Vox Populi Vox Dei

It’s okay to be boring on Twitter.

Now, before I begin this blog post in earnest, I’d like to draw your attention to the quote over on the righthand side. It’s the same quote that adorns my oft-neglected Facebook page, and I chose it not only for its value and truth in of itself, but also because it came from one of the greatest cultural minds to emerge in Britain during the latter half of the twentieth century. A great mind, a great wit, and with graceful mastery of the English language, Stephen Fry is akin to the Oscar Wilde of our time, and I don’t think anyone with two ounces of intelligence would ever argue that.

But even Oscar Wilde occasionally just wanted to tell someone what he had for lunch.

(I’m not going to recount the latest Twitter tweetstorm over Mr. Fry. If you missed it – like I did, originally – I’d refer you to the brief article in the New York Times.)

Twitter has been called many things since its inception. When I sat down with a friend of mine and described Twitter and why she should use it, her response was an unimpressed “It sounds like a lot of inane prattle.”

Well, yes. That’s precisely what Twitter is. It’s the small talk of the internet. It’s a telephone game between the human race, a cocktail party or coffee house chat, notes passed in study hall – and a place where, occasionally, things of Great Import are shared and useful information is passed. Just as a normal conversation can sometimes take you to places you hadn’t expected, so Twitter does as well.

We are pack animals. Communication is key to our survival and well being. We want to share the inane, the simple, the unneccessary, because in bringing someone else into our everyday world and routine we are no longer alone. Even those of us fortunate in Significant Others can’t share every single minute and sometimes feel isolated when apart (whether the isolation is forced, as in travel, or intentional as in “honey, please leave me alone for a bit so I can get some writing done”). Humans, by nature, can only take so much isolation before the voices in our heads start telling us to name ceiling tiles.

Twitter is a vessel which allows us relief from solitude in a brief, easily accessible manner. It’s not a hive mind; there are arguments, discussions, differing viewpoints, idiots, saints, conmen, and above all, ordinary people who just want to share the fact that the Corner Bakery in Washington DC’s Union Station has absolutely fabulous hazelnut coffee that they’re sipping while composing a blog post on their laptops, riding the commuter rail to work.

No one really cares about my coffee, I know this. But I don’t care about half of what comes out of people’s mouths when they’re talking to me. That makes me sound cruel and misanthropic, but it’s true. And it’s true for you, too. Most of the time, you have no personal or vested interest in the subject matter being discussed by the person whose standing in front of you, prattling away. But what we do care about, most often, is the person themselves and the fact that this is information that – for whatever reason – they need to share. To rebuff them is unthinkable (well, for most polite folks) and hurtful. They want to share, and by listening and allowing them the time to share their information, you are making them feel important and valued, and that is what I care about, whether the subject matter piques my interest or not.

For those people who simply cannot stomach small talk and prattle, Twitter provides. You can block, you can stop following updates, scroll past updates that you’re not interested in, and simply disregard replies. For everyone of us that loves the human race with misty, rose-colored spectacles, there’s another that merely tolerates others for their own purposes, or prefers human contact in small, manageable batches so as not to feel overwhelmed. And that’s fine, too.

Twitter makes me feel connected to the whole of the human race, and shows me that every person can be just as interesting or as boring as I can be, myself. It de-mystifies and creates equality among peers more effectively than any other social measure or philosophy or political regime. It is the undiluted voice of the people, and guess what? The people are boring, stupid, interesting, wonderful, kind, evil, selfish, fantastic, and utterly amazing.

Sometimes at night, I can feel a little low. When the world is quiet and at rest, it can feel like I’m the only person left alive, somehow encased in a bubble of shadows and lamplight. It’s a trick of the mind, of course, but when you’re alone and sleep feels like the enemy, it’s disconcerting to say the least. But then I tap the screen of my Pre, bring up Tweed and see that there are people alive and well, discussing the inherent benefits of dental floss, worrying about a college final, posting links to political articles, passing on information about upcoming gigs and appearances, and perhaps describing where they’re going or what they’re eating or what video game they just achieved a new level on.

And it’s so innocent, so simple, so normal, so reassuringly boring that I know for certain that everything’s okay, it will continue to be okay, and I can close my eyes and sleep well, knowing that I’m not alone in the vastness of the world.

By the way, this coffee really is delicious.

Life Essay: Crabapples

"Why do they call them crabapples, Grandma?"

They're small, and denser than I think apples should be. There's a tree on the edge of the woods. The fruit falls and the deer come out to pick it off, then eye up the vegetable garden that Pappy's fortified with wire and noisemakers. "There's deer in the yard, Wayne," she calls.

"Snake'll get 'em," comes the reply from the living room. Pappy's engrossed in bass fishing. I've promised to go out later and help him salt slugs. I'm not afraid of the garter snake that patrols the border between the vegetable garden and the gravel drive.

"They're called crabapples, sweetie, because they're so bitter they make you crabby if you eat 'em!" My grandmother, a diminutive, hunched figure in pastel polyester with salt and pepper hair and the best cookie jar on the east coast, chuckles to herself and opens the basement door to check on the laundry. I don't go into the basement much, the stairs are steep to my eyes, and it's dark and musty and smells like a cave. It's always clean, but it's a proper cellar, no modern finished basement in that house.

Still, there's something alluring that draws me when Pappy's in his workshop, constructing intricate fish hooks with bait and whittling bits of scrap wood into hand-shaped back-scratchers. They're handy to have around, he says. And with my grandfather, the pun was always intended.

He died my senior year of college, in late May. His funeral was held on April first, April Fool's Day, and that's how we knew it was his time. It's one of the reasons I still cling to a tenuous belief in God. My grandmother had a few more years left, and I didn't write to her like I should have, though I called her from my hospital room in Baltimore (see relevant entry from November, 2008) when she broke her hip and was admitted to a hospital in Pennsylvania. She passed away earlier this year, close to the time Pappy had left us, and again I half-wondered if maybe there might be some sort of God after all.

I shouldn't have been, but I was shocked to learn my grandmother hadn't been living in the cherished house on Mifflin Street in Johnstown, but it made sense: the house was tiny, being an old-fashioned duplex, angular and cramped, and the stairs were steep and treacherous.

I remember running up and down those stairs at breakneck speeds. There was non-skid lining on the stairs. It was brown, rubber, and had raised ridges to catch the soles of your shoes so you wouldn't slip. It hurt to run up and down the stairs, which we always suspected was a secondary motive. "My feet hurt!" "Stop running down the stairs so much."

In my mind's eye, I still pictured the two of them there: Pappy with his suspenders, shiny bald head and sharp eyes ready to tweak your nose when you weren't paying attention, and Grandma in her thick, wing-collared polyester, fussing about the kitchen or the basement in her quiet way, singing her favorite hymns to herself.

When it rained, the house smelled like rain and earth and flowers and wood. When it was nice out, the house was crisp and bright and you could nearly taste the sunshine in the open windows as it lit up bright columns of dust motes in front of the old standing radiators and shag carpet in the bedrooms. Old things never felt dusty or decayed, though there were relics from nearly every decade of the twentieth century to be found.

My imagination found fertile ground there in the house with its oddly shaped rooms and quirks, in the lush woods that surrounded us and the bounty of nature that sprung up everywhere - from neighbors gardens to the big hilly park in front of the house to the bordering woodlands, we were surrounded and embraced by living green things.

It was easy to believe in fairies and spirits and the unknown, there was such a strange heaviness to the mountain air. When my grandmother began knitting something for a baby unbidden, you knew someone in the family was pregnant before they did. When someone pointed to the kitchen window and told you how a ball of lightning - not a ball, a bolt - had appeared and dissipated before a major storm, you believed them. Not just that they think the saw it - you believed it truly existed. It was a place where six impossible things before breakfast was not out of the realm of possibility.

The house of my grandparents still lives in my memory, as do the games my cousins and I played as children, the times we spent together, and the sights and smells of those summers in my childhood. The details find themselves on paper in the strangest of places. A scene between two sisters in a West Virginia town in one partially-written manuscript has them drinking coffee and talking about loss over a vinyl tablecloth much like Grandma's, on a table much like Grandma's, near a window with yellow lace-trimmed curtains and a potted aloe plant much like Grandma's. A woman makes tea on a stove while she thinks of how her life is vanishing in pieces like loose hair down a drain, and the stove she leans on to cry is much like the stove my grandmother cooked on, with its white enameled metal and finicky burners.

A little girl breathes in night air that tastes of wood smoke, damp earth, and stardust while laying in the grass beside a bed of tiger lilies and a crabapple tree, watching the slow lazy rise of summer's last fireflies. It was me once, and it gets to be another little girl, living the memory through words on a page in a book that she may have noticed while hiding in the library to cool off in the air conditioning on a hot summer day...

...but that's another memory, and another essay in its own time. For now, I'll leave with one solid piece of advice gleaned from those summers I spent as a child at my grandparents' house in Johnstown:

Don't eat crabapples. They taste absolutely awful.

A Non-Techie's Review of the Palm Pre

I resisted a cell phone for a very long time. The last of the twenty-somethings to obtain one, when I finally cracked under pressure and bought my phone, I had three criteria: 1) Preferably the same carrier as my sister, given that's who the majority of my calls/texts would likely be to, 2) The carrier who would charge me the least up front, because of my terrible credit (who in their right mind gives an eighteen year old a credit card and expects them to have decent credit by the time they're twenty-seven?).

Additionally, I wanted a phone that would allow me easy access to email. I opted for a BlackBerry. Which would have been just fine, except I opted for the BlackBerry Pearl, as it was smaller. The demonic soul who sold me this phone at Best Buy swore to me the only difference was the size and the keyboard.

He lied. There are a lot of differences between other BlackBerry models and the Pearl. Notably, they work. The Pearl doesn't. Anyway, this isn't a review of the shit-tastic piece of scrap metal the Pearl is. I doubt that needs to be stated again; it's pretty self-evident.

So my birthday rolls around this year. I'm under a two-year contract, but Sprint is rewarding me for one year by giving me a discount on a new phone (with the hitch of signing another two year contract - which is totally fine by me, as I adore Sprint's customer service, they only charged me $150 up front, which they then refunded, and it's my sister's carrier).

My boyfriend - an avid iPhone user - asked me what I'd like for my birthday. "A new goddamned phone" was the answer I think all of you could have guessed. I scroll through all the available new phones, glare over at my Pearl, and opt for the newest, fanciest, sleekest piece of equipment you an apparently buy that isn't an iPhone. I asked him for a Palm Pre.

I read the techie reviews, from Gizmodo to Forbes to the online Palm communities and back again. I thought "Ooo, fancy pants" and asked for the phone. My lovely boyfriend delivered all of my birthday wishes: the phone, a nice dinner at La Sandia (in Tyson's - I recommend it for everyone who likes Mexican cuisine. Cuisine, mind you, not take-out Tex-Mex. Try the pork), and a quiet weekend at the beach (yes, he is officially awesome and a half).

So, I've had the Palm Pre for nearly two months now, and have used it sufficiently to provide what I feel is adequate review, from a normal person who simply uses her phone and doesn't review tech gadgets for a living. This is just a basic once-over, it isn't an iPhone vs. Pre match (let's be honest: by virtue of its app catalogue alone, iPhone's got the Pre beat (so far)). I'll draw some comparisons, but I haven't spent much time with the iPhone, only fondling it when my boyfriend isn't looking. Which is seldom.

THE AWESOME BITS

1) This is a very pretty phone. It's sleek, virtually seamless, smaller and easier to handle than the iPhone. And by "easier to handle", I mean of course "fits in a girl's jeans pocket much easier", though it's still fairly bulky in the pocket. This leads me to not carry the phone if I'm not carrying a purse, which drives the boyfriend up the damn wall. "I bought you the freaking thing so you'd carry your phone with you! Carry it! All times! Gaaaaaah!" I merely look at him with the pitying look a college professor might give a five year old trying to understand special relativity: Women and their accessories/necessities is an area best not ventured into by the male mind.

2) The multi-tasking is nice. I'm not a particularly busy person, but I am an extremely impatient person. While I will sit and wait for a Twitter link to load, it's nice to be able to click it, then switch back to my friends timeline in Tweed, then flip over and watch the YouTube clip while waiting for a blog link to load.

3) The camera's great, very nice quality photos, for the most part. But the camera app is the best part of it. While the Pre's a touchscreen, the photo doesn't "snap" until you take your finger off the camera icon. So you can hold it down and flip the phone around to take a picture with you in it easily. But the really nice part is that the app doesn't load the photo, and there's no lag between snapping photos, giving it very nearly the same speed as a film camera.

4) While it might be morally ambiguous, the fact that the Pre can sync to iTunes is pretty awesome. I'm not a big iTunes fan, but there's not really a viable alternative (yet), and to not have to indivudally shove .mp3's onto a memory card (an easily misplaceable memory card and adaptor) is huge (for someone who easily misplaces small things like memory cards and adaptors and flash drives and keys and her asthma inhaler).

5) The Pandora app. They basically took the same app as the iPhone app, only changed the buying option from iTunes to Amazon (which is...eh. It's acceptable out of necessity, I suppose, but it irks me that Amazon has no back up structure for purchased .mp3 files). Which brings me to...

6) Ease of switching individual files. USB Drive mode is a righteous and beauteous thing of glory. I <3 USB Drive Mode. Yes, I less than three it, that's how fond of it I am.


THE BITS THAT IRK ME

1) I mean, it's to be expected with a smartphone, but the battery life irks me. I know there's technological limitations with batteries, but I'd have loved to see an innovative cell phone battery to go along with the innovative WebOS - and for that battery to be standard. Sure, I can buy a new fancy battery that's compatible, but the stock battery overheats as it is (especially talking on the phone too long - which is something that really bothers me about smartphones in general - phones are for talking, why am I burning my fingers for using the phone for its intended purpose?), and I don't bloody want to spend another $45 and up on a new battery so my phone doesn't drain faster than a bottle of Hennessy in Kanye West's house.

2) The price of the Touchstone charger. It's twice the price and change of the iPhone dock. I know it's all fancy and cool, but come on! Cut me some slack here - I'm with Sprint because it's cheap, what makes you think I've got that much extra to burn to buy the special back for the special charger?

3) Which brings me to Sprint: 1) It's bad enough to have to dig out unwanted programs on a PC I buy. I do not want to not have the option to uninstall a freaking NASCAR app when I could give two flying shits about NASCAR and all it's doing is taking up space on my phone's hard drive. 2) When the Googlemaps app works better than your built-in GPS navigation, you have issues.

4) Sprint Navigation needs a whole irk number of its own. Googlemaps works faster, pinpointing my location using the location services on my phone that Sprint Navigation also uses, yet Sprint Navigation seems to surrender on cloudy days, Mondays, sick days, gray days, bright days, and the occasional day of fasting or when the wind is in the east. It sucks, basically. Use Googlemaps. Though that won't help if you can't tell north from south when trying to get back from a little historic town after antique shopping and forcing your boyfriend to go with you into the store packed to the brim with fairy statues, dolls, costumes, and stuffed unicorns (sorry, honey).

5) The "app store". If the app store were a real, physical place, it would occupy the bottom half of the Wal Mart bargain bin. A note to developers: It ain't the iPhone. We're hard up for apps, and charging $1.99 for every two-bit piece of junky code you can cobble together that's hacked from an iPhone app and only half functions ain't gonna get a new user to jump up for joy to buy a Pre. It's going to make them scratch their chins and think "Hey, AT&T might equate customer service with rakes and heated coals, but the iPhone at least has some decent apps, and the majority of them are free..." The Pre is giving you the chance at a whole new market, developers. Potentially. It's in your hands whether it explodes into glory or disintegrates into a place that takes up a rung somewhere below Goodwill and flea market (mostly trash but with the occasional item that you think "I may have use for this one day" but never wind up using for anything other than holding stray pennies).


LOVE-HATE

1) The keyboard. On one hand, I like that it's not a side keyboard. I'm sure that would make it more efficient, but it's kinda different and I dig that. And the roundness to the buttons and raised home key indicators makes typing with both your thumbs a valid option. On the other hand, it's really fucking tiny. The inverted keyboard on the Pearl was a bitch, but the smart software made up for that. What the Pre needs is a quick spell check button for the inevitable mistypes.


All in all, it's a good smartphone. It's not the iPhone, but then it hasn't had the time on the market the iPhone has had. It certainly beats other smartphones on the markets on a lot of fields. It might not beat a BlackBerry for business interests, or an iPhone for personal entertainment, but it fits a nice niche in the middle for people like me - I don't do a lot of gaming on my phone, or do a lot on my phone other than tweet, check email, browse news, and listen to music - who may use the phone sparsely compared to other smartphone users, but who delight in discovering new capabilities and dimensions that a smartphone can add to their lives.

I'm rather fond of mine.

Humbled.

I heard the news about the Nobel Peace Prize that morning while brushing my teeth, and it seems I had the exact same reaction just about everyone around the country had, including the Prize's recipient.

"Whaaaa...?"

My first thought: "Why? What for?"
My second thought: "Really?"
My third thought: "Why?"
My fourth: "Maybe he'll politely refuse. Doesn't seem to make sense."

But the more I think about it, the more I find myself warming to the idea. I began to accept it for what it was: political, yes, but also a death knell. And I found myself wholeheartedly approving of the philosophical death it foretells: Realpolitik.

Whossa whassat, you ask? It's a foreign policy, translated as "Realism" here in the United States, made most famous by folks such as Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and Condoleeza Rice. It's a theory of international relations that has hung on by its toenails since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

If you want my honest to God opinion, it's what started the Cold War to begin with. It's also the reason (okay, one of many) we had a second, bloody, World War.

Realpolitik functions around a simple, if somewhat cynical, principle: All nations act for their own self interest. Which is a fairly accurate statement. However, the policy adopted under this school of thought is defensive. One might argue that it's aggressive - but if you examine policies enacted by administrations under realpolitik-lovin' administrations, you'll find that all aggressions are filed under "D" for "Defense of our freedom/nation/oil/free trade/apple pie".

Defensive international politics is a lot like defensive driving. It's a concept that sounds great on paper, but in practice it creates a lot more danger than it helps avert.

My boyfriend and his friends tell each other not to drive safely, but to drive successfully. And with that, I begin to wonder if he knows more about international politics than most folks, and he was an art major.

What so-called "Liberalism" - the opposite school of thought to "Realism", which focuses on international coalitions and trade regimes and the importance of the international economy - represents is the same concept: Don't negotiate defensively. Negotiate successfully. Walk softly, but carry a very large wallet behind you. That's right: wallet.

We don't need a stick anymore, folks. We need money. Industry. Cash flow. Trade alliances. Bind nations together in an interlocking economy and you do not have wars. It is then within every nation's self-bloody-interest to play nice with their neighbors. Who were the main players in the two biggest wars to ever erupt over the face of our planet? Germany and France. What two countries can now no longer survive without the economy of the other? Germany and France. Why? The European Union, devised specifically to make Germany stop invading other fucking countries.

Establishing these institutions takes time. It takes patience, and it takes dialogue, negotiation, mediation, willing participation, international coalitions. This is a concept that President Obama understands. This is a goal he is working towards on the international stage: weaving nations closer together to end conflict, and to put our nation at the head of this process, because it is in our best economic, and our best defensive interest.

Defensive interest? Yes, that's what I said. Consider the following: Some drunk brute picks a bar fight with you. He rears back his fist to punch you. If you say "if you punch me, I'm going to punch you back harder" what do you think the reaction is going to be? Is he going to whimper and run away? No, you got his blood up. He's going to punch you anyway, damned be the consequence.

But if you say to the man: "Look. Punch me if you like. But know that if you punch me, all the money in your checking account, all the money in your bank account, everything you possess of value is going to vanish the moment you throw that punch. You will not be able to drink fresh water. You will not be able to fuel your car. You will not be able to heat your home or buy food or bake bread. You will be penniless and alone, and everyone will turn their backs to you when you ask for help."

Sure, they might throw the punch. But do you think they'll ever throw a second one? If you want to nip a conflict in the bud, you aim for the wallet, not the face, you see.

The President was humbled to accept this award, but he didn't refuse it. Yes, his rhetoric is good, it's solid, it's hopeful. He has made great strides in progressive politics from the moment he won the nomination. But he is humbled, and he should be. The world is dangerous. People don't like each other. Someone's itching to start throwing punches. He has a lot of work ahead of him, and each and every single step is going to be a struggle.

It's a long, hard road. Let's give the man some encouragement.

Entertainment, Creativity, Politics and the Art of Boycotting

I really don't play video games like I used to. For one, I can't afford it, and that's just on top of lack of free time and living with a really tiny television. So it wasn't until I checked my Twitter feed a few minutes ago and saw my boyfriend's trepidation over buying a copy of the new "Shadow Complex" game that I heard of the issues involved in its release.

The controversy surrounding the game lies in Orson Scott Card's involvement, as the author is a well-known political advocate against same-sex marriage. My boyfriend's resolution centered around the sentiment of "even bad men can create good things." Which is a fair point of view for people like us, that are on the other side of the issue, who believe in equal civil rights for everyone, not dependent on sex, sexual preference, age, or race.

But.

I'm going to say something here that's likely to anger some folks, but I'm going to say it anyway (the irony of free speech is not lost on me): Orson Scott Card is not a bad man, folks. He's not.

Do I agree with him? No. Hell no. Do I think his politics and views are outdated, close-minded, and incendiary? Yes, I do. But I can say the same thing of many people who disagree politically and ethically with me, and that does not necessarily make them bad people. Disagree, do no demonize (except in jest, but then only if it's really damn funny).

Here's the rub: Free Speech means people are free to speak their minds. It means people are going to say things that anger you. People are going to say things that offend you, make you sick, annoy you, inspire you, absolve you, and make you cry. The beauty of free speech is that you have the freedom to respond. You can say things to anger people, to inspire them, to move them to tears.

I do not politically and socially agree with Orson Scott Card. But I do respect his ability as a writer, and I love me some Ender's Game. But if you can't bear to read one word the man has written, by all means, don't buy his books. If you feel guilty for supporting someone so opposed to your ideals, then compensate by making a donation to a group that supports it. It's up to you to resolve that issue how you're most comfortable with.

To me, he makes a product that I enjoy. I also believe he has a right to do what he wants with his money that he earns through providing products that I, as a consumer, enjoy, and that he has a right to say what he wants. Just as I have a right to do with my money what I want to do, and just as I have a right to say whatever I want to say.

Look, I'm writing a book. If it gets published as I hope it will, whatever success my book meets with is not going to change or alter my political and social opinions or the vocalization of them. If there is someone out there who just steams at the thought of my supporting same-sex civil unions, or supporting a government-sponsored public health plan, or supporting the right to choose (all fairly incendiary issues), and can't bring it within themselves to buy my book because of my politics, well, then, that's their right. But it's also my right to keep on writing, and keep on sticking to my beliefs as my personal conscience dictates.

Fiction, entertainment, creativity are all very subjective and very personal. They can be used to convey political ideals - good Lord, look at The Immigrant (I will never see canned meat the same way again). I believe everyone's ideas have a right to be heard, seen, discussed and mulled over. So don't buy a book that offends you, but don't whinge when your local library buys a copy.

Also, boycotting is an ungainly beast to manage. I'm all for boycotting the big stuff, where it'll count. But boycotting this particular video game isn't going to do much in the big arena. It may be your personal choice not to buy it, and that may make you feel vindicated - and that's good -but understand you're not going to change Orson Scott Card's politics. Boycotts are chancy tools, need to be incredibly well-organized, and must pack a serious punch in order to be effective.

If you think Orson Scott Card is having so much of a personal influence on the politics of same-sex unions that he is literally denying you your civil rights, then by all means organize a boycott. But you will have to hit hard and hit widespread. You will have to get every single person who agrees with you to not only boycott anything written by Card, but any products from any publishers that carry Card's works. No Marvel comics. No Tor books. No Microsoft Game Studios. In order to have an effect on Mr. Card's income, you are going to have to have an effect on the income of his publishers and agents in order to get them to drop him.

Are you sure this is the route you want to go down? It is not wholly unprecedented, in the case of the Ford boycott. But you have to be ready and willing to accept the right of the people who boycotted Harry Potter, or more pointedly, The Golden Compass. Phillip Pullman makes no bones about his views on organized religion, and while I've never read anything in Orson Scott Card's works (what I've personally read of them, which is certainly not all) that offended my opinions in favor of gay rights, even with my open-minded view of religion The Amber Spyglass made me squirm a little. I downright knew people were going to be upset over it. But I fully support Pullman's right to write it, and my right to purchase, read, and enjoy it.

Look, if it offends you? Boycott to your heart's content. Seriously. Have at it. But understand that it's not the first and certainly will never be the last thing written or published or programmed or painted or drawn or glued together that is going to say something political that you might not like. And there are going to be people out there who write or publish or glue or paint or sew or program who are going to believe in things that you do not.

And they have the right to say it even while you have the right not to listen.

The Joy of Writing

Primordial soup.

That is what the creative portion of my brain is comprised of. Actually, make that primordial soup created by a Supreme Being that suffers from acute ADD. And likes shiny things.

Oh, look, I found a paper clip on the floor. I wonder where that came from. I don't use paper clips at home. Where was I?

No, but seriously. Writing is hard. Very. Coming up with ideas? That's easy. Anybody can have an idea for a good book just as anybody can look at a blank room and decide what they want it to be. The trick is in the execution, and that's what takes skill, devotion, time, and a whole lot of blood, sweat, tears, cursing, coffee, tea with milk and honey, and the occasional bottle of Orangina.

That could be personal preference, but I think most people can get behind the fizzy wonder of Orangina. If you can't, get the hell off my blog.

Now, there are some misconceptions about writers and writing. The first is that there's a standard way. There isn't. You have to grit your teeth and get through it when they force you into a meat grinder of a process in school. And, fair enough, they do it because not everyone is a writer, but will need to write something halfway decent at some point in their lives, which usually winds up being a late night college bender where you're shoveling together a twenty-five page research paper on Nicaraugan politics at three in the morning when it's due in class at nine.

Uh, again, that might just be me.

Point is, there's no standard method. There's no process that's universal. There's a general shape to it, but writing is a highly unique process that differs vastly from individual to individual. You can't say "a writer writes every day" or "a writer stands on one foot while twirling a paperclip around a pencil and typing his manuscript with only his pinky finger." They've got about the same level of meaning, because you cannot generalize writers any more than you can painters or recording artists. Sound, words, oil, acrylic, guitar, prose, glue: they're all mediums from which someone creates, and everyone does it differently.

My writing process generally involves a lot of mental cataloging and disjointed notes. Occasionally something will occur to me like a flash in the pain, and I'm able to link up all those little disjointed bits into a story idea. But from there, after the general idea, I've learned that I need to have no restraints. I tried restraints. I tried working out an entire plot from beginning to finish and all it did was lock me down in frustration as I tried to futilely connect point A to point B when point A was going to be damned if it was going to go to point B because point B was such an asshole and why couldn't he be more like point C where all the really interesting plotty bits were going to happen? B was such a drag. Fuck B, A's going to connect to C, and B can just shove it up his ass if point D doesn't do it first.

As much as that sounded like a gay harlequin romance, that was actually the process I was trying to implement on an epic fantasy novel. It didn't work. It didn't construct a story so much as a massive epic writer's block wall of doom. I may have to get out the bulldozer if I ever go back to that story.

Now, some writers need that structure to fill in the blanks. I've learned that my plots are very much like my basset hound. They're gonna go where they want to go and you're gonna deal with it. Sometimes the story yanks me down the street in pursuit of a leftover piece of pizza, sometimes I have to yank a chicken bone out of my story's mouth, and sometimes I stand by idly waiting for it to just hurry up and pee on the damn tree already.

But this process leads me to wonderful places, if I'm honest. My current project was something unexpected that sprang from a combination of a first sentence I wrote years ago, an imagination stirred by exposure to worlds that live in other writers' heads, and a love of clockwork and magicians. Much like a cross-country journey, I have a destination in mind - a pin prick in the atlas with yellow highlighted lines leading away from it - but the experience is in the journey.

Sometimes the words flow like water from my fingertips into the computer. Sometimes I have to reach for a spoon and dig them out. Sometimes they surprise me by showing up with characters I never knew existed and using them to solve problems I didn't know I had. But, mostly, the wonder comes from the fact that these words, these characters, they live in the place in my mind that my story has unfurled in. But I have to let them loose some way; I have to have a release valve for the stories and people and places that pile up in my head, knocking to be set free.

The author's note at the beginning of The Color Purple is one of the truest things I've ever read. The estimable, skilled, wondrous Alice Walker thanks her characters humbly for showing up. And then she describes herself as an author and medium. That always struck me.

I think all artists are mediums - the voices for the ghosts of our own psyche. The ghosts that speak through me are the need for adventure and escape, the need to find wonder and worlds beyond the world already known. It's a pretty human ghost, mine, and sometimes stubbornly silent and sometimes distracted by shiny things.

Oh, look, I just found another paper clip. I wonder how that got there?

A side of Snake Oil with that?

I want to lose weight.

I am fully aware that this will require a) I stop taking the bus to and from work, b) I stop helping myself to the company provided donuts every Monday morning, c) I stop eating late at night and d) I put down the beer. Among other things.

I have not really made an effort to do any of these things, so I think it's obvious I'm not that desperate about my attached flotation device of a belly. When it gets to that point, I absolutely will stop making excuses and put my shoulder to the wheel of a better lifestyle. In fact, I think I'll go to bed early tonight so I can get up in enough time to walk to work instead of scrounging in the sofa cushions for spare change to make bus fare.

Why am I yapping about this? Because I went to check the weather online, and accidentally clicked on one of those annoying GET A FLATTER STOMACH ads, this one touting how many television shows it had been advertised on. It amazes me how much people still fall for the "As Seen on TV" routine. It just doesn't seem to get old.

This one is allegedly from "Jenni" - a housewife and mother who couldn't apparently find the time to get her ass on a treadmill and lose her pregnancy weight. Yes, losing that weight can be difficult, but I have friends who've done it. By making the time to get their asses on a treadmill and not sacrificing their diet for the sake of time management. It's a choice. It's a hard one, because being a new mom is a challenge in itself that leaves you little time to worry about weight, but it's still a choice. You really want it, you sit down and figure out how to do it.

She's pushing this remedy of Acai berries - which have been proposed to cure everything from diabetes to bad sleep and also apparently can help enlarge your penis, if you care to believe the claims. "She" is backing herself up by saying she heard of the remedy by watching Dr. Oz on Oprah.

Dr. Oz, folks, is a hack who sells information gleaned off the Real Age bullshit test and sells it to pharmaceutical companies. And he's the worst kind of hack - he has a valid medical degree from a reputable school and has done actual good surgical work and disease research. But, as can happen with hacks, he's tried to incorporate philosophy, religion, and mysticism into what should remain a purely scientific field of study. It's human nature to want an easy answer, to fit everything into a sphere that makes sense to us, even if it's based on faulty reasoning. Just because A looks like it connects to B doesn't mean that it does. And just because you don't understand why it doesn't, doesn't mean that there's some mystical force or deistic hand involved in the process.

Sure, some natural remedies work. But think of how much tincture or tea you had to drink and how you could have easily taken a simple pill. Modern medicine is rife with shiesters, yes, but so is the natural medicine field - even more so, I'd say, as it focuses on people's distrust of big companies and white lab coats.

The second part of Jenni the mom's magic weight loss formula is a cleanser pill. Jesus, people, if we're still buying this is as a viable alternative to exercise, there's something wrong with the human species. Of course it makes you loose weight, but it's on a temporary basis and its not weight you were going to carry around anyway - your body absorbs the majority of calories before the leftovers hit your colon. You're basically expelling quickly what your body would expel naturally in its own time, but it's not going to flatten your stomach. Your pants might fit better immediately, but that's just going to last until your next cheeseburger.

And all this business about toxins? Really? The South Park episode didn't cure that idiocy away? Your colon naturally has bacteria whose function it is to break the toxins down out of food. Your body has a natural filtration system - liver, kidneys, etc. Not to mention the biggest myth of all - this proposed buildup of material inside the colon. Doesn't actually happen. See, your colon sheds old cells about every three days, taking any harmful material with it.

The human body is remarkable. Just put good stuff into it, take care of it (in this case it's a do as I say scenario, not do as I do or else jelly donuts with powdered sugar would be the world's next trendy diet), and it will do what it needs to do to keep you healthy. Don't underestimate it by stuffing it full of Snake Oil concoctions. You're generally doing more harm than good.

By the way, I found all this information through a few searches in reputable places. WebMD. New York Times. Wikipedia (okay, that's debatable, but they generally have links to reputable places).

And now I'm going to get some sleep so I can get up early and take care of my amazing body by feeding it a proper breakfast and getting in a good walk before work.