Technical Writing 101 - Technically, It's Writing

So, I've kind of decided a couple things about my life recently. They are that I really enjoy babbling on the internet (aka writing) and should probably do it more, and that I should have followed my 6-17 year old dreams of becoming a marine biologist. Sharks & jellyfish, hell yes. Of course not everyone gets to do sharks or be James Cameron so I'd likely be left with shallow tube worms and mollusks, but hey, still in the ocean. But instead of babbling about how awesome bioluminescence is and how the only way to make my life seem interesting sometimes is to imagine David Attenborough narrating it, I'll talk about writing.

I can only remember writing 3 pieces which have actually stuck out in my mind as actually being good. I was in middle to high school for all of them, have no transcripts of the originals, nor do I remember any of the details, so you'll just have to believe me. I should probably go ahead and clear up that good is likely not the best descriptor, but they have made me proud in different ways. Not included in this list are the two poems I wrote senior of high school, one about banana nut muffins and one about how English class was like beating a dead horse and asking what it meant. For some reason that teacher didn't like me.

Chronologically then. In 8th grade we were assigned the task of rewriting the ending of The Giver. What is going to make this explanation difficult is that I barely remember what happens in The Giver, and am thus just going to make it all up. The Giver was a bit ruined for me because I read A Brave New World and 1984 before it. I remember enjoying it anyway, but I seemed to be the only one in class who was not wowed by the possibility of a dystopian future (as an aside, blogger doesn't believe dystopian is a word and should therefor be burned to the ground). Basically the novel ends with the main character and his baby brother trying to escape their little community through the snow, and eventually seeing some things giving hope, but leaving it open, since as an adult you realize he has all the symptoms of hypothermia.

Fairly dark for a youth novel, but I made mine so much darker. In my less subtle ending, the hypothermia is way worse. He falls down in the snow, everything gets darker, then he feels his baby brother coddled against his chest start to move and realizes he has to keep going, blah blah blah. I can't remember, I think I killed the main character so that the baby could live. I remember it much more fondly than I am able to explain it out. It seemed so good at the time. It is the only time I can ever remember writing something that someone told me was good without prompting. I had always gotten A's on papers, but never received any real comments. This time my teacher (who apparently, my class was so horrible to that she quit the following year) told me it was great, and asked to submit it to some contest. It won something, and I have no recollection of what it was.

The second, was in 9th grade. It is the only true creative writing assignment I have ever had. The assignment was simply, write a piece of fiction. In true nerd fashion, I wrote about Grognar the Barbarian. I assume it wasn't Grognar, but he was indeed a barbarian. It was so enjoyable simply because it was solely my creation. When I think about it now, I'm quite sure it was a pretty good reflection of everything I was reading for fun at the time. Low fantasy hero, lovecraftian monsters of unspeakable even. Good triumphing over evil at great cost.

I remember writing the story all the night before. This was not unusual for me, I always did everything the night before, it's why I don't know anything now, but this was the first time I remember not being able to start before that. I could not think of anything I liked, anything I wanted to do. I wrote and had no idea where it was going. In circles obviously, all my writing does, but at least this one it was intentional. Spiraling down into the hellish abyss. I believe it was to rescue a princess, but I do not think he was a plumber.

And finally, the one that gives me actual pride at my own deviousness. 12th Grade AP Literature exam. Weird that something like that could give pride, but it's actually the only critique I am proud of as well. I like it so much because I got away with it. I like it because there was no way I could have been serious, but my points were so well in place that it could not be argued against effectively. I got a 5 on that exam, and I earned it. I never really thought of myself as a boastful person (whether that is true or not I can't really say) but when I got out of that exam, I was ecstatic, I knew I had passed. I knew I had written an essay about erectile dysfunction and gotten away with it.

The prompt was to fill in the background story for the scenario presented, the scenario being a man and woman having dinner, when a cake is brought out with a single candle. The man becomes angry with the woman and she cries. I really wish I remembered the details, but I suppose the stars aligned at that point in time and the constellations all pointed to that man not being able to get it up. I think the single candle was supposed to symbolize their anniversary, but he only saw it as a competing phallus, reminding him of how he was supposed to be, and how he was not. She tried consoling him, but it only made him angrier, thinking about how he was less than a man. I think I used the word phallus a record number of times in that essay. It gets quite old when you can't substitute penis, cock, dick etc etc. Had to keep it literary.

I realize now this is even worse than trying to describe a movie you saw 15 years ago. It's almost impossible to give enough detail to form into anything meaningful, and harder still to describe why you so fondly remember something you don't actually remember. I suppose I just remember the feelings associated with it rather than the facts.

Sometimes I clearly see the forces from the world that pushed me to this specific life, and it does occasionally make me regretful. I remember sitting with one of my great aunts and uncles and catching up with them. Must have been in high school at the time, but I think my sister was in college. They were asking the kinds of things you always ask kids of that age, about what I wanted to do and where I was going. I of course had no idea and said as much, so my great aunt said something along the lines of "oh, think you might write the next great American novel?" I didn't get the chance to answer. My dad said "No, that's more likely to be his sister." Within the past few years I was talking to my dad about my sister and he brought up the way she thinks and how detail oriented she is. How she probably would have been a better engineer than a lawyer.

(On Spotify)
The Pixies - Hey
The Decemberists - Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect
The Twilight Sad - Cold Days From The Birdhouse
The Strokes - Is This It?
...And You Will Know Us By The Trails of the Dead - Mistakes and Regrets
The Pains of Being Pure At Heart - Young Adult Friction
Brad Sucks - Making Me Nervous
David Bowie - Heroes

Yes I Fear Tomorrow I'll Be Crying

There is something unique and heart warming about riding at the front of the subway train. It's only in the old cars, the 50 year old cars that you can still do it I think. Now they're all blocked off or blacked out, but in the old cars where the conductor's cabin lies to one side of the train you can still see out.

There is so much more down there than you think about, than you can see looking out the side windows. The twists and turns built 100 years ago underneath the river, the spaces for the maintenance crews, the ancient graffiti. When you look at the tracks from the platform all you see is garbage and rats, but when you see it the mid points, the barely touched points. Dirty, rusty and labyrinthian. It's not so hard to imagine shanty towns and vagrants under the earth.

It's an oblong illuminated pathway to a place you go everyday but have never seen before. You know the train is going to slow down because you can see the lights. You know there's a curve to the right ahead. It's hypnotizing in its pure efficiency. It's like art deco at its hidden greatest. It was the future, human beings traveling at great speed underground, arriving at their destination, quickly and safely.

What a marvel it must have been. It's like the Crysler Building. Overshadowed because now it's just a regular building. Iconic in it's way, but it's not the tallest. I prefer it to the Empire State Building honestly, but it's not the prettiest either.

It's quite something to stand by a building and not be able to see the roof. I remember standing by the WTC towers when I was a kid. I never got to go to the top, not enough time or too expensive or something. But I remember they were so tall they looked like they had to be curving. Maybe memory just has a funny effect on those things.

I remember it right along with my first subway rides. Blurry, confusing, it was just SO MUCH. The city doesn't feel that way anymore. Maybe I'm just older, or maybe the city is the one losing its edge.

What Are You Doing In There?

So I've been watching a lot of Mad Men lately, and am getting rather into it. The episode with which I am stopping today is the one revolving around the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's interesting to think of, waiting for fire from the skies. It's also kind of interesting that we always assumed we would end in fire (and brimstone although honestly I've never been quite sure what that is supposed to be. Checked wikipedia, it's just sulfur, disappointing). I'm just fascinated with the image of it. The looking, the waiting. The prospective fire. The fear, I think. Say what you will about looking into it, I am rather fond of the abyss.

That makes it sound both morbid and grand but I don't think that's what I mean. It's just the long view. It goes on forever, and existentialism and meaningless and blah blah, it goes on forever. The world will end and it would be beautiful and terrifying and awesome in the traditional sense of the word. Like God's hand come to flick us off the planet one by one. Or maybe more like FLCL ironing out the wrinkles.

I suppose there is the idea that the earth will swallow itself again, a blue orb of poisoned seas. It seems somewhat more likely than the Waterworld scenario, the evolutionary gap between lungs and gills is so great it seems more likely that the sharks would build civilizations, or that our lungs would expand and we'd be more like dolphins. Or again, the dolphins would just replace us. Where would all that water come from anyway? If all the ice melted, but it were still cool enough on the surface for humanity to survive, which I am assuming is possible, where would the coasts be? One can only assume Siberia is pretty safe, Kansas and Colorado. The Andes. It seems like that also misses the fact that it would happen gradually, because we already know how to farm on water.

I honestly don't know what its like not to be able to see land. It seems nice. A wonderful void, filled with heat and salt and occasionally kelp. For the longest time my two obsession have been the ocean and the desert. When I was young and impressionable I read a book called The Perfume of the Desert. It makes it seem like the desert is really the only place you could find God. Which makes some sense I suppose, why would he want to hang out with everyone else? Not hidden under a rock or anything, but in a more introspective way. Tearing away all the other bits until you're just looking at yourself and this planet and he hangs out somewhere between the two.

Usually I go more for the polytheistic belief systems, but much like Buddhism has many applications, it seems Sufism does too. God has always been a metaphor to me for either Truth or Nature. Capitalization makes all the difference. I have proclaimed a great many things in my time, and will no doubt continue to do so, but it seems silly to me now. It is difficult to have serious conversations about beliefs because I honestly have no idea what I believe. The last time I got really into I muddled up my own thinking quite a bit with my feelings. There is the argument that logic does not or should not apply to beliefs, but that doesn't make much sense to me. Neither does omniscience really. Is it worth playing the game when you already know what all the moves will be? You can only play tic tac toe so many times. There's a finite set of moves, all of them done a practically infinite number of times. You know the outcome and only do it to pass the time, or to see if someone else knows where to put their circles to force a draw. But who would God be playing against? I feel bad for Lucifer. It's understandable why you'd want to stop playing (it is the only winning move), but my god man, how to pass the time afterwards?