Biscuitrat

A hundred billion bottles

2011-07-26T17:05:00Z

I moved out of my apartment in Austin this past weekend, and not without some sadness. My roommates and I lived a fairly cozy sheltered life. We’d baked hundreds of enchiladas and lasagnas and cakes—mountains of cakes. We spent hours sprawled out in the living room watching Netflix or playing videogames (more often than not, watching someone else play video games, and offering elaborate commentary)—this apartment also marks the first time I really ever played on an Xbox. In classic me-fashion, I’m a latecomer to the game.

I settled into our apartment in a way I never had in the dorms. I started thinking of it as home— so much so that I routinely told my dad on the way back to the Greyhound station that I’d call him “when I got home.” I didn’t even notice it as first. It was a very subtle and quick acclimation. It makes me sad in the same way that going back to Houston does, and walking through a house that you used to live in but knowing you eventually have to go somewhere else.

But school years and leases end, and it was time to spread out. We scouted out a little four-bedroom house on the east side of campus. Home for a year, and then back to thinking about moving and furniture and boxes. So many boxes.

A trend I can’t shake

My family tends to accumulate stuff on a large scale. We moved from our first house to our current house and never quite finished moving in. The garage is still full of boxes of books and 80s relics shoved none-too-carefully out of the way so there’s room to walk around— but barely enough. We gather and gather, replace, but never quite discard. I don’t know whether it’s out of nostalgia or just an implied foolishness at throwing out something you paid money for and which still, at face value, has a purpose. I’m just as guilty. My crimes are toys, clothes, and books, all of which (the latter being a unique case) I tend to grow out of and can’t really part with. Being in college messes with that. You can only fit so much in a dorm room. I learned that the hard way. So there’s not much you can convince yourself you need past the sheets, shower shoes (which I highly recommend), and microwave food (which I don’t) that you’re supposed to bring. The by-rule is that you can bring anything that fits in the back of a truck or a van. No more, no less.

Dorms teach you how to be a temporary resident; you can only really pretend that you have some claim to your room—that it’s any expression of how you want to live. But we invested a lot into our apartment—a lot in very relative terms, because of course, I’m describing the purchases of poor college students with poorer taste. We had art, some of it handmade and some of it ordered from a poster website so we could eat dinner (and also slave away at homework) below Gustav Klimt and van Gogh. It helped that we had a beautiful concert harp sitting by the table. An illusion perfected.

Come time to pack away our little home, I kept uncovering doodles we’d taped onto each other’s doors, books, and homework assignments. I couldn’t keep these. I had five boxes and a few plastic organizers, and a whole year’s worth of furniture and artifacts to fill them with. I had to choose. The food went first. Old vegetables, half-empty cans of jam. Things I couldn’t feel bad about tossing, although living in Austin has created this enormous sense of guilt in me when I throw away something I could probably recycle. #2 plastics, #6s, glass, aluminum—all of it went into bags and all of those went into the dumpster, with few exceptions. My apartment only started “recycling” a few months ago. Before then, we’d take our carefully-sorted boxes and bags to campus or a few centers set up near us. Even now, there are two small trash cans in the alley that are for “recycling.” Paper and metal, but not glass. It’s a shame.

Weight and burdens

Towards the end, we started throwing things away wholesale. The furniture had already been moved and stored, along with boxes filled with boxes filled with things I’d thrown in haphazardly out of haste. Small appliances, a vacuum that decided that instead of cleaning the carpet, it would catch on fire, containers, the free water bottles that accumulate after a few years of college event-shopping, and a disheveled boxspring that it took me a year to get rid of, having found out twenty minutes too late for my dad to drive back and take it home with him that it didn’t fit my bed frame—are now moldering in a landfill somewhere. My enormous, disgusting cross to bear.

]]> In the scheme of things, this is a very first-world problem. I’m not an eco-activist. I’m not even that ecoconcious, or a thousand other eco-prefixed things that I don’t have a vested interest in. I do my part, but not a lot more. Ease of use, quality, effectiveness, and value play much bigger roles in what I do and what I buy. But the weight of all the bags I dragged downstairs, all the boxes I filled up and tossed out, stays with me. My worst offense? A full bottle of bleach, unopened. How does someone even discard that, especially in the span of a day and a half also filled with cleaning, packing, and organizing—not to mention the little human necessities of food and sleep? Short of taking it back to Dallas where it would be unused and hidden behind boxes of dryer sheets and lightbulbs, we didn’t have any other options. Out of all the things we got rid of, the bottle of bleach stays with me. PETA would probably be delighted if dead dolphins and tiny baby seals trapped in plastic bags start showing up in my nightmares. But PETA’s full of dicks anyway.

But moving and moving and moving is tiring. So is packing and unpacking, taping and tearing, loading up and unloading the few things that keep you comfortable no matter where you are. I’m a little past vanloads at this point, so there’s a bit more work involved in the way of moving crews and reluctant siblings. I’m reminded more than ever that I need a driver’s license and probably some sort of big rig to port all of my things around in. And I took the easy route—I whittled what I owned (or what we shared) down to five boxes and a handful of errata. Everything else was carried downstairs, bags and bags at a time until we ran out of bags. I’m just hoping the long-term cost of the easy route isn’t my peace of mind. Or dead sea mammals.

No matter how I try

2011-06-22T18:00:00Z

This is the DART bus I ride back and forth from work every day. Actually, that’s incorrect. This is one of four buses I ride every day. Two up, two down. This is the bus that gets me home at 6 PM, more or less on the dot.

A lot of people ask me why I ride the bus at all. There are two reasons, one a little more complicated than the other. The big reason is that I don’t drive, but I’m working on it. Long story short, I should have squeezed driver’s ed somewhere in the mindless and free summers of high school, rather than trying to find a few weeks when I’m home from college and don’t have any other commitments. It’s a hassle, but one that will hopefully be resolved soon enough.

The second reason is probably why a lot of people take the bus. It’s cheap. Third reason? It’s easy. There’s a bus stop across from our apartment complex. The other bus stops right in front of the gate. And once I get on, I can read or write—things I can’t even do when I’m not driving. It’s calming at the end of a long day. Most of the time.

I’m no stranger to buses. They’re probably the most reliable way to get around Austin, and a godsend if you don’t have a car. I always make sure I’m nice to my drivers, mostly because I can’t imagine how hard it is sometimes to shuttle stressed out people back and forth from their jobs, to take a couple hits, and keep going for hours and hours. Nothing big. A “Good morning, how are you?” and a “Thank you, and have a nice day” can mean a lot though. I’m not the only one by far, but I try to do my share. Least I can do, right?

The bus system in Dallas is pretty efficient. Buses are usually on time, stay on route, and get you where you need to go. Traffic’s a problem no matter which city you’re talking about, and it can get a little crazy in Dallas too. I got stuck on the tollway for an hour waiting for an accident to get cleared up—I can’t complain. We drove past the wreck and the ambulances, and everyone who’d been groaning and looking at their watches suddenly got silent. It’s fair to be annoyed. People expect a certain thing from a service they put money into. People also generally understand that some things, like accidents, are inconveniences that can’t be avoided, especially not by a bus driver.

Yesterday afternoon, the buses were running a few minutes behind. Nothing shocking. Usually, you can get five or six minutes back once you get out of the city, and then you’re back on schedule. But rush hour in downtown Dallas being what it was—a crowd of people and cars, buses, and bikes all trying to get home at 5:30—delays are sort of par for the course. And a backup a few hours back in the system can make all the buses that follow it a few minutes late. This, I thought, was common knowledge.

]]> What should never have happened

The stop after mine is a busy street corner, and a few people are waiting. Cars are lining up, waiting at lights, looking for an easy way to break out of the gridlock, trying to find a quick way home. And I think, We’re all in the same boat. I have my distractions. I have the iPod I recently loaded with Muse and Regina Spektor, and it’s soothing. It’s easy to drift off and relax.

A man gets on the bus, and I can tell instantly that he’s upset. He’s focused on his watch, he’s grimacing. Someone with somewhere to be who now has to be there faster. Maybe I’m dismissive to think that it isn’t a huge deal. Five minutes is nothing to me. I lose so much more time being distracted and forgetting what I was doing than I’ve ever lost on the bus. And I know I’m only half an hour out from home.

The first words out of his mouth: “What time is the bus supposed to be here?” Oh God, one of them. I’m not at all punctual, but I can appreciate people who are to an extent. Some people think it’s a catastrophe if the people they meet and the things they do aren’t absolutely on time. I know from experience that it’s easy to get caught up in what you’re doing and lose track of time. Time is a domino effect. Things keep getting pushed back and pushed back because of the one file that refused to be uploaded, or the one song that just wouldn’t sync (I know, problems of the entitled college student).

The bus driver responds. It’s not enough.

“And what time is it now?”

Again, the timid response. We’re running further behind now, and the bus driver asks him to take a seat.

“What time are you supposed to be at this stop?”

“Take a seat.”

“What’s your name? Let me see your name tag. How do you spell your name?”

“Sir, take a seat.”

“I’m going to report this.” True to his word, he sits down and pulls out his phone. The bus driver, two feet away from him, is probably having the worst day of her life. All I want to do is say, “Sit down and shut up. Who told you could talk to people like that? Who gave you the right to belittle and degrade people?”

He calls the DART Transit Authority and starts reporting the bus number, the time, the stop, the woman’s name. He spells it out and repeats it, and I know the driver’s listening. He threatens to get her fired. It’s overbearing and obnoxious, but I can’t bring myself to say anything. He wouldn’t listen to me anyway. But that was the time—that was the opportunity, and I missed it.

The bus driver gets off the bus at the next stop. She has her phone out and she’s crying. She’s never dealt with something like this before, and she doesn’t know what to do, short of shutting out his voice and continuing on the route. It takes a lot to be able to do that, and she didn’t quite have it that day. So the bus stops. This is her first mistake, and only adds fuel to his self-aggrandizing fire.

I get off the bus to ask how she’s doing. She’s pretty beaten down. She lets us know another bus is a few minutes away. Back on the bus, I finally get the courage to tell the man that what he did was wrong. His response: “That’s your opinion.”

It’s not. It’s a human sense of right and wrong, and I won’t stand for another person being blamed for something that couldn’t be prevented. Short of pulling out my treasure trove of profanity, I made sure he knew that I thought he was unspeakably rude and had done the wrong thing for the wrong reasons.

The other bus pulls up and he gets on. By now, we’re running twenty minutes behind, mostly thanks to him. He begins to gather names to be witnesses. A few people exchange business cards and phone numbers. He asks me, and I refuse. I don’t want to speak for him. I don’t want to defend him. Hell, I don’t even want to be on the same bus as him. And when I finally get off the bus, I’m pretty beaten down too.

Aftermath

And I wish now, as I did then, that I had the courage to say what I wanted when the time was right. Maybe if the bus driver knew someone was on her side from the beginning, she would have kept going. The two things I want to say, that I hope he reads somehow, are these:

Are you proud of what you did?
How would you feel if someone tried to take your life and your career, as well as your dignity, into their hands?

But I can’t imagine his response being anything new. I did what I could. I called Transit Authority and relayed my description of the incident. I took her side. It’s one voice against his and it’s not very loud or very strong. But it’s truthful. And it’s fair.

And I wish that the other people on the bus—the people who made eye-contact with me and shared my looks of disbelief and rage at this man—had spoken out too. We could have made a united front and proved him wrong. It’s one incident that doesn’t stand out in the scope of human history and human contact, but at least I would be able to sleep at night knowing that we had done our best. Instead, I stayed up thinking and thinking about the contentment on his face, the certainty that he was the only person on that bus who had done the right thing, when he had done nothing more than abuse the authority that being a bus passenger afforded him. That’s the one word that comes to mind now: Abuse.

I’ll be riding this route for the next month and a half, and I hope I see her again. I want her to know that not everyone is like him. Not everyone treats people the way he does. I’ll do my part, even if it’s as simple as:

“Good morning, how are you?”

“Thank you, and have a nice day.”

I've seen what I need

2010-11-27T07:35:00Z

The tail end of NaNoWriMo is fast approaching, and it’s a miracle that I’m not more than a day’s hard labor behind. I’m excellent at filling up a word count quota on short notice. I am the champion of wandering around someone’s thoughts, and ending up with them taking a step forward a thousand words later. They’re tricks of the trade, after all, if you want your story to survive NaNoWriMo and still come out reasonably close to what you want it to be.

I’m writing a sequel this year to the novel I “finished” last year. In reality, I want to squish them together. Maybe market them as a magna-book if it ever comes to that. I was pretty sure that I ran completely out of novel ideas and plot lines last year or in the six years preceding last year, but I forgot how intricate I made this plot. I’m lucky, I guess. Spoiled for lack of a better word. I know, to some extent, exactly what’s going to happen in the next ten, twelve chapters. Okay, exactly isn’t exactly right. I work off of a very rough outline that says Mr. Slugbuddy goes for a swim or Grover Cleveland opens an elk preserve (maybe he feels triumphant!). It’s simplistic to the point of uselessness sometimes, but it helps when you’ve had this damned story in your head for years. It makes the pressure of finding something meaningful to spend words on so much lighter.

NaNo’s not hard for me because of the time and productivity constraints (I usually work best from about 10:30 to midnight, unless I’m tired—which is usually true). It’s hard because I’m a perfectionist, and I can’t write without flow. Sometimes, my paragraphs come to a jarring halt and everything stops until I can figure out why the previous sentence sounds so crappy. Everything hinges on everything before it, at least in my mind. Which is why I favor thought over actions. Thoughts are seamless; actions interrupt. My novel is probably 95% thought processes, 4% people whining, and 1% someone getting off their ass to go stick a sword in some other guy. But boy, the buildup to that 1%? Priceless. Maybe you could say I work the suspense angle. On second thought, maybe not.

I’m three days away from freedom and jubilation and going to bed accomplished. My last hurrah before finals, which will undoubtedly kick my ass. Oh well. I’ll take what I can get. Part II, here I come!

My brains hurts like a warehouse

2010-10-18T03:40:00Z

School is kicking my butt, which is a good thing. I haven’t been bored in a long time — I haven’t had time to be bored. What I call being “bored” now is being totally unoccupied. I don’t know what to do with my free time anymore, which is why I have resorted to dumb ways of wasting it. Like playing World of Warcraft again. Or Minecraft. Or watching the entire second season of 16 and Pregnant and developing a pathological and probably unsound phobia of babies as a result. Maybe those aren’t good enough reasons for not writing anything, but perhaps these are:

Five reasons I’ve been gone for nine weeks

5. Donuts

This is probably the worst excuse of all, so I put it first. The highlights of the last two weeks of my life have been finding, first, a maple and then a strawberry donut at the donut shop down the street. I treat myself to one every few days as a studying snack. I used to eat, you know, nuts and fruit and stuff like that, but healthy food is for wusses. Also people who want to live longer. But my donut habit can’t do as much harm, as say, my maple syrup habit. That’s a confession for another day.

4. Editing

I thought books editing themselves. I assume, if they did, their words would be as mean and cruel as these. I leave myself angry notes in my novel because they provoke me to be mean in return and kill off this character who wasn’t doing anything, or change that character’s name because it was more or less the same as an indigenous species of lettuce, and someone was bound to know. I still have huge chunks of chapters colored red. Some are highlighted yellow, you know, to make me really annoyed at how ugly it looks. SOMETIMES I JUST HAVE REALLY BIG TEXT, and that seems to work just as well. The secret to finishing your novel is to infuriate yourself until you get it done. You can deal with therapy later. And the schizophrenia somewhere in there.

3. Doodling

I’ve tried to keep a sketch book. Some days, all of my women look like men and all of my men look like women. Yesterday, I broke out my colored pencils for the first time in a year or so, and drew a not-too-shabby cliff and ocean. But I put the sun in the wrong place, and there go all my hopes of outplaying Rembrandt at his own game. You know. Because Rembrandt used a lot of colored pencils. I also keep doodling on assignments. I don’t know whether I’m trying to milk sympathy or partial credit out of my professors with it, or because when I have a minute left at the end of the test, my hand has a nervous habit of drawing oddly circular animals and labeling them. Personally, I think it’s pretentious, and I think my hand should shut its face.

2. Procrastination

My desk is littered with Post-Its. When I’m especially behind, I leave them on my monitor so I (supposedly) won’t be able to use it without addressing the notes first. I have learned to read around the notes or take them off, stick them in a growing pile of neglected notes beside my desk, and continue wasting time. Because this is what I do when I’m home from school. Of course, this is nothing compared to the problem that I can’t read or understand most of my notes because I picked those days to relearn cursive, and I wrote them in a state of unconsciousness. I am my own worst enemy.

1.5. This happened last week…

1. Outright neglect

Here’s the real problem. I forgot. I completely forgot I was supposed to be punctual and consistent and was waiting for something miraculous to happen that I would have to write about. Not my life, clearly. As you can see, that has only amounted to a predisposition for diabetes and a shortage of ball-point pens. But I’ll be better from here on out. At the very least, I’ll share my donuts.

Accept no defeat, surrender, retreat

2010-08-06T22:50:00Z

I’ll probably hate myself for saying this later, but I really can’t wait to get back to Austin. I’ve been letting my lazy side run free for about three months (six weeks of which I worked and worked hard, mind you!), and I really need to sit down, slap myself a couple times, and hit the books. I have a thesis to start preparing for and two majors to finalize. Granted, there will be quite a few Hulu breaks, especially since I’ve started watching Haven which is basically X-Files set in small-town Maine, David Duchovny stand-in and everything. Before I start fawning uncontrollably, I thought I’d explain something.

An explanation…

When I say I’m studying Classics and Linguistics to people who for a variety of reasons have never heard of it, everyone assumes, for reasons I cannot fathom, that “Classics” means “that girl reads a lot of Dickens and Hugo.” Which is totally true, but besides the point. Classics is the study of ancient Greek and Roman civilization. It combines history, literature, drama, politics, geography, languages, art — everything. The breadth of this field, both in terms of subject areas and sheer timespan, is the reason I chose it for my primary major.

Linguistics, similarly, does not mean I just learn a lot of languages (although this ls also true). It means that I am studying the science of language, the mechanics. It does help to know many languages to be a linguist, but you don’t learn them through the major. There. That settles things. For now…

…And a defense

It’s not even that people don’t understand what I’m learning. I’m starting to figure out a few people don’t value it. Sometimes it startles me who I hear it from: people who I thought valued education and culture. Now, there are some pretty silly majors out there, but far be it for me to tell someone that what they studied is worthless. At some point, one should be allowed to acquire an education for education’s sake, and that means study what you love, whatever it is. Some of us (ahem) love the past, and it will never be enough for me to sit down and read a Wikipedia entry about ancient culture. How could that possibly be enough? What does that teach me but the bare bones of these people and civilizations? It’s the same for History, English, Classics. Hell, it’s the same for all of the Liberal Arts. To know enough about your field to call yourself “educated” demands more than any casual research will ever give you. It demands an education. It demands mastery, and that’s something that anyone in any field should agree with.

I am not a classicist. Not yet. Not for several more years, until I’ve mastered the languages, read the works, poured through the history, thrown myself completely into my field. After two years, I have barely dug a hole two inches deep. The amount of things I’ve learned, however jaw-droppingly huge to me, is only a fraction of what I must one day master. It will take a lot of education to get to that point. In three weeks, I get to dig a little deeper. The only feeling that comes to mind is this: bliss.

I'm happy, hope you're happy too

2010-06-21T19:20:00Z

I don’t know when teaching stopped being a career people valued. It seems that every time I bring up my major, the first question out of someone’s mouth is, “What are you going to do with that?” And that instantly takes the smile off my face. It’s taken me a long time to come to the decision that I can do what I want to do, and sacrifice nothing. I don’t have to be a doctor or lawyer, because neither of those things will make me completely happy. A doctor’s life is stressful but infinitely rewarding, but I’m not great with stress and insomnia. Or Biochemistry. And frankly, I don’t like law very much. I like suits. Sometimes. And pinstripes. But law means legal codes and, in family courts, bitter people, sad people, angry people. That’s not for me.

But I have always loved teaching. I’ve been doing it unconsciously for years, just as long as I’ve been stealing office supplies and training Sandy to open doors (she’ll get there, just you wait). It’s something I’m comfortable with, something I know I can handle, and I think it would be a lot of fun. We have several excellent teachers in my family, so I don’t know why my mom still won’t stop trying to change my mind. Maybe it’s not as prestigious or as lucrative as law or medicine. Maybe she likes pinstripes just as much as I do, and regrets that I won’t be able to wear them while I smash someone’s face in with the GAVEL OF JUSTICE, but honestly? Those are minor concerns. I know I will have at least enough money for room and board and my ridiculous IKEA addiction (it’s like crack, but with a birch veneer). And above all, I’ll be happy.

That should be the end of the discussion right there. It is what I want to do. No more questions, no more, “But what about dentistry? (I hate teeth, I hate people’s mouths, I am chronically afraid of halitosis)” I’ve made my decision, so everybody else get on board or shut it, because the GAVEL OF JUSTICE is coming.

Some things are better left unsaid...

2010-05-25T18:25:00Z

I’ve written about being vegetarian before. And I think I’ve made a little booboo. Okay, a huge, monstrous, mother of a booboo. Or two. Oh boy.

As a preface, I have to say that my mother’s diet gets more and more restrictive every year, mostly for religious/personal reasons. I think she’s in a, “What other weird seeds can I put on my cereal today” phase (the answer is flax, which doesn’t sound appealing at all). She recently dropped out onions and garlic (and derivatives), which I still don’t understand, but that’s not the pertinent issue.

The problem is eggs.

I didn’t know my mom didn’t eat eggs for a long time, mostly because she made so many allowances with what we could eating growing up that I just assumed she ate the same stuff. So whenever we baked or bought cookies, which contained eggs, I assumed she ate them from time to time. Then she got hooked on waffles. Eggo waffles. She loves them, and I love them, and they’re one of the few non-Indian foods we share anymore. Which is why I can’t bring myself to tell her they have eggs in them, even if it’s right there on the label. I’m pretty sure it will evoke some horrible sense of guilt in her — even though eggs are technically vegetarian — and she might eat me in my sleep.

Cannibalism is not vegetarian, just FYI.

Maybe I’m taking this too far. Maybe it’s a harmless omission for my mom. But not for my grandma, who has probably never had eggs before. And who ate a waffle yesterday. The guilt starts with my mom, but when I found out that my grandma had eaten one, I was on the verge of reading out the ingredients there and then.

Back from the brink

But two angry Indian women doesn’t seem much better than two contented Indian women. The question is, where do I draw the line? If not at eggs, then what? There are so many questionable “vegetarian” products that even someone who is as conscious and anal about this stuff as I am has a hard time.

Even though I must seem like an asshole for doing this, I am extremely careful when I shop for my mom and grandma. I make sure there’s no onion or garlic, no eggs, low sugar, no fat. I check and double check the ingredients. I understand that, whatever my standards are in this weird and sometimes baffling food culture, their standards are far higher. So I have to pay attention.

]]> We brought home some yogurt today, and even though my mom wants my grandma to try it, I will do my damnedest to make sure I am the only one who eats it. Because unless you buy the nasty organic yogurt — which smells like formaldehyde and tastes worse for reasons I cannot fathom — you have to settle for something with gelatin. And I have come to terms with the fact that there is no vegetarian gelatin. There’s pectin, agar, etc, but no one in the industry is motivated to use that as a substitute. So yes, gelatin is meat. I can avoid it by substituting vegetarian marshmellows and PopTarts with pectin filling (even if they aren’t as good — and honestly? Why the hell do you need gelatin for a gooey fruit filling? JAM is gooey and fruit-filled, and guess what? It’s ALL pectin.). But I can’t avoid it in yogurt — at least, not in any yogurt that is suitable for human consumption, and doesn’t taste like pondscum.

Seriously, it’s awful.

I think my only option is to start buying waffles that don’t contain eggs and tell them both that, “These waffles are better” (they damn well better be). Oh, and I should probably go hide the yogurt. And ride out this guilt storm by making bad watercolors and stealing a TimeTurner so I can enjoy every last minute of ACL this year.

Out spring some sparkling thoughts

2010-05-19T19:00:00Z

I have just under a month before I start working, and I just realized that this is basically the way I’ve treated the entire last month or so of school, if not all of April and May combined. Aside from waking up and going to class, turning in papers and assignments, taking notes, cramming lunch breaks into ten-minute binges of pizza and juice, scheduling naps whenever and wherever there’s a free hour/fifteen minutes, and using Hulu as a way to keep myself from doing anything at all until after 11 PM — you know, all that college stuff — I’ve pretty much done exactly what I would be doing in Austin right now at home. Nothing. I have a month off, and my only accomplishment for the five or so days I’ve been home is I’ve killed a mountain of roaches, and I’ve moved a bottle of Goldbond lotion to my nightstand so I can slather all of the mosquito bites I got … yesterday, while watching old Scrubs and Doctor Who episodes on my DVR.

If this is the good life, I sort of want my old busy life back. With deadlines and responsibilities. I did say “sort of.” Everyone needs a break. I just find huge gaps of free time just a little more suffocating than actually sitting down and getting something done.

There is one encroaching deadline: Remember how I said I would get my novel done by June 30th? It was a pipe dream to begin with. My new goal is less impressive. I have to finish the first book (another 2,000 words or so) in the next few days so I can print everything I have so far, edit it extensively with a red pen (this is the fun part), and submit it by June 2nd for my free proof copy. I did my math wrong, it turns out.

I’m a little bummed for two reasons. First, I wish I had more of my book done. If I just worked at it a little harder, I think I might have at least been able to make some headway. But I know that I don’t have that sort of discipline unless I’m actually setting goals for myself. “Finish the book” is vague and unhelpful. “Write 2,000 words,” on the other hand, is something I can deal with.

Secondly, little did I know that “free proof copy,” doesn’t mean that you’ll get a manuscript copy of your book. You get an actual book. This is driving my life-long perfectionist streak up the wall, because I just know something’s going to go badly. Maybe it won’t matter because I’ll be holding the first part of my book in my hands. But there’s always the chance that I’ll open to one of the biggest scenes in the first part, and go, “Oh god, that was supposed to be an apostrophe.” And my world will just crumble around my feet.

Thank goodness no one but me has to read this yet. I just might die of shame.

]]> Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s hard writing a novel, and even though all I do is whine about it and not actually write as much as I’m supposed to, I love it. I love that I have this internal organization perfected so that I know exactly what’s supposed to happen next, which was always what scared me most. Characters are easy for me. So are descriptions. Structure, however, is difficult. I want to expound on every single thought that every character has, but I can’t do that unless I want to spend the next ten years writing my 2,000 chapter novel.

But I think the hardest part is writing something and not even knowing if anyone will ever want to read it. I entered a writing contest recently, and as I suspected, I didn’t win. But what surprised me was that everyone had submitted essentially the same types of stories and poems. I knew that by submitting fantasy, I had already lost that battle. But it made me wonder if there’s someone out there who is just dying to read the finished novel as much as I am. I desperately want there to be, but I think I can be happy if it’s just me for now — in my own little world.

All the roads we have to walk

2010-04-29T01:55:00Z

I’ve made it to the end of April, and it still hasn’t hit me yet that in a few weeks, I’ll be a junior in college, and two months later, I’ll be twenty. The (relative) enormity of that hit me a few days ago, and I think my only recourse is to regress into my nine-year-old state, where all I did was kick boys in the shins and play with Lego ponies. Which is, more or less, what I do now, I guess. But twenty? Now I don’t think they’ll let me get Subway’s Kid’s Meals without giving me creepy looks and putting a big picture of my face behind the counter.

All I wanted was the toy. And the cookie. And the juice box. Sigh.

I haven’t done a lot of work with the novel. I know, I’ve had months and months to work on it, but some days, I clamber onto my bed and I’m just asleep within five minutes of coming back from class. Mostly because I got into a habit of sleeping around 3 or 4 AM, and waking up at 8, or as it happens, 8:40 AM for a 9 AM class. It’s hard to break a pattern of sleeping badly or being unproductive. It’s even worse when your creativity fluctuates. I spent the last week doing “art” (I call them fancy doodles — best of both worlds), and not writing. Now, I think the good times are coming back.

There is one bright spot, though: I entered a writing contest a few weeks back, and I had to print out a twenty-page segment of my novel to turn in. I ended up with two copies of each work, and on the way back, I started reading through them. I couldn’t believe how different everything sounded, felt, seemed just because I was holding it in my hand, not staring at it on a screen. I felt captivated, which is the first great sign I’ve had in a long time. Probably since NaNoWriMo. Then it started to rain, and I had to put them away, but those ten minutes? Bliss. I guess it just goes to show you. Even a laser printer can change your life for the better.

Here’s to three more weeks of spring, and then the scalding-hot peace of mind to follow.

Oh, let's go back to the start

2010-04-07T20:25:00Z

I’m going to apologize in advance to anyone who ever has to read my novel later, but I wanted to try something out. Most of my novel is written in past tense, with snippets in present tense where memories are concerned or flashbacks or dreams to make the past tense seem more vivid and fluid. But I threw in a whole chapter — a prologue really — written in present tense. And I love it. But it’s set about thirty years before the start of the novel. What this amounts to is that the present is written in past tense and the past is written in present tense. I thought that was clever. In hindsight. Really, I just wanted to mess around with a scene in my head, and the best way for it to come together was just as it did.

A lot of this is due to my chronology. I really set myself up for confusion by starting one of my prologues (there are three because I am ridiculous) twenty years before the first chapter, and tacking on each consecutive prologue before the first. So, I suppose, instead of covering eighty years in thirty chapters, I’m covering about ten years in twenty seven chapters, and the relevant bits of the past in three prologues (spread out over three books). In terms of skimming the story down to the immediate action, that is very nearly the best I can do.

I really like present tense, but I feel like it’s easy to abuse. I use it sparingly, because if I didn’t have any reserve with it, I would keep writing chapters in present tense and lose track of my plot entirely. In this particular section, I thought I’d use it to give one of my characters a memory from her own point of view — you don’t really get to see a lot of her in her own mind, or with her family. Here’s a snippet:

Sanctuary

They stand before her like other men — not her boys, not the babes she taught to read, to walk, to sing. Fera — Feruq, after his grandfather — is taller, but Ithas is built stronger. Morica laughs with them, straightens their tunics. Even at fourteen, she stands tall enough to meet her brothers’ eyes, and Rema, outside this triangle of her children, sighs in contentment. She has them now, all three of them. But today, the war begins, and nothing will be the same after this. So she treasures this, and does not close her eyes. Still, somehow, she misses them, and when the boys turn to go, she realizes that she has not said a word to them at all. It is almost too late now. The horses are clattering their way down the hill into the valley. But she cries out above the wind, above the clamor of her cowardice, and they return: her boys, always her boys. There are too many words to say, too many fears that she will not name. Ithas will return and take his father’s title. Fera will become a statesman, a Paladin perhaps, for all roads are open to him. Morica, she will have into her old age, a little longer than the boys, reckless as they are, trying to sieve glory out of a war that has not yet begun. Not yet.

I haven’t quite finished this chapter, so I don’t know what the last third will hold. Something about war and intrigue and such — nothing huge. I’ll keep you posted!

What I really want to say

2010-03-27T03:36:45Z

A few days ago, I hit 200 pages on my novel, and I sat there for a few minutes looking at the number wondering exactly how I’d made it that far. I’d come close several years ago, with a much older draft. I probably skimmed 180 and thought, Well, this is it. I don’t know how much more I can write. I’m not over that fear even now. If it weren’t for the fact that I keep adding chapters to deal with the gaps in narrative, I would be halfway done with the book by now. I’m not.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but I have so much more story in me. I’ve spent six years so far trying to get just the first section — all the exposition I could ever write — done so that I can proceed to the sections that actually begin to utilize the maelstrom of conflict that I’ve brewed so far. And while those parts of the story are not yet clarified in my mind, I know, very roughly, what I want. The story can only get longer from here, which makes my June 30th deadline a little scarier. But considering that I didn’t start writing this section until, perhaps, halfway into March — rather than February, which would have been ideal — and I didn’t average more than perhaps 1,000 words a day, if that, there’s still a chance that I’ll make it if I keep up to my original schedule. But I almost think I’ve lost the discipline to force myself to churn out 2,000 words a day. Sometimes, I’ll come to a sentence that I absolutely cannot phrase in any pleasant way, and I sit there staring at it for minutes upon minutes, and all I can think about is, “Why isn’t this working?”

Then, there’s the matter of plot. Since NaNoWriMo, I’ve added five chapters to the first third of my book, making it nearly as big as my intended second and third sections together. That doesn’t sit well with me for obvious reasons, and it means that either I’ll have to whittle down the first third to its bare bones, or beef up the second and third which, as of yet, are still hanging around in my head waiting for me to write them down. At this point, anything is possible, and I’m grateful for that. My brand new netbook (an Acer Aspire One) is really helping me out as well. Plus it…matches my stapler.

I apologize, like always, for the huge hiatus in posts. We had nearly fifteen people at our house (including us) over Spring Break, which was hectic and busy and incredibly fun, and for the first time this semester, I actually feel like the end is in sight. And I know it’s silly to go through my education just waiting to be done with everything, but I have some exciting summer plans to look forward to. If everything works out, I’ll post all of the fancy details here.

Right. So last night, we drove out to San Antonio at 11 PM (for hassling purposes) and got back around 5:30 AM. I stayed up for another hour churning Greek into my brain (τιθημι, τιθης, τιθησιν) before going to sleep, getting up at 8:30, and owning things until I finally crashed at 4 PM. I probably shouldn’t do this as often as I’ve been doing this this semester, but as long as I can get things done — and done well — I don’t see why I shouldn’t enjoy a late-night-harassment-run or two.

I know I'm not a hopeless case

2010-03-04T23:10:00Z

I’ve just about lost my patience with a number of things, so I thought I might as well pour them out with the disclaimer that I haven’t slept well recently, and really, all I want from the world at this point is a cupcake or a strawberry donut:

In no particular order

People who call themselves “social media experts,” but their advice consists of telling people to use social media sites? Wasn’t that implied? Seriously.
Business-y words (a lot of business-y things, actually). Marketing, branding, and a host of others. People use them without knowing what they mean, or proceed to use them in all of their conversations. It is possible to overuse certain aspects of the English language.
Weak handshakes.
People who think weak handshakes actually imply something about a person, other than that they have weak handshakes.
The idea that a perception or first impression is absolute.
Cobras. Why, do you actually like cobras?
Young adult novels.
Arrogance, especially arrogance as a result of authority, and especially especially arrogance without any privilege or authority.
People who look down on other people for any reason and justify themselves in doing so

Those are some pretty generic complaints about society. But none of them bothers me quite as much as someone telling me my major is useless. I am, quite happily, a Classics major — and while it’s annoying having to explain what that is to people, most of whom assume something about literature or “learning languages,” and assume that that’s all there is to it. The reason I chose Classics is because it contains programs of language study and history and literature and anthropology/archaeology. Those are all fields I was interested in before I came to UT, and I was happy that what I loved doing before I got to UT was still viable, and more importantly, a denser subject than I knew it to be.

We’ve being doing this thing at my school called “Career Week” recently, in an effort to get students thinking about their future careers and what they want to do when they graduate. I think the intent is noble: the events publicize the fact that there are other options after college than getting a job immediately. As a result, I sat through a few panels for Classics majors (there aren’t many of us) and Plan II majors (it’s an interdisciplinary honors program/major — that’s the simplest explanation I can give). And I left them awestruck. Both panels told me, essentially, that Plan II and Classics were both augments, and that what I learned in them wouldn’t be directly applicable to any career. They were, essentially, bragging points — resume boosters.

Here’s my take. Plan II is better as a buffer, certainly. If you’re doing a Plan II major, chances are you’ll end up double majoring anyway, because you’ll be taking courses in a preferred field of study, and ideally come out of it with tons of credits. Then again, you could spend the whole time you’re in Plan II enjoying Plan II for what it is, and take courses in so many different areas of study that you can’t even keep them straight in your head. Even this is admirable, and that’s what I love about my honors program.

The thing is, Classics is an actual, full-fledged major. It is by no means an augment. It is something you do for four years. There is a structured, focused course of study, and your degree lends you a certain credibility in all sorts of fields. Incidentally, not even all of the advisors really know what a Classics major is, but it amounts to this: all of the advisors assume is that you won’t be one of the people who ends up going into academia — which is legitimate — but still, the point shouldn’t be to tell someone that their whole course of study won’t get them a “real” job, or to convince them that they have to start exploring all of their interests, in case they find an unusual talent for birdsong or making tiny, mechanical foxes that they want to do for the rest of their life. It’s like saying, “While you were too busy translating Latin, you forgot how much you loved microwaves, until this specific moment when you were making popcorn, and you dropped what you were doing (mostly the popcorn) and went to work for General Electric.” Who does that kind of story benefit? Certainly not those of us who love what we’re doing beyond belief.

I know that, when I graduate, I want to spend some time getting graduate degrees — hopefully a Ph.D., if I’m not burned out at that point. And then I want to do some combination of teaching and writing professionally. It’s really that simple. I won’t make a lot of money — I’m fine with that. If I get a job doing something I don’t like, I’m going to be miserable. Don’t tell me that my major will lead me straight to a desk job with TPS reports and water coolers. Because that’s my choice, and mine alone.

We shine with brightness

2010-02-13T23:20:00Z

I don’t really talk about poetry very much, nor do I write a lot of it. I usually leave that sort of stuff to Lindsay, because she’s got me beat when rhyme and rhythm are concerned. But nonetheless, I love it to pieces.

I rather like Petrarch and Dante, but in the late Renaissance, sonnets and odes about love and lost love and being sad about lost love start becoming excruciatingly common place, and the tedium of it bores me. I’m going to go ahead and blame England for this one, but come the late 18th and early 19th-centuries, poets like Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Byron start redeeming the sins of the lovelorn — or at least making it more palatable. But I love modern poetry (I’m going to define this as just poems of the 20th century, for simplicity’s sake) just a bit more. I can’t explain it. I know that, for every Ezra Pound or Anne Sexton, there are a thousand, terrible, modern poets.

So I went and scoured the internet for my favorite examples of modern poetry. Sometimes, I picked poems I have read many, many times before. Other times, I stumbled upon a work I liked by an author I had only read in passing before, and found something new to love and appreciate. My compendium includes Eliot, Neruda, Sexton, Millay, Sandburg, and Plath. As you’ve probably noticed, I keep fiddling with the poems I selected, because I keep forgetting which ones I liked, and I keep finding new ones I like even more. Many of these poems are merely excerpts (marked with an …), but I hope you like them!

T.S. Eliot

These are actually two of my favorite Eliot poems. Both Marina and Ash Wednesday are lyrical, solemn, and beautiful, and are some of Eliot’s more accessible poems. I love The Wasteland personally, but it is very abstract. So there we are:

Marina (…)

What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger‚ Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.

Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.
I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.
The rigging weak and the canvas rotten
Between one June and another September.
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.
The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.

What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.

Ash Wednesday (…)

VI. Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

Sylvia Plath

I actually hadn’t read much Sylvia Plath prior to this post, but I wasn’t surprised to find a lucid, eloquent voice, even in times of bitterness, anger, and anguish.

Sonnet: To Eva (…)

This was a woman : her loves and stratagems
Betrayed in mute geometry of broken
Cogs and disks, inane mechanic whims,
And idle coils of jargon yet unspoken.

Not man nor demigod could put together
The scraps of rusted reverie, the wheels
Of notched tin platitudes concerning weather,
Perfume, politics, and fixed ideals.

The idiot bird leaps up and drunken leans
To chirp the hour in lunatic thirteens.

Candles (…)

They are the last romantics, these candles:
Upside-down hearts of light tipping wax fingers,
And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes,
Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints.
It is touching, the way they’ll ignore

A whole family of prominent objects
Simply to plumb the deeps of an eye
In its hollow of shadows, its fringe of reeds,
And the owner past thirty, no beauty at all.
Daylight would be more judicious,

Giving everybody a fair hearing.
They should have gone out with the balloon flights and the stereopticon.
This is no time for the private point of view.
When I light them, my nostrils prickle.
Their pale, tentative yellows

…

They mollify the bald moon.
Nun-souled, they burn heavenward and never marry.
The eyes of the child I nurse are scarcely open.
In twenty years I shall be retrograde
As these drafty ephemerids.

I watch their spilt tears cloud and dull to pearls.
How shall I tell anything at all
To this infant still in a birth-drowse?
Tonight, like a shawl, the mild light enfolds her,
The shadows stoop over the guests at a christening.

Pablo Neruda

I read Neruda for the first time in English, senior year of high school. I took a poem in the original Spanish and set about translating it into English via Latin. For the life of me, I can’t remember what that poem was, but I found one about a penguin, so that will have to suffice:

Magellanic Penguin (…)

I was without doubt the child bird
there in the cold archipelagoes
when it looked at me with its eyes,
with its ancient ocean eyes:
it had neither arms nor wings
but hard little oars
on its sides:
it was as old as the salt;
the age of moving water,
and it looked at me from its age:
since then I know I do not exist;
I am a worm in the sand.

The reasons for my respect
remained in the sand:
the religious bird
did not need to fly,
did not need to sing,
and through its form was visible
its wild soul bled salt:
as if a vein from the bitter sea
had been broken.

]]> Carl Sandburg

Everyone knows Sandburg’s Fog, but I decided to rummage further and came up with these. I’m a sucker for classical references, so A Sphinx was a given (I had to fight myself not to put down Plath’s The Colossus); At A Window was just too sweet to not include though.

A Sphinx

Close-mouthed you sat five thousand years and never
let out a whisper.
Processions came by, marchers, asking questions you
answered with grey eyes never blinking, shut lips
never talking.
Not one croak of anything you know has come from your
cat crouch of ages.
I am one of those who know all you know and I keep my
questions: I know the answers you hold.

At A Window

Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.

Anne Sexton

I read through Sexton’s complete works last year in English, and was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked her. Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward is touching, and at the same time, touched with fear, or worry on Sexton’s part; Letter Written on a Ferry is a beautiful poem — I only included the last part because I love the last line — but I wish the circumstances in which I read it for the first time weren’t as unpleasant. Hopefully, I’ll get over that little memory soon.

Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward (…)

Down the hall the baskets start back. My arms
fit you like a sleeve, they hold
catkins of your willows, the wild bee farms
of your nerves, each muscle and fold
of your first days. Your old man’s face disarms
the nurses. But the doctors return to scold
me. I speak. It is you my silence harms.
I should have known; I should have told
them something to write down. My voice alarms
my throat. “Name of father—none.” I hold
you and name you bastard in my arms.

And now that’s that. There is nothing more
that I can say or lose.
Others have traded life before
and could not speak. I tighten to refuse
your owling eyes, my fragile visitor.
I touch your cheeks, like flowers. You bruise
against me. We unlearn. I am a shore
rocking off you. You break from me. I choose
your only way, my small inheritor
and hand you off, trembling the selves we lose.
Go child, who is my sin and nothing more.

Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound (…)

There go my dark girls,
their dresses puff
in the leeward air.
Oh, they are lighter than flying dogs
or the breath of dolphins;
each mouth opens gratefully,
wider than a milk cup.
My dark girls sing for this.
They are going up.
See them rise
on black wings, drinking
the sky, without smiles
or hands
or shoes.
They call back to us
from the gauzy edge of paradise,
good news, good news.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Millay is one of the more old-fashioned modernists. She wrote a lot of sonnets, a magnum opus — Renascence — and then, poems like this. Again, classical references. I’m sold.

Ode to Silence (…)

This is her province whom you lack and seek;
And seek her not elsewhere.
Hell is a thoroughfare
For pilgrims,—Herakles,
And he that loved Euridice too well,
Have walked therein; and many more than these;
And witnessed the desire and the despair
Of souls that passed reluctantly and sicken for the air;
You, too, have entered Hell,
And issued thence; but thence whereof I speak
None has returned;—for thither fury brings
Only the driven ghosts of them that flee before all things.
Oblivion is the name of this abode: and she is there.

And just for funsies, having made it this far, I’d like to show off Ozymandius, one of my favorite poems. Shelley is by no means a modernist, but, at this point, who cares?:

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandius

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Stuck true to your obsessions

2010-01-24T01:35:00Z

It’s almost the end of January, and I’m already setting myself deadlines. My calendar is already pockmarked with various page numbers, chapters, quizzes to be completed — and this is just for the next few weeks. On top of that, I’m going to make myself sit down and have a finished, draft copy of my novel ready by June 30th. Right now, I’m sitting at about 83,000 words (thanks to my 50,633 from this year’s NaNoWriMo.)

This seems outrageous, mostly to me, because usually this is where I stop a draft and start over completely. I’ve done it twice before, and I’m terrified that I’m going to pause halfway through, reach back to the beginning, and make my protagonists leprechauns or something, and then the rest of the story wouldn’t work because they weren’t small, mystical, or Irish. This honestly haunts my every waking thought.

Where I stand right now, I’m about ¹/₃rd through the novel. All of the exposition is done, most of the characters have been introduced, everything is screwed up, and a lot of other things are in motion, namely death and destruction and probably some evil babies or something. I’m not quite caught up there. Now, 50,000 words in a month is remarkably doable if you sacrifice a bit of sleep and tranquilize your control-freak inner editor, who says that “squirm” is a much better word than “wiggle,” and that you really don’t know anything about botany, except for what you looked up on Wikipedia to make sure you weren’t putting tropical plants in a tundra setting. (Did you know there’s such a thing as an “Air Potato?”).

But goodness, I need to write at least 100,000 words in five months without slacking off. The word count doesn’t scare me as much as the idea that I will have to constantly motivate myself over half a year to get this done. Considering that formatting alone will take me a month and a crate of Kleenexes and maybe some Lasik, And editing — oh boy, editing. Editing will probably take me the rest of my life. I really don’t have any time to waste. Other than the time I’m taking to write about this. If only novel writing was this easy.

I have learned one thing. If you let the story just race out of you, the plot usually comes together on its own — roughly, but it’s still viable. I’ve gotten away with preparing one-line outlines, or none at all, and my chapters seem to have seamed themselves together. Additionally, because I’ve been working with these characters for so long, I’ve stopped trying to reinvent the characters themselves. They’re set in stone. They won’t change, even if I tried to. But I can change their roles. I leave blanks in my plot for certain roles to be filled, and when I’m close enough to the scene, the right name fits into place. That way, everything that needs to happen is taken care of, and hopefully by the right character.

Editing this beast is going to be hilarious. I’ll post snippets along the way. Here’s one for the road:

“Mercy!” shouted Murron, shaking in her white robe. Elodan did not look for her, but continued to wait for the cold, sharp blade to fall across his neck and sever him from his body. He would live but a few moments after that, his eyes blinking closed and his mouth falling open, forming words that no amount of air could voice. He would say, humbly, honestly, “Show me no mercy.” When the last word rang out in the air, he thought, Here comes the darkness. Here come the nameless gods out to receive me, with their vessels and banners and knowing eyes. They will say that Elodan must live a thousand more lives, must be born lame, blind, and withered, cursed beyond belief for his sins. So too must Ekar Kamo, Elodan would whisper, and the spirits would agree with their heads bowed.

But perhaps, one would add, he has already undertaken his penance.

You are not infallible, Elodan of Trea.

Then what hope have I of mercy? he would plead.

“Mercy!” she cried again, clutching at Ekar’s elbow. The chancellor turned and lowered his sword, watching her quizically. Jeffard covered his mouth in with his hand to hide his surprise and abject terror.

Additionally

I took a crack at illustrations, and I threw some up (more or less) on some of my pages. I’m not sure what aesthetic I want to convey. I always have the hardest time illustrating things for myself, because I could do almost anything and get away with it, almost being the key word. I tried a little grunge, a little bathroom stall, a little whimsy. I wanted them to be somewhat rough, so wherever I’ve colored outside of the lines, it’s not my fault — I mastered neat coloring very early on (except with paints) — I did it on purpose.

Let me know how you like them!

And still this emptiness persists

2010-01-14T23:02:25Z

There was a moment last week when I thought that I could honestly switch to WordPress and have no problem with it, but every time I design with it, I feel like I’m cobbling something together instead of using the defined framework. It’s a little hard to tell, because sometimes you find regular PHP beside template tags. Granted, it works, and that should be all that matters. But I do love that Movable Type defines most of the things you will ever need for your site in advance. It just helps cement my choice of CMS a little more thoroughly.

There are a few things I would change, and a few of these I have definitely brought up before.

Features
This one is a little nitpicky, since I have no complaints about the bulk of Movable Type’s built-in features, but did you know that Movable Type hasn’t had proper article pagination until Version 4.3 (please correct me if I’m wrong)? I’m talking a simple previous/next entries link at the bottom of the page. I racked my brain trying to find a solution to work on my poor little 4.1 installation, but all of my best efforts failed. I tried about four plugins, and none of them managed to do anything either. Which brings me to my next point:
Plugins
I don’t know what happened to the developer community for Movable Type, but there’s not too many of them left. Just for comparison’s sake, WordPress has 7,965 available plugins. Movable Type has a mere 910. I’ll leave the guffawing and math to you guys. In the mean time, I might start writing my own, although this seems like a bad idea all over. Now, quantity usually doesn’t matter, and there are quite a few quality plugins on the community site, but maybe only one working version, or perhaps two, of the same sort of script. What ends up happening is that you don’t have alternatives to turn to if nothing works out. And when you really want help, the place you turn to first is the community forum:
Support
I can rant and rave about this at length. Fewer users means fewer knowledgeable users, which means fewer people who have answers rather than more questions. It really keeps coming down to the size of the community. You can have all the functionality in the world built into your CMS, but if no one’s constantly surging ahead and syncing it with the latest technologies, it won’t matter at all. There’s not a great deal of dignity in being just behind the baseline.
External Help
A lot of the really great sites for Movable Type help that I mentioned in one of my previous posts, like Movable Tweak, Learning Movable Type, and Movalog have either stopped updating or just don’t work. It’s always a good sign if the company that makes the product has the best support site for it, but it’s slightly more tragic when it’s the only one around. I mean, where do you go to when there’s nothing else?

Solutions

I encourage developers, programmers, and curious minds to try sparking some new life into MovableType.org. It’s a wonderful platform, and while most people aren’t comfortable with Perl/CGI — that’s it, isn’t it? PHP is more accessible? — it doesn’t look too bad. Hell, if I say I’m going to try it, it can’t be that bad.

I think a lot of you guys will get the impression that I’m just punishing myself by using MT, by wearing myself out until I just shiver and hallucinate about WordPress all day, but it’s just because I really like this system, and I hate to see it wear away. Six Apart is doing their part by creating a brand new version which, aside from the admin panel woes, and the catering towards a community site rather than a personal blog — hence the word “site” throughout. Now I think it’s my turn to chip in.

Or perhaps, this is as good as it gets.