ozarque
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "ozarque" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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08:59 am
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Eldering; eating less...
It started with an e-mail from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) idiotgrrl suggesting a blogpost on "Dainty Little Bites," by Kate Harding, at http://kateharding.net/2009/07/07/dainty-little-bites-discuss/ , and recommending the comments as well. Internet Explorer refused to show me the page and inflicted on me the cottonpicking Whirling Pizza Of Death until I gave up and did a Force Quit; but my even quainter Netscape 4.0 provided both the post and the comments promptly and efficiently, and idiotgrrl was right; it was a good read. [I didn't make it through all of the one-hundred-plus comments, but I plan to go back and do that later.]
What it made me think of, however, was the food dilemma at my house. George and I, thanks to his extraordinary cooking skills and the fortunate fact that we like all the same foods, eat very well. Every night when I sit down to my dinner, I am so grateful. In all the years since he took over the dinner-cooking, he has had only two failures; I think that's a Pulitzer-class record, myself. He makes the best Mexican food I've ever eaten, and the best Italian food I've ever eaten and the best salads I've ever eaten; he is a spectacularly good cook. And he bakes our bread -- the five-minute artisan kind -- himself, one splendid loaf after another.
However, as the two of us get older, we need less and less food. I marvel at the quantities of food we used to eat; those days are long gone. We now get four dinners out of one package of four chicken breasts; the spinach pie we used to eat completely at one sitting now serves us three times; making basmati fried rice used to mean two cups of rice, and now even one cup is too much. We're not dieting, and we're not Holding Back; we've just reached a stage in life where we need very little food. I remember, when I was a little girl, marveling at how little food my grandmother [who lived to be ninety-six] ate; George and I have reached that stage. We have a small glass of red wine with our dinner every night, and I consider us blessed.
Fortunately we both are happy with leftovers and we don't mind having the same thing Wednesday night that we had Monday night. No matter how careful we are, however, and no matter how hard George tries to cook only in modest quantities, we end up having to throw away food because it won't keep long enough for us to finish it. And that's a problem.
When our son Michael was living just down the road, we could always count on him to take any leftovers that were too much for us, with much enthusiasm. He was very fond of George's cooking. And while his partner Quinn was still living there after his death, we could at least count on being able to pass on our leftovers to her chickens and guineas. [Because Quinn eats only organic foods, she wouldn't eat them herself, but she was willing to risk non-organic with the poultry.] Now that Quinn has moved, we don't have even that option. When we had big dogs, they took care of any and all leftovers; our tiny Maltese won't touch them. We don't have any neighbors close by now that we're on a "Hey, would you be interested in some leftover chicken salad?" basis with. And health regulations -- very wisely -- mean we can't donate our leftovers to a food pantry or the local nursing home.
So... We end up, despite our best and most careful efforts, throwing away food, and that bothers me. I hate the idea of throwing away good food in a world where millions of people are going hungry.
Now, not to worry, please. Our appetites are not a symptom of depression or dementia or any other sort of illness. Neither of us is underweight. I'm sure that if we spent our days outdoors doing farmwork we'd eat more food, but we're not going to do that. If we spent our days outdoors playing tennis or swimming or hiking mountain trails, we'd eat more food -- but we're not going to do that either. We spend our days, basically, at our computers, and reading books, and doing crafts, and making music, and that -- Providence willing -- is what we plan to keep on doing.
Tags: eldering
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08:37 am
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Personal note; thank you...
Thanks to each and every one of you who has congratulated me and cheered for me and posted encouraging words for me.
There are some of you who would have been entirely justified in posting something along the lines of: "Oh, you finished a short story, and you thought that was worth a whole self-celebratory blogpost? Well, big deal! I finish a story a week/a story a day, and I don't get so dithery about it that I have to do an official announcement!"
Thank you for not doing that. Thank you for being careful not to break me.
It would have been far more Ozark of me to have gone to every one of your comments and replied with an individual "thank you" addressed only to you, but I have a feeling that your [yourall's] tolerance for that kind of behavior is limited.
Bless you one and all, therefore. Collectively.
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08:46 am
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Writing science fiction; update...
I am now someone who has written a whole new science fiction short story, all the way from the beginning to the end, and that's a comfort; I was genuinely scared there, for a while, that I was never going to be able to do that again. I would have been very sad to have to add writing short stories to the long list of things that I can't do any more.
It didn't turn out to be the U.S. Corps of Linguists story I had intended to write, which was a surprise -- but it did turn out to be a story about the Brethandi -- my ETs that look like Terran cattle. And that makes it useful; it's a step toward the story I was trying to write. And for once I didn't have to struggle to think of a title; it's called "The Brethandi Next Door."
It's a horrendously rough draft, and it's not plotted nearly tightly enough. But the rough draft is always the hardest part for me, and now I can start revising and rewriting, which is the fun part.
Rejoicing out loud here. ROL.
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11:20 am
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Writing science fiction...
I don't have writer's block any more, not since I [very belatedly] realized that the reason I was stuck was that I hadn't written the supporting material. But I'm struggling. I'm doing the same few pages over and over and over.
The plan was to write three or four short stories about U.S. Corps of Linguists (USCOL) teams doing fieldwork in the fictional universe where the ETs look like Terran cattle. [I've named those ETs now -- they're the Brethandi (stressed on the first syllable -- BREATH-un-dee -- rhymes with "Bethany") and I've named the planet Gaudalle (goh-DAHL). And I've named the languages, but will spare you those right now.] And I have two problems.
First, this stuff doesn't want to be three or four short stories, it wants to be a novel. I don't intend to let that happen, since my market niche these days is short stories rather than novels. And I don't belong to that school of writers whose characters are able to grab them and drag them about and give them orders. However, these characters are fighting back vigorously -- perhaps thinking that I'm way too old to be a match for them -- and that's not helping.
Second, as is always the case when I'm trying to write something new, I'm having trouble finding the exact right spot in the story arc that should be Paragraph One. Paragraph One has to be seductive enough to make the reader want to go on with the story, and that means it has to be chosen with exquisite care. I always write half a dozen beginnings, and then I go on writing a while, and then I discover that the real beginning is maybe ten pages into the manuscript. At which point I have to pull it back to page one and then do some re-ordering.
I've told you before that it's not unusual for it to take me ten years to write a short story. I'm hoping it's not going to be like that this time.
=========
Nonfiction online: "How Verbal Self-Defense Works" at http://people.howstuffworks.com/vsd.htm ; "Why Are Old Women Older Than Old Men And How Can We Fix That?" at http://www.seniorwomen.com/articles/articlesElginOld.html ; Religious Language Newsletter archive at http://www.forlovingkindness.org ; Fiction online: "We Have Always Spoken Panglish" at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Story-Panglish.html ; "What The EPA Don't Know Won't Hurt Them" at http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/epa.htm ; "Weather Bulletin" at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Weather.html ; "A Quorum Of Grandmothers" at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/QuorumOfGrandmothers.html ; The Communipaths at http://www.jackiepowers.com/SuzetteHadenElgin/TheCommunipaths.html . More stuff at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/SiteMap.html ; LiveJournal blog index at http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=ozarque ; Art Gallery at
http://www.bysuzettehadenelgin.com .
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07:53 am
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Personal note; Ozark/LJ culture clash?
rosalux has posed an interesting question:
"I've been wondering ... given what you've said about your own personality and your Ozark culture (I've just been reading a book about growing up in the Ozarks in the '70s and '80s) - how does this online culture strike you? It's more emotionally touchy-feely than most in-person communication. Does it feel alien, or burdensome?"
I wish I had a clear and concise answer to offer you -- I don't. Because the Ozark culture is all of a piece, with a clear set of defining characteristics. The culture here at this LJ, by contrast, is fragmented; my perception is that each of you who comments regularly brings a culture of your own -- although some of you do fall roughly into groups.
I have no way of knowing whether the culture you're presenting is genuine or is one that you're inventing, of course, but I try to interact with each of you as if it were genuine. My assumption is always that your intention is that I should "suspend disbelief" and assume that it is genuine, and I try to do that.
I know it's certainly possible that -- because I'm a fiction writer -- what I do is create a culture for each of you, making it up the way I'd make up a character in a narrative. If that's what I'm doing, I apologize; it's not my perception of what's happening, and it's not my intention.
Some of you bring a culture that does feel alien to me, because the gap between it and my own Ozark culture is so vast, and I don't always handle that very well. But no one's culture in this online group strikes me as burdensome.
What is most surprising about the question is the statement that the online culture is "more emotionally touchy-feely than most in-person communication." That's not the usual image of cybercommunication. The standard claim is that because it's written language all the emotional information is missing. But I agree with rosalux; in this LJ, there seems to me to be an abundance of emotional information. It wasn't that way at first; at first, I was completely mystified and lost. But that has changed, over the years, and now I am at home here.
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08:05 am
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Personal note; the driving puzzle...
raqs asked: "I wonder what it is about driving that repels you so?" And a number of you have suggested that there's something mysterious lurking behind my aversion to driving, and that if I could figure out what it is I might be able to deal with driving a lot more effectively.
I can remember being perfectly comfortable driving, once upon a time, even when I was merging into several lanes of rush-hour traffic on the San Diego freeways. I remember feeling as if the car were completely under my control; I do know what that feeling is like. But I only reached that stage after having spent months doing weird things like leaving for work two hours early so that I could use surface roads instead of the freeways; it wasn't something that came to me easily. And even when I felt comfortable, I wasn't enjoying myself; I hated driving, always.
The first possible explanation that comes to my mind, knowing myself as well as I do, is that driving seems to me to be a waste of time. Because while I'm driving I have to give it both of my hands and my full attention, and I can't be at my computer or doing art or needlework or anything "productive." But in the days when driving was easy for me I was able to work. I used to "write" whole scenes for my fiction and whole sections for my nonfiction by talking my way through them aloud, and revising them aloud, and then later when I was able to get to a keyboard there they were, neatly stored in my memory, and I could just type them up. I got a lot of work done that way, and there's no reason for me to think I wouldn't still be able to do that now. So that's not it.
Another possibility is the fact that I am -- and always have been -- spatially challenged. Because of my chronic vertigo, I'm never all that certain exactly where I am in space; my proprioception mechanisms don't work properly. I was never able to do those test questions where they show you a figure of some kind and ask you to draw what it would look like if it were turned upside down or on its side or some such thing. The most complicated shapes I'm able to visualize in a different orientation are a square and a sphere and a diamond. I do know what those three shapes turned upside down would look like -- and that is the end of my competence.
Some of you have suggested that perhaps the problem is the car itself. I don't think that's it. The old Taurus that I'm using to re-learn driving is exactly like the one I used to drive in the past; everything is arranged in the same way. And we've fooled around with the settings for the seat, and added pillows, and added the extra-wide mirror inside the car just like the one I used to use in San Diego, so that I'm the right height and can see everything I feel that I need to see.
It is so frustrating to me, and so infuriating, not to be able to do something that my grandchildren -- and almost everyone I know, of any age group -- can do as easily as they breathe...
Tags: eldering
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08:49 am
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Eldering; scary quote...
While de-cluttering, I came across the October 13, 2007 issue of New Scientist [thank you, hagsrus], which had a special section of articles on aging and dying and healthcare. And found this very scary quote on page 43 of Guy Brown's article titled "The bitter end" [pp. 42-43]:
"If current trends persist, people born in the developed world today could expect to live 100 years, but are likely to spend their last few decades with increasing disability and deteriorating health, and face a 25 to 50 per cent chance of dying with dementia. ... Imagine the economic consequences of providing one-to-one round-the-clock care for decades on end for millions of demented or disabled people. Yet we are doing absolutely nothing about it. Death, dying and dementia are nowhere on the political agenda. We are too afraid to think about the three Ds, and that suits the politicians fine because they are not easy problems to solve. We need to stop turning a blind eye to the multiple miseries at the end of life and attack ageing and the diseases of ageing head-on. ... Death is not the enemy; it is an integral part of life. It is ageing and its diseases that we should be fighting."
Brrr. Brown tells us on page 42 that average lifespan has been increasing "at the staggering rate of 2.2 years per decade (or 5 hours a day) for the last 100 years" and that there is no sign whatsoever of a slowdown.
I'm hearing a lot of talk about reforming healthcare; I'm not hearing anything about this particular aspect of that reform.
Tags: eldering
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08:44 am
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Personal note; wherein I get one A, and one F...
The A:
I have actually written three whole pages -- rough-draft pages, but pages all the same -- of my new U.S. Corps of Linguists story set in the fictional universe where the ETs the linguists are doing fieldwork with look like Terran cattle. And have been turning out more and more of the supporting material for that story. I am so pleased.
The F:
The need for me to re-learn my driving skills is just as acute as ever; I still have to do that. But since our son's death in March I haven't driven once, not even just around the yard. I haven't been able to make myself start on that detested project again, in spite of having had its necessity brought forcibly home to me while George was in the hospital in May. I am so disgusted.
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08:42 am
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Cyberdragon poem; postscript...
Thank you for all your kind, and very interesting, comments in response to "For Jedella, With My Very Best Regards." I just want to mention a couple of things here.
Michael Farris raised the question of why the human beings in this fictional universe bond with the cyberdragons, saying, "To understand the stories, I accept the hold that cyberdragons have over the humans that .... bond(?) with them. But there still seem to be missing elements on just how that bonding (or whatever it is) happens. I don't know if you've worked that out yet or are just as in the dark as I am..."
And then houseboatonstyx mentioned the gecko animation in the Geico commercials, which made me think of how crazy I am about that little gecko -- I am for sure bonded with that little gecko -- and the contrast between that reaction on my part and the creeped-out way I react to Golem in "The Return of the King."
If you've read the earlier posts in this fictional universe, you'll remember that the cyberdragon/human bonding phenomenon was an accident; the company that made the cyberdragons had intended them to be toys for children, and was taken by surprise. ["We had a dozen of the dragons in an observation room, and we brought in a dozen adults, and what happened next was beyond belief. We'd told them that the dragons were kids' toys, of course. Standard procedure. But in oh, two minutes flat, every single adult in the room was either sitting there with a dragon in their lap or walking around the room holding a dragon's front paw the way they would have walked around holding a child's hand. With big happy smiles on their faces. We'd never seen anything like it. And we sure as hell couldn't have predicted it."]
The company immediately made some modifications. ["We went back and made them softer, and lighter, and more ... more cuddly. And of course we re-did their front paws to make them exactly like a little child's hands."] That paw makeover, it seems to me, was a stroke of genius. There's something about the way a tiny child's hand, offered trustingly and without hesitation, feels to an adult human that -- at least for me -- has a very strong appeal. And the company would have known to make modifications that would trigger the standard human hard-wired reactions: the small round head; the big round eyes with the long silky eyelashes; the slightly-pouty rosebud mouth; and the irresistible little soft voice. And the programming that guaranteed impeccable Good Behavior, always. All those things, it seems to me, would lead to bonding.
I know there is a subset of adult humans who are immune to these characteristics, and who find little kids icky at best, and even repulsive. But the majority of us -- fortunately for the survival of our species -- don't have that immunity. Whether, in this real nonfictional world -- we'd be likely to bond with cyberdragons and perhaps treat them more lovingly than we treat our biological children, I can't say. I can only say that I hope not.
Tags: cyberdragons
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08:47 am
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Cyberdragon poem...
For Jedella, With My Very Best Regards
I remember the day my mother brought Jedella home;
I remember all her friends hurrying to our house.
I remember my mother, drunk on power, allowing them
to pass Jedella along from lap to lap.
I remember how each of those women rushed away tight-lipped,
and I knew even then what they were so determined not to say:
"It's not fair! Damn it all, I'm the one who should have been first,
the first to have a cyberdragon of my own! It should have been me!"
I remember my mother letting each one of those women
parade one turn around our livingroom
holding Jedella's pretty little hand.
[That's how they're made, you know. With little hands, like the hands of a child,
on their two front legs.]
I remember it all.
I tried everything I could think of to break Jedella,
but I wasn't strong enough -- I was only five.
Today, my men -- the men of the Humankinders --
hold the cyberdragons high in the air
and pop out their four slender legs, one at a time,
from the cunning balljoints,
pop their pretty heads out of their slender throats,
while their owners stand there screaming.
And they call us terrorists.
Cyberdragons, let us all please remember, are machines,
no more alive than your coffeemaker or your stove.
They feel no pain. They feel no fear.
They have no emotions.
My parents were fond of me, yes. But they loved Jedella.
They left me home when they went out [with one exception],
and took Jedella with them in her designer outfits.
The exception? They took me along, in my store-bought dresses,
when they went to church.
Loving your human child ... that is a family value,
expected of human parents when at church.
My mother explained it to me, carefully:
"Darling Brecklyn, it would be wasted money
to buy you designer dresses. Only think...
you'd grow out of them.
Jedella will never grow out of hers. And that's why."
Tags: cyberdragons
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09:15 am
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Writer's block, gone and not lamented...
I've been turning out page after page of the supporting material for the new fictional universe, and I'm falling more and more in love with it as I go along, despite the fact that it's not an easy world to build. This is the universe where the extraterrestrial protagonists that the U.S. Corps of Linguists team is being sent to work with look very much like Terran cattle -- they aren't cattle, but they look as if they are -- and that poses a lot of problems. It also offers me a full basket of opportunities to do neat stuff, and I am enjoying that. I am hoping to get the science -- in particular, the biology -- right this time, since biology's not my field; I'm hoping I can avoid making genuinely stupid errors.
And then there's the matter of finishing the collage book -- Thousands Of Hours Going By -- that I've been working on, before next year's Conestoga Art Show. [That's the universe with the Rainbow Eggs and the angleterrys and the sky portholes.] There are still twenty-seven collages that I have to write text for. And the very next one to be done is going to be hard; it has a big white rabbit, and a Rainbow Egg, and a sky porthole. I could cheat, of course; I could skip that hard one and go do easier ones first. But I know from experience that that's risky, since every page needs to build on the previous one. I could cheat even more and just tear the really hard collage out of the book and do something else with it; I'm building that universe, and I have all the power. But I'm resisting that temptation at the moment, and trying hard to think of a solution to the problem.
[The links to earlier posts from Thousands Of Hours Going By are:
http://ozarque.livejournal.com/580704.html
http://ozarque.livejournal.com/581203.html
http://ozarque.livejournal.com/581873.html
http://ozarque.livejournal.com/580975.html
http://ozarque.livejournal.com/589656.html
http://ozarque.livejournal.com/589997.html ].
Working on two fictional universes at the same time is a pleasure; when I'm worn out with one I can switch to the other. It sure beats having writer's block.
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09:06 am
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More about writer's block...
I have managed to write three paragraphs of the short story I wanted to work on -- and to revise those three paragraphs several times. And then I'm stuck. Never mind the fact that my usual writing session in the past has always been 3500 to 5000 words; I'm stuck at three paragraphs.
But I'm beginning to understand why I'm stuck: It's because I don't know enough about the fictional universe I'm trying to write in -- a fictional universe where I want to write a number of short stories and perhaps a series of novels.
Usually, when I write fiction, two conditions hold. First, I'm writing from an outline so detailed that I could start anywhere in the story arc and write that scene or dialogue; I know every last least wiggle of the plot completely. And second, I have a thick notebook of materials about the narrative's universe .... biographies and physical descriptions of the characters, detailed descriptions of the settings, a history of the time period (and often of hundreds of years before and after that time period), reviews of imaginary books and plays and films and art and music and social phenomena, descriptions of plants and animals and trees, descriptions of costumes, maps and charts and graphs and grammars ... a sort of wikipedia of that fictional universe.
I don't have any of that this time. I don't know what made me think I could skip that step. Maybe because I was able to sit down and write Peacetalk 101 without doing it? Maybe. But that's the only time in my entire life as a writer that I've ever been able to get by without the supporting materials, and I haven't the vaguest idea how it happened; it's very unlikely that it will ever happen again.
I think I know the way out of this writer's block now. I need to start the notebook of materials and write that, until I know that new narrative world so well that I'm able to write the detailed outline.
And then I'll be able to go on to paragraph four.
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01:09 pm
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Recommended link; interesting househusbandry article...
My thanks to Cindy Brown for alerting me to Aaron Traister's Salon article titled "Dude, man up and start acting like a mom: How I learned to stop sulking and embrace my life as a stay-at-home father." It's at http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2009/06/09/man_up/index.html , and my perception is that it has a happy ending, although that might not last. Sample:
"So I began my foray into the mildly unusual world of being a stay-at-home father. I expected to take a little time off, get the kid straightened out and then embark on a new and fabulous stage of my professional life where someone would recognize me for the genius I really was, and lavish me with the wealth and fame I so richly deserved."
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10:02 am
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Personal note; mad clutter postscript...
I just want to let you know that I have an arrangement, for archiving my papers, with the special collections section at the University of Oregon library in Eugene.
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08:02 am
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Eldering [I think]; mad clutter...
Some of my clutter has had at least a modest justification -- for example, in the days when I might actually have written another business book, I could justify keeping all my copies of Forbes as a source of examples. For the three business books I did write, those copies were indispensable; and in the days before I had online access to Forbes I was very glad that I had them.
And then there's the other kind of clutter. The mad irrational kind. The kind that makes no sense whatsoever. For example...
In the storage container out behind our house, there are actually boxes, sealed and neatly labeled, that hold every scrap of the materials I used to write my newsletters, starting in 1980. If I quoted from a newspaper story or a magazine/journal article, that newspaper story or magazine/journal article is sitting up there in a box.
Why? I have no explanation to offer. The Library of Congress has a full set of the copies up to January 2000, when I stopped offering the newsletters in any form except e-mail. And I have a full set of those copies myself -- the master set I used to make those copies for the L of C.
And then, from January 2000 on, there are two copies of every issue in my e-mail files, and two copies of every issue in my word processor files. And until January of 2009 -- when I was politely told to stop sending them -- there was a complete set of printouts of every issue at the office of the Linguistic Society of America.
Plus, on storage shelves inside my house, I am still stashing all the materials for every issue of the newsletters, each item carefully marked "used" plus the date of the issue, presumably so that when there's no room for any more materials in the house I'll be able to pack yet another box for George to put in the storage container.
This is mad clutter. Crazy clutter. It's like the clutter you read about that people find in houses where stacks of old newspapers have been piled floor-to-ceiling, leaving only a tiny narrow corridor to creep through with your arms tightly at your sides.
And something even more insane? It's going to be hard for me to send all of that stuff to the recycling center. I can't offer a single reason why I might ever need even one scrap of it again -- articles that might actually be crucial to my work have already been pulled from the mess as I went along and put into folders labeled "Core File 1" and "Core File 2" and [vamp till ready]. I will be sending it all to the recycling center -- my word on it -- but I'm going to feel somehow less safe after I do that. Do I have any smallest thread of justification for that feeling?
Nope. Not the smallest thread.
Tags: eldering
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09:05 am
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Poem...
Rackety Packety
She lives in a cluttered house.
She harbors a cluttered brain.
The first causes terror; the second causes pain.
The house-clutter fills up every nook and cranny;
the brain-clutter tangles up every dendrite.
She can sack up the house-clutter. She cannot write.
A bureaucracy is lurking in her brain.
It manages interplanetary communication.
It's tied in intricate knots of aggravation.
Cyberdragons are lurking in her brain.
Pseudo-children, carrying tangled tales.
She tries to undo the tangles, and she fails.
A star-crossed marriage is lurking in her brain.
A man wholly given to God and a woman of wealth.
They hide from her with unrelenting stealth.
A child who defies an angel lurks in her brain.
She knows how that story ends and how it begins.
It runs down a rabbithole, with a Cheshire-cat grin.
She lives in a cluttered house.
She harbors a cluttered brain.
The first causes terror; the second causes pain.
Tags: poem
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09:00 am
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Personal note; plaintive lament...
I have what feels to me like the world's worst case of writer's block. You may [or may, quite reasonably, not] remember me warbling about what a sign of progress it was that I was horrendously bored, because the only thing that has ever been able to make me that bored is the state of not-writing. Well. That was and is true. And the obvious cure for the state of not-writing is to sit down and write.
And I can't seem to do that. None of the things I usually do to end writer's block has worked. Sitting down with an already outlined-to-a-faretheewell short story or novel and working on that hasn't worked. Sitting down and re-typing the last page I wrote previously on a project hasn't worked. "Automatic writing" hasn't worked. Doodling hasn't worked. Starting some ghastly task like cleaning out a cupboard, from which I could escape to writing, with a clear conscience, hasn't worked. None of those things, usually reliable for me, has led to so much as one completed paragraph.
I tell myself, "You can do this, Suzette; you can. You know how to do this. You have been doing this all your life long. What you do is, you just buckle down and start putting one word after another on the page."
And the page sits there and looks back at me, blankly. Wordlessly.
Now, therefore, I am both horrendously bored and horrendously cross.
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09:01 am
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Personal note; signs of progress...
I know that I am getting better ... that I am making progress. The reason I know that is because I suddenly realized yesterday that I am horrendously bored. And the only thing that ever makes me bored in that overwhelming way is to not be writing a book (or to not be writing something shorter than a book). I'm out of the habit of writing, and I'm going to have trouble re-booting and getting back into my normal working routines -- but I'm suddenly aware that it's time for that to happen, and that is a Good Thing.
And then, in the context of the Great Upheaval -- do George and I move away from this beloved house and land, and if so where do we move, or do we find a way to stay here and have help with the work we can no longer do? -- there's another sign of progress. Whatever decision we ultimately make about this matter, we absolutely have to take steps to reduce the enormous quantities of clutter that we've accumulated over our forty-five years of marriage. We've been saying that for at least the past twenty-five years, but nothing has ever come of it. Until now. Every day now, George has been loading up the truck with boxes and sacks of clutter and taking it to the recycling center in town. It's painful, getting rid of all this stuff, but it absolutely has to be done, and we're doing it. And I'm helping. Every day, I'm filling sacks and boxes with things I'm never going to need again and have known for years I was never going to need again, but have mindlessly clung to all the same.
Onward.
Tags: eldering
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06:59 am
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Detachment; part two...
Staying detached when you're under verbal attack has nothing at all to do with being saintly. The critical factors for staying detached are:
1. Understanding the verbal attacker's motivation:
Hostile attackers are almost never motivated by a goal of causing their targets pain.
People who routinely use hostile language usually do so for one of three reasons:
a. They're not aware that any other method for handling disagreement exists -- usually because they grew up in a language environment where hostile language was the only mechanism they ever saw modeled for dealing with disagreements, no matter how trivial.
b. Verbal hostility fills a strong personal need for excitement that they don't know how to fill adequately in any other way.
c. Verbal hostility fills a strong personal need for human attention that they don't know how to fill adequately in any other way.
These people aren't out to hurt you. They may know that their language is going to cause you pain, but they perceive that as just a side effect; it's not their goal, and it's not what interests them. Knowing this won't make you like the language coming at you any better than you ever did, but it will change your reaction to that language, and it will give you time to ask yourself these essential questions:
a. What is the speaker's motivation for talking to me this way?
b. What do I actually disagree with in this situation? Do I disagree with the speaker's propositions, or the speaker's facts, or the speaker's emotional message, or is it something else?
2. Practice. I know it's trite, but it's true. Detachment, as opposed to a reflex knee-jerk response, takes practice. When you've always responded to hostile-language attacks without thinking first, you have to make a deliberate effort not to do that, and it's almost certainly going to be hard for a while. You live in a culture that says winning is the only thing that matters, that says losers are to be despised, that says letting anybody score a point before you do is weakness. It's not easy to replace that worldview with one that says letting other people drag you into verbal confrontations isn't winning, that being in control of your own language behavior isn't a characteristic of losers, and that scoring points -- especially hostile ones -- demonstrates not strength but simply willingness to follow a script.
The script goes like this:
X: "Hey, YOU are ripping off my PEOPle! And you can GET AWAY with it, because you're PRIVileged!"
Y: "I am SO SICK of this crap! If I don't put any of your people in my fiction, I'm an elitist! And if I DO put them in my stories, then I'm ripping them OFF! No matter what I DO, it's always WRONG!"
X: "Then why do you keep DOING it? You don't LEARN, DO you?"
Y: "Look, I'M going to write what I WANT to write, and I'm going to do it as well as I can, and if that's not good enough, the HELL with it!
X: "Like I said, you're privileged. YOU can get AWAY with that. A lot of people don't have that advantage."
Here's another -- detached -- way to go:
X: "Hey, YOU are ripping off my PEOPle! And you can GET AWAY with it, because you're PRIVileged!"
Y: "I hear you. And I'd be very interested in hearing more."
X: "Oh, come on -- you know EXACTLY what I mean!"
Y: "No, I really don't know what you mean. But I'd like to know, if you're willing to tell me."
Tags: verbal self-defense
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10:40 am
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Tech Puzzle; postscript...
My thanks to all of you for your comments with advice about my Tech Puzzle. Thanks especially to archangelbeth for finding me a way to buy presents for George that actually works!
But I keep wondering: How could this particular Tech Puzzle happen? How could there possibly be a program that responds to a customer's outdated browser by deleting all -- and only -- those links that would let the customer place an order?
That strikes me as so cottonpicking improbable! Somehow, it seems to me that everything in a program like the one amazon.com uses would conspire to be certain that links for placing an order would always be on the page. Maybe that's just a demonstration of how ungeeky I am... after all, I'm a person who doesn't even own a cellphone.
But still... it baffles me.
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