Dave made a grilled cheese out of Muenster cheese and Pepper jack cheese and it's DELICIOUS. See picture to activate taste buds above:
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Newsflash!
Dave made a grilled cheese out of Muenster cheese and Pepper jack cheese and it's DELICIOUS. See picture to activate taste buds above:
BIG Blog Post
I must admit I recently experienced a bout of lost faith. It's difficult to say if this doubting phase is over, but I'll continue and try to explain anyhow.
For one thing, I was tired of writing. I started to see writing as getting in the way of all these other things I had to do.
Besides that, everything I was writing seemed bad.
Lastly, I spent a lot of time talking, which translated on some level to meeting my word quota.
Now, I find myself in a strange position, that which necessitates me admitting I was wrong (I hate doing this and usually avoid t at all costs). Writing, in actuality, never gets in the way of things I "have to do." If I feel that writing is cumbersome my priorities are out of whack somewhere. My vision got skewed (Does that phrase evoke a picture of an eyeball with a skewer in it, or is it just me?). Writing actually, when done properly, organizes my life. Writing is the one thing that gives me a sense of order (which is kind of madness, since I never know what I'm actually doing when I write).
I think I also was thinking too much. (That previous sentence=case in point. Excessive parenthesis are also an indicator).
Thinking is dangerous. Not in the "we would all be revolutionaries if we just took time to think" kind of way, but in a "thinking is bad for you" kind of way.
I know a lot of people who think as a substitution for action. It's easy to feel you're simplifying things, when in actuality you're over thinking them. (A strange contradiction, right? you're creating all this brain static and somehow imagine that intangible mess is cleaning up real life problems.) I know a lot of people who think to make themselves feel good. It's like thinking releases endorphins in their brains that make them feel they've accomplished something. If you're a philosopher, that's great. You have all the reasoning in the world to think, and think, and think. But even the philosopher, eventually, sits down and writes. I'd be willing to hedge my bets that you aren't a philosopher until you sit down and write. Right? You could be the world's smartest person, with the most interesting and profound ideas, but until you actually do something about them, you're on the same plane as a 13 year old getting stoned by herself for the first time.
Enough about that. On a different note, I've recently been having a hard time reconciling my existence in NYC when my family is three thousand miles away. These bouts of homesickness or anxiety happen to many people I'm sure. I remember when I went away to college. I felt horrible, really horrible, for the first four months, though I couldn't put my finger on why. The girl across the hall, who was from Ohio, talked constantly about her homesickness. I didn't understand it. I thought talking made things better, and this girl just talked and talked without it ever improving anything. It probably didn't strike me until about two years later that during that time period I was homesick. "Ohhhhhh," was the voice my brain made. "There was a word for it." And I was really homesick. I lost my appetite completely and probably dropped twenty pounds. It makes sense that you would lose things when you're homesick. Right? Your sense of place has been misaligned, meaning you don't know where things go anymore. My weight got misplaced; my understanding of Ohio girl was in a different cabinet, far away. I didn't understand why she was talking, and had no sympathy for her words. I don't remember how I responded to her but I remember being acutely bothered. Doesn't she have other things to fixate on? might have been my train of thought.
Now I wonder if I was bothered because I was insanely jealous. I might have seen her as my exact opposite. She could talk and talk about her problems without them ever getting better. I never said a word because I wasn't even cognizant that something was wrong. What's more, she was from Ohio, and had a car. She could jump in her vehicle and be home in four hours. Between me and my family stood a taxi cab, a five hour plane ride, and a two hour drive to Las Vegas, amounting to about $400 that I didn't have. My sympathies for this girl were nil.
Even if I'd recognized that we were experiencing the same feeling, it wouldn't have been easier on either of us. The worst part of homesickness is how solitary an experience it is.
Looking through notebooks and drawings from that time period, I notice that my journal entries were more organized than ever and rarely mentioned that I didn't feel well. But my drawings were all of far away places I had never been, and they didn't have any sense of perspective. Only on the most unconscious level did my homesickness come out, although it affected me on all fronts.
I don't think it's possible for adults to experience homesickness the same way that I did when I went away to college. Homesickness is for people who have known one place their entire lives, a place where there was order, where returning to it would make everything ok. As an adult you learn that rarely are things in such a state that "everything is ok." You learn to make your own home, to be comfortable in your own skin. I'll never again have the indefinable queasiness, the painful self-absorption, and listless self-awareness that accompanies homesickness. But I do think there's something worse as we get older. I think, as an adult, that homesickness gets replaced with regret.
This is all to say that writing has replaced my notion of home. It's where I return to find order, to see if everything's okay, and to try to fix it when things have gone awry. Symbolically writing represents how growing up means learning to be responsible for your own happiness. To extend this metaphor between writing and home, regret and homesickness, I find that not writing turns into an almost profound regret. The type of regret you cannot experience as a child or teenager, seeing how time hasn't started in a sense for you during those years. Everything accelerates as a child and teenager; it's only as an adult that time starts to slow down, speed up, oscillate, and become the slippery mercurial creature that we recognize it as. The recognition that time is not a constant, it's irrational and irreversible, creates a sort of anxiety that parallels the anxiety of homesickness, and writing as a way of taming anxiety turns into a way of stoppering regret, or at least taming it, perhaps even making up for the mistakes you made.
This has gotten long and I'm going to end now.
For one thing, I was tired of writing. I started to see writing as getting in the way of all these other things I had to do.
Besides that, everything I was writing seemed bad.
Lastly, I spent a lot of time talking, which translated on some level to meeting my word quota.
Now, I find myself in a strange position, that which necessitates me admitting I was wrong (I hate doing this and usually avoid t at all costs). Writing, in actuality, never gets in the way of things I "have to do." If I feel that writing is cumbersome my priorities are out of whack somewhere. My vision got skewed (Does that phrase evoke a picture of an eyeball with a skewer in it, or is it just me?). Writing actually, when done properly, organizes my life. Writing is the one thing that gives me a sense of order (which is kind of madness, since I never know what I'm actually doing when I write).
I think I also was thinking too much. (That previous sentence=case in point. Excessive parenthesis are also an indicator).
Thinking is dangerous. Not in the "we would all be revolutionaries if we just took time to think" kind of way, but in a "thinking is bad for you" kind of way.
I know a lot of people who think as a substitution for action. It's easy to feel you're simplifying things, when in actuality you're over thinking them. (A strange contradiction, right? you're creating all this brain static and somehow imagine that intangible mess is cleaning up real life problems.) I know a lot of people who think to make themselves feel good. It's like thinking releases endorphins in their brains that make them feel they've accomplished something. If you're a philosopher, that's great. You have all the reasoning in the world to think, and think, and think. But even the philosopher, eventually, sits down and writes. I'd be willing to hedge my bets that you aren't a philosopher until you sit down and write. Right? You could be the world's smartest person, with the most interesting and profound ideas, but until you actually do something about them, you're on the same plane as a 13 year old getting stoned by herself for the first time.
Enough about that. On a different note, I've recently been having a hard time reconciling my existence in NYC when my family is three thousand miles away. These bouts of homesickness or anxiety happen to many people I'm sure. I remember when I went away to college. I felt horrible, really horrible, for the first four months, though I couldn't put my finger on why. The girl across the hall, who was from Ohio, talked constantly about her homesickness. I didn't understand it. I thought talking made things better, and this girl just talked and talked without it ever improving anything. It probably didn't strike me until about two years later that during that time period I was homesick. "Ohhhhhh," was the voice my brain made. "There was a word for it." And I was really homesick. I lost my appetite completely and probably dropped twenty pounds. It makes sense that you would lose things when you're homesick. Right? Your sense of place has been misaligned, meaning you don't know where things go anymore. My weight got misplaced; my understanding of Ohio girl was in a different cabinet, far away. I didn't understand why she was talking, and had no sympathy for her words. I don't remember how I responded to her but I remember being acutely bothered. Doesn't she have other things to fixate on? might have been my train of thought.
Now I wonder if I was bothered because I was insanely jealous. I might have seen her as my exact opposite. She could talk and talk about her problems without them ever getting better. I never said a word because I wasn't even cognizant that something was wrong. What's more, she was from Ohio, and had a car. She could jump in her vehicle and be home in four hours. Between me and my family stood a taxi cab, a five hour plane ride, and a two hour drive to Las Vegas, amounting to about $400 that I didn't have. My sympathies for this girl were nil.
Even if I'd recognized that we were experiencing the same feeling, it wouldn't have been easier on either of us. The worst part of homesickness is how solitary an experience it is.
Looking through notebooks and drawings from that time period, I notice that my journal entries were more organized than ever and rarely mentioned that I didn't feel well. But my drawings were all of far away places I had never been, and they didn't have any sense of perspective. Only on the most unconscious level did my homesickness come out, although it affected me on all fronts.
I don't think it's possible for adults to experience homesickness the same way that I did when I went away to college. Homesickness is for people who have known one place their entire lives, a place where there was order, where returning to it would make everything ok. As an adult you learn that rarely are things in such a state that "everything is ok." You learn to make your own home, to be comfortable in your own skin. I'll never again have the indefinable queasiness, the painful self-absorption, and listless self-awareness that accompanies homesickness. But I do think there's something worse as we get older. I think, as an adult, that homesickness gets replaced with regret.
This is all to say that writing has replaced my notion of home. It's where I return to find order, to see if everything's okay, and to try to fix it when things have gone awry. Symbolically writing represents how growing up means learning to be responsible for your own happiness. To extend this metaphor between writing and home, regret and homesickness, I find that not writing turns into an almost profound regret. The type of regret you cannot experience as a child or teenager, seeing how time hasn't started in a sense for you during those years. Everything accelerates as a child and teenager; it's only as an adult that time starts to slow down, speed up, oscillate, and become the slippery mercurial creature that we recognize it as. The recognition that time is not a constant, it's irrational and irreversible, creates a sort of anxiety that parallels the anxiety of homesickness, and writing as a way of taming anxiety turns into a way of stoppering regret, or at least taming it, perhaps even making up for the mistakes you made.
This has gotten long and I'm going to end now.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Our Cats are the Best
Tueessday, my favorite day of the week. I don't have work or school which means that I sit at home and play with our cats and sell stuff on Craigslist. If you want to see a video starring me my friends and most importantly our CAT go to this link:
Cat by Design Video
Mmmm on that note the Highways album is out! I'll put up a link for downloading once I get the go-ahead.
I started my second short school assignment. We were discussing minor characters and their function in a narrative. Ford Maddox Ford says that “If you’re going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he’d better
be real enough that you can smell his breath.” With that in mind the function of a minor character is in a sense extremely important. If you can bring a minor character to life in a quick sentence or two, then you're really nailing two of the most important aspects of good writing: economy and vivid, unique detail. The minor character also has the ability, within those one or two sentences, to further the plot or create depth, otherwise not achieved, in our reading of the protagonist. Our assignment was to write a scene where the protagonist engages a minor character. Using the narration of the protagonist we're supposed to reveal the minor character to the reader.
I wrote about a little girl who thinks her dad is probably Santa Claus but he's actually probably a drug dealer. I know, that sounds terrible. But the idea of parents who provide for their children in disreputable ways was on my mind and for some reason, that was the storyline that jumped out at me. So I started writing a first person narrative, where the little girl isn't really telling a story but offering "evidence" for why her father is Santa Claus. She imagines presenting this evidence to Amanda, a loner fifth grader who sometimes hangs out with the third graders. It was really cool, actually: when I introduced this minor character the story suddenly became three dimensional. Through the narrator's parenthetical notes addressed to Amanda you understand the little girl in a way not possible when she's just spewing off her list of evidence. Hoorrayyy, learning to write.
I've got to go drink coffee.
Cat by Design Video
Mmmm on that note the Highways album is out! I'll put up a link for downloading once I get the go-ahead.
I started my second short school assignment. We were discussing minor characters and their function in a narrative. Ford Maddox Ford says that “If you’re going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he’d better
be real enough that you can smell his breath.” With that in mind the function of a minor character is in a sense extremely important. If you can bring a minor character to life in a quick sentence or two, then you're really nailing two of the most important aspects of good writing: economy and vivid, unique detail. The minor character also has the ability, within those one or two sentences, to further the plot or create depth, otherwise not achieved, in our reading of the protagonist. Our assignment was to write a scene where the protagonist engages a minor character. Using the narration of the protagonist we're supposed to reveal the minor character to the reader.
I wrote about a little girl who thinks her dad is probably Santa Claus but he's actually probably a drug dealer. I know, that sounds terrible. But the idea of parents who provide for their children in disreputable ways was on my mind and for some reason, that was the storyline that jumped out at me. So I started writing a first person narrative, where the little girl isn't really telling a story but offering "evidence" for why her father is Santa Claus. She imagines presenting this evidence to Amanda, a loner fifth grader who sometimes hangs out with the third graders. It was really cool, actually: when I introduced this minor character the story suddenly became three dimensional. Through the narrator's parenthetical notes addressed to Amanda you understand the little girl in a way not possible when she's just spewing off her list of evidence. Hoorrayyy, learning to write.
I've got to go drink coffee.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Second Week of Class
It's raining in New York and I'm super caffeinated. I had two strong cups of coffee when I awoke, since I overslept and figured drinking two cups would compensate for lost time. In some sense it did--I scribbled out my first school assignment in about half an hour, cleaned, and then sat twiddling my thumbs until I realized I could leave the apartment in spite of the weather.
The internet's down, so I went in search of a coffee shop. I'm now sitting in a charming French cafe that smells of onion quiche and espresso. I even have the window seat. However I'm also on my third cup of coffee and so find myself rather out of my mind. Usually caffeine focuses me. But it also makes me more easily agitated. I made the mistake of looking at my bank account and it scared me so badly I haven't been able to focus since.
My first writing assignment outside of the novel was to imagine my reincarnation, or what I would be in the afterlife. I wrote about a character whose theology is derived mainly from sleepover parties and Woody Allen films, and for the most part considers herself a 'nihilist.' When she's confronted with the choice of what world she inhabits next she decides to be the worm on the devil's left ring finger. I wrote it, feeling inspired, and upon reviewing it thought it sounded more like an outtake from an Adam Sandler film then something suitable for intelligent professors written by an intelligent student. Oh well. We can't all be winners, all of the time.
School is going well. I workshop my novel on October 13th. This gives me over a month to revise and and add upon what I have so far. I wrote the bulk of the novel thus far in under a month. Five weeks sounds like real luxury, which means I probably won't work nearly as hard as I could.
I bought a ton of books. All of them are fiction. In the checkout line I felt like a joke. It looked like I was shopping for a personal vacation and not school. Too good to be true? Too soon to speak? Want to know my reading list?
"Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me" Javier Marias
"Room" Emma Donaghue
"Thousand Acres" Jane Smiley
"Madame Bovary" Gustave Flaubert
"Metamorphosis" Franz Kafka
Man Down"
"Pastoralia" George Saunders
"Kafka on the Shore" Haruki Murakami
"King Lear" William Shakespeare
"Disgrace" J.M. Coetzee
"Cruddy" Linda Barry
"Out Stealing Horses" Per Patterson
A bunch of articles by Charles Baxter, David Mamet, Joseph Campbell; a Chekhov play, and a sprinkling of short stories.
I've started Javier Marias' book. We're supposed to read it, critique it, and workshop it as practice. Of course it's near perfect, in its own right, and so I find this a disconcerting assignment. "This is why you don't choose good books!" the voice inside my head says, in the same intonation as that of "This is why we can't have nice things!" What's more, it's not the type of book I want to read in a week. Anyone read it? It's something to be read slowly. The pacing is slow. To read it in a week is like scarfing an e'clair. What's more, I would prefer a tostada to an eclair, metaphorically speaking. If I have to scarf my food it better be cheap and easy on the stomach. Ahhh, fail. Too much coffee talking heads gotta stop. Start over.
Ahh, school. I'm a big fan of high brow meets low brow. So i have a very love/hate relationship with academia (does a creative writing MFA count as academia? I should probably know...) I should also probably go. By now the caffeine has completely taken over, and I have little option but stop now or ramble indefinitely in failed attempts to redeem myself. More to come soon, hopefully.
The internet's down, so I went in search of a coffee shop. I'm now sitting in a charming French cafe that smells of onion quiche and espresso. I even have the window seat. However I'm also on my third cup of coffee and so find myself rather out of my mind. Usually caffeine focuses me. But it also makes me more easily agitated. I made the mistake of looking at my bank account and it scared me so badly I haven't been able to focus since.
My first writing assignment outside of the novel was to imagine my reincarnation, or what I would be in the afterlife. I wrote about a character whose theology is derived mainly from sleepover parties and Woody Allen films, and for the most part considers herself a 'nihilist.' When she's confronted with the choice of what world she inhabits next she decides to be the worm on the devil's left ring finger. I wrote it, feeling inspired, and upon reviewing it thought it sounded more like an outtake from an Adam Sandler film then something suitable for intelligent professors written by an intelligent student. Oh well. We can't all be winners, all of the time.
School is going well. I workshop my novel on October 13th. This gives me over a month to revise and and add upon what I have so far. I wrote the bulk of the novel thus far in under a month. Five weeks sounds like real luxury, which means I probably won't work nearly as hard as I could.
I bought a ton of books. All of them are fiction. In the checkout line I felt like a joke. It looked like I was shopping for a personal vacation and not school. Too good to be true? Too soon to speak? Want to know my reading list?
"Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me" Javier Marias
"Room" Emma Donaghue
"Thousand Acres" Jane Smiley
"Madame Bovary" Gustave Flaubert
"Metamorphosis" Franz Kafka
Man Down"
"Pastoralia" George Saunders
"Kafka on the Shore" Haruki Murakami
"King Lear" William Shakespeare
"Disgrace" J.M. Coetzee
"Cruddy" Linda Barry
"Out Stealing Horses" Per Patterson
A bunch of articles by Charles Baxter, David Mamet, Joseph Campbell; a Chekhov play, and a sprinkling of short stories.
I've started Javier Marias' book. We're supposed to read it, critique it, and workshop it as practice. Of course it's near perfect, in its own right, and so I find this a disconcerting assignment. "This is why you don't choose good books!" the voice inside my head says, in the same intonation as that of "This is why we can't have nice things!" What's more, it's not the type of book I want to read in a week. Anyone read it? It's something to be read slowly. The pacing is slow. To read it in a week is like scarfing an e'clair. What's more, I would prefer a tostada to an eclair, metaphorically speaking. If I have to scarf my food it better be cheap and easy on the stomach. Ahhh, fail. Too much coffee talking heads gotta stop. Start over.
Ahh, school. I'm a big fan of high brow meets low brow. So i have a very love/hate relationship with academia (does a creative writing MFA count as academia? I should probably know...) I should also probably go. By now the caffeine has completely taken over, and I have little option but stop now or ramble indefinitely in failed attempts to redeem myself. More to come soon, hopefully.
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