I have a historical adventure story in my head that I'm a little bit intimidated over writing. It's not the story part; I'm getting used to that. No, it's the language. I mean, I can barely keep up with changes to the mother tongue in my own lifetime; how am I to handle it 400 years ago?
Now, I grew up in a linguistically unpretentious region in the southern United States. Back home in Mississippi, we might've used a metaphor or two to make ourselves sound cooler'n a.... Um, smarter'n a.... Well, you get the drift. Anyway, that was the extent of our linguistic shenanigans, generally speaking. Words just plain meant what they meant back then.
Okay, I know what you're thinking, and you're right. There is one rather well-known exception to my previous statement, and it has to do with blessing peoples' hearts when there really isn't any blessing being done to any hearts whatsoever. In fact, it didn't just mean one thing; the phrase could be used to signal all sorts of sentiments. The connotation depended -- and still does -- entirely on usage. For example, the three words at the end of "my cousin's entire mobile home park was taken out by that tornado, bless their hearts," mean something entirely different from the three words at the end of "they found the permanent markers to use in drawing on my kitchen wall, bless their hearts." Same words, different intention, and if you didn't catch it, you're as sharp as a cue ball.
Back then, though, it should be pointed out that we didn't have an Internet to pass things around, either. When I moved to California to finish high school, they actually thought I was wishing blessings upon their hearts. Now, I did, very quickly, stop contracting "you" and "everyone" into the vernacular "y'all," but that was simply because I didn't enjoy the attention that the shortened, more flexible utterance brought me. Overall, the language was the language.
Now? Sheesh. The "mother tongue" has spawned some really strange offspring. Thanks in part to the rapidity of dissemination and complete lack of grammar checking on the Internet, linguistics has gotten nuttier than a squirrel turd. I mean, do you remember when literally and figuratively meant opposite things? Recently they literally changed the dictionary definition so that they're the same word, but only if you mean 'em that way. And then there's gay. Used to be that word meant happy, lighthearted, carefree, but my generation was pretty effective at redefining it to refer to someone who is homosexual -- because, um, someone who is homosexual is obviously happy, I -- um, guess. Now, though, it means something completely different. How gay is that, right?
And what's up with hate? Growing up, to hate meant something fairly specific. You knew if/when you were being hated on. That, though, was before the haters and the haters of haters got hold of it. Now, if you write a law that somebody disagrees with, you're hating. Meanwhile, if you disagree with said law, you're hating. If you disagree with the disagreement--you hater, you!
(that said, let's please leave the actual political stuff to my personal Facebook page)
I hate it. Literally.
- TOSK
Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts
Friday, March 27, 2015
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
The Absence of Noise
"If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers." - Doug Larson
How strange our language is, to define certain things as the absence of other things.
I'm specifically thinking of the word quiet, which is defined by Ye Olde Dictionary as the absence of noise. Noise--yes, that can be defined, and pointed to; we all know noise when we hear it. Right? But quiet? It's--well, um, it's the lack of, um, well, it's, I guess, it's the lack of noise.
See what I mean?
There are any number of sonic physical definitions we could come up with. After all, sound is merely a vibration in the air around us, and that is easily measured in terms of decibels. I suppose one could--and, now that I think on it, someone probably already did--specify "quiet" as a certain number of dBs. Still, that seems a waste, since few of us carry dB-meters around with us.
That said, we all know what quiet sounds like, right?
Quiet's certainly not the only word that's defined like that. Take my own pastime, writing. It's got an entire category of genres--and here I refer to non-fiction--that is defined by what it is not. Fiction is fairly well defined; it is prose that's imaginary, made up, false. Romance, for example, is fiction (take that for what it's worth). The same is true of science fiction, but I suppose that one was too obvious.
So the antonym, or opposite meaning word, of fiction is truth, right? Problem is, that space in the bookstore contains far too many books by folks like Rush Limbaugh to be called "The Truth Section." Thus, I imagine its title is the result of a bookseller of old nodding at it and saying, "Forsooth, verily, I supposeth that yon volumes be not entirely made up." Not Entirely Made Up is too long a title for that area, though.
Hence, the non in non-fiction.
But I digress.
I've written about quiet before. Then, it wasn't completely quiet; I was actually surrounded by the beautiful crescendo of a natural wooded environment awakening for a splendid fall morning. This morning, on the other hand, the lack of noise was pretty much complete.
I awoke to a power outage.
I didn't realize it at first. Upon my eyes fluttering to their open position, I noticed a couple of things in rapid succession. The first was that it seemed quiet--but then again, it was morning in our new Mobile, Alabama, home, a solidly brick house with a decent quantity of sound-proofing. Second, my bladder was full, full, full. The second sensation rapidly overwhelmed the first, and so I staggered toward the bathroom along a path I'd already walked a few times that was luckily rather well back-lit by the morning sun streaming through the open window shade.
As usual, I closed the bathroom door first so as to not disturb my beautiful wife's slumber, and only when the door latch caught did I flip the light switch to its on position.
Nothing happened.
Now, I wasn't entirely awake yet. That, and my mind was occupied in dealing with the screaming sensation coming from my bladder.
Slowly it dawned on me that what should've happened--a bathroom appearing before my very eyes--hadn't, and that could only mean one of two things: either the bathroom had been taken away in the middle of the night, or the light switch was broken. So I did the only thing any sane person would do: I reached over, flipped the light switch back off, and then moved it back up again.
Again I was shocked by the amount of nothingness that happened.
By this point I was coming out of my morning stupor enough to wonder if it could be a power thing--I didn't take those electrical engineering classes at West Point for nothing, after all--but also by this point my bladder was starting to wrap itself around my entire abdominal cavity and do its best boa constrictor impersonation. Luckily I knew pretty much where the toilet was, and I'd learned a secret trick long ago that drastically improves my aim first thing in the morning, especially in the dark.
(don't tell anyone, but I'll share it with you--the secret trick is called sitting down. I manage to avoid hitting the seat and the floor 100% of the time when I do that little amazing trick--just, never in public. I am, after all, a manly man)
Bladder finally satisfied, I sallied forth to discover the extent of the not-noise. Our bedroom ceiling fan was off, I noticed for the first time. It's almost always on, and though it's not a noisy one, its soft shwoop-shwoop is noticeable in its absence, once you--um, notice it. The main bathroom similarly didn't have any light no matter how many times the switch was flicked. Every appliance in the kitchen was dark, and even the little guy in the refrigerator refused to turn that light on when I opened the door.
Definitely, the power was out, I realized as I closed the refrigerator door. See how much good that excellent EE education I received was doing for me?
I tried using the spiffy cell phone app the power company has to check it. Problem is, Mississippi Power and Alabama Power are so close together--literally--that they use the same system, apparently, and so when I signed in I got a "well, of course your power is out; your account was closed five years ago," message. No, no, no--not that account in Biloxi, this one here in Mobile, I told my cell phone, which for once didn't prove itself smarter than me.
Finally I called the actual phone number, and right away they told me that there was, in fact,a power outage, and that crews were working on it, and that power was expected to be restored within a couple of hours.
Ahhhhh, I was finally able to say. Coming up: a couple hours of--well, of quiet, and today I'm working the late shift and don't have to be in till afternoon, which meant that I could enjoy the entirety of it.
What was I to do?
Sleep, was the obvious answer, and so I did the only sane thing I could think of. I went back to bed.
Have a great day, and--oh, by the way, have a great 2015!
- TOSK
How strange our language is, to define certain things as the absence of other things.
I'm specifically thinking of the word quiet, which is defined by Ye Olde Dictionary as the absence of noise. Noise--yes, that can be defined, and pointed to; we all know noise when we hear it. Right? But quiet? It's--well, um, it's the lack of, um, well, it's, I guess, it's the lack of noise.
See what I mean?
There are any number of sonic physical definitions we could come up with. After all, sound is merely a vibration in the air around us, and that is easily measured in terms of decibels. I suppose one could--and, now that I think on it, someone probably already did--specify "quiet" as a certain number of dBs. Still, that seems a waste, since few of us carry dB-meters around with us.
That said, we all know what quiet sounds like, right?
Quiet's certainly not the only word that's defined like that. Take my own pastime, writing. It's got an entire category of genres--and here I refer to non-fiction--that is defined by what it is not. Fiction is fairly well defined; it is prose that's imaginary, made up, false. Romance, for example, is fiction (take that for what it's worth). The same is true of science fiction, but I suppose that one was too obvious.
So the antonym, or opposite meaning word, of fiction is truth, right? Problem is, that space in the bookstore contains far too many books by folks like Rush Limbaugh to be called "The Truth Section." Thus, I imagine its title is the result of a bookseller of old nodding at it and saying, "Forsooth, verily, I supposeth that yon volumes be not entirely made up." Not Entirely Made Up is too long a title for that area, though.
Hence, the non in non-fiction.
But I digress.
I've written about quiet before. Then, it wasn't completely quiet; I was actually surrounded by the beautiful crescendo of a natural wooded environment awakening for a splendid fall morning. This morning, on the other hand, the lack of noise was pretty much complete.
I awoke to a power outage.
I didn't realize it at first. Upon my eyes fluttering to their open position, I noticed a couple of things in rapid succession. The first was that it seemed quiet--but then again, it was morning in our new Mobile, Alabama, home, a solidly brick house with a decent quantity of sound-proofing. Second, my bladder was full, full, full. The second sensation rapidly overwhelmed the first, and so I staggered toward the bathroom along a path I'd already walked a few times that was luckily rather well back-lit by the morning sun streaming through the open window shade.
As usual, I closed the bathroom door first so as to not disturb my beautiful wife's slumber, and only when the door latch caught did I flip the light switch to its on position.
Nothing happened.
Now, I wasn't entirely awake yet. That, and my mind was occupied in dealing with the screaming sensation coming from my bladder.
Slowly it dawned on me that what should've happened--a bathroom appearing before my very eyes--hadn't, and that could only mean one of two things: either the bathroom had been taken away in the middle of the night, or the light switch was broken. So I did the only thing any sane person would do: I reached over, flipped the light switch back off, and then moved it back up again.
Again I was shocked by the amount of nothingness that happened.
By this point I was coming out of my morning stupor enough to wonder if it could be a power thing--I didn't take those electrical engineering classes at West Point for nothing, after all--but also by this point my bladder was starting to wrap itself around my entire abdominal cavity and do its best boa constrictor impersonation. Luckily I knew pretty much where the toilet was, and I'd learned a secret trick long ago that drastically improves my aim first thing in the morning, especially in the dark.
(don't tell anyone, but I'll share it with you--the secret trick is called sitting down. I manage to avoid hitting the seat and the floor 100% of the time when I do that little amazing trick--just, never in public. I am, after all, a manly man)
Bladder finally satisfied, I sallied forth to discover the extent of the not-noise. Our bedroom ceiling fan was off, I noticed for the first time. It's almost always on, and though it's not a noisy one, its soft shwoop-shwoop is noticeable in its absence, once you--um, notice it. The main bathroom similarly didn't have any light no matter how many times the switch was flicked. Every appliance in the kitchen was dark, and even the little guy in the refrigerator refused to turn that light on when I opened the door.
Definitely, the power was out, I realized as I closed the refrigerator door. See how much good that excellent EE education I received was doing for me?
I tried using the spiffy cell phone app the power company has to check it. Problem is, Mississippi Power and Alabama Power are so close together--literally--that they use the same system, apparently, and so when I signed in I got a "well, of course your power is out; your account was closed five years ago," message. No, no, no--not that account in Biloxi, this one here in Mobile, I told my cell phone, which for once didn't prove itself smarter than me.
Finally I called the actual phone number, and right away they told me that there was, in fact,a power outage, and that crews were working on it, and that power was expected to be restored within a couple of hours.
Ahhhhh, I was finally able to say. Coming up: a couple hours of--well, of quiet, and today I'm working the late shift and don't have to be in till afternoon, which meant that I could enjoy the entirety of it.
What was I to do?
Sleep, was the obvious answer, and so I did the only sane thing I could think of. I went back to bed.
Have a great day, and--oh, by the way, have a great 2015!
- TOSK
Thursday, September 18, 2014
The Challenges of A Simple Journey
The simplest journey may still be rife with challenges.
Yes, I know that sounds deep and philosophical and stuff. In this case, though, I'm talking literally. Specifically, in writing this I refer to my drive to work today.
Oh, right--those who aren't in the know yet will be happy to hear, I hope, that I am once again happily and gainfully employed. I've joined the team of a small college on the north side of Philadelphia, happy as a rooster in a henhouse to rejoin the quest to pile a great deal of knowledge into students' heads.
That means, of course, that my author bio is once again incorrect in all of its different incarnations. Now I get the joy of trying to find it everywhere and remembering how to edit it in each of those places. I think this time instead of "Stephen lives in Virginia--no, Memphis--no, Pennsylvania" I'm going to write "Stephen lives in the United States in a location that is not on a gorgeous beach close to a source of inexpensive alcoholic beverages" and then dare fate to make that one incorrect.
So, yeah--Pennsylvania. Beautiful, beautiful place. Horribly windy roads. Horribly windy roads that change names mid-ways down, unless they're known primarily by number, in which case that sometimes changes at random, too. Oh, my lord, driving in this place always seems to take me to the same destination: "crazy." It's like the road system here was designed by a committee of drunken monkeys, and flatulent drunken monkeys, at that.
That said, after several weeks of driving it and generally figuring out what is where, I'm finally feeling comfortable enough to drive without thenaggingdirection of Bertha. Yes, I call my GPS app on my cell phone Bertha. It--well, it just seems to fit.
So I've made it to work a couple of times, and back home again, too, without her help. That's significant, because it's about a 25 mile drive down Drunken Monkey Lane. But yesterday, after following various major roads, I got wild and crazy and decided to look in Google maps for the optimal route.
Now, optimal route is much like the term best novel; everybody has their own ideas on how that should be chosen. Bertha, in particular, seems to use traffic data taken from somewhere--Hogwarts, possibly?--to determine it, and she also loves recalculating frequently, and occasionally with rather surprising results.
"Turn back there!" *screech* *squeal*
To me, though, optimal means shortest. I know, it's only a mile or two worth of gas that's the difference, but still. I like driving, or at least knowing, the shortest path from one point to another. Hence, my research yesterday. And hey, I found it. Last night I drove it home. It's a nice path through rural Pennsylvania, in the evening, at least if you don't mind ignoring occasional low speed limits.
This morning? Another story entirely.
You like stories, right?
So I pulled onto my new optimal route just as the coffee was really settling in between the red blood cells. It's a pretty two-lane road headed generally south, and I loved driving it for the first few minutes. Then the guy in front of me came to an abrupt stop.
Now, I'm sure some of you will argue that an abrupt stop is what you should accomplish at a stop sign. And yes, you'll generally be correct. But then that guy executed a left turn, leaving me with a full, unobstructed view of the huge "Road Closed" sign ahead of me as well as the poor hardhatted kid set to guarding it. He looked as uncomfortable as I felt.
Which way to go? Straight, the direction to my work, was blocked. My remaining options were, of course: left, or right. In a flash impulsive kind of thing, I decided to follow the guy who'd made the left turn. Clearly, he had to have known that there was something down that-a-way, yes?
It was a wise choice. A couple of hundred yards down the road a street sign indicated Old Windy Bush jutting off to the right, heading back down the way I needed to go. I rejoiced; the road I had been so indelicately removed from was called Windy Bush. I know I couldn't just assume that Old Windy Bush joined up with the new Windy Bush, but it was just as likely as it not joining up, so I took it, and a couple of miles later found myself at one of those drunken monkey-designed Y intersections, this one joining Old Windy Bush with Windy Bush.
After flipping a not-entirely-professional gesture toward the "Road Closed" sign at that end of the construction site, I turned triumphantly back down my chosen path. And then, as luck would have it, a couple of miles farther down the road I saw--yes, again.
Road Closed.
By this point, I was done with the optimal route crap and just wanted back on a road I knew would go through. Thus, I turned right; I remembered that out that direction there were a few routes I'd been on before.
And then I entered--you guessed it, probably: Drunken Monkey-ville. The road spun about to the left and went--well, somewhere. I guess the reason they don't put up a sign telling people that they're in the middle of Nowhere is that, when you're there, it's pretty dang obvious.
And so there I was, touring Nowhere at 45 mph.
Finally, though, I came to another intersection. Now, imagine--heck, don't imagine, just write--a capital X. Cursive, not block print, and complete with curls. Now turn it up so that it's on one leg. That's the intersection I found myself staring at a red light through. And I was so done, so over that path.
I picked up my cell and started Bertha up. I'm surprised she didn't begin with a maniacal cackle or two when she realized where I was, but she didn't. She also started quickly, for once; usually when I'm en route to somewhere and start her up, she takes so long loading that by the time she's ready to offer advice I'm already past the decision point and a couple of miles farther from my destination. "In approximately three hundred fifty yards, make a U-Turn, you idiot," her mechanical voice always says.
But no, this morning she zipped right to life. I opened the search option, picked my work address, and was delighted when she immediately told me to turn left.
Left. Okay, okay, I can do that. Left, it is, and onward to civilization. I looked up at the light, which was still red.
I looked back down to see what the next turn would be, only to note that she'd changed her mind. Straight through the intersection, now.
Wait. What?
Oh, wait, she apparently decided. Not straight through; that would be wrong. Turn right, she ordered and flipped the blue line showing my route over to that direction. And then, while I watched in dumbfounded disbelief, she decided it was actually better for me to make a U-turn right there and go back the way I'd come.
It was, I guess, her way of gleefully saying "I got nothin' for ya, buddy."
Screw that. I turned left.
Before long, I came out on the wrong side of an intersection I recognized from my earlier travels. Rejoicing, I turned back down the path and finally got to work, only a little bit late and about ten minutes after my bladder decided it was really, totally, completely full.
Not bad, all things considered. And I'm happy to be back in the working world, regardless.
So, here's hoping you're having as great of a week as I am!
- TOSK
Yes, I know that sounds deep and philosophical and stuff. In this case, though, I'm talking literally. Specifically, in writing this I refer to my drive to work today.
Oh, right--those who aren't in the know yet will be happy to hear, I hope, that I am once again happily and gainfully employed. I've joined the team of a small college on the north side of Philadelphia, happy as a rooster in a henhouse to rejoin the quest to pile a great deal of knowledge into students' heads.
That means, of course, that my author bio is once again incorrect in all of its different incarnations. Now I get the joy of trying to find it everywhere and remembering how to edit it in each of those places. I think this time instead of "Stephen lives in Virginia--no, Memphis--no, Pennsylvania" I'm going to write "Stephen lives in the United States in a location that is not on a gorgeous beach close to a source of inexpensive alcoholic beverages" and then dare fate to make that one incorrect.
So, yeah--Pennsylvania. Beautiful, beautiful place. Horribly windy roads. Horribly windy roads that change names mid-ways down, unless they're known primarily by number, in which case that sometimes changes at random, too. Oh, my lord, driving in this place always seems to take me to the same destination: "crazy." It's like the road system here was designed by a committee of drunken monkeys, and flatulent drunken monkeys, at that.
That said, after several weeks of driving it and generally figuring out what is where, I'm finally feeling comfortable enough to drive without the
So I've made it to work a couple of times, and back home again, too, without her help. That's significant, because it's about a 25 mile drive down Drunken Monkey Lane. But yesterday, after following various major roads, I got wild and crazy and decided to look in Google maps for the optimal route.
Now, optimal route is much like the term best novel; everybody has their own ideas on how that should be chosen. Bertha, in particular, seems to use traffic data taken from somewhere--Hogwarts, possibly?--to determine it, and she also loves recalculating frequently, and occasionally with rather surprising results.
"Turn back there!" *screech* *squeal*
To me, though, optimal means shortest. I know, it's only a mile or two worth of gas that's the difference, but still. I like driving, or at least knowing, the shortest path from one point to another. Hence, my research yesterday. And hey, I found it. Last night I drove it home. It's a nice path through rural Pennsylvania, in the evening, at least if you don't mind ignoring occasional low speed limits.
This morning? Another story entirely.
You like stories, right?
So I pulled onto my new optimal route just as the coffee was really settling in between the red blood cells. It's a pretty two-lane road headed generally south, and I loved driving it for the first few minutes. Then the guy in front of me came to an abrupt stop.
Now, I'm sure some of you will argue that an abrupt stop is what you should accomplish at a stop sign. And yes, you'll generally be correct. But then that guy executed a left turn, leaving me with a full, unobstructed view of the huge "Road Closed" sign ahead of me as well as the poor hardhatted kid set to guarding it. He looked as uncomfortable as I felt.
Which way to go? Straight, the direction to my work, was blocked. My remaining options were, of course: left, or right. In a flash impulsive kind of thing, I decided to follow the guy who'd made the left turn. Clearly, he had to have known that there was something down that-a-way, yes?
It was a wise choice. A couple of hundred yards down the road a street sign indicated Old Windy Bush jutting off to the right, heading back down the way I needed to go. I rejoiced; the road I had been so indelicately removed from was called Windy Bush. I know I couldn't just assume that Old Windy Bush joined up with the new Windy Bush, but it was just as likely as it not joining up, so I took it, and a couple of miles later found myself at one of those drunken monkey-designed Y intersections, this one joining Old Windy Bush with Windy Bush.
After flipping a not-entirely-professional gesture toward the "Road Closed" sign at that end of the construction site, I turned triumphantly back down my chosen path. And then, as luck would have it, a couple of miles farther down the road I saw--yes, again.
Road Closed.
By this point, I was done with the optimal route crap and just wanted back on a road I knew would go through. Thus, I turned right; I remembered that out that direction there were a few routes I'd been on before.
And then I entered--you guessed it, probably: Drunken Monkey-ville. The road spun about to the left and went--well, somewhere. I guess the reason they don't put up a sign telling people that they're in the middle of Nowhere is that, when you're there, it's pretty dang obvious.
And so there I was, touring Nowhere at 45 mph.
Finally, though, I came to another intersection. Now, imagine--heck, don't imagine, just write--a capital X. Cursive, not block print, and complete with curls. Now turn it up so that it's on one leg. That's the intersection I found myself staring at a red light through. And I was so done, so over that path.
I picked up my cell and started Bertha up. I'm surprised she didn't begin with a maniacal cackle or two when she realized where I was, but she didn't. She also started quickly, for once; usually when I'm en route to somewhere and start her up, she takes so long loading that by the time she's ready to offer advice I'm already past the decision point and a couple of miles farther from my destination. "In approximately three hundred fifty yards, make a U-Turn, you idiot," her mechanical voice always says.
But no, this morning she zipped right to life. I opened the search option, picked my work address, and was delighted when she immediately told me to turn left.
Left. Okay, okay, I can do that. Left, it is, and onward to civilization. I looked up at the light, which was still red.
I looked back down to see what the next turn would be, only to note that she'd changed her mind. Straight through the intersection, now.
Wait. What?
Oh, wait, she apparently decided. Not straight through; that would be wrong. Turn right, she ordered and flipped the blue line showing my route over to that direction. And then, while I watched in dumbfounded disbelief, she decided it was actually better for me to make a U-turn right there and go back the way I'd come.
It was, I guess, her way of gleefully saying "I got nothin' for ya, buddy."
Screw that. I turned left.
Before long, I came out on the wrong side of an intersection I recognized from my earlier travels. Rejoicing, I turned back down the path and finally got to work, only a little bit late and about ten minutes after my bladder decided it was really, totally, completely full.
Not bad, all things considered. And I'm happy to be back in the working world, regardless.
So, here's hoping you're having as great of a week as I am!
- TOSK
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Linguistics and Humor
Gosh, has it really been nearly a month since my last post? I suppose it has. At least, I presume the site doesn't lie. June 22nd to July 16th is--well, quite almost, nearly a month. I suck, don't I?
But wait! I really do want to talk about linguistics and humor. But first, how 'bout I 'splain, briefly, why I've been such a slacker?
I'm in Pennsylvania now, for one thing. I know, when I started this blog I was in Virginia, and then I was in Tennessee. Memphis is Memphis, and some day, if you meet me in person and perhaps wet my lips with a little bit of alcoholic beverage, I'll give you some details about why I'm chuckling to be outta there. But since the last post, I managed to stuff all of my--well, my stuff--into storage, and I'm now living in the second bedroom of my brother's house in The Keystone State. It's been a challenge in more ways than one, but I'm finally back to where I might actually be able to start writing seriously once again.
That said--TWP! No, no, just kidding, if you understood what I said.
Now, some of you might have no idea what I just said. It is, after all, three English consonants, which means that technically it's not an English word. It might be an English acronym, of course, but often those are represented T.W.P. rather than TWP. Often, but not always.
However, if you know Welsh, or if you've read my latest novel Prophecy, you know that "twp" means "idiot." See, Welsh needs vowels, too, but luckily for them they held on to the double-u as a vowel as well. Twp, then, is pronounced toop in Welsh, and is an insult.
Why, then, does it seem to be on so many road signs in eastern Pennsylvania?
The first time we saw it was leaving the PA Turnpike headed toward New Hope on Highway 202. It was used in a road name, and I shook my head: surely they can't know what the word means. After all, Twp is also the abbreviation for township, sometimes. Just a little way down the highway, though, we happened upon Welsh Road, and, I confess, that set me to wondering.
Then, today, in our driving up and down the Delaware River, I saw it on a sign again.
No, seriously, there's nothing like seeing a sign and your brain interpreting it as "Idiot Road."
Could that Twp today have stood for Township? I suppose it could. English, after all, isn't all that good at delineating the distinction between a word and an acronym. In any event, I hope it does. I really do hope nobody would name their street Stupid Road on purpose.
- TOSK
But wait! I really do want to talk about linguistics and humor. But first, how 'bout I 'splain, briefly, why I've been such a slacker?
I'm in Pennsylvania now, for one thing. I know, when I started this blog I was in Virginia, and then I was in Tennessee. Memphis is Memphis, and some day, if you meet me in person and perhaps wet my lips with a little bit of alcoholic beverage, I'll give you some details about why I'm chuckling to be outta there. But since the last post, I managed to stuff all of my--well, my stuff--into storage, and I'm now living in the second bedroom of my brother's house in The Keystone State. It's been a challenge in more ways than one, but I'm finally back to where I might actually be able to start writing seriously once again.
That said--TWP! No, no, just kidding, if you understood what I said.
Now, some of you might have no idea what I just said. It is, after all, three English consonants, which means that technically it's not an English word. It might be an English acronym, of course, but often those are represented T.W.P. rather than TWP. Often, but not always.
However, if you know Welsh, or if you've read my latest novel Prophecy, you know that "twp" means "idiot." See, Welsh needs vowels, too, but luckily for them they held on to the double-u as a vowel as well. Twp, then, is pronounced toop in Welsh, and is an insult.
Why, then, does it seem to be on so many road signs in eastern Pennsylvania?
The first time we saw it was leaving the PA Turnpike headed toward New Hope on Highway 202. It was used in a road name, and I shook my head: surely they can't know what the word means. After all, Twp is also the abbreviation for township, sometimes. Just a little way down the highway, though, we happened upon Welsh Road, and, I confess, that set me to wondering.
Then, today, in our driving up and down the Delaware River, I saw it on a sign again.
No, seriously, there's nothing like seeing a sign and your brain interpreting it as "Idiot Road."
Could that Twp today have stood for Township? I suppose it could. English, after all, isn't all that good at delineating the distinction between a word and an acronym. In any event, I hope it does. I really do hope nobody would name their street Stupid Road on purpose.
- TOSK
Sunday, February 2, 2014
An Evening With Charlie Brown
You know how we all have some stories from our *ahem* younger years *ahem* that, while we shouldn't share them in public, they're too funny not to share? This is one of those stories for me. I've told it in person numerous times, and it hit on me now, as a way of recovering from the curse-fest that was the fairy story, that I should record the tale on here as one that is a) PG-rated, and b) entirely true.
One of my most successful periods as a teacher came about as a result of actions that were, for the most part, entirely to the credit of other people. One of my better students approached me and suggested that we form a student chapter of a national IT organization. About all I remember actually doing was saying "okay," and that launched a rather brilliant epoch. A group of mature, highly engaged students took charge, helped by the liaison from the professional agency (a man whose friendship I still cherish today). We won awards, we brought home trophies. We crushed the local state college. It was beautiful, man.
It was during our first national trip, in fact, when I got an experience I'll never forget. Thousands of IT students converged on Atlanta for the national conference, hailing from some of the most prestigious schools in the U.S. We, the Alaskan contingent, sent teams to compete in all sorts of nerdy competitions: database design, web site design, coding, and so on. That's all stuff that makes an IT guy like me get weak in the knees.
The least nerdy competition was the scavenger hunt, and it was also the only part of the event in which I, the faculty mentor, could take part. It was a blast! The first thing we did, of course, was set up a router inside one of the hotel rooms and get seven or eight laptops a'whirring to find solutions to the questions posed. I know, I know, it probably violated the hotel's Internet use policy, but hey, everybody else was doing it, too.
It didn't take us long to zero in on the easy ones. Closest Waffle House: check. Certain kiosk at a nearby mall: check. Then we hit the biggie: take a picture, the item commanded, with Charlie Brown.
It turns out, in hindsight, that we should have looked on the campus of the community college that was sponsoring the event, because it apparently sported a large statue of the entire Peanuts gang. Why the Peanuts members are immortalized as a statue at a community college is something I've never bothered asking, but there they are. I guess, anyway. I never actually saw it.
You know how sometimes people get questions wrong on tests because of ambiguity? Well, if you're a teacher, you know that. It's really quite easy to ask a question and think that there's absolutely no way for someone with half a brain cell who's been even partially awake in your class could not answer A, and then have three quarters of your class answer B because, if you look at it the way they do, B is the better answer.
Oops.
Yeah, what I'm getting to, slowly but--well, slowly--is that there are multiple ways to interpret "Charlie Brown." At least, there were in Atlanta, at that time.
It turns out that back then (I just researched it for this post, and it seems the venue closed down in 2010) there was also a fairly well-known night club named Charlie Brown's Cabaret. No, it wasn't named after the cartoon character who Lucy keeps from kicking a football. Instead, the facility was named after its founder--or rather, his--er, her--or, whatever--stage name.
You see, Charlie Brown was an internationally-known drag queen. Still is, from what I can tell, only now he--she--dangit, what gender-specific pronoun do you use for a drag queen?--the performer is 63 years old and only does an occasional show on the side.
At the time, though, apparently Charlie Brown was The Stuff if you were interested in cabaret drag shows in the Atlanta area.
We weren't. We most definitely were not, I should add. Lovely gay friends I may have, but I most certainly do not wish to watch any of them flounce about in a dress. Nevertheless, down we went in a cab to central Atlanta, the three of us--the faculty mentor, the club president, and one of the club officers--taking one for the team, as it were.
(and when I say we went down, I mean downtown. 'k?)
The cab dumped us off at the "gates"--police barriers is more like it--to Backstreet, a downtown hangout that felt like a place that three IT dudes from Alaska should definitely not be. Luckily for us it wasn't very busy yet; after all, we were there at the "IT Guys Party" time, which I have to suggest is generally a few hours prior to any other party times.
Hey, now, I was--still am, at heart--an IT guy. It's my party and I can cry if I want.
*ahem* So, anyway, because it wasn't very busy, Charlie Brown's place was easy to spot and get to. Boldly we walked up to the door and greeted the bouncer, and then we realized that nobody had figured out how we would introduce the subject of our visit.
"We need a picture with Charlie Brown" didn't seem right. I mean, who walks up to the front doors of a venue and demands photographs with the celebrity? We'd discussed it a little on the rather long cab ride there, and the assumption was that several groups would've already beaten us there. Surely the national club would've discussed this with the star before sending people for pictures, right?
The guard/bouncer/ID checker guy stared blankly at us.
None of us had any idea how to broach that subject. Hell, none of us had any idea how to broach any subject when entering a drag venue.
Luckily the club president was with us. A big man, he hulks over my mere six feet. He looks like he's descended directly from the great Viking chieftains, too, and one gets the idea being around him that "fear" isn't something he's been guilty of feeling often. Besides, he's been happily married for years, and to a beautifully impressive woman who looks like she shares his ancestry and would bench-press anybody who dared suggest that her husband was into--well, um, you know--that stuff.
Our Norse god took the lead, explaining the club, the scavenger hunt, and the chief goal for our visit.
The bouncer walked away chuckling. After a minute or two he came back and explained that Charlie Brown was amenable to our plight, on one condition.
We had to stay for the first act, at least, of the show.
Yeah, okay. Like, how difficult could that be?
I kept wondering how we'd managed to be the first team to get there as we were led back to the star's dressing room. There, we got to snap several awesome photos while we chatted with one of the world's premier drag queens. It was--actually, it was pretty awesome. He's a great guy, and the conversation, short as it was, proved both pleasant and engaging.
Then we watched the show.
For the record, none of us had any idea what to expect. What we got proved wildly entertaining, though. Charlie Brown's act consisted of both music and comedy, and the insults he hurled toward some of his audience members--the Georgian "peaches" and us Alaskans, included--were as funny as they were priceless.
The first act was so good, in fact, that we stayed for the second. That was when the mental injury was sustained.
See, the second act was sort of topless. The performer strutted out onto the stage in a slinky silvery dress, and then as--still don't know which pronoun to use--sang, the top of the dress came down to display.....
Yeah, breasts. Breasts with pasties, so it wasn't completely topless, but they were bared breasts nonetheless.
I've rarely been so conflicted. My eyes were entranced; it's not often that they've had such perfect specimens of womanhood displayed to them under the glare of spotlights. My brain, meanwhile, recoiled. Those are amazing breasts brushed up against That's a dude dancing topless.
Ow, ow, and ow.
I have no idea how the rest of the show went, as it was quite early in the silver-dress act that the three of us Alaskan IT guys decided that we'd gotten everything we'd come for, that and just a little too much more, and so we ducked down and fled from the building. We washed our minds out with as much alcohol as we could consume that evening, but it didn't help--I still occasionally close my eyes only to see that glimmery silver dress, halfway down, and what it contained.
Oh--and no, we didn't win the scavenger hunt; as I already pointed out, that was the wrong Charlie Brown. We did, however, win a certain amount of infamy, thanks to the pictures we submitted being shown early and repeatedly within the slide show at the awards night dinner.
It ended up being entertaining as heck to one of the club members, who it turned out was gay and fell out of his seat laughing at our expressions upon seeing ourselves on the big screen with Charlie Brown himself.
I suppose that even I learned something on that trip to Atlanta.
- TOSK
One of my most successful periods as a teacher came about as a result of actions that were, for the most part, entirely to the credit of other people. One of my better students approached me and suggested that we form a student chapter of a national IT organization. About all I remember actually doing was saying "okay," and that launched a rather brilliant epoch. A group of mature, highly engaged students took charge, helped by the liaison from the professional agency (a man whose friendship I still cherish today). We won awards, we brought home trophies. We crushed the local state college. It was beautiful, man.
It was during our first national trip, in fact, when I got an experience I'll never forget. Thousands of IT students converged on Atlanta for the national conference, hailing from some of the most prestigious schools in the U.S. We, the Alaskan contingent, sent teams to compete in all sorts of nerdy competitions: database design, web site design, coding, and so on. That's all stuff that makes an IT guy like me get weak in the knees.
The least nerdy competition was the scavenger hunt, and it was also the only part of the event in which I, the faculty mentor, could take part. It was a blast! The first thing we did, of course, was set up a router inside one of the hotel rooms and get seven or eight laptops a'whirring to find solutions to the questions posed. I know, I know, it probably violated the hotel's Internet use policy, but hey, everybody else was doing it, too.
It didn't take us long to zero in on the easy ones. Closest Waffle House: check. Certain kiosk at a nearby mall: check. Then we hit the biggie: take a picture, the item commanded, with Charlie Brown.
It turns out, in hindsight, that we should have looked on the campus of the community college that was sponsoring the event, because it apparently sported a large statue of the entire Peanuts gang. Why the Peanuts members are immortalized as a statue at a community college is something I've never bothered asking, but there they are. I guess, anyway. I never actually saw it.
You know how sometimes people get questions wrong on tests because of ambiguity? Well, if you're a teacher, you know that. It's really quite easy to ask a question and think that there's absolutely no way for someone with half a brain cell who's been even partially awake in your class could not answer A, and then have three quarters of your class answer B because, if you look at it the way they do, B is the better answer.
Oops.
Yeah, what I'm getting to, slowly but--well, slowly--is that there are multiple ways to interpret "Charlie Brown." At least, there were in Atlanta, at that time.
It turns out that back then (I just researched it for this post, and it seems the venue closed down in 2010) there was also a fairly well-known night club named Charlie Brown's Cabaret. No, it wasn't named after the cartoon character who Lucy keeps from kicking a football. Instead, the facility was named after its founder--or rather, his--er, her--or, whatever--stage name.
You see, Charlie Brown was an internationally-known drag queen. Still is, from what I can tell, only now he--she--dangit, what gender-specific pronoun do you use for a drag queen?--the performer is 63 years old and only does an occasional show on the side.
At the time, though, apparently Charlie Brown was The Stuff if you were interested in cabaret drag shows in the Atlanta area.
We weren't. We most definitely were not, I should add. Lovely gay friends I may have, but I most certainly do not wish to watch any of them flounce about in a dress. Nevertheless, down we went in a cab to central Atlanta, the three of us--the faculty mentor, the club president, and one of the club officers--taking one for the team, as it were.
(and when I say we went down, I mean downtown. 'k?)
The cab dumped us off at the "gates"--police barriers is more like it--to Backstreet, a downtown hangout that felt like a place that three IT dudes from Alaska should definitely not be. Luckily for us it wasn't very busy yet; after all, we were there at the "IT Guys Party" time, which I have to suggest is generally a few hours prior to any other party times.
Hey, now, I was--still am, at heart--an IT guy. It's my party and I can cry if I want.
*ahem* So, anyway, because it wasn't very busy, Charlie Brown's place was easy to spot and get to. Boldly we walked up to the door and greeted the bouncer, and then we realized that nobody had figured out how we would introduce the subject of our visit.
"We need a picture with Charlie Brown" didn't seem right. I mean, who walks up to the front doors of a venue and demands photographs with the celebrity? We'd discussed it a little on the rather long cab ride there, and the assumption was that several groups would've already beaten us there. Surely the national club would've discussed this with the star before sending people for pictures, right?
The guard/bouncer/ID checker guy stared blankly at us.
None of us had any idea how to broach that subject. Hell, none of us had any idea how to broach any subject when entering a drag venue.
Luckily the club president was with us. A big man, he hulks over my mere six feet. He looks like he's descended directly from the great Viking chieftains, too, and one gets the idea being around him that "fear" isn't something he's been guilty of feeling often. Besides, he's been happily married for years, and to a beautifully impressive woman who looks like she shares his ancestry and would bench-press anybody who dared suggest that her husband was into--well, um, you know--that stuff.
Our Norse god took the lead, explaining the club, the scavenger hunt, and the chief goal for our visit.
The bouncer walked away chuckling. After a minute or two he came back and explained that Charlie Brown was amenable to our plight, on one condition.
We had to stay for the first act, at least, of the show.
Yeah, okay. Like, how difficult could that be?
I kept wondering how we'd managed to be the first team to get there as we were led back to the star's dressing room. There, we got to snap several awesome photos while we chatted with one of the world's premier drag queens. It was--actually, it was pretty awesome. He's a great guy, and the conversation, short as it was, proved both pleasant and engaging.
Then we watched the show.
For the record, none of us had any idea what to expect. What we got proved wildly entertaining, though. Charlie Brown's act consisted of both music and comedy, and the insults he hurled toward some of his audience members--the Georgian "peaches" and us Alaskans, included--were as funny as they were priceless.
The first act was so good, in fact, that we stayed for the second. That was when the mental injury was sustained.
See, the second act was sort of topless. The performer strutted out onto the stage in a slinky silvery dress, and then as--still don't know which pronoun to use--sang, the top of the dress came down to display.....
Yeah, breasts. Breasts with pasties, so it wasn't completely topless, but they were bared breasts nonetheless.
I've rarely been so conflicted. My eyes were entranced; it's not often that they've had such perfect specimens of womanhood displayed to them under the glare of spotlights. My brain, meanwhile, recoiled. Those are amazing breasts brushed up against That's a dude dancing topless.
Ow, ow, and ow.
I have no idea how the rest of the show went, as it was quite early in the silver-dress act that the three of us Alaskan IT guys decided that we'd gotten everything we'd come for, that and just a little too much more, and so we ducked down and fled from the building. We washed our minds out with as much alcohol as we could consume that evening, but it didn't help--I still occasionally close my eyes only to see that glimmery silver dress, halfway down, and what it contained.
Oh--and no, we didn't win the scavenger hunt; as I already pointed out, that was the wrong Charlie Brown. We did, however, win a certain amount of infamy, thanks to the pictures we submitted being shown early and repeatedly within the slide show at the awards night dinner.
It ended up being entertaining as heck to one of the club members, who it turned out was gay and fell out of his seat laughing at our expressions upon seeing ourselves on the big screen with Charlie Brown himself.
I suppose that even I learned something on that trip to Atlanta.
- TOSK
Monday, December 30, 2013
2013 Accomplishments and 2014 Resolutions
Remember how 2013 started? I do. It started right on this post of mine, the January 1, 2013, missive in which I resolved to accomplish several awesome things. That, incidentally, was the first post of my friend Cricket Walker's 365-day posting challenge. You know, that challenge for which I was going to post 365 blog entries, one each day, in 365 days, thus creating a travelogue for the year I'd just finished traipsing across.
Remember all that? Well, I do. And now, watching the tail end of 2013 gallop past me like Secretariat with a jet engine up his butt, I'm pretty sure that "I blew it" is an understatement.
Don't go getting all soft on me, now. I cut my professional teeth in the U.S. Army Infantry, where if you can't handle a "your performance sucked so much shit, you were farting pastures" in an after-action review, you aren't going to last long. Granted, I didn't last long, but my anti-longevity wasn't due to thin skin.
So anyway, first, I need to review all the stuff I didn't accomplish last year. Then, and only then, can we get to all the stuff I'm not gonna accomplish next year. Trust me, that's the best way.
Chief Blog Goal #1: post a blog entry each and every happy little day of the happy little year.
Nope. Not really even close. I was 115 entries short. 114, actually, once I post this one. Oh, I kept up for quite a while, with one post for every day right up to the end of May. That's nearly five months of consistent blogging, I'll just point out, and that ain't bad. It's also 251 posts in a year, which really ain't too shabby at all, as blog activity goes. It's also helped me see the importance of back material--many days my most-hit post wasn't even from that day. Oh, and also, I doubled my total hit count. All in all, not bad, then, but as goal attainment goes, it sucks big fat ogre toes.
The rest of my 2013 resolutions:
Wait. Let me rephrase that, because it's patently untrue. 2013 was, in fact, a pretty dang good year for me. I moved into a great job opportunity. I met some great neighbors. I accomplished more writing than I've ever done before, and a lot of it is sweet awesome sauce. Heide's health continues to improve. Jessa graduated from high school, and Vinny graduated from a college program.
I guess you can miss nine out of ten goals and still have a pretty dang good year.
Oh, yeah, and I got a Gandalf lunch box for Christmas. That, and a TARDIS throw-blankey. How many of you got a Gandalf lunch box or a TARDIS throw-blankey, hmm? Pretty dang good year? Nah, pretty dang great year!
Okay, so I've had a pretty good few years, honestly. It's been a lot of cases of not accomplishing what I set out for, but what I did accomplish has made me happy.
So with all that being said, what should I vow to do in 2014? Keep in mind as I ask the question that I haven't accomplished much of what I vowed in 2013, 2012, or other years in the past. So--maybe--maybe I should just play the odds? Since history tells me that I'm most likely not going to do what I say I'm going to do, maybe I should work it like this:
In 2014, I resolve to:
Take that, Cosmos...
Now, we'll see whether I accomplish what I've said I would, or what I've said I wouldn't.
To tell you the honest truth, though? If I merely succeed in spending the next 365 bright and beautiful days under the sun with the love of my life, Heide, I'll be the luckiest man on the planet. I can only hope, for your sake, my friend, that you have someone who brings the sweet awesome sauce to your life like she does to mine.
Goals or no, here's hoping you have a great, happy, and, above all, safe New Year!
- TOSK
Remember all that? Well, I do. And now, watching the tail end of 2013 gallop past me like Secretariat with a jet engine up his butt, I'm pretty sure that "I blew it" is an understatement.
Don't go getting all soft on me, now. I cut my professional teeth in the U.S. Army Infantry, where if you can't handle a "your performance sucked so much shit, you were farting pastures" in an after-action review, you aren't going to last long. Granted, I didn't last long, but my anti-longevity wasn't due to thin skin.
So anyway, first, I need to review all the stuff I didn't accomplish last year. Then, and only then, can we get to all the stuff I'm not gonna accomplish next year. Trust me, that's the best way.
Chief Blog Goal #1: post a blog entry each and every happy little day of the happy little year.
Nope. Not really even close. I was 115 entries short. 114, actually, once I post this one. Oh, I kept up for quite a while, with one post for every day right up to the end of May. That's nearly five months of consistent blogging, I'll just point out, and that ain't bad. It's also 251 posts in a year, which really ain't too shabby at all, as blog activity goes. It's also helped me see the importance of back material--many days my most-hit post wasn't even from that day. Oh, and also, I doubled my total hit count. All in all, not bad, then, but as goal attainment goes, it sucks big fat ogre toes.
The rest of my 2013 resolutions:
- Write every day. Nope, didn't do that. Wrote a lot of days, and a whole lot more of what I wrote in 2013 was a whole lot better than the crappola I scribed in 2012, in my own less than entirely humble opinion. Still: fail.
- Publish four books. Nuh uh. I got one, and then a boxed set. That's it. One novel and a marketing device don't equate to four novels in any realm. I did press on quite a bit, with Elf Queen nearly ready to go and its successor's first draft done. Still: fail.
- Take risks. Well, hell, I did that the very first day, making crappy goals like this one. I did some other stuff that can be considered risks, too, but--ah, hell. Final score on this one: indeterminate.
- Operate smarter. What the hell was I thinking with this one? "Operate smarter"--really, big guy? Okay, show of hands: who thought I was smarter this year? Who thought I wasn't? Yeah, I'm gonna fail myself just for writing this unmeasurable-as-hell, stupid goal down.
- Freelance each week. Just--no. The time I was spending doing freelance, though it made me a better writer, paid off in very small ways, while the time I have spent writing novels, embarrassingly for the freelance sites, is already paying off better, and will hopefully in the future pay off heads and armpits above the freelance rate of pay. Smart fail, but fail nonetheless.
- Dozen short stories written. Or, um, not. Fail.
- Social network weekly. Hey, I've played Facebook games weekly; does that count? I think the main purpose of this goal was to pull my weight in APG, and since they and I are no longer associated, I'll just rate this one a nice big juicy ball of fail, okay?
- Move. Now, this one makes me giggle in a way that would probably lead you to suggest that I need professional help if you were to hear it. I did it. I frickin' moved. But. The goal was to move into a house from the craptastic apartment we were renting. Nowhere in there was I suggesting a journey of a thousand miles. While I'm not saying it was bad that I moved to where I did, I gotta give myself only half credit for this one. And half credit, on a goal, is--yes, you guessed it. Fail.
- Exercise once a day. Not even close. If you strung 'em out it would probably be closer to once a month. Big fat floppy fail there, with whipped cream and sugar on top.
Wait. Let me rephrase that, because it's patently untrue. 2013 was, in fact, a pretty dang good year for me. I moved into a great job opportunity. I met some great neighbors. I accomplished more writing than I've ever done before, and a lot of it is sweet awesome sauce. Heide's health continues to improve. Jessa graduated from high school, and Vinny graduated from a college program.
I guess you can miss nine out of ten goals and still have a pretty dang good year.
Oh, yeah, and I got a Gandalf lunch box for Christmas. That, and a TARDIS throw-blankey. How many of you got a Gandalf lunch box or a TARDIS throw-blankey, hmm? Pretty dang good year? Nah, pretty dang great year!
Okay, so I've had a pretty good few years, honestly. It's been a lot of cases of not accomplishing what I set out for, but what I did accomplish has made me happy.
So with all that being said, what should I vow to do in 2014? Keep in mind as I ask the question that I haven't accomplished much of what I vowed in 2013, 2012, or other years in the past. So--maybe--maybe I should just play the odds? Since history tells me that I'm most likely not going to do what I say I'm going to do, maybe I should work it like this:
In 2014, I resolve to:
- not INCREASE my income by any substantial measure.
- not COMPLETE four novels that are rockin' good.
- not BREAK THROUGH to world wide publishing success.
- not ACHIEVE every goal I'm assigned at work.
- not LOSE most of the weight that I've gained over the years.
- not GET IN SHAPE.
Take that, Cosmos...
Now, we'll see whether I accomplish what I've said I would, or what I've said I wouldn't.
To tell you the honest truth, though? If I merely succeed in spending the next 365 bright and beautiful days under the sun with the love of my life, Heide, I'll be the luckiest man on the planet. I can only hope, for your sake, my friend, that you have someone who brings the sweet awesome sauce to your life like she does to mine.
Goals or no, here's hoping you have a great, happy, and, above all, safe New Year!
- TOSK
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Remembrances of Panic
Since I waxed so fondly of panic in my last post, I figured I should include a couple of significant panic-related memories in this one.
There's a lot I don't recall about growing up in Mississippi. Of course I remember being able to run around the neighborhood without locator devices or family radio or any such things--hey, it was many years ago in the South, and such activities were generally far safer than they are today. At the same time, I remember being pretty much the opposite of affluent, to the point where our pastimes included using a broom handle to hit a taped-up wad of paper in a poor semblance of the sport of baseball, and also chasing each other around the neighborhood with BB guns to play war.
I remember having to walk to school. Uphill. Both ways. Barefoot. Kicking the dinosaurs out of the way, even.
More to the point, I vividly remember the first time I saw my mother lose control while driving.
It snowed. Now, such an event was a rarity in and of itself in Corinth, Mississippi, but this time we got nearly a quarter of an inch of the white stuff, and it stuck to the ground. My father was away from home, and our power had gone out, leaving my mother with two young boys -- I think I was somewhere around 10, which means my brother was somewhere around 4 -- and no way to prepare hot food.
It would have been a foodtastrophe, except that there was a Shoney's in town.
Bravely, my mother piled us all in the muscle car that she and my father loved driving (and that all northerners know is a horrible choice in the snow), and we started down the beautiful white streets (nobody else drove in the snow, either) toward the beautiful, distant building filled with warm coffee and pancakes.
There's a hill in Corinth -- a famous one to Civil War buffs, at that, because it's where a fort was built since that's what you do on hills when you're in the military -- directly down the road from our old home, and it leads a long sloping descent into the actual town part of town. The part of town, I will add, that contains such havens as a Shoney's restaurant and even a Piggly Wiggly. In normal weather it would've been a fun hill for bicycling down, except for the extreme amount of traffic it carried. On that snowy white day we had the whole road to ourselves, which was a good thing because about halfway down, Mom lost control.
She did all the typical stuff I described in my last post that mere mortals do when they lose control. She panicked. She stomped on the brake. She started screaming something entirely foreign-sounding (no, I didn't mention that tendency of the panic crowd in my last post, but I should have). Then, when physics finally ran its course and the car came sliding to a stop at the bottom of the hill, pointed sideways across the road, she told us how glad she was that we were all safe.
Then, we went to Shoney's.
It's funny that that's one of my clearest memories of growing up. There's something about panic, the abject terror that takes over our entire souls for that brief period of time, that remains etched in our minds forever, isn't there?
I had a similar experience about a decade later, this time with my own hands wrapped around the steering wheel. My West Point cadet company was holding our annual Christmas party, and for that year we'd scored the ski lodge. It was a nice place, for sure, but to get there you had to exit the gates of West Point, travel down scenic highway 9W, and enter the ski hill's separate driveway. Of course, only the seniors could drive their personal vehicles on post back then, and since it was too far for a comfortable walk, we used military transportation to get the cadets in our company to the party.
A deuce and a half it was, then.
At least, I think it was a deuce and a half. The Army has two main cargo trucks, either of which can be seen in various movies pulling up to a group of unsuspecting civilians in a cute little villa and then disgorging dozens of camo-clad troops who've been ordered to kill. The deuce and a half (slang for "two and a half ton") is the smaller one, as you probably would have gathered without prompting when I said the other one is called a five ton. The differences between them, other than size, are subtle -- one has an exhaust can and the other just an exhaust hat, and so on -- and frankly I can't recall which model of truck it was on that wintry day a quarter century ago.
It was a standard transmission, I remember that much. That makes it most likely (though not certainly, as my research since has proven) a deuce and a half rather than a five ton. Again, not that big of a deal.
It was older'n dirt. That was a big deal. The truck had one of those steering columns that would swing one direction by a ways, and then the other direction by a different ways, and yet the tires would continue along the same track as though the steering wheel hadn't moved a bit. It also had a fairly loose shifter path, which meant that sometimes you hit the right gear, and sometimes you didn't, no matter how expertly you maneuvered the damn long rod.
Hey, most of the trucks they let us cadets drive were like that.
So anyway, I don't recall why I ended up driving that night. I do recall that there weren't all that many folks who would admit to having a valid military permit to drive the big trucks, and/or admit to having their wallets with them. Whatever reason, though, I was the driver, and the required passenger was a plebe who, likewise, had drawn a short straw of some sort.
He and I will always remember that night together....
No, no, nothing like that. We were just transporting the cadets of our company to the ski lodge from the barracks, that was it. It took two trips. Trip one was made with as little incident as possible -- no incident, in fact, if you don't count the constant harassment the driver of any such vehicle has to endure from the peanut gallery in back. After a while I learned to not hear the "grind it till you find it" catcalls and the "easy on the shifting" growls, though, and so I didn't count that as incident.
Without incident, then, it was.
I pulled out of the ski lodge on my way to pick up the second set of cadets, my trusty TC (the plebe) sitting in his seat. It was snowing, and it was dark, two factors that probably should strike fear in the heart of anybody driving an unfamiliar, cranky, old vehicle down a relatively unfamiliar stretch of highway, but hey, I was bulletproof back then.
I was bulletproof right up till I missed third gear, that is. Then I did what most people would do, I like to think: I looked down at the shifter assembly.
As soon as I looked down there, though, I ended up steering the truck off of the highway. I felt the right tires go thunk and drop to the gravel of the shoulder, and then I did what most people do in Loss of Control situations: I panicked. In my panic, I completely forgot what I'd learned in my physics classes and yarded the steering wheel around to swing the big truck quickly back onto the friendly pavement.
The friendly pavement which was, I should remind everyone briefly, quite slick with new-fallen snow.
The truck spun a graceful 180. It was -- it was beautiful, man.
Now, I've done 180's in vehicles since. I've done plenty, in fact. There's something special about a big old Army cargo truck executing that maneuver, though. In addition to the panic, you feel kinda like a mash-up of Rambo with The Joker doing a waltz spin that would make Ginger Rogers proud. I mean, it's a big truck. It doesn't look that big from outside -- or maybe it does, to some people -- but from the driver's seat, it's huge. And when it's spinning in relation to the rest of the world, well, now, that's panic, my friends. Slow, graceful, elegant freakin' panic.
We did stop, though. Amazingly, there wasn't a lot of traffic; all I could see were a couple of headlights way out in the distance. I felt the bumper knock up against the safety rail in the middle of the highway, but when I looked later it hadn't even dented anything on the truck. All in all, it was a moment of pure unadulterated terror that ended very, very well.
And that was when I did something really stupid.
See, the reason the "TC" -- the second person in the vehicle -- is required to be there according to safety regulation, is that anytime you back up one of those monsters you're supposed to have someone to regulate the flow of everybody else around so that you don't hit anybody. I knew that. I'd been through Army trucker training, man.
So I looked over at the poor plebe and told him to get out and regulate the flow of everybody else while I backed us up and around and got going straight again.
Hey, it was safety regulations I was following. But really? Later on I replayed the scene in my head, and watched the poor guy pull his fingers out of the dents that his panicked hands had clawed into the dashboard, then climb dutifully out of the safety and warmth of the truck cab to stand in the blowing snow -- with no light! -- stopping traffic so that we could turn around, I realized what a dumb and dangerous move that had been.
Dumb, dumb, dumb. Dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.
Yeah, okay, it is awfully damn funny, too, now that it's been years and nobody got hurt, but at the time, it was just dumb.
He did a great job, though. He leaped right out into our headlights and took up a position that was a mixture between parade rest and stop -- you know, one hand sticking straight out, palm outstretched, in the unmistakable (when visible) pose.
Now, luckily once again, New York drivers are many things, but they're generally not stupid. The ones behind us never even got close, as they'd obviously seen the tall lights of the truck do a pirouette move in front of them, and they wisely slowed way down. It also didn't take me long to back the truck out, turn it around, and -- after waiting the moments it took the poor now-semi-frozen plebe to clamber back into the warmth of the cab -- drive off.
And I never looked at the floor board in a snowstorm again.
- TOSK
There's a lot I don't recall about growing up in Mississippi. Of course I remember being able to run around the neighborhood without locator devices or family radio or any such things--hey, it was many years ago in the South, and such activities were generally far safer than they are today. At the same time, I remember being pretty much the opposite of affluent, to the point where our pastimes included using a broom handle to hit a taped-up wad of paper in a poor semblance of the sport of baseball, and also chasing each other around the neighborhood with BB guns to play war.
I remember having to walk to school. Uphill. Both ways. Barefoot. Kicking the dinosaurs out of the way, even.
More to the point, I vividly remember the first time I saw my mother lose control while driving.
It snowed. Now, such an event was a rarity in and of itself in Corinth, Mississippi, but this time we got nearly a quarter of an inch of the white stuff, and it stuck to the ground. My father was away from home, and our power had gone out, leaving my mother with two young boys -- I think I was somewhere around 10, which means my brother was somewhere around 4 -- and no way to prepare hot food.
It would have been a foodtastrophe, except that there was a Shoney's in town.
Bravely, my mother piled us all in the muscle car that she and my father loved driving (and that all northerners know is a horrible choice in the snow), and we started down the beautiful white streets (nobody else drove in the snow, either) toward the beautiful, distant building filled with warm coffee and pancakes.
There's a hill in Corinth -- a famous one to Civil War buffs, at that, because it's where a fort was built since that's what you do on hills when you're in the military -- directly down the road from our old home, and it leads a long sloping descent into the actual town part of town. The part of town, I will add, that contains such havens as a Shoney's restaurant and even a Piggly Wiggly. In normal weather it would've been a fun hill for bicycling down, except for the extreme amount of traffic it carried. On that snowy white day we had the whole road to ourselves, which was a good thing because about halfway down, Mom lost control.
She did all the typical stuff I described in my last post that mere mortals do when they lose control. She panicked. She stomped on the brake. She started screaming something entirely foreign-sounding (no, I didn't mention that tendency of the panic crowd in my last post, but I should have). Then, when physics finally ran its course and the car came sliding to a stop at the bottom of the hill, pointed sideways across the road, she told us how glad she was that we were all safe.
Then, we went to Shoney's.
It's funny that that's one of my clearest memories of growing up. There's something about panic, the abject terror that takes over our entire souls for that brief period of time, that remains etched in our minds forever, isn't there?
I had a similar experience about a decade later, this time with my own hands wrapped around the steering wheel. My West Point cadet company was holding our annual Christmas party, and for that year we'd scored the ski lodge. It was a nice place, for sure, but to get there you had to exit the gates of West Point, travel down scenic highway 9W, and enter the ski hill's separate driveway. Of course, only the seniors could drive their personal vehicles on post back then, and since it was too far for a comfortable walk, we used military transportation to get the cadets in our company to the party.
A deuce and a half it was, then.
At least, I think it was a deuce and a half. The Army has two main cargo trucks, either of which can be seen in various movies pulling up to a group of unsuspecting civilians in a cute little villa and then disgorging dozens of camo-clad troops who've been ordered to kill. The deuce and a half (slang for "two and a half ton") is the smaller one, as you probably would have gathered without prompting when I said the other one is called a five ton. The differences between them, other than size, are subtle -- one has an exhaust can and the other just an exhaust hat, and so on -- and frankly I can't recall which model of truck it was on that wintry day a quarter century ago.
It was a standard transmission, I remember that much. That makes it most likely (though not certainly, as my research since has proven) a deuce and a half rather than a five ton. Again, not that big of a deal.
It was older'n dirt. That was a big deal. The truck had one of those steering columns that would swing one direction by a ways, and then the other direction by a different ways, and yet the tires would continue along the same track as though the steering wheel hadn't moved a bit. It also had a fairly loose shifter path, which meant that sometimes you hit the right gear, and sometimes you didn't, no matter how expertly you maneuvered the damn long rod.
Hey, most of the trucks they let us cadets drive were like that.
So anyway, I don't recall why I ended up driving that night. I do recall that there weren't all that many folks who would admit to having a valid military permit to drive the big trucks, and/or admit to having their wallets with them. Whatever reason, though, I was the driver, and the required passenger was a plebe who, likewise, had drawn a short straw of some sort.
He and I will always remember that night together....
No, no, nothing like that. We were just transporting the cadets of our company to the ski lodge from the barracks, that was it. It took two trips. Trip one was made with as little incident as possible -- no incident, in fact, if you don't count the constant harassment the driver of any such vehicle has to endure from the peanut gallery in back. After a while I learned to not hear the "grind it till you find it" catcalls and the "easy on the shifting" growls, though, and so I didn't count that as incident.
Without incident, then, it was.
I pulled out of the ski lodge on my way to pick up the second set of cadets, my trusty TC (the plebe) sitting in his seat. It was snowing, and it was dark, two factors that probably should strike fear in the heart of anybody driving an unfamiliar, cranky, old vehicle down a relatively unfamiliar stretch of highway, but hey, I was bulletproof back then.
I was bulletproof right up till I missed third gear, that is. Then I did what most people would do, I like to think: I looked down at the shifter assembly.
As soon as I looked down there, though, I ended up steering the truck off of the highway. I felt the right tires go thunk and drop to the gravel of the shoulder, and then I did what most people do in Loss of Control situations: I panicked. In my panic, I completely forgot what I'd learned in my physics classes and yarded the steering wheel around to swing the big truck quickly back onto the friendly pavement.
The friendly pavement which was, I should remind everyone briefly, quite slick with new-fallen snow.
The truck spun a graceful 180. It was -- it was beautiful, man.
Now, I've done 180's in vehicles since. I've done plenty, in fact. There's something special about a big old Army cargo truck executing that maneuver, though. In addition to the panic, you feel kinda like a mash-up of Rambo with The Joker doing a waltz spin that would make Ginger Rogers proud. I mean, it's a big truck. It doesn't look that big from outside -- or maybe it does, to some people -- but from the driver's seat, it's huge. And when it's spinning in relation to the rest of the world, well, now, that's panic, my friends. Slow, graceful, elegant freakin' panic.
We did stop, though. Amazingly, there wasn't a lot of traffic; all I could see were a couple of headlights way out in the distance. I felt the bumper knock up against the safety rail in the middle of the highway, but when I looked later it hadn't even dented anything on the truck. All in all, it was a moment of pure unadulterated terror that ended very, very well.
And that was when I did something really stupid.
See, the reason the "TC" -- the second person in the vehicle -- is required to be there according to safety regulation, is that anytime you back up one of those monsters you're supposed to have someone to regulate the flow of everybody else around so that you don't hit anybody. I knew that. I'd been through Army trucker training, man.
So I looked over at the poor plebe and told him to get out and regulate the flow of everybody else while I backed us up and around and got going straight again.
Hey, it was safety regulations I was following. But really? Later on I replayed the scene in my head, and watched the poor guy pull his fingers out of the dents that his panicked hands had clawed into the dashboard, then climb dutifully out of the safety and warmth of the truck cab to stand in the blowing snow -- with no light! -- stopping traffic so that we could turn around, I realized what a dumb and dangerous move that had been.
Dumb, dumb, dumb. Dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.
Yeah, okay, it is awfully damn funny, too, now that it's been years and nobody got hurt, but at the time, it was just dumb.
He did a great job, though. He leaped right out into our headlights and took up a position that was a mixture between parade rest and stop -- you know, one hand sticking straight out, palm outstretched, in the unmistakable (when visible) pose.
Now, luckily once again, New York drivers are many things, but they're generally not stupid. The ones behind us never even got close, as they'd obviously seen the tall lights of the truck do a pirouette move in front of them, and they wisely slowed way down. It also didn't take me long to back the truck out, turn it around, and -- after waiting the moments it took the poor now-semi-frozen plebe to clamber back into the warmth of the cab -- drive off.
And I never looked at the floor board in a snowstorm again.
- TOSK
Sunday, October 20, 2013
Namaste-ed out
Long day, yesterday.
First came the "Namaste Day" event that my wifetalked guilted me into attending. See, with all of the writing and working, and working and writing, that I've been doing lately, I have to admit that I haven't been spending a lot of time with those who love me. I also have always had a strong metaphysically spiritual side, though lately it's only evident once you chip through the thick, hard curmudgeonly shell.
Besides, she promised I'd have fun.
By the time we left, we were exhausted. Unfortunately, we couldn't come straight home because we needed some cat food (which can only be picked up at the pet food store, thanks to special dietary needs of the littlest carnivore in the family) and a refill on meds for the daughter (which can only be picked up from the pharmacy) and hey, I wanted some beer (which can't be picked up at either the pet food store or the pharmacy) and so we had not one, and not two, but three stops to make on the way. The thought, tired as I was, made me want to whine.
We managed to successfully make those stops, though, and with a minimum of whining, and so finally, exhausted, we pulled into our garage.
And there the neighbor was, outside, washing his car.
Now, first of all, I like my neighbors. I like them quite a lot, in fact. I've not lived anyplace where I've had such explicitly neighborly neighbors in a long, long time. Yes, they're very Southern, and yes, they have just as many quirks as any other set of neighbors would have, but they make it clear that they sincerely care about having a good neighborhood and about their neighbors. It's--well, it's heart-warming.
But not when we're tired. Especially not when we're exhausted but yet there's no way for this curmudgeon to sneak a great big Jeep Commander into the garage without him noticing as he washes his car a narrow alleyway away.
Not, um, that I would do such a sneaky thing, but I have to admit that the thought crossed my mind.
Tired or no, I had a neighborly obligation to wander across the alley to say hi while the wife and daughter got everything from the different stores into the house. But then, they surprised me by joining us outside. As did the neighbor's wife. As did the other neighbors. Before long, we had a full-on neighbor party in beach and lawn chairs in the alley separating the rows of homes. Soon the sun went down, dragging the temperature with it. Individually we all went indoors to pile more clothes on, nobody willing to call it quits before anybody else--especially not us, since we'd made it known that we'd come back home to the South from Alaska.
"Cold? What cold? I spent fourteen years in Alaska; this isn't cold. Let me tell you about the time I was tromping through three feet of snow and met the grizzly bear tromping the other way--," is hard to say when your teeth are chattering, but by goodness I managed.
Sheesh. I finally managed to end it at about 10:00 pm. Like I said, I like my neighbors a lot, but not so much when I'm cold, tired, and cranky.
What got me so tired in the first place, though, was an interesting experience. Yes, I'd been dragged (though neither kicking nor screaming, I admit) to the festival. Namaste! I honestly hadn't wanted to go; instead, I'd wanted to sit and work on a book. Heide pointed out, though, that being outside the house was what provided me with a lot of my writing inspiration, and she was absolutely correct.
Therefore, Namaste! For those unfamiliar with the term, it means "I bow to the divine/light/whatever within you." It's probably the most commonly-used term in yoga, ranking, as I suspect it must, even over the true building block terms of yoga which include "tadasana," "downward facing dog,"and "put your elbow in the other ear now."
To be honest, I enjoyed my stay there, at least till I got namaste-ed out. I mean, there's only so much 'bowing without really bowing to the divine in so many other people that I never met before' that an old cranky curmudgeon like me can take. After a while, I was just plain tired of not-really-bowing.
That, and there are always a great many wonderful people to meet at these types of events, which means your "nice to see you" smile is always burning. At the same time, there are always a few people there who creep me the hell out. If you've been to one, you know what I'm talking about.
Anyway, we arrived just in time to pay my entrance cost (ten dollars; the girls had already attended the evening previous and thus were already paid for) and head to the session on Automatic Writing. It was an interesting session; a woman with vibrantly blue hair and sequined hat and scarf who identified herself as a Reverend lectured us on the process of asking an archangel for help answering a Deep and Important question and then writing the answer for 20 minutes.
Now, you know me by this point in the post, I hope. If so, you're aware that the next thing I'm'a gonna say pretty much has to be snarky, or else the curmudgeon in me is gonna explode. Still, as much snark as I could possibly apply to the situation, the fact was that the whole Automatic Writing gig worked when I tried it. She set the timer, and I asked the archangel for help with a particular situation, and then I sat and wrote down some of the clearest thoughts I've had on the topic. Impressive, that. Was it the archangel I'd called for, or my subconscience, or the memory of all the episodes I've watched of Dr. Phil while spending time with my beloved one that brought the newer, deeper, richer understanding? I don't know, and it doesn't really matter. Point is, it worked.
Maybe Dr. Phil is the archangel?
Sorry, that was snarky.
The next session was even more meaningful. In it, the presenter told us (basically) that we get back from the universe what we put out into it. Reap what you sow, yadda yadda, and all that stuff, but it made a lot of sense based on the negativity surrounding a lot of the move we just made and what has happened to us since. Yeah, I know, duh and all that, but she had some useful techniques for transforming negative vibes into positive ones to send out into the universe. The important fact is that I left with some great notes regarding how to react to negative situations in the future.
We attended a couple of other sessions that seemed a bit less useful to me than the others had, and then we listened to a couple of fairly young guys describing astrology in a way I've not heard it before. If true, it puts current events into a light that, juxtaposed against past events in similar astrological circumstances, is interesting at best and alarming at worst. It had to do with something I'd not heard of before called a "square"--yes, I know what a square is, silly, but not in this context. I'll have to do my own research on it.
Was humorous, too, hearing them pronouncing the--well, the name of the next to last planet. You know, Uranus. "Your'-uh-nus" is how they said it, and it took me a sec to, um, square that with the way we were taught to say it in high school. Finally somebody else asked a question about the "square of Pluto and 'your-ay'-nus'" and I thought I was gonna explode in childish glee.
I didn't, though. My lovely bride has some elbows, she does. Effective deterrence, they are.
All that said, by the end of the afternoon I'd taken in quite a lot more than I had thought I would, or could. I was really ready to go. I was just flat namaste-ed out.
- TOSK
First came the "Namaste Day" event that my wife
Besides, she promised I'd have fun.
By the time we left, we were exhausted. Unfortunately, we couldn't come straight home because we needed some cat food (which can only be picked up at the pet food store, thanks to special dietary needs of the littlest carnivore in the family) and a refill on meds for the daughter (which can only be picked up from the pharmacy) and hey, I wanted some beer (which can't be picked up at either the pet food store or the pharmacy) and so we had not one, and not two, but three stops to make on the way. The thought, tired as I was, made me want to whine.
We managed to successfully make those stops, though, and with a minimum of whining, and so finally, exhausted, we pulled into our garage.
And there the neighbor was, outside, washing his car.
Now, first of all, I like my neighbors. I like them quite a lot, in fact. I've not lived anyplace where I've had such explicitly neighborly neighbors in a long, long time. Yes, they're very Southern, and yes, they have just as many quirks as any other set of neighbors would have, but they make it clear that they sincerely care about having a good neighborhood and about their neighbors. It's--well, it's heart-warming.
But not when we're tired. Especially not when we're exhausted but yet there's no way for this curmudgeon to sneak a great big Jeep Commander into the garage without him noticing as he washes his car a narrow alleyway away.
Not, um, that I would do such a sneaky thing, but I have to admit that the thought crossed my mind.
Tired or no, I had a neighborly obligation to wander across the alley to say hi while the wife and daughter got everything from the different stores into the house. But then, they surprised me by joining us outside. As did the neighbor's wife. As did the other neighbors. Before long, we had a full-on neighbor party in beach and lawn chairs in the alley separating the rows of homes. Soon the sun went down, dragging the temperature with it. Individually we all went indoors to pile more clothes on, nobody willing to call it quits before anybody else--especially not us, since we'd made it known that we'd come back home to the South from Alaska.
"Cold? What cold? I spent fourteen years in Alaska; this isn't cold. Let me tell you about the time I was tromping through three feet of snow and met the grizzly bear tromping the other way--," is hard to say when your teeth are chattering, but by goodness I managed.
Sheesh. I finally managed to end it at about 10:00 pm. Like I said, I like my neighbors a lot, but not so much when I'm cold, tired, and cranky.
What got me so tired in the first place, though, was an interesting experience. Yes, I'd been dragged (though neither kicking nor screaming, I admit) to the festival. Namaste! I honestly hadn't wanted to go; instead, I'd wanted to sit and work on a book. Heide pointed out, though, that being outside the house was what provided me with a lot of my writing inspiration, and she was absolutely correct.
Therefore, Namaste! For those unfamiliar with the term, it means "I bow to the divine/light/whatever within you." It's probably the most commonly-used term in yoga, ranking, as I suspect it must, even over the true building block terms of yoga which include "tadasana," "downward facing dog,"and "put your elbow in the other ear now."
To be honest, I enjoyed my stay there, at least till I got namaste-ed out. I mean, there's only so much 'bowing without really bowing to the divine in so many other people that I never met before' that an old cranky curmudgeon like me can take. After a while, I was just plain tired of not-really-bowing.
That, and there are always a great many wonderful people to meet at these types of events, which means your "nice to see you" smile is always burning. At the same time, there are always a few people there who creep me the hell out. If you've been to one, you know what I'm talking about.
Anyway, we arrived just in time to pay my entrance cost (ten dollars; the girls had already attended the evening previous and thus were already paid for) and head to the session on Automatic Writing. It was an interesting session; a woman with vibrantly blue hair and sequined hat and scarf who identified herself as a Reverend lectured us on the process of asking an archangel for help answering a Deep and Important question and then writing the answer for 20 minutes.
Now, you know me by this point in the post, I hope. If so, you're aware that the next thing I'm'a gonna say pretty much has to be snarky, or else the curmudgeon in me is gonna explode. Still, as much snark as I could possibly apply to the situation, the fact was that the whole Automatic Writing gig worked when I tried it. She set the timer, and I asked the archangel for help with a particular situation, and then I sat and wrote down some of the clearest thoughts I've had on the topic. Impressive, that. Was it the archangel I'd called for, or my subconscience, or the memory of all the episodes I've watched of Dr. Phil while spending time with my beloved one that brought the newer, deeper, richer understanding? I don't know, and it doesn't really matter. Point is, it worked.
Maybe Dr. Phil is the archangel?
Sorry, that was snarky.
The next session was even more meaningful. In it, the presenter told us (basically) that we get back from the universe what we put out into it. Reap what you sow, yadda yadda, and all that stuff, but it made a lot of sense based on the negativity surrounding a lot of the move we just made and what has happened to us since. Yeah, I know, duh and all that, but she had some useful techniques for transforming negative vibes into positive ones to send out into the universe. The important fact is that I left with some great notes regarding how to react to negative situations in the future.
We attended a couple of other sessions that seemed a bit less useful to me than the others had, and then we listened to a couple of fairly young guys describing astrology in a way I've not heard it before. If true, it puts current events into a light that, juxtaposed against past events in similar astrological circumstances, is interesting at best and alarming at worst. It had to do with something I'd not heard of before called a "square"--yes, I know what a square is, silly, but not in this context. I'll have to do my own research on it.
Was humorous, too, hearing them pronouncing the--well, the name of the next to last planet. You know, Uranus. "Your'-uh-nus" is how they said it, and it took me a sec to, um, square that with the way we were taught to say it in high school. Finally somebody else asked a question about the "square of Pluto and 'your-ay'-nus'" and I thought I was gonna explode in childish glee.
I didn't, though. My lovely bride has some elbows, she does. Effective deterrence, they are.
All that said, by the end of the afternoon I'd taken in quite a lot more than I had thought I would, or could. I was really ready to go. I was just flat namaste-ed out.
- TOSK
Saturday, October 19, 2013
Fictional Languages
One thing J.R.R. Tolkien was famous for was his intricate development of fake languages for his magnum opus, Lord of the Rings and the rest of its genre-creating set. It was, indeed, a great story about some very engaging characters, and it would very likely have been a hit even without the linguistic effort he exerted. But he did exert significant effort. Hey, the man created both Elf and Dwarf languages, each with its own runic alphabet. How cool is that?
He was, from what I've read, a linguist at heart. His day job was doing etymology for the dictionary, of all things. I mean, I knew that somebody had to have done all the work required to tell me that "wunderbar" came from the root words "wunder," which means good, and "bar," which refers to a place to consume alcohol, but till I read Tolkien's bio I had no idea that somebody was a real person. But it's true, he did it, and by all accounts he loved to do it.
He reportedly loved it so much that he probably would've been screaming at me for making etymological stuff up like I am wont to do (and just did), in fact.
Me, linguist? Not so much. I handled linguistics in Return of the Gods in much the same sloppy way most fantasy works gloss over the issue. In my case I did it by inventing magical translating blocks for use in the library. Cheap and cliched it might be, but it worked and it allowed me to get on with the interesting bits of the story.
In Dragon Queen I'm taking a little different path. For the first book I'm shamelessly ripping off the entire Welsh language. Heck, I don't feel bad about it either; after all, nobody ever writes Welsh(TM) and so I'm not actually stealing any intellectual property. On top of that, I've always loved Welsh, what with its funky interpretation of the alphabet and the melodic pronunciations. I was able to work some of the funkiness into the storyline, and the language's use presents some fun situations throughout the book.
Take, for example, the main character's confusion over the name of one of the animals in the story: is it Booboo or Bwbw? The spelling that completely lacks vowels just plain doesn't make sense to the poor Mississippi lass who, despite her standing as a recent high school valedictorian, had to go through and complete both a primary and a secondary education with only English(TM) in her linguistic toolbox.
It's a little challenging for an author, this using a language that I don't speak. I suppose that would've been easier for Tolkien--nobody can tell him he's got a declension wrong, for example, because he made it all up in the first place. By definition, the way he does it is the right way. But I'm using Welsh, which does, in fact, have standard rules, and not all of which I know.
I'm only using it in little spots in the hope that I don't some day have an actual Welshman walk up and punch me in the face for language abuse.
It's possible, trust me. The unintentional language abuse, I should add, not necessarily the face-punching. I worked with a multilingual group in my multinational MBA Leadership course. We had mostly Alaskans and Austrians in the cohort, but there was also a German who spoke--well, Real German (as opposed to Austrian German). Most of the time we communicated in English, the course being held on the Americans' home turf and all.
Toward the end we were required to create a leadership activity, and my group, twisted as it was (hey, it included me) decided to teach communication by blindfolding the crap out of everybody and making them do stuff. "The Blind Leading the Blind" was an obvious, if horribly cliched, name for the gig.
Thing was, none of the Austrians in my group were particularly motivated to translate the English instructions I'd written into their language, which was one of the requirements of the exercise. So I took the project on. Only--I didn't speak German. Still don't, neither Real German nor Austrian German. Yeah, I can ask for a beer, or the restroom, or both, and with enough hand gestures can probably get across a request for schnitzel and fries, and so I'm not terribly worried for my own life if I ever find myself in Heidelberg again. But I'm certainly not "conversant" in the language.
Now, this was a while ago, back when Babelfish was a major site. It was great; you fed phrases into the magical text box and told it what language to translate to, and CLICK! The wizards within their web server would nearly instantly feed you back the translation. For free, even!
I used Babelfish to translate the instructions into German for the Austrians.
And I sent the results to them.
And I heard nothing for a week.
When we were together next, I asked what they thought of my excellent translation. They grinned and patted me on the head (verbally, not literally). "No, really," I insisted; I wanted constructive feedback, after all.
Finally one of the uber-polite Austrians explained that what I'd written, in German, was actually, "The Window Coverings Leading The Window Coverings."
Oops.
At least they didn't punch me in the face for language abuse.
This time, though, I want everything to be perfect--or, at least, accurate. Thus I've spent hours triangulating phrases. There are quite a few English-to-Welsh translating sites out there, and when two or three give me the same result, I know I'm close. Then I spin the result back into the Welsh-to-English translators, and if it comes up right, then I'm happy with the word choice. At that point, I run off to look at the Welsh grammar sites to make sure I've pluralized and declensed and conjugated correctly.
For the insults, meanwhile, I go directly to a Facebook friend who lives in Wales. Yay for friends! Yayyay for friends with strong insult mojo!
It's taken some effort and some time, but I think I've created something that will at a minimum avoid face-punching in return for language abuse. I'm pretty happy about that.
For the second book I'm creating another language, though I won't spoil any plot points by saying why. Because I'm trying to build in a certain mood, I'm actually picking the lower-hanging fruit from the Slavic language tree. At least I have taken a couple of courses in Russian, and so I can read the alphabet and can declense that language with the best of 'em.
Yay for vodky vodkui! (see yesterday's post)
I'm still not interested in creating a whole new language from scratch, though. Tolkien, I ain't. Sorry.
- TOSK
He was, from what I've read, a linguist at heart. His day job was doing etymology for the dictionary, of all things. I mean, I knew that somebody had to have done all the work required to tell me that "wunderbar" came from the root words "wunder," which means good, and "bar," which refers to a place to consume alcohol, but till I read Tolkien's bio I had no idea that somebody was a real person. But it's true, he did it, and by all accounts he loved to do it.
He reportedly loved it so much that he probably would've been screaming at me for making etymological stuff up like I am wont to do (and just did), in fact.
Me, linguist? Not so much. I handled linguistics in Return of the Gods in much the same sloppy way most fantasy works gloss over the issue. In my case I did it by inventing magical translating blocks for use in the library. Cheap and cliched it might be, but it worked and it allowed me to get on with the interesting bits of the story.
In Dragon Queen I'm taking a little different path. For the first book I'm shamelessly ripping off the entire Welsh language. Heck, I don't feel bad about it either; after all, nobody ever writes Welsh(TM) and so I'm not actually stealing any intellectual property. On top of that, I've always loved Welsh, what with its funky interpretation of the alphabet and the melodic pronunciations. I was able to work some of the funkiness into the storyline, and the language's use presents some fun situations throughout the book.
Take, for example, the main character's confusion over the name of one of the animals in the story: is it Booboo or Bwbw? The spelling that completely lacks vowels just plain doesn't make sense to the poor Mississippi lass who, despite her standing as a recent high school valedictorian, had to go through and complete both a primary and a secondary education with only English(TM) in her linguistic toolbox.
It's a little challenging for an author, this using a language that I don't speak. I suppose that would've been easier for Tolkien--nobody can tell him he's got a declension wrong, for example, because he made it all up in the first place. By definition, the way he does it is the right way. But I'm using Welsh, which does, in fact, have standard rules, and not all of which I know.
I'm only using it in little spots in the hope that I don't some day have an actual Welshman walk up and punch me in the face for language abuse.
It's possible, trust me. The unintentional language abuse, I should add, not necessarily the face-punching. I worked with a multilingual group in my multinational MBA Leadership course. We had mostly Alaskans and Austrians in the cohort, but there was also a German who spoke--well, Real German (as opposed to Austrian German). Most of the time we communicated in English, the course being held on the Americans' home turf and all.
Toward the end we were required to create a leadership activity, and my group, twisted as it was (hey, it included me) decided to teach communication by blindfolding the crap out of everybody and making them do stuff. "The Blind Leading the Blind" was an obvious, if horribly cliched, name for the gig.
Thing was, none of the Austrians in my group were particularly motivated to translate the English instructions I'd written into their language, which was one of the requirements of the exercise. So I took the project on. Only--I didn't speak German. Still don't, neither Real German nor Austrian German. Yeah, I can ask for a beer, or the restroom, or both, and with enough hand gestures can probably get across a request for schnitzel and fries, and so I'm not terribly worried for my own life if I ever find myself in Heidelberg again. But I'm certainly not "conversant" in the language.
Now, this was a while ago, back when Babelfish was a major site. It was great; you fed phrases into the magical text box and told it what language to translate to, and CLICK! The wizards within their web server would nearly instantly feed you back the translation. For free, even!
I used Babelfish to translate the instructions into German for the Austrians.
And I sent the results to them.
And I heard nothing for a week.
When we were together next, I asked what they thought of my excellent translation. They grinned and patted me on the head (verbally, not literally). "No, really," I insisted; I wanted constructive feedback, after all.
Finally one of the uber-polite Austrians explained that what I'd written, in German, was actually, "The Window Coverings Leading The Window Coverings."
Oops.
At least they didn't punch me in the face for language abuse.
This time, though, I want everything to be perfect--or, at least, accurate. Thus I've spent hours triangulating phrases. There are quite a few English-to-Welsh translating sites out there, and when two or three give me the same result, I know I'm close. Then I spin the result back into the Welsh-to-English translators, and if it comes up right, then I'm happy with the word choice. At that point, I run off to look at the Welsh grammar sites to make sure I've pluralized and declensed and conjugated correctly.
For the insults, meanwhile, I go directly to a Facebook friend who lives in Wales. Yay for friends! Yayyay for friends with strong insult mojo!
It's taken some effort and some time, but I think I've created something that will at a minimum avoid face-punching in return for language abuse. I'm pretty happy about that.
For the second book I'm creating another language, though I won't spoil any plot points by saying why. Because I'm trying to build in a certain mood, I'm actually picking the lower-hanging fruit from the Slavic language tree. At least I have taken a couple of courses in Russian, and so I can read the alphabet and can declense that language with the best of 'em.
Yay for vodky vodkui! (see yesterday's post)
I'm still not interested in creating a whole new language from scratch, though. Tolkien, I ain't. Sorry.
- TOSK
Friday, October 18, 2013
On Learning Foreign Languages
"In one hundred years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching Remedial English in college." - Joseph Sobran
"The relationship between a Russian and a bottle of vodka is almost mystical." - Richard Owen
I love my Facebook friends. Most of the time, that is. Yesterday we ended up having two great big, long debates on Facebook. The one on a political topic turned ugly, pissed everybody off, and didn't ever find resolution. I swear, next election season I'm gonna find a way to make opening Facebook shut my computer down. "Politics" and "social media" are the new opposites.
That said, we (including some of the very same people who participated in the political one) held a very civil and quite productive discussion on the first quote above. It was wonderful. Granted, the topic of the debate/discussion wasn't really anything dealing with remedial English courses; that part is too obvious, and too obviously painful (especially to those of us who work in college-level education as I and many of my Facebook friends do) to really put any energy into. No, instead, the talk was on the topic of the efficacy of learning Latin and Greek in high school, versus the more "useful" languages such as, say, Spanish, German, or Mandarin.
That was very interesting. What good is it, after all, to learn other languages? I brought up, and somebody else backed it up with an article that had a picture of the human brain, that learning languages is like gymnastics for a part of the brain that doesn't get worked out otherwise. Yay. Brain pictures--cool. That wasn't my main point, though, nor was it Sobran's.
To get more personal with this point, I consider myself a pretty good linguist. I've been told by editors that my prose is very "clean." I'm kinda proud to say that comes with no more than the basic required composition classes in high school and college both.
I also learned Russian at West Point, though. It wasn't because I necessarily wanted to learn Russian, nor was it because that was the only choice. It was, rather, that I thought that the Russians would be the nation's chief enemy and thus it would be a good idea for an Infantry officer to know their language. It would be "useful," in other words.
The sheer volume of wrongness in my assumptions there is incredible, but that's not worth discussing here. Regardless of reason, I soon found myself sitting in a class trying to learn one of the most foreign of foreign languages. I mean, they don't just flip the alphabet around a little like the Welsh do; they have a completely different one.
And they conjugate their nouns.
I know, every linguist reading this just gritted their teeth. "Conjugate" is what you do to verbs, you're probably screaming at this post right now, right? It's the process of changing the word, slightly or more so, in order to make it clear what the verb is saying. An example, in English: I see, and you see, and they see, but he, she, or it sees. Now, though, time has passed since I wrote that, and so I saw, and you saw, and they saw, and he, she, or it saw.
Funky, right?
Not nearly as funky as Russian.
For nouns, the process of modifying the word to make its place in the sentence clear is called declension. Russians do it, in spades. English does it, too, to a lesser extent; I'd just never really noticed. For example, if you're going to use the third person male pronoun in English, you might say that "he received a new straightjacket." But if it's something being done to the third person male pronoun, you should say "I put him in a new straightjacket." "He" changes to "him," and everybody's happy, right? Except, perhaps, for the guy in the new straightjacket, but he doesn't care about us, and we don't care about him, right?
(didya see all the declensing I did in that last couple'a clauses?)
That's pronouns, now, and it's the old basic subject vs. object discussion that we had back in grammar school. Meanwhile, nouns change--a lot--in Russian, and all depending on how they're used. Let's take, for instance, the only Russian noun I still remember after all these years: vodka. If you're going to say that vodka tastes good, then it's spelled just like that: vodka. Using, I should add, that funky Cyrillic alphabet, but let's not get too crazy. If, on the other hand, you're going to say that the vodka drink tastes good, you've changed the noun from one that stands as a subject itself (nominative) to the case that describes another noun (genitive). It's telling us what kind of "drink."
And then there's the dative case, which sadly has nothing to do with dates or with dating no matter how much vodka is involved. No, the dative case is the formal way of describing the object portion of the subject-object issue I mentioned before. And yes, it applies to both nouns and pronouns. While English changes pronouns but not nouns: "she hit her in the face" but "the girl hit the girl in the face," Russian does both, because we need to know who's getting hit in the face in Russian no matter who is doing it to who--er, whom.
As a result, though in English we really don't give a crap whether it's vodka or a vodka drink waiting to be consumed, or even whether I drink the vodka, in Russian it's "vodka" or a "vodky" drink, and I drink neither "vodka" nor "vodky" but instead "vodke."
Yeah, you have to learn all that to learn Russian.
Yeah, I hated it.
Still, I'm glad I took the two courses in the language. Why, you ask? It's not because I'm anywhere near conversant in Russian. I mean, yeah, I can now order a vodka if I'm ever over in Moscow ("Moskva"), but I could've probably managed that even without the courses. They'd'a probably giggled a little at my wanting to drink vodka instead of "vodke," but after enough vodky vodkas are consumed, who really cares, right?
What learning the little bit of Russian did for me, though--and this speaks back to the original topic of the post--was taught me more about the language I speak, no matter which one it is.
By paying attention to how the noun is used, in other words, I've become much more knowledgeable--and cognizant of that knowledge, too--about nouns. Same with verbs, as well as with other parts of speech that I've always flippantly tossed out in English but had to pay attention to while mangling them in Russian.
I think that if we required every high school graduate to have passed a full year of coursework in Russian, we wouldn't need nearly as many remedial English courses in college, is what I'm saying.
But that's probably just me.
Might need more vodkui, though.
- TOSK
"The relationship between a Russian and a bottle of vodka is almost mystical." - Richard Owen
I love my Facebook friends. Most of the time, that is. Yesterday we ended up having two great big, long debates on Facebook. The one on a political topic turned ugly, pissed everybody off, and didn't ever find resolution. I swear, next election season I'm gonna find a way to make opening Facebook shut my computer down. "Politics" and "social media" are the new opposites.
That said, we (including some of the very same people who participated in the political one) held a very civil and quite productive discussion on the first quote above. It was wonderful. Granted, the topic of the debate/discussion wasn't really anything dealing with remedial English courses; that part is too obvious, and too obviously painful (especially to those of us who work in college-level education as I and many of my Facebook friends do) to really put any energy into. No, instead, the talk was on the topic of the efficacy of learning Latin and Greek in high school, versus the more "useful" languages such as, say, Spanish, German, or Mandarin.
That was very interesting. What good is it, after all, to learn other languages? I brought up, and somebody else backed it up with an article that had a picture of the human brain, that learning languages is like gymnastics for a part of the brain that doesn't get worked out otherwise. Yay. Brain pictures--cool. That wasn't my main point, though, nor was it Sobran's.
To get more personal with this point, I consider myself a pretty good linguist. I've been told by editors that my prose is very "clean." I'm kinda proud to say that comes with no more than the basic required composition classes in high school and college both.
I also learned Russian at West Point, though. It wasn't because I necessarily wanted to learn Russian, nor was it because that was the only choice. It was, rather, that I thought that the Russians would be the nation's chief enemy and thus it would be a good idea for an Infantry officer to know their language. It would be "useful," in other words.
The sheer volume of wrongness in my assumptions there is incredible, but that's not worth discussing here. Regardless of reason, I soon found myself sitting in a class trying to learn one of the most foreign of foreign languages. I mean, they don't just flip the alphabet around a little like the Welsh do; they have a completely different one.
And they conjugate their nouns.
I know, every linguist reading this just gritted their teeth. "Conjugate" is what you do to verbs, you're probably screaming at this post right now, right? It's the process of changing the word, slightly or more so, in order to make it clear what the verb is saying. An example, in English: I see, and you see, and they see, but he, she, or it sees. Now, though, time has passed since I wrote that, and so I saw, and you saw, and they saw, and he, she, or it saw.
Funky, right?
Not nearly as funky as Russian.
For nouns, the process of modifying the word to make its place in the sentence clear is called declension. Russians do it, in spades. English does it, too, to a lesser extent; I'd just never really noticed. For example, if you're going to use the third person male pronoun in English, you might say that "he received a new straightjacket." But if it's something being done to the third person male pronoun, you should say "I put him in a new straightjacket." "He" changes to "him," and everybody's happy, right? Except, perhaps, for the guy in the new straightjacket, but he doesn't care about us, and we don't care about him, right?
(didya see all the declensing I did in that last couple'a clauses?)
That's pronouns, now, and it's the old basic subject vs. object discussion that we had back in grammar school. Meanwhile, nouns change--a lot--in Russian, and all depending on how they're used. Let's take, for instance, the only Russian noun I still remember after all these years: vodka. If you're going to say that vodka tastes good, then it's spelled just like that: vodka. Using, I should add, that funky Cyrillic alphabet, but let's not get too crazy. If, on the other hand, you're going to say that the vodka drink tastes good, you've changed the noun from one that stands as a subject itself (nominative) to the case that describes another noun (genitive). It's telling us what kind of "drink."
And then there's the dative case, which sadly has nothing to do with dates or with dating no matter how much vodka is involved. No, the dative case is the formal way of describing the object portion of the subject-object issue I mentioned before. And yes, it applies to both nouns and pronouns. While English changes pronouns but not nouns: "she hit her in the face" but "the girl hit the girl in the face," Russian does both, because we need to know who's getting hit in the face in Russian no matter who is doing it to who--er, whom.
As a result, though in English we really don't give a crap whether it's vodka or a vodka drink waiting to be consumed, or even whether I drink the vodka, in Russian it's "vodka" or a "vodky" drink, and I drink neither "vodka" nor "vodky" but instead "vodke."
Yeah, you have to learn all that to learn Russian.
Yeah, I hated it.
Still, I'm glad I took the two courses in the language. Why, you ask? It's not because I'm anywhere near conversant in Russian. I mean, yeah, I can now order a vodka if I'm ever over in Moscow ("Moskva"), but I could've probably managed that even without the courses. They'd'a probably giggled a little at my wanting to drink vodka instead of "vodke," but after enough vodky vodkas are consumed, who really cares, right?
What learning the little bit of Russian did for me, though--and this speaks back to the original topic of the post--was taught me more about the language I speak, no matter which one it is.
By paying attention to how the noun is used, in other words, I've become much more knowledgeable--and cognizant of that knowledge, too--about nouns. Same with verbs, as well as with other parts of speech that I've always flippantly tossed out in English but had to pay attention to while mangling them in Russian.
I think that if we required every high school graduate to have passed a full year of coursework in Russian, we wouldn't need nearly as many remedial English courses in college, is what I'm saying.
But that's probably just me.
Might need more vodkui, though.
- TOSK
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Let Me Hear Your Body Talk? No, Thanks
I grew up a bright-eyed child of the 70's and 80's, decades when Grease was The Movie and Olivia Newton-John was The Singer. I'll never forget how much fun we had dancing to "Physical."
"Let's get physical, physical,
I wanna get physical, let's get into physical.
Let me hear your body talk, your body talk,
Let me hear your body talk."
When you're a late teen or early twenty-something, "let me hear your body talk" means something--well, physical. Physically emotional. Erotic, even. "Ooh, baby, let me hear your body talk," was admittedly something I never, ever, had the guts to say to a woman, but there's no question what I'd've meant if I had mustered the courage to speak aloud such hypnotic eroticism.
Now, in my forties, I really don't want to hear anybody's body talk. Nope, sorry, not interested in anything it's got to say or the aromas that might go along with it.
Slightly less annoying is that song by Wham that was quite popular back when I was--um, very, very young, really, I was. You know the one, right? We all cringe when we hear it cranking up at karaoke night, because we know that after the guy singing it goes through a few catchy lines about waking him up before the song's target can go-go (a line that has an extra meaning or two, itself), he's gonna lean back and, depending on how drunk he is, wail out a horribly off-key high note.
"I don't wanna miss it when you hit that hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh...." *screech*
High shouldn't be that high. Nor, I must add, should most men's voices attempt be raised that high, no matter how--no, especially when drunk.
But even when it's not a serious assault on the senses, it's got a double meaning hanging around in there, doesn't it?
What's your favorite double entendre?
- TOSK
"Let's get physical, physical,
I wanna get physical, let's get into physical.
Let me hear your body talk, your body talk,
Let me hear your body talk."
When you're a late teen or early twenty-something, "let me hear your body talk" means something--well, physical. Physically emotional. Erotic, even. "Ooh, baby, let me hear your body talk," was admittedly something I never, ever, had the guts to say to a woman, but there's no question what I'd've meant if I had mustered the courage to speak aloud such hypnotic eroticism.
Now, in my forties, I really don't want to hear anybody's body talk. Nope, sorry, not interested in anything it's got to say or the aromas that might go along with it.
Slightly less annoying is that song by Wham that was quite popular back when I was--um, very, very young, really, I was. You know the one, right? We all cringe when we hear it cranking up at karaoke night, because we know that after the guy singing it goes through a few catchy lines about waking him up before the song's target can go-go (a line that has an extra meaning or two, itself), he's gonna lean back and, depending on how drunk he is, wail out a horribly off-key high note.
"I don't wanna miss it when you hit that hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh...." *screech*
High shouldn't be that high. Nor, I must add, should most men's voices attempt be raised that high, no matter how--no, especially when drunk.
But even when it's not a serious assault on the senses, it's got a double meaning hanging around in there, doesn't it?
What's your favorite double entendre?
- TOSK
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Technology, Efficiency, and Effectiveness
Modern technology is awesome! With it we can be ineffective and inefficient way faster than we ever could before.
My Facebook friends were treated to the above quote on my feed this morning. I won't claim original sourcing, because surely someone else has run into the same concept before. It just twanged me pretty hard today.
There I was, heading to our branch campus to preside there for a while. No, I'm not the President (who, thanks to etymology, we'd expect to preside); he's away at a business meeting, as is the manager of the branch campus. The main campus, where I'm installed as Dean, has plenty of chiefs for someone to be "in charge" at any given time, but today the branch campus needs one. I'm available via cell, via email, and so on, but somebody still needs to have feet on the ground. Because, you know, sometimes technology doesn't solve our problems.
On the drive over here I started thinking about this business meeting the college leadership is away at, and specifically about one of the conversations they're likely to be having: scheduling "improvements." Now, when I started doing academic scheduling it was decidedly old-school: post-it flags, markers, and a large white foam core board with columns for days and rows for classrooms. I tried migrating the system to Excel, but that didn't make the process better in any measurable way.
I mean, scheduling is scheduling. The trick is to get every class that students need (within reason) into a classroom in a time slot with a teacher without requiring either teachers or students to be in two places at once or having two classes in the same classroom. Simple, right?
Apparently not. My next college implemented a piece of modern technology that was designed to schedule for us. Ah, let's hear it for efficiency! Can I get a great big ole' woo hoo whoop-whoop from you? "It'll schedule 85%; you just assign the exceptions manually" was the byline.
Yeah, right.
I'm not sure how they were measuring the 85%, but the majority of what the to-remain-unnamed software turned out was a pile of steaming, unadulterated crap. The whole thing was one big funky-smelling exception, and using the software made my job harder, not easier. "More efficiently" somehow required twice as much time.
Luckily I fled quickly enough from there and landed in the safety and relative sanity of a different college group. There, the approach to scheduling was "um, yeah--just make more classes." It was a hot mess when I got there, but I was able to jimmy up a spreadsheet to look like my old reliable foam core and I soon had 'em scheduled like a pro.
New college group now. They've been scheduling efficiently, near as I can tell, for years and years, all by hand at a single, half-hour-long, quarterly meeting. Coolest part about it, for me, is that my only participation is in scheduling the meeting--I could get hit by a bus tomorrow (God forbid, of course) and the campus would still be able to figure out what classes to offer next term. Yay!
And now somebody in the home office wants to introduce the same "modern technology" that provided me with such aromatically scheduled piles of feces before.
Yeah, right. I gave my boss what should be sufficient rhetorical ammunition to battle the beast of technology, to skewer the siren of software. Hopefully he'll come back with a trophy.
It's not just scheduling, though. Not even close. Remember back in the 90's, when people grandly predicted how paperless we'd be by now? How efficiently offices of the 21st Century would run? Yeah, right. Crap is what it is. I see more filing cabinets in the offices now than I saw way back when, as a kid running around in my dad's place. I'm not gonna say that his office ran efficiently, because I honestly have no idea, but I will say that if what we have is more efficient than what he worked with, then I feel really, really sorry for him and his coworkers.
Thing is, back then we knew that filing was a resource. A company had to maintain certain records, and generally had to do it within a certain number of cubic feet. People went to school to learn how to efficiently run an office--how to run that cool mimeograph machine, how to use comb bindings, and yes, even how to set up a filing system. In fact, the latter bit was one of the more important parts. People even used to put "filing" on their resumes, remember?
Now, it takes me all day to find a form sometimes, because I have to search in the various places on the Sharepoint site, looking through folders that are all over the site but all named "forms," and when I don't find it there I go look through the S: drive, and if I strike out there, there's always the T: drive and the U: drive to search, and by that point I've chewed through yet another mouse cord in frustration and then asked my assistant about it, only to learn that it's actually in the first place I looked but called something different by file name. Called something I'd've never guessed in a million years.
Something like "Evaluation Form," when the top of the document clearly says it's an "Instructor Observation Form," which is precisely what I wanted to use it for. It's under the Es, not the Is, in the great big flooded sea of MS Word-based computer files.
True story, that.
Gotta love modern efficiency, right? But you know what? The qualities that make an office run effectively and efficiently haven't changed. They haven't changed since my dad's time. They haven't changed since before then, either. It's still the same basic thing: accessing information and using it to make decisions and effect change. That's it. Sometimes technology helps, but more often it just makes us faster at being ineffective and inefficient.
Writing is like that (yes, once again--you knew I was eventually going there, right?).
Back in high school, I was Editor in Chief of the little paper there, called the "Tyro Times." It was a job I was grossly underprepared for, having only written occasional articles for the community section of the San Bernardino local paper, but I'd applied, and so had the guy who'd been with the paper for the entirety of his high school years, and I showed up for the interview and he didn't. Thanks to my presence, I was granted (for one semester only--I ceded the position to him at Christmas) the unique privilege of being go-between for all my "reporters," who couldn't type, and the typesetter, who required stuff to get to her in a typed format. Thus, I learned to type at really fast rates of speed, mostly so that I could still get some sleep the nights before an edition release.
Back then, publishing took a while, which was pretty much okay. We typed our stories and submitted them to the typesetter, who would block everything out and get it set to print. It would then be printed and delivered. Total time was a few days. The pros, who had typesetters and printing presses on site, were able to turn it around overnight, and that was pretty cool.
Today, if CNN.com doesn't have a blurb about an explosion over in the Middle East within a few minutes of it happening, we as a society start going nuts.
Question: are we that much more informed as a result? Not really. I mean, people still apparently think India is mostly populated by Arabs.
I read an interesting anecdote once, placed at the end of one of his Incarnations of Immortality books, of how the great Piers Anthony transformed his writing techniques from the ancient typewriter he'd always used to a modern computer. It was fascinating, reading about the machinations he went through, including mapping a Dvorak keyboard over the IBM one and then re-mapping keys to do specific stuff. Fascinating, fascinating, fascinating.
And here's the deal. When asked in an interview what the impact was on his writing, he didn't gush about how much better it made him. It was a simple mechanical productivity improvement, because he only had to type it once instead of twice. That's it.
Now that we have technology, nearly everybody is a writer. All it takes is a word processing software package, a matter of however many hours it takes to put your story onto paper, and Internet access, and blam! You're a published author. Sort of. But now, there are hundreds of thousands of books available in a space where twenty years ago we wouldn't have had a tenth the number of choices.
And you know what? The overall quality hasn't improved.
Now, I'm not saying anything bad about Indies. I love my fellow Indies. Some of what they've turned out rivals the quality (in a good way) of what the traditional publishers have done. Some of what the traditional publishers have done, just like some of what the Indies do, is a great big smelly pile of crap, too.
Because you know what? The basic qualities of a good story haven't changed. They haven't changed since the days of Piers Anthony's typewriter banging. They haven't changed since the days of Mark Twain. They're the same basic stuff: conflict, character, plot arc. That's it. Sometimes technology helps, but more often it just makes us faster at producing crap.
Y'all have fun today!
- TOSK
My Facebook friends were treated to the above quote on my feed this morning. I won't claim original sourcing, because surely someone else has run into the same concept before. It just twanged me pretty hard today.
There I was, heading to our branch campus to preside there for a while. No, I'm not the President (who, thanks to etymology, we'd expect to preside); he's away at a business meeting, as is the manager of the branch campus. The main campus, where I'm installed as Dean, has plenty of chiefs for someone to be "in charge" at any given time, but today the branch campus needs one. I'm available via cell, via email, and so on, but somebody still needs to have feet on the ground. Because, you know, sometimes technology doesn't solve our problems.
On the drive over here I started thinking about this business meeting the college leadership is away at, and specifically about one of the conversations they're likely to be having: scheduling "improvements." Now, when I started doing academic scheduling it was decidedly old-school: post-it flags, markers, and a large white foam core board with columns for days and rows for classrooms. I tried migrating the system to Excel, but that didn't make the process better in any measurable way.
I mean, scheduling is scheduling. The trick is to get every class that students need (within reason) into a classroom in a time slot with a teacher without requiring either teachers or students to be in two places at once or having two classes in the same classroom. Simple, right?
Apparently not. My next college implemented a piece of modern technology that was designed to schedule for us. Ah, let's hear it for efficiency! Can I get a great big ole' woo hoo whoop-whoop from you? "It'll schedule 85%; you just assign the exceptions manually" was the byline.
Yeah, right.
I'm not sure how they were measuring the 85%, but the majority of what the to-remain-unnamed software turned out was a pile of steaming, unadulterated crap. The whole thing was one big funky-smelling exception, and using the software made my job harder, not easier. "More efficiently" somehow required twice as much time.
Luckily I fled quickly enough from there and landed in the safety and relative sanity of a different college group. There, the approach to scheduling was "um, yeah--just make more classes." It was a hot mess when I got there, but I was able to jimmy up a spreadsheet to look like my old reliable foam core and I soon had 'em scheduled like a pro.
New college group now. They've been scheduling efficiently, near as I can tell, for years and years, all by hand at a single, half-hour-long, quarterly meeting. Coolest part about it, for me, is that my only participation is in scheduling the meeting--I could get hit by a bus tomorrow (God forbid, of course) and the campus would still be able to figure out what classes to offer next term. Yay!
And now somebody in the home office wants to introduce the same "modern technology" that provided me with such aromatically scheduled piles of feces before.
Yeah, right. I gave my boss what should be sufficient rhetorical ammunition to battle the beast of technology, to skewer the siren of software. Hopefully he'll come back with a trophy.
It's not just scheduling, though. Not even close. Remember back in the 90's, when people grandly predicted how paperless we'd be by now? How efficiently offices of the 21st Century would run? Yeah, right. Crap is what it is. I see more filing cabinets in the offices now than I saw way back when, as a kid running around in my dad's place. I'm not gonna say that his office ran efficiently, because I honestly have no idea, but I will say that if what we have is more efficient than what he worked with, then I feel really, really sorry for him and his coworkers.
Thing is, back then we knew that filing was a resource. A company had to maintain certain records, and generally had to do it within a certain number of cubic feet. People went to school to learn how to efficiently run an office--how to run that cool mimeograph machine, how to use comb bindings, and yes, even how to set up a filing system. In fact, the latter bit was one of the more important parts. People even used to put "filing" on their resumes, remember?
Now, it takes me all day to find a form sometimes, because I have to search in the various places on the Sharepoint site, looking through folders that are all over the site but all named "forms," and when I don't find it there I go look through the S: drive, and if I strike out there, there's always the T: drive and the U: drive to search, and by that point I've chewed through yet another mouse cord in frustration and then asked my assistant about it, only to learn that it's actually in the first place I looked but called something different by file name. Called something I'd've never guessed in a million years.
Something like "Evaluation Form," when the top of the document clearly says it's an "Instructor Observation Form," which is precisely what I wanted to use it for. It's under the Es, not the Is, in the great big flooded sea of MS Word-based computer files.
True story, that.
Gotta love modern efficiency, right? But you know what? The qualities that make an office run effectively and efficiently haven't changed. They haven't changed since my dad's time. They haven't changed since before then, either. It's still the same basic thing: accessing information and using it to make decisions and effect change. That's it. Sometimes technology helps, but more often it just makes us faster at being ineffective and inefficient.
Writing is like that (yes, once again--you knew I was eventually going there, right?).
Back in high school, I was Editor in Chief of the little paper there, called the "Tyro Times." It was a job I was grossly underprepared for, having only written occasional articles for the community section of the San Bernardino local paper, but I'd applied, and so had the guy who'd been with the paper for the entirety of his high school years, and I showed up for the interview and he didn't. Thanks to my presence, I was granted (for one semester only--I ceded the position to him at Christmas) the unique privilege of being go-between for all my "reporters," who couldn't type, and the typesetter, who required stuff to get to her in a typed format. Thus, I learned to type at really fast rates of speed, mostly so that I could still get some sleep the nights before an edition release.
Back then, publishing took a while, which was pretty much okay. We typed our stories and submitted them to the typesetter, who would block everything out and get it set to print. It would then be printed and delivered. Total time was a few days. The pros, who had typesetters and printing presses on site, were able to turn it around overnight, and that was pretty cool.
Today, if CNN.com doesn't have a blurb about an explosion over in the Middle East within a few minutes of it happening, we as a society start going nuts.
Question: are we that much more informed as a result? Not really. I mean, people still apparently think India is mostly populated by Arabs.
I read an interesting anecdote once, placed at the end of one of his Incarnations of Immortality books, of how the great Piers Anthony transformed his writing techniques from the ancient typewriter he'd always used to a modern computer. It was fascinating, reading about the machinations he went through, including mapping a Dvorak keyboard over the IBM one and then re-mapping keys to do specific stuff. Fascinating, fascinating, fascinating.
And here's the deal. When asked in an interview what the impact was on his writing, he didn't gush about how much better it made him. It was a simple mechanical productivity improvement, because he only had to type it once instead of twice. That's it.
Now that we have technology, nearly everybody is a writer. All it takes is a word processing software package, a matter of however many hours it takes to put your story onto paper, and Internet access, and blam! You're a published author. Sort of. But now, there are hundreds of thousands of books available in a space where twenty years ago we wouldn't have had a tenth the number of choices.
And you know what? The overall quality hasn't improved.
Now, I'm not saying anything bad about Indies. I love my fellow Indies. Some of what they've turned out rivals the quality (in a good way) of what the traditional publishers have done. Some of what the traditional publishers have done, just like some of what the Indies do, is a great big smelly pile of crap, too.
Because you know what? The basic qualities of a good story haven't changed. They haven't changed since the days of Piers Anthony's typewriter banging. They haven't changed since the days of Mark Twain. They're the same basic stuff: conflict, character, plot arc. That's it. Sometimes technology helps, but more often it just makes us faster at producing crap.
Y'all have fun today!
- TOSK
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
That One Intersection
Every commute has it--that one intersection that frequently/occasionally/sometimes/often gets our blood boiling. That, if we're not slipping through it with white knuckles wrapped tightly around the steering wheel, head swiveling both directions, breath fearfully rapid and shallow. One way or another, you've got it.
Granted, every intersection was like that during my winter commutes in Alaska--white knuckled, breathless, and thanking the patron saint of bobsledding every time I made it safely to work. But that's what a statistician might call an outlying data point.
My new commute here in Memphis has that intersection, despite it being the shortest commute I've suffered in years. In this case, it's a pretty benign-looking road connection where a two-lane road cuts down through Shelby Farms and meets the four-lane mega-path that roars past one of the larger hospitals and then deep into the heart of Memphis.
It's a simple three-way intersection. A simple intersection with, it turns out, a propensity for accidents.
I'd wondered why I saw accidents there so frequently. "Oh, look, another accident" quickly became a weekly or biweekly mantra. They were always on the same corner of the intersection, too, which was an observation that didn't seem all that important at first since three-way intersections only have two corners.
Ahh, nothing brings the blood pressure up to professional work environment levels like the morning commute, right? There's always something going wrong. If you leave at precisely the right moment to arrive on time, you'll hit a few traffic signals wrong and thus arrive a few minutes after the time you were shooting for. Leave five minutes early and you'll get behind somebody who drives slow enough that you're still a few minutes behind. Leave fifteen minutes early and you'll get into something else, and yes, you'll still end up a few minutes behind upon arrival. Leave over an hour early and you'll have the smoothest commute ever, only to arrive at work wondering what the hell you're gonna do for the extra hour that you could've been in your pajamas at home during.
Add to the timing thing the nature of our fellow drivers. Now, there are some out there who do, in fact, practice good ole' Southern hospitality. These are the folks who, though waiting in line to pass through a stop sign, will slow down to let someone out of their driveway into the flow of traffic. They're the angels. They're also only about 10%, if that much, of the Southern drivers here in Memphis. No offense to my fellow Memphis-ians, but most folks here will speed up just to keep you from being able to pull out of your supermarket parking spot. On the road, in a commute? Fugeddaboudit, y'all.
Back to topic, though: there are several special things about this special little intersection. One is that just a few hundred yards before it, as I'm headed through the park and to work, there's a merge. It's the dumbest merge spot ever, if you ask me, and nobody here did. Some people apparently like their mornings spent with nature and all that crap, so as the two lane road makes a sixty degree (ish) turn, another two-lane road from the park itself cuts in. There aren't any signs or anything, just a rather large herd of buffalo standing there laughing at us. The traffic going toward the stoplight moves, as single-lane stoplight traffic often does, in fits and spurts. The traffic coming the other direction is similar; there'll be nobody using that lane for a long while and then a long string of cars passes by at about 45 mph.
Generally there's one or two health nuts coming from inside the park to merge with the slow flow of regular coffee-guzzling commuters, and so it's always a matter of timing and kinda random decision-making as to whether I'm going to let one in. This morning there were not one, and not two, but a dozen cars waiting to get in. Nobody in their right mind is going to let a dozen people in, and if you slow down for just one there's a (kinda likely) chance that three or seven are just plain gonna nose their way in ahead of you. It's that Southern hospitality thang again.
See what I mean about blood pressure?
So as I was sitting there in an idling car watching the dozen morning park people also idling, I looked toward the light and saw the reason we hadn't moved in a while. This little red pickup down the way was also idling. The problem with his movement, or lack of, was that everybody ahead of him had got up and gone.
It was like he was awaiting a special invitation. From God.
Grrrr.
Finally--finally!!!--he pulled one body part out of his other body part and put the truck into gear. Everybody else slowly followed. You know how traffic starts back up after a stop, right? Somebody moves, and then the next person eventually moves, and if you're several cars back you can--and just might--eat your steering wheel in the time it takes the "eventually moves" inertia to get back to you.
But finally--yay!--it got to me, and I moved, and the people behind me moved, and the people in front of me accelerated, and we were off like a single-file herd of turtles. Yippee! Forward, on to the light!
Now, whoever designed that light messed it up. The two-lane road that ends there gets a green light for both right and left turns, and that's what we were going on. Once that green light is done the road's occupants get a red light while one side of the four-lane road gets to make a left onto the two-lane. That happens for about half a minute before the straight-through and always-full four-lane occupants get to slam their accelerators down to the floor boards.
So this morning we were rumbling toward the stoplight and it turned red. No biggie; the folks turning right onto the four-lane (which is most of us, since that's toward Memphis) still have about half a minute while people are turning left before the straight-through people get to go. Instead of stopping or even slowing down, then, we all know to accelerate!
Except one guy.
Who was three cars in front of me.
Screech! The person two cars ahead of me managed to stop. The one behind him managed to stop. I managed to stop. Everybody behind me managed to stop, believe it or not.
We stopped, and we got hot.
Remember what I said about Southern hospitality and patience? Nah. The collective blood pressure of the line went up by at least a thousand. Horns were blaring. People were growling like a dog defending its hydrant. And can you blame us?
How dare some idiot stop at the red light?
And that's why there are frequent accidents at that corner.
I did have a correlation for this topic to writing to make, but I'll be darned if I can remember it. Any ideas?
- TOSK
Granted, every intersection was like that during my winter commutes in Alaska--white knuckled, breathless, and thanking the patron saint of bobsledding every time I made it safely to work. But that's what a statistician might call an outlying data point.
My new commute here in Memphis has that intersection, despite it being the shortest commute I've suffered in years. In this case, it's a pretty benign-looking road connection where a two-lane road cuts down through Shelby Farms and meets the four-lane mega-path that roars past one of the larger hospitals and then deep into the heart of Memphis.
It's a simple three-way intersection. A simple intersection with, it turns out, a propensity for accidents.
I'd wondered why I saw accidents there so frequently. "Oh, look, another accident" quickly became a weekly or biweekly mantra. They were always on the same corner of the intersection, too, which was an observation that didn't seem all that important at first since three-way intersections only have two corners.
Ahh, nothing brings the blood pressure up to professional work environment levels like the morning commute, right? There's always something going wrong. If you leave at precisely the right moment to arrive on time, you'll hit a few traffic signals wrong and thus arrive a few minutes after the time you were shooting for. Leave five minutes early and you'll get behind somebody who drives slow enough that you're still a few minutes behind. Leave fifteen minutes early and you'll get into something else, and yes, you'll still end up a few minutes behind upon arrival. Leave over an hour early and you'll have the smoothest commute ever, only to arrive at work wondering what the hell you're gonna do for the extra hour that you could've been in your pajamas at home during.
Add to the timing thing the nature of our fellow drivers. Now, there are some out there who do, in fact, practice good ole' Southern hospitality. These are the folks who, though waiting in line to pass through a stop sign, will slow down to let someone out of their driveway into the flow of traffic. They're the angels. They're also only about 10%, if that much, of the Southern drivers here in Memphis. No offense to my fellow Memphis-ians, but most folks here will speed up just to keep you from being able to pull out of your supermarket parking spot. On the road, in a commute? Fugeddaboudit, y'all.
Back to topic, though: there are several special things about this special little intersection. One is that just a few hundred yards before it, as I'm headed through the park and to work, there's a merge. It's the dumbest merge spot ever, if you ask me, and nobody here did. Some people apparently like their mornings spent with nature and all that crap, so as the two lane road makes a sixty degree (ish) turn, another two-lane road from the park itself cuts in. There aren't any signs or anything, just a rather large herd of buffalo standing there laughing at us. The traffic going toward the stoplight moves, as single-lane stoplight traffic often does, in fits and spurts. The traffic coming the other direction is similar; there'll be nobody using that lane for a long while and then a long string of cars passes by at about 45 mph.
Generally there's one or two health nuts coming from inside the park to merge with the slow flow of regular coffee-guzzling commuters, and so it's always a matter of timing and kinda random decision-making as to whether I'm going to let one in. This morning there were not one, and not two, but a dozen cars waiting to get in. Nobody in their right mind is going to let a dozen people in, and if you slow down for just one there's a (kinda likely) chance that three or seven are just plain gonna nose their way in ahead of you. It's that Southern hospitality thang again.
See what I mean about blood pressure?
So as I was sitting there in an idling car watching the dozen morning park people also idling, I looked toward the light and saw the reason we hadn't moved in a while. This little red pickup down the way was also idling. The problem with his movement, or lack of, was that everybody ahead of him had got up and gone.
It was like he was awaiting a special invitation. From God.
Grrrr.
Finally--finally!!!--he pulled one body part out of his other body part and put the truck into gear. Everybody else slowly followed. You know how traffic starts back up after a stop, right? Somebody moves, and then the next person eventually moves, and if you're several cars back you can--and just might--eat your steering wheel in the time it takes the "eventually moves" inertia to get back to you.
But finally--yay!--it got to me, and I moved, and the people behind me moved, and the people in front of me accelerated, and we were off like a single-file herd of turtles. Yippee! Forward, on to the light!
Now, whoever designed that light messed it up. The two-lane road that ends there gets a green light for both right and left turns, and that's what we were going on. Once that green light is done the road's occupants get a red light while one side of the four-lane road gets to make a left onto the two-lane. That happens for about half a minute before the straight-through and always-full four-lane occupants get to slam their accelerators down to the floor boards.
So this morning we were rumbling toward the stoplight and it turned red. No biggie; the folks turning right onto the four-lane (which is most of us, since that's toward Memphis) still have about half a minute while people are turning left before the straight-through people get to go. Instead of stopping or even slowing down, then, we all know to accelerate!
Except one guy.
Who was three cars in front of me.
Screech! The person two cars ahead of me managed to stop. The one behind him managed to stop. I managed to stop. Everybody behind me managed to stop, believe it or not.
We stopped, and we got hot.
Remember what I said about Southern hospitality and patience? Nah. The collective blood pressure of the line went up by at least a thousand. Horns were blaring. People were growling like a dog defending its hydrant. And can you blame us?
How dare some idiot stop at the red light?
And that's why there are frequent accidents at that corner.
I did have a correlation for this topic to writing to make, but I'll be darned if I can remember it. Any ideas?
- TOSK
Monday, September 9, 2013
The Professional Publauthographadisher
Note: This is meant to be gentle fun-poking. For the love of all that's holy, don't take it too seriously. I mean, I know all y'all reading this are smart people, but I also knew that nobody would read a book about Greek gods coming back to power and write a negative review because it's not a Christian book.
*ahem*
So, I've glanced over at the blog of my friend way over there at terribleminds, Chuck Wendig, fairly often. I like his writing and his humor. I don't always agree with him, but I don't always disagree with him, either, which places him well above most political commentators on my list.
So today, he wrote about being an "Author-Publisher."
He doesn't like the term "self-published," it turns out, because it leaves out the fact that those who self-publish are generally also authors. Then again, that's the main point--I don't know anybody who self-publishes anything written by anybody else, because then it would no longer be "self" publishing. But I admit that the term itself is absent the nod to the task of writing, which would be objectionable to me, also, if I used it by itself.
I don't.
No, it's true. I never answer the question "what do you do" with "I'm a self-publisher." That just sounds dorky. "I'm an author" can sound a bit pretentious, as Wendig ably points out, but the way I generally put it is "I'm a self-published author." There--it's a nod to the fact that I write stuff, and also a nod to the fact that I then go through the work of publishing it all by myself, all while avoiding sounding all pretentious and crap.
Isn't that cool?
He also makes a point about his fondness for hyphens, which is an addiction I can no longer support. See, I've freelanced. When you freelance you're working at the whim of those with the checkbooks who may or may not know the correct rules for hyphens, semi-colons, and other moderately complex crap like that, and since hyphens are way over-used, they're generally looked down upon for that very reason. It was thus that I started using fewer hyphens, and with the diminished frequency of use I've found I enjoy not using them as much.
It's kinda like when I stopped using tobacco and realized I could taste other things again. Cool!
But Wendig is right to point out that we who do the work to make our writings available to the public all by ourselves deserve credit without the stigma of all of the "see, all I have to do is push this button here to get my quasi-readable crap to appear on Amazon" self-published authors. Fact is, though, that's more than publishing.
Publishing is what you do when you press that button there to get your writing, readable or not, to appear on Amazon. That's the simple part. We're also distributors, advertisers, graphic artists, office trash removers, and all sorts of other stuff as needed.
Thus, I would like to propose a more complex term to fit the greater complexity of the job. I am still--yes, still!--an authorpreneur, mind you, but only those who've looked at how difficult it is to be an entrepreneur of any sort realize what that term implies. To get that complexity across in the most straightforward manner possible, I am now....
Stephen H. King, TOSK, Ph.D. and Publauthographadisher
There!
- TOSK
*ahem*
So, I've glanced over at the blog of my friend way over there at terribleminds, Chuck Wendig, fairly often. I like his writing and his humor. I don't always agree with him, but I don't always disagree with him, either, which places him well above most political commentators on my list.
So today, he wrote about being an "Author-Publisher."
He doesn't like the term "self-published," it turns out, because it leaves out the fact that those who self-publish are generally also authors. Then again, that's the main point--I don't know anybody who self-publishes anything written by anybody else, because then it would no longer be "self" publishing. But I admit that the term itself is absent the nod to the task of writing, which would be objectionable to me, also, if I used it by itself.
I don't.
No, it's true. I never answer the question "what do you do" with "I'm a self-publisher." That just sounds dorky. "I'm an author" can sound a bit pretentious, as Wendig ably points out, but the way I generally put it is "I'm a self-published author." There--it's a nod to the fact that I write stuff, and also a nod to the fact that I then go through the work of publishing it all by myself, all while avoiding sounding all pretentious and crap.
Isn't that cool?
He also makes a point about his fondness for hyphens, which is an addiction I can no longer support. See, I've freelanced. When you freelance you're working at the whim of those with the checkbooks who may or may not know the correct rules for hyphens, semi-colons, and other moderately complex crap like that, and since hyphens are way over-used, they're generally looked down upon for that very reason. It was thus that I started using fewer hyphens, and with the diminished frequency of use I've found I enjoy not using them as much.
It's kinda like when I stopped using tobacco and realized I could taste other things again. Cool!
But Wendig is right to point out that we who do the work to make our writings available to the public all by ourselves deserve credit without the stigma of all of the "see, all I have to do is push this button here to get my quasi-readable crap to appear on Amazon" self-published authors. Fact is, though, that's more than publishing.
Publishing is what you do when you press that button there to get your writing, readable or not, to appear on Amazon. That's the simple part. We're also distributors, advertisers, graphic artists, office trash removers, and all sorts of other stuff as needed.
Thus, I would like to propose a more complex term to fit the greater complexity of the job. I am still--yes, still!--an authorpreneur, mind you, but only those who've looked at how difficult it is to be an entrepreneur of any sort realize what that term implies. To get that complexity across in the most straightforward manner possible, I am now....
Stephen H. King, TOSK, Ph.D. and Publauthographadisher
There!
- TOSK
Saturday, August 24, 2013
A (Late) Birthday Tribute To Ogden Nash
Hey, I'm always late for birthdays, anniversaries, and so on. I love celebrating Christmas in early January. Thanksgiving--why not Friday or Saturday, eh?
So--yeah. Happy Birthday, Ogden Nash. He was actually born August 19th, but hey, the 24th is close enough, right?
A friend of mine, Carol Tomany, wrote a beautiful post yesterday that featured the little snippery quasi-rhymes that Nash was famous for, and it caused me to remember how entertained I can be, for long periods of time, reading Nash's work.
Here are some of his shorter pieces:
I test my bath before I sit,
I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance
I think that I shall never see
Beneath this slab
John Brown is stowed.
The Lord in His wisdom made the fly,
And then forgot to tell us why.
The truth I do not stretch or shove
Sure, deck your limbs in pants;
Affection is a noble quality;
It leads to generosity and jollity.
I have a bone to pick with fate,
Senescence begins
Enter, breath;
Breath, slip out;
He tells you when you've got on too much lipstick
(and speaking of husbands, some Nash advice)
To keep your marriage brimming,
So--yeah. Happy Birthday, Ogden Nash. He was actually born August 19th, but hey, the 24th is close enough, right?
A friend of mine, Carol Tomany, wrote a beautiful post yesterday that featured the little snippery quasi-rhymes that Nash was famous for, and it caused me to remember how entertained I can be, for long periods of time, reading Nash's work.
Here are some of his shorter pieces:
I test my bath before I sit,
And I'm always moved to wonderment
That what chills the finger not a bit
Is so frigid upon the fundament.
I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance
Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.
I think that I shall never see
A billboard as lovely as a tree.
Perhaps unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all.
Beneath this slab
John Brown is stowed.
He watched the ads
And not the road.
And not the road.
A child need not be very clever
To learn that "Later, dear" means "Never."
The Lord in His wisdom made the fly,
And then forgot to tell us why.
The truth I do not stretch or shove
When I state that the dog is full of love.
I've also found, by actual test,
A wet dog is the lovingest.
Sure, deck your limbs in pants;
Yours are the limbs, my sweeting.
You look divine as you advance --
Have you seen yourself retreating?
(one of my favorites, that one is)
(one of my favorites, that one is)
Affection is a noble quality;
It leads to generosity and jollity.
But it also leads to breach of promise
If you go around lavishing it on red-hot momise.
I have a bone to pick with fate,
Come here and tell me girly,
Do you think my mind is maturing late,
Or simply rotting early.
Senescence begins
And middle age ends
The day your descendents
Outnumber your friends.
(ouch)
(ouch)
Enter, breath;
Breath, slip out;
Blood, be channeled,
And wind about.
O, blessed breath and blood which strive
To keep this body of mine alive!
O gallant breath and blood
Which choose
To wage the battle
They must lose.
He tells you when you've got on too much lipstick
And helps you with your girdle when your hips stick.
(the perfect husband, right?)
(and speaking of husbands, some Nash advice)
To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.
Hope you enjoyed!
- TOSK
Hope you enjoyed!
- TOSK
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