends!
These are a hoot! Most of them are product-oriented, and I’m a bit too old for most of those. My memories of Valentines’ Day Cards are from the Mid-60’s, from Elementary School. Everybody would buy Valentines for everybody else in the class. You would stuff them in a big box and then they would get passed out. Everybody ended up with a big pile of cheap paper. This really confused me – if everybody gave and received them, what was the value?
I’m trying to remember what these looked like… I think it was something like this.
I have always been a map fanatic. With the advent of the web and GPS and all the cool digital mapping applications available now, paper maps have sort of fallen to the wayside. But still…. man, I want one of these, real bad.
This website, suncalc.net is great for figuring out places and times for sunset/sunrise photography. Want to catch the sun rising behind a certain building tomorrow? The site will tell you. More importantly, what date will the sun set behind a certain scene from a certain vantage point? suncalc.net will tell you.
It was with more than a little trepidation that I drove downtown to take a look at Shane Pennington‘s installation for TEDxSMU,Transcendence. I had left the place in shambles the night before, with drunken Christmas Hooligans tramping across the Zen garden, poking at the ice, and posing in (for them) hilarious poses with the artwork, snapping a record on their iPhones.
I was relieved to find that the Zen Garden had been restored. There were some folks out keeping an eye on the installation, and a few hardy souls were braving the spitting rain.
Everyone agreed that the thing was mesmerizing in the daylight, even with the overcast skies. I would love to see the ice in bright daylight.
She said that she had heard that one of the stones in the human forms was from the parents of a childhood friend of the artist. This friend had passed away and after the ice is melted and the artwork is closed the stone will be given back to the parents to be placed in their stone garden on their rural home as a memorial. A nice story.
I would like to return every day while the sculpture melts, if possible. That may be difficult, but I know I can make it a few more times. I have no idea how long it will take before it is all gone. The biggest change from last night were in the human forms – their heads and faces were noticeably smaller and had lost all detail.
A wonderful thing. The only aspect it lacks… if this were my installation I would definitely put in a webcam.
This photo was shot through the large monolith of ice, and you can see a human form beyond.
Looking around the shelves at a used book store I came across a copy of 500 Essential Cult Books. I’m casting around for something to read right at this moment.
I didn’t buy the book, but I did sit down with it, some index cards, and a Parker 21 that I carry, and sat down at a table to go through most of the 500.
My first impression is that I was shocked at how many of the books I had already read… somewhere around half. The books were divided into categories and some I had read almost all of the selection.
At any rate, I filled a couple cards with books that I had not read and that looked interesting. Some I already have in my library or Kindle, most I do not. Here’s the list, in no particular order:
Generation X – Douglas Coupland
Nausea – Jean Paul Sartre
Been Down so Long it Looks Like Up to Me – Richard Farina
You can read both of these articles and decide what you think about it on your own, but it does bring back an experience of my own, one I’ve talked about ad nauseum – but still…. I think I’ll write it down here. This is something that happened almost forty years ago… so maybe the trends identified in the articles aren’t so new after all.
I remember my first freshman chemistry class at the generic big Midwestern public university. It was held in a large old gothic auditorium (since burned down) where they played the basketball games back in the twenties and thirties. The professor walked out on the first day and said, “This is Chemistry 301, Introduction to Chemistry for Chemistry Majors. You should only take this class if you are going to get a major in Chemistry. There are three hundred and fifty students in this class. We graduate about forty chemists a semester. You need to do the math. If you don’t think you can make it through this class, drop as soon as you can to minimize the damage to your academic career.”
I was stunned when about a dozen kids walked out at that point. How low must their self-esteem be to give up at that point (or maybe they realized they were in the wrong classroom). The first exam took over half the class. The mid-term dropped half of those that were still left. At the end of the semester the class was well under a hundred. The really bad thing was that, three years later, Physical Chemistry took a third of those that had made it that far (I still believe that P-Chem is one of the absolute evils in the world – I know if any other chemists are reading this – I just gave you a nightmare).
A few years ago I was at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Arlington (I remember there were three Nobel Prize Winners at the dinner) and the the topic was improving chemistry education. I was talking to a professor afterward about how to increase the enrolment of chemists and he said, “Actually, in my experience, most of the student that can be chemists, are chemists… what we need is to increase the understanding of some of the basic tenets in the non-chemist population.” This was a guy that should know what he was talking about.
Oh, and the article talks about how grades are lower in STEM classes than in, say, business or liberal arts. No shit. My goal in chemistry was to graduate, that was it (I consider my bare C- in P-Chem I and II to be one of the greatest accomplishments in my life. I managed to pass two semesters in a subject where I had absolutely no idea what the hell was going on at all). In the decades since, I don’t think I have ever had anyone ask me my GPA. I have hired a few chemists in my day and if I ever had a job applicant with a 4.0 and a major in chemistry (In reality I never have seen or heard of such a thing) I would not hire them. To get a 4.0 in a chemistry curriculum you would either have to be too smart to be in the same world as I am, or some sort of mutant that could not relate to ordinary human beings in any meaningful way.
Another list of “Must Eat At” places in New Orleans.
I’ve been to six of the nine… though some were a long time ago. I wrote about Joey K’s the other day. Last year I set out to find the best Shrimp Po-Boy in New Orleans, and Parkway was the best, IMHO.
Man, I would love to snag a 2011 Rangers World Championship Cap. I wonder what impoverished tropical hell hole I’d have to go to so I could buy one of some poor dude’s head.
A few more Scopitones. Starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
I used to Love the Tijuana Brass, back in the day. This song and Scopitone is not why.
Great Hair… terrible rock and roll.
There have been some very good versions of Telstar over the years. This is not one of them. Plus odd and wildly inappropriate footage.
Petula Clark… one of the greats. There was “Downtown”, “I Know a Place”, “My Love”, “Colour My World”, “A Sign of the Times”, and “Don’t Sleep in the Subway.”
Maybe I should take this list and try to get through it before I die (probably right before). So far, before reading the article, I’ve been to five (that I can remember).
Sometimes I look ahead and read a book because there is a movie coming out at some future date made from the book. Thus it is with Hunter Thompson’s The Rum Diary.
I enjoyed the book more than it deserved. That whole Caribbean Ex-Pat wasting away in Margaritaville, almost getting killed by the government dictator’s thugs thing is very attractive to me. Probably better read (and written about) than lived.
The movie is out now and it looks good. At least to me.
It is interesting that this is the second time Johnny Depp has played Hunter S. Thompson in a film. I always thought that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was unfilmable… and the film proved me right. This one should be very different.
Isn’t that the point of a maize maze? Aren’t you supposed to get lost? I went to one once, with two kids, and it was a little disconcerting – but I was also aware that at any time I could walk through the corn if I had to.
OK, I hate Martha Stewart as much as you do… actually I hate her more, because I actually have a reason to be pissed at her. If you ask me nice, some day I’ll tell you about it.
In the meantime, she may be a nasty little piece of work, but she does know how to:
10,000 Steps a Day – They gave out pedometers at work, I discovered I was walking about 12,000 steps a day during my workday alone.
Take a Picture a Day – Been there, done that.
Write a Novel (Nanowrimo) – Been there, done that.
How about a blog entry every day for a month… yeah, that sounds tough, not.
Then he gave a short list of examples of things to stop:
No TV
No sugar
No Twitter
No caffeine
I don’t find giving something up for 30 days to be so inspiring. If you want to give it up, give it up. If you only need to cut back, then cut back.
So, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. What can I do for thirty days that wouldn’t be too difficult, expensive, or time consuming, starting tomorrow. Let me think about it and go on to another TED lecture.
Derek Sivers: Keep your goals to yourself
Interesting idea. I have always thought that telling everybody your goals gave you the advantage of using social shaming as a motivating force. Another thing to think about and come back to.
Don’t eat the marshmallow yet
The most important principle for success is the ability to delay gratification. No big surprise. Anyone that has spent a lot of time around teenagers knows how rare and important this is.
Of course, there is another factor that isn’t discussed. Even when I was a kid, I hated marshmallows. I would have hidden the thing to make them think I had eaten it so I didn’t have to deal with another one.
Life Lessons Through Tinkering
I spent an enormous amount of time as a child tinkering. My children never really did this at all. Does that make a difference? I don’t know.
My tinkering spaces (my office room and my half of the garage) are sorely neglected. They are cluttered and inefficient. I miss the tinkering. I have a handful of tinker projects half completed.
Can I put the lessons from all these talks together?
OK, here’s my plan. I’ll work some, every day, a few hours a day, for thirty days, on the half completed tinkering projects I have laying around.
What are they?
I’m not going to tell you. Keeping it a personal secret will help me get it done. I have two projects in mind, both rather small projects, I know I can get them done. The bigger projects, such as redoing my office room, I’ll put off for the next thirty days… or the thirty after that.
Thirty days or so from now I’ll write a couple blog entries on what my projects were. Come back and see.
What about the marshmallow? Well, in this case, delayed gratification isn’t really an issue, the doing is the gratification. Maybe I’ll reward myself in some small, extra way. I don’t know how – there is no extra money laying around…. I’ll have to think about it.
Bill Chance 