A blogpost a day keeps the sanity away.

In preparation for Nanowrimo, the month where I, along with hundreds of thousands of others, will attempt to write 50,000 words in the month of November, I have decided to write a blogpost every single day, starting yesterday, until the end of October. Man, that is quite the beginning sentence. Kind of a slog to get through that one, but oh well, it's written.

Because these posts will be prep for Nano, I will edit them very little. They may go off-topic, or wade into ridiculous topics and side-rants. Who knows. The point is to put words on the screen. Quantity, not quality. Feel free to skim the posts to see if anything is funny, useful, or interesting. Mileage may vary.

So. One post a day. Not bad, right? I didn't even set a minimum length. It will be a breeze, a piece of cake. What makes a piece of cake so easy, anyways? Or pie? Easy as pie. Is pie really that easy? If so, why have I never made one? If pie is so easy, why do we pay so much to buy one?

Regardless. My journey has begun. It actually began yesterday, with my post about being Bored. I guess I just dislike hearing that parents buy their kids electronic devices just so they won't be 'bored'. Being 'bored' is part of growing up. Ehh, no need to rehash what I said yesterday.

What am I going to write about in these blogposts, you might ask? Who knows? Whatever comes across my mind. Whatever's goin' on up in the ol' mind-noggin. Random snippets of flash fiction? Perhaps. Random rants about how spoiled kids are these days because I'm an old man? Probably. Whatever catches my whimsy.

Word-vomit. That's a great phrase and is particularly keen in regards to NanoWrimo. I'm going to need to spew out word-vomit on a daily basis. MmmMmm good.

So that's the deal. A post a day until November starts and then it's off to the races. If I don't do it, I'll buy you, my reader, a beer if you call me out on it. If I do complete this, then you owe me a beer. It's only fair, right? Right. Makes sense to me.

I'm out. Check back in tomorrow.

Being Bored is Okay

We seem to despise boredom. We fight it with phones and music and tv and games. We fill every second of our lives with entertainment, all so that we won't feel that we don't have anything to do. Parents buy their children ipads so that they won't get 'bored' on long road trips. Really? Give me a break. You know what I did on long family roadtrips? Looked out the window. I thought about stuff. I talked to my family.

Not to go all "back in my day" on everyone, but let's be serious here. Why are we so against being bored? It's a freakin' luxury to be bored. We should be happy to be bored. It means our needs are met, we aren't hungry, tired or dehydrated. It means our lives are so perfect that we don't have to be doing anything. It's amazing. It's time to think, ponder, reflect. But we'd rather turn on the tv and channel surf, or put on music so we don't have to interact with anybody else.

As adults, it's fine, do whatever, but for children? Kids should be bored. It forces them to think. To be creative. It forces them to make up their own games, their own stories, their own minds. If we stuff 'entertainment' down their throats every moment, they'll never have to think on their own. If they're constantly in contact with friends through a digital device, they'll never be forced to just be alone and think They won't have to deal with being bored, they'll just plug in and tune out. Let your kid look out the freakin window on road trips. Let them be bored because, hey, it's okay. Life is going to be boring and they should learn to do something other than sit in front of a screen.

I remember those long road trips, head against the window, staring at the landscape flying by, and just thinking. Creating stories in my head. Visualizing. Kids shouldn't need ipads to fight against boredom, they should be able to use their imagination, as corny as it sounds.

Anyways, that's my rant in defense of boredom. It gets a really bad rap and really, it's your own fault if you're bored. You've got a freakin' human brain in your head. If you're bored, you're not really using it.

Curiosity Didn't Kill the Cat

I am a curious person. I walk by a building and wonder what sort of work goes on inside, what types of people work there, what are the politics of the place, what are the interpersonal dramas that go on? Essentially, what stories are happening within?

I think about everything. Everything I see and hear, I imagine details and situations, possibilities that stem from what I experienced. How things might be put into a story or used for a dilemma or conjuring up a tense situation. I hear people speaking and imagine their lives, where they might live, what they might do. This might sound sort of creepy but it's completely innocent. I enjoy thinking about possibilities, all kinds of possibilities. I enjoy using my imagination to create entire worlds from minute details. It's not only a sort of mind-imagination exercise, it generates numerous amounts of substance for stories, for writing, for crafting realistic fictional characters and situations.

Curiosity is a good thing.

Yet we are afraid of being curious or of having knowledge. We say things like "Ignorance is bliss" and "curiosity kill the cat" which is bullshit. The news stopped telling the truth because we didn't want to hear it. Now, we have a fictional news show that actually tells the truth, only about events that happened months ago so that it's "okay" and hey, it's just a tv show, not real life. We live in our own cocoons of personal knowledge and are afraid to admit that somebody else might be right, that we might be wrong about things, so we only listen to people who agree with us and insult those who disagree and that way we never have to face the idea we might be wrong.

I had no idea I would go off ranting like this on this blog post but here I am.

I am a curious person. When someone does something, I want to know WHY. Why did they do it, why did they feel the need to do it and why did they think it would be a good thing to do? Why is a very important question and most of us probably don't even understand WHY we do certain things, much less try to figure out why other people do things. We're all bundles of water bags filled with emotions and thoughts pressured by the experiences of our lives, driven to do things by our past.

It helps with writing characters. You always have to know the why, even if you don't reveal it to the reader. The character needs a past that influences them, the pressures that we all experience in our daily lives.

I get this curiosity from both of my parents. My father is always thinking about why things happen and how the world works. He constantly theorizes about situations, why this thing happened as opposed to this other thing, why this might have happened but not this. If he doesn't know something, he's not afraid to imagine the answer, to hypothesize using what he does know. It's actually a great skill in life, using what you know to figure out what you don't know, and even if you're wrong occasionally, it helps you deal with situations and think about new situations.

I think my mother is curious about people. She wonders about their feelings and their thoughts, and what drives them to do things. She wonders how she can help them. I, too, am curious about people. There are times I watch cars go by and just wonder about whose driving, whose riding, where are they going and why? Who are all these people driving down this road at this exact time? What do they do? What are their lives like?

The drive for knowledge is just basic human nature. We want to know, we need to know. The more we know, the more power we have over our own lives and choices in life. Perhaps we think of cats as curious because they are more independent than other pets. They do their own thing, they do what they want, when they want.

Maybe curiosity did kill the cat. Perhaps the cat ventured out into the night to see what was out there, and got eaten. But guess what? We're not fucking cats. Be curious. Learn things. There is information literally at our fingertips. Never has knowledge ever been easier to acquire. Get some. Learn something.

Perspective-Taking (pt 2): In Writing

In my last post,  I wrote about how perspective-taking is a skill everybody needs and uses. It's essential for social interaction and establishing relationships. It's how we relate to one another.

Today, I'm going to talk about how perspective-taking is a must for writing. It is crucial to authors. It's easier and more difficult to take a character's perspective. First of all, they are made up, they are created, they are imaginary. How do you relate to an imaginary character? How can you consider their thoughts and feelings?

You created them for a purpose, to act in certain ways and do certain things, and yet they must have their own motivations. They must have thoughts and feelings, reasons for acting the way they do, or else they will fall flat. They won't feel alive to the reader. Even the villains need good reasons for the things they do. Why do they hurt people? What in their past has made them act like this? How might we all come to such evil actions, if circumstances were different?

The best writers do this well. Their characters feel alive. Indeed, sometimes a character can become so alive, they do things the writer doesn't expect. That might sound crazy but it's true. They can take a life of their own, and if they do, the writer is doing their job. You can't force a character to do things. You can create the motivation and the reasons they do them, though. It's a writer's job. Humans do things for a reason. Something motivates them, something makes them think it is what they should do. Characters should be the same way.

The best villains are the ones we relate to. The ones we realize we could become, if our positions were reversed. They are also the most troubling. See the situation from your hero's point of view before you make him save the day. Why is he saving the day, besides the obvious? Why fight or struggle?

If you're rushing through a draft of a story, it's okay to ignore things, but you can't forever. You have to go back, view the character's actions, and ensure they have good reasons for doing so, even if those reasons only seem good to that character.

Get some perspective.

Perspective Taking (pt 1.): In Life

"Perspective Taking" is a phrase used to mean, essentially, seeing things from another person's point of view.  It's taking another's perspective in a situation. Imagining how they feel, what they think, and why they do the things they do.

We treat it as a skill in special education. It's something we try to teach to students who tend to have a very difficult time with it. It's something we learn, growing up. It's how we make connections with others and make friends. It's how we know how to act around others. It's essential for meaningful social interaction. 

Some students find it hard to do. It takes imagination. Some students simply can't understand how to think like someone else, or consider how someone else feels. They are too focused on themselves, and don't see the need to care about what others are thinking. They don't see the need to understand why someone did something. 

It can be difficult to see things outside of our own perspective. (I think many adults have trouble with this as well, else why do strangers get so mad at eachother so fast, over little things?)

Understanding our own feelings and why we feel them is difficult enough. How can we expect to know why someone else did this or that? 

The truth is we can't. Not for sure. It's why we ask so many questions. How are you feeling? Why did you do this? We can't know for certain why someone does something unless we ask, but asking isn't always an option. So what do we do? We guess. We guess all the time. We guess this person did this or that, for this reason. We might not be right all the time, but the more we guess, the better we get at it. Perspective taking takes guessing. That's part of what's so hard about it. 

It's also hard because to take someone elses' perspective, you have to care about them in some way. If you don't care, there's no point in understanding them. We should care, though, even if it's just because it's a fellow human being. That's not so easy, all the time. There are many times we'd rather not care or understand, but we should try. 

Perspective taking doesn't just help us understand why someone acted a certain way, it helps us realize other people aren't so different from us. If we put ourselves in their situation, we can see that maybe, just maybe, we would have acted the same way, and if we would have acted the same way in the same situation, how can we judge or be angry with them? 

We're all similar beings. We want and need certain things, all being pushed and pulled by the various different forces acting in our lives. 

I'm not saying we need to forgive and forget everybody for every act they commit. But at least we can forgive the small things. The person slow in traffic, the guy who cuts you off, the girl who bumps into you, etc. It seems to me that whenever someone inconveniences us, even in a small way, we respond with anger, like 'what the fuck is this person doing'. We don't think about them or consider why they may have done it, they're a stranger so we immediately call them douchebags in our minds. We'll give friends and family the benefit of the doubt, but not a stranger. Why is that? 

Why let a little thing infuriate you when the person who did it wasn't trying to ruin your day? 

Can't we understand that Shit Happens and people make mistakes. Accidents happen. Let it go. 

Here's an example. I bought chicken from Whole Foods the other day. It's a ten-minute walk from where I live. We were going to cook it for dinner. Open the package and it smells like rotten eggs. Bad news. Bring it back, manager apologizes, I just ask for another package the same size and he says no problem. I get a new package, bring it home, it also smells bad. At this point, I'm pretty fucking pissed off. I could have gone back and yelled at the dude, blah blah blah, made a whole scene and really ruined his day. I didn't. I brought it back, asked to get the same amount fresh from the butcher and the manager apologized numerous times, said that would be fine, and that was the end of it. 

I might have gotten more if I had made a scene. Maybe I would have gotten a gift card or something. I don't know. I do know I probably would have made some people feel shitty and probably would have felt like shit myself for doing so. I don't like making people feel bad, even if they might deserve it. I can't really yell at someone who apologizes and seems genuine about it. I know how shitty dealing with customers or patrons is. I was a bouncer and people treated me like shit about doing my job and about things I couldn't change or wasn't in charge of. 

I fucking hated it. 

Who was I supposed to yell at, at Whole Foods? The manager for not knowing the chicken went bad before the sell-by date? The butchers who are genuinely friendly and nice every time I go there? It's not like they intentionally gave us bad chicken. I got good chicken, cooked and ate it. The dude apologized. No big deal. No reason to scream at someone. 

You know what I appreciated as a bouncer? The nice people, who were friendly even if they had to wait in line for awhile. They made my night so much better. That's a difference we can all make. Be nice and friendly, especially to people who deal with people day in and day out. It can make somebody's day that much better. 

Alot of girls and guys thought they knew about me and my job as a bouncer but they didn't know shit. You might not know shit about someone else so try to give them the benefit of the doubt, as much as you can. Treat them like you would a friend. Treat them decently. 

Take someone else's perspective. 

I think everyone should work in a job where they have to deal with people. Restaurant, retail, nightclub, customer service, etc. That gives you some fucking perspective. Then maybe people wouldn't treat folks, who are just doing their job, like shit. 

I was going to go into how Perspective-Taking is especially an important skill for writing, but I think I will write a second blog post for that. 

I guess the message is...try to be nice and shit? It's better than being angry all the time. 

"The Wheel of Time" and me

A few weeks ago, I finished a series I'd begun a decade ago. It's quite the experience. I felt mentally exhausted, emotionally wrung out, saddened yet pleased, awed yet sorrowful.

I'd finished "A Memory of Light", the final novel in "The Wheel of Time" series.

I started "The Eye of The World" in high school, knowing that one of my older brothers had read it and enjoyed it. I liked fantasy, losing myself in a wild yet somehow plausible world, another reality. The stories intrigued me, the action was exciting and simply put, the magic was cool.

"The Eye of The World" hooked me immediately. It had everything I could have wanted. Three farmboys are forced to leave their home, chased by evil, and heroically save the day. The action was there, intense and heart-thumping. The characters were fantastic. I felt like I knew them, their thoughts and feelings. They fought, tooth and nail, giving it their all to save the day.

And yet, at the end, the day was saved but not much more. The story went on. There was something much bigger growing. I felt like I had barely scratched the surface, even though the book was 700 pages long or so.

I devoured the next few books, one after another. The boys grew, slowly but surely. The conflicts grew as well, becoming bigger and crazier. The cast grew as well, on both sides, good and evil. Each book brought new cultures, each incredibly detailed, down to what they wore and their hair styles. This wasn't just a fantasy story, this was an entire world, an entire reality to delve into.

I delved into that world, The Wheel of Time, time and time again.

The story grew beyond just three boys, though they stayed as centerpieces. The Wheel of Time wasn't about three boys, it was about the end of the Third Age, about the Last Battle between Light and The Dark One, it wasn't one story it was a multitude, all weaving together brilliantly.

Eventually, I had to stop, not because I wanted to, but because I had caught up to Robert Jordan as he wrote new novels. Sometimes, I would go back and read the first couple, refresh the story in my mind. I fell easily back into the world, the characters as familiar as old friends.

Each time Jordan would finish a new one, I'd consume it in a matter of days. I could tell the end was coming. It had to. He couldn't write the story forever. Things were shaping up for the grand finale and I knew it would be one hell of a ride.

Then, after the 11th book in the series, while working on what he thought would be the final book, Robert Jordan unfortunately passed away.

I felt crushed. This writer, this creator of an amazing world, had died. It's always sad when a writer passes away. You see, when you read a writer for so long, you feel like you know them. Writers put much of themselves into the work. I knew Jordan's world, so I felt like I knew him. I wish I could have known him, or let him know how much his world meant for me.

But he was gone. Another sting, there would be no more Wheel of Time. I would never know what happened to my favorite characters. I could only imagine.

I put the series aside for a long time. I'd thought it was done for good. I made my peace with it and moved on. It was a really great series that unfortunately didn't get an ending. Oh, well, I thought. What I got to read was pretty freaking great.

Then, I heard The Wheel of Time wasn't dead. Jordan had kept numerous notes and his wife had taken them to Brandon Sanderson to finish the series. I can only thank Mrs. Jordan so much. It must have been hard, giving your husbands work to another, trusting them to finish it the right way. But she wanted the readers to get their ending, and she must have known Robert Jordan wouldn't have wanted to leave his readers like that.

I felt ecstatic when I heard, yet also nervous. Could someone else write a Wheel of Time novel? Not to mention the penultimate finale to Jordan's world?

Well, I knew I would find out. I just had to read one more book when Sanderson finished it...

Then I heard he was splitting the final novel into three, as it was simply too much material to fit into one book. I had not one more novel to finish the series, but three, one published a year for three years. 14 books in total. Would I ever actually read the end? I sometimes wondered.

When I read the 12th, Sanderson's first, my worries were dashed away. Sanderson performed some sort of miracle, creating a novel that felt like The Wheel of Time, through and through, keeping the characters consistent and hurrying the plot along at an exciting pace.

I read the 13th book in three days. It blew my mind. I couldn't believe the end was coming. I just had to wait an agonizingly long time.

Finally, A Memory Of Light was published in January, 2013.

Unfortunately, I couldn't read it then.

See, I felt I had a duty, a responsibility. If I was really going to read the end to The Wheel of Time, well, I needed to fucking reread the entire series before I did so.

So I did.

I started last summer, possibly a year ago, and read through all 13 books without a break in between. I engulfed myself in the world, reliving the climactic moments, the badass action, the drama. Dropping back into that world felt great, the cast of characters like old friends come for dinner.

Now, I've read the end. I know how The Last Battle finishes. I know what happens to the characters. It was, honestly, better than I could have imagined. Everything came back around. Everything tied up. Nothing was forgotten (as far as I could tell).

I have never felt so connected with any other novel or series. It is a fantastic world to dive into, and I would recommend it to anyone willing to invest the time into it. I tell you, the payoff is worth it.

I don't usually use this word, as these days it is completely overused and has nearly lost all meaning, but it truly fits.

The Wheel of Time is epic.

Finally, a blog post

I know it's been awhile. I do many things to convince myself not to write a blog post. I tell myself nobody will read it, so what's the point? Or I convince myself I have nothing to write about. If I don't have a specific topic or subject for a post, what's the point in writing one? What will it even be about?

I figured enough time has passed. I'm just going to write and see what comes out of it.

The summer has been a hot one. I work in a special education program, with kids who are between the ages of 16-19, but have very limited function. It's very different than my work during the year, where I work with students  in grades 4-6 who function near to grade level but need social and behavioral support. At times, my job in the summer feels more like babysitting than teaching. Sometimes, I'm asked why I do it? Why work with these kids? Why do this job? And, most importantly, is this what I want to do as a full-time job, is this the career I want to go into?

I have been wrestling with these questions for awhile now. Do I stick with the english-teaching or go into special education? Special education seems like it would provide more opportunities. Either way, I must go to grad-school, spending time and money I don't have for possible future employment. So again, I return to the question: Is special education the career I want to go into?

The answer is yes. As infuriating as it can be at times, I enjoy my job. I enjoy the students. Every one is unique and fantastic in their own way. Every day is different, every day presents new challenges in helping students understand skills and knowledge they need to live a successful life. Yes, students can be aggravating, but they can also be great. The moment when a student finally understands an idea is an incredible moment. And you helped them do it. It's a great feeling.

I want to do this. I want to go to work everyday thinking about how I'm going to teach these students what they need to know, I want to be worrying about the best way to handle students' various situations. I know there will be paperwork. I know some days will drag on and other days it will feel like I'm banging my head against a brick wall but tell me a job where it never feels like that. Setbacks, disappointments, and irritation happens in every job, every day. I don't care. This is what I want.

So I need to go back to school. Take classes again, take out more loans and spend free time learning. That's okay. Improving oneself, improving one's education is a good thing. I've always enjoyed learning new things. I'm somewhat excited to go back to school, despite the time/money commitment. At least I will be back on track, instead of feeling stuck where I am.

Man, it feels good to say that. I hadn't really committed to it, until now. Writing can do that. You can start off writing about something and realize you want to say something else, realize you've already made a decision to a question you had in your mind.

If you are stuck with a choice, and you don't know what to do, try writing about it. Write out your thoughts, your hopes, your worries. It might help. Writing organizes your mind, it focuses you.



Finally, a blog post written. I will try to write them more often, even when I think I have nothing to say.  Remember, write first, ask questions later.