Another Year Over...

The year is almost over, and I suppose it's time to set resolutions again.  It's been a pretty good year for my writing.  I've gotten a ton of great feedback on my blog, and even if it's only read by a couple dozen people who click on my Facebook links to it, they're still people whose opinions I value a great deal, so it's been extremely encouraging.  I've probably done more writing this year than I have in any other one, and I'm hoping to break that record soon.

Looking ahead to resolutions, I want to resolve right here and now that I'm going to finally finish revising a novel for publication this year.  Granted, I've made that resolution before, but I'm doing it now on a (somewhat) public forum, which will give me more incentive not to look like an idiot by failing at it.  I've already gotten a few chapters under my belt, and there's no reason I can't go all the way through with it if I keep myself to a schedule.  Granted, there's always the doubt in my mind that the world doesn't need another book about vampires or vampire-like creatures, and that may well be true, but I really feel that I brought a unique voice to this one, and the feedback I've gotten from some not-easily-impressed friends has kept me determined to see this through.

I'm also going to resolve to run a 3:30 marathon in L.A. this year, although I'm only going to get one chance in that case, so I can't be to hard on myself if lousy weather, or an illness, or injury, or any number of other unexpected variables gets in my way.  There'll be other marathons eventually.  I'm at least going to stick to my training, even if it means doing a lot of long runs in the cold of winter (or boring myself half to death on the treadmill with them if the weather just becomes completely unworkable).

This has been a remarkable year for me, and I'm truly grateful for all the people in my life who made it that way.  I hope you all are heading into the new year ready to meet the challenges it brings, and that you find the determination and support you need to reach whatever goals matter to you the most!

The Unbearable Awkwardness of Being

Listening to Dan Harmon's Harmontown podcast today really got me thinking about the nature of creative minds, and how to care for them.  He was reading from the old journals he kept as a teenager on the show, and they had a certain pretention in them that he openly acknowledged, and which I immediately recognized from my own past writings, which I've often winced at (and still do with some of my recent stuff).  There was also a segment near the end where he was talking to a guy in the audience who'd deferred his creative dreams in order to pursue a more practical line of work, and again I saw echoes of my own life choices.

The most important advice Harmon had to give was to keep writing, and that you're probably going to write a whole ton of shitty words to get to the good ones.  That's advice I keep reminding myself about, and it's advice that I've tried to put into practice with my daily entries on 750 Words.  I've written nearly 150,000 words there so far, which is the equivalent of nearly three years of National Novel Writing Month.  Granted, the vast majority of what I've written there hasn't been fiction, but there's a certain level at which it's all just expository writing, and I feel that we could all stand to develop a solid narrative voice even when describing our own lives.  I think that voice is still a work in progress for me, and maybe it'll always be that, but I know that I'm not wincing now as much as I once did.

I've also noticed that creativity, my case included, often runs hand in hand with obsessive behavior.  Sometimes I can use this obsessive behavior for good, like when I apply it to running, or writing, or cleaning.  Other times it drags me down, like when I become obsessed with a video game, or checking social media for updates.  I can't always control where my obsessions head (especially when I'm feeling tired and/or depressed), but I think I'm finally starting to understand this behavior better.  I think it's what makes creative people so prone to addiction.  Thank god I haven't had to deal with that in my own life, but it's something I keep at the back of my mind.

I think having other people in my life to support me---especially my wife, whom I can never thank enough for that---has really helped me keep my obsessions on the positive side.  That's not to say I don't still slip up every now and then, but the cycles are shorter and less frequent now.  I even feel that I'm being more productive at work, although it helps to have a job where I finally feel like I'm part of a highly capable team on that front.

It's funny---I was always somewhat of a loner growing up.  I always thought I was better off on my own, and that other people didn't understand me well enough to be my friends.  I was focusing, though, on the things that I couldn't change (i.e. other people's reactions to me) instead of the things that I could (my behavior).  Granted, when I finally did learn how to be a fully functioning social creature, there was a lot of trial and error.  That's what often scared me off from it when I was younger---I was an incredibly easily embarrassed boy, and kids my own age could be especially cruel when dealing with my weirdness.  Through it all though, I always regretted the times I didn't try reaching out to people more than the times I did.  I even managed to get over my all-time most awkward moments eventually (though perhaps that may have something to do with the passage of time making them less vivid).

There was one particular event that haunted me for ages.  Tim Robbins went to the same high school as me, and while I was there he came in to give a speech at the auditorium.  There was a Q & A session afterwards, and I got it into my head that this was my big chance to ask a celebrity a question.  The only question I managed to come up with, however, when I raised my hand and the kid with the microphone came over, was whether the veteran actor/director had heard any good dirty jokes from Walter Matthau on the set of I.Q.  The response he gave was a polite demurral, which is probably what I would have done in the same situation, but good lord did it ever take me a long time to live that down---and nobody had even made fun of me for it!  Even that, though, is finally something I can look back on and... well maybe not laugh about yet, but I'm getting there.

So I Ran a 60K This Morning...

Today I ran my first ultra marathon: a 60K, which worked out to about 37.2 miles.  It was fun, then less fun, then excruciating, as endurance tests often are.  It's funny how quickly one can go from finding climbing hills uncomfortable, to finding descending hills uncomfortable, to finding walking uncomfortable, to finding standing uncomfortable, as happened to me during the final twelve miles.  The race was a 1.2-mile warmup followed by nine laps around Central Park.  The scenery got repetitive pretty quickly, which I've heard isn't the case with the better ultras out there, but knowing the terrain as well as I do certainly helped me pace myself better.  The whole course took me about six hours and twenty-three minutes, which I guess was pretty good for my first time (60K is such an unusual distance that there really aren't metrics for it).

When I was in my seventh lap I saw a guy pass me going backwards, which first made me think, "Jesus what a fucking showoff!"  After a bit of reflection, however, I realized that he was doing it to switch up which muscle groups he was using, so that he could wear them out more evenly.  I ended up adopting this tactic myself a little further down the course, and I found it to be quite a relief.

The weather was pretty nice---a bit cold, but quite sunny.  I ran the first seven laps with my backpack, where I'd stored the sweatshirt I wore to the race, the souvenir shirt I got that morning as a part of my race entry, and other various race-related odds and ends.  After seven laps of carting it around (it was fairly light), I finally stowed it near everyone else's backpacks at the start.  It was actually more to get people to stop saying, "Wow, you're going all that way with that heavy backpack?" than it was for actual ease of running.

At the end of the race I was given a very nice lucite plaque to commemorate my finish.  I promptly dropped it while trying to put it in my pocket, my coordination not being all that great after running more miles than I ever have in my life.  The damage was minimal though---I didn't even notice it until I got home.

Epilogue:

While riding the G train home from the race, I met a man that I feel very sorry for.  He was trying to get to Coney Island to visit his mother, and I had to explain to him that in order to do so he would have to switch to another G train at Bedford-Nostrand (it's running in two sections this weekend), then take that G train to Hoyt-Schermerhorn (which is where it's being cut off this weekend), then take an A train one stop to Jay Street (maybe on a different platform, maybe not; I didn't even know how the MTA was handling it), then go upstairs and take a shuttle bus (the limited shuttle bus, not the local one, which doesn't go far enough) to the F train at 18th Avenue, because that was the closest stop that the F was running to this weekend.  For those of you not familiar with these particular trains, the trip in question usually involves making ONE transfer, to a train that runs on the same track.  As if Coney Islanders hadn't suffered enough in recent weeks...

On top of all that, the man I was talking to---although he didn't appear to be much older than me---walked with a cane.  There's never a good story behind a situation like that.  I really hope he made it to his mother's house all right...

The Marathon That Wasn't

Today was supposed to be the day I ran my marathon, after 16 weeks and almost 600 miles of training.  I guess it wasn't as big a deal for me as it would've been for other people: it wasn't my first marathon, and it wouldn't have been my last.  I also didn't have to travel to get here, and it'd be just as easy for me to try again next year (I heard we're all getting automatic entry into next year's race after this, but that might involve paying the entry fee all over again).  I was hoping to improve on my last official time for the NYC Marathon by about an hour, bit it's not like all the gains I've made during my training are just going to disappear overnight.

There were some people thinking that we could just get the marathon postponed, but I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen---the money's already been spent, and the work's already been done.  At least it's good to know that NYRR is planning on donating all the water and supplies that would've been given to runners to people who could use it a lot more right now.

Instead of running 26.2 miles today I ran about 14 and a third, tracing the marathon route up to the Queensboro Bridge, then heading back along Third Avenue in Manhattan to make a loop.  I remember Bloomberg saying at one point that running the marathon would be a morale booster, a sign that New York City was back and open for business, like when they ran the marathon back in 2001 after the September 11th attacks.  Running the route today, it was pretty clear that we were NOT back.  Endless lines of cars on Bedford Avenue and McGuinness Boulevard were still waiting for gas.  If the marathon were happening those streets would have been closed off, and I have no idea where those cars would've had to go.

I did see a number of runners along the route wearing the long-sleeve marathon t-shirts that they were giving out at the marathon expo this weekend to people who'd registered.  One of them even had her race number pinned to it.  I smiled and gave them a thumbs-up.  Even though their plans were dashed they were still out there working at it.  Of course that got me to wondering whether all the energy we were spending on this running could be better used to help in the recovery efforts somewhere...

Thoughts on an Impending NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo keeps getting closer, and I still haven't decided on a story.  I know it's going to be slow going if I just start writing off the top of my head without planning scenes ahead of time, so I'd better decide which story I'm going to go with over this weekend.  It's not that I have to have all my scenes planned out, but I need enough to at least get me through the current day's writing, so that I can take a breather and plan further scenes after it.  I think my issue is that I haven't particularly latched on to any of the characters I've been thinking of for my stories yet, so there isn't a particular story that jumps out at me.  Every so often I'll be seized by the notion to jump off and write something completely different---a prospect both dangerous and exciting.  I'm less worried about getting to 50,000 words this year than I ever have been before, but I have to be careful not to get cocky and just take it for granted that I'll finish on time.  I think in my fourth year I ended up going about ten thousand words over (and was still only about two-thirds of the way through the story, which I STILL haven't finished), but all the other years it came pretty close to the wire, and the story started to run out just as the 50,000 word mark became tantalizingly close.

Let me go over again what I've got so far: there's my coming of age story of a New York kid transplanted to Iowa, my fictional dystopian city anthology, my one about the struggles about an oddball Staten Island family, and (running a distant fourth) the tale of the world's last moviegoer, whose largesse supports the entire remaining industry.  They're all premises that I feel I could write at least a few chapters of at this point, but I don't know whether they'll peter out after that or inspire me to keep going.  I guess I could always start with one and switch to another if the situation becomes truly dire, but finding the momentum to start up an entirely different plot after the first one fails can be difficult given how fraught with discouragement that predicament is.

At the very least I'll have the opportunity to write with my friends again, and I'm looking forward to that in and of itself.  There's so much more creative energy in a room full of other writers than there is when I'm just alone with the blank page.  Granted the blank page doesn't terrify me like it used to, but other people's determination working towards the same goal is like a drug that there's just no substitute for.  Even after five years of NaNoWriMo I hardly ever write new work outside of November.  If I can find the time for my marathon training I'm sure I could find the time for writing, but then there's that question of momentum again...

At least I've been doing my daily writing pretty consistently (even if I only rarely work up the nerve to post it to the public).  I can write 750 words in 20 minutes pretty consistently now, which is something I never thought I'd be able to do before.  I'm sure it'd take me considerably longer if I was writing this all down longhand.  My penmanship was never the greatest, and I fear it's gone downhill significantly since the days I used to regularly practice it while taking notes in college.  I think I still have those notebooks somewhere in my parents' house, but lord knows what I'd ever do with them...  I just hope that I can keep this kind of speed (or anything resembling it) when I switch over from fact to fiction next week.

The Lonely Desk

At the far end of the subway platform at High Street sits what is perhaps the saddest desk in the world. It's inclosed in its own plexiglass case, with only room for a single chair and the desk itself, and it sits unadorned except for a monitor showing camera views of the subway platform, and an honest-to-goodness large paper log book in which the activity monitored is written down, with the handwriting changing occasionally (presumably as different shifts spend their time in this curious purgatory). about seven feet off the ground, the imprints of three bullets dent the plexiglass. One time I saw a 20-ounce bottle of Wild Cherry Pepsi on the desk, as if that beverage by its very essence could add color to the drab world into which it was thrust. The A and C trains scream by both sides of the little desk, each in their turn, and I can only hope that whoever is condemned to keep their watch in that place is at least adequately compensated for their sacrifice. I haven't seen anyone in there, mind you---or at least I haven't seen anyone recently. I imagine that it's the off hours when that cubicle serves its true function, monitoring a place that could potentially become quite dangerous in its desolation once the intimidating forces of crowds no longer stay the hand of whatever lowlifes attempt to engage in the dishonorable practice of subway crime. Are there heroes who inhabit that small space? Will history remember any of their names? I can't imagine anyone would take that position seeking glory, but then again many of the greatest heroes are the ones who don't see themselves as heroes, and are constantly seeking ways to do what they do better. I'm not even sure who runs that place---whether it falls under the jurisdiction of the police department or the MTA. Do they ever get visits from people who dwell in the tunnels beneath this vast city? I wonder if there are any books about such people... I've certainly spent a fair amount of time imagining what their existence may be like, and at this point I'm not sure whether the truth would help or hurt my creative vision.

Marathon Training: Week 9 (And the Writing it Eclipses)

Last night I started on Week 9 of my marathon training.  I've now run 300 miles over the course of 47 hours in the last two months.  It gives me pause to contemplate that.  Two whole days out of that time were spent running.  That's five percent of my waking life.  It's definitely shown results.  Last night I ran over six 8:20 miles and felt great; my miles were about a minute longer than that back when I started.  There was also the half marathon the other weekend, where I kept running faster and faster as it went along until I began to wonder whether I'd been holding back too much, and yet it was still the fastest pace I've officially run anything more than 5 miles at.

On the other hand I haven't been writing very much.  (Or at least I haven't been writing very much fiction---my daily writing has kept up fairly well, but it's been mostly journal stuff)  My piano and guitar playing has been pretty sparse too.  If I had those two days back, would I have devoted them to creative pursuits?  There's no guarantee of that, so I need to tell myself that the important thing is I used them for something productive.  No sense beating myself up when I've actually been accomplishing some of my goals.  The creative ones are always the hardest to satisfy, too, since I can't just hunker down and be creative whenever I feel like it.  If I made writing my job of course I'd devote more time to it, but I find that I need a large chunk of time to ease into a good rhythm.  With running I can accomplish a good day's progress in half an hour anywhere there's a road, but when I write I need at least a full hour, devoid of distractions.  Hopefully I'll get some good work done at the write-in this Thursday, but last time I found myself drawn into conversations too much.  Maybe I should go find a place off by myself if that happens again; it's nice to meet with friends, but if they're not being productive around me it's hard to do it myself.

One of the biggest boons to my running lately has been my discovery of the marvelous effects that wearing a compression shirt can have on cooling me down.  Sweating waterfalls in high humidity has always been a problem for me, and the new compression shirts I got just suck all that sweat right through them, where it runs right off their slick surfaces.  On top of that they also help me better feel the cool breeze that my running creates.  I almost never feel a long and/or hard run in my legs; it's always been the heat in my face and chest that's hit me first.  With that problem gone I think I've been able to shave at least good thirty seconds off my pace.

I wish that there were some similar tool that would help me crank out a couple more hundred words per hour.  Writing every day certainly helps, but there's nothing in the way of purchases that really has an effect on the level of the compression shirts.  NaNoWriMo is coming up again soon, and I don't think I'll have my novel revised before it starts.  I'll have to make my peace with that.  I just wish there was a realistic schedule I could get into and stick with; something similar to my marathon training program, except with words.  I guess I could always devise a schedule of my own, but I don't know what goals would be realistic.  I suppose it's hard to devise a universal system for this sort of process---writers are very different from each other in terms of how much they can produce and how consistently they can produce it.  Plus, I don't know how realistic it would be to lay two rigorous schedules on top of each other and stick to both of them.  I already spend little enough time with my wife between my running and her long hours at work, and I'd feel terrible about cutting into that time any more.  As it is the night seems to fly by once the cooking, cleaning, and eating of dinner starts.  Things should cool down once the marathon and NaNoWriMo are over, but should I really put it off for that long?  Won't other appointments and obligations start to creep in then and fill up my calendar?  I need to devise a more systematic approach, but for the time being it continues to elude me...

Marathon Training: Week 5

I've been spending so much of my time running lately that it's started taking over my thoughts.  I think about how I can go faster, hold out longer, chafe less, and ignore the intense heat that I feel whenever I'm out running in the humidity and sweating all over the place.  I hear the Pace Lady, as I've taken to calling her, in my head, telling me that my pace is at 11 minutes per mile, or seven and a half minutes per mile, constantly fluctuating as if to mock me, and still it's probably the most accurate running app I've used so far (including the watch I used to use with the foot attachment).

At least I'm pretty sure I can rely on my legs.  My upper body might be doing all kinds of crazy things with the sweating, and the heart racing, and the constant need for more air than it seems possible to glean from the air around me, but I've hardly felt anything at all that's worried me about my legs.  Occasionally my calves or my knees will make themselves known more than they should, but it hasn't really gotten to the point of what I'd call pain.  I think that could serve me well if I ever worked up the nerve to try an ultramarathon, but I'm not there yet.  I still haven't gotten through a regular marathon without hitting a point where my legs made themselves known quite vociferously, though I'm hoping that'll change if I can get my time down far enough under 4 hours.  My best so far is around 4:15, but last year was the first time I got really serious about sticking to an official training schedule, and the one I'm on this year is more intense than that one.  It's been working out pretty well: I'm on week 5, and I've actually been running more miles than I've been scheduled to.  It can be hard to fit the runs into my schedule sometimes, but the only time I've outright skipped one was last night when a thunderstorm was raging outside.  Even then I took the opportunity to get back to P90X and do some plyometrics.  I definitely felt that it my calves this morning, which I hope is for the better.

In three days I'm doing the second NYRR Long Training Run in Central Park.  I'm either going to go 16 or 20 miles, depending on how my legs are feeling.  I've gotten to 20 before, but I'm not even sure it's a good idea to be running that many miles so long before the marathon, when I haven't been running anywhere close to that distance yet, nor do I need to in order to ramp up to where I need to be.  I've got 11 weeks still, and a number of long races to run before then.  I actually feel bad that I've scheduled so many races, since it leaves only a few weekends when my wife and I are free to get out of the city for a couple of days.  Even when we do get away I'll still have to keep up with my runs, since my schedule has me running 6 or 7 days out of practically every week.

Running has also become a major part of my Tuesday nights now, since that's when I'm taking my running class.  Including the warm ups and cool downs, each class has racked up nearly 7 miles for me, and some of them are the most intense miles of my whole week.  I've done three classes so far, and two of them have had us running loops in the north end of the park, where the most punishing hills are.  I've run some of my fastest miles there, but I can't keep up that kind of pace, and by the third of the three laps I've been dropping back a pace group to keep myself from keeling over.  The other week the course took place along what are roughly the last three miles of the New York City marathon, which helped remind me what I'm in for in November.  There were two minute breaks between miles during the class, which helped my pace tremendously.  Lord knows I won't be running nearly as fast after I've put 23 miles behind me, but it still felt good to know that I can keep up with everybody else when the hills and the humidity are a little less intense than they were on the nights when we were in the north end of the park.  I'd have to say that, from my two experiences with the NYC marathon so far, the mile coming up to Central Park has to be the most dispiriting mile I've ever run, since it's uphill pretty much the whole way.  It's not even a steep uphill, but it's constant, and it comes at a time when most runners don't have a whole lot left to give.  I'm not looking forward to that mile this year, but hopefully I'll be better prepared for it than I've ever been before.

Wish I Was There...

I'm writing at the end of the day instead of the beginning today, since I ended up getting in here late this morning.  The reason for that was because I forgot to move my car last night, and as a result ended up having to spend a half hour driving around the neighborhood looking for a space.  I should really know better by now, but I suppose my memory will never be perfect.  It feels like the parking situation in Bed-Stuy has gotten noticeably worse every time I've forgotten to move my car the evening before.  Some streets are even lined with double-parked cars that are sitting around specifically in anticipation of the street cleaner coming through.  It's enough to make me want to give up my car entirely (or buy a space in the lot nearby, although I still balk at the notion of paying $200 per month for something that STILL isn't technically worth it in opportunity costs when compared with the gas I spent looking for a space and the time I wasted doing it).  Along the way there were a few near misses, and at one point I'd actually parked my car and gotten out of it before seeing the "NO STANDING" sign that somebody else had already parked in front of.

It's times like this when the density of New York starts to bother me.  I've said in the past that I don't think I'd be able to enjoy life in a small town, and I still believe that's true in the long run, but every so often I feel a desperate need to get away from here, and this is one of those times.  It's been a couple months now since I've left the city, actually---I feel like I'm overdue for a trip.  Going to visit my brother in California over the Labor Day weekend, and heading out to Iowa the weekend after that may help, but I can't commit to anything sooner, since I have NYRR runs scheduled for the two weekends before that.  I really wish I could take more than a long weekend's worth of days off, too, but I'm still working off all the time I took for my honeymoon, and I don't feel like getting myself in any deeper just yet (plus I'm going to need to take off a couple days around Christmas anyways).

There's also the notion of just taking some time to hang out at home, since it feels like one social responsibility or another has been tugging at me.  Then again, the prospect of staying at home might not be so appetizing once the contractors invade my apartment in the near future.

Plus, when you come right down to it, is being "away" necessarily even a relaxing, restorative experience?  In order to reach whatever haven you're heading for there's going to be a trip involved, be it by car or plane or train or whatever, with all the attendant stress those modes of transportation entail.  Worse still is the trip back, where the deadening grind of the commute steadily unravels what peace of mind you managed to gain from the trip.  Okay, so I'm being cynical here: not every trip is stressful.  In fact, some can be quite pleasant.  There's no way to be certain when you leave, however, what kind of travel experience you're going to have.  I'd be the last one to argue, though, that something shouldn't be done because you're uncertain of the outcome.  I guess I'm just arguing in circles now.

I'd love to get upstate sometime soon, before it gets cold.  There's so much more space up there, and the lousy cell coverage actively encourages me to cut the cord and engage with the world around me.  My family has a place up there, but I'm not sure that any of them have been to it yet this year.  The house was my grandfather's legacy, and now it would appear that his descendants are too busy to enjoy it the way he did.  It's an old barn that my grandfather converted into a two-story home by the sweat of his own labor, and I have many fond memories of making the trip up into the mountains, through the trees, to a place where there are blueberry bushes to pick in the daytime and millions of stars to gaze upon at night.  It's a quiet place: a place where drive-in movie theaters can still be found, and where being early to bed and early to rise can reward you with the sight of deer grazing in the fields.  There's even a baby grand piano up there...  It might need tuning, but it still plays well enough.  Plus, there are miles upon miles of potential runs to take, with hardly any traffic to worry about.  Maybe I'm romanticizing it too much after being away for a while, but I feel a powerful need to return there soon.  I may have to wait a month or two, but I desperately want to find a way to make it work somehow.

I Really Like to Think and Stuff

One of the nicest things about 750 Words is the list of my most commonly used words that it gives me at the bottom of my stats every day.  It's been very instructive to learn what terms I overuse, like "really", "like", "though", "think", and others.  It's helped me cut down on qualifiers, as I've seen certain offending words disappear over time.  We actually had a discussion about qualifiers in Writers Group this past Saturday, and it really made me think about how often I use them in my own writing.  For example, I often talk about how I "think" something is the case, even when I don't have any strong doubts about it.  I'm not entirely sure how I use "like" the most---whether it's through similes, giving examples, or talking about preferences.  Maybe it's a combination of the three.  I know that I don't use it as an interjection in print, because lord knows how irritating that would get.  At any rate it's a weak word, and I should cut down on it.  Of course the point of these entries isn't to write perfectly, it's just to write.  I shouldn't stop myself for word choice during NaNo, since the whole point of it is to quickly produce a rough draft that I can then revise with better word choices (and possibly better plot and character choices, depending on how seriously I go off track).  If I don't catch myself now though, I'll never be able to hone my instincts to make the correct choices sooner.  After all, I don't always have the time to proofread what I write, and I'd like to know that there's a good possibility that I got things right the first time.

One particularly troublesome word I've been trying to strike from my commonly used list is "thing".  It's one of the most vague nouns in the world, and as a result it suggests itself all the time.  Often there's a better word waiting right around the corner if I give it an extra moment's thought, but sometimes I'm dealing with a category so broad that I'd need to completely redefine my argument in order to bring a more specific term to the surface, and I'm not always prepared to do that.

Something else I've noticed in the statistics of my daily entries is that I'm a lot more introspective on the days when I'm thinking of posting my entry to my blog.  I don't talk about my recent activities as much, and I try not to be as judgmental of others, which often leads to me not talking about others at all.  Does that really make an entry more worthy of being shared with other people?  I mean, I'm not naive: I know that there can be real, damaging consequences to the wrong person reading an opinion that I should have just kept to myself in the first place, and I don't want to overstep the bounds of my confidentiality agreement when I talk about my job.  There's a layer of self consciousness to it too though, and I need to try and peel that back as much as I can.  Not that I have any obligations to anybody, but there are a lot of parts of my life that could benefit from me being more open and honest (as long as I choose my words carefully, at least).

A Quick Run through My Mind

I want to attack a piano right about now, but I'm still at work so I guess I'll just have to get my percussive urge out in another daily entry.  I was actually feeling somewhat listless and unmotivated earlier this afternoon, but then I had a cup of coffee (MEDIUM strength coffee at that), and now I'm bursting at the seams.  I want to create something.  Something spontaneous and awkward and raw and possibly terrible but then again maybe not.  It's like it's there inside of me, bouncing around, not yet fully formed but itching to get out like some kind of horrific demon fetus.  I want to run up and down the rows of cubicles, I want to parkour up the walls and lounge in the little window up by the high ceilings.  I want to do half a dozen things that would probably result in me breaking multiple bones, but I can't do any of them right now so I just need to keep furiously typing away at my laptop.  There's work to be done, and I'll get back to it, but I need my primal moment right now, even if I can't express it with my whole body.  It's the reason I snap my fingers and clap my hands as I go down the hallways.  I'm not sure how many people notice that, but it's an impulse too strong for me to contain.  The fact that it comes out so spastically is part of the reason I've never been able to play an instrument consistently.  My brain's always bouncing from one thing to another, and sometimes it's all I can do to focus for even a minute.  When it's something like writing where I have the luxury of starting and stopping and giving the thoughts time to resolve themselves it usually works well enough, but it's always much harder for me to do that in the moment.  I guess it makes sense, then, that running is my sport of choice: it's built on enough ingrained reflex that I can just keep putting one foot in front of the other while letting my brain take it's occasional wanderings.  I've run far enough in my life that I'm not going to just trip the second I think of something else.  Wait, no, that's not it.  It's more like running is such a physically demanding activity that my brain doesn't have enough oxygen to focus on anything other than making sure I have enough oxygen and don't bump into the people around me.  I actually CAN exhaust myself, instead of having to hold it all in and wait for another time to let loose.  I guess I could theoretically leave the office for a few minutes and run around for a bit outside when I get to feeling like this, but I'd end up coming back drenched in sweat, which would be awkward for a number of reasons.  Maybe it's the city.  Maybe it's the nonstop pace of New York that hooks me like a drug until I have to keep moving constantly or go insane (or both).  Maybe I need more sleep.  For the first time in many days I didn't feel tired when I woke up this morning, but I could still be paying the price from days past.  I have to wake up early tomorrow for a race, so things might not improve soon on that front.  Racing in the heat of summer can be awfully frustrating, since I never run as fast as I do in the cooler weather because I'm inevitably drenched and stifled by the humidity about a mile in.  Even the air feels harder to breathe, like it's too thick to fit into my lungs.  Still, I have to keep in mind that the heat's slowing everybody else down too, so it's not like I'm going to place lower in the rankings (not that I'm anywhere near good enough to actually win anything yet).  Nonetheless it's discouraging to see people passing me left and right and not feel like I can push myself any harder.  Sometimes I envy my wife's almost nonexistent sweating, but on the other hand she also is a lot more susceptible to hot and cold, to a degree that I wouldn't wish on anyone (especially her).  I have to remind myself that I'm still getting faster, slowly but surely, and I just need to keep at it and stay disciplined.  If I had that kind of discipline with playing music I'd probably be a lot better at it by now.  At least with my writing I can do things like this, which is essentially just keeping my head down and pushing until I hit the finish line.

The More Things Change...

Today at work I went to a "speed networking" event, where a bunch of us formed into two lines and then had two minutes to introduce ourselves to each other before moving down to the next person.  It was kind of chaotic, but it was a nice way to get to know a few more people there.  Granted, there are still hundreds of other people in that office alone that I haven't met and may never meet, but it's always good to have a few more familiar faces out there.  Even having the chance to practice my small talk was nice.  It's the kind of event that I'd never have been able to force myself to go to ten years ago, but I feel like I've changed dramatically since then.

I have NaNoWriMo to thank for that mostly, I think.  I'd known nerds before I did NaNo, but I'd never known a group of such GREGARIOUS nerds before.  I was used to folks who were mostly quiet and kept to themselves; the type of guys (and they were almost always guys) who, even when they talked, were almost inaudible.  Now I have more female friends than I ever had before in my life, and even if a crowd is still not my favorite place to be I'm at least up for diving into one for a while.  In fact, my social calendar's gotten to the point that I'm starting to miss my old solitary stretches a bit.  But then when I finally do get some time to myself I usually grow lonely surprisingly quickly unless I have a task to keep myself focused on.  My video games are gathering dust, and it seems that the more I read and write, the more those hackneyed plots suffer by comparison.

The downside of not having those quiet times is that I feel like I'm not creating enough.  I mean, I'm writing these blog entries, and the daily entries beyond them, but I'm not really telling stories or making music of my own.  Not that the world doesn't have enough stories or music, but I still feel like I have something to say that's unique to me.  Otherwise I'd be more than happy to just consume the great works of the world and just be a programmer for the rest of my life.  But every so often I'll get a song stuck in my head, and know that I can't pull it up on iTunes because it's never been written or performed.  Or I'll get an idea for a character or a plot in my head, and I desperately don't want it to die there.  I think that's what I fear the most about death: dying with ideas in my head that I'll never be able to share with anybody.  Now maybe nobody'll be interested in hearing at least some of those ideas, but there has to be something worthwhile in that great clattering heap of thoughts that keeps me up at night and taunts me when I'm least able to write things down.  I've gotten some good feedback on some of the stuff I've written, and I'd like to go further with it.

I'm definitely planning on getting back to revising my novel this weekend.  The longer I spend on it, the easier it'll be to keep going, so I want to really plug away at it when I get the chance.  I'm looking at a big stretch of Sunday afternoon in particular that should be able to get me off to a good start.  I've taken a few passes before, but the only time I've had the momentum to go all the way through it was when I was getting my revised sections critiqued by friends.  The story still needed another draft at that point, but the fact that I committed myself to a series of deadlines really helped me stay motivated.  Maybe I should set a schedule for my revising, but I don't know what kind of pace would be realistic for me to meet without falling behind and getting discouraged.  That's even more of a question mark because I'm about to officially start my marathon training next week.  Now THERE'S something that has a set schedule I need to stick to.  But then again running is something that's much easier to break down into discrete units of achievement, since there isn't any creativity involved.  There's a psychological aspect to it, but it's not on the same level as creating a whole world and making sure that everything in it fits organically.  That's no excuse though.  If I'm going to get this revising done, a schedule is the only way I know to make it work.  Now I just need to find the time to create one...

Two Staten Island Lives

I spent this afternoon in Staten Island, visiting women who straddled both ends of the spectrum of life.

The first was my cousin, who just turned 11 days old today.  No matter how many babies I see, I still can't get over how tiny everything is about them.  Tiny nose, tiny mouth, tiny hands with tiny fingers that have little itty bitty fingernails at the ends of them.  She was sleeping for most of the time that I, my wife, and my parents were there, but every so often her eyes would blink open in a flash of brilliant blue, or her arms would stretch wide as her mouth opened into a wide, toothless yawn.

I won't lie: even though I'm fully aware of how much precious sleep and time and money it would cost me, I would love to have a baby in my life.  My wife isn't ready yet, and I completely understand: we've just gotten married and we'd like to spend some time alone together before starting a family.  Plus, for reasons financial and otherwise, we really should have more stability in our lives before introducing a child into the picture.

Looking at that baby today, I wondered what type of person she'd turn into as she grew older.  What dreams will she have?  What type of music will she listen to?  How will she get along with her parents?  Her life is still wide open, filled with endless possible permutations to come.  My parents were telling her parents stories of when I was very young.  Some of it I remembered (my memories go back to about when I was 2 1/2) and some of it I didn't.  They also talked about my younger brother, and I can remember him all the way back to the hospital nursery, where I saw him for the first time through the glass.  Now he's taller than me, and living his own life all the way out in California.  That's something my four-year-old self probably never could've fathomed while staring at the little sleeping creature in the blue hat all those years ago.

After we left my cousin's place, we headed next to a rehab center not too far away, where my 87-year-old aunt is in the process of recovering from a stroke.  We found her propped up in bed, resting her eyes at first but awakening at the approach of company.  She looked better than the last time I saw her, but still nowhere near where she had been before the stroke.  She hasn't regained the power of speech yet, although she tries to form words with her lips and vocal cords---words that are mostly undone by the fact that she still doesn't have much control over her tongue.  Even without words, she's still surprisingly alert.  I could see in her eyes the recognition of who we were and at least some of what we were saying, and also the frustration at her own inability to communicate.

I've known my aunt all my life, and spent many a day as a toddler running around her house while my mom and dad were out working.  Every Christmas Eve we went to her house for an endless stream of seafood, followed by opening presents no earlier than midnight, and getting home in the wee, blurry hours of the morning.  (There were times as a kid when I wondered whether Santa had already come while we were out)  When I got out of grad school and started my first job, I became her tenant, living in the second story of her house for a couple of years---the same rooms where my grandparents had once lived, and where my mother grew up.  She was always quick to offer her opinion, and she had a great store of wisdom to share from her life that led from her childhood as the daughter of immigrants to her acquiring her C.P.A. and eventually becoming a dean at the nearby college.  She was a local celebrity, and knew a veritable Who's Who of Staten Island's movers and shakers.  She was still threatening to take me down to the barber's to have my long hair shorn off a few weeks ago, before everything changed...

I looked at her lying there, white hair beginning to show as the results of her last salon visit grew out.  I wondered what my life would be like at her age (or my parents' life, for that matter).  I've had multiple members of my family tell me, "Don't get old," over the years, but I've never been thrilled by the prospect of the alternative, either.  There will still be generations to come, though, and we all need to make room for them sooner or later.  I only hope that I can live on in their memories...and that those memories, on the whole, are pleasant.

O Spider-Man

Okay, before I begin this entry let me get one thing straight: I haven't seen the new Amazing Spider-Man movie yet.  In fact, I'm still not sure I'm going to catch this one while it's in theaters.  The reviews so far have been pretty mixed from what I've seen, and I'm already a couple of movies behind this summer since I still need to catch Moonrise Kingdom and Brave (and The Hunger Games, if I can find a place where it's still playing).

The most important thing keeping me on the fence about the new Spider-Man movie, though, is how unnecessary it seems.  It's not that I wouldn't like to see another Spider-Man movie...  I wasn't head over heels about the first set of movies when they started coming out a mere ten years ago, but they had some great aspects to them, and I caught all three in theaters (although the third one was stretching it a bit).  What bothered me about those movies was all the angst and brooding they brought to a character who really would be better off without it.  Sure there's the whole morality play of the origin story, with Peter Parker callously ignoring the criminal whose capture could have saved his Uncle Ben's life.  (Ooh, I'm sorry, did I spoil that for you?  Are you among the handful of people in this country who haven't seen that play out yet either in the comics or on the screen?  Well then maybe the new movie is for you after all)  But by and large Peter Parker is a wiseass: a guy who cracks jokes while fighting for his life.  Maybe it's a defense mechanism, but it's a hell of a lot more fun than watching Tobey Maguire brood all over the place.  He's not tortured, he's neurotic!  In a sense that makes him more of a New Yorker, because lord knows how much harder it would be to get by in this city if we didn't have our senses of humor.

So now the new movie, from all accounts I've heard, is not only going to bring back the brooding, but it's going to bring back the origin story as well.  The origin story that I first read over two decades ago in my grandparents' basement from a volume called The Origins of Marvel Comics.  (I wish I knew what happened to that book over the years; besides Spider-Man it also had Thor, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Dr. Strange... man those were good times)

Granted, there are new actors this time, and they're actors I've enjoyed in the past.  Andrew Garfield is great at getting emotion across without overselling it, and he pulled off a flawless American accent in The Social Network (although he is NOT AT ALL a nerdy outcast type).  Emma Stone is continuing the Sony decree that all redheaded actresses playing Spider-Man love interests must become blonde, and vice-versa (see Kirsten Dunst and Bryce Dallas Howard; I've heard that Stone is actually a natural blonde, but how many people know that?).  Then there's Sally Field and Martin Sheen as Aunt May and Uncle Ben, to remind baby boomers how old and close to the grave they are (or, alternatively, because some executive thought the characters should be younger and more attractive...sigh).

The point I'm trying to get to, in my usual long-winded way, is do we really need to see this story play out again over the course of half a movie yet again?  It doesn't even sound like the writers spent a lot of time planning out what comes after...some business with the Lizard, from the sound of it, which I guess could be interesting if they gave the relationship between Parker and Curt Connors more time to develop, but that's not what I've been hearing from the critics.

Maybe I'm relying too much on critical opinion here.  I took a film class once where I was told not to read any movie reviews at all, and just form my own opinions about what I was seeing.  And I'll admit that there have been times when I went into a movie bracing for the worst based on what I'd heard from critics, only to be pleasantly surprised.  But what bothers me so much about the reviews I'm seeing this time around is that they're confirming all of the issues that I was already worried about, and unlike some Hollywood blamemongers I don't believe that critics actually have vendettas against certain projects (or even the power to sink multi-hundred-million-dollar movies if they did).  Maybe if I had the time to watch more movies this summer I'd be more inclined to give ol' Spidey a try, but like I've been saying over and over here, time isn't exactly something I've got buckets of right now.

Details, and the Devil therein...

A shaggy, wet-haired man in his early thirties sits on a comfy old couch, a large chrome laptop covering his legs.  He's wearing an indigo t-shirt with a white drawing of Super Mario on it; the shirt used to fit a little better, but he's dropped some weight since those days.  Below his feet the floor pulses with the sound of dance music from his neighbors in the apartment below.  In his own, cluttered apartment, the sound of Patsy Cline starting up "I Fall to Pieces" can be heard from the stereo as his wife waits in the kitchen for the fish to marinate; she's gazing into her own laptop on the granite countertop.  When the man looks over his shoulder at her, she gives him a wry smile and walks towards him, gently chiding him about what he's been writing about her on his blog.

I've noticed that my writing doesn't tend to have a lot of physical detail in it, especially in the first drafts.  Part of that is because setting the scene doesn't usually interest me as much as getting the characters doing stuff and interacting with each other, but part of it because of my limitations: I don't have a great deal of descriptive power, even though Iike to think I have a decent-sized vocabulary (although I've been trying to expand my vocabulary lately by studying SAT words---among other language-related stuff---on a nifty little memorization site called Memrise).  The specific words for things often elude me, or are downright unknown.  Specific articles of clothing, especially women's clothing, and the materials that they're made of, are common offenders, along with architectural features both interior and exterior.  I'm also often stuck when I'm trying to describe a very specific emotion, and that tends to be the trickiest situation of all, since unlike the other cases I'm not always certain that the word I'm looking for actually exists.  It's times like that when I have to resort to evoking the feeling through description, and being evocative is always a tricky business, since signifiers can mean different things to different people when they're not part of an established shorthand.  Now here's the point where I'm supposed to go citing specific examples of this phenomenon, but it turns out that that's something else I'm not terribly good at, especially when I'm trying to write extemporaneously and don't really feel like it's worth the energy of doing research.

I'm also hesitant to put more detail than necessary into my stories for pacing reasons, as I alluded to earlier.  I don't often enjoy hearing long descriptions of clothing or food (I'm looking at you, George R. R. Martin, although you certainly redeem yourself many times over for it), and being too specific about a character's appearance can even make it harder to get the reader into the story, since it'll be that much harder to relate the writer's creations to themselves or people they know (or at least that's been my experience as a reader sometimes).  I've found that, in my favorite stories, a few very particular, well-chosen details can be the most effective of all.  If you see a three-legged dog with a human femur in its mouth, do you necessarily even need to know its breed?

I need to do more exercises like the first paragraph of this entry, drawing from my actual surroundings to practice description.  It's a muscle that can grow stronger in time, but it needs to be used regularly if it's going to develop properly.  Then we get to the issue of finding time again.  I read an interesting blog entry on the New York Times website this morning about people (and New Yorkers in particular) feeling busy all the time, but that busyness being a product of their own ambitions and priorities, not anything born of necessity.  The tone of the article felt like the author was oversimplifying things a bit, but it still gave me pause.  Should I be taking more time to just sit back and enjoy life, instead of rushing from one scheduled task to the next?  I probably have more free time than a lot of people, but there are still so many things that I feel like I don't have enough time to work on, and there are always exciting events going on in the city that I feel like I'm missing out on because I don't have the time or the energy to head out every night to try and catch every single one of them.  All in all, I really can't say that I have many regrets at this point in my life though, and I feel blessed to be surrounded by an abundance of possible things to do.  Having all the time in the world but nothing to do with it would drive me insane (in fact, it's probably at the root of my concept of hell).

Writing vs. Running

I ran a 10K this morning up in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens.  It wasn't my best race, given that even by 8am in the morning when the race started the temperature was already at 86 degrees, and I'm one hell of a sweater.  Granted, I'm not sure anybody ran their best race today, since I finished pretty well in the pack.  It's actually my fastest 10K so far, unless you count any given 10 kilometers from the 15K I ran back in April when the temperature was actually reasonable and my miles went by 30 seconds faster.  (It feels weird to be measuring distance in miles when a race is in kilometers, but that's how we do things in this country, apparently)

Like I mentioned last time, running's been taking up a lot of my time in the past few years, and that's time that I could be spending writing and revising novels or short stories or anything else that I might be able to find a publisher for.  Sometimes it feels kind of selfish, since running (or at least running in races) is really something that I'll only ever really be doing for myself (unless I volunteer for a charity like Team for Kids, which is something I've been meaning to look into for a while now).  My writing is a hobby that I do in the hopes of someday reaching an audience, which might not be the most noble or useful cause in the world, but I'd certainly feel good about making somebody else's day a little more interesting.

So am I going to have to choose between the two, or sacrifice running in order to have enough time to focus on my writing?  No, I don't think I'm gonna do that.  I can already see me forcing myself to stare at a blank page endlessly during a dry period, trying to will creatures to life that just won't come.  Couldn't I spend that time better by running?  I mean, it's not like I'm constantly thinking up story ideas when I'm out jogging around the neighborhood, but I don't listen to music while I do it, either, and I think that ends up having a pretty calming effect on my mind.  I need that calmness: that break from the responsibilities of my job and my household and my family.  I mean, I enjoy all three of those parts of my life, but sometimes I'm seized with an anxiety that I can't quite quantify when I'm surrounded by them for too long at a time.  There may be medications for such a feeling, but I've always worried about the effect that psychology-altering drugs might have on my creativity and my personality.  As long as I can run though, or go lift some weights, or bang away at the piano, I have an immediate outlet for that anxiety.  Writing provides that sometimes, but the effect isn't always immediate, and there's often some higher-level problem solving involved.  I need things in my life that I can just do, finish, and then look back on and say, "I did this!" without feeling like I'm wasting my time (which may be part of the reason I've drifted away from video games over the years...  That's a story for another time though).

So I'll keep running, and I'll keep writing.  The writing may come more slowly, but at least I have my daily entries to give me something under my belt pretty often.  In fact, I just signed up for the monthly challenge for July on 750 Words, where I need to write the titular number of words every day of the month in order to win.  Gamification has worked out well for me in the past (thanks, Fitocracy), so I'm hoping it'll work for my writing as well.  Granted, I've tried and failed at one of these challenges before, but I've been on a good streak lately (with the exception of one very busy day), and I'm hoping to continue it for a good while longer.  There are badges on 750 words for as many as 365 consecutive days, but I'm not gonna hold myself to a mountain quite that tall just yet.  I'm just going to take this one day at a time, and see how far it gets me.

I'm a better runner than I was last year, and I think I'm a better writer than I was a year ago too, although obviously the second of these claims is a lot harder to quantify.  In both cases I'm pretty sure that I can get better if I just keep plugging away at it.

On Writing, not Writing, then Writing Again

Last night I was thinking about getting back into blogging, and maybe even blogging about writing, in order to get myself to write more, even if it's just writing about writing.  So I go to my long-neglected blog, and what do I find?  I had exactly the same idea almost exactly a year ago, and I never followed up on it.  At all.  Also, I'm cringing reading those words, wondering how this stranger from the past ever could have thought what he was doing was witty, or original.  Maybe that's too harsh, but that's how I felt skimming those words, unable to read more than a few at a time.  Maybe it's the hopefulness of it all that bothers me the most, knowing how little has been accomplished since then, like that statue of Ozymandias lying in ruins amid the endless desert.

It's not exactly like I've been idle since then, though.  I've moved to Brooklyn, run another marathon, changed jobs, GOTTEN MARRIED...  All those things too a lot of time and attention, and it's shown in how little I've watched TV or played video games over the past years.  It still doesn't feel like things have entirely settled down (there's another marathon coming up in November, after all), but I don't think I have quite so many major milestones ahead of me at the moment.

So should I try this crazy experiment again?  Will it end up the same way?  Yes, and god I hope not.  Why have I started to feel hopeful again?  Well, a lot of it has to do with the fact that a friend of mine introduced me to a site called 750 Words a few months ago, and it's given me an excuse to start writing again in a non-NaNo capacity.  I was given extra incentive by a writing course I took back in the spring that introduced me to the concept of "morning pages", where you write at three pages worth of whatever comes into your head first every day, just to keep yourself writing.  So far I've written over 40,000 words on it during about 50 not-all-consecutive days, although I can't say I'll be sharing those words with the world at large anytime soon.  I've been writing words more to get them out of my system than to speak to any particular audience, so I've spent many of them going on and on about topics too quotidian or inane to be worth anybody else's time, and in some cases I've written out thoughts too personal and/or specific for me to feel like letting loose on the world at large (where they'll immediately be swallowed up by the din of another million voices aching to be heard, but still...).

The only problem is, if I'm going to start writing for an audience again, it's going to slow my writing down, making these entries take longer to write and lowering the chances that I'll actually follow through with them.  I'm not going to force myself to vomit every single entry onto my blog, but there are a number of topics that have been swirling around my head that I'd like to work through on the page, including some thoughts on stories past and present that would do me some good to address.

It feels good to get all this out onto a page, and I'd definitely recommend morning pages in general and 750 words in particular (they have badges, too!) to anyone who may be reading this who's also writing-inclined.  And if you'd like to follow along with my little experiment, be warned: I haven't turned my inner editor off completely (I find that downright impossible, and I think it's made my rewrites less painful), but I'm not going to be going through everything I write with a fine-toothed comb to make sure it's actually worth reading or even grammatically correct.  (Granted, I don't suppose many bloggers do this anyways, but I digress)  I'll try to excise anything that's obviously me just trying to fill words, so not every published entry may make it all the way to 750, which is probably for the best.  And if you are reading, please feel free to go ahead and comment!  It always helps to know that I'm not just hurling all these words into the abyss.  Even so, the abyss is still better than keeping my ideas in my head, where they'll quickly fester and fade.  When they're on the page they have a way of multiplying, regardless of who ever actually sees that page.