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.