Fighting with my inner critic

I’ve been having a lot of trouble lately writing.  I’ll sit in front my laptop and just stare blankly, I’ll (maybe) write a couple of paragraphs and then delete them, I’ll look over my old writing and rip them apart.

I have no idea how to silence my inner critic and just let myself go and it’s making me increasingly more and more frustrated.  *sigh*

Everyone’s been telling me to just “turn it off” and “let go” …    <—-  What the hell does that mean?  I think that may be my problem, I never stop thinking.  When I’m sitting by myself, driving in the car, jogging on the treadmill, sitting in the sauna… my inner narrative never turns off.

And the only time, the ONLY time, I can say that my brain is quiet is when I’m gaming and not thinking about anything else, save for what’s happening on the television screen.

I’ll give this novel writing a serious go this summer, I’m not giving up, but I may just not be cut out for fiction writing.  And that would be disappointing for me but better to face up to a truth then wasting time chasing an impossible dream.  Especially considering how improbable that dream originally is anyway.

Walking down memory lane via Google’s street view

I’m finding Google’s street view feature to be equal parts fascinating
and disturbing all at once.  I’ve done,
what I’m sure, most people have done and immediately looked up all the
addresses of people that I know and basically spied on them, or spied on their
houses and neighborhoods, anyway.  It’s
fascinating in that I’ve attempted to go all over the world and seeing what is
available to view, I wasn’t successful in looking up places in Mumbai, India or
Seoul, South Korea but I did briefly visit the UK, Australia, Japan, France and
Italy all within a matter of half an hour.

My latest foray involved doing some background location
scouting for the setting of my novel, Lawton, Oklahoma.  There were gaps in my memory about the
location of certain landmarks and I wanted to walk down memory lane of the
place that left an indelible mark on my adolescence for the brief time that we
lived there.  Memory is a funny
thing.  The neighborhood that I lived in,
in my memories, is vibrant.  The grass is
green and the trees are in full bloom, flowered and leafy.  The neighborhood is what economists would
call “mixed income”, and so there were houses built with dark red bricks and
immaculate lawns next to houses that were probably painted at one point and
time but the paint being in a current state of, let’s say, distress.  The picture that Google paints of my former
neighborhood is a bleak one.  The grass
is dead, shaded in colors of brown and yellow.
The trees, or what’s left of the trees, are dry and bare.  The neighborhood looks to be in a state of
decline, and the street that I had lived on has been extended and a long row of
square, cement apartments line the right side of the street.  The school I attended, Robert E. Lee
Elementary (The Fighting Rebels), looks exactly the same, at least the building
itself does.  The playground is gone,
turned into a larger parking lot and the softball field is now fenced in.  The other playground, that had been on the
far end to the right of the school is also gone.  The woods behind the school is full of bare
branches and dry tree trunks.  Those
woods, that would be the source of fascination when we first moved there looked
to be dying.  I wonder if the kids in the
neighborhood still tell the same story, that was told to me when I moved there
or from the look of things reality may be scary enough.

Upon arriving and settling in to our house on Mission Blvd,
the friends that I had quickly made, who lived nearby , wasted no time in
telling me the latest on dit that had the neighborhood in a state of
agitation.  The body of a young girl had
been found raped and murdered in the woods, just behind the elementary school
that I was to attend.  She was of the
same age as we were and was well liked.  Apparently,
the police had been administering lie detector tests on the suspects, who were
members of the family and the whispers had concluded that the father was the
culprit, although no one was ever arrested.
But there was another theory held by the kids in the neighborhood, which
was that Tina was killed by the homeless man that lived in the woods.  No one, other than a couple of people had
ever seen this man however there was no doubt in any of their minds that he
existed.  A dwelling had been found,
crudely fashioned with branches and mud and in it contained empty food
containers and other evidence of habitation.

And in a truly adolescent morbid fashion, they took me to
the spot in the woods where the body had been found and pointed in the general
direction of where they believed the homeless man lived and by that time, we
had sufficiently spooked ourselves about the existence of the fabled transient
that we had to leave the woods.  The case
of the watcher in the woods played out, at least in my memory, much like a
Babysitters club or Sweet Valley Twins story, with a group of us boldly seeking
out the dwelling (which we found) and attempting to catch a glimpse of the man
purported to live there (which we didn’t).
Of course, as an adult, it’s obvious to me that it was probably made by
a couple of boys who used it as some sort of a fort or base.  I don’t know why that explanation never occurred
to us at the time but it didn’t.

Lawton is also where I began walking the unwieldy path
towards adulthood, starting with learning about Tina, followed by the sharing of
a secret from my best friend and concluding with a decision made on a warm Sunday
night by my parents regarding the confession of the same type of secret from
another friend.  It’s hard for me, not to
think about what could have happened, if only….

…if only, I’d pressed my parents harder…

…if only, I’d told someone else, some other authority figure…

… if only, I’d been a better friend…

Those memories need no embellishment, there’s no question in
my mind about what happened at those times.
Those memories are bittersweet.

.. ..

Why I love Evergreen

I went to the woods
because I wanted to live deliberately.

I wanted to live deep,
and suck out all the narrow of life.

To put to rout all that was not life, and not,
when I had come to die
discover that I had not lived. ~ Thoreau

Our assignment next week is to not to come to class.  You have to love Evergreen.  Classes for next week have been canceled and we’ve been instructed to take a page from Thoreau and to “live deliberately”, to use the time we have next week for anything we want to but to perform those tasks deliberately.

All too often, we sleepwalk through a great portion of our lives; akin to mindless braineating zombies, we trudge through the monotony of our days not really thinking about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

I began my deliberate soujorn into more meaningful living by skipping class on Wednesday because my little sister had flown into town unannounced and wanted to have dinner. She lives in NYC and the last time I saw her was 6 months ago when i got to spend damn near 3 weeks with her.  It was amazing, and I love NY but not enough to live there, by the time I got home, I was exhausted.

As is my habit and obsession with making lists, I was prepared to make one with the activities that I had planned on doing this week but decided against it, as it was probably not in the spirit of Thoreau and so this week will be lived vicariously and unplanned and I plan on updating my blog with the results.

Serenity now…!!

Serenity now…!!

I had initially begun this blog post as a really whiny one, because I’m feeling quite rundown at the moment.  Je suis tres fatigue.  Everything’s finally catching up to me and I was quite cranky about it.  Symptoms being: (but are not limited to) stomping around (silently) at work, half assed reading and response papers, and unkempt hair (which is godawful since I can’t control the goddamned curls as it is).

Oddly enough, the Tao te Ching came to mind.  I can’t control anything outside of me, I can only control my actions and reactions (as it were).

Which silenced the mutinous voices in my head and replaced them with others.  Other voices that were quiet and content. In looking back at my life, in the past couple of years, what exactly do I have to moan and groan about?

Absolutely nothing.

So many good things have happened in the last year alone, so many good things keep happening.  While I may bitch and moan about aspects of my current job, I’m so very lucky to have one in this economy. Particularly in this industry that’s been hit hard and people have been scaling back on their spending.  I bought a brand spanking new car and financed it with great terms and my credit score is a number that I thought I’d never see.  I’m healthy, I have wonderful family & friends.  Friends who’ve been with me a loooong time and lots of new friends.  I’ll be done with school next summer and will probably have my first book draft finished by the end of this summer.  I spent some time with my sister and got to explore NYC, went to Vegas (giggled at someone as she ralphed in the elevator).  Contemplating an international jaunt with my 2 weeks in December. I live in a house that has character (to say the least), money in the bank, food in the fridge and plans to attend PAX09 in August.

Life is good.

Rach asked me if I felt bad or depressed about turning 32, about being older.  Hell, I think I feel more bad about not feeling 32 than lamenting about another inevitable turn of the wheel.  This will probably change if I ever get married or when I have a child (I keep hearing that the little monsters age you rapidly) but until then I’m happyto be a 32 year old who loves tearing it up at the Family Fun Center, sometimes (rarely) spending an obscene amount of money on shoes or ballet tickets, or up all night reading or playing a video game.

Yes, I’ve made a shit load of painful mistakes but I’m fortunate to be in a position that those mistakes haven’t cost me everything.  I’m not going to spend my life looking back and wishing all the pain away.  I’m not going to spend my life ignoring that it happened but recognize that it’s a part of me and to ignore it would be akin to living a half life.  And so I’ll recognize the past, live in the present and look to the future with no small amount of anticipation.

Be one with the dust of the way,
Then you can’t be controlled by love or by rejection.
You can’t be controlled by profit or by loss.
You can’t be controlled by praise or by humiliation. Tao Te Ching, Chapter 56

In the midst of burnout

I think the full time schedule is finally getting to me.  Working fulltime and attending school fulltime has really made me tired.  It’s an effort for me to even complete my reading assignments and unfortunately I haven’t done much of the reading this year, I’ve just been faking it.  I also haven’t making very good use of my time on weekends.

I have to take better care of myself and it starts with completely cleaning my bedroom and bathroom.  I’ve written a  to do list with tasks that must be done today, and I only listed things that needed to be done immediately, and so it’s not overwhelming at all but I have no energy.

I’ve been really lethargic and tired lately.  I haven’t been sleeping well and it’s affecting everything.  I’ve weaned myself off of coffee in favor of various teas (Celestial Seasonings “Morning Thunder” HO!) and I like that I’m not crashing at the end of the workday like I would be drinking coffee.

I MUST organize my time better and utilize every minute in a useful way.

Working, the musical by Studs Turkel

Tonight, I watched the musical that was created with the creation of a book called, Working which was written and researched by the legendary Studs Turkel. The words that the actors used were the words of real people as they described to him why they work and how they work among other things. Some of the phrases that struck me most was:

“people want to find meaning in their lives. They want to be remembered and recognized.”

“When the arm starts working, the brain stops working.”

“People know their own worth or lack of it.”

“Everybody should have something to point to, to be proud of.”

And these were common themes, stated in various ways by the interview subjects. Working is a required part of life but we’ve noticeably lost a connection to the work we perform. The laborer mentioned how he doesn’t know what happens to the steel once it leaves the mill, he doesn’t know if it’s being made to create a car, or a steel girder, etc. but other’s, for example someone who works to create a building, while they don’t own that building, they can still point to it and say, I helped make that.

Another common refrain was one of power, and this was most prominent with the people who had jobs that they hated. They recognized that they did their job well, usually a little too well, but they would make the job interesting by doing something that made that job unique to them. The newspaper boy loved to throw the newspapers into the bushes, the secretary would deliberately make mistakes with her typing and transcription, the gas man would scare his clients by sneaking up behind them and yelling, “Gas man!”

There was a common thought from the people working at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder, that their children would do better. Their children wouldn’t be laborers, cleaning women or farm hands.

When the Hispanic laborer who worked on various fruit farms started talking about how people don’t even know how the food that they eat gets to their grocery stores, it made me think of Arendt’s “banality of evil”. There are children who believe that our meat naturally comes packaged the way that they see it in Safeway. We don’t understand/comprehend/or care about the backbreaking labor and inhumane working conditions that make it so that I can eat strawberries and oranges all year around. What’s evil is the thoughtlessness of our actions, that we go through the motions and not think about what we’re doing. It’s scary because we’ve become accustomed as a society to operate in this fashion.

 

Day 2 – Write On! Workshop

I’m making a lot of really good progress in my creative writing this weekend, of course it’s at the expense of my work in the program, but I have a lot of free time next week with the boss being gone and will be able to catch up… provided I don’t procrastinate or decide that, in my new zeal for writing, forsake all the reading and writing that’s required of me, but I don’t anticipte that happening.  *I hope*

I’ve written about a half a chapter and had it evaluated by Peter Bacho, who’s writing, I love and me being needy today and needing validation, had it validated that yes, I’m off to an excellent start and that I should attempt to finish my novel by the end of the summer.  This should be my goal.  I probably will, if I can mange to worm myself into the Summer Writing Workshop this summer, if it’s offered… *hope, hope* If not, I’ll still make the attempt but I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish it.

I’ve written a partial outline, and a cast of characters.  I’ve finally identified my antagonist and setting, time period.  I just need to continue adding to this chapter.  My setting is Lawton, OK… having lived there previously and now using the creepy street view feature, looked up my old neighborhood, which is barely recognizable.  The school building itself, looks exactly the same, but the playground area is now gone, turned into a parking lot, it looks as if the neighborhood is in decline and I couldn’t identify the house I lived in on Mission Blvd. I think it’s gone, there’s a long row of apartments at the end of the street that were never there when I lived there.  It was a little bittersweet.  I had thought to use the location and set it in the present but I don’t want to use the Lawton that is now, it’s bleak and dreary.  I’ll use the Lawton that was or the Lawton that may never have been except in my own head.

I’ve also come up with a couple of short story ideas that maybe I can finish next week and start to submit them for various publications. I finally bought my textbooks for this quarter and will start my reading tonight.  There’s a group of people going out tonight and I had thought I might join them but I don’t think I’ll be able to, too much reading and then there’s the seminar response and I really want to get a jump on my position paper this week.  Readings are going to start soon, must go.

what is the place of work within the human condition today?

i have burned many a brain cell on this question in the last week and haven’t really come to any hard conclusions and yet it’s always in the back of my mind, …..

what is work?…

work is an artificial construct used to help shape our worlds

work is an activity that you perform in exchange for currency

Most people do not get to own the product of their work (which is one of the main points of Marxism that i do agree with)

why do we work?

to buy/collect material possessions that make us feel complete or happy

to create a better future for our children

to be able to retire and enjoy leisure

to pursue goals and dreams

i think what i’m having problems with is that, i’m finding it difficult not to view work strictly in the arendtian sense of labor, work and action.  i agree with quite a few of her assertions but it bothers me that i’m having a hard time taking a step back and objectively viewing work from every angle i.e. marx, lao tzu, aurelius, et. al.   i keep coming back to arendt.

And then there’s the problem of defining the human condition and what exactly it is, can their even be a definition? i think previously i tentatively described the human condition as a search or a connection with the sublime.   i suppose by default, if one doesn’t search or have  a connection to the sublime, your not fully human.  is that something that i actually agree with? can i support it? do i even  want to…?  i need to take a break and maybe hash this out verbally w/ carmen….

some thoughts to mull over…

there have been some quotes from various authors that i’ve read recently that have made me pause and step back:

“I found God in myself and I loved her fiercely” –ntozake shange

“I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” — james baldwin

“When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn’t make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better. “It’s all right” we whisper, “I’m here, I love you.” and we lie: “I’ll never leave you.” For just a moment or two the darkness doesn’t seem so bad.” –  Hellblazer comic #27

nightly ramblings…

in the previous post, i mentioned that the past 12 months has been a period of a lot of personal growth for me.  part of that came in the form of education, i went back to school and am now happily esconced at evergreen state college.  the program that i’m in has been examining the concept of work within the human condition, who does what work and how our current ideas about work has come into being.  i was really intimidated when i initially went to the preview in the fall, i had been out of an academic setting for so long, i hadn’t really written anything in such a long time, i wasn’t sure if it would work out, my confidence in myself was “iffy”, you could say.  i had lost my swagger and brass.  but i’m starting to recover it, a little bit.

we’ve had extensive readings, we’ve read:

the meditations by marcus aurelius, the human condition by hannah arendt, the tao te ching by lao tzu, moby dick, robinson carusoe, walden, uncle vanya, the odyssey, what is history?, the work ethic in industrial america, rights of man, john locke, marx, and it’s all been fascinating in different ways.

but the text that’s most affected me has been hannah arendt’s, “the human condition”.  it was incredibily difficult to begin the book, it’s dense and she packs so much meaning in a single paragraph, you have to reread and as much as i resisted it (possibly affected by her gorgeous prose) what she’s been saying has been seeping into my worldview.  i watch some of my favorite movies and i see them differently, which is why i’m online tapping out my thoughts online.

Recently, the movies that i’ve watched: watchmen, hellboy 2, pan’s labyrinth, the orphanage have taken on other overtones.  according to arendt, we’ve lost the ability to fully interact in the public sphere because we’re too busy taking care of private concerns.  the private has become the public and we’re all basically being turned into mindless, robotic laboring things.  which of course, brings all kinds of negative things with it but i guess what really struck me was the loss of the sublime.  what separates us from the animals? what is it that makes us human?  it began with i, robot when i thought to myself, “why are we really searching for the technological holy grail of AI?” in the movie, and in a lot of other movies that feature robots, they are almost always shown as a servant of mankind, their shown holding the shopping bags, drawing the bath, helping us cross the street and if they are shown in a job setting it’s in a position that would be considered “menial” (i’ve come to hate that word) and beneath our notice.  and if you were to ask someone what the role of a robot w/ ai would be in today’s society, you would probably get the same kind of answer, a helpmeet of humans.  but since the industrial revolution, our work, our jobs have been deskilled to improve productivity.  they’ve been deskilled so that if you need to be replaced, you can be replaced easily by someone else.  no spec ial training or skills involved.  there was a man, his name escapes me, who jumpstarted the deskilling by seperating the operations of a factory by tasks and then timing his employees to see how long it took them to complete the task.  there are photographic stills that have become a part of pop culture that were taken by him.  the goal being for a human to work like a machine but of course, we aren’t machines.  we get sick. we figure out how to slack off and not let the boss know.  we take days off. we can’t work incessantly.  i don’t think it’s a big jump to say that since we’re been deskilled and forced to work like machines but with all the failings that are human to say that as soon as they are able, we will be replaced by machines.  it’s already started with technology.  we know from history, that slave labor was incredibly profitable for the south and when they lost it, the south crumbled, and some would argue, to this day, still hasn’t recovered from it.

so the question has to be asked, what is the research into artificial intelligence really about? is it about helping us or about replacing us?

right now, i think work (or arendt would call it labor) is a detriment to the human condition.  we’ve become laboring animals and our concern is mainly for the biological and the mundane. and that uselessness, that working for a paycheck, drains us emotionally, psychologically and so we try to find our pleasures and passions outside of work.  but for a lot of people, by the time they get off of work, they’re exhausted and want to relax and sleep and then the next day the cycle begins anew.  i guess what i’ve been thinking in watching pan’s labyrinth and hellboy 2 especially, is that there is a fantastical world, within our own and we’re unable to see it because we’re so concerned with the mundane, because we don’t have the time and we’ve lost the inclination to see and experience the sublime.

if we lose the sublime, we lose our humanity.

i’ve lost my train of thought….time to go to bed.